Should I Focus on Imaging for Myself?

Dear A. B.

Thanks so much for your prompt reply.

That is really interesting, A.B.!  Wow, so you have actually done this sort of thing all your life! Your stories are amazing.

I just learned a few days ago that my husband has started to look for another job.  I thought we were going to be in this house forever, and had started to plan some upgrades to the house.  This changes everything of course. I don't think we'd try selling the house for at least of couple of years, but still, I need to "design to sell" now rather than re-do for the long term.

At first I felt scared when he shared the news.  After all, the housing market is abysmal.  Our value has plummeted.   I know we will lose money at the time of sale...IF we can sell. Houses sit unsold forever anymore. 

After about 48 fear-filled hours I started to actually allow myself to think about the positives that could exist with this scenario.  By brain wanted to say "What positives?" but I persisted.  This move hasn't been the greatest for either myself or my husband.   While I've accepted living in a city I don't really like, maybe is it possible that this change could allow me to move to a place that I actually do like...that I even love?  Should I allow myself to dream big like that? 

If my husband could get a job about 45 miles north of where we currently live, I'd be in seventh heaven.  I love everything about the place. The houses, the environment, the culture, the opportunites and activities there are all "up my alley!"  The icing on the cake is...my sister whom I love dearly, lives there. 

Should I focus my energy toward this possibility?  I guess I'm so afraid of being disappointed again & feeling that broken-hearted pain. 

Still, a part of me has been pushing toward the positive...what if?  What if I could live there? (Good things like that don't happen to me my brain insists.)
 
This is why I wondered about the image boards, etc.  Instead of thinking, "I'll take what I can get & that's surely going to be the pits" why not make an effort to go for what I'd really love & even believe a little bit that it could happen?

It was inspiring to hear how you "imagined" your aspirations into reality.

Thank you.


Ginger 

Dear Ginger,

There is a huge difference between wishing for something and believing, "knowing," you have it. Here's the magic words if you want them, courtesy of a cyber-physiologist named Gary Sinclair.

"Bring those things into being that be not as though they are."

This is what the imagers are attempting to do that you talked about.

You can play with this, after all in many respects life is a game, and you'll find a lot of things will miraculously come your way. I play with it now and then for fun. Shouldn't life be fun, too? However, life is a mystery. If you think you can pin life down to some kind of formula that "works",  or that you can "work" life, you are not going to be able to do it.

That's the problem I have with books like "The Secret." Life may not anything like people think it is. The wisest comment I ever heard about life still remains that of Sophocles "I know what I know. I do not know what I do not know." And of course, we must go forward with our day according to what we know.

But just because you get something you want, that doesn't mean anything ultimate to your life, does it? Even when my hair comes out right and I turn out to look just like that model when I'm 18, so what?

Who knows what the alternative might have been if I didn't "mess around with imaging and imagining?"  Don't get me wrong, I was happy about it when I looked at the picture and my face in the mirror. It was a nice feeling. Many people say the Greeks were such a beautiful people because they surrounded themselves with statues and pictures of beautiful people. Why not? And I like my hair brownies and hair  fairies who usually don't let me down.

And I always try to remember to invoke the protection for myself and what I am doing that anything I imagine or image is "for the good of humanity." I am not interested in stirring up the dark powers  to work on my behalf..

I pray for a lot of things for other people that they want. Why not? And why not be optimistic about the possible future rather than pessimistic? Optimism seems to be so much more pleasant. It feels good. Pessimism feels bad so why do it? Many wise people have said we all should  be expecting good things from life without necessarily spelling them out with pictures and imaging.

We want to be creative and make a good life for ourselves and the people we love. But perhaps we should avoid the extremes where we are insisting on some degree of happiness or success and trying to beat life into giving us what we think we are owed, due to our set-up expectation.

You could win a million dollars in the lottery one day and get hit by a car and turn into a paraplegic the next. Or you could be born with a silver spoon and get everything you ever wanted and die a fortunate person. Or you  could be born a poor person and work and slave your whole life. Can you say, truly, that one life is blessed and one is not? Please remember Viktor Frankl here.

Here is a paragraph from my book Depression is a Choice that might help as well:

Our essential happiness is not conditional. Conditional happiness cannot pass for essential happiness anymore than being serially grateful for disparate things can pass for a state of infinite and abiding gratitude. Conditional gratitude, where we see something that causes us to be grateful, is not the same as essential gratitude, where being grateful causes us to see something. Conditional happiness, the temporary excitement of having what we want, of fulfilling some perceived need, is not the same thing as essential happiness, the transcendent awareness that we want whatever is.

Conditional happiness is a feeling that comes and goes. Essential happiness is our original state of well-being that is always available to us. It is not quantitative despite the fact that we think it depends upon some quantity of things or feelings we “must have.”

I tried to put some of my thinking about the mystery of life  into a book called "Children of the Gods" which you might find interesting, even comforting, I don't know. You can get it in on amazon for a couple of dollars I think. I wrote it many years ago. I still find the last two pages comforting.

I still can't get my head around things like murder, torture, child abuse, etc. I just kind of lump them into the idea that there will always be evil in the world because, according to ancient wisdom, the physical world is one of duality. For a thing to appear, it must be accompanied by its own absence--hence we write on a black chalk board with white chalk.

Life is such a mystery that many of the greatest quantum physicists turn mystic. How else when you can be hit and killed by a 2x4 and yet no one has ever found the smallest "last" particle of matter which can’t be divided into some smaller particle. So far they just find atoms, quarks and energy. A. B.