Learn it here now — your most powerful mode of thinking and perceiving
by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
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See also — Image Streaming for Groups
How to Image Stream
What you need is an external focus to describe your images to. A tape recorder with blank tape, or a simple Dictaphone like every office used to have, provides you a potential listener for that all-essential focus. Call in a friend, or phone to call up a friend and keep him or her on the line, and you have, even better, a live listener to serve as that external focus.
Of that half of you who did get an image, some found a strong, clear, definite image or set of images, while others just got a glimpse, a faint impression which you might think was hardly worth describing, or weren’t certain whether you were just making up the idea rather than seeing an image —
— Yet whatever you got, the key is to examine and describe it aloud, in as rich detail as possible even if you feel at first as if you are “forcing” it and “making up” some of it to fill your description to your external focus listener. More, though, and more, will come as you describe — be alert to this happening, and describe the new impressions when they come. Your images will become rich and vivid and even their meanings — as Image Stream contents are often symbolic or metaphoric — will start to become apparent.
That is Image Streaming. Each full-flow Image Streaming session should run from 10 to 30 minutes. Examine whatever images happen to be playing in your mind’s eye at the time, while describing them in rich detail to a live or potential listener (person or tape recorder). Even minimum, trivial-seeming impressions or whatever: describe them in such richly textured detail as to force anyone listening to experience and see what you are describing. 10 to 20 minutes at a time, practice several hours of Image Streaming and you will have mastered the basic skills needed to make other forms of visual thinking work for you. — And you will also have experienced some of the other benefits of Image Streaming as well, including improved intellectual performance and creativity.
Even if your imagery is already clear and vivid, you will be astonished at how much more so it quickly becomes when you describe it in this way, while continuing to examine it. This improvement is even stronger if —
- You describe in as sensory-textured detail as possible. The major part of your brain that we want to bring on line, works with sensory images even in profoundly intellectual matters. Explanation takes you away from that sensory immediacy. Instead of saying, “I’m at the beach” or “This is Virginia Beach,” detail instead the warmth of sand under your toes, the sound of surf, the smell of salt, the wheeling of the gulls above you in the almost-white sky, black and white of the gulls on that paler white far above you ….
- Describe as rapidly as you can, to get more and more detail in. Describe faster than you can stop to judge whether or not something is worth mentioning, just go ahead and flow it through (and see what comes with it). This is a kind of “brainstorm” only with description instead of ideas or answers, and has a similar rule to brainstorming’s “if it occurs to you, express it!” Really rapid-flow describing exerts almost a Venturi force or suction pulling other perceptions into focus.
- All this is done most easily with eyes shut, so that your inner visual circuits aren’t distracted away from these initially subtler signals, and so they can operate at full sensitivity. In other words, please keep eyes closed during such processing, in order to see more freely.
What If You Didn’t Get Pictures?
We provide here a series of 24 back-up procedures, any one of which is pretty likely to help you to get pictures started. Once you do get any kind of impression at all started, “describe the dickens out of it,” as if you were still looking at it even if it was but a fleeting glimpse or impression — and you will find more coming. — And more coming. — And more coming!
Please pursue whichever of the back-up procedures work for you, until you are able to do pure Image Streaming. Most of them are forcing techniques, to get a flow of something started which, by describing it while you are examining it, will bring other perceptions on line until you find yourself working with actual and consciously undirected images. Once you achieve this, then please do log several hours of Image Streaming, 10 to 30 minutes at a time.
If you did get pictures, these back-up procedures would only slow you down from getting your Image Streaming accomplished (unless you are planning to teach it, in which case you’ll want to be familiar with all the back-up techniques). It’d be better to go ahead and begin experiencing and practicing.
— What we call the “Ten/Ten Test” — if, after at least 10 minutes per day of Image Streaming for at least ten days, you don’t find your life positively and miraculously transformed, then ignore everything we’ve said and do something else instead. But if you do find Socratic and other miracles happening in your life, please do continue the practice of Image Streaming: no matter how good things become, they can become even better for you! — Fair test?
Socratic Miracles
Contrary to recent general belief, virtually every human can quickly and readily learn to “get pictures” in his mind’s eye, thus becoming able to do visual thinking. We have provided here, after the main Image Streaming procedure above, some of the back-up procedures we now keep on hand to ensure that everyone “gets pictures” and becomes able to think visually. Thus, the benefits and advantages of visual thinking are widely available, not just to a fortunate few but to everyone who cares to make use of them!
(You are welcome freely to even teach Image Streaming to others whom you care about, and even to replicate this paper — in whole to preserve context, but not in part, notwithstanding the copyright notice at the end of this paper — so long as you cite in each instance your source having been via Project Renaissance.)
Here, more perhaps than in any other context, we are looking at equal opportunity! You now have this information in your hands. You are virtually guaranteed success if you bother to learn and practice simple activities which, apparently, everyone can readily learn and practice! ( — And if you’re tough enough to see through to application the unique discoveries you will be making!) Starting advantage, differences of birth, wealth, placement, schooling, even intelligence, can make little long-run difference compared to the advantages of simple sustained practice of these activities and your active resolve to see their results through to fruition.
There is some justice in the world.
And, indeed: once you’ve started examining your perceptions and detailing what you find in them, you are just as capable of Socratic miracles as anyone else!
