What’s Wrong With This Picture?

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

Imagine a child, perhaps your own. It doesn’t matter if it’s a girl or a boy. Let’s give the child the name: Bobbie. Bobbie wants very badly to win the state competition in any event—let’s just say it’s a “Math Is Cool” competition. Bobbie is good a math—really good. Bobbie practices and practices and studies for the upcoming competition. Bobbie has heard of visualization, so Bobbie begins visualizing the victory.

Bobbie reads all about visualizing success. Books that teach the power of attraction, the power of the mind to create, the power to focus, visualize in detail and with emotion and to let the visualization go, knowing that it is done. Bobbie has done all of this and Bobbie has done it just exactly as taught.

Bobbie does well at State but Bobbie does not win. Bobbie does not even get an award. Bobbie goes away sad and feeling broken. Bobbie knows the winner. The winner doesn’t practice, study or visualize. In fact, the winner doesn’t even seem to care if they win or not. Bobbie doesn’t understand and Bobbie comes to you for answers. What do you tell Bobbie?

Just pause now and genuinely reflect on what would you tell Bobbie? What would you tell your own?

What’s wrong with this picture? Again, take a moment and ask yourself this question, “What is wrong with this picture?”

I assume that before you continue reading you have taken the time to really give serious thought to the past two paragraphs. If not, please do so for the value here is not in how quickly you can read the material or whether you can comprehend the words, the real value is in the feeling that comes when you realize that what’s wrong is beyond your controls. Perhaps it’s also easy to become agitated—maybe this visualization stuff is all just so much hocus-pocus.

Here is what we know scientifically about visualization. It works to improve motor skills. Vividly imaging shooting free throws with a basketball is statistically almost as effective as practicing. It can also work to attract things into people’s lives. It can influence how one walks, how they dress, how they speak, even how they talk to themselves. It can definitely influence levels of confidence; form self-fulfilling prophesies and mold expectations while shaping in some ways future and careers. But with all that said, does it create like creating a painting or building a race car? Even more provocative, by way of interrogation, should we be visualizing the stuff we want to create?

On any given night in America there might be a million people tuned into some lottery drawing, all in hopes of winning the jackpot. If they all vividly visualize winning will the prize be split or will it take one million episodes for each to realize their visualization? When put in this light, when held under this level of scrutiny, what is it really about visualization and manifestation that so many are claiming?

In my opinion, for what it’s worth, there is a lot of nonsense out there about visualization. We are all capable of certain types of manifestation but it is my training and experience that in order for a lasting manifestation to be realized, we must first make the changes in ourselves. We are much more likely to manifest success when we look and act successful. Creating a vision board and hanging it in the television room next to that good old TV, filling that board with pictures of the house, the car, the flower garden and so forth of our dreams, visualizing the same over and over, even smelling the flowers and feeling the leather seats or holding that door knob in our hand during our visualizations, then opening our eyes and watching that television while we relax and put something into our mouths—all of this just doesn’t cut it!

In other words, if the changes are in us then the manifestation may follow—but then the question, because we can, should we?

There is a story I like about a man who finds God. God looks upon this man as a parent might its child. Anxious to tell the child a few things, God approaches to speak. There are only a few brief moments available, for God knows that soon this interlude will disappear. Before God can speak, the man recognizing the presence of God anxiously begins an endless steam of questions. Like a child, they are questions such as, “Why is the sky blue?” “Why is the earth round?” God patiently provides the answers but suddenly the phone rings and our man is awakened from his dream. “Wow,” he thinks, “God just answered my questions in my dream.” Unfortunately, the question he did not ask would have given God a chance to tell our fellow just exactly what God thought he should know. The question that went unasked was, “What do you want me to know now God?”

Isn’t visualization a little along this line, if what we are doing is designed to fulfill us, to serve our purpose—for that matter, to make us truly happy? Should Bobbie be asking, “What would you have me know and do now?” as opposed to attempting to force an outcome? Choices and confusion. As I pointed out in my book, Choices and Illusions, I submit that each of us is different, with different gifts, separate identities and all of this is part of our birthright. It is in accepting and employing to the very best of our abilities those gifts given us that we fulfill our purpose. As my friend and wife says, “Let me know what you want me to know and do. Let me do Thy work and if I am doing as I should be doing, help me so it is easy.” I think of it this way, “Let me do Thy will, for my perfect will is Thy will.”

Blessing to all of you and thanks for the read,

Eldon