I recently listened to a story by a gentleman named Bob. Bob is in his mid 80's and has more energy and vibrancy that most people half his age. Bob grew up during the Great Depression. His education consisted of less than one year of high school. Materially and economically, he had very little in his life and nearly everything he saw in his immediate environment bespoke of lack and limitation.
In his early twenties, he befriended a man who would eventually become his mentor. He asked this mentor, a successful businessman and philanthropist, how he could be successful in life. Bob explained to his mentor how he’d grown up in an environment that reinforced the opposite of success, and learned from the people around him that "Life is hard, and then you die." Bob's mentor suggested that rather than focusing on the past or present circumstances, to imagine what he wanted in his life, and to write that down on a gold sheet of paper. Then he instructed Bob to read it every day.
Since Bob had nothing to lose, he followed his mentor's advice and wrote down he wanted to make $25,000, which was a pretty good sum of money in those days. Bob started his own one-person business, cleaning offices at night. To make a long story short, within one year he’d built a business that earned $14,000 a month. Today, Bob is a multimillionaire, and even though he doesn't have to, he still enjoys working every day doing what he loves.
Bob doesn’t tell this story to impress people about how well off he is. Instead, he wants to demonstrate the power of focusing our thoughts on what we want rather than what we don't wish to have in life. He noted that to change our life or world, we cannot just see things as they are. We must use our imagination to see things as they can be. The idea is that if we want to experience something new in our life, we have to imagine in our minds and speak with our words what it is we want before it shows up in our world. To manifest something extraordinary that has never happened before is the reason Albert Einstein said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
This principle applies to any area in our life, even our health and body temples. When we begin to say and imagine things that we mostly make up, our mind and body won't know it’s not true. When we imagine that our life is magnificent and beautiful or our body temple is a fit and vital instrument, it doesn't know we're fibbing. When we declare life is good, the patterns in our brain begin to change, and our nervous system begins to acclimate to a higher frequency. Up to that point, we’ve been telling ourselves untruths anyway. We’ve been telling ourselves at some point or another, in some form or fashion, how bad things are, or how the Universe is not for us, or that life is against us; and we believe it. As a result, it created illnesses, aches and pains, and all sorts of undesirable experiences in our lives and our world.
Even if you don't believe life is good, lie to yourself, then watch that imagined experience unfold. That's because the law of the Universe doesn't know you're lying or joking. It only knows what you believe at that moment. Begin to tell yourself that life is magnificent. When you do, you connect to the Presence. This Presence is for you, and everything is working together for your good. You will bypass the surface mind that is conditioned to believe that there is not enough in the world – not enough good, love, supply opportunities, or creativity. You will go beyond the surface beliefs of the mind and begin to drill into the awareness that all the power, Presence, love, and abundance that there is or ever will be is your life and being.
That's the message I got from Bob's story. We may as well try it. After all, what do we have to lose?
Peace and Blessings,
James