Paul Scheele presents "Genius Mind: Activating Your Brilliance" from 6:00 to 8:30 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 4, at Edge Life Expo. Advance tickets are $35 thru 11/2, and $37 at the door. Visit uptowntix or call (612) 604-4466. Complete expo details are at www.edgelifeexpo.com
Paul Scheele, co-founder of Learning Strategies Corporation, is a remarkable man who is devoted to working in the field of human potential. He teaches people how to tap into their inborn genius, taking life-altering subject matter and presenting it in a way that laymen can understand. This is a gift. While watching a video of his the other day, I observed an extremely intense audience. Paul works in such a way that he managed to relax them. His wonderful sense of humor served to help take people out of the fear zone. When you attend his seminar, expect to become involved by participating in actual exercises. I found his process of teaching to be very entertaining while at the same time being very effective.
What a package! If you are serious about wanting to recognize your potential and take responsibility for it, you owe it to yourself to come to Paul’s workshop at the Edge Life Expo 2005.
Scheele is the author of PhotoReading, Natural Brilliance, and The Genius Code. He has taught hundreds of thousands to PhotoRead written information at speeds of 25,000 words a minute and beyond. Over a million of his books and recordings are in circulation.
Mr. Scheele shared more information about his work in a phone interview with Edge Life.
Tell us a bit about you and how you got interested in your career.
Paul R. Scheele: I grew up in New York and Chicago but have spent the last 35 years in the metropolitan Twin Cities area, Minneapolis and St. Paul, so I really consider myself a Midwesterner. About the time I was in high school, I found a set of audio tapes on self-hypnosis. They really helped me to relax, which I absolutely loved. So I began my own personal quest to attain states of relaxed awareness. When I thought, "Who are the models of this?" the idea of a yogi sitting in meditation was the image that came to me. So I started studying hatha yoga and yoga meditation.
While going to the University of Minnesota, I had an opportunity to take a training program in how to hypnotize. The woman who owned the oldest established hypnosis practice in the Twin Cities took me under her wing at that time and began referring her clients to me.
When I graduated with a degree in biological sciences, I began working full time in the field of human potential. Working near the university, I helped clients with study skills and relaxation, quitting smoking, losing weight, that sort of thing. It was a great introduction to human potential, because it really gave me a window on how the human mind works. Literally thousands of hours of working closely with people one-on-one showed me a lot about how the mind and brain work.
Then I had the opportunity to be trained as one of the first practitioners in Neuro-Linguistic Programming. I first studied it in 1977 and then was at the first residential credentialing program in 1980. In 1981, I was one of 70 people in the world who were certified as Master Practitioners of NLP.
Was there a defining moment in which you really knew what you wanted to do with all this education and experience you had?
Scheele: One of the first presentations that I gave to a large group was a demonstration of hypnosis to a church youth group. Here I was 19 years old working with kids who were 15 and 16 years old. I had several of them in a nice deep trance and I gave the suggestion to one fellow that he couldn’t move his foot, that it was glued to the floor. And in fact he couldn’t move his foot at all. The only way he could was by unlacing his shoe and pulling his foot out of the shoe, which never moved off of the floor. I then suggested that he could not tell me his name, that he had forgotten it. To my amazement, he absolutely could not utter his name.
Now, at that moment instead of thinking, "Hypnosis is so powerful!" I thought, "Wow, we’re doing this to ourselves all the time! Every day, we’re taking perfectly reasonable resources of mind and we’re throwing them out, because we accept the suggestion I cannot."
That was my epiphany. I realized that my role as a hypnotist wasn’t to place people in trances. It was to awaken them from trances that they had accepted about themselves that weren’t so, that were really self-limiting. Because so much of what our society delivers to us on an ongoing basis is self-defeating and self-limiting, I realized I had my mission basically set out before me. It has come to me that what I stand for is to help people reclaim the genius capacities that they were born with that were de-geniused out of them through traditional education and living in society.
