[yagazuzy]

I ordered the deluxe version through Steve's recommendation, and I have completed it. If I were to sum up all my lessons into one word, it would be:

Trust

The course is teaching me to trust my intuition or inner mind or whatever you want to call it because it knows what will take me to my goal. Analyzing too much and second-guessing myself causes me to read a bunch of irrelevent passages or just more than will practically serve me.

Learning to use the technique well is still a challange, but I have noticed some definite results, and I hope this will be something I can apply to my school work.

When I was previewing a book, it felt like I was flipping through it randomly, and I wasn't getting too much. After photoreading the book, I super read and dipped (which turned into rapid-reading), and I felt like I could grasp the main concepts of the book effortlessly. It felt as though my eyes knew where to look. I intuitively read specific words and sentences that made the overall meaning of the book's message clear even though I only read about one sentence every 5 pages. So far, this is the only book I've met so much success with.

Seeing as I'm loaded with tons of school work, my next step was to power photoread (syntopic) 5 books for school and make a mega mind map. This has not been very easy. I over dipped on one book, and another book seemed so thick and complicated that I wasn't understanding any of it. I got overwhelmed and stopped the whole thing.

One interesting thing happened though. I wanted to find the steps for syntopic reading before I started, so I picked up the photoreading book with the thought that I was going to open it up to exactly the page that I needed. And that's exactly what happened! I open the book to the exact page that contained step 1! I think that this sort of intuition is the essence of photoreading (along with purpose, of course). It has only happen sporatically though.

Perhaps the key to connecting with intuition it to just relax. When I was photoreading that book I was very successful with, I was relaxed and open to the information that would come to me. When I tried out syntopic reading, I was so bent on extracting everything from the books because I needed to know the information to write my papers that I placed too much pressure on myself.

Learning to trust when doing my school work is going to be a real challenge I think. Relaxing my need to know everything for personal reading is one thing. Relaxing that need for school work is an entirely different ball of wax. Can I really trust myself to gather the information I need for my assignments so that I can write something intelligent? What if I miss something, and I sound like an idiot in my paper?