Power Of Your Imagination
Imagine you are in the kitchen. You take a fresh lemon from the fruit bowl. It is cool in your hand. The yellow dimpled skin feels smooth and waxy. It comes to a small green conical point at either end. The lemon is firm and quite heavy for its size as you look at it in the palm of your hand.
You raise the lemon to your nose. It gives off such a characteristic, unmistakable citrus smell doesn’t it? You take a sharp knife and cut the lemon in half. The two halves fall apart, the white pulpy outer skin contrasting with the drops of pale lemon coloured juice that gently ooze out. The lemon smell is now slightly stronger.
Now you bite deeply into the lemon and let the juice swirl around your mouth. That sharp sour lemon flavour is unmistakable. Stop a minute! Is your mouth watering? Did your mouth pucker? If it is, you have achieved synaesthesia, because you imagined the feel, sight, smell and taste of the lemon. You have used your imagination well. The implications are fascinating, because of course, nothing actually happened – except in your imagination! Yet your mind communicated directly to your salivary glands and told them to wash away the sour taste.
The words you read were not reality – but they created reality – your flow of saliva. The subconscious mind cannot differentiate between what is real and what it believes is real. Yet it directly controls your actions in a very tangible way.
“There’s Nothing Good or Bad but Thinking Makes It So” ~Hamlet
“Man freezes to death in refrigeration car”. The 1964 headline was hardly startling, but the circumstances were. A man had become trapped inside the refrigeration car as the door accidently slammed on him. When he was found, he had all the physical symptons of having frozen to death. Yet the refrigeration unit was switched off and at no time had the temperature been at, or even close, to freezing. He believed he was going to freeze – and his mind had produced the physical effect to create hypothermia and freeze him to death.
A man lay quietly in an Haitian hut, resigned to the inevitability of death. He had seen the voodoo doll in his likeness with pins stuck in it. In reality he was perfectly healthy, but his mind had accepted the inevitable, and he had subconsciously willed himself to die. Only the intervention of a priest, who destroyed the doll in front of him, saved the Haitian’s life.
The above instances are alI examples of self fulfilling prophesies brought about by suggestion. There are thousands more.
Children invited into the New York University’s Department of Psychology were assessed according to the wealth of their parents. They were then asked to estimate the physical size of a group of coins. The poorer children ALL over-estimated the actual size, the richer ones ALL under-estimated the real size.
Dr. Rosenthal, a California psychologist, administered I.Q. tests to a public school class. He totally ignored the results, but nevertheless divided the class into two groups. The first group, he informed the teacher, was considerably brighter than the second. There was, in fact, no difference. The children were never told his conclusions and the teacher was told to treat all the pupils the same, He did the same to the teachers telling them they were the best chosen teachers, and told them not to tell anyone else about it.
Eight months later the grades of the two arbitrarily classified groups were compared. The first group had grades 28% better than the second group and their I.Q.’s actually measured higher! Without one word being said, the teacher had managed to communicate, quite unconsciously, a higher expectation of the first group and a lower expectation of the second group. ALL WITHOUT THE SUBJECTS EVEN KNOWING. The teacher had created a better learning environment for the favoured group, and it worked.
Students in a Bulgarian class were asked to memorise a poem. Another identically matched class was also asked to memorise the same poem, but this time they were told the author – who was a famous and respected poet. The second group remembered 60% more than the first group, in the same time period. The authority of the author suggested it was important to learn.
We act not according to what things really are – but according to what we expect them to be: believe them to be: imagine them to be.
“Imagination,” said Napoleon, “rules the world”.
He should have known, for he actually rehearsed every battle he ever fought weeks before the event in his mind. Going over his own tactics, visualising the enemy defences, their reaction and the terraine.
Napoleon was 150 years ahead of his time.
Jack Niclaus ascribes his success to visualisation. Before every shot, he actually “sees” the club strike the ball, watches the flight of the ball in the air and “sees” where it comes to rest all before he actually makes the shot. Top tennis pro’s do it. “Golf is 90% mental, 10% mechanical. “wrote Alex Morrison the father of modern golf teaching. The same can be said of many other sports and the visualisation technique is now widely known as the “Inner Game of Tennis”.
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