At Learning Strategies Corporation, we produce audio products that allow people to find an internal resource that can assist them in accomplishing what they desire to improve the quality of their lives. It’s all about creating this internal environment in which they can locate and apply those resources that are already within them, that they have walled themselves off from as a result of negative self-suggestion.
Wow! So true. I’ve always said that we’ve been mass-hypnotized into being disempowered.
Scheele: Buckminster Fuller put it this way, "By the time we reach fifth grade, one out of 10,000 have escaped from being de-geniused by well-intentioned, well-meaning adults." Out of every 10,000 people, 9,999 of us will have stepped away from the true power that is within us. That power really doesn’t go away. It’s just been switched off. My work in the Genius Mind DVD is to really help people switch their genius capacities back on. And when people take the PhotoReading Course we developed, they actually learn to mentally photograph the written page at a page per second. We start you out at a page a second.
That is so astounding! To me that seems impossible.
Scheele: You must realize that if you really think it’s impossible, it will be.
I remember a fellow who called me up and said, "Paul, I want to thank you. You did something that I had promised myself that I would do. When I was in college, I saw the first Superman movie, where he goes up to the Crystal Palace and gets all of the world’s information. He flips through the pages as fast as he can turn them." After the movie, this man thought, "My mind could probably do that, too." So he flipped pages like that prior to taking his next exam, and he wrote a perfect exam. His professor pulled him aside after he handed back the tests and said, "I want to know how you did that. I’ve never seen anybody in the history of my class write a perfect exam."
Although embarrassed by how he got the idea, he shared what he had done. His professor told him that he must write it up and let others know about it. So he called me to say that basically the PhotoReading Program describes exactly how the human mind can do what he demonstrated it can do. Today, the PhotoReading book is in eighteen languages.
What I want to say is that very quickly in the course people recognize that this isn’t just about reading. It’s really a course on how to use the full potential of the mind. If you can PhotoRead, what else can you do? This is just one demonstration of what the human mind is capable of.
My reaction when I’m hearing this is that I’m kind of psychically moving forward and then I’m running back, because part of me really senses that I know what you are saying is true, and part of me is really afraid to discover my full potential because of what is going to happen when I do.
Scheele: It’s beautiful that you recognize that. The second home study program we created is Natural Brilliance. That came from observing participants of our PhotoReading course. Every once in a while we would get someone who said he got nothing out of it. I thought that was impossible, as there are 18 different ways in which a person could double their reading speed in that course, so how could it be that someone got nothing out of it?
I began to study it. It turns out that their approach to learning unintentionally created more of the same problem. Interestingly, there is a rich body of research in psychology about resolving such paradoxical problems. That’s what my Natural Brilliance Program is all about. It helps us move forward when our own actions have been keeping us stuck.
What you described as going forward and pulling back and going forward and pulling back is an oscillation. What you’re doing is bouncing between end points on a continuum called your comfort zone. You only go so far into how powerful you can be before you start running the other way thinking, "Yeah, but I don’t want to discover what’s on the other side of that, because it could get me into trouble." Then you run the other way again. But after you put yourself down so much that you can’t tolerate living like that, you run the other way to human potential.
This oscillation produces a stuck state. What my work is about is helping people break out of this stuck state and achieve not only lasting freedom, but the success that they’ve really imagined could be.
The Natural Brilliance Program has been published in many countries, as well. It’s always been one of our best programs and we’ve held retreats on it. The idea is that we really can access phenomenal human potential even when we’re pre-wired to stay away from it. We can break through that.
This is really exciting stuff! What can you tell us about The Genius Code?
Scheele: The Genius Code came about as a fabulous collaboration with my colleague Dr. Win Wenger, who created Project Renaissance and wrote a best-selling book called The Einstein Factor. He created something called image streaming. We use image streaming as an activation technique in our PhotoReading Course. Image streaming is immersing yourself in an ongoing stream of intelligence and creative associations that the human brain is making that are outside of your conscious awareness. You can ask a question of this genius brain of yours and step into this flow of information and out of it actually retrieve the answers to any question that you may have. The basis of it is socratic method, but it’s also outrunning the editing function of the limited conscious mind. You learn to actually bypass the limits of the conscious mind to get at these real genius capacities that are always there and always running.
