Life is EXACTLY What You Imagine it to Be.

Means all this around us is exactly what we think it to be. This gives our reason for why things tend to be so bad around us – we allow the news to treat it that way. This explains why we are having a rise in pornography addiction and pedophilia – people are able to surround themselves with deviant material and so become that world: they are filling their minds with sexually-related materials and their world then fills with that same material.

Find the Silence

Isolated communities don't have these problems. The Amish, for example, are living lives mostly unchanged since the 1800's. Murders, rapes, incest, all these problems are relatively unknown. They don't have the child-star murders and the publicity-seeking pedophile. They don't have the teen disappearances which glut the news for weeks. They do have farming accidents which maim or kill. But their lives are simpler.

Several authors tell one to “seek the silence”. Haanel describes this simply as sitting still and learning to control one's own thoughts. Entire Eastern disciplines have evolved around this one point. In our Western culture, we marvel at people who can meditate for days and weeks in a single sitting. Yet this is a skill people are not taught modernly.

Emerson and Thoreau wrote about taking walks in the woods in solitude and letting themselves become immersed in the simple activities of the wildlife around them. And people of our age used to appreciate being able to jog on quiet lanes – though more modernly, they are taking iPods and other distractions with them.

It's been noted that our society doesn't like silences, can't stand the pauses in conversation and impulsively seek to fill them. In older days, people trained their young to think before they spoke – children were best “seen and not heard.” The reason the white immigrants to Hawaii were known as Haole (those who do not breathe) is because the traditions of Polynesia included taking a breath before one spoke.

As a culture, we have grown away from the discipline of listening and thinking, of pausing before speaking, of gathering your thoughts before acting. Yet this is a simple skill to master.

I am told the Ukraine today have a similar custom. Before taking a trip, they get everything ready and then go sit in the house and think. In this way, the could review their plans and preparations – and then discover anything they had failed to include or hadn't prepared for.

Conversely, I recently went with a friend to build some wooden platforms for a remote training program. The truck had been packed with all sorts of tools, generator, power cord, wood, screws, bolts, drill, etc. We were only 10 minutes away, but there was no power available and every thing had to be trucked in. When we got there, measured and marked everything out – we found that the circular saw had the wrong blade in it, one for cutting tile, not wood. So we had to go back for another saw. When we returned and cut the first pieces, we found that we didn't have a drill bit the right size. By now, with all our preparations and lack of , it was nearly time for lunch. Those platforms did get built in the afternoon, but we wasted most of a morning by not simply double-checking before we started off. We could have taken a “breather” just before starting, but didn't.

But what's this got to do with imagination?

Plenty.

The person who cannot control what he thinks about gives over much of his choices to the environment. That person cannot master his environment as he/she says that what the media, the Internet, the TV says is more important than his/her own choices in life, than his/her own beliefs.

This is why people get “addicted” to porn, “become” pedophiles, become addicts to any drug or political party or any habit. Those people have simply given up their power of choice over to something else. They have simply quit thinking for themselves – for the most part. All addictions are from giving your power of choice (and your responsibility for your own actions) over to some physical universe substance.

This flies in the face of all the successful self-help authors, not to mention many, many historical and religious figures who realized, said, and acted on the exact opposite.

The bulk of self-help revolves around the single fact (proved empirically by multiple thousands of people, just in this century) that whatever you think, you become. Another phrasing is that whatever you think about comes to pass. Or the reverse – your environment shows what you are thinking about. While based on Eastern and even older philosophies/religious beiefs, the fact of this principle isn't easily denied – and never effectively.

Napoleon Hill based a book on this fact that has been estimated by one publisher to have sold over 30 million copies. His Think and Grow Rich was based on his cumulative conclusions after interviewing over 500 successful people in twenty years. Norman Vincent Peale based his successful book on the same premise: if you think positive thoughts, you get positive results; if you think negative thoughts, you get negative results. Earl Nightingale, in his landmark bestselling classic recording “The Strangest Secret” lists a panoply of authors who have concluded the same thing – earlier than Plato and Aristotle, up through Jesus, Shakespeare, Emerson and William James, right on up to the present authors of that date: George Barnard Shaw, Einstein, and more. Nightingale's conclusion: We become what we think about.

James Allen put it this way:

“A man's mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild; but whether cultivated or neglected, it must, and will, bring forth. If no useful seeds are put into it, then an abundance of useless weed seeds will fall therein, and will continue to produce their kind.”

I could go on with other authors who have intensively investigated this very subject, but the fact is observable by anyone. If you simply keep your mind on a single goal, you will inevitably achieve that goal, providing you consider that you think about that goal in an easy and relaxed state of mind, that you consider the goal already achieved, that you always think about that goal only in order to perfect the details and completeness of it.

Addiction is simply filling your mind with the drug, or porn, or habit until you feel you can think of nothing but that substance or act. Why is Alcoholics Anonymous so successful? Because it brings people into a group so that they can interrupt those habits which have become so destructive and get them back under control. Any successful drug program is just so, because it enables the person to utilize group support and also helps the person to re-educate oneself.

Whatever you think determines what has happened to you, what is happening to you, and any future you are going to have. Your environment reflects your own thoughts and attitudes. Hopeless people life in relative squalor. Those who have “given up” live in the poorest of surroundings. Those who have confidence build their own rich lifestyles on this planet. (As well, those children of these rich people, who were not taught the secret of thinking, will squander all those inherited riches in a single lifetime, leaving nothing for their own children except debt.)

Your life becomes what you have thought about – not what your parents did or didn't do for you, not what your teachers taught you or failed to teach you, nothing happens in your life based on how rich or poor or mistreated your distant forbears were when and how they stepped on this continent. Your life on this planet depends on what you have thought and are currently thinking. It's really that simple.

There are no victims, only lazy thinkers.

You can't sue anyone to get you a better life. If you consider you are fat, you are. But suing hamburger joints won't make you thin – you have to get a vision of yourself at a certain weight and then get in your own discipline to eat and exercise better. Drop your caloric intake and start taking energetic walks and you will lose pounds by the dozen – and this will only work to the degree you keep your vision in front of you all the time.

Same for getting rich. Both Hill and Wattles say the same point in their books on getting rich: you have to consider that you are rich and work effectively toward that vision. Winning the lottery is very possible, but it doesn't happen for those who harbor more doubt than faith that it is possible.

The law behind this is no real secret – it never has been. But unless you discover and utilize this law for yourself, it might as well be secret.

Conceive, Believe, Achieve.

Get Hill's book and follow his six steps. Get Wattle's book and follow his summary to the letter. For more work, get Haanel's book and do all the 24 lessons to personal result. And there are many, many other authors who have written about this law and they will all tell you the same thing: You become what you think about.

So it is really up to you. What has happened to you in the past doesn't have to keep recurring. All you have to do is change your mind. Look around you and see what could be improved. Build a picture in your mind, a vision of the ideal solution for that scene. Figure out what steps you need to take to start achieving that goal and start getting these steps done. Eventually, you'll arrive right where you want to wind up, providing you keep faith in your own dreams and visions, and constantly work toward them.

If you dither about, and lie on the couch to just channel-surf – then you are going to accomplish only what the advertisers put into your mind. So – your life is up to you.

See you on the other side.