Most of the time, you probably imagine that life is happening to you instead of the other way around. But have you ever stopped to consider the idea that maybe you are happening to life? Today, we’ll discuss unlocking the power of imagination and how your mind shapes reality.
What does that even mean? Just this, everything you experience in life takes place in your mind. When someone touches you, you only know they’re touching you because your mind transfers the sensations via neural pathways that allow you to understand what’s happening in the world around you.
However, without the neural connection, you wouldn’t be able to know or perceive if someone was touching you.
Someone could be crushing your hand without that connection, and you wouldn’t even notice!
That’s because the experience isn’t happening in your hand; it’s happening in your mind! It might be happening to your hand, but the actual experience is in your mind.
We just happen to have extensions of our mind that reach each section of our body because this is what helps us navigate the world and understand what’s good and safe for us or not as a physical being.
If we could remove the mind from the body, what would we be? Pure imagination! Consciousness!
We could do anything, go anywhere, be anyone. It wouldn’t matter because we would be thought, consciousness waiting for manifestation.
How cool is that?! AND, if that’s the case, what stops us from becoming anything we want to become right now?
A lack of imagination.
A static belief that I am who I am and that can’t be changed.
Is This Really True?
Why are you who you are? If you were born to different parents and a different ethnicity in a completely different part of the world, you would be an entirely different person.
The problem is that you allow yourself to fixate on the gross materialistic version of yourself more often than the etheric, spiritual version or the essence of your soul.
Why do you do this?
Because every day since the day you were born, you’ve learned to navigate the world using your physical senses to inform you of who you are and where you are.
You developed an ego that is mainly concerned with your survival and pleasure.
You probably didn’t have a spiritual master or teacher who taught you how to experience the more subtle attributes of life. As such, your experience has been reduced to the physical dimension.
This doesn’t mean you don’t experience the non-physical. Most people experience this at night during sleep. A few…actually, when you get down to it, it’s really countless millions across the ages who have been able to experience the non-physical in their waking life.
Most people associate this type of non-physical living with spiritual masters such as Jesus, Buddha, or yogis and monks of various religions, not with themselves because they don’t think they can attain it for themselves.
Why?
Simply because they haven’t learned how to do it on their own.
What Does It Matter if You Understand the Power of Imagination or Not?
Just this, for the entirety of your life, you’ve either been relying on someone else to provide the image of who you should be for you, or you try to base your image off someone else, someone you admire, because you’ve never really taken the time to understand who you truly are yourself.
Most of us are just amalgamations of various individuals we admire or associate with. Many of us are comprised of significant bits and pieces of those who raised us.
It’s almost frustrating how often I stop myself and say, “That’s something Dad would have said or done.” “I’m laughing just like Dad would have.” “This is what my Mom, Grandma, or best friend would have done.” The list goes on and on.
Insert whoever you want into those scenarios. This is also why they say you are the five closest people you associate with.
The point is, are you really you, or are you acting out the imagination of those around you?
How much of your life has been spent living as the photocopied version of someone else?
We all have dreams inside us, so does your life line up in accordance with your dreams?
Also, this bit of information is important. I don’t think you will be truly separate from anyone else in your imagination or dreams because we all feed off each other and are essentially one on a deeper level anyway. BUT are you living the truth of your existence or merely accepting what life has dealt you?
In reality, you have just as much creative power in your imagination as anyone else. You don’t have to rely on someone else’s authority to understand how to use your mind to shape reality because you can learn to do that for yourself.
You also don’t have to try to be someone else to live the life you think you want to live.
How often have you pushed your true feelings aside, your dreams, because they seem overwhelmingly large and frighteningly impossible?
So, instead, you find someone else to mimic as you attempt to scratch out a living and hope for the best.
This doesn’t have anything to do with money, either. Plenty of wealthy people are scratching out a living because they think whatever they’re doing will fulfill them.