Note, though, that for most people, for most purposes, these “back-up” procedures are a sidetrack — an admittedly somewhat entertaining sidetrack but a sidetrack nonetheless. For most of your Image Streaming exploration experiences, once you’ve learned how to do so, should simply be to look in, see “what’s playing there now,” and to begin describing as you continue to examine what’s currently “there.”
— And in the nature of things, every one of the images you did get up, which was not an afterimage and which was not an object or set of objects that you decided beforehand to see but which came from “somewhere else besides where you were telling the story from” — EVERY such undirected image is full of message, pregnant with meaning, addressing some issue or key insight for you with your subtlest, most comprehensive resources which are, indeed, “brighter than we are” even though they are very much a part of you.
Decoding Your Images
Although technical solutions and inventions often come in literal images, many important “messages” gotten from your subtler resources are metaphoric, symbolic, and that is why we now refer you to a few books, each of which presents you with extensive detailed instructions on how to decode these experiences, how to make sense of them, and how to develop your visual thinking skills within hours to the point where you can put questions and issues of all kinds to your inner faculties, instantly get images in response which answer them, and almost as instantly become able to understand and verify those answers!
One of those books, the one which Success Magazine liked so well it carried it for sale for three years, with several articles, is A Method For Personal Growth and Development, exploring many forms of application of Image Streaming to creative solution-finding, all the way to the most advanced of all post-Einsteinian Discovery Technique, High Thinktank. The other, focussed more on technical and scientific discovery and inventing, and upon entrepreneurial innovation, is Discovering the Obvious: Techniques of Original, Inspired Scientific Discovery, Technical Invention and Innovation.
That third strongly recommended book, Beyond Teaching And Learning, applies Image Streaming and related techniques to eight major families of radically enhanced and accelerated learning and growth technique, some of which families have 50 or more specific methods associated with them. — Not all 50 are in the book, just a representative example or so from each family.
The most comprehensive and extensive of all our publications, a set of texts, tapes and equipment for a course titled The Beyond-Einstein Training, represents Project Renaissance’s attempt to take most of the entire field to a yet higher level.
Sources
- Win Wenger, Beyond Teaching And Learning, 2nd international edition. Singapore: Project Renaissance, 1992.
- Win Wenger, A Method For Personal Growth and Development. Gaithersburg, MD: Project Renaissance, 3rd edition, 1991.
- Sidney J. Parnes, Visionizing: State of the Art Processes for Encouraging Innovative Excellence. Buffalo, NY: Creative Education Foundation, 1988.
- Win Wenger, Ph.D., Beyond O.K. — Psychegenic Tools Relating to Health of Body & Mind. Gaithersburg, MD: Psychegenics Press, 1979.
- Win Wenger, Ph.D. Discovering the Obvious. Singapore, Project Renaissance, 1994. A special version is being published in the various democracies of the former Eastern bloc and in the underdeveloped countries, for use by common citizens there: Creating Wealth, For Yourself And For Others, In Countries Without Capital.
- Wenger and Susan Wenger, Your Limitless Inventing Machine, 3rd edition, 3rd printing, Gaithersburg, MD: Psychegenics Press, 1981.
- For a listing of other authors and programs which now teach our Image Streaming procedure, please see Citings.
- Cookbook recipe-like instructions, literally word-for-word until one gets used-enough to the procedure to improvise, provide how to train entire groups at a time, numbering as many as several hundred participants. Two different group-training scripts were originally published in Beyond Teaching And Learning and in A Method For Personal Growth and Development. Both are now published here online: Image Streaming for Groups.
- The Principle of Re-Investment of Methods, as in our Toolbuilder method. We seem to be the first to apply this key principle. We’ve been applying it relentlessly since the late 1960s. The principle runs thus: IF you have a good method for solving problems, one of its best uses is on the problem of how to create better methods of solving problems! — And one of the best uses of those better methods is on the problem of how to create even better methods of solving problems! Keep on re-investing your methods into creating better methods, and after awhile you’ll be hitting into some pretty heavy-duty systems. We have done so. We are doing so. Our intent is, for so long as we draw breath, to use the best of what we’ve found in search of yet better. If other programs can be persuaded into a similar self-instructive search, things could get pretty interesting!
Further Reading
An expanded discussion of the Image Streaming process is also contained in these quickbooks,
…the entire texts of which are now available on this website.
The books listed below expand on these techniques and on other strategy elements, and they set forth the foundations for Image Streaming and other intelligence-enhancing processes developed by Project Renaissance. They are described in some depth in the Books section, where you can also order them, and many others.
- Win Wenger and Richard Poe, The Einstein Factor. Rocklin, CA: Prima Publishing, 1996.
- Win Wenger and Paul Scheele, Genius Code. Audio course by Nightingale-Conant, 2003.
- Win Wenger, Discovering the Obvious: Techniques of Original, Inspired Scientific Discovery, Technical Invention, and Innovation. Gaithersburg, MD: Project Renaissance, 1999.
Important References
- Image Streaming Back-Up Procedures — 24 ways to get pictures started
- Image Streaming for Groups — two main methods
- Image Streaming in brief — a summary for quick reference
- Dream Realms — applied Image Streaming by Michael Campbell