#44 Imagination and Will Power

Your will power, thoughts and imagination are bound together.  Will power NEVER goes against them.  Therefore, it behooves you to try to abandon through willpower the thoughts you have imagined.  You cannot do it.  

     You are always in a state of attracting.  What you attract depends upon what you think about and believe.  Your will power is your power of attracting as you will something to happen.  Your will is your thoughts materializing. 

     Understand that you cannot use your willpower as a weapon against your thoughts and imagination.  Your will draws reality towards you like an earth magnet.  It is unwavering, unbendable and unstoppable until you change your thoughts. 

     Diets fail, addiction treatment plans fail, marriages fail when you consume yourself with thoughts of donuts, drugs, or adulterous desires and then try to waive off the materialization of those events with some incredible will power.  Your will power is not some super hero inner strength that allows you to thwart off a donut, a drink or an affair.  It is exactly the opposite!  Your will power is your power to draw to you what you think about.  The only way to prevent the materializations of events is by stopping your thoughts.

     Thoughts attract similar thoughts; similar thoughts band together as ideas.  Mental pictures are painted. Soon you are visualizing.  It is the obsessive repetition of thought that draws forth unwanted behavior.  You have to be immediately willing to banish thoughts unworthy of you from the focus of your attention.  Your bad habits are conquerable when your thinking is consciously directed away from the habitually bad thoughts.  That is the only way.  Soon your physical world will turn about and seem to cure you.  But it is the steered thinking that altered your experience.

     Think of your will as self talk.  The repeated messages that you send yourself direct your experience.  For example, if self-talk includes commenting on the undesirable status of your weight, obsessing over what afflicts you, or a dread of exercising each of these conditions will magnetically be drawn to you.  As you fight for control, you further draw undesirable situations because you are magnifying your thoughts in these areas.  Your power resides in redirecting your thoughts not in trying to redirect the environment the thoughts produced. 

     What many of us attempt to do is diet by forgoing food or battling intense exercise regimes.  While physical exercise has its benefits and place, you are fat because of your thoughts.  You are consumed by thoughts of food and weight.  You try to diet by forcing food away.  However, you continue thinking about brownies, treats and the taste of bacon.  Repeatedly trying to shove the food away does not work.  Your thoughts, imagination and WILL POWER are strong attractants.  They will produce results whether you like it or not.  Directing your thoughts away from food and the scales will change your weight.  That is your only option.

     What do we say about a person who is on a diet and forgoes desert?  “Oh my, what astonishing will power!”  However, it is not the will power that banished the dessert.  The thoughts of the dessert were not allowed to spin out of control.  The person’s thoughts were on anything BUT the dessert.  You cannot think of dessert or its delicious offering and push it aside. Your thoughts are what are pushed aside first!  You reject the dessert by rejecting first the thoughts. 

     You might think that you have been thinking fat thoughts and so agree to think thin thoughts.  However, you “imagine snacks.” You think you are powerless to your own will.  However as I have stated, your will power followed your imagination. One million Americans are overweight.  Five million diet each year in futile attempts to shed pounds that only regain themselves over time.  Failed attempt after failed attempt leaves you feeling in the dumps.  All you think about is dieting plagued by these incredible urges to eat.  If you had listened to your feelings (feeling bad about your weight and failures) you would have known they were trying to tell you something about your thoughts.  You are attracting more reasons to feel bad, more weight, more down in the dump feelings.  Your attempts to thwart a reality that you created through thought are impossible.  You have to change your thinking.  When you think of yourself at your ideal weight, feel good about the person you are right now and push aside the thoughts of weight, you will experience change.   You have to love yourself the way you are, adore your body and feel good about the person you see in the mirror in order to be given more experiences of feeling good about who you are.  That is will power in action!  It is the attracting will power of specific constructive thoughts, I love who I am and the rejection of “I am fat” thought in action here.

     Remember we talked about the power the word I am contains.  Whatever follows I am are your beliefs.  Your beliefs dish out your reality.  So what you believe about I am (fill in the blank) is what you are going to get without fail every single time.

     Every person that is overweight is consumed by thoughts of food, right size portions, hunger, special diets, new diets, tight clothes, calories, carbs, protein, foregoing dessert, cellulite, dress size, and how nice fries would taste right now.  Overweight people are consumed with thoughts of food and their body size.  Right weight people give no more thought to food than they do a blade a grass.  In fact, food is so far from their thoughts they often forget it is time to eat. Their thoughts are not consumed with hunger or their clothing size.  Right weight people look in the mirror and think I like how I look today.

     Change your thinking.  Change your life.  Do not underestimate the power of your will.  Do not think for one moment that you can entertainment negative thoughts and reject their consequences.  The key is to lock the door on thoughts that destruct you.  You must with all effort imposed push them from you mind. 

     People who lose weight, have a drinking problem, or drug addiction have incredible difficulty overcoming their obstacles due to will power.  They put their problems constantly in the forefront of their thoughts and then try to reject the outcomes.  They are met with debacle every time.  You cannot reject physically what you have produced mentally.  You cannot WILL away the physical aspects of what your thoughts have produced.  Your will power follows your thoughts and imagination WITHOUT FAIL.  You cannot use your will power as a weapon against thoughts and imagination.  It is their ally.  We refer to our will power backwards so often.  We have deceived ourselves (built up this false belief) into thinking we have super strength to will away what we think about.   However, you get what you think about every single time.

     Often times we find some people get sick, get better, and get sick again.  Or they lose weight and then gain it right back.  Ultimately, the bad thoughts return surging them once again with a notion of weakness.  Why does this happen if thoughts are attracting powerful thoughts and positive beliefs are growing?  How does the bad habit return?  By the time you have lost the weight or have been won over to good health, shouldn’t you continue going in that direction?

