CONSULTING IMAGINATION
by Jon Rappoport
My consulting practice began about 20 years ago, while I was giving a writer a tutorial on putting his first book together.
He was stuck on a section, and I was helping him sort out his confusions. We reached a point where it became obvious that the root problem was, as he put it, “I can only see vaguely what the material looks like. Every other section in the book is clear, but not this one.”
That seemed a bit odd, because he had a whole list of items he intended to include in the “vague section.”
So I decided to do some of my imagination exercises with him, adapting them to the book. Pretty soon, he said:
“That’s it! This section is really another book.”
He went on to describe his relationship with his father, which was just one of the items he was going to touch on in the “vague section.”
He talked for the better part of half an hour about his father, and at the end of it he said, “I just outlined my next book.”
From that point on, it took him ten days to finish the first book and wrap it up.
I asked him, “Why do you think everything straightened out for you when we did the imagination exercises?”
He said, “Because my father is the only person in my life who seems to have no creativity whatsoever. And whenever I think about him, it’s like thinking about a brick wall. All of a sudden, while we were doing the exercises, I saw that he was actually creating his own life. I saw how he was doing it…and then I felt an enormous sense of relief.”
Over the next few sessions with this writer, I saw how much relief he was experiencing. His personality changed. He became much more open and energetic. His enthusiasm for his book widened and multiplied.
Imagination can transform what seems like dense reality. It can transform reality and experience. It can transform relationships, and the past.
If I needed any more proof that imagination was the fabled Philosopher’s Stone of the alchemists, this was it.
There is a deep truth here. To one degree or another, I see it operating every day with my clients. Imagination liberates frozen realities in a person’s life.
The encrusted energy and denseness in those realities and relationships escapes like stale air when a door is opened to the outside day.
Reality turns out to be like sculptor’s clay. It may look like steel, but that’s because imagination has been left out of the equation.
And sometimes “that steel” in a person very close to us appears to affect us—as if, by contagion, we become inert and solid, too. But it’s an illusion, and the proof comes when we sufficiently employ our own imagination.
The lead becomes gold, flowing in streams.
A new dawn.
Jon Rappoport