Desire

May he give you the desire of your heart and make all your plans succeed.                                                                                                        Psalms 20:4

To the unenlightened the changes which takes place in your life because of your change of your concept of yourself always appears to be the result, not of a change of your consciousness, but of chance, outer cause, or coincidence. However, the only fate governing your life is the fate determined by your own concepts, your own assumptions; for an assumption, though it may be false, if persisted upon will become fact. The ideal you seek and hope to attain will not manifest itself, and will not be realized by you, until you have imagined that you are already that ideal. There is no other way for you to realize except by a radical transformation of the way you think, and only by your assumption of the feeling of your wish fulfilled. In every case, make the results or accomplishments the crucial test of your ability to use your imagination.

Everything depends on your attitude towards your desires. The thing that you do not affirm as true of yourself can never be realized by you, it is your attitude alone that is the necessary condition that will cause you to realize your goals and desires.

All transformation in your life is based upon suggestion, and this can work only where you let yourself completely open to the influence of your desire. You must abandon yourself to your ideal as a mother turtle abandons her eggs in the nest on the beach, for complete abandonment of self is the way to become one with your ideal. You must assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled until your assumption has all the sensory vividness of reality. You must imagine that you are already experiencing what you desire. That is, you must assume the feeling of the fulfillment of your desire until you are possessed by it and this feeling crowds all other ideals out of your consciousness.

If you are not prepared for the conscious plunge into the assumption of your desire fulfilled having faith that it is the only way to the realization of your dream you are not yet ready to live consciously by the law of assumption, although there is no doubt that we all live by the law of assumption unconsciously. But if you ready to accept this principle and are ready to live by consciously assuming that your wish is already fulfilled, then your adventure of life begins. To reach a higher level of being, you must assume a higher concept of yourself.

If you do not imagine yourself as other than what you are, then you remain as you are. If you do not believe that you are the person you want to be, then you remain as you are. Through the faithful systematic cultivation of the feeling of the wish fulfilled, desire becomes the promise of its own fulfillment. The assumption of the feeling of the desire fulfilled makes a future dream a present fact.

The experience of life is a psychological one in which all conditions, circumstances, and events of your life are brought to pass by your desires. It is your desire to be better, do better and have better that brings the positive experiences of life. Remember you are more than enough and you can have the desires of your heart.

Since your life is determined by your desires, you are forced to recognize the fact that you are either a slave to your desires or you are the master of your desires. To become the master of your desires is the key to undreamed freedom and happiness. You can attain this mastery by deliberate conscious control of your imagination. You determine your desires in this way: form a mental image, a picture of what you desire, of the person you want to be. Concentrate your attention upon the feeling that you are already that person. First, visualize the picture in your consciousness. Then feel yourself to be in that state as though it has already manifested in your surrounding world. By your imagination your desire which was a mental image is changed into a solid reality.

The great secret is a controlled imagination and a well sustained attention firmly and repeatedly focused, on the desire to be accomplished. It cannot be emphasized too much that, by creating an idea within your mind, by assuming that you are already that idea, you identify yourself with it and thereby transform yourself into its image, you start thinking from the idea instead of thinking of the idea. Everything is already there as true possibilities as long as we think of them, the desire becomes overpoweringly real when we think from it. This was called by the ancient teacher’s subjection to the will of God or resting in the Lord and the only true test of resting in the Lord is that all who do rest are inevitably transformed into the image of that in which they rest, thinking from the desire fulfilled. You become what you will, and your enduring will is your concept of yourself and all that you believe and accept as true. By you assuming the feeling of your desire fulfilled and continuing in that assumption, you will experience for yourself the results of that state of mind. By not assuming the feeling of your desire fulfilled, you will not experience the results of your desire fulfilled.

When you understand the redemptive function of imagination, you hold in your hands the key to the solution of all your problems. Every phase of your life is made by the exercise of your imagination. Determined imagination alone is the means of your progress, of the fulfilling of your dreams. It is the beginning and the end of all creating. The great secret is a controlled imagination and a well sustained attention firmly and repeatedly focused on the feeling of the desire fulfilled until it fills the mind and crowds all other ideals out of consciousness. I call this right thinking. What greater gift that could be giving to you then to be told the truth that will set you free. The truth that sets you free is that you can experience in imagination what you desire to experience in reality, and by maintaining this experience in imagination, your desire will become an actuality.

You are limited only by your uncontrolled imagination and lack of attention to the feeling of your desire fulfilled. When the imagination is not controlled and the attention is not focused on the feeling of the desire fulfilled then no amount of prayer will produce the desired effect. When you can call up at will whatever image you please, when the images of your imagination are as vivid to you as the images of world around you, you have become the master of your fate. You must stop spending your thoughts unwisely. Everything in life must be an investment. To invest is to lay out for a purpose from which a profit is expected. It is only what is done now that counts. Whenever we assume the feeling of being what we want to be we are investing.