     Two aspects of the power of thought occur when we yo-yo up and down in pants size or yo-yo up and down spectrum of health.  First, polarized thinking is ravaging the thought process.  Second, normal neutral keeps you grounded.  You can pivot in any direction away from normal neutral.  However, until you change your normal neutral pivoting point your polarized thoughts will return you to that normal neutral point of inspection.  People plagued with weight problems or illnesses never really change their thinking patterns.  For instance, they may constantly watch food in-take as they slim down.  They obsess over their weight.  They worry about gaining weight back.  If a person is ill, that person may worry about getting sick again.  The habitual thoughts never leave their mind.  They are still focused on the destructive thoughts.  However, they have temporarily moved to the positive aspects of the destructive thoughts.  For example, you can think about how good you feel about your body size or how bad you feel about your body size; but you are still noticing your body size.

     You take any bad habit and you will find that it is a bad habit of the mind.  Your thoughts are where the offenders lay.  When you try to make physical corrections, you lose every time.  You have to rid yourself of the offending thoughts first.  If you attack the outward physical condition but do nothing to correct destructive thoughts, your destructive thoughts will return your destructive physical condition.

     Smalls seeds of beliefs build allowing you temporary positive successes.  However, in the trenches lay the negative habitual thoughts that are very comfortable to you.  Eventually you allow them to creep back in without even an awareness that they are doing so.  Your bad habit thoughts whisper, “We’ve been good.  One piece of pie won’t hurt.”  Remember your thoughts have attracting power.  As soon as you allow a destructive thought in, others will follow.  Soon you have eaten three desserts; gained fifteen pounds back and feel bad about yourself!  The only way to rid the difficulty in your life is to rid all thoughts, positively constructed or negatively constructed, that center round the problem. 

     Remember feelings are navigators that indicate whether you are moving towards harmony, away from harmony or are at normal neutral.  If you do not feel really good about yourself or condition then you must take action to acquire that feeling.

     Whatever your perceived problem is, as it enters your mind, state your ideal you, and then dismiss that thought.  Excuse it.  Tell it you no longer need it.  Any thought about your weight (or problem) brings upon more reasons to obsess over.  Remember, your will power is not a weapon to be used against your vice. 

     Smokers encounter this same sort of failure when they attempt to quit smoking.  They throw the pack of cigarettes out and try to fight the urge not to smoke.  What is the“urge?” That urge is your will power in action bending you; physically pulling you as hard as it can towards materialization of your thoughts.  It is not the nicotine that draws the cigarette to you.  It is the thoughts of smoking spiraling out of control in your mind.  The urge to smoke is your thoughts; your will power drawing to you exactly what you are thinking about.  How do people quit smoking?  They quit by forcing thoughts of smoking from the mind.     

     Just think for one moment of that inescapable power as you succumb to any bad habit!  That is the law of attraction at its finest.  Do you recognize it?  We erroneously call the Law of Attraction an urge.  An urge is repeated cyclical thoughts over and over “I want a cigarette, I want a brownie,” “I want a beer,” set to replay that thrusts you with the force of gale winds towards the object that you choose to think about.  The Law of Attraction is connecting you without fail to your object. 

     You can chock it up to some chemical imbalance or powerful withdrawal effects of drugs.  Call it what you like.  But know this.  The second you redirect your thoughts, the sensation disappears.  Consider driving home from work with obsessive thoughts of I want a cigarette traversing your mind.  Someone calls your cell phone.  Your thoughts of wanting a cigarette are interrupted as you focus in on the conversation with the caller. The moment you hang up you allow the flood gates of destructive thought to usher in.  The urge to smoke that cigarette comes right back.  Your constant cyclical thinking propels you towards the object of your thoughts.  As long as you think that drug has the ability to start and stop your thoughts, you will misplace your ability to quit.  Your ability to quit resides with your ability to redirect your thoughts.  Your ability to lose weight resides with your ability to redirect your thoughts.  As I said before, any bad habit is a bad habit of the mind first!

     You can blame the drug’s effects or a chemical imbalance.  You can blame your thyroid or your genes.  Blame whatever you want.  Understand though that by placing blame you misplace the solution.  With any bad habit you have falsified the joy the habit brings.  You have developed a false belief.  You erroneously believe your bad habit brings you joy.  You think pleasurably of smoking or eating.  Some motivational authors will tell you that if you associate enough discomfort with bad habits, they will dissipate.  To some degree that is true because we generally avoid painful thoughts.  Additionally, painful thoughts are often the catalyst necessary to redirect thoughts.  We generally do not like thinking about painful thoughts so we listen to our feelings by redirecting our thoughts. 

     Ultimately, though it does not matter whether you focus on reasons for wanting something or not wanting something.  It is that microscopic attention that you are giving the habit that causes the problem to linger in your life.  Pain begins in your thoughts.  As you associate pain in your thoughts, you tend to stop thinking about painful thoughts.  For example, people do not like to think about past relationships gone sour, getting fired or in general any bad experiences endured.  It is because these experiences cause the feeling of pain that people steer from them.  The feeling is meant to direct you away from the painful thought.  Often we listen to these types of feelings and do redirect our thoughts.   

     However, experiences always start and stop with your thoughts.  It is better to thrust out all thought of the bad habit.  Any attention given to your habit is thought power.  Remember it is not what you do not want that you do not get.  It is what you avoid thinking about that you do not get.

