Imagination

By this time you know that I enjoy reading. One of the authors that mesmerized me is Wayne W. Dyer, and I took the liberty of copying a chapter from his book "Wisdom of the Ages" entitled IMAGINATION. I would like to share it with you by posting snippets of it for you, but for the full text, I am leaving it up to you to follow through. Mr. Dyer quotes a poem and then renders his thoughts: "What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep you dreamed? And what if, in your dream, You went to Heaven ....And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awoke, you had the flower in your hand? By Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)."


Mr. Dyer then says:

"The first step in creation, this unifying principle, is imagination. This poignantly simple poem invites you to delve into your imagination and reconsider your agreement with reality. What we know as real has its limits, but imagination is boundless in the dream state. Our agreement with reality invalidates the idea of being able to bring an object from the dream world into the waking world.

Reconsider what you are capable of in your dream state. Sleeping for eight hours each day means you will be in this dream state for thirty years if you live to the age of ninety. That is one-third of your life that you enter a state of awareness in which your agreement with reality is breached and you manifest everything that you need for the dream simply by the power of your thoughts. You have no concept of time, in fact you can go forward or backward in time at will. You talk to and see the dead, fly if you choose, walk through trees and buildings, change your shape instantaneously, become an animal if you so desire, breathe under water, and be in more than one place at the same time.


The most amazing part about all this dream activity is that for the length of the dream you are one hundred percent convinced that all of it is real. Your unlimited imagination is so convincingly powerful that for one-third of your life, you lose your agreement with reality.


When you wake, you say to yourself, this part is real and all that activity in my dream state is unreal. Go back to your dream state. Every character in your dream is YOU assuming those roles with your mind. When you are having a conversation with people in your dream, you are yourself, then at the same instant you are whomever you are talking to as well. You actually do not have conversations with someone else in your dream, you are those characters and yourself all at the same time. Similarly, the flower in your dream is not a flower in the same sense that you experience it while awake. In fact, you are the flower in your dream, and because your imagination shuts down to almost zero when you awaken, you lose the ability to create without limitation as soon as you leave your dream.


It is not absurd to think that it is possible to bring a flower from the imaginary dream state into the level that we agree is waking awareness. Everything you are capable of accomplishing, experiencing, and knowing in one-third of life spent in pure imagination, you can accomplish, experience, and know in the remaining two-thirds. The key is to banish doubts and allow yourself the privilege of flying directly into that ecstatic state while awake. Work at being a waking dreamer by allowing the same kinds of privileges, freedoms, and, yes, powers, that are taken for granted in a dream state.


To me it seems silly to think of being awake and being in the dream state as two distinct experiences of reality. I know that my dreams are not predictors of what is going to happen in my waking life, nor are they symbols that provide clues to the real me. For me this dream state is like an open invitation into the mystical world of imagination. It is my opportunity to explore limitlessness, to know it firsthand, and to become totally convinced beyond all doubt of the realm of imagination. Then while awake I can go into my imagination and use it to travel miles beyond ordinary waking awareness. Then this waking world becomes but a canvas to my imagination.


When you rewrite your agreement with reality, you can use your experience of that one-third of your life while ensconced securely in your imagination to accomplish all that you desire without going to sleep. Imagine yourself able to manifest into your material world whatever you are capable of conceiving in your mind, and let go of any doubts that you may have allowed to creep in.


To apply the power of your creative imagination in your life today, begin by:

* Always keeping in mind that you become what you think about, be very careful about any thoughts you harbor that involve doubt.

* Keep track of your dreams in the sense of remembering those 'unreal' experiences that you were absolutely convinced of while they were occurring. Then work at eliminating your conditioned benefits about their impossibility. You want to eradicate the word 'impossible' from your consciousness. Truly, if you can conceive it, you can create it.

* Literally rewrite your agreement with reality so that it reads, 'Anything I am capable of one-third of my life I can add to the other two-thirds if I so choose'.

* Live more in your imagination. Give yourself the freedom to wander into unfamiliar territory in your mind and to explore new possibilities in your fantasies, excluding nothing. These imaginative meanderings will ultimately become the catalysts for living an unlimited life.


Your imagination, just like your body, grows through exercise. Wake up and hold that flower in your hand."

I hope you enjoyed reading the above taken from Mr. Wayne W. Dyer's book. Goodnight..Elvira