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Imagination VS Willpower
Willpower is meant to fail.
Have you ever tried to relax in a nervous situation? The more you try, the more you fail. Some lucky people have learned to take deep breaths and picture something relaxing or humorous, like a naked audience. Nevertheless, most people will go through their entire lives without being able to relax on command.
Willpower is a mechanism that was built to give your brain an easy way to disobey your orders. Most of the time, it is doing this for your own good, or the good of the human race. For instance, if a man, during sex, starts willing himself not to have an orgasm it will probably make it happen two times faster. But a commonly known method of delaying orgasm is to think of baseball or some other non-sexual subject.
The mind responds to what you believe, not what you want. If you believe something, your mind will go to whatever lengths necessary to make that belief true, including changing you and your perception, or even changing the world around you if it can.
Belief and Imagination – “I’ll believe it when I see it!”
What is more convincing than actually experiencing something? Not even a testimonial from a very reputable source can replace actually witnessing an event. Your subconscious mind works this way too, if you experience something, your subconscious mind lets down its guard and accepts it as true.
Belief and Imagination both trigger the same mental mechanism. In fact, it could be said that belief and imagination are the same mechanism, because they have the same effect. Many studies have been done on the result of imagination vs. belief. A basketball player who believes he can shoot and score is much more likely to make a shot than one who doesn’t believe. However, if the person who doesn’t believe imagines himself shooting and scoring, it is almost as likely to happen.
Try a little experiment. Get a rubber band and shoot it at a spot on the wall 10 times. Now sit back and take 5 minutes to imagine the rubber band hitting the exact spot on the wall every time you shoot it. It never misses in your mind. Every time you shoot it hits. In your mind, shoot 10 times and make it hit every time. After 5 minutes of visualization, shoot at the same spot another 10 times. The vast majority of people will find their shots are much more accurate than before. If you are already good at shooting rubber bands, try something else, like flipping a quarter and catching it with your eyes closed.
The Mind can’t tell the difference
The subconscious mind can not tell the difference between imagination and real experience. Don’t believe us? If you imagine food, you will become hungry and start to salivate. If you imagine an attractive person, you will start to get excited. You, of course, know it is not real, but your subconscious mind does not and its mental reaction is the same.
Using sensitive medical equipment, scientists can spot which parts of the brain “light up” when a person has an experience. What is amazing is that the exact same areas light up when the person is asked to simply imagine the same experience. The neural, electrical response to a real experience is almost identical to that of imagination! So identical, in fact, that the subconscious mind has trouble telling the difference.
The quirk of imagination is something that can be leveraged with Mental Programming. If you imagine yourself strong, thin and healthy, your mind, thinking it is real, will act to make the visualization a reality.
The remarkable effects of imagination increase with the clarity of the experience inside your head. Visualizing while in deep Alpha, near Theta, is enormously powerful because you are near a dream state, which is as vivid as mental imagery gets.
