If you can remember when you learned to drive a car you will recall how difficult it was to focus on everything at once. There was the steering, the looking in the rear view mirror, the gas pedal, the brake, the turn signals, etc. Gradually, it all became familiar and then automatic, until you were able to just enjoy driving. That’s called unconscious competency.

Developing and perfecting imagery skills happens the same way and regular practice is the path to mastery. I often say to clients: “Those who practice every day gets results, those who don’t, don’t.”

“Constant instant practice” is a term I learned from Dr.’s Bresler and Rossman. They describe this as “allowing a frequent occurrence in daily life (such as a telephone ringing) to become a reminder to practice.” You can set up a series of triggers but start with one. For example, you might be working on your marriage relationship and may have determined that you want to experience more deep love and trust with your partner. So, you might anchor in the ringing phone to that feeling. The phone rings, you see his number displayed, and this triggers a feeling of deep love.

Imagery And Perception

There’s a turning point in working with imagery. At first, it’s just imagination. But at some point a person realizes that it’s also perception.

You’re not only imagining that feeling of deep love with your partner, you’re also perceiving it. You’re not just imagining a guide, you’re perceiving her -- this aspect of yourself -- and her wisdom is your own inner knowing. You’re not just imagining a future outcome, you are actually having the experience.

Past, present, and future coexist in the quantum field of deep time. You taste that lemon in your imagination and you salivate.You feel that loving future and you smile.

The Slinky Effect activates: the physical chases the imaginal to grow the future you have envisioned into brick and mortar reality.

TRICKS FROM NATURE

Michael Pollan writes:

How plants sense and react is still somewhat unknown. They don't have nerve cells like humans, but they do have a system for sending electrical signals and even produce neurotransmitters, like dopamine, serotonin, and other chemicals the human brain uses to send signals. We don't know why they have them, whether this was just conserved through evolution or if it performs some sort of information processing function. We don't know. There's a lot we don't know.

And chalk up another human-like ability -- memory. Pollan describes an experiment done by animal biologist Monica Gagliano. She presented research that suggests the mimosa pudica plant can learn from experience. Pollan states, “merely suggesting a plant could learn was so controversial that her paper was rejected by ten scientific journals before it was finally published."

Mimosa is a plant, which looks something like a fern, that collapses its leaves temporarily when it is disturbed. So Gagliano set up a contraption that would drop the mimosa plant, without hurting it. When the plant dropped, as expected, its leaves collapsed. She kept dropping the plants every five to six seconds. After five or six drops, the plants would stop responding, as if they'd learned to tune out the stimulus as irrelevant. This is a very important part of learning — to learn what you can safely ignore in your environment.

THANK YOU MR. KUBRICK

We are a species under threat and our storytelling proves it.

There are a plethora of films that employ vivid imagery to depict a nightmare future (182 listed online), and a dearth of films presenting anything uplifting (just 1 listed). 2001: A Space Odyssey is the only inspiring example I could find mentioned online and I’d like to close with a quote from reviewer Roger Ebert about this remarkable film which presents a possible future that includes human transformation:

Only a few films are transcendent, and work upon our minds and imaginations like music or prayer... (This film) says to us: We became men when we learned to think. Our minds have given us the tools to understand where we live and who we are. Now it is time to move on to the next step, to know that we live not on a planet but among the stars, and that we are not flesh but intelligence.

I would suggest that we are both intelligence and flesh. We live in the planet; we belong here. Simultaneously, we are at home amongst the stars. Our imagination can weave these together into the transformation we are envisioning, from separation to oneness.

All of a sudden we become aware that,
instead of our being born into the world,
this world has simply been born in us.

Wherever we look we are seeing
not what we depend on for our survival
but what now depends on us
in order to survive.

For through our divine awareness
we are the source
and creator and maintainer of the universe
just as a tree sustains its branches and shoots.
...Everything is inside you now, rooted deep into your being.

And with the entire universe inside of you,
where in reality it always has been,
you can sense for the first time how much power you hold
in the palm of your hand.”

For the whole world
– whatever you experience or perceive –
is just buds on the tree that you are.”

- Peter Kingsley

Copyright 2016. Natural Wisdom LLC.
Reprinted with permission of the author.

Article Source

Now or Never: A Time Traveler's Guide to Personal and Global Transformation
by Will T. Wilkinson

Discover, learn, and master simple and powerful techniques for creating the future you prefer and healing past traumas, to improve the quality of your personal life and help create a thriving future for our great grandchildren.

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About the Author

Will T. Wilkinson is a senior consultant with Luminary Communications in Ashland, Oregon. He has written and delivered programs in conscious living for forty years, interviewed scores of leading edge change agents, and pioneered experiments in small scale alternative economies. Find out more at willtwilkinson.com/

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