Speech to the Faculty of Health and Social Science

Polytechnic University of Hong Kong

November 2003

Thinking, Being, Health and Disease

Dennis K. Chong ©

In this essay the male pronoun will apply to either gender.

The plural pronoun will apply to both authors.

The nominal pronoun will apply to the first author.

We dedicate this paper to the first Chinese space man:

Yang Liwei.

We are truly honoured to be asked to speak to you.

What we utter here, we pray and hope will stir the peace and tranquility of your high institution because we are desperate for your co-participation in the exploration of the unexplored country that we hope to open before you.

We would like to begin by posing to you this question:

Who or what are you?

When you answer this question, you suddenly realize that your answers are opinions about yourself. These opinions are like layers of table cloths over a table. A table cloth is not the table. An opinion about you is not you.

Let us say we can all agree that whatever you may say about yourself, we can all agree with you when you say:

I am.

Now to say that “I am” presupposes that there is an “I” first.

This “I” is in turn an opinion. It is you asserting that “I am I.”

To say “I” is, at some level, to know “I.” It is in the knowing of “I” that we implicitly know that it is in the process of “am-ing.” Therefore, we can then assert, “I am.” In saying this, you are again uttering an opinion, to wit, that this “I” that is I is “am-ing.”

The offering of this self-recursive evaluation is a derivative of a faculty that is able to do what it is doing. What it is doing is to perceive distinctions, even self-distinctions. These distinctions fall into such classes as:

interpretations opinions

judgements adjudications

evaluations determinations

insights perceptions

conclusions derivations

abstraction.

Such distinctions are ABOUT itself, others, things and the reality in which it is in.

In the Greek language, the ABOUT is called meta. We call this faculty the meta function, m(f). It would seem that logically we are left to conclude that since every utterance about the self is an about of the self, then source of all the abouts or metas must be the m(f):

You are the m(f).

I am the m(f).

In Psychology this faculty is known as the ability to abstract. The abstraction is the distinction. It is also known as the global function. We, in turn, as noted call it the meta function, m(f).

The operation of the m(f) is continual if not continuous:

Whether one likes it or not, one must interpret other people, who in turn interpret other people (often) interpreting still other people, and so on. Interpreting of others interpreting still others are not a matter of choice or chance because one so frequently and spontaneously interprets other people in multiple embedded and iterated sequences of attitudes that one comes to think of explicit metathoughts in similar sequences.

Radu J. Bogdan: Minding Minds The MIT Press 2000 page 153.

We have a pet, a Beagle. It is very obvious that he has a meta function because he can arrive at judgements, distinctions and conclusions. However, compared to us, he is limited in the degrees that he can go to. Human beings clearly can extend the use of this faculty to an infinite degrees. It is this that marks us with the power to think. Human thinking is metamenation.

It is the m(f) that gives us the power to think. Thinking is metamentation. The faculty of the m(f) uses the mind as the engine to generate its thoughts.

In this context, we now have a problem. This problem the assertion by René Decartes:

Cogito, ergo sum.

(I think therefore I am.)

To say this is practically to say that because I think I am a human being.

This position was serious questioned by Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek by his character, Data the android. In the series, it was and is very clear that he was deemed NOT to be human even though he could think better and faster than a human being. The bar that was set for him to be deemed human and which he could not meet was that he had to have feelings or emotions. This he could not do.

In time he was to acquire the emotion chip. The unanswered question now is:

With the emotion chip, was Data human?

This leads us to an examination of feelings. What are feelings? To answer this we now propose a practical demonstration.

From this demonstration we can conclude that

I. to have a feeling is to have an ABOUT of either self, other, things of a life situation

II. since the feeling is an ABOUT, it must be deemed to be a thought

III. the faculty of the m(f) uses the body as the engine to generate its thoughts - which in this instance are feelings

IV. the body is therefore the engine of analogical thinking

V. just as we can have thoughts about thoughts we can have feelings about feelings. Feelings about feelings are called metastates. One consequence of this, as Michael Hall found is that as one ascends the meta scale, the final meta state escapes its temporal co-ordinates. As a result when you ask the question, say, “What are you depressed about?” the person can only reply, “I don’t know.”

Because Meta-States have references to other states of consciousness, an abstraction of thoughts-feelings about previous thoughts-feelings, it moves up the scale of conceptualization and into the world that we construct with our languaging – The Land of Nominalizations! Meta-States accordingly, have much more references to things inside our skin (“things” like ideas, concepts, etc). Korzybski would have called this an intensional state.

