Meta-Programs are Solidified Meta-States
“Those who know and manage their own feelings well, and who read and deal effectively with other people’s feelings— are at an advantage in any domain of life...” Daniel Goleman, Emotional
Intelligence
As perceptual filters, meta-programs not only describe the way we see and perceivethe world as we process information, they also reveal the extent to which higher level thought becomes so
incorporated into our neurology that they seem inborn, permanent, and part of our “temperament.” The key word here is “seem.” As you will soon discover, these seemingly innate programs are learned and developed, which is what make them amendable to change and transformation.
Meta-Programs and "Personality"
The concept of “personality” has arisen several times already in describing metaprograms. This raises numerous questions:
C How are meta-programs and “personality” related?
C Are our meta-programs the same thing as our “personality?” C If they are not, how do they differ? As we begin it is obvious that meta-level patterns governing our thinking and attention style critically affect how we experience ourselves as “persons,” and our “sense of self.” They also critically affect our emotions—how we feel, how and what we value, the states that we access, how we speak and behave, etc.
These processes are intimately related to "personality," as their component behaviors. That is, we experience ourselves as “persons” and having a “personality” that we present as we express the powers of our person, namely, our powers of thinking (reasoning, representing, valuing, believing, etc.), of emoting (feeling, caring, valuing), of languaging (talking, self-dialogue), and of behaving (acting, responding, relating, etc.)
Linguistically, “personality” is a nominalization. Hidden processes are inside the noun-like word. Some processes have been turned into a noun, “person,” and then that pseudo-noun has been
nominalized further into “personality.” C So what hidden verb lies inside these terms? C What process have we nominalized when we use this term?
Since personality refers to "the organization of an individual's distinguishing character traits,
attitudes, or habits" (Webster), the hidden verb harks back to “acting as a person." And "person" goes back to Latin designating "persona" which refers to an "actor's mask" used in the Greek and Roman plays that portrayed or characterized a person. These former usages help us to recover the processes within this highly nominalized term of personality. What are the processes?
C The characteristic ways that a person typically behaves in thinking, believing, valuing, emoting, communicating, acting, relating, etc.
C The overall gestalt that emerges from all of one’s particular response styles in thought, emotion, speech, and behavior.
C The overall configuration of a person’s meta-levels of perceiving, sorting, and paying attention— the meta-programs.
C The overall configuration of a person’s meta-levels of frames that describe believing, valuing, identifying, understanding, deciding, intending, etc.—the governing meta-states.
Understanding “personality” in this way frees us from the misunderstandings that seductively result when we nominalize "personality." When we turn “personality” into a thing, or worse, into an internal entity, we think about it as if it were a solid and unchangeable. It is not. De-nominalizing
"personality" enables us to recognize that this multiordinal term refers to the combination of our content programs (strategies) that we use in life as we play out our roles and from our style of structuring information (the meta-programs, meta-states).1
Regarding these levels of functioning (i.e., content programs and meta-programs), any behavior or response style that we perpetuate will eventually drop out of conscious awareness and begin to operate unconsciously. If this happens for conscious content programs like typing, driving a car,
playing ball, expressing social skills, looking friendly, reading, etc., how much more does it occur for the more unconscious meta-programs? And meta-level unconsciousness increases the power and stability of these programs.
When we have lots and lots of "characteristic ways of functioning and thinking" operating at an unconscious level, we experience them as solid, real, and enduring. It works because we don’t
question them. We assume them. We then experience our "personality" as solid and not susceptible to change. So inasmuch as they lie close to how we experience our "temperamental" nature (a
nominalization that refers to our "temper" of mind or mental style) typically we feel tempted to think of them as permanently "built in." Yet this other term, "temperament," simply refers to the "makeup" (or temper) of mind, "the peculiar or distinguishing mental or physical character" of it.
Meta-Processing Levels
Early in my trainings with Richard Bandler, I learned that we create our metaprograms by making a meta-move to the content of our thinking (see The Spirit of NLP, 2000). In this way we create these meta-levels. In modeling of metaprograms, I originally sorted them into five categories of processing: mental, emotional, conative (choice), communicational, and semantic and I made each of these areas of meta-programs an entire class of meta-programs.
These processing categories highlight the wide range of ways we can pattern or structure our experiences. As we engage in mapping cognitively, emotionally, conatively, and conceptually or semantically—we generate our personal "style" or modus operandi called "personality.”2
Our learned and cultivated style of patterning becomes our meta-level reality which we apply to all of our encounters (Figure 4:1). We apply our habituated style so that it becomes our way of operating in the world and our way of moving through life. Consequently, this generates the stable phenomenon of our "personality." At this level it exists as the way we have learned to typically structure our
The Source of Meta-Programs
If meta-programs operate at a meta-level, at a level higher to our primary thinking-and-feeling about things in the world, it shouldn’t surprise us that they are related to meta-states. But how? What’s the relationship between meta-states and meta-programs?
