Understanding

For those of you who don’t know, dyslexia is characterized by trouble with reading along with various other awkward mental conditions despite average to above average intelligence. I’ve gone years without receiving a professional diagnosis having struggled to make it through college as I tried to find any way to understand my course materials without needing to read the overpriced text books assigned. I heard in the passed that I was dyslexic but I hadn’t received proper meaning behind what it is how it will effect my life and that ultimately I’m either dumb or defective and that’s why I’m so…weird.

This past year had been one of the most trying and testing times of my life, and as I cycled through my memories sadly reminiscing one failure after another, I again posed myself with the question, “What’s wrong with me?”. On the day of my birth February 16th this year, I did something I never thought to do in all my life. Research dyslexia. What I found was not that I was slower than others but rather the exact opposite, I’m just as smart as my peers if not possibly smarter.

Days went by as I lost myself in a hyper focused state franticly studying this “dyslexia”, this “learning disability”, this “gift”. Why had I not know about this all these years? Does anyone else? Learning that my brain works similarly to that of the minds in the world, Leornardo Divinci, Piccaso, Steven Spielberg, Richard Branson, Walt Disney, Muhammad Ali and even Albert Einstien was game changing. I had to know more, if I was somehow similar to these great leaders or I had something in this brain that gives me the ability to think anything like them, I felt it was time I toke advantage of it. But what exactly are those advantages?

M-I-N-D Advantage (Difference In Cognition, not a “Learning Disability)

This led me to taking a dive into a book called “The Dyslexic Advantage” and a list of skills I unknowingly had been using my entire life and probably many other undiagnosed dyslexics. It gives an in depth explanation of our strengths as opposed to the mainstream’s perception of our “learning disability”.

M – Material Reasoning - which is primarily reasoning about the position, form, and movement of objects 3D space.
I – Interconnected Reasoning - which is primarily the ability to spot, understand, and reason about connections and relationships. (e.g., analogies, metaphors, systems, patterns)
N – Narrative Reasoning - which is primarily the ability to reason using fragments of memory formed from past personal experience. (i.e., using cases, examples, and simulations rather than abstract reasoning from principles)
D – Dynamic Reasoning - which is the ability to accurately predict using patterns derived through experience the future or the unwitnessed past.

This might be one of the most important books I ever read in my life. The accuracy to my strengths and tradeoffs were spot on and if you’re dyslexic I HIGHLY recommend it. So are visual and verbal thinkers really that different? I just find it hard to believe that everyone doesn't have the ability to think and manipulate things in 3d in their head. What exactly does a verbal thinker perceive verse the visual thinker?

Visual vs Verbal Thinking

The image above was cut from a publication named “Inner vision: Seeing the mind’s eye”. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to reconnect to the site hosting the publication (perhaps you can help me out?) as I believe its been removed or taken down since I cut this image for my own research and reference. What I found to be odd was why he wrote an article about what it’s like to imagine an object as symbolic or pictorial? For me in order to remember, I use both. Why didn’t he just imagine a cut out of the word apple as an apple? Then the question wouldn’t need to be answer because the object would be both pictorial and symbolic. That’s when I realized that there really are some people who can’t visualize objects never seen, verbal thinkers. Visualizing objects never seen would be key to understanding things multidimensional and beyond the idea of impossibility. Albert Einstein came up with E = MC2 after he imagined chasing after a beam of light and that the thought experiment had played a memorable role in his development of special relativity. He visualized the seemingly impossible and made it possible bringing it to our dimension as written text in the form of math.

The Mind’s Eye and the Davis Procedure

Most dyslexics such as myself fall in the category of Visual thinkers with us being the estimated 1 in 10 of the population. What was interesting is after learning about the minds eye and its connection to visual imagery and spatial recognition is that free form conversion of 2D to 3D doesn’t come naturally to most people. I had no idea seeing and imagining in multiple dimensions in my head was a special skill (Material Reasoning) – MIND BLOWN! I wanted to learn how to how to correct my reading/spelling problems so I found a book called “The Gift of Dyslexia” which held the Davis Procedure, giving steps for dyslexics to reorient the minds eye to it proper position. Through the power of my newly realized skill in Interconnected Reasoning, I connected an image I found in the book, to one of my favorite characters I read about as a child. This is when things got interesting.

The image to the left shows the point in which to align a disoriented dyslexics minds eye in order to get one of the optimal perceptions of world(although they may vary by individuals and they’re specific talents). In this position you can literally image if you have a strength in material reasoning a 3rd person view of yourself and thus see a sort of perception of 360 degrees. Stay with me here, I know this all sounds ridiculous but I swear I’m on to something. The right picture is of a character named Neji Hyga, a fictional character from a manga/anime named Naruto (perhaps you’ve heard of it). Anyway the point is the blind spot of the character’s ability correlates to the blind spot of the mind’s eye. “One does not see, look at or sense anything in, through or at the mind’s eye. One see or looks with, from or out of the mind’s eye.” – Ronald Davis (The Gift of Dyslexia).

Yeah I know this sounds very pseudoscience-y but the mind’s eye does perceive multidimensionally as an extrasensory perception and at the epicenter of that perception utilizes sound and senses of balance and motion. I don’t have the sited sources but it has be explained by a number of therapies including:

The quantum physics concept that perception itself produces effects on the object that is being perceived.
It might be some form of perception that has not yet been identified
Ex: like the sonar that gives dolphins a three-dimensional mental image of their surroundings and even allows them to communicate these images it other dolphins.
It could be conceived as a form of imagination, where the person mentally constructs multiple views of the object or symbol being perceived.

The psyche speaks in images, visual thinkers are connected and Carl Jung knew

A year ago before departing the corporate world to define my own creative style, I asked myself a question that led me to the meaning of Synchronicity (A design I made based on the I Ching months prior to my recent revelations) sending me back in time to a moment with an ire connection to a man named Carl Jung came in to perspective and has since then confirmed that there is so much more going on than western education wants us to know.

Listen to the voices of the past if they have meaning for you. Here is a quote from Carl Jung:

"The evolutionary stratification of the psyche is more clearly discernible in the dream than in the conscious mind. In the dream the psyche speaks in images, and gives expression to instincts that derive from the primitive levels of nature. Therefore, through the assimilation of unconscious contents, the momentary life of consciousness can once more be brought into harmony with the law of nature…and the person can be led back to the natural law of his own being." JUNG – CW 16 para 351

So Dyslexic? Or Clairvoyant?

Clairvoyance (from French clair meaning "clear" and voyance meaning "vision") is the alleged ability to gain information about an object, person, location or physical event through extrasensory perception. Any person who is claimed to have some such ability is said accordingly to be a clairvoyant ("one who sees clearly"). Jungian psychology talks about this using extrasensory perception to visualize the unknown. With the mastery of the M-I-N-D strengths, all of what’s defined as clairvoyant is one in the same matching extrasensory perception with multidimensional thinking. Can you see it? The research of western understanding about the dyslexic mind, Jung's psychology and eastern spirituality with the third eye. The clues are everywhere they just need to be pieced together. One day I hope to be a scholar and I want to continue my research and share my findings with the world, I feel like for the first time in my life I found a greater purpose. I hope to use this platform to spread the word. Now, I don’t have a degree in psychology, nor am I trying to say I’m the next genius or psychic but…you gotta admit, I’m on to something. I can see possibilities, their connections and combine them together to make sense of it. I guess you can call me a modern druid in training. Enjoying the journey, excited for the destination.

- Druid Cruize