What does it mean, to us and to you, that so remarkable a variety of authors and programs have written about or incorporated Image-Streaming into their own work? All of these had and have a full head of steam on their own excellent and very special programs and methods. Each was so struck by the effects and benefits and nature of Image-Streaming that they incorporated it into their own great work.

In addition to the full description of Image-Streaming on this website, accounts of and instructions for Image-Streaming are also found at a number of other sites and locations on the Web.

Image-Streaming consists of describing aloud, in as much detail as possible, to a live listener or an audience, or to a tape recorder as potential audience — while observing the ongoing stream of sensory imagery of all kinds, which stream constitutes by far the greater part of our thinking. That ongoing stream is the source of virtually all our understanding and of all our creativity.

Significance of Image-Streaming

Less than two percent of our brains is involved in conscious thinking and experiencing.

This two percent associates — we consciously think — in words. I say "sky" and you think or say "blue"; I say "table" and your response is likely to be "cloth" or "leg." Most of the time when you try considering to puzzle out some concern or question, you usually subvocalize in words.

In contrast, some eighty to ninety percent of your brain associates in sensory images instead — forty to forty-five times more of your brain by volume than the parts of your brain which do your conscious, verbal thinking.

Where, then, is the greater part of your intelligence to be found? — in that two percent or in that eighty-plus percent?

Not only by the amount of brain involved. Our conscious verbal brain is trained down by the speed of the language we speak, to go much slower and more ploddingly compared with the rest of our brain. Most of the rest of our cerebral cortex, topmost region of our brain, communicates point-to-point some ten thousand times faster than do the conscious verbal parts. The main, limbic, brain, associates and communicates some ten thousand times faster than does most of the cortex — ten thousand times ten thousand — ten MILLION — times faster than does your conscious verbal mind.

Even more important, only a tiny part of our memory and experience are directly accessible to conscious remembering and use — and THAT access only by heavily edited executive summaries. Most of us expend huge effort and attention to trying to store in more highly retrievable form certain portions of experience (both in and out of school), and usually "lose" or "forget" most of that anyway.

In contrast, all or very nearly all of the experiences we've ever had, conscious or unconscious, are still in our living memory, highly accessible to our unconscious sorting and associating (and still coloring our thoughts, perceptions and choices even though we are consciously unaware of them).

Everything cited to this point is well-known, verifiable fact, long familiar to science after centuries of disciplined research into mind and brain. Also widely acknowledged these past several decades is the finding and observation that apparently every conscious thought and perception and action is preceded by relevant unconscious — "pre-conscious" — brain functions.

Your Reflexive Beyond-Conscious Sorter

What follows from all of this, of even greater importance, which even a little bit of formal research could readily verify if ever performed or allowed to be performed, is a reflexive sorting process, associating throughout our huge "unconscious" data-base.

We call this "unconscious," but the "un-" part of that refers only to the "conscious" part of us! The part of mind and brain involved in this instantaneous reflexive sorting and associating is anything but "unconscious." More sensibly, we in Project Renaissance have taken to calling this the "Beyond-Conscious Mind."

On the face of it, this ongoing stream of sensory-image associations is thousands of times richer, perhaps tens of millions of times richer a process than is our conscious thinking and experiencing.

— And it is there all the time, running freely without conscious effort on our part:  like breathing and heartbeat — the rich, image-sorting streambeats of your mind.

Then and now

We all enjoyed full free use of this ongoing process while we were infants or small children. It was drilled out of us, it was forced to "move underground" under a barrage of instructions to pay visibly conscious attention to whatever adult was talking to us or teaching ("eyes front! Look at me when....") and fixated on specific things going on ("Keep your eye on the ball!") — concentrating on these things and treating all our hundreds of sidebands of thought and perception as merely irrelevant and distracting.

Image-Streaming is, as of this writing, the readiest and most sensitive way we have to access some small part of this infinitely rich ongoing orchestra of sensory thoughts, associations and perceptions.

Who Can Image-Stream?

