Man’s Perceptions are not bounded by organs of Perception: he perceives more than sense (though ever so acute) can discover.
However much you seem to be living in a material world, you are actually living in a world of imagination. The outer, physical events of life are the fruit of forgotten blossom-times—results of previous and usually forgotten states of consciousness. They are the ends running true to ofttimes forgotten imaginative origins.
Whenever you become completely absorbed in an emotional state, you are at that moment assuming the feeling of the state fulfilled. If persisted in, whatsoever you are intensely emotional about you will experience in your world. These periods of absorption, of concentrated attention, are the beginnings of the things you harvest. It is in such moments that you are exercising your creative power—the only creative power there is. At the end of these periods, or moments of absorption, you speed from these imaginative states (where you have not been physically) to where you were physically an instant ago. In these periods the imagined state is so real that when you return to the objective world and find that it is not the same as the imagined state, it is an actual shock. You have seen something in imagination with such vividness that you now wonder whether the evidence of your senses can now be believed, and like Keats you ask,
was it a vision or a waking dream?
Fled is that music . . . Do I wake or sleep?
This shock reverses your time sense. By this is meant that instead of your experience resulting from your past, it now becomes the result of being in imagination where you have not yet been physically. In effect, this moves you across a bridge of incident to the physical realization of your imagined state. The man who at will can assume whatever state he pleases has found the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven. The keys are desire, imagination, and a steadily focused attention on the feeling of the wish fulfilled. To such a man any undesirable objective fact is no longer a reality and the ardent wish no longer a dream.
Prove me now herewith, saith the Lord of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it.
Malachi 3:10.
The windows of heaven may not be opened and the treasures seized by a strong will, but they open of themselves and present their treasures as a free gift—a gift that comes when absorption reaches such a degree that it results in a feeling of complete acceptance. The passage from your present state to the feeling of your wish fulfilled is not across a gap.
There is continuity between the so-called real and unreal. To cross from one state to the other, you simply extend your feelers, trust your touch, and enter fully into the spirit of what you are doing.
Not by might nor by power but by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.
Assume the spirit, the feeling of the wish fulfilled, and you will have opened the windows to receive the blessing. To assume a state is to get into the spirit of it. Your triumphs will be a surprise only to those who did not know your hidden passage from the state of longing to the assumption of the wish fulfilled.
The Lord of hosts will not respond to your wish until you have assumed the feeling of already being what you want to be, for acceptance is the channel of His action. Acceptance is the Lord of hosts in action.
