WOULD YOU TRUST YOUR UNCONSCIOUS?

A brief story

Finding a dry seat on the rock turned out to be a challenge, peppered as it was like a seagull bombing range singled out for target practice. Although there were only one or two of them making their way in the sky across the hill, it looked evident that this might be on the flight path to and from a distant rubbish tip. He settled himself gingerly, took in a deep breath, and allowed himself a long, whispering sigh as he took in the stunning view. He could see for miles in every direction, the green hills tinted bluer and greyer as they marched majestically far off into the distance. The huge expanse of the lake laid before him way down there rippled its upside-down copy of the emerald green hill and trees rising steeply from the opposite bank. His sense of peace and tranquility was complete. Loosely clasping his hands, he softened his body forward, resting his forearms on his knees and breathed in the landscape. The gentle breeze wafting sheep smells on his right cheek and whispering in his ear gave a chill bright morning air. Music of a distant thrush, the low drone of an even more distant, invisible aeroplane engine, and the faint murmurs of sheep in lower fields took him back to childhood, in a warm summer cornfield with his mother and his little brother. The warm sun on his back contrasted deliciously with the coolness of the pale blue sky.

Something - who knows what, made him look up above him in the instant that he felt the stinging smack downwards on his right jaw, the iodine and white splat that caught the collar of his shirt and stained the entire front of his jacket and right leg. He could feel the wetness of the muck on his neck and at the corner of his mouth as he made his involuntary jerk to his feet. He wasn’t quick enough as his left foot lost its traction on wet, slushy sheep dung, skating off and lifting straight-legged from the ground as his backside came down with all his weight in a heavy, painful thump back onto the rock. As his right palm came right down in the wet patch of seagull dropping, he found himself yelling inside, “Blast!!! I KNEW I should have kept going down the hill and not climbed over that stile!”

Would you trust your unconscious? After all, while consciously you are looking, listening, moving, touching and grasping, sniffing, chewing, savouring, swallowing and enjoying, your unconscious is doing so much more on your behalf.

As you direct your gaze to look, it calculates and produces the muscle tensions to move your eyes, head, neck, and the rest of your body to carry out your instructions. While you look at that tree, building or lone person walking, it “sees” the entire landscape at once, scanning the whole for signs of anything that moves in such a way that could pose a danger to you, or for patterns that indicate what you want to look at. As you watch the other person’s eyes and the movements of their mouth in your conversation, it sees everything, scanning the other person for changes in the size of their pupils, alterations in the skin colour, tiny shifts in muscular tension around the eyes and mouth, the nature and patterns of their gestures, movements of their fingers or positioning of their feet and legs, their posture, scanning them for signs of similarity, safety, attraction or threat. As you listen to what they say, your unconscious hears the changes in volume, direction, intonation, tone and emphasis, notices rhythmic patterns, cadences and breathing, recognizes patterns in their words and phrasing, and organizes your internal representations according to verb tenses to structure your sense past present and future. Making similar responses to your other senses, it interprets everything at once to create meanings. It can do this by comparing and contrasting with stored memories and learned patterns, concocting chemical formulae to inject into your blood to create entire physiological, neurological states, producing your “instinctive” movements and responses to what happens in your surroundings.

And all of that is just the tip of the iceberg. Whether or not you know to trust your unconscious, it does all of that and more anyway.

When you read, one word at a time, telling yourself what you are reading under your breath, your eyes have already seen and taken in not only the whole of the page, but all of your surroundings too. And because your nervous system recognizes instantly the patterns, syntax and meanings of the writing it detects in front of you, it already has those meanings gathered and processed at lightning speed. What you do however without meaning to of course, is to use your conscious attention to override the work already completed by your unconscious attention, and to slow your conscious covering of the page to about 200 or so words per minute, (this does not mean that you are necessarily making sense, understanding and remembering at 200 words per minute!). You do this partly because of your thorough training and long-term practice of doing it this way, and who can blame you. You are normal!

If consciously you are designed to direct your attention to what you want to look at or do, and your unconscious faithfully carries out those instructions doing everything that’s necessary in the background, what if you could apply this to reading and learning? If you could give specific and carefully structured instructions to your unconscious about what you want to read, how much you want to recall and understand, and how you want the information to serve you, would that not be a brilliant and different way. And the beauty is, because the unconscious sees the whole landscape at once, there is no need to slow its intake down to the snail’s pace of conscious sequencing and processing. You can have this luxury at the later stage of extracting only what you need.

PhotoReading, is a system for learning and reading that recruits the entire unconscious, including the mix of body chemistry, body posture, movement and rhythm, relaxation, concentration, and everything that goes to make up your state in any moment. It provides those specific instructions for the unconscious, and makes it possible for the intake or reading part to take place at the speed of the unconscious.

To date, after more than twenty years of research, teaching, world-wide application and practice, no one has yet found a measureable limit to the speed of the unconscious. There is usually a limit to the speed at which you can turn the pages of a particular book or other reading material, influenced not least by the quality of the paper, how the pages are bound, and by your dexterity, among other things. If in many books and printing formats there are between 200 and 250 words per page, then a double page spread would expose your eyes to 400-500 words. If you can rhythmically turn pages at one page per second, then visually you could take in between 24 and 30 thousand words per minute.

This lightning-speed intake of the writing is a little like downloading and installing a file from the Internet. An icon appears to let you know the file is there in your system, and to access the information and make it useful, you then open the file and search its contents. The essential difference from the computer metaphor however, is that YOU yourself ARE the hard disk and processor. The equivalent of opening the file and searching its valuable contents is called Activation in the PhotoReading Whole Mind System. There are five different “reading” methods for activating what you have downloaded, immediately expanding your range from the one and only method you have been likely using up to now.

If you could meet your intentions for reading and get the level of comprehension and recall that you need in the limited time you have available; if you could at least double, or even triple, quadruple or quintuple your current reading and learning speed, would you be prepared to Trust Your Unconscious?

Try it out! I’m delivering a PhotoReading course at the NLP Academy.
Look at http://www.nlpacademy.co.uk or ring 0208 686 9952 to book it. I’d love to see you there.