Transformation I: learning to frame things in a new way.
Transformation II: learning a new set of frames
Transformation III: learning the system that gives birth (and death) to the sets of frames

The problem with specifying Transformation III is that we tend to overlook that most of our punctuations arise from the same premise (or implicit rules, programs, logics) for punctuating. Comparing different punctuations that arise from the same premise merely generates Transformation II - we become more skilled at inventing new punctuations within the same system.

FOR EXAMPLE:
All the different historical schools of psychotherapy that think they are paradigmatically distinct actually belong to the same set of frames: behaviorism, Gestalt, Jungian analysis, humanistic psychology, or family therapy. Most, if not all, are within the same set of frames even though they loudly declare that they are not related.

BUT WHAT IN THE HELL IS HIGHER ORDER TRANSFORMATION?

Gregory Bateson:
"It is a corrective change in the SYSTEM of sets of alternatives from which choice is made." In other words, here change does not refer to change of a specific response (I) or contextual punctuation (II), but refers to change of the premises (the rules) underlying an entire system of punctuation habits. This order of change is rare and difficult. It sometimes occurs in religious experience and wherever else there is profound reorganization of character.

HOW DO I GET OUT OF TRANSFORMATION II?

Alan Watts:
"The 'guru' or teacher of liberation must therefore use all of her skill to persuade the student to act upon her own delusions, for the latter will always resist any undermining of the props of her security. She teaches, not by explanation, but by pointing out new ways of acting upon the student's false assumptions until the student convinces herself that they are false."

HUH?

Carl Whitaker:
"It's though an individual patient comes with a leaning tower of Pisa and the therapist, instead of trying to straighten the tower, builds it higher and higher until, when it falls, the entire building falls rather than just the construct that the therapist has helped with."

FOR EXAMPLE?

Gregory Bateson (personal conversation with BK):
"I helped prevent the war in Southeast Asia from having traditional propaganda on the radio. The latter is when you come on the air and pretend to be a bunch of dissident soldiers who hate their leader. They did a great deal of it in Europe during WWII and they wanted to do it in Southeast Asia. I was in a position to say no. You shall do the reverse. You shall come on the air professing to be an official Japanese station, you will exaggerate the propaganda everyday, and you will exaggerate it 30% and give it back. That's the entire policy. In other words, you amplify the hell out of it until they can't bear it and yet don't know how to deny it. It's a double bind.

HOW CAN WE MOVE TOWARD HIGHER ORDERS OF TRANSFORMATION?

W. Ross Ashby:
"No system can produce anything "new" unless the system contains some source of the random."

DO YOU MEAN THAT WE NEED TO ASK, "MAY I HAVE A LITTLE NOISE PLEASE?"

Yes, but not too much, not too little. Bateson guessed 30%

WHAT SERVES AS NOISE?

Whatever you believe holds meaning, but is sufficiently ambiguous and complex so as to inhibit being readily understood. Examples of noise: family history, cultural myth, psychobabble, religious metaphor, Asian philosophy, mathematics, I Ching, astrology, cybernetic epistemology, chaos theory. But not any noise will do, you must be believe that it is meaningful. Therefore we shall call it "meaningful noise."

- Bradford Keeney