Quite often at seminars like this, people ask questions in the following way. They go "What do you do with someone who's depressed?" (pointing at himself) The word "someone" isn't specified, verbally. We say it's a word with no referential index. It doesn't refer to something specific in the world of experience. However, the nonverbal communication was very specific in that case, and people do the same thing with other non-verbal processes. If you are able to identify things like accessing cues and other non-verbal cues, you can be pretty clear about how something works. People will come in and say "Well, I have a problem" and their non-verbal behavior has already given you the sequence that produces it.

So a "How specifically?" question or a "How do you know?" question will usually give you a complete non-verbal specification of the process that the person goes through. Magic I has a very complete specification of how to ask appropriate questions using the meta-model.

One of our students taught the meta-model to a hospital nursing staff. So if a patient said "I'm sure I'm going to get worse" or "I can't get up yet," the nurse would ask "How do you know that?" The nurse would then follow that up with other meta-model questions, to help the patient realize the limitations of his world model. The result was that the average hospital stay was reduced from 14 days to 12.2 days.

The whole idea of the meta-model is to give you systematic control over language. When we first took the time to teach it to our students, the result was the following: first there was a period where they went around and meta-modeled each other for a week. Then they began to hear what they said on the outside. They would sometimes stop in midsentence because they would begin to hear themselves. That's something else the meta-model does: it teaches you how to listen not only to other people but to yourself. The next thing that happened is that they turned inside and began to meta-model their own internal dialogue. That changed their internal language from being something that terrorized them to being something that was useful.

The meta-model is really simplistic, but it's still the foundation of everything we do. Without it, and without systematic control over it, you will do everything that we teach you sloppily. The difference between the people who do the things that we teach well and those that don't, are people who have control over the meta-model. It is literally the foundation of everything we do. You can be bright and witty and sharp and make the most complex metaphor in the world, but if you can't gather information well, both internally and externally, you won't know what to do. The meta-model questions are the ones that really give you the appropriate information immediately. It's a great tool for that, both on the outside and the inside. It will turn your internal dialogue into something useful.

When you use language with people, they assume that all the stuff they are accessing on the inside is the same as what you said. There's so much going on inside that they have no consciousness of the external form of your communication. You can utter sentences of syntax which have no meaning and people will respond to you as if what you said is completely meaningful. I'm surprised that anyone ever noticed that some schizophrenics speak "word salad." I have gone into places and spoken word salad and people have responded to me as if I had uttered perfect English. And of course you can embed crazy commands in word salad.

Once we were having a party at our house and we wanted to buy some champagne. We live in an area where there are no stores, so we went into a restaurant and said "Look, we want to buy a couple of bottles of champagne to take home." And the guy said "Oh, we can't do that. It's against the law." We said "Well, we're having a party and we come here and eat a lot and isn't there anything you can do something" He stopped for a moment, and he said "Wait a second. I think I can do something." So he took the bottles and gave them to himself, and then he went outside behind the restaurant and gave them to us and we tipped him. Our behavior was totally bizarre, but he had to respond, because the only thing that was evident in his consciousness was this odd sequence. It's really important to understand that most people are very chaotically organized on the inside.

Man: Does the intellectual level of the client make a difference, say retarded versus genius?

No. I don't know of any. Unconscious minds operate amazingly the same no matter what the educational level or intelligence level is. "IQ" is also a function of the kinds of structures we've been talking about.

Woman: When you ask the person to go through whatever the experience is that troubles them and you watch them, you become aware of what the process is that they go through?

Yes, in a special sense of the word "awareness. " There is nothing that I have done here at any point today that I am conscious of, in the normal sense of being reflexively conscious of what I am doing. The first time I know what I'm going to do or say is when I find myself doing it or hear myself saying it. This is an important point. I really believe that the face-to-face task of communicating with another human being, let alone a group of people, is far too complex to try to do consciously. You can't do it consciously. If you do, you break up the natural flow of communication.