by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
Winsights No. 44 (August 2000)
Many or most of you reading this already have learned how to Imagestream. Many of you have even practiced it at least some — and experienced at least some degree and form of nice little mental tuneup from it. The subject of this month’s excursion here involves just one use, one application, of Image Streaming which may be absolute dynamite.
We’ve just been creating a new course on tape which contains this remarkable application. This new course is to become available this November (2000) from Nightingale-Conant, for whom I’ve been recording these past few days. [Editor’s note: See Genius Code, available from this website.]
Those of you who have not yet learned to Imagestream, this is now your occasion and reason to go to my free online-published quickbook, You Are Brighter Than You Think. Follow the instructions given, in the last third of that quickbook, for Imagestreaming. Save to file or print out those instructions. With them, save to file or print out the instructions following below.
The instructions below are for rebuilding the very foundations of your understanding, ready once you’ve practiced an accumulated several hours’ worth of Imagestreaming. Build some skills and experience with Imagestreaming if you have not already done so. Then you can use the procedure below to target directly on, and immensely strengthen, your ability to understand, appreciate, and be enriched by everything around you and by everything in your experience, outer and inner.
This next page or so gives you the means to do exactly that, to understand far more about everything that’s going on, to see matters of all kinds in depth which previously had little or no meaning for you, and generally to experience your life profoundly more rewardingly.
The Sequence and Structure of Understanding
We’ve written briefly before (in Winsights No. 28) about a Swiss biologist who became the founder of cognitive psychology and perhaps a half-dozen other sciences regarding human development. Jean Piaget, closely observing infants and young children, found that our human powers of understanding grow from a sequence of more basic experiences. Our current ability to understand rests upon more basic earlier understandings which, in turn, rest upon even more basic sensory experiences.
For example, as babies we needed a lot of experience in things like peek-a-boo to discover that things are still there whether we’re looking at them or not. Once that was understood, in turn, as young children, we needed a lot of experience playing with quantities of objects, and with pouring fluid into different containers of different sizes and shapes and volumes, before coming on our own to realize that how many of something is key, or that the volume of the fluid and the volume of the container is key, regardless of the shape of the container.
That seems awfully elementary — because it is. This principle Piaget called the “principle of conservation” — conservation meaning constancy. This principle of conservation of quantity, in turn, builds within each of us, from personal discovery through play that generated a lot of basic sensory experiences and observations, the basis from which we could understand some further matters and issues. As little kids, we needed that understanding of constant quantity pretty well, in order to become able, in turn, to come to understand that some actions are reversible…that you can pour water, say, from one container to another and then pour it back.
We also needed a lot of play and sensory experience, exploring how some actions are reversible and that some actions can go back and forth, before we could come to understand that some actions are irreversible…that some actions go only one way, like pouring water out on the ground, or mixing hot and cold, or having a glass fall and shatter.
Gaps in the Structure of Our Understanding
If we missed some of these basic experiences along the way for whatever reason, that gap in our structure of understanding makes it harder for us to understand now what’s around us and what’s going on. For example, if we never really got, by first-hand sensory play experience, the fact that the volume of the water stays the same regardless of the shape of the container, we were eventually taught that information as someone else’s fact instead of our finding it in our own immediate sensory experience.
If such a gap happened along our path of development, we’d never really dig how some of the stuff going on around us is reversible, that it can go back and forth and be adjusted to suit…and that some of the stuff going on around us can’t be undone. That’s a lot of stuff to have weak understanding on! And it applies in some fashion and in some degree to nearly everything!
Actually, we all have gaps, key points in our developing structure of basic understandings where we were simply taught as facts various key principles which we would have done better to have discovered for ourselves through our own immediate sensory experience.
A Nice Little Dilemma
The more basic the principle, the further away it is from our current conscious attention. But the more basic the principle, the more it applies to and bears upon nearly everything. So the more basic the gap, the more contexts there are within which our understanding is weakened, and the greater its negative difference in our lives…and the harder it is for us to track down through our conscious memories and information, much less try to repair such a gap. And the greater positive difference it would make throughout our life, were we somehow to do so. We propose now that you do so, now and freely, with the rather simple procedure we’ve set forth here, following below.
To Repair Those Gaps and Strengthen All of Your Structure of Understanding
The purpose of the instructions below is to help you discover one of your key gaps, to repair that gap, and to strengthen thereby all of your powers of understanding regarding all matters upon which that more basic understanding bears.
With even that little of an explanation, your beyond-conscious mind already knows and has selected for you one of those critical gap points in your development — and a strategy of Imagestreaming experience with which to show it usefully to you! So:
Have a friend read the following instructions to you, with appropriate pauses long enough for you to answer back with a detailed description of your experience where indicated. Or, you can record these instructions onto tape, with those pauses, then on playback have the tape cue you through these experiences with you answering back your descriptions out loud to the voice on the tape. With these instructions being cued to you instead of your having to look over to see what step is next, you can more fully enter the experience, keeping your eyes closed to see more freely.
Anything you describe to a listener in detail while examining it, you discover more and more and more about. Describing thus aloud these experiences that follow, these elements of your Imagestream will develop them far further for you and show you much more than would otherwise be possible.
Arrange a space within which to pursue this major experience for a while with fullest focus and attention, a good half hour or so, without being interrupted.
