The Power Of Imagination

Willpower needs an enemy to overcome before it reaches its goal.

It tries to be tough and, like most toughies, it becomes a cream puff when the going gets rocky. There is a gentler, easier way to shuck bad habits—imagination. Imagination seizes directly on the goal; it gets what it wants.

This is why in earlier chapters I placed so much emphasis on your learning true-to-life visualization at deep levels of mind.

If you spur your imagination with belief, desire, and expectancy, and train it to visualize your goals so that you see, feel, hear, taste, and touch them, you will get what you want.

“When the will and the imagination are in conflict, it is always the imagination that wins,” wrote Emile Coufi.

If you think you want to give up a bad habit, chances are you are deceiving yourself. If you really wanted to give it up, it would fade away on its own. What you should want more than the habit itself is the benefit of giving it up. Once you learn to want that benefit strongly enough, you will become free of the “unwanted” habit.

Thinking about your habit and firmly resolving to give it up may bind you more tightly to it It is a little like firmly resolving to go to sleep; the very firmness of your resolve can keep you awake.

How can this be made to work for you?

As examples, I will use two habits which Mind Control graduates overcome most successfully: overeating and smoking.

If you want to lose weight, your first step is to reason out the problem at the outer level.

Is your problem overeating, underexercising, or both?

It may very well not be overeating, but eating the wrong foods. A diet of foods more suitable to your particular needs may be the answer. Your physician would know.

Why do you want to lose weight? Are you so fat that your health is impaired, or do you simply feel that a slimmer you would be more attractive? Either provides a good reason for losing weight, but you must know beforehand how you expect to profit from the weight loss.

If you already eat the right foods in modest amounts, if you get as much exercise as you reasonably can, and you are only slightly overweight, my advice would be —unless your physician says otherwise—to live with it I do. The alternative is an unnecessary disruption for you. Besides, there are probably bigger problems and more important opportunities in your life to put your Mind Control to work on.

If you are sure that you really want to lose weight and you know why, your next step is to analyze all the benefits you will derive—not general benefits like “look better” but concrete ones involving, if possible, all the five senses.

Example: Sight: Find a photograph of yourself when you were as thin as you would like to be now.

Touch: Imagine, when you are thin again, how smooth your arms and thighs and stomach will feel to your touch.

Taste: Imagine the flavors of the foods you will emphasize in 3’our new diet

Smell: Imagine the odor of the foods you will be eating.

Hearing: Imagine what those who are important to you will say about your success at losing weight! Even the five senses are not enough for thorough visualization.

Emotions are important too.

Imagine how elated and confident you will feel when you are as tiun as you want to be.

With all this firmly in mind, go to your level. Create your mental screen and project onto it a visualization as you are now. Now let it disappear and from the left (the future) slide on an image (the old photograph perhaps) of yourself as you ultimately want to be and will be when the diet succeeds. While you mentally gaze at the new you, imagine in as much detail as you can what it wfll feel like to be this thin. How will it feel when you bend over to tie your shoelaces? Walk upstairs? Fit into clothing that is now too small? Walk on a beach in a bathing suit?

Take your time and feel all this. Go through the five senses, one at a time, as described above. How will your at- titude toward yourself feel as a result of achieving this goal?

Now mentally review your new diet—not just what you will eat, but how much—and select a few between- meal snacks, raw carrot or whatever.

Tell yourself that this is all the food your body will need and that it will not send you hunger pangs as a way of asking for more.

This is the end of your meditation. Repeat it twice a day.

Notice that not once during your meditation was there any image or thought of the foods you should not eat. You eat too much of them because you like them; the mere thought of them will make your imagination lurch in unwanted directions.

Hollywood actress Alexis Smith was quoted by the San Jose Mercury News (October 13, 1974) as saying, “Positive thinking works beautifully on a reducing diet.

Never think once about what you are giving up but concentrate on what you are getting.''

She is often told that she is more attractive now than when she made some of the Warner Brothers movies now showing on TV. She attributes much of this to Mind Control. “The big difference,” she is quoted as saying, “is that now I’m in better balance and more in control of myself.”

In your weight-loss program, be sure to select a reasonable target for weight reduction; otherwise you will destroy the believability of your project. If you are 50 pounds overweight you cannot reasonably believe you will look like Audrey Hepburn or Mark Spitz next week. To visualize this will do little good. Old body messages may come through the first few days to remind you of the delights of a candy bar.

During your busy day, when you may be unable to meditate, take a deep breath, put your three fingers together, and remind yourself in the same words you used during meditation that your diet is all your body needs and that you will not have hunger pangs. A quick glance at an old photograph of yourself as you would like to be again will be helpful.

