Super-Charge Your Brain Using Meta-States

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

For a number of years a commercial ran on televisions in the USA that I'm sure many of you have seen. The commercial zoomed in on an egg frying ... You could hear it sizzle. Then a narrator would say, "This is your brain on drugs." As a message about frying your brain by doing drugs, it contained a great message, tremendous visual effects, and so was very memorable.

Now imagine a high tech lab worker tinkering with a positronic brain like the android Data's on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Suddenly, the person seems energized with a new level of vitality, brightness, and focus. A narrator explains, "This is your brain on great meta-states!"

Yet what looks like a high tech lab worker is actually a neuro-semanticist. And what we thought was tinkering is actually just a high level conversation between the neuro-semanticist and a person desiring more personal mastery. The neuro-semanticist was simply meta-stating the person with higher level resources and so the rush of energy and the flush of vitality that resulted, was just a brain on meta-states.

Brain Check

How super-charged is your brain? Have you put in a turbo-charger so that when you want to focus on something, you just turn on your laser-beam focus and poof! The world goes away, time goes away, "self" goes away and ... zap! ... you're in a highly focused genius state? Is that what study, research, work, leisure is like for you? Would you like it to be?

Perhaps you have taken your brain and super-charged it with some really great ideas―the world's greatest inspirational ideas so that as you now move through everyday life, even the simplest activities seem special and sacred and you're in a state of childlike wonder and curiosity, ready to explore new possibilities. Is your mind like that when you go to work? Seeing opportunities for how to contribute, how to add value, how to have more fun, how to make your relationships better, how to use your spare time for taking the stairs and adding fitness and health to your life? Does your brain function like that?

It is a human possibility to super-charge your brain so that you are in charge of your states and the great ideas that you have and the knowledge you have learned become implemented in your everyday activities. How can we learn to super-charge our brains in those ways?

This is Your Brain on the Highest Mind-Frames

Meta-States has allowed us to recognize that in human consciousness, it is not our first thoughts that exercise the most influence or the highest influence in our lives. Just thinking great thoughts isn't a guarantee that they get inside and run your programs. You can think about the NLP Presuppositions all day without them charging your motor programs with a new way of performing. Great ideas as the following need to be translated down into muscle to transform us.

"The Map is not the Territory."
"Behind every behavior is a positive intention."
"If what you're doing doesn't work, do something different."

Why is thinking and affirming these great ideas not sufficient? Because there is something that's even more crucial that our first thoughts. Namely, our second thoughts. What you think about your first thoughts (your meta-states) governs the frames of mind.

"Nonsense, it's all nonsense!" will discredit and dis-invalidate and set a frame of doubt and disbelief about the first thoughts and thereby nullify any positive influence they could have on your life.

"Great guidelines for operating with more skill and focus in the world. Yes, operating by these ideas will greatly enhance my influence." This thought will validate, confirm, and set a frame of value and reality. It will thereby transform the mere "thought" into an empowering "belief."

This is the power of meta-states. Our mental and emotional states about other states (our meta-states) do not only make our thinking and emoting richer and our perspective wider, they also set frames of meaning. As we hold in mind these frames, they become our "meanings" (for so the word "meaning" means). Each move up that we make transcends the previous level of our thinking and emoting so that we think-and-feel about the previous state. Each move up also includes the previous level. This explains how we take a state, transcend it to higher ideas, concepts, and feelings, and then use that as the frame for the first level thoughts-and-feelings.

How about the state of anger? Do you like your anger? Do you like yourself when you are angry? These are meta-state questions. If not, then super-charge your brain on anger with some higher states like calmness, respect, thoughtfulness, self-esteem, compassion, etc. Super-charging your brain isn't only about turning up the intensity of primary states, it is also about texturing and qualifying your states so that they give you a rich and full experience.

Transcending one level moves us up a level so that we create a classification or category for the lower and so we include the lower within the higher. You can now super-charge your learning state, for example, with joy/delight/pleasure, appreciation, outrageous/outlandish, courageous, etc. Imagine the possibilities! This is what we mean by a "logical" level, although it was Korzybski who recognized that all such logical levels in the human neuro-linguistic system are psycho-logical, and so he always hyphenated psycho-logical.

Transcending one level to another level sets a meta-frame and thereby creates a semantic structure in the mind-body system. That is, joy can now become the semantic frame of learning. This gives us joyful learning. In this way, meta-states define, describe, and create our neuro-semantic networks or matrices of frames. We can call them "belief systems," "value systems," network of a semantic interpretative scheme, but whatever we call them― the structuring or punctuating creates a higher level of mind. This can be to our enhancement and personal mastery and it can just as equally be to our detriment, dysfunction, and pathology. It all depends upon the internal "logic" of the embedded network of meta-states.

What frame of mind would you like to wake up in every day for the rest of your life?
What frame of mind would you like to carry with you when you engage in business, in negotiations, encounter conflict, sell, make friends, exercise, or a thousand other activities?
What frame of mind would make life exciting, full of wonder, and an expression of our creativity?

Working on All Thrusters

Okay, so you say we can super-charge our brain with meta-states? What specifically can we do with meta-states to put a turbo-charge to our brain so that we begin to truly work on all thrusters?

