JON RAPPOPORT DESCRIBES HIS CONSULTING
Imagination envisions new realities. That’s the starting point.
After that, we come to the fact that, with sufficient deployment of imagination, a person then looks at his own steady-state reality and realizes it is provisional, subject to change.
His chronic reality isn’t as solid and final as he thought it was.
This new understanding isn’t just an intellectual speculation. It’s based on experience.
In my consulting work with private clients, I conduct imagination exercises to bring about this experience.
You could look at it this way: if you want to build up your body, you go to the gym and work out. Most people never think of “going to the imagination gym.” They don’t work on developing this vital and fantastic capacity, this imagination. They let it remain in the background of their lives.
Your imagination contains power that is stunning. It’s a shame to let it go to waste.
My clue about imagination comes from my work as an artist over the last 50 years, my friendship with a man I believe was the most innovative hypnotherapist of his time, Jack True, and my study of the ancient practices of Tibetan magicians.
In Tibet, once upon a time, it was understood that imagination was the key to enlightenment. This was front and center in their spiritual practices and exercises. Their “gym” was intense. It was the core of their commitment.
There are several levels or types of reality. One is what you see around you every day, and what you discover online or on television. Another is your own interior reality, which is less defined, but which exerts a powerful influence on the way you deal with people, relationships, situations, goals, work, and future. A third reality is what you can envision, based on what you truly desire. Some people have only a vague notion about this third level.
It turns out that all three types of reality are subject to change.
In my work with clients, I approach imagination as the key that unlocks all the doors.
I also know that people tend to wonder how they can really USE imagination. It’s not clear to them. They need lots of experience using it. That’s why I spent a lot of years inventing and developing imagination exercises. If you want to understand a tool, an instrument, you need to employ it. You need to employ it extensively.
That’s what happens in my phone sessions with private clients.
My first client, 30 years ago, was a man who described himself as “an engineer with vague pretensions of being an inventor.” He worked for a large corporation in Southern California. He wanted to make a breakthrough and invent…he didn’t know what and he didn’t know how.
So I told him we would have a number of sessions and I would lead him through imagination techniques that could help him.
Three months later, he was telling me his marriage had improved to a fantastic degree. That was completely unexpected. That was the first big change. It wasn’t immediately apparent how these techniques had brought about the change.
But soon he told me. He said he realized he had been looking at his marriage through “a certain kind of lens,” and that lens was HIS OWN INVENTION. He saw this. It was quite vivid to him. Long ago, he had constructed the lens, and by seeing everything in his marriage through it, he was gradually destroying the best relationship in his life.
And now there was no need for that. He began seeing his wife as he had when they’d first met. When they’d fallen in love.
As he and I continued to work, he started making sketches of several inventions he was imagining, and those sketches became drawings and plans and blueprints, and finally, prototypes. One of them, a year later, was his ticket out of the job he didn’t want any longer.
On the day he quit the job, he wrote me a note: “When I was a young man, I came to California because I felt the pull of great energy in the Space program. I was thrilled to enter the scene. It was my great goal to be a part of the effort. Now I realize that was, on my side of things, all about the power of imagination. I was imagining a future so intense and adventurous. And then, as time went by, I let it slip away. I allowed myself to become ground down in the politics, the cynicism, the bureaucracy. Now I’ve got it back. I’m so much more conscious this time around. I’m not going to let it slip away again. But even more, I know my imagination is a key to levels of consciousness I hadn’t dreamed existed. That’s the biggest thing…”
His letter sums up so much of what we go through in life. It starts out high, wide, and handsome, with tremendous energy and purpose, but then, gradually, the vision fades and the emotion loses some of its power. We settle for less. We make “adjustments.” We think of this as “being realistic.”
But the dream of the vision and its fulfillment never really goes away. Some part of us remains on alert for the opportunity to start over, with more wisdom, but with that same boundless and open enthusiasm.
That’s where imagination comes in, because that’s where the enthusiasm lives.
We can get it back, and more, if we start by realizing imagination has never vanished. It’s a potential energy, and it needs to be tapped into.
I’ve been through lots of ups and downs, and I’ve always come out the other side, because I know, in my bones, that ordinary repetitive reality is just a prelude to the main event—which is created through and by imagination at full bore.
Will wonders ever cease?
No, they won’t, if we give them a solid chance.
Jon Rappoport