Individuals from all walks of life are questioning their life choices because they don’t feel fulfilled in what they’ve imagined for themselves.
This brings us back to the question, “What does it matter if you understand the power of imagination or not?”
Well, you’re using it every day to create your reality whether you know it or not. Wouldn’t it be advantageous to understand how you’re doing it?
This whole idea is about understanding that you, what appears to be an immortal being, have immense power stored up inside of you that you don’t know how to unlock.
In fact, most of us are clueless about how to truly unlock the power of our imaginations.
We haven’t explicitly been taught how to do this, and I think it’s because most people have trouble letting go of their gross materialistic views.
I know I do.
I’ve struggled with it for most of my life.
When I look in the mirror, I tend to see all the negative reasons I can’t use the power of imagination to shape my reality instead of all the positive reasons I can or should.
It isn’t that those positive reasons aren’t there; it’s just that in most of my upbringing, I wasn’t taught how to look for them or that they were even there in the first place. So, as a result, I lived most of my life based on other’s imaginations.
What about you?
How Does Your Mind Shape Reality?
This is the tricky part. How do you actually make it work? The truth is, you do it every day; you just don’t realize it.
However, most people tend to get stuck in the rut of “This is my life,” thinking life is happening to them rather than they are happening to life. Thus, they don’t consider how they can shape their own reality.
Each choice you make tends to solidify your beliefs in your current situation. You act according to the standards you set for yourself and believe to be true about your life and circumstances.
But is that experience accurate? Is it a true representation of who you really are?
No. It’s not.
Don’t believe me? Go back and change that one big regret you have in life and play out how you think your life could be different.
Since we’re playing with imagination now, don’t just stop there; go back and change every mistake, regret, and hurtful word that you said to someone or that someone said to you; go back and practice the game-winning shot so that you win the game and get the scholarship.
Go back to that bad business decision and make the right one instead. Instead of holding resentment and anger, go back and forgive the person who hurt you.
Try imagining what life would be like if religion hadn’t hurt you.
See what it would be like if you had found religion instead of growing up non-religious.
The point is, if you change any of these events, your life will take a divergent path. Depending on the event, that divergence may not be all that grand; however, changing certain major events could make your life completely different.
To the point where you wouldn’t even recognize that individual if you saw them walking down the street.
NOW, imagine you could be that ideal version of yourself today. What would that look like? Who would you be?
If you asked people how they feel about themselves or who they genuinely see themselves as but aren’t living up to that ideal, most people’s lives would be so drastically different that they wouldn’t even know who they are.
Unfortunately, most people hide from that true self. The one that dominates life and causes them to live up to their full potential.
The life that is so grand and wonderful it seems as if it could only be dreamed of.
But isn’t that just what imagination is?
Dreaming.
Living the Dream
Don’t take this out of context. The dream isn’t living someone else’s life who seems to have more than you. The dream is living life to the fullest on your terms.
Living the dream is harnessing the power of your imagination and shaping your reality in accordance with the part of you that knows there’s so much more to life if you would just reach out and take it.
The question is, will you?
Most people don’t.
I certainly haven’t.
I’ve spent years feeling the potential trapped inside but always too insecure to live up to it. Nowadays, that sentiment is changing, thankfully, but I still have work to do. And so do you.
But why should you do the work?
As Leo Tolstoy said,
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
– Leo Tolstoy
This is why you should do the work. If you want the world to change for the better, you’ll have to change for the better.
Mahatma Gandhi said it this way,
“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”
– Mahatma Gandhi
It’s only when you start to incorporate living up to your highest potential that you begin to affect the world in a truly positive way.
To be clear, you’re always affecting the world in one way or another, and now that you’re aware of that, how can you do it productively and effectively?
As you learn to unlock the power of your imagination and how your mind shapes reality around you, a new paradigm begins to grow within.
One that shows you that this concept is way more readily available than you might think and that the only thing holding you back from truly experiencing this revelation is you.