First, scan through a list of resourceful states, ideas, physiologies, etc. that would energize your brain and give it new vitality. What would you include in your menu list? Would you add in a dose of pleasure or would it be a mega-dose? Would you include focus and concentration? How about intentionality? Let your list only be limited by your imagination: inspiration, resilience, passion, a great vision, etc.

Second, go through your list and use the basic meta-stating pattern of accessing the state, amplifying it so that it has sufficient neurological energy, and then applying to the state of your brain. What if you set a frame that you used your brain in a playful way when you read and study? Just how playful would you want to be and would that kind of playfulness turn on the thrusters of creativity?

Third, test for the gestalt. In systems language, a "gestalt" arises as a new configuration that emerges which can't be explained by the sum of the parts. The mixture of the parts allows something new to emerge, an emergent property that's more than the sum of the parts. We do this in meta-stating as we add resource to resource to resource, bake for awhile, shake well, and then see what new properties emerge. Testing for the gestalt can occur through trying on a new frame of mind about a state, through future pacing, through time-lining and checking the quality control of an experience.

In the testing for a gestalt, however, something else occurs. We begin to set the mind looping through a spiral of states, resources, ideas, feelings, etc. so that we put a person into a particular kind of spin. Unlike the spin that we hate, the vicious downward spiraling whereby we turn more and more of our thoughts and emotions against ourselves, we access the looping of a virtuous upward positive spiral. This means that with each loop the mind goes round and round, reinforcing the positive direction, and accelerating the learning until it all coalesces into the muscles and neurology. This describes an installation process unique to meta-stating. It teaches the brain a new direction in which to go and a new Matrix from which to operate.

Name Your Thruster

It's unfortunate that the term "state" sounds like something static. Yet that is simply an accident of language. Our mind-body states are not static. In fact, they are everything but static. They are dynamic energy fields ... energy fields that arise from the energy of our physical metabolism. Accordingly, they involve mental energy, emotional energy, and the energy that results from representing, valuing, believing, caring, etc. That's why we can meta-state ourselves with thoughts, feelings, and even physiologies. We can bring "deep relaxed breathing" to our anger and notice how this way of breathing transforms the anger. We can bring standing up and coaching our body to express confidence to a state of learning in a context of trying on a new skill.

When it comes to super-charging your brains with meta-states, the possibilities are endless. Bob loves meta-stating with the Drop-Down Through pattern. Here we bring a sense of dropping down through an emotion and do so repeatedly until we get to the a state of nothingness and then we can be in that "nothingness" for a moment, letting it cleanse and release us from the negative feelings that we started with. Then we can kinesthetically feel like we are dropping down through that void into something else, something wonderful and positive. That is, we can just allow that "nothing" to open up so that we continue dropping. And as we now drop down through the void, we can do so until we come out the other side where we can be pleasantly surprised at the powerful and resourceful state we then experience. And we can do that again, and again, two or three times or even more and as we do, we can take each of these resources and apply them to the original experience.

This meta-stating seems upside down and plays with a wonderfully strange metaphor. As it does, it undoes negative states that have gotten into muscle like stuttering. With meta-states, it truly is just a matter of naming your thruster, naming the frame that you want to set as the rules of the games you want to play. And with that the adventure begins.

Turbo-Charging My Brain with Meta-States

"Well, has it happened to you? You found or invented Meta-States, so is your brain super-charged? After all, you've been working with meta-states and meta-stating consciously longer than anyone. So what effect has it on you?"

During the first year or two I didn't think so. At least, not in those terms. I was using Meta-States to model the structure of resilience and self-esteem and proactivity. And my study of it was more focused on the model itself, the academic background that validated the model.

Then during the second year of working with meta-states, I found the work on personal genius that John Grinder and Judith DeLozier had worked on. In their writings they knew that it would be through logical levels and second-ordered attentions (or meta-states) that they could bring together the prerequisites of personal genius. Yet their model was far too clumsy, awkward, and full of unnecessary components (see Turtles All the Way Down, 1983). So I began translating it using meta-state structures and streamlining it. That was late 1995 (see Secrets of Personal Mastery, 2000).

The first focused genius state that I created for myself was the researching and writing state. I super-charged that state with ease and playfulness in being interrupted, intentional focus, and numerous other resources. After that I really didn't think much about it. After all, I was busy teaching the pattern in trainings.

Then about two years ago I began the Prolific Writing workshop. It was then, for the first time that it dawned on me that I had written some 20 books since 1995 and had not once experienced the dread of all writers, "writer's block." Not once. In fact, writing has become absolutely "a piece of cake."

Later when several people modeled my strategy of researching, writing, and model making, they found highly charged meta-states (gestalt states). And they found that it had been installed not only about writing, but about business, negotiating, wealth building, and vitality. So has it worked for me? You bet.

Summary

Now it's your turn. Your brain can become super-charged too in just the right way when you put it on Meta-States. Then you can texture your states in just the right way that truly enhances your everyday experiences. After all, the quality of your life is the quality of your states― and meta-states.

Author:

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D., cognitive psychologist, international NLP trainer, entrepreneur; prolific author and international training; developer of Meta-States and co-developer of Neuro-Semantics. (P.O. Box 8, Clifton CO 81520), (970) 523_7877. www.neurosemantics.com

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Referents:

Hall, Michael L. (2000). Meta-States: Managing the higher levels of the mind. Grand Jct. CO: N.S. Publications.

Hall, Michael, L. (2001). Texturing your States. Web Site: www.neuro-semantics.com