it may seem incredible but it is true the world in
which we live is a world of imagination in fact
life itself is an activity of imagining all that we behold though it appears
without it is within in our imagination
of which this world of mortality is but a shadow
nothing appears or continues in being by a power of its own events happen
because comparatively stable emotional activities
created them and they continue in being only as long as they receive such
support therefore the secret of imagining is the
greatest of all problems to the solution of which everyone should
aspire for supreme power supreme wisdom
and supreme joy lie in the solution of this great mystery
when man solves the mystery of imagining he will have discovered
the secret of causation and that is imagining creates reality
divine imagining and human imagining are not two powers at all but one
the valid distinction which exists between them
lies not in the substance with which they operate
but in the degree of intensity of the operant power itself
acting at high tension an imaginal act is an immediate objective fact
key low an imaginal act is realized in a time process
human history with its forms of governments
its revolutions its wars and in fact the rise and fall of nations
could be written in terms of the imaginal activities of
men and women all imaginative men and women are forever casting forth
enchantments and all passive men and women who have
no powerful imaginative lives are continually
passing under the spell of their power if imagination is the only thing that
acts or is in existing beings or men as blake
believes then we should never be certain that it
was not some woman treading in the winepress who began that
subtle change in men's minds or that the passion
because of which the earth has been drenched in blood
did not begin in the imagination of some shepherd boy
lighting up his eye for a moment before it ran upon its way
the future is the imaginal activity of man
in its creative march imagining is the creative power not only of the
poet the artist the actor and orator
but of the scientist the inventor the merchant
and the artisan its abuse in unrestrained unlovely image making is
obvious but its abuse in undue repression
breeds a sterility which robs a man of actual
wealth of experience imagining novel solutions
to ever more complex problems is far more noble
than to restrain or kill out desire life is the continuing solution of a
continuously synthetic problem imagining creates
events our world created out of men's imagining
comprise a warring beliefs therefore there can never be a perfectly
stable or static state today's events are bound to disturb our
yesterday's established order imaginative men and
women invariably unsettle a pre-existing peace of mind
hold fast to your ideal in your imagination
nothing can take it from you but your failure to persist
in imagining the ideal realized imagine only such states that are of
value or promise well to attempt to change
circumstances before we change our imaginal activity
is to struggle against the very nature of things
there can be no outer change until there is first
an imaginal change everything we do unaccompanied by an imaginal change is
but total readjustment of services imagine the wish fulfilled brings about
a union with that state and during that union we behave in
keeping with our imaginal change this shows us that an imaginal change
will result in a change of behavior however our ordinary imaginal
alterations as we pass from one state to another are
not transformations because each of them is
so rapidly succeeded by another in the reverse direction but whenever
one state grows so stable as to become our constant move our
habitual attitude then that habitual state defines our
character and is a true transformation now let me
call your attention to the design on the cover of this record you will
notice a man sitting on a park bench imagining himself to be in a home
this is the secret of those who lie in bed awake
while they dream things true they know how to live
in their own dream house until in fact they do man through the medium of a
controlled waking dream can pre-determine his
future that imaginal activity of living in the
feeling of the wish fulfilled leads man across a bridge of
incident to the fulfillment of the dream if we
live in the dream thinking from it and not of it then the
creative power of imagining will answer our adventurous fancy and
the wish fulfilled will break in upon us and take
us unawares man is all imagination
therefore man must be where he is in imagination
for his imagination is himself to realize that imagination
is not something tied to the senses or enclosed within the spatial boundary of
the body is most important although man moves
about in space by movement of his physical body he need
not be so restricted he can move by a change in what he's
aware of however real the scene on which sight
rests man can gaze in one never before
witnessed he can always remove the mountain if it
upsets his concept of what life ought to be
this ability to mentally move from things as they are
to things as they ought to be is one of the most important discoveries that men
can make it reveals maine as a center of
imagining with powers of intervention which enable him to alter the course of
observed events moving from success to success through a
series of mental transformations of nature of others and himself
how does he do it self-abandonment that is the secret he has to abandon
himself mentally to his wish fulfilled in his
love for that state and in so doing live in the new state
and no more in the old state now we can commit ourselves to what we
do not love so the secret of self-commission is
faith plus love faith is believing what is
incredible we commit ourselves to the feeling of
the wish fulfilled in faith that this act of
self-commission will become a reality and it will
because imagining creates reality imagination is both conservative and
transformative it is conservative when it builds its
world from images supplied by memory and the
evidence of the senses it is creatively transformative when it
imagines things as they ought to be building its world out of the generous