When you begin to make this change, life opens up more than you may have previously experienced. Things start to flow more easily than they once did.
Situations that may have bothered you in the past don’t hold as much power over you.
Instead of blaming anyone and anything for your problems, you start holding yourself responsible for each and every situation you may find yourself in.
You will develop inner peace and joy as you progress because it is not about pleasing anyone. It’s simply about living life to the fullest of your abilities and enjoying life whichever way it comes.
I Don’t Believe You and This Idea of the Power of Imagination
That’s fine; you don’t have to. It won’t hurt my feelings.
Trust me, it took me way too long to start figuring this out, but if it helped me overcome intense, deep, dark episodes of depression that lasted for 20+ years, to the point where I almost committed suicide several times even though I could have taken a different route, I won’t blame you if you don’t believe me yet.
Sometimes, you have to hear something repeatedly or see it multiple times before you can start to believe it.
You may not believe it now because you might be trapped in a place like I was. Lost. Hopeless. Often, the only promise to end the suffering seems to be taking your own life or escaping your current reality however you can.
It seems like you can never find the courage to truly face your demons.
Maybe you’ve just never thought about it like this before. Perhaps you’ve regulated the understanding of your existence to mere biological factors in which you’re born, live, and die, and that’s it, so what does it even matter?
Maybe you’re stuck in a controlling religious paradigm that tells you in order to please God, whichever you may serve, you have to do A, B, and C, and failure to do so means…rejection, you are less than acceptable, or maybe you are acceptable but barely.
It could be none of these. Maybe this is just an entirely new concept for you.
Regardless, as I mentioned earlier, you have to wonder what life would be like if you had done things differently. Not that you can go back and change the past, but to see what the power of imagination can do.
You can quickly get lost wandering down that road and start to feel frustrated, so don’t play there too long or allow any negative sentiments about why you did or didn’t do something to overwhelm you.
Instead, think about how this could change the way you view yourself moving forward.
Plenty of people have done just that. They started out holding one set of cards that life seemed to deal them, but throughout the course of their lives, they decided to pick up a different set—one they designed.
One they imagined.
You can find many of their stories across the pages of history from every race and culture. From Emporers to the poorest of poor.
People from all walks of life have imagined or reimagined what life could be like if they decided to change and do something different.
It doesn’t mean you’ll get it all at once or receive it instantly, although I believe it can happen quickly.
However, if you’re consistent, take the time to imagine the unbridled version of your life or reality, and take the steps needed to achieve it; I believe you will begin to see those ideas come to fruition.
The question is, are you willing to take a chance and go all in, or will you settle for the status quo you’ve accepted for your life?
Honestly, either way is fine. You’re going to live, and eventually, you’re going to die. You just have to decide which version of yourself you want to play out.
For me, I’m going to choose to continue using the power of my imagination and my mind to shape my reality.
I want to see the world change to become a better place, but to do that, I need to change myself to align with that ideal.
As I do so, I begin to step out more and more. It’s literally the only reason I’m writing this Newsletter. I’m imagining the person I want to be, and it’s beginning to take on more shape and form with each little step I take. This newsletter is just one instance of that change and desire.
I hope it made you think about things differently than you’re used to.
If, for some reason, you happen to disagree with me, that’s great! Because I don’t want to just be somebody spoon-feeding you a personal ideology without you looking into it for yourself.
BUT, there are many, many individuals out there who have attained a much higher status of spiritual insight than I that seem to think the ideas I’ve written about here are accurate to one degree or another.
Go find and listen to them, and judge for yourself whether these ideas are true or not. Read the scriptures of ancient texts and see if this idea aligns with their words. Do your due diligence and decide from there.
Please remember to share this letter with someone else. You can also sign up to have these delivered straight to your inbox every Saturday morning at 8 am. Be sure to follow me on my social channels for upcoming news, resources, and additional insights.
Again, thank you for reading. I hope you have a fantastic day!
Much love to you all,
Josiah