     Imagine harnessing the urge of your will power in action.  We have all felt that will power before; whether it was for a cigarette, a drink or even for the affections of another person.  Imagine harnessing that power in any direction you wanted; that unbendable, undeniable, unyielding power to serve your thoughts.   Imagine unleashing that power towards your ideals!  It is that power directed and concentrated, like you employ now on all your bad habits, directed towards your ideals.  Guess what is going to come your way?  It cannot be stopped.  Your power to attract is unyielding.

     Our old thoughts continue because like a well worn shoe they fit comfortably.  There is no place like home.  You will keep replaying these thoughts until you break free from the pattern.  We can redirect our thoughts at any time with concentrated effort.  Some people equate effort with massive amounts of work.  Effort is energy.  Directed energy is power.  You do not have to sit in a darkened room sweat brimming from your brow forcing unwanted thoughts from your mind.  You just need to be aware that they exist and expel them the second they arise.  Replace your harmful thought with a new helpful thought.  Soon your new thoughts will feel like that old comfortable shoe. 

     As I was going through a divorce with my husband, I often had thoughts pop into my mind that made me feel angry towards him.  My feelings were an indication that I needed to change my thoughts ‘or else’ more reasons for being angry would be brought upon me.  However, I did not always listen to them.  Sometimes I let the thoughts brew allowing my angry thoughts to attract more angry thoughts.  As I did this without fail greater and greater reasons were brought into my awareness of why I should be angry with him.

     This is how both the Law of Attraction and your point of normal neutral work.  The Law of Attractions gives you more of the same thoughts to think about.  Your normal neutral position keeps you tethered to your current state of affairs. 

          All of the thoughts, emotions, attitudes and beliefs occur in the mind.  My anger was a product of my thoughts. My thoughts were not a product of my anger because I did not feel angry until that first thought occurred.  As I let it grow, the feeling grew.  Again, my feelings were trying to tell me that I was not in succinct with harmony.

     On the occasions that I allowed my thoughts the freedom to explore those angry thoughts, without fail days or sometimes a week later something would happen that would provoke more anger.  It may have been something related to my husband that refueled those thoughts or something entirely different such as finding something a trinket of mine that my kids broke. 

     The point is that by allowing those thoughts to brew, I was attracting more reasons to be angry into my experience.  I was manifesting it.  This is exactly what I mean when I tell you that you form your reality as you.  Most of us do it on the fly.  It then does not occur to us that our thoughts create it.  We think we are thinking those thoughts due to the circumstance.  We do not recall our angry thoughts of yesterday that have brought us incidents to be angry over today.  We do not make that connection.

     It is difficult to thrust out thoughts that are part of beliefs.  They do attract.  They will attract.  They will be brought to your awareness constantly.  Ridding me of my angry thoughts was not easy either.  I kept reminding myself that unless I wanted more of these same thoughts and physical experiences, then I needed to stop my thoughts.  I battled with pushing them out of my mind too.  I found it easier when I changed my focus; that is I thought about something entirely different, something that made me feel good…my ideals.  

     Your will power is unleashed upon your ideals only by developing thoughts and beliefs that give you that elated feeling.  How do you get that elated feeling?  You take action on them.  It is no different than any habit you have formed.  To this point, your ideals have not given you that elated pleasurable feeling because you have taken no action upon them.  As you act, your feel good feelings will surface.  Soon taking action upon your ideals will become an insatiable urge. 

     Think how good you feel when you act upon something constructive.  You get a project done that has been on your to do list.  You take that vacation you have dreamed about.  You go to your child’s school function.  You take a day off and go to the spa. 

     Actions fuels thoughts.  Thoughts return more of the same.  As these “feel good” thoughts occupy your mind, the destructive ones are automatically set aside.  You now have good thoughts being produced.  If you find yourself stuck in a cyclical thought pattern, take action!  Do something that you feel good about. 

     This is how I broke the pattern of returning to myself angry thoughts.  I worked on my book.  I organized my closets (something I felt good about doing).  I engaged in playful activity with my kids.  As I involved myself in physical action, my mental thoughts had to tend to those physical activities and feel good thoughts.  Thoughts precede form.  So, if I am doing something, I have to think about it first.  That left my angry thoughts untended to.  My angry thoughts could not occupy my mind and so they left. 

     To some degree action taken can give relief to your cyclical thoughts, whether your cyclical thoughts are of anger, smoking, weight issues, or problems with your health.  Ultimately, you need to deal with your underlying beliefs in order to pivot away from the problem altogether.  We will talk about how to do that in a later blog.

#43 IMAGINATIVE REDUNDANCY

     We readily consider ourselves creatures of habit.  We sit at the same desk or lunch table.  We follow the same morning routine.  We follow the same bedtime ritual.  However, we do not stop to consider our habitual mental thoughts.  We apply our habits solely to the physical aspects of our lives and are oblivious to our repeated daily mental thoughts.  It is the repeated mental thoughts that produce our daily physical habits, but we are unaware.

     It is the patterned thinking that we need to break away from for the real change to occur.  Our imaginations have been stymied as a result.  Remember those 60,000 thoughts a day we had?  Recall, 95% of what we think are yesterday’s thoughts?  Your imagination produced those redundant thoughts.  You struggle with fresh new ideas, concepts, inventions, or change because you are imagining the same things over and over. 

     These cyclical thought patterns grip us.  For many of us, the last time we allowed our minds to have a truly fresh thought was during childhood.  At some point during adolescent, our creativity was discouraged.  We adopted the belief that imaginative thought belonged in the world of a child.  Certainly our employers want imaginative employees.  However, only along the lines of what they want you to create for them.  While you might consider yourself a thinker, at work for example, you lack imagination in other areas where focus is lacking.   

