A Night To Remember
Tina Lifford is the author of The Little Book of Big Lies: A Journey into Inner Fitness told me this story.
In the early 1990s, one fateful night while hanging out on the Santa Monica Pier with my friend Nirvana, a doorway to my Self opened and remains opened and thriving to this day.
Nirvana and I were walking past a shop, and I was drawn to a provocative poster in the window of the actress Nastassja Kinski lying nude and intertwined with a Burmese python. I gazed at it for maybe five minutes, locked in on every component of its composition.
The proximity of the snake’s tongue to Kinski’s ear made me stick my baby finger in my left ear and wiggle free of the willies that had crawled in.
That’s when I noticed that a small crowd had gathered in front of another poster. One of the gazers asked the friend she was with, “Can you see it?”
Everyone was tilting his or her head from one side to the other, clearly trying to find the “right” position. Another person excitedly said, “I see it!” Then another said, “I’m in!”
I asked Nirvana, “What are they looking at?”
He explained that “hidden” in the 2-D poster of a Paris street scene was a detailed 3-D experience of the same scene. If you looked at the poster long enough, from the right perspective, the flat, 2-D image literally “popped” into an intricate 3-D image.
After I had spent a few minutes tilting my head from one side to the other, grumbling, he reassured me, “It’s there. Keep looking. I saw it.”
I returned to the poster with fierce focus . . . nothing. I moved closer, hoping that would help me see what some of the others could see. Nothing. I backed away from it . . . still nothing. I was determined to stand there looking at that poster FOREVER if I had to.
Then it happened. Suddenly, the 3-D world popped into view for a second or two, long enough for me to know that what the others were saying was true.
I planted my feet and looked at the poster again. I surrendered to the idea that seeing the image was possible without me knowing how to make it happen. As I studied it, I had no doubt about the intricate world that was hidden in that piece of paper. I knew it was real. I looked at the Paris scene, knowing it would become three-dimensional. And it did.
I don’t remember my drive home. I was inside the world of that 3-D poster, walking its streets past shops and turning down corners. I was mesmerized by how detailed the 3-D version of the poster was and how one minute it was there, and the next second it had vanished from view and become a simple flat poster again.
Each time I had lost sight of the 3-D perception, it took a while for me to find my way back in. But each reentry took less time, and I could see the 3-D scene longer.
Seeing the 3-D image was, in part, due to a shift in my perception of the poster. From the moment I heard other people talking about something I could not see, my perception of life in general widened. I believed in a world I couldn’t see. And I trusted my ability to enter it.
The more glimpses I caught of that 3-D world, the more I looked for it and expected to see it. I became so committed to the 3-D image that I could not look at the poster as I had before. I knew it did not represent the whole truth. It was limited.
Of course, this is a metaphor for spiritual awakening. Spiritual teachers throughout the ages tell us there’s a bigger reality behind the world we see and that our problems and challenges are a matter of perception. Shift our perception, and we can change our world.
I began to see my sacred torture – my oldest most challenging personal issue – like I saw the 2-D poster…present, but not the truth.
I realized that my sacred torture had conditioned me to see myself in a two-dimensional way. I had come to expect, and make room for, the fear or discomfort associated with it: feeling a certain anxiety, or queasiness in the stomach, or other stress somewhere else in my body. I was living my life trapped in a 2-D image of myself, constantly surviving the disquiet that my sacred torture caused, letting it dictate when and with whom I felt safe.
On that pier, I was introduced to the idea of my thriving Self that was inside me waiting to be seen. However, to get to know this Self, I would have to challenge my 2-D vision of my Self.
That night I put my sacred torture on notice that I was ready to believe in a reality greater than it. I began to look at the old torture, fully expecting it to transform. And from that point forward, I practiced my resolve over and over again. I made a pact with my Self that whenever I started to forget that I am more powerful than my challenges, something would happen to remind me . . . and something always has.
This made me feel like the universe was listening to me and had my back. I got into the habit of no longer seeing my challenges and fears as fixed “forever” states. When the habit of thinking in my old way surfaced, I would shake my head “no” and correct my thinking.
Over time I began to see my challenges as overindulged thoughts in need of discipline. I began to give those old challenges less attention. Instead, I allowed myself to contemplate freedom from any burden.
A therapist once told me when something is chasing us in a dream, we should stop, turn around, and look at what is pursuing us. This advice is counterintuitive to how we usually deal with threatening things. We run. But when we can stop and let all the feelings we are running from catch up to us, this bold action dissolves the scary picture, changes the perspective, and drains the power out of the things we run from.
Seeing the poster image change from 2-D to 3-D taught me that a shift in perspective regarding any issue is possible.
Your sacred torture is a lie. Dismantling it is possible. Deconstruction starts with being courageous and remembering who you are.
Get to know Self through your imagination and visualization. Stand in front of your burdens, centered in your Self, and tell your small surviving self the truth: I am bigger than your small idea of me. I expect freedom. I will stand here for as long as it takes.
Your Hidden Power of Imagination
According to the Master Key Experience imagination and visualization is when we form mental pictures of a future desired result, invention, business concept, service, organization, movement, etc.
