Its honestly very frustrating when you get smart enough to know how dumb you are. Its pretty miserable. I've never been more alone on this journey of IMS. I guess I'll have to practice it for years before the landscape of my brain changes. Feeling smarter is not the same as actually being smarter and I don't think getting a near-perfect score on a midterm is hard enough to be an accurate assessment of one's intelligence. Its too easy for it to be so. Its so frustrating having to listen to all the dogma that surrounds intelligence and the only way to disprove it is by making yourself a test-subject of IMS. Its a natural characteristic of the human mind to adapt to its circumstances but unfortunately standard image streaming remains hard. I want to focus on detail and absorb the complexities of my surroundings. I'm tired of seeing fuzzy images. I don't think academic performance is an accurate indicator of intelligence as I do well but am pretty stupid. I just hope that there is some truth to the IQ claims and it is not some sort of prank. The smarter I get the more skeptical I become of its claims. There is no doubt I have gotten smarter but I want to see an objective increase in IQ that is dramatic. Every minute counts. I must take advantage of adolescent neuroplasticity. I will do 50 minutes of IMS + 30 minutes of DNB + 20 minutes of P.T. almost every single day. I need to do P.T. and DNB or else my working memory becomes that of a bacterium insofar. Consistency is key. If people older than me have experienced tangible gains than there should be some merit. I apologize for sounding like an image streaming skeptic but I must further experiment before arriving to a definitive conclusion. I just want to put my mind and heart at peace.
Your concern and skepticism towards this are pretty normal, at least from my observations, of people starting, or have been trying to get a rhythm going. I’ll try to express in sectioned concepts as I’m noticing some common themes in the posts I’m skimming through (and in the past). Keep in mind that I haven’t image streamed in the traditional sense with speaking aloud, and then debriefing nor have I attempted QWS as well for a long time now. Mostly due to working two jobs, and being in a relationship, and working towards another side hustle took nearly all of my time.
Now that I have one job to worry about, and out of a relationship entirely, the pandemic kind of forced me to re-evaluate things. Anyway:
Image Streaming Is A Bit of a Misnomer on Validating Intelligence Objectively
I say image streaming is a ‘bit’ of a misnomer because people feel that if they cannot have the visual potency in their sessions, that somehow, they’re not going to be as intelligent as they want to be. To use image streaming as a sole metric for intelligence ends up with a battle of how long a person can continue running the mental hamster wheel to churn out mental sensory representations in the sandbox of their imagination. At some point, the person will, whether unconsciously or not, wonder how they can get any utility out of these practices (in the context of the CGTG).
To put it simply – the theme of developing a disciplinary disposition for the sake of it as mentioned in the guide can only take a person so far until they start wondering about applying the utility of the methods in their everyday lives.
Imagery is a useful anchor point, but one can learn other mental sensory representations because visualization is just one of many modalities, i.e., one could attempt kinesthetic modalities, and when they get something going on with that, they use that to piggyback and catapult themselves into imagery where they can sublimate the other modalities. Image streaming seems fractal, in other words, if you can’t get the juices flowing immediately – one learns to take advantage of anything that can be described, and through enough bouncing around, they’ll eventually get somewhere. Win Wenger has a lot of methods for anyone to use on his website. It’s okay to start with fuzzy images, and as others have mentioned, fuzzy images aren’t something to be used exclusively for visual incompetency. It could also be a sign of over-working yourself.
It is what it is, and we can’t expect ourselves to always be a eureka-rendering machine.
The Existential Fear of Mental Upkeep & Acuity
The guide enforces how consistency and developing a scholarly-like disposition with discipline are essential because they throw out the stake that you go back to zero. This adds on to the skepticism as to why anyone should trust some random person or corporation in the guise of one individual making these claims should be taken seriously. And yet at the same time, the stake is thrown because without some kind of fear involved, chances are, the individual may not want to have some relentless drive to utilize the methods for mental upkeep and acuity.
When a person gets into image streaming, they may find themselves consciously learning of what would typically be unconscious competencies, and being aware of the grandiose sandbox of their mind. They go about it in the conventional sense where they are at the very least refining their episodic memory. Because recalling things in this way with mental sensory representations that they describe would be more natural given that’s one of many main ways we experience things – in an episodic fashion.
From wanting to take advantage of your adolescent years brings awareness that I think we all share which would be an existential fear of the loss of one’s autonomy. Because if an individual doesn’t see potency with the mental sensory representations, it causes a conflict with trying to mitigate this existential fear, and how they react to this varies – sometimes in an extremely negative manner. This is why individuals may try to attempt image streaming more than just trying to have a better IQ. Because they’ll start seeing that the IQ narrative is just surface level thinking, and when they become aware of how much their mind censors, repress, and utilizes other cognitive functions to make them carry out their day — this the part where they realize there’s a lot more to worry about than intelligence.
