JUST IMAGINE
BY FRED RICHTER ©2003
Let your mind go to a place that pleases you. A place that makes you feel good inside. Picture it clearly. See the details. Smell the smells. Listen to the sounds. Let it wander. What is happening? How is it different from the reality you are in? How incredible that we can create in our minds anything we want to see, anyplace we would like to be, anything we could want to be. Just like a dream. Our dreams paint reality for us so vividly that we cannot know at times what is real and what is imagined. Our daydreams can do the same. What a miracle our minds are. And what we imagine, what we create in our minds, we can create in our lives, in our reality. Anything. What is the difference between what we really see and what we imagine we see? Is there a difference? Is our reality more real than what we imagine in our minds? What is real?
I can imagine that I am another person, or that I can fly, and I can really experience the feeling of flying, just as I have many times in my dreams. I can imagine that I am in love, and feel the wondrous, elated joy in my heart as if I am. If I imagine it, is it not so?
Everything that is created is first imagined in someone’s mind. All that is real was first imagined. Some of what is real today was not even imagined a few years ago. But it could have been, because in the imagination, anything is possible, there are no limits and there is no impossible.
If I don’t like my circumstance of life, I can easily change it in my mind, and my reality will follow. So my life can be anything that I choose to see in my imagination. If I don’t like the person that I am, I can become any kind of person that I can visualize in my imagination.
Imagine what it would be like to be totally happy. What ingredients are necessary to feel totally happy? What would it take for you to feel that way?
What about your life? What about your finances? What about your relationship? Your career? Your marriage? Your children? What you own? A vacation? Where you live? The people around you?
Our reality is, truly, colored by our thinking. We are as we see ourselves. How can we see ourselves differently than we do? Just imagine. Imagine yourself as you would like to be. Imagine that perfect relationship in your life. Imagine the financial security. Imagine the career success. Imagine that wonderful vacation. Imagine that new home. Imagine everything just as it needs to be, to make your life perfect. And imagine it all in detail. Create the pictures in your mind that include the sight, smells, sounds and feelings. Include the colors, the people, and the turn of events. When you watch a great movie, do you let it absorb you? Do you, for that span of time, live in the movie? Is it real? Someone created all of it and put it on film and yet you can step into it as though it were another world, another reality. This is the same way we can create “whole movies” in our minds that can feel as real as life itself and then live those realities.
Does anything exist that we do not see in front of us right now? Does anyone exist who is not with us at this moment? How do we know? Are we sure they truly are there, where ever there is? Isn’t it a fact that for us, those who are not with us right now only exist in our minds? If you are sitting in a room alone, are you not in fact the only person who truly exists in the world right now? Do you have evidence that other people are “out there?” Or do you “just know?” How do you know? If they were no longer alive, would you know? If the entire human race disappeared while you were on a canoe trip in the wilderness, would you know? Or would you only find out when you returned and found no one? Pretty morbid thought? Yes, but it illustrates the point that before you found out the truth, all was well in your world and everyone you knew was still there, somewhere. But they existed only in your mind. The reality was they were gone already, you just didn’t know. And not knowing, you didn’t feel any different.
And does the past exist as if now? Does the future exist as if now? Is the present all there is? What is the difference between what we see before us and what we see in our memory, or our imagination? How is this moment different from yesterday or tomorrow? Can you look back at a picture and experience the same feelings you felt when you took that picture? Can you imagine that you are there? How does that feel different than when you actually were?
Can you imagine that someone loves you? Is that delusional? Does it matter? Aren’t the feelings the same as if we know they do?
Is there a difference between a memory or a dream or an image created in your mind (your imagination)? How would you describe the difference? Is it not true that each is just an image in your mind? What is a memory? How does it exist except as an image in your mind? So let’s create another one, as an experiment. Go to a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed. Close your eyes; relax your whole body and breathe deeply and slowly. Clear your mind of its clutter by just gently letting any thoughts that enter slide away. Now picture yourself in a place you’ve never been. You’ll have to create the surroundings, as you have no pre-determined pictures to draw on. Choose somewhere you’d like to be. On a mountain top; in a huge, green meadow; in a boat on the ocean; on a stage, performing in front of hundreds of people; in a cabin in the woods; in a busy office of a huge, successful company filling a key career role; surrounded by your children or by your friends; or with a special person whom you may not even know. You get the idea. Now, paint the picture. Don’t skip any details; make it complete. The visuals, the sounds, the feelings, are you warm or cold, who is with you? Now let the scenario expand, let it flow. Let it play out like a movie in any way that your imagination takes it. Go on for as long as you care to and really see and feel the events, what is said, what is done. Now open your eyes and recall what took place. Re-run the film. Now is it a memory? How was the experience different from a dream? How is the memory different from “real” memories? You see, they’re all the same, aren’t they?
