Why Is Your Imagination a Power Tool?
Daydreaming is important, not just a waste of time. More than that, it is a skill, which can and should be developed. If you are serious about manifesting your desires, you must be able to create detailed, realistic internal sensory experience of the thing or state you want. What you are imagining must feel real and possible, and it should feel good to generate these imaginings.
Your Own World Between Your Ears
Your imagination is your domain. Nobody can tell you what to do there. In the world of your imagination, anything is possible. You can dream freely, uninhibited by the hard “facts” of the world outside your own head. Through the medium of your imagination, it is also possible to make those dreams into realities. But first you have to make the dreams as vivid as possible. “Vivid” means alive or full of life. Infuse your dreams with life.
Using Your Inner Senses
It helps if you use as many sensory modes (sight, sound, touch, etc.) as possible. This comes with practice. If you imagine what you desire on a daily basis, you will become more and more able to easily generate full-bodied, waking dreams, bursting with sensory experience. Most people come to this practice with natural ability with one or two sense modes. Then you will want to fill in your skills by developing the sense modes that are missing.
See It
Learn to see clear, vivid images of what you are creating. What will your life look like when you have what you want? See it, in living color, larger-than-life. Make the colors brighter, get out of black and white. Practice by looking at a bright, easy-to-perceive color with your open eyes. Then close your eyes and try to reproduce the color in your mind’s eye. At first you may succeed for just a second or two. Practice holding it for longer time periods, until you can imagine scenes in color for minutes on end. If you get distracted, let your mind wander a bit, then bring your attention gently back to what you are doing and focus again on seeing color and shape. When you are not meditating but are simply out enjoying life, notice color and shape. This will give you something to play with next time you are meditating.
Hear It
If sound is an unfamiliar sense mode, try imagining sounds. Let music run in your head. See if you can run through your favorite song, start to finish. Find out how many of the musical details of it you can remember and replicate in your inner ear. Then listen to it and hear how close your approximation was.
Another aspect of the sound mode is inner self-talk. Do you have a voice inside your head that tells you what is possible and what is not? Try adjusting the volume on that voice. Is it a male or a female voice? Is it a literal recording in the voice of one of your parents? Suppose it’s your father saying, “You’ll never amount to anything!” Suppose then that you speed it up so it sounds like Alvin the Chipmunk. It’s a little hard to take that kind of message seriously when it sounds like a chipmunk. Suppose it’s a teacher saying, “What a good student you are!” Turn up the volume. Play the recording over and over. Let it drown out other, more negative, recordings. It may take years to play positive messages as many times as you’ve heard the inner negative messages, but eventually that old stuff will fade.
Now go back to your dream. Ask yourself: What sounds, noises or inner self-talk are associated with what I am creating? Replay them in your head. Talk to yourself, internally or aloud. Encourage yourself, as if you were a beloved child and the voice is that of a loving, supportive adult who believes in you. Talk yourself into the dream, and don’t tolerate voices that speak fear to you, whether they are inside your head or outside of it.
Feel It
The bodily sense mode has two parts: one is kinesthetic, or inner-body and the other is touch, or outer-body.
Touch is easy. How would the world feel to someone who had the life you are creating for yourself? Would you wear silk? Can you imagine running your hands through piles of money? Have you test-driven that car you want—do you know the feeling of its steering wheel in your hands? These are the building blocks of manifestation. Become familiar with these sorts of sensations, run them over in your mind frequently.
The kinesthetic mode is a little more complex. It covers internal body sensations like balance, weight, gravity and “intuitive hits.” The feeling of swallowing is kinesthetic. So is a stomach-ache. Menstrual cramps are kinesthetic. The feeling of satiation after a good meal is kinesthetic. So is the sensation of balancing on a bicycle. And the feeling of the hair standing up on the back of your neck is kinesthetic.
Ask yourself how having the life you want will feel to your inner body. Will you be more balanced? More grounded? Will it feel solid in the tummy, instead of like the butterflies you feel when you are imagining something scary or something beyond your reach?
Smell and Taste It
If you like, and if it’s pertinent, add in the other sense modes: smell and taste. Does having what you want mean gourmet dining? Fine chocolates? Is there a food, a taste or a scent that symbolizes for you this thing you are creating? What is the “richest” scent you can think of? Lavender? Roses? Cheesecake? Try weaving that into the dream so as to create a tapestry of experience in which you are surrounded with congruent, enriching sense data.
Create a Signature Moment
After you have gotten some practice with all of the sense modes, try creating a signature moment around something you want to manifest. In the future, I am wealthy. How do I know I am wealthy? I look out the window of the bedroom of my fabulous home and see a beautiful sunset over the bay. I hear the sounds of my children playing. I feel a sense of strength and groundedness in my belly. I feel that I am wearing silk pajamas and look up to see that it is six in the evening, but I am still in pajamas because I am retired, yet the sounds of my children tell me I am still young. I feel my leg-muscles pleasurably burning because in the dream I have the leisure to run every morning. It is all happening in one sense-moment and all my senses conspire to tell the same story and point to the same reality.
A signature moment can be brief but also contain lots of meaning and back-story, all compressed into that moment. And you can draw on it anytime you have a few minutes free. Just a few minutes at a time, several times a day over weeks and months can move you powerfully along the road to what you want.
What Advertising Does That You Should Do
The main purpose of all advertising is to hijack the imagination of the viewer. Notice how ads use attractive models with warm, fond tones of voice. Everything is larger than life. Colors are bright. Objects are large. Faces are in close-up. The camera pans in quickly on the object being advertised. You may not be able to smell things on TV, but look how the steam rises! That burger must taste good.
The advertiser is trying to create your dream for you, on his own behalf. He knows that it is a very short trip from imagination to action and thus to reality and so he pumps up your imagination in hopes that it will lead to action, i.e. you buying the product. And preferably as quickly and as often as possible. Your imagination is yours—take back control of it! Why should McDonald’s get better use of your imagination than you do?
Put Yourself Inside the Dream
It’s best to place yourself inside your vision. When you imagine a thing or a lifestyle, see-feel-hear the aspects of that. Make it big, bold, beautiful, colorful, like advertising. Then get into the picture. Don’t just see scads of cash—see them in your hands, see numbers in your bank account, touch them with your own fingers, look at the dead presidents on the bills. If you find yourself slipping out of the picture, climb back inside.
Your Lizard Brain Doesn’t Know The Difference
Why is it important to do all this? Why do sense modes matter? Because your hind brain, your lizard brain, does not know the difference between imagination and reality. And your lizard brain is what will create the thing you are manifesting. Once your hind brain gets used to the idea of you having what you want, it won’t be long before it happens.
Your hind brain also does not comprehend time. All times are now to the lizard brain. Therefore, place yourself in your dream and tell its story as if it’s happening now. Your hind brain will get busy manifesting it, especially if it starts to feel more real than the negative things in your life that you’re hoping to let go of.
Practice, Practice, Practice!
These skills may seem elusive and hard to measure, but really all that you need to do is practice. Just try it. Then try it again. Then keep trying it until you find suddenly that you are now dreaming in color when previously you only dreamt in black and white. Suddenly you are hearing symphonies in your head where previously you could barely hold a tune. And then—voila! Suddenly your external life responds to the internal shift: it becomes sweeter, richer, brighter than it was. And you are the one who made it that way.
