10-16-2005, 10:49 AM
The following discussion took place on the 'batesmethod' Yahoo Group. It is copied here so members of this forum have a chance to read it and even continue the discussion here.
From: "MethodOfTheWeek" <methodoftheweek@s...>
Date: Thu Mar 10, 2005 9:28 pm
Subject: Method of the Week - Sub-conscious Visualization
METHOD OF THE WEEK
Submitted by Peter Wallrich.
Replies, questions, and differing opinions are always welcome for the Method
of the Week.
---------------------
Sub-Conscious Visualization
When someone says, "imagine this...", I always do a
good job at imagining the situation. I cannot say that
I'm doing it correctly though. My apparent process of imagination isn't
visual. The word 'imag-ination' implies that it is suppose to be a visual
process. I'm confused.
Lately, I'm beginning to think that my imagination
process is visual, but the images aren't accessible to
me. Every once and a while, usually when I'm lying
down to rest, I'll find a clear image in my inner
world. As soon as I notice it, something automatic in
me begins to examine it and the image dissipates. When
my inner visual field goes back to the infrared
television fuzz, I sometimes catch myself compulsively repeating a thought
to myself which pertains to trying to sustain the image. The problem may be
here, but it could go either way.
One way, the compulsive repeating of thoughts trying
to sustain the image may be indicative of the
overstrain that permeates all of the writings related
to the Bates Method.
Another way, this is how images are held. This is how
people uphold their world. Images are held, as Aldous
Huxley put it, in a piece-meal fashion. Something very
fast directs attention here then there, then here,
covering the different parts of the whole image. After
twelve years of wearing glasses, whether I needed to
see clearly or not, my attention director is really
out of practice with the piece-meal fashion of seeing
(I have seen myself as slow in other instances as
well). For people with good vision, this is probably a sub-conscious habit.
Maybe I will notice it until it becomes habitual.
Maybe this isn't the problem at all. I think well, but
not in pictures. Maybe I do think in pictures, but on
a sub-conscious level. The reason I'm concerned about visualization is that
I think it is the same as seeing, except with seeing the data is fresh. I
think that learning how to visualize better is a way to help myself see
better.
I try to visualize the period, a seemingly simple visualization. I may have
said that wrong. Trying implies effort. Sometimes, I have the intention of
visualizing the period. The period evades me. I intend to visualize the
white background behind the black period. Nope. I don't know what
visualization is suppose to be. Am I suppose to see it, like I see things
out here? Am I suppose to remember how I saw it? Is there a difference?
I think that visualization is one of the keys that
I've been missing in order to unlock the tension. I
think that all I need to do is to relax, and the
intention of visualizing the period will be enough.
Also, relaxation may help me to just observe the
images that come to me, not examine and scrutinize
them. Is there a helpful hint that anyone can give me?
Has anyone learned a secret on how to relax?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "Andrew Judd" <andrewedwardjudd@h...>
Date: Fri Mar 11, 2005 12:14 pm
Subject: Re: Method of the Week - Sub-conscious Visualization
If you can see then you have a good visual imagination already.
The question is: Can you consciously control your imagination?
Chances are you resist allowing your imagination to produce pictures
in a natural manner. Therefore this ability is unavailable to you
while you resist.
Why must you have a good visual imagination already?
Our sense of sight is just that. Its a sense that guides us into
having an idea of what is outside of our body. Everything that we
see is produced in our imagination. There is no real time picture
produced at all.
If you open your eyes and look, then this is what you imagine you are
seeing.
What you see fits your version of what reality looks like.
If in your reality you can only see images with your eyes, then when
you close your eyes you see nothing. Its kind of logical!
Indeed with this belief if you were to close your eyes and see images
that would be illogical and quite scary! Surely you would be going
crazy?
Beliefs are an important part of what you can see and how you see.
Indeed a way of thinking that tends mainly towards being logical is a
belief that prevents normal vision.
Why?
Logic would suggest that you always see the same face when Fred comes
to call. However since we only imagine what we see its quite
possible that Fred can have any face we want him to have. Would that
be scary or fun?
As we develope and mature we become more competant at knowing
what it is we are sensing from outside our body and what it is
that is only imagined. In former times it was recognised that
we only imagined what we saw at a football game. The referee,
also imagining what he saw, was given the authority to make
decisions.
I can now personalise this based on my own experiences around the
time i got myopia (interestingly enuf i now realise)
As an 8 Year old child I remembered being completely terrorified
by a large hairy gorrilla lumbering up the stairs to attack me.
I screamed as if I would be killed. My father was very quickly
by my side asking why i was so frightened of him and asking
"Am i really that scary to you boys?" Dad was disabled and
unsteady on his feet - this was a difficult moment
for him I can now remember...he seemed so sad and shocked.
