For the psychotherapeutic practice developed from that, see the Method Of Levels.

Fascinating stuff, there, thanks for the post. It sounds very much like something I've been observing recently with myself and certain clients, where a persistent behavioral pattern is being driven by a barely-noticed criterion being checked at a higher level.

That is, when trying to make a decision, there was sort of a "final check" being done in the mind, to check for some obscure criterion like what other people would think of it, or whether it made me look clever enough, or whether I would be "good". Consciously, there's only the sensations of hesitation (before the check) and either satisfaction or dissatisfaction afterwards.

Now, I have tools that quickly get rid of things like this once they can be captured in awareness, but I haven't had a method to reliably detect the presence of one and bring it into debugging scope. If MOL can do that, I will be all over that in a heartbeat.

It's interesting that the third link you gave describes a process very similar to certain pieces of what I already do, as far as mental observation training, just a little less directly. It also seems that in MOL, there's an expectation that simple awareness is therapeutic. In this respect it seems somewhat similar to Michael Hall's meta-states model, in which one is explicitly invited to check the criterion at one level against more global criteria, but in MOL this appears to be implicit.

Hm, oh well, enough rambling. It sounds like the key operator in MOL is to extract the implicit criteria from framing statements -- something I don't do systematically with clients, or at all on myself.