This is Vol. 6 of the archives of Capital Ideasmiths, Project Renaissance's former e-zine. Please note that because these are archives, many external links contained herein may no longer work.
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Announcing the Discovery Festival in March. Find out more here. A message
from Win More Winsight
articles are up now at Winwenger.com: In case you're
new to all this... Writers
needed who know the periodicals market. Some major apparent opportunities. Someone
handy needed, to tinker up and help develop several low-tech, simple
inventions, in return for partial ownership. WANTED:
ambitious college students to tutor classmates using Project Renaissance
methods. Help others, help yourself, possibly earn some money.
Editor:
Michael W. Cole
Why You Need a Live Partner for Image Streaming
Special Advisory - Thirty years of experience with various of the resources currently discussed here have made it abundantly clear that: For most of the techniques you find in the ImageStreaming and other Project Renaissance contexts, you really need a live partner/co-explorer as your audience. You can get by for less with results that are still good, but results which just don't compare to those where you have a live listener. The tape recorder we mention in most of our books as an alternative way to provide yourself that defining audience, is a bare minimum required for the effects these methods produce. A live human being as partner, for everything from Image-Streaming and Over-the-Wall to Brainstorming, CrabApple and Windtunnel, is far more effective and rewarding. The many of you who HAVE found effective and
rewarding results with these methods using only a tape recorder, are
indeed to be congratulated, but you really should explore the even
wider and more rewarding worlds, at least some of the time, with live
human partners and listeners. This is especially true of anyone having difficulty "getting" effective images in ImageStreaming. The original version of that method, "the Helper Technique" now among our back-up procedures for making certain that anyone can "get" such images (http://www.winwenger.com/ebooks/bright3.htm), has to have a live partner so you can watch for one-another's reflexive attention-cues which accompany the experience of such images. But the need of a live human partner extends far beyond ImageStreaming. Why do you need an audience? You need an external focus to describe your awarenesses
to in order to reinforce them. By describing or otherwise making specific
responses to your own awarenesses, you- Only in "Improvitaping" (http://www.winwenger.com/archives/part13.htm) among our various methods is the tape recorder the best "audience" for this purpose. (For "Freenoting" (http://www.winwenger.com/archives/part13.htm) and the problem-solving "Walk-in-the-Woods" [not yet in our website as of 1/4/02 but there soon, free meanwhile upon request], a notepad is the best medium for recording.) For nearly everything else, a live human partner and listener is far, far better. A live listener, just by being there, helps you
avoid the short-cuts in perception and thought, the trivial fluff
and stock responses which otherwise bar our way toward our own deeper
perceptions. Having a live listener "puts you on your good behavior"
for expressing your perceptions in detail and for giving attention
and definition to your various, deeper and subtler, awarenesses. To develop your awarenesses in whatever direction or domain, you need to express from or respond from those awarenesses, or describe them. The better the quality of your response or description, the better your development and perceptual definition become. You need also your feedback from your own response or description. The better the quality of that feedback, the better your development and further definition. When you have a live partner listening or a live audience, this affects very much how you respond and the way you describe. This is actually a double-whammy effect, because having a live listener or listeners profoundly affects also the way you hear yourself. How you hear yourself, how you perceive your feedback from your own outputs, is usually far more important than the feedback which the live listener can provide you directly, though that is important also. The main reason for a live listener is not HIS feedback to you, though, but the quality of how you receive your own feedback reinforcement from your own output in the context of that listener's presence, and the quality of your own output. Hear one-another out. Draw each other out. When it's your turn to be speaking, pay far more attention to what you are actually perceiving than to what you know. Don't repeat yourself much, for the universe is infinite: by attending your own perceptions, you are infinite. And so also is that person you are drawing out. Even the least of us is a window on God, whatever your definition. This is more than just a sentiment. It is more than just Project Renaissance's belief that this marks the main path to a more fully human future. See its case at http://www.winwenger.com/feed1.htm and, a la Socrates, in "Mutual Lives" at http://www.winwenger.com/part33.htm Please find at least SOMEONE amongst all your contacts and acquaintances with whom to develop the worlds unfolding from each of our methods and sets of scripted specific step-by-step "recipes" or instructions. - - Even if at first you have to post a phone-only note at your community bulletin board or grocery store. We will also renew our attempts at Project Renaissance to get local thinktanks going in other locations besides those here in the Washington, D.C. area and in Ontario. We've also just developed new trainers, across this country and in Sweden, Norway and Scotland, who can also act as local contact points in helping to arrange in-person, face-to-face co-exploring partnered live listeners. But we want for