dreams of fantasy in the procession of images the ones
that take precedence naturally are those of the senses
nevertheless a present sense impression is only an
image it does not differ in nature from a
memory image or the image of a wish what makes a
present sense impression so objectively real is the individual's
imagination functioning in it i'm thinking from it whereas in a
memory image or a wish the individual's imagination
is not functioning in it and thinking from it but is functioning
out of it and thinking of it if the individual
would enter into the image in his imagination as the design on the
cover of this record suggests then would he know what it is to be
creatively transformative then would he realize his wish and then
he would be happy every image can be embodied but unless
man himself enters the image and thinks from it it
is incapable of birth therefore it is the height of folly to
expect the wish to be realized by the mere passage of time that which
requires imaginative occupancy to produce its effect obviously cannot
be affected without such occupancy we cannot be in one image and not suffer
the consequences of not being in another imagination is
spiritual sensation enter the image of the wish fulfilled
then give it sensory vividness and tones of reality by mentally acting
as you would act were it a physical fact now this is what i mean by spiritual
sensation imagine that you are holding a rose in
your hand smell it do you detect the odor of roses
well if the rose is not here why is its fragrance in the air
through spiritual sensation that is through imaginal sight sung
man can give to the image sensory vividness if he does
all things will conspire to aid his harvesting
and on reflection he will see how subtle were the threads that laid to his goal
he could never have devised the means which his imaginal activity
used to fulfill itself if man longs to escape from his present sense fixation
to transform his present life into a dream of what might well be
he has but to imagine that he is already what he wants to be
and then feel the way he would expect to feel
under such circumstances let him like the make-believe of a child
who is remaking the world after its own heart
create his world out of pure dreams of fantasy
that he mentally entered into his dream that he mentally do
what he would actually do were it physically true
he will discover that dreams are realized not by the rich
but by the imaginative nothing stands between man
and the fulfillment of his dreams but facts
and facts are the creations of imagining if man changes his imagining he will
change the facts man and his past are one continuous
structure this structure contains all of the facts
which have been conserved and still operate below the threshold of his
surface mind for him it is merely history
for him it seems unalterable a dead and permanently fixed past
but for itself it is living it is part of the living age
we cannot leave behind us the mistakes of our past
for nothing disappears everything that has been
is still in existence the past still exists
and it gives and still gives its results man must go back in memory seek for
and destroy the causes of evil however far back their life
this going into the past and replaying a scene of the past
in imagination as it ought to have been played the first time
i call revision and revision results in repeal
changing our lives means changing the past
the causes of the present evil are the unrevised
scenes of the past the past and the present form the whole structure of man
it is carrying all of its contents with it any alteration of content
will result in an alteration in the present and
future live nobly so that mind can store a past
well worthy of recall should you fail to do so
remember the first act of correction or cure is always revised
if the past is recreated into the present
so will the revised past be recreated into the present
or else the promise that though your sins are like scarlet
there shall be as white as snow is a lie the question may arise as to how by
representing others to ourselves as better than they really were or
mentally rewriting a letter to make it conform to our wish or by
revising the scene of an accident the interview with the employer and so
on could change what seems to be the unalterable facts of the past but
remember my claims for imagining imagining creates reality what it makes
it can unmake it is not only conservative
building a life from images supplied by memory
it is also creatively transformative altering a theme
already in being the parable of the unjust your
gives the answer to this question we can alter our world
by means of a certain illegal practice by means of a falsification of the facts
that is by means of a certain intentional alteration
of that which we have experienced and all this is done
in one's own imagination this is a form of pulsar
which not only is not condemned but is actually approved in the gospel teaching
by means of such a falsehood a man destroys the causes of evil and
acquires friends and on the strength of this
revision proves judging by the high praise the
unjust cure received from his master that he is deserving of confidence
because imagining creates reality we can carry revision to the extreme and
revise a scene that would be otherwise unforgivable
we learn to distinguish between man who is all imagination
from those states into which he may enter
an unjust job looking at another's distress
will represent the other to himself as he ought to be seen
for he himself in need he would like the man on the cover of this record
enter his dream house in his imagination and imagine what he would see
and how things would seem and how people would act
after these things should be then in this state
he would fall asleep feeling the way he would expect to feel
under such circumstances would that all the lord's people
were unjust yours mentally falsifying the facts of life
to deliver individuals forevermore for the imaginal change goes forward
until at length the altered pattern is realized on the
heights of attainment our future is our imaginal activity in
its creative march imagine better than the best you know