     Without an exercised imagination, our thoughts stagnate into cyclical patterns.  We are all capable of achieving much more than we currently do.  It is only because we feel powerless and lacking that we pursue so little.  When we connect to the real power source of our imagination, the lack and the feelings of powerlessness will subside. 

     You need to learn to use your minds potential by allowing your thoughts to trail pausing to concentrate not on your usual thoughts but thoughts that are atypical to you.  Atypical does not mean undisciplined.  Atypical means pushing your thoughts in directions you are not accustomed to. 

     Until diligence is employed your current thoughts will plague you.  Change requires effort.  As a child, you employed great effort learning to stand up and walk, hold your spoon to feed yourself, and tie your shoes.  You concentrated heavily on these tasks until they were achieved.  As an adult, you abandoned your diligent thinking in favor of more structured thoughts requiring much less mental effort.  You checked your imaginative thinking in at the door of adulthood.

     You did this at the same time that your limiting beliefs structured walls around you.  As you were told to stop dreaming, or you’ll never be able to do that, or so few people ever become one of those, or why would you bother with such silly ideas you stopped building your aspirations within your mind.  Beliefs formed that confined your thoughts to those that you think are appropriate within the belief. 

     You free your imagination by entertaining a multitude of thoughts just as you would exercise your leg through physical therapy after an injury.  Allow time daily to explore fresh thoughts.  Pick a quiet spot and a random topic and allow your thoughts to trail off.  Do not allow your beliefs to give value to your thoughts. 

     Exercising your imagination will bring forth a heightened awareness of it.  Frequent use will reward you with markedly fresh ideas.  When you are presented with challenges, frequenting the realm of your imagination will help you solve your dilemmas.  The key is the ability to summon up an endless supply of thoughts. 

Supplement: The Cure for All Illness

The cure for all illness lies with the belief in wellness firmly established within the conscious mind.  I realize the audacity of this statement.  I realize there are people who very much want to believe that statement; yet cannot seem to heal their body.  Equally there are people who will say that it is irresponsible and contemptible to make such claims.  However, I assure you the conscious mind creates your physical reality including your body and the perception of the body’s well being. 

          When you think of your whole body, you understand that there are parts within parts.  Your skin is peeled back to reveal organs and tissue.  Upon magnification of your organs and tissues, cells are revealed.  These cells are reduced to molecules which then consist of atoms.  Atoms contain protons and electrons.  You ultimately are reduced to energy. 

     It is at this level of pure energy that your conscious mind excites energy and assembles you.  You are assembled energy bond by the conscious mind.  The energy created by a thought excites other forms of energy creating a process of attraction or creating a repellant.  Your predominant thoughts and beliefs are your strongest attractors.  They form the perception of you.  If this is difficult to understand, I suggest that you read blogs #4, #5, and #6 for an in depth understanding of the human body and the conscious mind.   

     It is the conscious mind that controls the body.  The body does nothing without the command of the conscious mind.  You must think before you do.  Even during periods of inattentiveness to the body, such as daydreaming while driving, the conscious mind still holds the body at its command.  You are aware of your body even though you are thinking of other matters.  Conversely, the body does not have periods of time where its whereabouts vanish from the conscious mind.  The conscious mind can always locate the body.

     Accordingly, the conscious mind is free to roam and has no need for a body.  You already have periods of inattentiveness to the body such as when you are asleep.  The conscious mind is free to explore this alternate reality of which the physical body is not a part.  The body is never a part of a reality of which the conscious mind is not a part of.  The body does not imprison the conscious mind, but rather the conscious mind commands the body.

     When you think of your whole self again, you understand that the mind controls the body.  Yet, we seem unwilling to relinquish this (conscious mind) control at a cellular level, erroneously believing that due to the small size of our body’s cells that they are not organized, controlled or directed by the conscious mind in the same manner as the body as a whole is.  For example, we know our conscious mind is responsible for the movement of our hand, yet lose site that the conscious mind directs cellular activity as well.  When we view the body as a whole entity, it seems unalterable to us.  We have the perception that we are stuck with this body.  But the body is combined at a level of pure energy that is very much directed by the predominant thoughts and beliefs of the conscious mind. 

     You cannot separate your body from the predominant thoughts and beliefs of the conscious mind.  Your body is assembled energy based upon those thoughts and beliefs and so is one with them.   You can change the perception of your body only through your beliefs.  You have altered your body many times already and this does not seem weird to you.  In fact, every cell in our body is replaced every eleven months or so.  We shed our hair and our skin.  Our eyelashes fall out.  Our cells die and form new cells.  We completely accept this.  As the energy of our thoughts and beliefs change over time, so does our body.  What we do not realize is that our perception of our body changes as our thoughts and beliefs change.  So to that extent, we are already molding our body. 

     It is worth reading blogs #9 through #24 for an in depth understanding or your thoughts and beliefs.  You cannot think yourself into a new body that of which is not a part of your belief system since your beliefs (predominant thoughts) are what create your body.  For example, you cannot think your 5’2” frame into a 6’3” giant because you hold the belief that this is impossible.  However, you can change many other aspects about your body which are believable to you, including healing yourself if you believe that is an outcome for you.  If you believe in illness and the perception of power illness has upon you, then you cannot pretend your way to wellness.  People who have sent illness into remission did so by believing in wellness.  They reinforced their expectation of the outcome of wellness through action. 

     Positive thinking and optimism are the opposite side of the same belief:  I am sick.  Thinking optimistically about your illness is vastly different than believing you are already well.  Do you understand the difference?  You must think you are well in order to be well.  To think you are sick and hope to get better reflects only illness.