people everywhere, not just in these countries and cities only, to enjoy the benefits of live partnered pursuing of these various method resources and procedures. We can't and won't use our general mailing list for this because some on that list will value their privacy more, and we respect that. If you are willing to try getting together with each other as co-explorers in your area, please send us your name, physical address, email address and phone number, under the heading of "LOCAL," to wwenger101@aol.com It may take a year or more to accumulate enough others in your area for us to be able to launch a get-together in your area, so you should also be making your own contacts meanwhile. Likewise as was recently suggested in this list, if you are willing to meet with others for live co-exploring of these procedures, you might routinely include your town or city in your signature line. Local thinktanks: Many of the world's best, and various, creative and ingenious problem-solving
Even With a Tape Recorder - Here are ways to make your experience more effective even when you are unable to obtain a live listener, using only a tape recorder as your potential listener: 1. Decide firmly that you will keep this tape recording. Decide temporarily, at least, that you are going to let others listen to the tape you are making (even if you don't finally do so). In every way you can, establish your tape recorder as a listening presence so that the presence of that listener will affect what you express of your perceptions and how you express it, and affect also how you hear yourself. An ordinary cheap recorder will do enough for that, but here's another approach for boosting your results with a tape recorder, taking advantage of the fact that the quality of your feedback bears upon the quality of your experience and what you get from that experience. 2. Improve your auditory feedback. Use a fairly decent tape deck recorder with good stereo mike or pair of good though ordinary mono mikes, and a good set of stereo headphones. Turn the volume up just a little. Turn the treble or higher pitched part of your sound up fairly well - it's the higher frequencies in your voice which carry most of your information. The headphones in this set-up will carry your own voice back to your hearing at electronic speed, faster than your own sounds come back to you acoustically. This will considerably improve and enrich the worlds which you explore through our procedures, even when you are not using a live listener, only the illusion of a live listener as represented by your tape recorder recording. 3. Best of both worlds - A live partner or partners, each of you with a stereo rig described in # 2 just above. This can well carry into yet further worlds of effect. In conclusion: These are matters which have become very clear to us more recently than the books we've written over the past third of a century and also more recently than most of the various procedures we now have published on the web. As good as things have been, for you to follow out these suggestions here and/or engage a friend as live listener and co-explorer, can only make things far, far better yet. Enjoy!
Copyright
2002 by Win Wenger, Ph.D., Project Renaissance, Box 332, Gaithersburg,
MD 20884-0332, wwenger101@aol.com,
http://www.winwenger.com
You may, however, freely copy this procedure–in whole, including
this notice, but not in part, for use with colleagues and friends.
Image
Streaming as a Two-Step Process by Susan Wenger
How do you know that Image-Streaming works? What if: When we have a problem or question we are working on, there is a solution or an answer (henceforth problem/solution) we would like to see, but it may not be practical, do-able, efficient, the best solution. When we see an image that seems to solve the problem, how do we know it is the right solution, and not just the solution we'd like to see? How do we know we're not force-fitting a solution from an image when either the image or the interpretation of the image was wrong? For example, were we to advocate that the President of the United States should image-stream to find the best action to take against a terrorist act, how can we then trust that the image he finds and the action he takes are indeed appropriate and best? The answer is: We use two different processes when we image-stream. This may have been overlooked, because we tend to use the phrase "image-streaming" to describe the first part of the process as well as the whole two-step process. In the first step of image-streaming, we utilize the principle of description to pole-bridge between our image-producing brain and our awareness brain regions. If all we do is to produce images and describe them, we may come up with a solution that seems right but is not. The crucial partner process to the image-streaming is the debriefing after this image-streaming step. This debriefing step occurs when the participant is fully alert and conscious, and this step is thoughtful, cortical, analytical. The debriefing process should be as vigorous and as rigorous as we can possibly make them. This is when the person who has the fullest knowledge of the problem he is trying to solve moves away from the shadowy world of images into the full light of conscious, analytical scrutiny by the cortex. If the image he came up with is valid, and if the interpretation/action plan he came up with is valid, he will see this to be the case when he is out of the imaging process, into the debriefing process. The relaxed, dreamy state of imagery behind him, he is now enjoined to plan lucid steps for implementation, he is consciously and deliberately examining options, he is defending his image and interpretation to a listening partner, and the defense itself will expose flaws in the image or interpretation. His partner won't expose flaws, because his partner doesn't have all the facts - his partner only has the facts that