Visual Aids
It isn’t what you think. It’s HOW you think it.
Let me explain. Studying English Literature at Oxford university, I read a lot of books. Many made a big impression, but it was one I read later that really turned my universe upside down.
…No. Make that two books that changed my life. The first one prepared me for the second.
First came the anthropologist Margaret Mead’s Male and Female. Stories of growing up in several different societies in South East Asia. Those lives were so different from each other. Worse. They were even more different from mine.
I realised with a horrid shock that all I had been brought up to believe was just the way things were in daily life, part of the immutable truth of the universe, in fact represented only one of many equally valid ways of going about living.
What was the big one, my second life-altering, earth shattering book?
I no longer have it, but Google tracked it down: Science and the Supernatural by John Taylor. Amazon stock it. Not that they appear to value it quite as highly as I do. 50 copies are available, used and new from one cent.
One cent. That’s right. Go and get it if you like. It isn’t often you get prices so well adapted to the world financial situation.
Anyway, John Taylor, if this paltry tome is really the one I remember, subjects a variety of beliefs in the paranormal to the scrutiny of science. All but one fail to win his approval. That one is hypnosis.
As a result of reading this book, I rushed out and enrolled in the nearest course in hypnosis.
Before you run and hide behind the nearest sofa, let me assure you that I am not the least bit interested in getting you to believe you are a hamster, or dash back and forth obeying my every command.
I was simply bowled over at that time by the realisation that thinking was not the abstract affair I had always believed it to be. Processes in my head that I had fondly thought of as taking place in a vacuum were not by any means so spectral.
‘Thinking something through’ can often be better described as imagining it through.
Recognising this internal imagery is what gives hypnosis its undoubted power. Visual thinking became my passion. On the odd occasion when abstract thinking really did seem to be carried out in thin air, I resorted to charts, diagrams and other helpful visual aids.
Of course, I did come across a few uncooperative souls who seemed only to be able to see the point of an argument with their ears. But then, I still had a lot to learn…
COME ALONG NOW, PUT YOUR WORST FACE FORWARD!
PAINTER 12 BRUSHES
Fascinating, Valerie. I have not read your John Taylor, nor am I completely following your thought process here.
It’s peculiar, though. I never feel I’m in a vacuum. I feel and believe that thought has substance, and that I’m somehow linked to others’ thoughts, even when I’m alone. This morning as I read, coffee mug in hand, journal and pen close by, I jotted these notes: Language of words is a gift to us to communicate among us. But when left to myself, my thinking, my hopes and goals and prayers, all of these are non-verbal. Words sometimes result, but most of the time I’m flitting visually, spiritually, across vast chunks of both space and time. Trying to see what I want to see, to visualize what is good and uplifting and able to grow me as a person.
Before you think I’m nuts, when I was a little girl, I wanted so badly to learn to swim, yet I was deathly afraid to try. (My mom was terrified of water, so she never once took us to a pool.) We had a community pool where school friends met in the summer to play. I was the only one left in the shallow end, and I determined I would not go another season unable. I went to bed each night and pictured myself floating — how would it feel to take my feet off the floor of the pool? I progressed from seeing me to feeling the experience, and within two days I was swimming in the deep end as if I’d been doing it all my life.
Now I have no idea whatsoever if this is even in line with your post — you’ve gone beyond me with the hypnosis thing. But this is what you triggered in my thinking. This is an example of, not what I thought, but how I thought it. Albeit elementary.
Feel free to delete this if I’m way off-base.
Barb
Glad you found this interesting!
By the way, it doesn’t seem to have been attached to my new Digg account. I am shown as having been dugg by nobody. Is this right?
While I do read obsessively, I am very visually oriented. In fact I visualize my own scenes in what I read quite well from a few short descriptions and tend to scan over long wordy ones. Where would we be without internal imagery
Anita
Hello Valerie-owl –
Well for me, being an artist since the crib, visual thinking is where it’s at!
It wasn’t until I became a freshman in high school where art class was an elective course and not full credit at that, that I realized that the whole class was not interested in making pictures. Up until that time everyone went to the required art class once a week. But once we had the choice only a few of us signed up.
Your post brings up many thoughts – enough to write a whole book about but for now – back to my own overdue posts.