     Healing yourself is initiated within the mind first and is projected outwardly to the body.  Doubt cannot be a part of your wellness belief system.  Doubt, conflict, reservation, and fear are the epicenter of your current belief system thrusting off your new thoughts on wellness  I must refer you to blog #24 What is Doubt and what it is not to help you understand its role.  When you understand that the mind controls the body and not the other way around, you can begin the healing process.

          The medical community often dismisses the ability of the conscious mind to heal the body.  Often cases in which individuals overcome illness are thought to be rare or unusual.  The reason there are so few cases of success is because the workings of the conscious mind are grossly misunderstood.  The focus of the medical community is exclusively on the body.  Yet, the body is the effect.  The cause is always your thoughts. 

     There is a great deal of research demonstrating the benefits of positive thinking, optimism and hope.  It is commonly accepted that these qualities initiate far better outcomes in terms of recovery than their counterparts of despair, pessimism and doubt.  However, as I stated just a moment ago a positive attitude still supports a faulty belief system, albeit the brighter side of it. 

     Generally, people who face catastrophic illness teeter between pessimism and optimism.  Those who remain on the optimistic side experience far greater positive outcomes than those who wallow in despair.  Thus although it is misunderstood, the medical community gives credence to the power of positive thinking.  They say:  Be hopeful!  Be optimistic!  Ultimately though, the state of the conscious mind in the case of optimism or pessimism reflects and supports the same belief:   I am sick, I believe in illness, I believe that the body is separated from the conscious mind and can act on its own accord, I believe in disease.  If you want to be well, you must first endorse that wellness in the conscious mind.  In other words, to “become,” you must already “be.” You are what you believe yourself to be.  If you want to be well, you must believe in the ideal version of that wellness.

     The reason healing your self is considered rare or difficult is because most people are unaware of their beliefs and how those beliefs actually perpetuate their illness.  It is simply not enough to believe in a positive outcome.  You must believe in what is ideal. Again, this is vastly different than remaining positive.  Remember, the body does not and cannot act out on its own accord.  Your body, all of your body including the small cells, relies upon direction from the conscious mind; so if your cells are not well or your heart is not well or you are overweight, your conscious mind is channeling that to you.  Your body cannot produce outcomes that are not first initiated within the mind.  The medical community grossly underestimates the power of the mind and places the body at the forefront for treatment; but you know your body is not in command and cannot cure that which your conscious mind produces.  Your body is not in charge.  Your conscious mind is.  And for that reason, you must focus on what is ideal in order to achieve it.      

          You may have heard of a man by the name of Norman Cousins who in 1964, laughed his way back to health after he was diagnosed with Ankylosing Spondylitis, a rare disease of the connective tissues.  His chance of survival was stated as 1 in 500.   “Get your affairs in order,” his doctor told him.  Norman had mere months to live.
     Norman changed the course of his outcome by doing something critically different.  He did something that most of us would not do upon receiving such devastating news.  Most of us would get a second opinion, take massive amounts of medication, seek ongoing treatment, and finalize our affairs; thoughts and actions that support a belief in an impending death.  However, at that critical moment Norman did three things that would ultimately change the course of what he was to experience.  He chose to believe in his own manufactured cure, not the illness.  Furthermore, he took action to reinforce with his conscious mind this belief.  He cemented his new thoughts into his mind until they formed a belief.  This is what Norman Cousins did:

    
1. He fired his doctor and left the hospital to check into a hotel. He believed that the hospital signified defeat and overmedicating was not good for his health.  He found a doctor who would work with him as a team member as opposed to one insisting on being in charge.

2. He began to get injections of massive doses of vitamin 'C'.

3. He obtained a movie projector and a pile of funny movies including old Marx Brothers films and Candid Camera shows. He spent a great deal of time watching these films and laughing. In spite of being in a lot of constant pain, he made a point of laughing until his very stomach hurt from it.

How did Norman Cousins fair?  Well, he finally did die.  However, it was not until November 30, 1990!  26 years after he was told to get your affairs in order.

     I will have more to say about Norman Cousins in a minute.  First, when I was in my early twenties, I smoked.  During that time, someone gave me a cassette tape with subliminal messages intended to help a person quit smoking. The tape contained instrumental music with secret messages supposedly embedded within the songs.  I was instructed to listen to this tape three times a day for two weeks.  At the end of the third day, the tape’s instructions said I would not crave a cigarette and would give them up.  I was instructed to listen to the tape for the entire two week period as reinforcement. 

     I have no idea if that tape was actually embedded with smoking cessation messages.  However in 1989, I believed the tape contained actual messages that worked.  The result was that I quit smoking.  I did two things very similar to what Norman Cousins did.  (1) I believed in an outcome (that I would quit smoking) and (2) I took action to reinforce my belief (I listened to a tape that I believed would help).  Norman Cousins watched movies and laughed.  He also took doses of vitamin C, again another measure that aided in developing the belief that he could heal himself.  Because he allowed new thoughts and took action to reinforce those thoughts, he altered his reality to one of wellness.  The power reinforced action has upon a belief you are cultivating cannot be underestimated.

     Why are doctors baffled by cases like Norman Cousins?  Why can't we all duplicate his method?  The cure lies in the belief in wellness, not in the method.  People cure themselves all the time through outrageous methods that they believe work.  It is the belief that produces the outcome, not the method.  Wellness is created within the mind, not treated upon the body. 

     Several years after I had quit smoking, I recall talking to co-workers about my method (subliminal tapes) for quitting smoking as we sat for lunch on a particular day.  To this day, I still recall a particularly offensive comment by a lady who was about ten years my senior.  She said, “Really, Christina a smart girl like you falling for those subliminal tapes. You should know better than that!  Those tapes are pure garbage!”

