If you are unsure how to bring your imagination from passive to active, watch a child play. Children have no trouble at all employing their active imagination. Give them a ball of yarn and a pile of sticks and they will give you a fort. “Here’s where the kitchen is,” they will say! “Yeah, and over here is my room. My bed is here. And this big rock is my pillow.” Children will spend hours setting up battlegrounds, tea parties, or hoeing a make believe garden. How are they at entrepreneur skills? There is no reluctance on their part selling crayon pictures, homemade bracelets or cookies that are falling apart. Do kids dread going door to door to selling their goods? No, they love going door to door with their cooked up inventions, crayon pictures and mud pies! Kids believe in their abilities and actively employ their imagination.
The world’s most successful people transport their imagination from passive to active: Movie makers, song writers, novelist, gaming creators, painters, inventors, scientist, entertainers, and magicians. The top performers in any professional category are always those deemed to have the “wildest” imaginations. You too, can be imaginative. All it takes is practice. What is available to any top performer is also available to you. As you use your imagination, a dousing of fresh thought trickles in.
Shedding limiting beliefs allows your imagination to stretch. When we shed the belief that man could not fly, we came up will all sorts of vehicles for man to fly in: airplanes, hot air balloons, helicopter, space shuttle, parachute, and blimps. It is the belief that bars the ideas entry. When you clear the path, ideas will spring to mind, one after another, from the easily doable to the absurd. Do not deny these thoughts their proper consideration. That is your mental power in action trying to bring your desired object close to you. Denying these thoughts and opportunities is the same as denying your object.
Are you familiar with the children’s movies “Finding Nemo” or “Monster, Inc?” Finding Nemo is about a young fish that is separated from his overprotective and rather paranoid father. The father must venture out of the safety zone of his coral reef to find his young son. The story tells the tale of father and sons adventure as they try to find each other. Monster’s Inc. is a story about Monsters that live in a parallel universe to ours accessible through the closets of children. The Monsters have to scare children to collect screams. The screams of children power the Monsters electrical world. A little girl accidentally enters the monster’s world and the adventure begins.
These stories could only be created through active imagination employed regularly. When you are open to ideas, they come. When you shut ideas out through your beliefs, they cannot come. They are denied access by the beliefs. The only reason you feel a lack of creativity is because you are not letting your thoughts springboard you into ideas like Finding Nemo or Monsters Inc. You do not permit them. You walk around oblivious to your thoughts with a big tag across your chest that reads, “Access denied.”
Your thoughts are worthy of exploration. If there is ever a time to listen to the knock, knock, knock of your thoughts…the time is now. Often our brief interludes of constructive thought are followed up with the flickering of attracted thoughts responding. But we miss the sparking of new thought. We take no action.
Your imagination is tapped through active use. Take your imagination into your meditation sessions. Force its use by asking yourself questions out of the ordinary. Ask yourself questions you would not normally or ever consider. Examples such as: What would my world be like if I lived on the leaf of a Sugar Maple Tree? Would I learn how to access its sap? What could I use the sap for besides a sweetener? Ask of yourself, how could I have $10 without laboring for it? What job do I think is the best job in the world? In considering this job, what do I think is the most challenging aspect of this “best job?”
There are no rules to the questions you ask except that you must either feel good or neutral about the material. Bring no unpleasantries into your session. Your imagination will spring up through active frequent use. If you do not use it, you lose it. However, you can gain it back. Your imagination does not pack up and leave you. You have only suppressed it. It did not go anywhere. By suppressing it, imaginative thoughts do not occur to you. When you use it often, thoughts leap seemingly out of nowhere.
When you feel in command of your imagination, then you can initiate thoughts of your ideals. Prematurely setting ideals causes you to aim low. After all, if your imagination is harnessed like a beast, it will not occur to you that certain ideals are available. You have likely heard people say, “I never would have thought of that” or “I wish I would have thought of that.” What are they saying this about? Just about every good idea that slaps them in the face from the Pet Rock to the Invisible leashed pet. They said it about Colonel Sanders secret recipe, Martha Stewart’s Life Style entertainment, the slinky, Rubik’s cube, and on and on.
Ideals spring from the pursuit of an active imagination. When you allow yourself to ponder without restriction the ideal life you desire, it too will begin to take shape. Ideas that would have never occurred to you before will occur. That is why it is important not to loiter in new found thought. You should always keep idealizing since your ideal is always relative to where you are now. It is a moving target. As you carve your way towards your ideal, thoughts that have not occurred to you before will help you to set new ideals. You are always moving towards a new set of ideals. If you linger to long on a tier, beliefs will grip you in that tier. While some may be beneficial, others will hold you to certain experiences. That is why it is always important to remember what you believe holds no universal truth. You do not want new beliefs to mesmerize you in the same regard your old ones do.
Your imaginative ideas should be as unrealistic as possible for this reason: What is real, is already believable by you and requires no reinforcement. Thinking in terms of what is unrealistic and unobtainable stretches your mind. It forces you to consider thoughts you normally would not. Once these thoughts are brought into the active mind for inspection other like thoughts will follow including thoughts that make the unobtainable obtainable and the unrealistic real.
When Gary Dahl first thought of the Pet Rock, it was amongst friends who were at the time complaining about their pets. The Pet Rock was a laughable substitute for a pet. However, Dahl went home to consider the Pet Rock further. He even went as far as creating a guide on caring for the fictitious Pet Rock. The more he thought about this very unrealistic pet, the more real it became real. Ultimately, he put together a marketing plan that successfully launched his pet rock to a welcoming market. The rest is history.
Your imagination works well when you use it well! Creating your ideals through imagination serves as a guide for your thoughts. Until now, you have allowed your thoughts to wander, snaking off when you perceive them as becoming too unrealistic within your belief system. Time spent in concentrated effort imagining your ideals draws forth those experiences. Like the water drip and the fall leaves, small daily doses build up monumental results quickly. The degree to which you are willing to devote concentrating on your ideals, determines the speed at which your ideals are returned. Small doses performed daily lead to large immediate results.
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