Because these processes occur at a level above the primary level of our everyday content thinking and responding, they relate to the structure of perceiving itself, not content. Meta-programs are the
form of the story, not the story. Yet where do these meta-levels come from? They arise as meta-states.
They are solidified meta-states, meta-states that have coalesced into muscle. As such, they have “gotten into our eyes” and have become our way of looking at the world.
Because meta-states form the foundation of meta-programs, metaprograms result from meta- states. They are meta-states that have become so habituated that they have coalesced into muscle and have thereby “gotten into our eyes” to color our perceptions.
Figure 4:1
The “Logical Levels” of Meta-Programs
Meta-programs as perceiving patterns begin as mind-body-emotion states. They begin as a state we repeatedly access. We then default to these states so often, or perhaps so intensely because we “had to” (we were commanded to do that, or forbidden to go the opposite way), or because we lived in an environment that kept evoking them. We evoked them so often that they eventually became our
primary, or only, option. Now weonlyaccess these states. In this way these states get into our muscles to become part and parcel of our neurology. No wonder some early descriptions of meta-programs called them “neurological sorts.”
A Prototype Meta-Program Creation
It does not take a lot to imagine how this takes place. Imagine growing up in a home where we are told to “get the big picture.” Or, what if that was the style of thinking most often demonstrated by our parents. Or, what if we experienced humiliation or insult if we got too involved in details. Given these contexts, it would be easy and natural to learn to think and process information in terms of the big picture, globally, rather than specific details.
The opposite could just as equally occur. We may have been repeatedly instructed, “Pay attention to the details!” If so, we would learn and practice zooming in on the most minute specifications. And, if we did that month after month, year after year, such thinking would inevitably induce us into either a
detailed state of mind, and so we will feel. And if it works, if it succeeds in helping us get on in life,
then we willvaluethat way of thinking. After awhile, we might even draw the conclusion that, “I’m that kind of a person; I naturally sort for details.”
As a prototype, this describes how a way of thinking, and the holistic mind-bodyemotion state it creates, becomes a meta-state. We use it, default to it, let it become our way of thinking and feeling, and eventually use it reflectively in all of our thinking. It then becomes our perceptual pattern or meta- program.
The Meta-Stating Dynamic
This understanding of how meta-programs arise gives us a model for thinking about what happens to a meta-state in the process. As we activate the reflexivity mechanism of mind so that we continually bring thoughts-and-feelings to reflect back onto our thinking, we construct state-about-state structures. It is reflective thinking that operates at the core of our ability to make meta-moves to higher logical levels with our thoughts-and-emotions. As we reflexively think about our thoughts, this conceptually moves us up to higher levels so that we keep layering meta-level of thoughts-and-feelings onto
thoughts-and-feelings.
Yet it doesn’t stay layered in the way this metaphor suggests. Unlike an onion with stable layers or a set of Russian Dolls embedded within each other, mindemotion states are dynamic. They move. As we run our neuro-pathways in a particular way (matching/ mismatching; options/ procedures; global/ specific, etc.) using our nervous system in these ways of processing information habituates into a fluid state. These higher levels coalesce into the lower levels. They merge into them. Eventually, all we have left isa perceptual frame-of-referencethat’s a rich and full perception. The testuring by the higher state generates a dynamic way of seeing. It now stabilizes as the state by which we see the world. It is in this way that our meta-states solidify into meta-programs.
Suppose a person over-uses the meta-state of global thinking while at the same time he de-emphasizes detailed, specific thinking. As this particular thinking and perceiving pattern (a meta-program) is operating, it is also a state of consciousness (a meta-state). We could describe the person as being in a global state. We could say the person is accessing thoughts-and-emotions of a global state. We could say that he has stepped into a state or position of being a visionary, seeing the big picture, and operating from a philosophical stance. We could just as well describe him as operating from the global meta-program.
the importance of the global perspective, then we outframe it with value. We could also construct this meta-program by bringing it upon itself (global about global), joyful about global thinking, fearful to get too specific, dislike or disgust about details, etc. There are a great many ways we could construct the meta-program out of various meta-states.
Repeating any meta-state structure over and over eventually creates a habituated meta-state that gives us a meta-program. Sometimes these meta-structures generate a new category—agestalt state. In the first Meta-State books, I describe these as a “canopy of consciousness.” I use this phrase and
metaphor as one way to talk about how a meta-state can so completely engulf all of our other states so that it creates the mental atmosphere within which we live.
Metaphorically, living within a pervasive meta-state is like living within an atmosphere. The
atmosphere not only filters everything and determines how we color our world, it also operates at a level outside-of-normal awareness. Living in such an atmosphere we hardly notice how the
atmosphere filters all incoming information and outgoing perceptions, how it colors our
understandings, experiences, memories, anticipations, etc. As a canopy of consciousness, it becomes the very fabric of our mental and emotional life.