For someone who really wants to explore and take advantage of all of this, how long of a process would this be? Is it necessary to read the books, take the seminars and buy the DVDs?
Scheele: My master’s degree is in Adult Learning and Human Development Technologies. People usually have their own learning styles for things and that is why we present the information in books so you can learn from reading, in home study programs, so that you can listen to audio and see video. We also have live seminars for many of our programs, which are completed in a single weekend. And then we have a more intensive immersion with a whole bunch of other folks called a retreat. So PhotoReading can be learned in any of those formats. The same with Natural Brilliance.
My recommendation is that you take a look at your particular learning style. I know people who would never take a seminar, because they’re afraid of self-disclosure or dealing with other people. They love the home study. Somebody else may want to learn it from a book. It really is entirely up to you. If you were to go through a home study program, depending on which of our 15 programs it would be, you could learn it in 12 to 15 hours. If you took a live seminar, you could learn it in 18 hours over a Friday night, Saturday and Sunday.
Once you learn it, is it just part of you or is it like a skill that will improve with practice?
Scheele: That’s a good question. Skill building is something we go through in everything that we teach. We feel that information, in and of itself, is nice and interesting, but it really is only as effective as your ability to put it into action that will get you closer to what you want to create in your life. What we’re always looking for is creating a rich environment for you to find the resources within you, apply the skills and accomplish the results. When you learn the technique, you will be able to apply that technique to anything that you approach.
For example, after learning the PhotoReading technique, you can apply it to anything, from reading magazines and reports, newspapers and books, technical literature, information on the internet, e-mails, anything. The technique is generative, which means that each time you use it, you become more skilled in solving these kinds of reading problems. You actually generate additional skills and abilities as time goes on. The more you use it, the more comfortable you are with the techniques, which are quite different from anything you ever learned in school.
Most of my work introduces people to two capacities that we all have. One is a phenomenally vast non-conscious mind. We have processing abilities that are tremendous, memory storage, pattern recognition, creativity and connection to infinite intelligence. Our non-conscious mind is so vast compared to our conscious mind. The database of it outweighs what we carry around consciously by 10 billion to one.
The other capacity that we have is something called the pre-conscious processor, which means that we can take in information, discriminate that information from others and differentially respond to that information and never consult the conscious mind. This pre-conscious processing capability means we can take in information literally as fast as the sensory systems in the brain can process it. Just to give you a feeling for this, the brain and eyes can process 10 million bits of information per second, but the conscious mind – what you and I read with and make sense of the world with – only receives forty bits of that. When you realize the processing power and the phenomenal capacity that the human mind has, it’s almost beyond comprehension.
If people take advantage of this, consider the impact it will have on the world.
Scheele: The world certainly, and also on their individual lives.
Paul, what will you be doing at the Edge Life Expo?
Scheele: I’m going to be giving my presentation on the Genius Mind. We’re going to show people how to double their reading speed. We’re going to show them how to contact the phenomenal pattern recognition capacity of the brain to be able to learn in an accelerated way and solve problems more effectively. Afterwards, I’ll be on hand for book signings.
Any parting messages for us?
Scheele: Learning Strategies was established as a human resource training and development firm back in March 1981, so we’re officially celebrating being in business for more than 24 years. We have hundreds of PhotoReading instructors around the world and the course is being taught in many languages. It’s going to be 20 years this fall since we began teaching PhotoReading. Think about it. Thomas Kuhn wrote in The Nature of Scientific Revolution that it takes 20 years for the paradigm to shift. This is it. I believe the world is ready to begin recognizing the phenomenal capacity that is within them.
Let’s switch back on the genius abilities of the human mind!
For more information on Paul R. Scheele, visit his website