As meta-states continue up the scale into more and more transcendental states, they become more atemporal in nature. This enables us to carry them across time in a way that we cannot carry primary states through time.

Michael Hall: META-STATES A DOMAIN OF LOGICAL LEVELS. SELF-REFLEXIVENESS IN HUMAN STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS. Empowerment Technologies 1996 page 88.

In this respect, we believe it is not inappropriate and certainly timely to observe that for Descartes to come up with his aphorism, leaves us to conclude that he was a man who was totally dissociated from his feelings. As such he never knew or felt his feelings. This is not the same as to have feelings but to put them on hold or to suppress them.

Let then remind ourselves what we have said. It is our body that generates analogical thoughts. Through the m(f) our body thinks. It does so by having emotions about itself, others, things and life situations.

We can also have feelings through the mind. This happens because our mental thoughts have their analogical isomorphisms, i.e. feelings. You only need to think of a happy event and you will recapitulate the happy thoughts of those moments. You only have to think of the death of someone dear to you and feelings of grief will arise in you.

Feelings can be well-formed or ill-formed. The critical distinction between a well-formed of ill-formed emotion is whether having it will entail harm to the person or not.

One can have primary ill-formed feelings or one can have ill-formed metastates. Primary feelings are not sustained over time. You can have a primary feeling of anger then it subsides, a.k.a. blowing over. However if it is a metastate, then, it will endure across all transits of time and all transepts of places.

All emotions can vary intensity. Thus:

Here is another example:

The atemporal property of a metastate is by definition constant since we “carry them across time”. The result, except for special circumstances, is that we will be unaware of it. We are unaware because:

VI we live in the emotion of the metastate

VII it is constant.

Both above conditions inevitably mean we habituate and accommodate to it. The consequences are that:

1. we will not know what it is about

2. if it is ill-formed, one would not be aware of its deleterious consequences

3. we will not be aware of the things that we might do that flow from it.

There are other ill-formed states that carry across time with us because they are functions some powerful belief. Let us consider a belief that comes from an identification. Thus recently we had a woman in utter misery, woe and tears because her conclusion about herself was:

I am no good.

This is a derivative of the m(f) but it is in the form of an identification. It is in the category of a self-recursive opinion about herself. Until it was reversed she was trapped in its prism and her entire life was a continuous misery, woe, tears, pain, suffering, anxiety and fear.

We now realize that an ill-formed emotion carries analog consequences and at critical thresholds, it can have potentially serious if not lethal consequences.

The critical question now becomes:

How can a person do the shift from feeling sick to actual disease?

He will do the shift when:

1. there is junko logic in place

2. the emotion reaches a semantic threshold.

The term junko logic was originally coined by Richard Bandler. It refers to the analogical mal-formed logic in the being of a person. They include examples such as:

Nobody likes me.

I am a sinner.

I am no good.

People will look down on me.

Nobody is going to put me down.

What is a semantic threshold of an internal state? The semantic threshold of an emotion, feeling or internal state is when it is converted to its analog equivalent. Thus:

Emotion Analog equivalent

a yen for someone rape

anger hitting out

grief tears and wailing and screaming

anxiety hysterical panic

jealousy fighting

hunger ravenous consuming of food

contempt urinating on another

This is what we found out about a woman who had a cancer of her throat and then a cancer of her breast. We applied the manouevre of the Quadrant Search. We shall now demonstrate what this is:

With the Quadrant Search you can retrieve critical information that is out of conscious awareness.

This the result of the Quadrant Searches from a patient who firstly developed a cancer of her left breast. When this was resolved she subsequently developed a cancer of her thyroid. This is the result of the Quadrant Search with reference to her breast cancer:

We then applied the Quadrant Search regarding her thyroid cancer:

The point of this presentation is to show you where the technology is at today in the awesome exploration of the incredible universe of human complexity. We have to go beyond using giving labels and opinions about conditions of ill health and disease. We have to stop assuming that these labels and opinions that we give are the ill health and disease themselves.

Today we are able to find out what are the underlying sentient process that underpin the human condition that is the wonder that is man or the horror that he can. We are in a position to find out how one can rise to the heavens or fall into the abyss. The technology is here to reverse these conditions.

In this endeavour we are desperate for your co-participation in the exploration of the unexplored country that is before you.

We thank you Dean for this signal opportunity and singular honour to share this with you.