Now let’s look for a moment at what imagined thoughts, pictures and events do to us. Again, relax, close your eyes and breathe deeply. Picture the person in your life that you love or would like to love. See that person with another – having fun, being romantic, flirting, even making love, and secretly carrying on a relationship behind your back. Don’t give in to the temptation to put the picture out of your head as soon as you feel the unpleasantness. Keep it. Let the film roll, again as long as it wants to. Now open your eyes and take note of how you feel. Did your breathing change? Are there other physical changes that took place? Is your heart beating faster, your mouth dry, and your blood pressure higher? Do you feel a “sick” feeling in the pit of your stomach?
Let’s try one more negative experience to clearly illustrate the effects. Picture yourself driving your car on a busy road. Suddenly, in the corner of your eye you see a truck coming at you from the left side and it’s not stopping or even slowing down. There is not enough time to react or do anything. It’s just there, closer and closer and then you feel the impact as it hits the whole side of your car and you hear the metal that was your car being crushed as the truck comes through your car to crush your body as well. Now open your eyes and review your feelings. Did the fear mount inside you? Did you have physiological as well as emotional changes taking place inside? Did this really happen? When you think back and clearly remember the details, is there a physiological reaction of some kind again?
Perhaps the above two scenarios are too negative for you and could not allow them to clearly come into your mind. Ok, try a couple of simpler ones. Picture a lemon, fresh and cold, right out of the refrigerator. Take a sharp, large knife from your kitchen and carefully slice the lemon in half. Smell the sharp, sour tang of the lemon. Notice the juice leaking from the halves as you complete the cut. Now cut one of the halves again, into quarters and take one of the quarters to your lips and suck the juice from it. Let the sourness and the sharp tang of the fruit fill your mouth and your throat as you swallow. Feel the acid in your stomach as it goes down. Now take stock of your reactions. Did your mouth water? Did your mouth pucker when it tasted the sourness? Were there other reactions?
One more. In your mind only, take an envelope you are about to mail. Lick the glue on the flap, but imagine as you run the flap of the envelope along your tongue, you misjudge the angle and the sharp edge of the paper cuts your tongue. Feel the sting as the paper cuts a slice into your tongue, feel the blood flow from the cut. Now stop the film and think about what’s happening. I’ll bet your tongue was moving, reacting to the imaginary paper cut and your physiology was reacting to the trauma to your body.
All of these imagined events existed in your mind alone and had no basis in reality and yet they all caused physiological changes to take place in you and strong emotions to arise. They caused reactions not unlike the reactions that would have come from the same events had they been real. Were they real? How did they differ in your mind from reality? There was no knife, no lemon, no truck, no unfaithfulness, and yet the memory of each now exists in your mind, just as though they had really existed. These were but daydreams. Not too different from nighttime dreams; real only in your mind, and yet in some ways as real as anything in the physical world.
We’ve all awakened from deep sleep and awful nightmares to find that our hearts were pounding, our blood pressure high, breathing hard and fast and filled with fear only to realize that nothing really happened. Or did it? Which is the dream? As children we’ve all experienced frightening nightmares that woke us in a state of terror, crying for our closest parent. For most, these childhood nightmares go away and don’t return. Why do we experience these as children and then see them fade away as we grow up? Could it be that children are more open to imagination, or could it be memories of a past lifetime that have not yet completely faded away? Does anyone really know for sure? But the fact is that the reactions, in every case, are as real as if the event occurred in the physical world.
Let’s experiment with some good daydreams and positive feelings. Picture yourself walking on a warm beach, in the sun, just in the edge of the water. The water is warm and clear and the sand is soft and almost white. The waves are gently washing over your feet in a smooth, even rhythm that almost keeps time. You can feel the sun on your shoulders, warm, comforting, energizing. As you walk slowly along the shore, you look up at the sky, bright blue and clear with just a couple of fluffy clouds drifting slowly across. You look back, over your shoulder and someone you find very attractive and deeply care about catches up to you and warmly takes your hand as you then walk together, feeling the wonderful closeness and warmth of the surroundings and the relationship. You turn to the person who’s with you and embrace in a tender, caring hug that spreads warm, loving feelings from your head to your toes. I know you’d rather stay there, but back to the “real” world for now. How do you feel? Have physiological changes taken place again? Is your body in a state of homeostasis or overall well-being? Do you feel relaxed and warm and at peace? But alas, it was only a daydream again.