More recently, I have shifted metaphors, as we have shifted from canopy to Matrixto describe the idea of meta-states as embedded frames within frames, and the overall configuration as the Matrix of
our Frames (Frame Games, 2000). Because meta-programs arise from meta-states, we can think of
meta-programs as coalesced or solidified meta-states. Therefore the more we value, believe in, appreciate, find benefits in, and identify with the meta-state, the more we create driver meta- programs.
Meta-Stating Driver Meta-Programs
In a driver meta-program the state-dependency of the meta-state governs how we perceive, sort, and process information as our default style. It becomes our “way of being” in the world. It is our way to
do “personality.” We do personality because personality is not a “thing,” but a set of processes. This
puts the process front and center making it more fluid and easy to transform an experience. In a driver meta-program we have our primary states embedded inside of a larger context that is made up of the meta-states which form the meta-program.
Consider when the meta-program of mis-matching becomes a driver. Here we have the cognitive style of perceiving, sorting for what’s different, embedded inside of higher states. The person undoubtedly believes that doing this is important and valuable. It’s a way to “be oneself,” to “think one’s own thoughts,” to “not be controlled,” to “not be told what to do or think,” etc. It’s probably embedded in other higher frames: this is who I am; I have to do this; memories of parents or teachers forcing me to do things their way shows what happens when you just give in and compromise, etc. While modeling any particular person driven for mis-matching will provide different structures for this gestalt, the basic principle is the same. Within every meta-program we find layered meta-states within even higher meta-states that support, validate, and give the structure meaning. In Meta-States we say that there are always “frames by implication.” That is, whatever state we apply to another state and so layer level upon level, there are multiple implied frames that we have not made explicit, but just assume.
Put all of this together and we have meta-state structures that grow into metaprograms and into canopies or maxtrices of consciousness. Together as a synergistic force, they create a pervasive psychological force that pervades all facets of our lives. They define and construct meta-level structures of "reality" for us.
Meta-Stating to Create Perceptual Filters
Did you get all of that? Yes, we know that was pretty heady, so in the next chapter we will continue to sort it out. For now, here’s a practical application. We will do it with a state that is typically
considered a meta-program, and an important one, Internal Reference (Authority Source meta- program, #24).
Let’s begin with the state of internal reference. This means that you look inside your own mind, emotions, voice, and behaviors to make up your mind about something. We are not born that way. We are born without any of those discriminations. We are born without any sense of self or other, any sense of boundaries or distinctions. We are born undifferentiated. So at first, everything was just one thing. Then we began to open our eyes and use our senses to notice differences and eventually to differentiate ourselves from mother, family, home, etc. It’s the way we grow, individualize, and become an autonomous human being. We learn that our thoughts are ours; our emotions are our own; so with our movements and words.
Now imagine what would happen if you embedded all of your states with internal reference.
Suppose that you began here, what do I think about this or that? What do I feel? What do I say? What do I want to do? Can do? Suppose you brought this state of internal referencing from yourself, from your values and visions, from your opinions and choices and applied it to every primary experience, thought, emotion, and behavior you experience? What if you embedded every belief about yourself, others, the world, your identity, mission in life, etc. in this kind of self-referencing?
Once internal referencing becomes our highest frame of reference, our highest meta-state, and meta- program, it engulfs all of life. It engulfs our sense of being responsible, owning our choices, and running our own brain. Then it becomes the very fabric of our reality. Subsequently this would make blaming others increasingly difficult. Passivity, helplessness, and reactivity would also become increasingly foreign. Ownership of our own responses would then become the core of our perceptual filters for thinking and feeling. It would become one of our more permanent character traits, belief systems, and dispositional styles for how we orient ourselves in the world.
Can we Consciously Install Meta-Programs?
Yes. Knowing where meta-programs come from empowers us to intentionally design meta-programs that give us a mental-and-emotional edge regarding a given expertise. We can install it first as a meta- state, then repeat it, and meta-state it with value, belief, decision, etc. until it becomes a meta-
program. Using metastates in this way enables us to establish higher frames to enhance any
experience. In this way we can choose higher canopies or matrices and incorporate them as part of the very structure of our consciousness. By habituating our states and meta-states at higher “logical levels,” we no longer have to consciously access a particular frame of mind. We can make that
mindset an intimate part of the resource states that make up the very mental-emotional and conceptual atmosphere in which we live. Because we never leave it, we do not have to go there to get it. It
of our structure of consciousness, as how we naturally see, hear, feel, and smell— a meta-program. We can even do this for states of mind that are not now considered metaprograms. For example, suppose you never had to access the state of respect for people, personal confidence, thoughtfulness of others, mindfulness of mapmaking, etc.? Suppose you made any of these (or any other resourceful state) part of your meta-program canopy of consciousness? How would that change things for you? How much more resourceful would you be then?
Doing this takes a conceptual construct and feeling and installs it as a frame of mind that we can wake