the imager thought relevant to the problem, the facts that the imager told him; and because it is definitely not the role of the partner to expose flaws or to initiate discussion. The partner's active listening, however, forces the imager to anticipate the sort of questions an all-knowing partner would ask, forces him to ask himself the questions he would ask someone else with that problem solution with his own complete knowledge of the problem. An important aspect of this is that it is not just the solution that should be analyzed by the imager, but also the image itself (which he has seen and perforce described inadequately - however long he described the image, he only described the parts he thought relevant to the listener, not the essence of the image itself); and also the applicability of the image to the problem and applicability of the image to the solution. Thus, the critical, cortical faculties of the imager are utilized to the fullest in examining his image outside of the imaging state, and hence he is able to validate to his own fullest satisfaction the reality of the solution, and the solution will be valid. Can the solution still be wrong? Of course it can, for any number of reasons. Man is fallible, and his images will be based on his understanding of the problem, not necessarily the problem itself. His cortical analysis of his solution can be mistaken. When we try and try and try to solve a problem and fail, our thinking gets rutted and gets in the way of finding a solution: similarly, we can grasp so eagerly at a new solution that appears feasible that this very grasping may interfere with our rational analysis of the solution. Nevertheless, the combination of image-streaming and debriefing is SO much more powerful than any other approach to our problem that it succeeds in an overwhelming majority of instances. In conclusion, I urge the most rigorous post-imagery debriefing process that the partners can muster. Too many image-streamers assume that when they have their image and their solution and their action plan they are done. It is critical to the usefulness of the process that the imager examine his image and solution and action-plan intensely, guided and aided by his debriefing partner. A very effective process for ensuring this examination is a second debriefing with a new partner, who was not involved in the original image-streaming, focusing on evaluating and validating the connections between the problem, the image, the solution, and the action-plan for implementation. When image-streaming is done with a tape recorder instead of a live partner or set of partners, it is even more important that the results be debriefed. In the absence of a partner, the imager should spend added time debriefing in a thinking, cortical manner, such as writing down solutions/action-plans in a permanent logbook (as opposed to a random scrap of paper to be discarded soon after). The rigor of the debriefing will diminish with the experienced imager-streamer, as his confidence in the process increases with every success; however, it should always be an important step in the process. Susan Wenger
Copyright
2002 by Susan Wenger
Announcement: Presentations and Presenters Sought
Top-of-the-Line PRESENTATIONS AND PRESENTERS Sought---- For next year's Ides-of-March DiscoverFest II, and Your involvement with this year's Ides-of-March DiscoverFest I (March
16-17 1) Make it easier for us to get to know you and to know how to respond
to Here is some guidance to what we are seeking in these events Special Features of the Ides-of-March DiscoverFest Event(s): 1) These are very experiential. Persuasion and explanation are limited
to 2) Emphasis is on participants creating special experiences under
3) Experience first, sort out afterward. Some entertainment value
is 4) Pre-event, Friday evening, revving-up session for presenters.
5) Event easily accessed by the public. 6) Cutting-edge exploratory. Special Features of the November Double-Festivals: 1) Experiential, and/or theory, and/or special findings. Any lecture's
2) Emphasizes: felt effects and benefits; human potential; new 3) "Making sense" extended toward building a unified general
theory of 4) Pre- and post-conference intensive workshop trainings an option
- 5) These November DoubleFestivals, featuring the overlap between
6) Cutting-edge exploratory. In both types of event, the Ides-of-March DiscoverFests and the November
Special Regarding THIS March 16-17, "World Premiere," DiscoverFest I: With our attendance in this very first DiscoverFest, March 16-17
weekend, Further rounds of the Ides-of-March DiscoverFest, in 2003 and after,
are For any special arrangements for this March 16-17 DiscoverFest, and/or
to
Announcement: Discovery Festival
Discover world after amazing world, from within you and wherever, through a wondrous variety of methods and programs. Voyages of Discovery! -to far worlds indeed, setting forth within the Holiday Inn at 8777 Georgia Avenue, just 4 blocks from the Silver Spring, Maryland, Metro station. DiscoveryFest will feature pure wall-to-wall process experiences. Practically all introduction and exposition and persuasion-of-the-case are relegated to the program notes and free printed handouts. The time we have together in these excursions will be sheer live experiencing. Except for two special sessions at the start and one at the end where we all meet in one space together, every 90 minutes three new voyages-of-experience begin. After no more than 5 minutes of introduction, your choice among these three ventures will provide you more than an hour of extraordinary direct experience. 