     That comment really stung at first.  Years later though, I realized that the method I used really did not matter.  The method was not smart or dumb, proven effectual or proven ineffectual. It was not practical or a bunch of hype.  What mattered was that I believed in the outcome that my method would produce.  Since I believed in the outcome, the method worked.  A subliminal tape would never have worked for my co-worker because she did not share my belief in its ability. 

     Will laughter work to cure your illness?  Will treatment or medicine work?  Will prayer work?  Or will nothing work?  Do subliminal tapes work?  I produced an outcome from the tape.  She more than likely would not be able to duplicate my result.  Is my co-worker right or am I?  Essentially, neither one of us is right and neither one of us is wrong.  We both get exactly what we believe in.  What you believe matters! 

     I want to share another aspect of Norman Cousins’ case with you.  Norman Cousins served as an Adjunct Professor of Medical Humanities for the School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles.  He did a lot of research on the biochemistry of human emotions, which he believed were the key to success in fighting illness.

     As you think, so you feel; and the only way to feel is to think!  Your feelings are the navigators of your thought.  Feelings are intended to help direct your thoughts to harmony and prosperity all while leading you away from dissonance and despair.  Your reality follows your predominant thoughts and beliefs.  If you feel well, you are thinking well.  If you feel sick, crummy, lonely, depressed, devastated, or if you have that awful sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach, then be warned.  Your thoughts will produce a reality that follows along the path of those thoughts.  Feelings remind you to keep thinking along a current path by giving you a feeling of euphoria.  They also send up red flags when your thoughts are damaging.  That “pit” in your stomach is an urgent message to get off that thought frequency.  See blog #25 and #26 to gain a greater insight into your feelings.

     Norman Cousins saw a relationship between his emotions and his well-being.  He incorporated laughter, love, faith and hope in his treatment plan.  Emotions follow thoughts!  If he had these emotions, his thoughts had to come first to produce them.  The method of recovery was irrelevant; Norman Cousins’ foundation for wellness was already cemented in his thoughts. 

     The last thing I am encouraging anyone to do is stop their treatment in lieu of watching old Marx Brothers films.  I am not trying to dictate a method for curing yourself.  In our western culture, doctors play a prevalent role.  We are accustomed to seeking their advice and treatment for our illnesses.  We believe in our doctor’s healing abilities. We believe in pharmaceutical remedies.  You cannot thrust off an illness if your beliefs still support the supreme ability of the medical community and the unmitigated power of disease.  You cannot brush off your doctor and your illness, yet hold doubt in your mind as to your own ability to produce specific results.  To do so would be dangerous. 

     When Norman Cousins took matters into his own hands, he still worked with his doctor.  He still held beliefs about medicine and disease.  In fact, it is his beliefs in disease that garnished him with illness.  However, he held a much greater belief in his own healing ability and the power his emotions could contribute to his cure; thus making him secure in his belief that he could heal himself.  He also found a doctor that supported his belief structure further propelling him towards success. 

     The message I want you take from this is one of hope.  You are not at the mercy of a diagnosis.  You are not at the mercy of the beliefs of a doctor.  You are at the mercy of what you believe; and thankfully you can change that. 

     You can change your outcomes by changing your thoughts.  You must (and this is not an option), only permit thoughts of wellness, thoughts that make you feel good, thoughts of the ideal you in a state of wellness.  You must be willing to squeeze out all thoughts of despair from your mind.  And finally, you must believe that being well is an option for you.  How many months do you have to live?  Only you can determine that.  Are you going to accept a 6 month sentence?  Or like Norman Cousins are you going to believe in your cure?

     The next step you must take is one of action.  Act upon your beliefs.  If you believe in the ability of a doctor, then by all means use one.  However, find one who supports your course.  This will lend further credibility to your newly seeded beliefs.  Next, stop validating beliefs on illness.  Only allow thoughts of your well-being to permeate your conscious mind.

     It will be difficult at first.  If you have read my blogs on the power of thoughts and beliefs, then you know they have the power to attract and repel; much like two sides of a magnet.  What you experience will change as your predominant thoughts and beliefs change.  A new reality of experiences may seem unapparent at first.  However, you are building a new foundation thought by thought and until it is built up, it will be unapparent.  Ultimately though, your new thoughts and beliefs will rise up and produce a reality just as consistent and cemented as your thoughts and beliefs are today.  You must first believe in you!

     I want to end by saying that there is nothing wrong with you if you are not able to become well.  Nor is there anything wrong with you as you became ill in the first place.  Illness is an experience.  It is not something dysfunctional within you.  You work well.  I assure you.  Your life is a series of experiences set about to enrich the conscious mind.  Without distress, we would not know pleasure.  Without sorrow, we would not know joy; and without pain we would not know love. 

     The conscious mind is on a journey to enrich itself.  It enriches itself through experience; when you have a traumatic experience you are also enriched by its opposite.  There is great benefit of which you may not even be aware of to all experiences.  Did you consciously set out to make yourself ill so you could experience an appreciation for wellness?  If you do not hold an awareness of the power your thoughts have, then you probably did not consciously direct your thoughts towards illness.  However, you did not consciously direct them away from illness either.  You let your thoughts stroll towards an experience.  You can alter your experience if you chose to do so now by taking command of your thoughts. 

     Please feel free to email me privately at christinabialas@gmail.com if you are struggling with an illness, have a question or comment on my blog.  I would also encourage you to read my entire blog as the material presented here is a supplement to other sections.  To understand how to cure yourself, you must understand how you work.  How you work, why you seek the enrichment of experiences, why a person would attract illness versus wellness, how your cells attract, how your feelings work, understanding doubt, your belief system, setting your ideals, planting successful succeeds of thought and more are contained within my blog.  To repeat it here would be redundant. 