Every great person has used the faculty of imagination and and visualization harnessed its power to accomplish what they desire. Imagination and visualization are two of the critical success factors in life, yet, sadly they often goes untapped for many of us.
The Power of Imagination. A fertile imagination is the source of all creative thinking, which is even more important than knowledge. It’s one of the main reasons why most people don’t succeed– they haven’t learned to use their creative potential.
The Power of Imagination reveals the part of spiritual life that is often shunned or closeted away because it may seem New Age or too unconventional. On the contrary, when believers use their imaginations to see beyond current circumstances into the realm where God paints pictures in their minds, healings are commonplace, goals are accomplished, dreams come true, and victories are celebrated!
According to the Master Key Experience the Power of Imagination is a way of being in the world that sets forces in motion that are FAR more powerful and productive than doing alone. Power by force is a very limited form of power. This is what “physical doing” is. Not that action isn’t required for producing results in life.
Imagination is one of the most powerful of all vibrations of Energy in the Universe. When considering imagination it must never be confused with mere fantasy, unreal thoughts or simply as a “figment of the imagination”, but rather as an extremely powerful, natural, God given ability that every single human being without any exception possesses.
According to the Master Key Experience the imagination is a powerful means for communicating truths about God, and so God shows an awesome regard for the imagination in His word. Because we are called to creativity, a working, gut-level understanding of the imagination is vital. It can be our greatest strength or our greatest weakness.
Imagination is the ability to develop a mental image of something that is not perceived through the five senses. It is the ability of the mind to build mental scenarios, objects or events that do not really exist or are not present, or have happened in the past.
The Master Key System
The Master Key System has been teaching me ways to develop getting to know my true self. According to the Master Key System imagination is the constructive form of thought which must precede every constructive form of action.
- A builder cannot build a structure of any kind until he has first received the plans from the architect, and the architect must get them from his imagination
- The Captain of Industry cannot build a giant corporation which may coordinate hundreds of smaller corporations and thousands of employees, and utilize millions of dollars of capital until he has first created the entire work in his imagination.
- Objects in the material world are as clay in the potter’s hand; it is in the Master Mind that the real things are created, and it is by the use of the imagination the work is done. In order to cultivate the imagination it must be exercised. Exercise is necessary to cultivate mental muscle as well as physical muscle. It must be supplied with nourishment or it cannot grow.
- It is the few who know that the things which they see are only effects, and understand the causes by which these effects were brought into existence.
How did the battleship come to be where it is?
Take the same position as heretofore and visualize a Battleship; see the grim
monster floating on the surface of the water; there appears to be no life anywhere about; all is silence; you know that by far the largest part of the vessel is under water; out of sight; you know that the ship is as large and as heavy as a twenty-story skyscraper; you know that there are hundreds of men ready to spring to their appointed task instantly; you know that every department is in charge of able, trained, skilled officials who have proven themselves competent to take charge of this marvelous piece of mechanism; you know that although it lies apparently oblivious to everything else, it has eyes which see everything for miles around, and nothing is permitted to escape its watchful vision; you know that while it appears quiet, submissive and innocent, it is prepared to hurl a steel projectile weighing thousands of pounds at an enemy many miles away; this and much more you can bring to mind with comparatively no effort whatever.
How did the battleship come to be created?
How did it come into existence in the first place?
All of this you want to know if you are a careful observer. Follow the great steel plates through the foundries, see the thousands of men employed in their production; go still further back, and see the ore as it comes from the mine, see it loaded on barges or cars, see it melted and properly treated.
Go back still further.
See the architect and engineers who planned the vessel; let the thought carry you back still further in order to determine why they planneg the vessel; you will see that you are now so far back that the vessel is something intangible, it no longer exists, it is now only a thought existing in the brain of the architect; but from where did the order come to plan the vessel?
Probably from the Secretary of Defense; but probably this vessel was planned long before the war was thought of, and that Congress had to pass a bill appropriating the money; possibly there was opposition, and speeches for or against the bill.
Whom do these Congressmen represent? They represent you and me, so that our line of thought begins with the Battleship and ends with ourselves, and we find in the last analysis that our own thought is responsible for this and many other things, of which we seldom think, and a little further reflection will develop the most important fact of all and that is, if someone had not discovered the law by which this tremendous mass of steel and iron could be made to float upon the water, instead of immediately going to the bottom, the battleship could not have come into existence at all.
This law is that, “the specific gravity of any substance is the weight of any
volume of it, compared with an equal volume of water.” The discovery of this lawrevolutionized every kind of ocean travel, commerce and warfare, and made the existence of the battleship, aircraft carriers, and cruise ships possible.
You will find exercises of this kind invaluable.
When the thought has been trained to look below the surface everything takes on a different appearance, the insignificant becomes significant, the uninteresting interesting; the things which we supposed to be of no importance are seen to be the only really vital things in existence.
How did your life or circumstance come to be where it is?
How did it come into existence in the first place?
What do you see: An Old Lady or Young Lady?
How do you see your life: Good Life or Bad Life?
Neville Goddard – How to Manifest Your Life Using Imagination! (Beyond POWERFUL!)
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