* You Are a Prophet

excerpted from PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia Your imagination is the single most important asset you possess. Your imagination is your power to create mental pictures of things that don't exist yet and that you want to bring into being. Your imagination is what you use to shape your future. And so in your own way, you are a prophet. You generate countless predictions every day. Your imagination is the source, tirelessly churning out mental pictures of what you'll be doing in the future. The featured prophecy of the moment may be as simple as a psychic impression of yourself devouring a fudge brownie at lunch or as monumental as a daydream of some year building your dream home on a mountainside in Hawaii. Your imagination is a treasure when it spins out scenarios that are aligned with your deepest desires. Indeed, it is an indispensable tool in creating the life you want; it's what you use to form images of the conditions you'd like to inhabit and the objects you hope to wield. Nothing manifests on the material plane unless it first exists as a mental picture. But for most of us, the imagination is as much a curse as a blessing. We're often just as likely to use it to conjure up premonitions that are at odds with our conscious values -- that's the result of having absorbed toxic programming from the media and from our parents at an early age and from other influential people in our past. Fearful fantasies regularly pop up into our awareness, many disguising themselves as rational thoughts and genuine intuitions. Thos fearful fantasies may hijack our psychic energy, directing it to exhaust itself in dead-end meditations. Every time we entertain a vision of being rejected or hurt or frustrated, every time we rouse and dwell on a memory of a painful experience, we're basically blasting ourselves with a hex. Meanwhile, ill-suited longings are also lurking in our unconscious mind, impelling us to want things that aren't good for us and that we don't really need. Anytime we surrender to the allure of these false and trivial and counterproductive desires, our imagination is practicing a form of black magic. This is the unsavory aspect of the imagination that the Zen Buddhists deride as the "monkey mind." The monkey mind is the part of our mental apparatus that's filled with pictures that endlessly zip around with the energy of an agitated monkey. If we can stop locating our sense of self in the endless surge of the monkey mind's slapdash fantasies, only then might we be able to be here now and want what we actually have. But whether our imagination is in service to our noble desires or in the thrall of compulsive fears and inappropriate yearnings, there is one constant: The prophecies of our imagination can be pretty accurate. Many of our visions of the future do come to pass. The situations we expect to occur and the experiences we rehearse and dwell on are at least sometimes reflected back to us as events that confirm our expectations. Does that mean that our mental projections create the future? Let's consider that possibility. What if it's at least partially true that what we expect will happen does tend to materialize? Well, here's the logical conclusion: It's downright stupid and self-destructive to keep infecting our imaginations with pictures of loss and failure, doom and gloom, fear and loathing. The far more sensible approach is to expect blessings and joy and peace and fulfillment and understanding and meaningfulness. And that's the reason why I'm so reverent in composing my messages for you. If I'm to be one of the influences you invite into the intimate sanctuary where you nurse your self-fulfilling prophecies, I really want to be gentle with you. It's why I avoid invoking worry and doubt, and instead nudge you in the direction of passion, integrity, happiness, and generosity. And that's exactly the approach I'd like you to take. I want you to pay ultimate respect to yourself. Understand your power as a potent prophet of your own life. Flush away the images running around your imagination that are not in harmony with your life goals. Create images that encourage you to be your best. Cultivate feelings and ideas and imaginations that are in alignment with your highest ideals and deepest desires. + To buy PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia, the book from which the above piece is excerpted, go to Amazon or Barnes & Noble.