And as children too we had scary nightmares. We imagined things
that we found frightening.....therefore logically an uninhibited
imagination like we find in dreams **is** scary. Totally
mindnumbingly terrorifying.
As an 8 year old child (and older into adulthood) I felt safe
under the blankets at night. No harm came to me while i was in
bed and covered. But even to have a foot exposed was to invite
terror.
For some reason I felt fine by day. With a light on i was
anxious but less so.
Evidently I came to associate my sense of sight when things were
strongly seen with my eyes as something safer than what I could only
imagine.
And of course it makes sense that if we insist that everything we
sense is filtered (because we are
frightened of seeing what we might imagine) then in every moment
of our lives we are constantly on the alert to prevent what we
might imagine. Day or night. Eyes open or closed.
Interestingly too, I am still getting night terrors on waking up
while it is dark.
And i have been doing rebirthing. Last Tuesday I suddenly imagined
that my rebirther was naked in the room with me. I kind of stared in
disbelief and even amusement for a while and then suddenly got
frightened that this was happening, I then exerted a kind of control
and her clothes faded into position. However the image of her
without clothes and with clothes was just as realistic or seemed so.
The only reason that makes sense to me that i was scared was that I
suddenly realised that i was not in control of what i was imagining.
A few years back I was getting 'visitors' in my room in a similarly
realistic fashion. Sometimes i was Ok about it....they would fade
away and at other times it terrorified me.
After my father died I found that while doing a technique called
pyschodrama that i could see him lying in front of me in his coffin
so completely realistically (while I was crying) that had i not been
comfortable with that image it would have been pretty scary.
Interestingly if i did the technique using a smaller table as a prop
my dads body would become smaller to fit the dimensions. This was
kind of fascinating and amusing to me dispite the emotional nature of
the experience.
Recently other than the rebirthing i have been doing controlled
visualisation on a theme or area of consciousness in the style of
Mccraken on palming. To start with i found my mind surprisingly
chaotic.....but i followed Mccrakens instructions....guided my mind
back to the theme and quite quickly got better at staying on track
with no big deal.
This process of mental clarity is important
We need to be clear what is pleasant for us and what is unpleasant.
So that in an instant we can repress what is unpleasant rather than
linger and instead turn towards what is pleasant.
(Repression is normal. Suppression is probably something that is done
with effort)
For many years i have tended to focus on my difficult past. Somehow
doomed to replay the images. My normal sighted brother never talks
about it and gets majorly pissed off with me if I do.
When I could realise that my mum might die i found that unbareably
painful. It was something i really really truefully did not want to
see. Somehow this realisation that its better to not see some things
has been helpful to me. It seems we do have a simple choice on what
our mind attends to and it something we can cultivate - this appears
to be the message of Bates.
Last night after beginning this email and then going to bed I once
more awoke to some shape in my room. This time i was curious. I
moved towards it. It seemed to be an eye floating in space. I moved
closer and it seemed I could move around it. I became satisfied it
was nothing much of interest and just returned to bed and was quickly
asleep.
I have to remind myself I dont do drugs and even dont drink much
alcohol these days!
Andrew
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: nancy@n...
Date: Sat Mar 12, 2005 9:59 am
Subject: Re: [Bates] Re: Method of the Week - Sub-conscious Visualization
On Fri, 11 Mar 2005, Andrew Judd wrote:
> For many years i have tended to focus on my difficult past. Somehow
> doomed to replay the images. My normal sighted brother never talks
> about it and gets majorly pissed off with me if I do.
I've had a habit like that--I've at least somewhat cleaned it up, but
I'd tend to stabilize painful emotions. Part of it was wanting to hang
onto them long enough that I could understand them and part of it
was wanting to be able to prove I was being hurt.
Nancy
------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "David" <david@i...>
Date: Sat Mar 12, 2005 7:54 pm
Subject: Re: Method of the Week - Sub-conscious Visualization
Peter,
There are several clues in how you do it from when you're lying down
to rest like you described.
For oen thing, it's when lying down - maybe your habit is to hold
too much tension when you're standing or sitting, so that you keep
yourself from resting?
You want to remember a period, but can you say specifically where
this period is? A book somewhere? When you have a flash of something
you remember, it's not generic, it's specifc. If you look at a
period right now, it might look different than you had thought.
A period is simple, but I don't think complexity has much relevance
to whether you can remember something - either it's clear or it's
not. More complicated things can actually be easier because you find
more details more interesting, or it can be like raising the bar.
Color is what we see, or at least shades of grey if you're color
blind or at night. Form is secondary, in my opinion. I have a hard
time remembering anything unless I can remember the colors one at a
time. Are you doing that? If not, I can only imagine that you're
mentally staring, trying to get a form (ie: a large area) before
colors (detail).
You lose the image immediately because you're pushing your attention
to where you don't really want to go, if you were to leave yourself
alone.