5-10 minutes of question/answer, and a few minutes to debrief, or compare notes with one-another, or compose your thoughts, and make your selection among the next three voyages, completes the 90-minute cycle. On each of your chosen eight of the twenty-some relaxed and rewarding voyages provided this weekend, you can discover greater riches in more detail and arguably greater benefit than you can on an extended arduous physical vacation trip to some exotic clime. Many of these excursions will be from Project Renaissance, which has published many hundreds of unique procedures and has as many more unpublished. Procedures from other programs and disciplines will also feature. On the opening general session Saturday morning, we will literally experience, and in a VERY special way, the visiting of another whole unique world. The second general session, also Saturday morning, we will explore the extraordinary powers of modern Socratic Method and the rich pathways it literally in fact opens upon infinity. The rest of Saturday, and most of Sunday, will feature your choice among three concurrent voyages at a time. The final session Sunday afternoon will again be a general session, where we will all meet together again - this time to go "Toolbuildering" (a version of which begins at http://www.winwenger.com/toolbld.htm), discovering whole new processes, methods, skill-building techniques and arts. DiscoveryFest is not a training program, nothing is "done to you," nothing is "installed," nothing is committed, any "selling" by individual programs represented there is confined to the handout literature. You are not going to any formal training on this one. Instead, DiscoveryFest is simply a set of explorations. Remarkable exploration experiences, but simply these experiences and not a training. No promises are made other than that these explorations respect everyone's comfort, are highly entertaining, high quality, and may well provide you other, additional benefits if you desire for them to do so. You know what such festivals as the food-based "Taste of Bethesda" or "Taste of D.C." are like: consider DiscoveryFest to be a grand calorie-free but substantial "Taste of the Mind." Discover world after amazing world, from within you and wherever, through a wondrous variety of methods and programs. You know or must have suspected by now that we, as do some other programs, have more than just a few diverse but worthy experiences around. You may even have wondered when you might get a chance to try out one or another with good people that you hadn't had a chance to in our various Project Renaissance training sessions, annual Double-Festival conferences in November, and/or our monthly thinktanks. (And, of course, you are aware that a good many other programs also have some worthy experiences you'd like to try out, in good company.) More than 40 different experiential procedures from Project Renaissance free on the web, several hundred more that are published in books; hundreds more which aren't yet...... Any curiosity about what some of these experiences might be like, or how useful they might be to you? Multiple programs and disciplines are represented here, not only Project Renaissance. Twenty-some different experience procedure sessions, mostly three different ones at a time along different topical tracks, all day Saturday and Sunday and a round or so Saturday evening. Each session is a wall-to-wall experiencing. Any persuading, and most explanation, is specifically limited to free handout literature. At most, 5 minutes explanatory introduction at the start of each session, a little more explanation is permitted during 5 minutes question/answer at the end, without marketing. Events are on a 90 minute cycle. Up to 5 minutes introduction, 70 minutes the actual experience, 5-10 minutes Q/A: then 10-15 minutes before the next session to visit exhibits, compare notes or debrief with others as you please or ask questions, and find your way to the next session. This is not a formal conference, nor is it a training workshop, though the experiences may serve some training purposes. Nor is it a "trade fair." It is something unique, simply an opportunity to experience, in good company, responsibly conducted, some of the best procedures in the world for enhancing abilities and perceptions and awarenesses, and to experience them live. Many people - indeed, ANYone alive between the ears! - will leap eagerly and with delight to such a unique opportunity. - - An opportunity to inexpensively experience a wide range of such sessions, from creative problem-solving and accelerated learning to invention and discovery, self-exploration, energy sessions, health and healing, creativity and the arts, etc. This first Discovery Festival is only $79 for the two days, $49 for one day, $10 for one session only. Save $10 for the two days or $5 for the one day by registering with Project Renaissance, P.O. Box 332, Gaithersburg, MD 20884-0332 USA by or before March 1. We will also register and admit at the door, beginning 8:15 a.m. Saturday morning, March 16. Location: The Holiday Inn Silver Spring. The Holiday Inn is at 8777 Georgia Ave., Silver Spring, MD 20910, tel. 301/589-0800. Very easy to find by car, the Holiday Inn is also just a few steps from the Silver Spring Metro Station. Literally experience visiting entire new worlds, wonderful worlds of discovery, for something less than what a conventional cruise would cost you! - - At how real some of these worlds will be for you, and how rewarding. You will be truly amazed at how rich will be for you the many things that you will discover. No commitments, no pressures, no strings, just come on in and fly!
( ) For both days of the weekend ( ) For Saturday ( ) For Sunday Your Name Your Address (Optional:) Your email and website (Optional:) Your phones: Payment: $ (Pick up your badge at the registration desk: that is how you will
be
Copyright
2002 by Win Wenger, Ph.D., Project Renaissance, Box 332, Gaithersburg,
MD 20884-0332, wwenger101@aol.com,
http://www.winwenger.com
You may, however, freely copy this procedure–in whole, including
this notice, but not in part, for use with colleagues and friends.
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