Mitch Horowitz

I was inspired by his book because, first of all, I don’t mind the sensationalistic title. We are beings who live in multiple worlds, including a transcendent world, an inner world, and what has been called the world of Caesar—the outer world, the world of resources, the world of commerce, the world of materiality—which we are obligated to function in as much as we are obligated to function in any other area of life.

Do not bow before the dictate of facts and accept life on the basis of the world without. Assert the supremacy of your Imaginal acts over facts and put all things in subjection to them. Hold fast to your ideal in your imagination. Nothing can take it from you but your failure to persist in imagining the ideal realized. Imagine only such states that are of value or promise well. To attempt to change circumstances before you change your imaginal activity, is to struggle against the very nature of things. There can be no outer change until there is first an imaginal change. Everything you do, unaccompanied by an imaginal change, is but futile readjustment of surfaces. Imagining the wish fulfilled brings about a union with that state, and during that union you behave in keeping with your imaginal change. This shows you that an imaginal change will result in a change of behavior. However, your ordinary imaginal alterations as you pass from one state to another are not transformations because each of them is so rapidly succeeded by another in the reverse direction. But whenever one state grows so stable as to become your constant mood, your habitual attitude, then that habitual state defines your character and is a true transformation.

How do you do it? Self-abandonment! That is the secret. You must abandon yourself mentally to your wish fulfilled in your love for that state, and in so doing, live in the new state and no more in the old state. You can’t commit yourself to what you do not love, so the secret of self-commission is faith—plus love. Faith is believing
what is unbelievable. Commit yourself to the feeling of the wish fulfilled, in faith that this act of self-commission will become a reality. And it must become a reality because imagining creates reality.

Imagination is spiritual sensation. Enter the image of the wish fulfilled, then give it sensory vividness and tones of reality by
mentally acting as you would act were it a physical fact. Now, this is what I mean by spiritual sensation. Imagine that you are holding a rose in your hand. Smell it. Do you detect the odor of roses? Well, if the rose is not there, why is its fragrance in the air? Through spiritual sensation—that is—through imaginal sight, sound, scent, taste and touch, you can give to the image sensory vividness. If you do this, all things will conspire to aid your harvesting and upon reflection you will see how subtle were the threads that led to your goal. You could never have devised the means which your imaginal activity employed to fulfill itself.

If you long to escape from your present sense fixation, to transform your present life into a dream of what might well be, you need but imagine that you are already what you want to be and to feel the way you would expect to feel under such circumstances. Like the make-believe of a child who is remaking the world after its own heart, create your world out of pure dreams of fancy. Mentally enter into your dream; mentally do what you would actually do, were it physically true. You will discover that dreams are realized not by the rich, but by the imaginative. Nothing stands between you and the fulfillment of your dreams but facts—and facts are the creations of imagining. If you change your imagining, you will change the facts.

it makes, it can unmake. It is not only conservative, building a life from images supplied by memory—it is also creatively transformative, altering a theme already in being.

“There is no fiction.” Imagine better than the best you know.

The images of our imagination are the realities of which any physical manifestation is only the shadow. If we are faithful to vision, the image will create for itself the only physical manifestation of itself it has a right to make. We speak of the “reality” of a thing when we mean its material substance. That is exactly what an imaginist means by its “unreality” or shadow.

An assumption, though false, if persisted in will harden into fact.

Change the image, and thereby change the fact.

“If the fool would persist in his follyHe would become wise.”