As you progress with your Mind Control in this and other areas, your total mental state will improve and this in turn will contribute in important ways to better functioning of your body. With a little mental nudging it will more gladly seek its proper weight.

There are a number of variations on this technique that you can use. They may occur to you during meditation. One man, a factory worker in Omaha, said to him- self during his meditations, “I will desire and eat only those foods good for my body.” Suddenly he found a new interest in salads and vegetable juices and a fading interest in high-calorie foods. Result: He lost 40 pounds in four months.

A woman in Ames, Iowa, used the same technique.

A few days later she bought some doughnuts—3 for her children and 3 for their friends.

“I completely forgot to buy any for myself. I almost cried. Mind Control was working!”

A farmer in Mason City, Iowa, bought a $150 suit which, to say the least, was a poor fit He could neither draw up the trousers nor button the jacket “The salesman thought I was crazy,” he said. But with the mental- screen technique, he lost 45 pounds in four months and “now the suit looks tailor-made for me.” Not all the results are this spectacular—in fact not all of them should be. However, Caroline de Sandre of Denver and Jim Williams, who is in charge of Mind Control activities in the Colorado area, launched an ex- perimental program which shows the reliability of Mind Control techniques for those who genuinely want to lose weight

She organized a workshop for 25 Mind Control graduates to meet once a week for a month. Among the 15 who attended all the meetings, the average weight loss was a little more than 434 pounds. All lost weight! A month later, she checked with these 15 and learned that 7 had continued to lose weight, and t were holding steady. None had gained weight!

This was not only a painless experience for these graduates, it was a joyous one, Caroline reports. Not only did they lose weight with no hunger pangs or any other discomfort, but they reinforced many Mind Control-acquired skills.

The average weight loss was about what it would have been had they taken one of the more successful weight-reduction courses. Caroline herself had been a lecturer for one of these courses for a year and a half, and was Assistant Food Director of the Swedish Medical Center in Denver—she knows about proper nutrition and weight control.

She plans to continue this workshop and to develop another one for smokers.

Smoking is so serious a habit that if you are a smoker, the time to start becoming a former smoker is now.

As with weight reduction, we will take this in easy stages, giving your body plenty of time to learn to obey a totally new kind of instruction from your mind.

There is no need for reviewing at the outer level why you should stop; the melancholy reasons are familiar enough. What you need is a list of benefits which you later make so vivid that you will want to stop.

You will have more vitality; your physical senses will be sharper; and you will savor life more fully. You know better than I, a nonsmoker, what you will gain.

Go to your level and see yourself on your mental screen in the situation where you normally smoke your first cigarette of the day. Visualize yourself, fully at ease, from that moment until the end of an hour, doing everything you would normally do except smoking.

If, for example, the hour is 7:30 to 8:30 A . M . , say to your- self, “I am now and will remain a former smoker from 7:30 to 8:30 A . M . I enjoy being a former smoker during this hour.

It is easy and I am used to it.”

Continue this exercise until you are really fully at ease, at the outer level, with your first hour of freedom from cigarettes. Now for the next hour, and soon the third, and so on. Take this slowly—pushing too fast may lead to punishing your own body, which is hardly fair, since your mind, not your body, introduced the habit in the first place.

Let your mind do the work through imagination.

Here are a few hints to speed up the day of complete liberation:

Change brands frequently.

During the hours when you are not yet a former smoker, ask yourself each time you reach for a cigarette, “Do I really want this one now?” With surprising frequency the answer is no. Wait until you really want it

li, during one of your liberated hours, your body intrudes with an apparent “need” for a smoke, take a deep breath, put your three fingers together, and—using the same words you use in meditation—remind your-self that you are and will remain a nonsmokar during this hour.

In controlling the smoking habit, you can add other techniques to this basic method. A pack-and-a-half-a-day smoker for eight years, an Omaha man visualized in Alpha all the cigarettes he’d ever smoked—a great heap of them. Then he put them in an incinerator and burned them.

Next he imagined all the cigarettes he would smoke in the future unless he stopped—another great mound of them—and he gleefully burned these too in the incinerator. After having quit smoking many times in the past, this time he gave up cigarettes for good after only one meditation. No craving, no overeating, no side effects.

I cannot, I regret to say, report as much success with smoking as with weight reduction. However, I know of enough graduates who have given up smoking, and enough others who have reduced the amount they smoke, to urge anyone who now smokes to put Mind Control to work on the habit.