Preparation
Let’s let your Imagestreaming faculties and mind now take you back in your very early memories to that point, whether these are early memories which are already conscious for you, or whether these memories resided beyond your conscious reach until now. Let yourself be surprised by what comes to view in your Imagestream, whatever experience that is, whatever images there happen to be — some point in your infancy or early childhood where you did not encounter directly for yourself and discover for yourself, in your own immediate experience, some very basic principle.
Let your mind do that for you now. Once you let your Imagestream contact memory of a very early point of experience in your life, let your Imagestreaming mind give you the appropriate sensory-immediate experiences that you had missed. Let your Imagestreaming mind give you a fantasized encounter with those sensory-immediate experiences which will repair and strengthen that gap in your structure of understanding.
Then, after that experience, we can extend that fantasy by coming forward in your life toward the present moment, visiting and re-creating various points of your life which would have been different had your powers of understanding been intact and at full force.
And we’ll let your Imagestreaming mind fill in fresh experiences at these later points, too, still always knowing the difference between this fantasized personal history and the reality of what had happened in real life, but returning to the present moment in time with your powers of understanding well repaired and greatly strengthened forever.
We’ll take on this process a simple step at a time. I’ll cue a step for you, then you examine whatever perceptions come with that step. Please, while examining those perceptions, describe them in detail, to me, this voice on the tape, or to whoever is there with you as your listener.
The Step-By-Step Instructions
- Please let your Imagestreaming faculties take you back to some key point early in your intellectual development…some point way back early in your life. Let things drift back toward some early point in your life. Without trying to recall events, without trying to remember early memories, just let your Imagestreaming faculties open on a key point of your early development. Whether or not it at first seems to fit, just let any impression or image or images now unfold freely for you. Please describe them in detail to me, the voice on the tape, or to whomever you have there as listener. Please start describing these images or impressions in as rich sensory detail as you can, beginning now…..
(Allow 3-4 minutes, blank on the tape or waiting by the live listener, for this describing.)
- Now, please let your imaging mind imagine for you the most effective and appropriate experience that, if it had happened instead of what did happen to you at that point, it could have best enriched your understanding at that key point. Just allow whatever impression or image, now, and by describing it build around it in all your senses whatever that experience is. Please describe to me your way through that experience in as rich sensory detail as you can. Please resume describing your images or impressions of this experience now….
(Allow 4 to 8 minutes for such describing.)
- Excellent. Now let’s come forward a little in time to some other point in your life, a little more recently in your past, a point in your life where the new understanding you’ve just been exploring would have made a difference. And then let’s explore that difference. First, let your Imagestream come to that more recent point of past experience. Whatever impressions or images now come before you, let things unfold from there for you with this new basic understanding and appreciation as part of it.Letting your Imagestreaming faculties move you forward in time, from that very early experience in your life, to other key points of development which followed directly from such a basic area of understanding…… What was a later point in your life where the key understanding from this early experience would have made a lot of difference? Let your imaging faculties take you to that later point of time in your life where having that earlier understanding well would have made a difference to you. Whatever images or impressions come now, please describe them richly to me now….
(Allow 4 to 7 minutes for such describing.)
- Good. Now let your Imagestreaming faculties come forward to yet a later point in your life before the present moment. This later moment is also a moment where that early understanding would have made quite some difference to you. Whatever images and impressions now come, please describe these in richly sensory detail to me, please describe them now…..
(Allow 3½ to 7 minutes for such describing)
(Optional extra step, if this experience is going very well and productively:)
Let your Imagestreaming faculties move you further forward in time from there, along your life’s development between then and this present moment in time here and now. Go to one or several more such points in your life experience where having that very basic understanding would somehow have made a very big difference to you. Please describe each of these experiences to me, resuming now….
(Allow maybe 3-6 minutes for each such experience to be described.)
- There is always something more or something new to discover that can enhance even further your wonderful powers of understanding.Your next experience with this process can be different, finding and repairing some other old gap in your structure of understanding, as you build your ever-burgeoning powers of understanding toward wonderfully higher and more profound levels, as everything around you and everything in your life take on new dimensions of meaning.For now, let’s come back fully to the present moment in time and space…. Coming fully alert, remarkably refreshed and feeling clear…. yawning and stretching…. coming fully alert and feeling terrifically good!
Then please take maybe 10 or 15 minutes more to detail, to your listener and to a notepad, or to a blank tape in your tape recorder and to a notepad, at least some of the specific improvements that you feel this particular episode or set of experiences has made in your present-day understanding and perception.
Mark off three days on your calendar and set up a specific time where you break out that tape recorder again, or at least that notepad, and detail some of the further differences you have noticed that the foregoing experience has by now made in your understanding and in your life. And in what ways various sectors of your life have become richer for you.
So much gain for so little effort!….
Just one simple exercise for you — two, if you’ve not yet learned Imagestreaming and need to go to You Are Brighter Than You Think to learn that good-for-so-many-uses Imagestreaming and accumulate, 5 to 15 minutes at a time, several hours of experience and practice at Imagestreaming, before doing the above repair to your powers of understanding as one special application of Image Streaming. This repair of your whole track of development, and equipment for understanding, is only one of the many uses of Image Streaming, but a very good such use!
We at Project Renaissance have always strongly felt that true understanding is far more valuable and useful than is the short-term temporary rote memorization that most schools and most teachers willingly allow in its place, and which most of us, with that short-change so universal in our experience, also appear willing to settle for. Also, we find that understanding makes our perceptions of everything so very much richer and more rewarding.
Most of our techniques are aimed at building understanding and building our ability to understand. The above simple half-hour procedure is one of our more direct ways for building the ability to understand.