Dave
From: "MethodOfTheWeek" <methodoftheweek@s...>
Date: Thu Mar 10, 2005 9:28 pm
Subject: Method of the Week - Sub-conscious Visualization
METHOD OF THE WEEK
Submitted by Peter Wallrich.
Replies, questions, and differing opinions are always welcome for the Method
of the Week.
---------------------
Sub-Conscious Visualization
When someone says, "imagine this...", I always do a
good job at imagining the situation. I cannot say that
I'm doing it correctly though. My apparent process of imagination isn't
visual. The word 'imag-ination' implies that it is suppose to be a visual
process. I'm confused.
Lately, I'm beginning to think that my imagination
process is visual, but the images aren't accessible to
me. Every once and a while, usually when I'm lying
down to rest, I'll find a clear image in my inner
world. As soon as I notice it, something automatic in
me begins to examine it and the image dissipates. When
my inner visual field goes back to the infrared
television fuzz, I sometimes catch myself compulsively repeating a thought
to myself which pertains to trying to sustain the image. The problem may be
here, but it could go either way.
One way, the compulsive repeating of thoughts trying
to sustain the image may be indicative of the
overstrain that permeates all of the writings related
to the Bates Method.
Another way, this is how images are held. This is how
people uphold their world. Images are held, as Aldous
Huxley put it, in a piece-meal fashion. Something very
fast directs attention here then there, then here,
covering the different parts of the whole image. After
twelve years of wearing glasses, whether I needed to
see clearly or not, my attention director is really
out of practice with the piece-meal fashion of seeing
(I have seen myself as slow in other instances as
well). For people with good vision, this is probably a sub-conscious habit.
Maybe I will notice it until it becomes habitual.
Maybe this isn't the problem at all. I think well, but
not in pictures. Maybe I do think in pictures, but on
a sub-conscious level. The reason I'm concerned about visualization is that
I think it is the same as seeing, except with seeing the data is fresh. I
think that learning how to visualize better is a way to help myself see
better.
I try to visualize the period, a seemingly simple visualization. I may have
said that wrong. Trying implies effort. Sometimes, I have the intention of
visualizing the period. The period evades me. I intend to visualize the
white background behind the black period. Nope. I don't know what
visualization is suppose to be. Am I suppose to see it, like I see things
out here? Am I suppose to remember how I saw it? Is there a difference?
I think that visualization is one of the keys that
I've been missing in order to unlock the tension. I
think that all I need to do is to relax, and the
intention of visualizing the period will be enough.
Also, relaxation may help me to just observe the
images that come to me, not examine and scrutinize
them. Is there a helpful hint that anyone can give me?
Has anyone learned a secret on how to relax?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "Andrew Judd" <andrewedwardjudd@h...>
Date: Fri Mar 11, 2005 12:14 pm
Subject: Re: Method of the Week - Sub-conscious Visualization
If you can see then you have a good visual imagination already.
The question is: Can you consciously control your imagination?
Chances are you resist allowing your imagination to produce pictures
in a natural manner. Therefore this ability is unavailable to you
while you resist.
Why must you have a good visual imagination already?
Our sense of sight is just that. Its a sense that guides us into
having an idea of what is outside of our body. Everything that we
see is produced in our imagination. There is no real time picture
produced at all.
If you open your eyes and look, then this is what you imagine you are
seeing.
What you see fits your version of what reality looks like.
If in your reality you can only see images with your eyes, then when
you close your eyes you see nothing. Its kind of logical!
Indeed with this belief if you were to close your eyes and see images
that would be illogical and quite scary! Surely you would be going
crazy?
Beliefs are an important part of what you can see and how you see.
Indeed a way of thinking that tends mainly towards being logical is a
belief that prevents normal vision.
Why?
Logic would suggest that you always see the same face when Fred comes
to call. However since we only imagine what we see its quite
possible that Fred can have any face we want him to have. Would that
be scary or fun?
As we develope and mature we become more competant at knowing
what it is we are sensing from outside our body and what it is
that is only imagined. In former times it was recognised that
we only imagined what we saw at a football game. The referee,
also imagining what he saw, was given the authority to make
decisions.
I can now personalise this based on my own experiences around the
time i got myopia (interestingly enuf i now realise)
As an 8 Year old child I remembered being completely terrorified
by a large hairy gorrilla lumbering up the stairs to attack me.
I screamed as if I would be killed. My father was very quickly
by my side asking why i was so frightened of him and asking
"Am i really that scary to you boys?" Dad was disabled and
unsteady on his feet - this was a difficult moment
for him I can now remember...he seemed so sad and shocked.
And as children too we had scary nightmares. We imagined things
that we found frightening.....therefore logically an uninhibited
imagination like we find in dreams **is** scary. Totally
mindnumbingly terrorifying.