Virtually everyone can Image-Stream. Over the years, of the over ten thousand people with whom we've had some relevant contact, only three persons were unable. Two of these I'm pretty sure could have been gotten to "see their own images," given a little special work. Yet, to thirty to forty percent of the American public, the very idea of actually seeing your own images the way you are seeing these words or any other objective object, seems completely strange if not impossible. (This writer was once numbered among that thirty to forty percent.)

Most of the rest of us are so used to picturing things in our mind's eye consciously that the idea that some don't have this experience comes as a surprise, even in these later days when seemingly so little can surprise us.

Nearly everyone who could not, can once they have seen it demonstrated (see Easy, Direct Way to Teach ImageStreaming to Entire Groups).

We have also freely published twenty-four "back-up" procedures to ensure that even deeply inveterate non-seers can start "getting" mind-pictures and begin to Image-Stream.

Image-Streaming is so easy, so natural a process, that most people teach themselves from the instructions posted here under Image-Streaming. It is so easy and natural a process that in professionally taught groups, the simple method outlined in Easy, Direct Way to Teach ImageStreaming to Entire Groups suffices to ensure that everyone in the group of twenty, thirty, forty, even one hundred, learns (re-learns!) the skill readily.

In perhaps one group in five, one person — sometimes with his partner, for whom the inability was modelled — may need help from the back-up procedures. You may wish to carry with you a print-out copy of those back-up procedures the first time or so you take a group into Image-Streaming, just to heighten your confidence.

Here, now, are the two versions of the detailed steps for group instruction:
 

  Easy, Direct Way to Teach Image-Streaming to Entire Groups

  The Original Group Method for Teaching Image-Streaming

Conclusion

Bottom line — our conscious mind works with only the tiniest fraction of our brain and mental resources. Most of our mind and brain associates in sensory images, not consciously and not in words, but nonetheless is the source of our understanding and our creativity in that, very occasionally, an insight gets through into our conscious mind.

The insight — the understanding — the answer — the apparent solution — is reflexively sorted out and on exhibit in our Beyond-Conscious mind just about instantaneously, as communications in these sensory regions of brain and mind are so much more rapid than they are within our word-based, conscious regions trained down as they are to the speed of the language we speak.

Though far from infallible, the insights and answers arrived at through the sensory mind appear to be much more accurate and comprehensive than those arrived at through conscious deliberative process, because both their speed and the great breadth of the data-base from which they derive take far more into account than do our consciously derived answers.

Image-Streaming is presently the most sensitive and rich process by means of which to tap into this beyond-conscious associative process, whether for general insight or in order to gain answers. More and more programs and authors are finding our Image-Streaming process valuable to their own efforts.

More and more people around the world want to learn and teach Image-Streaming — some are doing so from a variety of levels of expertise and information.

We actually wish to encourage this process, rather than to exploit it or to try to put up proprietary and security barriers around it, because this simple Image-Streaming and the phenomena it represents are one of the great natural resources of the human race, everyone's birthright.

I am freely and openly publishing these details on how to teach it to a group, because when you do so I want you to get it right! I will also answer your questions on the matter, as best I can. Email to Win Wenger.

When you do so, please make printouts of this article — in its entirety, including the copyright notice below — freely available to your participants. (We will also very much welcome translations of the whole of this piece into local languages, and being advised of them so we can support your good work in our website.)

We encourage you to train, as best you can, or to co-explore with others in groups, not only Image-Streaming but various other procedures we've published freely on the Web or in books.

Only professionally certified trainers from Project Renaissance, however, have our guaranteed quality control. No one without this qualified certification may represent themselves as a Project Renaissance trainer nor their efforts as the Project Renaissance program (only as resources from the Project Renaissance program), but you are welcome and encouraged to train as best you can our freely published resources.

If you'd like to develop past these limitations and become a certified Project Renaissance trainer, please see conditions and instructions posted under Trainer.

Again, here are the full procedures:
 

• Easy, Direct Way to Teach Image-Streaming to Entire Groups
• The Original Group Method for Teaching Image-Streaming