By Von Braschler, author of Manifesting and Mysterious Messages from Beyond.
Creative visualization is much more than wishful thinking and dreaming, as many people seem to believe.
Some people try very hard to visualize change but are confused when their visualization does not create real results. Unfortunately, their desire does not manifest as real change in the physical world.
My new book Manifesting from REDFeather takes a fresh look at thought form projection and creative visualization with practical exercises to help you target your thoughts and create real change. Manifesting showcases my experiences, studies, and workshop observations and focuses on often overlooked key steps in creative visualization. These missing steps prevent people from manifesting what they tried to visualize, and all steps are necessary. The steps are easy, too, if done in the proper sequence with focused intent.
Following this book will fill in the missing steps to give you everything you need to effectively visualize and manifest. Anyone can do it. You do not need to be a swami or Samadhi mystic with years of disciplined meditation training; that helps, but the outline of instruction in Manifesting will give you the essential formulate needed for success.
Please note that by adding these missing steps, I am not faulting any of the previous instructions or books on creative visualization that you might have followed. Many people simply try to run before they learn to walk properly. It is human nature to try to jump into something bold, new, and exciting. Often, we jump before reading the full instructions and going through the process with attention to every detail.
In the case of creative visualization, the details are important, and no steps can be skipped by anyone who wants to achieve real manifestation at the end. Otherwise, your visualization is just daydreaming.
Leading meditation workshops in creative visualization shows me how many people try to visualize without going into a deep, active meditation. The steps they miss often include:
- Failing to establish a clear, blank slate in their mind’s eye—a tablet on which to compose.
- Neglecting to create an accurate, personalized picture of what they want to manifest as a blueprint to follow.
- Failing to store this personalize picture and retrieve it on command to execute or do not visualize the finished result clearly.
- Not meditating on the creative visualization process after the fact to cement the new reality.
At first these missed steps may seem like a lot to add, but the process is easy if done as one continuous exercise. One step should naturally follow the other. In time, the whole process can come easily to you and become natural — and the profits are huge. Effectively visualizing and manifesting can create a better reality. This is an inherent ability, one that everyone can develop.
You are meant to shape the world as a co-creator of reality. Consider that this world is hardly complete: it is in a state of becoming. You can be a part of that process. The first thing to visualize is you correctly meditating and achieving success by manifesting. This visualization is one quick picture, an overview of the process. You then go into a deep, active meditation to build your picture and make it a reality (by reality, we mean an active part of your personal, moving reality.)
The manifestation becomes part of your everyday world as you experience it — it is not just in your imagination anymore. What you manifested is part of your moving reality in the manifest world of physical existence. We begin with imagination, but it does not end there. We learn to engineer what we initially envision as a new possibility; some people have called this imagineering. Herein, we call it creative visualization.
- Shakti Gawain’s excellent guide, Creative Visualization, influenced me many years ago: she helped introduce this practice in the West.
- I was also heavily guided by the classic Hindu text, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, required reading for anyone serious about meditation. It introduces you to a wide variety of meditations designed for various purposes and expectations, such as the development of mystic powers.
- The fourth section of The Yoga Sutras guides you in absoluteness, although many people never get that far in their yoga study. These texts made Manifesting possible, for I could not have written this more complete guide to visualization without their excellence guidance.
The early books on consciousness development and thought power by various Theosophists also influences my study of creative visualization.
- Helena Blavatasky’s books, including her Collected Writing and The Secret Doctrine, suggest that our thoughts vibrate as they extend out from us, reaching targets with impacts and substance. Helena explains how all human consciousness (like universal consciousness,) is expanding. Fundamental to life cycles, energy materializes just as matter reverts to energy.
- Therefore, our consciousness and thoughts are energies that assume form and manifest. Incidentally, much of modern science substantiates Helena’s early vision of the universe and creation in her book, The Secret Doctrine.
- Thought Forms by Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater and
- Thought Power by Annie Besant also fit this discussion. Besant and Leadbeater, early clairvoyants, described the form that thoughts assume based on focus and intent, and the power of these thoughts when they assume physical manifestation. Another early clairvoyant,
- Geoffrey Hodson, described various effects produced by strong or concentrated thought when they are manifested. These descriptions of radiating vibrations or waves of thought form suggest safety guidelines to direct us responsibly.
- We should add the many books by Alice Bailey on mysticism, unexplained laws of nature. and latent powers in people. I was particularly guided by the Bailey classic A Treatise on White Magic, first published in 1934.
I must add my one of my teachers to my personal list of comprehensive, creative visualization influencers. The psychic author, Louis Gittner, who ran an inn on Orcas Island in the San Juan Islands near Vancouver, would patiently tutor students who sought him out for many years. The perfect teacher, unassuming and totally selfless. Gittner would freely avail himself to any student who found him and requested his help, answer every question, and then demonstrate by example what he taught. He was the genuine article.
One of the things Louis Gittner instilled in me was this magical formula: first conceive, then believe, and then achieve.
Finally, our consideration of key source material in our study of creative visualization must include the modern groundbreaking research of Japanese researcher Masaru Emoto.
- Experiments in The Hidden Messages in Water have been replicated around the world in the serious, scientific study of thought power and have led to many helpful books and videos.
In addition to supplying the missing steps in creative visualization, Manifesting hopes to establish some practical parameters for responsible use of thought power:
- You will know what you can and should reasonably expect to create and what you should avoid.
- You will understand personal creative visualization and group thought.
- You will examine the various kinds of thought form and what makes creative visualization strong and lasting.
- You will examine the long-term effects of thought form, both focused and unfocused.
As you can see, creative visualization is much more than wishful thinking and hopeful daydreams. After working with people in workshop settings who did not understand this deep, active meditation, I decided that it was time to add the missing pieces to the puzzle and make the picture complete and realized.
Please follow all the steps in Manifesting and learn how to change your world – it really is all within your power. Creative visualization is all about self-directed change, and now you are that agent of change.
About the Author
Von Braschler is the author of many books on consciousness development, dreams, energy healing, and time. He has lectured and led workshops throughout the United States and the United Kingdom. He has also appeared on many radio and television programs and was a runner-up finalist for a COVR national book award. Previously, he was host of a popular podcast called Healing with Your Pet: Our Psychic, Spiritual Connection. Previous books include Seven Secrets of Time Travel, Moving in the Light, and Confessions of a Reluctant Ghost Hunter. He lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota, but does most of his writing in a cabin on a remote island in Washington State.