Find your picture albums or whatever box or cupboard you keep your photos in. Look through them until you find one that jumps out at you with pleasant, wonderful memories. Let your mind go into the picture. Look at all the details. Picture yourself back there, feeling the same feelings, experiencing the same surroundings, sensing the same smells, sounds and sights. Enjoy the memory. How does it feel? Do your body and mind react as they did when you “really” lived the experience in the picture? Do you feel some sort of nostalgia in the pit of your stomach? What does it feel like? Where did it come from? How can you keep it? Is it less real than the actual event in the picture? Does it feel like a dream? Or like it’s happening now? Does it matter?
Now the answer to this is easy, but would you rather have the good feelings inside, or the bad ones? Can you choose? At any given moment, can we decide what our reality is? Of course we can’t go around daydreaming all day to create good feelings, or someone soon will haul us off and put us in a quiet room, alone somewhere. But can we control what happens in our heads and in our bodies by creating our mental and emotional environment? We’ve just proved that we can. In each moment of our lives, we can choose the thoughts we wish to allow to direct and control us. We can “imagine” the good in all things and happenings instead of the bad. When negative emotions “fall” upon us, we can consciously replace them with positive emotions instead, just by thinking positive thoughts or reliving positive experiences.
Our lives can truly be like wonderful, loving, warm daydreams by only letting those kinds of thoughts linger. And the effect on our health and our longevity and on the quality of our lives will be significant. We can write the script, direct and produce the movie that lingers in our minds and becomes our target, our goal, our “vision.” And what we carry around in our heads and our hearts has an uncanny way of becoming our reality in the physical world. If we live in our daydreams and our imaginings, we would be out of touch with reality. Perhaps. Or what is reality? For us, not for anyone else. Could it be that people who go within themselves, those that some of us would call mentally ill, are truly happier inside than the rest of us? I’m not recommending going away to live in your mind instead of the world, but the fact is that our happiness is what we create for ourselves, be it inside or out. And we can create whatever life we choose. When we imagine the life of our dreams and visualize it in detail and let it “live inside of us, the universe tends to unfold it before us, and our dreams truly become our physical reality. So whatever it is we want, we start by vividly imagining it, in detail and then watch the script and the movie played out before our eyes as our real life.
We must realize that nothing will happen in our lives that we do not first imagine. And we must remember that we can imagine anything. There are no limits! Napoleon Hill, in his book “Think and Grow Rich” said: “whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe it can achieve.” The bible says: “As a man thinketh, so is he.” These are only a few of the many writings that remind us of the fact that we can be anything and can do anything in our lives. But we must learn to first imagine what we would like to be or what we would like to do. Clearly, in detail, and we must see the whole script, not just bits of it. It must become so real to us that we cannot separate “reality” from that which we want to become. What is it that you would like to change in your life? What would you like to become that you are not? What would you like to have that you do not? Can you believe that it is possible? If not, what needs to change so you will believe it? How can you let your imagination create scenarios that seem totally impossible or so far fetched that you think they’re foolish or just dreaming? What is impossible? Why? Can you put aside the editing for now, and just create without judging or critiquing? Can you paint pictures for yourself that seem totally unrealistic? Just imagine what you want to, without any limits. Forget the cost, the budget, present relationships, responsibilities to others, rules, laws, time restraints, your age, your location, your current job and what you have or do not have now. Forget your presumed abilities or lack of abilities, your education or lack of it and your experience or lack of it. Don’t even consider your physical characteristics, limitations, handicaps, skills, or your appearance. Do realize that even handicaps, sicknesses, diseases and terminal illnesses can be overcome by your mind. You start by imagining yourself in perfect health and changing what you imagine into reality. Do you think that’s going too far? That’s not possible? Well, that’s the first thing to overcome. You must believe that “through faith, (which is our imagination) all things are possible.”
Once we believe and accept that anything is possible, and we have a really clear picture in our imaginations, what must we do to make our dreams come true? Can we now just go about our lives and watch the dreams unfold? Sometimes it really is just that easy. The fact is that our own minds and spirits go to work on our dreams when we see them clearly and our subconscious minds steer us in the right direction. Our subconscious is like the guidance system of a missile, making minor and major changes and course corrections to put us in the right place at the right time to reap the rewards of the “targets.” We are amazed at the “coincidences” that continue to unfold and the synchronicities that keep falling in our path. Somehow, when we let our imaginations flow from the Universal Consciousness, we tap into it and our ability to accomplish things and remove obstacles far exceeds the limits of our own individuality. It is said that the whole Universe gets behind us to make our dreams come true. Our responsibility, though, is to take advantage of the opportunities put before us and to not sabotage the open doors through disbelief or a self perception of unworthiness. Step through the open doors and close them behind you. See them as the path to your dreams and be willing to accept that the Universal Consciousness has only good in store for you.