As an 8 year old child (and older into adulthood) I felt safe
under the blankets at night. No harm came to me while i was in
bed and covered. But even to have a foot exposed was to invite
terror.
For some reason I felt fine by day. With a light on i was
anxious but less so.
Evidently I came to associate my sense of sight when things were
strongly seen with my eyes as something safer than what I could only
imagine.
And of course it makes sense that if we insist that everything we
sense is filtered (because we are
frightened of seeing what we might imagine) then in every moment
of our lives we are constantly on the alert to prevent what we
might imagine. Day or night. Eyes open or closed.
Interestingly too, I am still getting night terrors on waking up
while it is dark.
And i have been doing rebirthing. Last Tuesday I suddenly imagined
that my rebirther was naked in the room with me. I kind of stared in
disbelief and even amusement for a while and then suddenly got
frightened that this was happening, I then exerted a kind of control
and her clothes faded into position. However the image of her
without clothes and with clothes was just as realistic or seemed so.
The only reason that makes sense to me that i was scared was that I
suddenly realised that i was not in control of what i was imagining.
A few years back I was getting 'visitors' in my room in a similarly
realistic fashion. Sometimes i was Ok about it....they would fade
away and at other times it terrorified me.
After my father died I found that while doing a technique called
pyschodrama that i could see him lying in front of me in his coffin
so completely realistically (while I was crying) that had i not been
comfortable with that image it would have been pretty scary.
Interestingly if i did the technique using a smaller table as a prop
my dads body would become smaller to fit the dimensions. This was
kind of fascinating and amusing to me dispite the emotional nature of
the experience.
Recently other than the rebirthing i have been doing controlled
visualisation on a theme or area of consciousness in the style of
Mccraken on palming. To start with i found my mind surprisingly
chaotic.....but i followed Mccrakens instructions....guided my mind
back to the theme and quite quickly got better at staying on track
with no big deal.
This process of mental clarity is important
We need to be clear what is pleasant for us and what is unpleasant.
So that in an instant we can repress what is unpleasant rather than
linger and instead turn towards what is pleasant.
(Repression is normal. Suppression is probably something that is done
with effort)
For many years i have tended to focus on my difficult past. Somehow
doomed to replay the images. My normal sighted brother never talks
about it and gets majorly pissed off with me if I do.
When I could realise that my mum might die i found that unbareably
painful. It was something i really really truefully did not want to
see. Somehow this realisation that its better to not see some things
has been helpful to me. It seems we do have a simple choice on what
our mind attends to and it something we can cultivate - this appears
to be the message of Bates.
Last night after beginning this email and then going to bed I once
more awoke to some shape in my room. This time i was curious. I
moved towards it. It seemed to be an eye floating in space. I moved
closer and it seemed I could move around it. I became satisfied it
was nothing much of interest and just returned to bed and was quickly
asleep.
I have to remind myself I dont do drugs and even dont drink much
alcohol these days!
Andrew
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: nancy@n...
Date: Sat Mar 12, 2005 9:59 am
Subject: Re: [Bates] Re: Method of the Week - Sub-conscious Visualization
On Fri, 11 Mar 2005, Andrew Judd wrote:
> For many years i have tended to focus on my difficult past. Somehow
> doomed to replay the images. My normal sighted brother never talks
> about it and gets majorly pissed off with me if I do.
I've had a habit like that--I've at least somewhat cleaned it up, but
I'd tend to stabilize painful emotions. Part of it was wanting to hang
onto them long enough that I could understand them and part of it
was wanting to be able to prove I was being hurt.
Nancy
------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "David" <david@i...>
Date: Sat Mar 12, 2005 7:54 pm
Subject: Re: Method of the Week - Sub-conscious Visualization
Peter,
There are several clues in how you do it from when you're lying down
to rest like you described.
For oen thing, it's when lying down - maybe your habit is to hold
too much tension when you're standing or sitting, so that you keep
yourself from resting?
You want to remember a period, but can you say specifically where
this period is? A book somewhere? When you have a flash of something
you remember, it's not generic, it's specifc. If you look at a
period right now, it might look different than you had thought.
A period is simple, but I don't think complexity has much relevance
to whether you can remember something - either it's clear or it's
not. More complicated things can actually be easier because you find
more details more interesting, or it can be like raising the bar.
Color is what we see, or at least shades of grey if you're color
blind or at night. Form is secondary, in my opinion. I have a hard
time remembering anything unless I can remember the colors one at a
time. Are you doing that? If not, I can only imagine that you're
mentally staring, trying to get a form (ie: a large area) before
colors (detail).
You lose the image immediately because you're pushing your attention
to where you don't really want to go, if you were to leave yourself
alone.
Dave
Site Administrator
"Half of our funny, heathen lives, we are bent double to gather things we have tossed away." - George Meredith
"Half of our funny, heathen lives, we are bent double to gather things we have tossed away." - George Meredith