#42 Universal Imagination

     We are connected to each other by way of the Universal Mind.  And through this connectivity unlimited resources are available. Recall that there is no more energy in the universe today than a billion years ago.  Nor is energy created.  All energy that exists has always existed and will always be the same energy to exist.   Since you are connected to everyone and everything through energy, and all energy now is the same energy that has always been, you are connected to everything, everyone and all thoughts in what you think of as past, present and future.  Contained within each of us is omnipotent power laying latent waiting for retrieval.  We are linked to this force.  If we feel we are not creative or talented it is only because we have not tapped our own resources. 

     Tapping into your imagination is much like tapping a syrup tree.  Once triggered, the ideas flow.  By poking a little here and a little there your imagination springs like an unstoppable leak.  Ideas appear to come suddenly out of nowhere.  Since you have not learned to tap this internal resource, you are baffled into thinking external resources give ideas, such as a person, or TV commercial or an object spotted.  However, these ideas have always been available within you and have been within your command.  You too are multi-talented, creative and capable of conceiving the exact magnitudes that others have originated. 

     Your imagination is open and free.  It is permitted to create anything.  Think about the inexhaustible amounts of potential creativity within your mind.  You can create purple trees with green faces, invisible rocks that walk, and three legged dogs that talk all within the confines of your mind.  There is absolutely no limit as to what you can think.  Since your imagination is free to create in whatever it endeavors any limits are limits that you think you have.  If you think you are bound to mediocre ideas, your file on mediocrity is retrieved.  When you accept that you are unchained, unrestricted and unhampered by thought activity, a bountiful of ideas comes brilliantly to mind.

     You liberate your imagination by diffusing distorted and inconsistent beliefs that are not congruent with what you are attempting to achieve.  We arrive back at our ideals finding the only way to imagine ideal possibilities is by relieving ourselves of the burden of our beliefs holding us back.  As we do this we start imagining ideals instead of best case scenarios.  We imagine the impossible as possible. 

     Your imagination holds an unlimited plethora of potential ideas waiting for energetic stimulus to trigger it.  Thought is that energetic stimulus firing off.  Consider how effective brainstorming is.  The thoughts produced are retrieved inwardly.  The information revealed was always contained within the realm of your reach and existed prior to your retrieval.  When you focus inward in search of specific information, information presents itself.

     Understand that this information exists now and is available to you now.  Your mind holds active thought but also holds unlimited chunks of thoughts and ideas for your inspection when you are ready to receive them.   They are there for the asking.

     The direction of your imagination relies upon your focus.  What you focus upon matters.  Thoughts serve as the building blocks of your imagination stacking upon one another like multi-directional bricks and mortar.  Your thoughts attract other like thoughts building upon wildly imaginative ideas.

     Your imagination is self-directed and centers concentrically around one idea to the exclusion of other ideas when it is deliberately directed.  This is the law of attraction at work.  As you imagine different colors of the rainbow, colors of all sorts are returned.  Your imagination cannot interrupt your directed thoughts on rainbow color and deliver instead types of fish.  If you direct your thinking, your imagination returns thoughts on the direction of your thinking.  If you think of nothing specific, ideas roam.  If you focus upon lack and despondency, your natural trail of imaginative thought provides threads of connected thoughts to lack and despondency.  Conversely, directing your thoughts and imagination away from lack and despondency and towards abundance and harmony provides plentiful imaginative thoughts in that direction.  You can direct your imagination to work on your ideals.  Ideals are returned to when you do.  In this case you are using your imagination to extreme benefit. 

     Undisciplined thoughts lead to haphazard results.  Conscious mind is creative and expansive.  Thought expands the minds and evolves the self.  Restricted imaginative thoughts hamper growth and expansion.  Your duty is to free your imagination from restraining beliefs allowing imaginative dilation.  Once the shackles on your imaginative powers are loosened, and thoughts are steered in a constructive direction, your experiences will change.  Growth will occur. 

     As you expand your imagination you become greater than what you are because we are all in a constant state of becoming.  As we expand, we are rewarded with a richer experience and greater imaginative abilities.  It is not that the abilities are improving as if a lack of knowledge existed, but rather, our imaginations are being stretched. The information is already available to you like an infinite connect-the-dot where the dots for connection always exist.

The Power of Diligence and Vision

     We have all experienced outcomes that are great, good, okay, mediocre, and complete and utter failures.  I personally have experienced each of these at different points in my life.  People who achieve astounding success have also experienced each of these outcomes.  Think of Andrew Carnegie, Oprah Winfrey, J.K. Rowling, Madonna, Martha Stewart, Steven Spielberg, or Bill Gates.  These super successful people have had plenty of failures.  However, in the areas of their life’s great moments, they achieved astounding success.  The relevance is that my list of great moments includes outcomes that are great, but typical.  Bill Gates or Oprah Winfrey’s are just plain astounding.  People who have achieved astounding levels of success do one thing differently; they have a vision and employ pure diligence.

     I am sure most people think they understand what diligence is: Repeated effort targeted at a task.  However, that is far from what diligence is.  Diligence is not chipping away at the leaves in the back yard, studying until wee hours of the morning or working late hours at a job.  Diligence is not the same thing as hard work. 

     During the time I owned rental properties, I had a friend who also owned a string of properties. This friend was constantly running from property to property checking on the progress of the rehab work.  Often he would show up on the job only to remember that he had forgotten to bring some necessary painting supplies or other such items.  Off he would rush to the other side of town to pick up paint.  He would drop the paint off; then get back in his car and proceed to drive to same side of town he picked the paint up to check on a property he was rehabbing over there.  His day was consumed with overlapping errands.  There was no question that this friend worked hard.  He worked long hours every single day nearly seven days a week.  However, diligence is not persistently working hard.  Diligence is not working long hours or sticking to the task at hand.  Diligence is persistently working smart.  And to work smart, one must have vision.

