For those who are interested, and for what it's worth, here are some things that I have figured out/discovered over the years while PhotoReading:
Everything IS contained in the PhotoReading book, the home study course and the seminar - although the relative importance of things might not be stressed enough, in my opinion. The biggest thing that needs to be stressed is, I think, the use of relaxation and learning how to interpret the signals that your inner mind delivers.
PhotoReading delivers as promised, but you have to get the "knack" of it (like anything else), and getting the "knack" is dependent upon paying attention to how your mind works. A 3-10X speedup in reading speed/comprehension using PhotoReading is actually at the low end of what the process can deliver, and that with practice "spontaneous activation" can increase in frequency, and that application of the material PhotoRead is almost immediately possible given the right circumstances.
Ok - so the question becomes, just how does one unlock the powers of PhotoReading? I think the "knack" is letting go of the immediate need for conscious comprehension and awareness of the material, and learning to open the "gateway" to the subconscious. In the PhotoReading book Paul Scheele recommends letting your intuition guide you, looking for inner promptings, etc. to guide super reading and dipping. I think a big part of getting ready for this is the dictionary game - it helps train the doorway to your inner mind and teaches you how to interpret the promptings that your conscious mind receives from the inner mind. I think most people play the dictionary game a few times and then put it aside. They then go about trying to PhotoRead, expecting the material to come to conscious awareness the same way it does when regular reading - i.e., trying to force recall through the conscious mind - rather than allowing it to bubble up from the inner mind.
Playing around with Image Streaming, "playing" with the information that you PhotoRead, using Direct Learning, etc., all help in learning how to get the process to actually work. One of the biggest things to learn, however, is to let the conscious mind do the job "thinking" and the inner mind do the job of "absorbing/learning" and not confusing the functions of the two. I guess that what I'm saying is - to really get the system to work for you, you have to learn to let go of the old paradigms of learning and trust that the material is absorbed while PhotoReading. Allow it to come to your awareness. Have a purpose for what you're learning, but have fun with it.
A lot of this stuff is, I think, based in the same mental technologies that Jose Silva developed/extended. The idea was a relaxed "ideal mind state" for learning (i.e., the alpha or alpha-theta state), and the beta state for action. Nervousness, pressure, etc. bounces the mind from the alpha-state to the beta-state immediately, effectively closing the door to the information flow from the subconscious (ref. _The High Performance Mind_ by Anna Wise for a decent discussion on this). Forcing recall moves the PhotoReader from the relaxed alpha-state to the beta-state and makes access to the information increasingly difficult.
So - back to what I was saying above...this is all mentioned in the PhotoReading book, but is not stressed enough, I think. Relax...play...keep the channels to the inner mind open by NOT forcing recall...let it bubble to the conscious mind. Play with pictures, images, intuitions to see the different ways that you access the information. Play the dictionary game every day, but don't worry about the results...it's only a game and a training tool for learning how to relax and request stuff from your inner mind.
Who else wants to add their general tips to this thread?
