Hello kc I have this strange feeling that your comments are directed somewhere else. In particular, you say. "Also alot simpler and quicker John than going to meta meta meta meta and continue to evaluate more things on a different level back and forth when not needed if you know what I mean!" Well, I actually don't know what you mean. I cannot recall ever proposing multiple meta positions - in fact, in Whispering, Carmen and I make the precise point in the presentation of triple description and Dilts' fourth position that such "higher" level perceptual positions are not justified and if necessary, can be easily handled by an application of the simplier form called triple description. Forgive me, I am on the road and don't have a copy of Whispering handy to cite the pages - the footnote associated with this point is quite distinctive as it includes the presentation (crude but accurate, we hope) of the Hegelian dialectic. This was also the point of the (humorously intended) challenge to Michael Hall's work of meta states that seems to have exercised him greatly. Your quotes from Bateson are among my favorites, always a pleasure to read such an genius. Your own representation of how you would go about mapping from the faithful recordings to an explicit model make perfect sense to me with one caveat. Carmen and I worked very hard in describing the phases of modeling. In that description, we insist that there occur a period of unconscious assimulation during which the modeler suspends all attempts to make conscious explicit sense of the patterning being offered by the model (suspension of all f2 filter) until the modeler can reproduce in the world the same effects that the model does in roughtly the same time period and with roughly the same quality. I didn't find this in your description. All the best, John