High Thinktank process points to a phenomenon of shared values
by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
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Photography by Elan Sun Star
“A million butterflies, rising from a meadow into the sun!”
Some version of this image and answer-impression was reported by every member of the 26-person workshop training group in Ravenna, Ohio, in April 1982. This was in response to one of our High Thinktank questions, in which no participant had conscious knowledge of the question she or he was answering until after s/he had answered it.
The process resembles somewhat the Johnny Carson spoof “Karnak,” but is for real, following the procedures spelled out in our book, A Method for Personal Growth And Development [now out of print]. Participants are trained to visualize not in conventional forms of directed imagery but in UNdirected imagery — in post-Einsteinian Discovery Technique, drawing upon ongoing imagery, streams of which run constantly in the back of the mind and which arise from subtler, more sensitive regions of the brain and mind. High Thinktank, elsewhere on this website, freely provides full instructions for this process.
The participants were trained to interact with these images, extract their meaning, and to become able, via that imagery in response to questions, to get instant meaningful answers to a wide range of questions, problems and issues. In the final, High Thinktank phase of the training, participants present “concealed” questions to each other, or as a group are silently asked such questions by the trainer or coordinator.
The purpose of concealing the questions from consciousness is to prevent one’s expectations of what the answer “ought” to be from getting in the way of, or otherwise distorting, undirected imagery responses arising from subtler, more sensitive areas of brain and mind in answer to those questions.
This is a highly practical process, in that the answers gotten by this High Thinktank method tend toward far higher accuracy and ingenuity than answers gotten by any other means in our experience. As of the present writing, it takes about one day to train initially all members of any group with effective, accurate use of High Thinktank, though some can perform it immediately without any training.
This is even more practical for the great issues and problems for which and on which everyone has long since staked out a position — but for which the answer has not yet worked. Indeed, there are some questions or problems which seem impossible to ask without getting a whole catechism of stuff running through your head—
For example: “What is the best system of government?”
Bingo! — a whole catechism of conditioned phrases and declarations running through your head, such pithy bytes as democracy being very imperfect but still it’s better than other forms of government, “I pledge allegiance,” “get out and vote…” “One man one vote…” None of which even comes close to an answer, much less a useful answer, on that question. How do we get past all that stuff we “know,” into fresh perceptions from which may be found the answer? — By not triggering it in the first place. By “reading” what your subtler resources have to say in answer to a “silent” or “concealed” question, then discovering that the question you’ve answered happens to be: “What is the best form of government?”
The question which that Ohio workshop answered was of that sort. Participants had no conscious knowledge whatever as to the question they were answering until after they had “read” their subtler mind’s response to it.
Not all these independently elicited answer-images were completely identical. Some were variations — a field of butterflies as far as one could see, for example, which became a single glowing carpet of colors. A flock of birds rising in great numbers from treetops into an endlessly deep sky. One experience of being a tiny mite floating, while a bright light drew closer and closer. One participant on the question had a memory flashback, to a night-time swim years earlier in which he had swum underwater toward a light set in the sides of the pool. But all were images of that sort, and strongly experienced, vivid. All of the image answers apparently saying the same thing and saying it strongly.
This is quite remarkable, since the question they answered was an issue over which those same participants consciously happened to be bitterly divided!
Every group we’ve trained is special, but Ohio groups seem more so as the people who have shown up in them often appeared to have very strong beliefs on unconventional topics and were more than willing to venture them. What had happened earlier in this particular session was that someone in it had ventured a remark about “life after death” and everyone had jumped in. Half of this group was of the absolute and unswerving belief that we DO continue past the point of physical death; the other half was as firm in holding that “when we die the lights go out and that’s that!”
It was with some difficulty that this writer finally pulled this group back from the usual kinds of argument on that issue and back to the training context. But — into the pot of “concealed” questions to be used in next day’s High Thinktanking segment of the training, he decided to prepare and include this “secret” question: “What happens to our conscious existence beyond the point of death of the physical body?”
The first few questions processed had the usual initial scatter and gradual trend toward a 2/3 accuracy rate (ed. note: current training group accuracy rates run at about 90%.) Then the above question was selected, unbeknownst to the participants…..
Vivid, strong images. And regardless of any participant’s position taken during the earlier argument, regardless of any participant’s asserted belief on the topic — the images were unanimous! ALL the images were some version of, or very strongly resembled, that most-often-reported image from this session, the “million butterflies rising from a meadow into the sun.”
Regardless of what participants believed consciously and with apparent intense conviction, they ALL unconsciously believed in a continuation of existence past physical death, an ingathering toward some higher form of existence. That does not make such continuity and higher form a fact, however suggestive this unanimity-despite-conscious-beliefs might be that this is the case. What is the fact, though, is that participants’ unconscious minds were unanimously agreed on an issue over which, consciously, they were bitterly at odds.
Loathe to invite disharmonies into his workshops, this writer was nonetheless anxious to probe this remarkable phenomenon further. With three subsequent training groups he probed until he found an issue over which the members were sorely divided, then slipped the relevant question into the pot of “concealed” questions for the High Thinktanking phase. On each of those three occasions, the same outcome:
Despite whatever conscious belief as regards some sharply divisive issue and disagreement, everyone UNconsciously is unanimously agreed on those same issues. However disagreed consciously, all UNconsciously are unanimously agreed!
The reader can experiment directly enough, himself, with the same High Thinktank procedures as self-trained in A Method For Personal Growth & Development. For self-training or non-professional training from those instructions, allow a day or so, or maybe 10 trial questions with intervals of time between, to get up to full levels of accuracy. OR start with Image-Streaming, through the succession of procedures for interpretations and answer-getting, through “Instant Answer” on into the work with “concealed” questions in High Thinktank.
Anyone can do it. In our professionally taught workshops it takes only one day to have virtually everyone able to deliver High Thinktank answers with very high accuracy and ingenuity. Thus —
We are addressing here a very wide-spread phenomenon. We’ve not yet had opportunity to test this cross-culturally, but it may well be that every human being, at unconscious levels, agrees with the rest of the human race as to each of the great issues, including matters of right and wrong, matters of past-death survival or other metaphysics, so we no longer have to go around killing one another to persuade others to our particular view, issues of human purpose, types of government, and so on.
In particular, we are proposing to investigate the hypothesis that — despite ours being a post-situational ethics society, in anomalous confusion as to whether any standard of behavior can pertain — that we all innately share, however unconsciously, a common system of values, a common standard of right and wrong behaviors that transcends particular religions and ethnicities — a common and universal, innate, ethics.
A second particular we propose for investigation is the development of appropriate mechanical devices and machines-based procedures to identify and distinguish “yes/no” subliminal responses in the human organism. By stochastic elimination this would be a new creative problem-solving procedure in its own right. The “machine read-out” would make for more standardized measurement for comparison of responses, and moreover could carry application of the above findings over into various arenas of conflict resolution, including marriage counseling, labor-management relations, and international diplomacy.