What is the Experience of “Meta”?

Posted by: Steve Andreas in: Articles

What is the Experience of “Meta”?

In the past, you and I have had significantly different fundamental understandings on a number of issues that could be the basis for a public dialogue between us, such as:

1. Whether or not it is important to distinguish between two uses of “meta” to refer to large scope (“the big picture”) or general category — a topic I explored at length in my Six Blind Elephants books.

2. My description of your concept of “layering” as the reverse of nested categories in the logical levels of naïve set theory, as set forth in Elephants, pp. 114-116

3. Whether Submodalities are meta or subdivisions of scopes of experience.

Of course you may have changed your views on one or more of these issues, or you might prefer to choose others. Assuming we could agree on an interesting issue on which we have differing views, I have some fairly specific ideas about how to create a respectful dialogue to avoid misunderstandings, side issues, etc.

Privately one of us would write up a position statement on the selected issue, and the other would respond to it in writing. Then we would each edit or revise our positions until we are both satisfied that we have had an opportunity to present our position fully, respond fully to the other’s position, and that we each understand the other clearly, to avoid problems like, “Well, that’s not what I said,” or “That’s what I said, but what I really meant was—” etc. This would also be an opportunity for each of us to notice any “ad hominem” arguments or other logical fallacies, and remove them.

After we are both satisfied with the result of this process, we would jointly offer this to the public (the summit group, your and my blogs) and invite comments from others.

I think this could serve as an example of working toward clarification or resolution of important issues that currently divide or confuse the field. Please let me know if you might be interested in joining with me on this, and/or if you have other views on how we could better accomplish the goal of presenting contrasting views in a way that could provide a productive dialogue.

Michael agreed in principle, and sent me a number of different extensive position statements on the meaning of “Meta,” and I take this as an invitation to focus on this topic. I prefer to begin with a more concise statement for our dialogue, but other writing projects (and my struggle with greatly diminished energy due to Parkinson’s disease) have delayed me until now. ... http://realpeoplepress.com/blog/what-is-the-experience-of-meta?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SteveAndreasNlpBlog+%28Steve+Andreas%27+NLP+Blog%29