    When you persistently work smart, it is with a plan or vision in mind.  My friend never sat down to plan his day, considered what he wanted to accomplish or take time to plan his success.  Since he had no plan he accomplished only a fraction of what he could have.  He ended his day feeling overwhelmed and very much like there were not enough hours in the day to finish his work. 

     It is easy to view this friend as having poor time management skills.  We could accuse him of being disorganized.  We could even say he is inefficient.  What we do not recognize are these same characteristics in ourselves as they are applied over the course of our lifetime.  We fail to see how much of our life is an overlap of yesterday.  We fail to see how inefficient we are at achieving our goals.  And time management?  Really, when are you going to get around to living the life you intended?  Where he lacked a daily plan, most of us lack a vision for our life!  Diligence is not persistently clamoring away at a job.  Diligence is not organizational skills or great time management.  Diligence is persistently acting upon your vision. 

      We never succeed at realizing our dreams because we do not act with diligence towards them. We work towards the wrong purpose.  Most people have only a vague idea of what they want in life.  Like my friend who had only a vague idea of what he wanted to accomplish each day.  We want be wealthier, healthier or happier yet we have no real plan of achieving it or exactly what we mean.  We hold only an abstract idea that we want more than what we have.  Ultimately, we also are consumed by our day.  While my friend overlapped many of his errands, our days to some degree are repeats of the one before.  So little changes and so little is accomplished when we have no aim.  One of my favorite quotes comes from the story of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.  I use this reference often in my writing as I think the wisdom is inescapably clear.   

"Cheshire-Puss," she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider.

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

"I don't much care where---" said Alice.

"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.

"---So long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.

"Oh you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."

  Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, Martha Stewart, and anyone who has achieved astounding success simply new where they were heading.  They had a vision and they worked diligently towards that vision.  Remember, diligence means working persistently towards your vision.  It does not mean I am a hard worker.  Paraphrasing the Cheshire cat, you will arrive somewhere if you walk long enough.  The somewhere should be your vision.  However, most people do not take the slightest step towards their vision, ever! 

     If I ask you where you are heading and what your plan is for arriving there, would you know?  Or would you answer, I don’t know?  The sad truth is most people do not know where they are heading because they believe life happens to them.  They do not take aim because they believe attempts are futile. Why bother!  Why work diligently towards matters unobtainable! 

     I was reading recently that diligence runs contrary to human nature. The article stated that people are content to take the path of least resistance.  It said that we want instant gratification.  We do accuse ourselves of such mediocrity often. 

    However, what is the path of least resistance?  The path of least resistance is what you are doing now! And it takes a whole lot of effort. You have an entire belief system structured to hold your now moment in place.   You are in active attraction.  Change requires effort too.  A whole lot of change requires a whole lot of effort. After all you are trying to uproot a belief system.

     Change will not occur until you (1) believe in a vision and (2) work towards that vision diligently.  Diligence is work away from what you have and towards what you want.  That is what Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart and all others did.  They plow horsed their way from point A to point B.  Vision gave them aim.  Diligence, which we said is action aimed at your vision, is what got them there.  Vision is mental work. Diligence is persistent action aimed at your vision.  The two combined turn you into an unstoppable force. 

    

HOW YOU ACQUIRE VISION

     Vision is your ideal image of you.  I talked in depth about ideals in section #32 Living the Ideal Life, #33 Ideals Uncertainty and Problems that arise, #34 Creating your Ideals, and #35 Your Ideals, other People and Your Fears.  You acquire vision by holding an unrestricted view of who or what it is you want to be.  Your vision should be audacious!  It should be extraordinary without compromise. 

     Once this vision of you is firmly cemented in the conscious mind, specific goals should be set.  Goals are chunked down into steps.  Steps are assigned tasks.  What is the result?  By following the tasks, you are sure to complete the steps.  Once the steps are followed, your goal is reached.  Upon completion of your goals your vision arrives. Reaching our vision is impossible when we neglect or refuse the process.  Achieving your vision is absolutely inevitable when the process is followed.

     I volunteer at my children’s elementary school.  Every other Friday, I sit in the hall and work individually with first graders learning to read.  As these blossoming readers struggle with a word, my job is to help them figure out the word.  Compound words like baseball, cannot, sunflower, lifetime or fireworks are intimidating to these first graders.  I can actually tell by the expression on their young faces that they have no idea how to tackle the word.  However, I rarely have to tell them the word.  Often it is only a matter of chunking it down.  I cover up base and let them read ball.  I then cover up ball and let them figure out the word base. They inevitably scream, “Baseball!”  You arrive at your vision in much the same matter by chunking it down.  Inevitably, you will arrive.

     The conscious mind and the Universal Mind always provide for us in exact correlation to the thoughts and beliefs channeled through their gateway.  Therefore, you must channel greater thoughts of your vision and restrict the entrance of status quo.  Without fail, every super successful person has held strongly to a self-created vision supported by thoughts and beliefs propelled by diligent action. 

     Reality is materialized from our strongest thoughts and beliefs.  The consistency that we see or status quo is not the path of least resistance.  It is the epicenter of our greatest strength.  Diligence is not against human nature.  It is a part of human nature, albeit employed in the wrong direction most often; that is towards status quo.  As you create a vision and consciously direct your thoughts towards that vision taking diligent action, your reality has to follow.  It has absolutely no other choice.  It is a Universal Law that you experience what you believe.  Therefore, your vision must follow thought and action, thought and action, thought and action!