GSM, Interesting topic.  To my understanding it is exactly the *aboutness* that no one's been able to put in sensory terms.  It's true that MH, in his article able how the phobia process uses a meta state, or his many comments about how any change process involves "going meta," attempt to develop this idea, but how is this to be differentiated from 3rd position?  Can I not, from 1st position also conceive of that 3rd? Or if I say to myself, "I feel x about feeling y," do I actually have a feeling about a feeling, or am I feeling something about a conceptualization that I've made of a feeling, since when one shifts from one state to another, is there anything really left of the previous state that I can have a state about?  There may be a residue of the previous state, but that is an aspect of the current state, not something separate.  What I've found is that what most people mean when they "go meta" is that they are taking one state and moving it to one rep system and observing it from another rep.  So perhaps I end up humming a tune or talking about an image I've made about another state.  Or I visualize a kino which was a response to talking to myself.  That may not be a "meta" state as much as an incongruence. Changing feelings into ideas, and abstracting sensual information, while it is extremely useful at times, is nothing new.  It is what much of psychotherapy has been about, for the most part, from the time of Freud.  I believe it is NLP's often running counter to that trend -- at least knowing how to run both ways -- that makes its efficacy as a change methodology possible. Anyway, this is my two cents.  I don't have decades of NLP experience, but I do know much about other change methodologies. best, JS