But this doesn’t mean I’m against anyone trying to develop intelligence – I’m talking about being so fixated on it to the point that it breaches extreme intellectualism that they may not make attempts to tap into other aspects of themselves that would be on an emotional level. In other words, balancing rationality and ‘emotionality’ for a lack of better wording.
Of course, that guide can’t be a person’s end-all-be-all because it’s just a stepping stone towards the common realization that the mind loves novelty. And when an individual utilizes image streaming to come to an understanding that there can be infinite possibilities of how those mental sensory representations go about within their cognition, it can also fuel that existential fear for the worse because now they’re going to have to find ways to take responsibility for themselves.
Because they were used to just learning things in the typical fashion, and trusting that they’ll eventually have long-term memory and short-term memory relative to whatever they’re doing (e.g. studying for a test they may not apply when they get a job after they graduate). And now that they’re consciously becoming aware of all this – it becomes this quest towards resolving the narrative that they can still have an unchallenged sense of authority with their continuity of self. Because otherwise, the existential fear starts dominating them – the loss of autonomy – along with another existential concern like existential neurosis - the fear of wondering how they’re going to take responsibility for their life. Discipline without an overarching direction = discipline for the sake of it.
This is why the utility of the guide is finalized before they start mentioning the big-grandiose-ultra-gigatron-super-secret to life; it’s just their watered-down, New Ageism version of having some overarching direction to apply that discipline. Keep in mind that everyone has to cultivate those virtues on their own; no guide can be their coach on that because it’ll end up with normative ethics of how to live your life. And with the narrative of IQ that they use as an elevator pitch, if they were to try to be specific, then they would be spreading potential dogma of an extreme shift of intellectualism. Perhaps during an era of self-help and hustle economy that was rapidly blossoming, they felt inclined to find some vague positivity to go by and sell to others reading.
However, the processes outlined are useful, and the cultivation of having a disposition that has discipline is useful nonetheless as a reference point for people to adopt. But, anyone can tailor it to whatever is convenient for them.
Alienation, Self-Indignation, & Limits of Expressing Mental Sensory Representations to Others
We can all come to an agreement that we privately experience what’s going on within our cognition. That no one can have direct third-person access to the inner confines of another person’s mind. Of course, physically, we can do this (e.g. analyzing the brain), but in the context of mental sensory representations and qualia in their raw nature, not so much.
So, unless the hard problems of consciousness have a smaller gap (i.e. how qualia is instantiated/come to being/etc.), that privacy of our subjectivity will always be something we cope with. In the context of image streaming and other practices derived from it when a person gets used to consciously diving within their mind, they find themselves having a hard time talking to others. Because while that person is talking, you’re probably at the Andromeda Galaxy, mentally speaking.
Through discipline, one can have the disposition to control those urges because they were urges that were naturally censored out unconsciously. It just goes to show that venturing with image streaming and other practices involves learning when to shift into certain mental states, and when to have a disposition that seals most of it off for the sake of interpersonal affairs.
But, it just raises another solution where it’s okay to seek other avenues of the human condition and social intelligence elsewhere because discipline alone can only take you so far. Because if a person doesn’t learn to juggle with this where their livelihood depends on it, it can be quite a challenge. And because of this, a self-indignation starts cultivating – they start resenting the very same disposition that tries to unconditionally allow the images and other mental sensory representations to come into their conscious awareness while also having to deal with everyday life.
Because they’re trying to have a one size fits all disposition/mental shift to accommodate for that. Now, I’m not saying the solution is to have multiple personalities, but to just realize to carry out certain things requires learning how to shift into certain mental states. For example, having a disposition to unconditionally allow thoughts into your conscious awareness, and having a work persona, socioeconomic persona, etc.
And because no one, for the time being, can have that direct, third-person access to this solitude we privately have, alienation is inevitable. Which makes it hard for others to find a common ground even when expressing their experiences with words, symbols, etc. We’re limited on anecdotes, and having some kind of faith that if one person claims to do it, and have these epiphanies and self-reflecting their endeavors that others can do it as well. Because one can presume that we have similar neurological underpinnings (but of course everyone can be wired differently) and that when processes can be made to carry out something, with discipline and application, we can trust something can be done despite not having that access of another’s qualia and subjectivity.
It reminds me of that episode, Crocodile, in Black Mirror where there somehow existed a fictitious world where others can see the sensory representations and memories of others.
