by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
Winsights No. 2 (6 April 1997)
The procedure is called “Image Streaming.” It is a modernization of Einstein’s “Deep Thought” Discovery Method, combined with a modernized version of Socratic Method. Both methods, throughout history, have been closely associated with extraordinarily high levels of mental, perceptual and intellectual performance. We finally figured out why this is so.
Einstein was not the first to use his method, but he was the first respected scientist to “go public” with it. He would let mental imagery play freely, and examine it as closely as possible to see what he could learn from what he observed (e.g. using this method he learned relativity). However, in its original form the Deep Thought Discovery Method is a very soporific process. He, and others who used it, would tend to nod off.
The Socratic Method arose from the context of the first schools in our civilization’s tradition. Those schools were not for the sake of students. They were for the purpose of providing audiences to the leading thinkers of the times. They could better develop their thoughts and perceptions by describing them to those select audiences. In turn, the nicer people – especially the Sophists and most especially Socrates – would return the favor and draw out ideas from their listeners in turn. This drawing-out process proved so productive of miracle leaps in understanding that education itself became named after it, when observed in the root – “educare” (L.), “to draw forth.”
Anything you fix your perceptions on, examine, and describe out in detail to a listener, you will discover more and more and more about. This should not surprise anyone familiar with laws of behavior and psychology, especially the Law of Effect: “you get more of what you reinforce.” Further, when you describe your own perceptions (not someone else’s second-hand information as is the case in today’s didactic classrooms) you reinforce the behavior of being perceptive.
When the Socratic Method was in extensive use – in late classical Greece, of course, and again during the European Renaissance – those tiny population bases produced not only a higher ratio but an enormously higher absolute number of world-class geniuses than the number found in today’s didactically taught 6 billion people! Think of this in terms of “what gets reinforced” and “what does not get reinforced” in these two approaches to “education.”
Especially when we look not at the formalities of fierce argument and dialog in which the original Socratic Method was cast, but at what these methods did: cause people to examine their own inner and outer perceptions, and to attempt to respond to or describe what they discovered there.
Put this aspect of the Socratic Method together with the Einsteinian Deep Thought Discovery Method and suddenly you no longer have something so soporific. Instead you have a sensitive, subtle process delving deeply into one’s own personal symbology in an intensifying, vivid experience of one’s own free-flowing inner imagery. And that free-flowing imagery is always giving important insights, at any and every given moment, even though nearly all of us have been ignoring this remarkably invaluable personal resource all these years!
Image Streaming is the “purest” of the many forms of this combination of modernized Einsteinian and Socratic Methods. It not only shows you a wealth of in-sight and understanding, but reinforces more and more of whatever intelligence you may have online with your immediate consciousness. With this your performance on intelligence tests rises permanently, and the numinous qualities of experience more and more enrich your life day by day.
Further, neither of us have been able yet to find anyone (out of thousands trained) who cannot learn and practice some form of Image Streaming and thus begin to harvest these intelligence gains and many other benefits!
Not only is Image Streaming “good for you” like a medicine in that practicing it builds your mind and the interconnectedness of your brain. It is also:
- Highly entertaining in its content!
- Loaded with understandings about your world and about yourself and those important to you.
- What was REALLY going on when you…..
- Creative problem-solving.
- Profoundly accelerated and improved learning.
- Innovating and creating and inventing.
- A fast road to scientific discoveries
- A way to gain control of your autonomic physiological processes
Next week we will show you a step by step method for getting in touch with your own Image Stream.