Visualization
Question: You say to "want what God wants." Do you mean to not visualize what we would like to manifest for ourselves? Is that wrong to do? Is having expectations for a better journey in life an illusion?
Answer: There is nothing wrong at all with visualizing what one wants to manifest. We must do this in our daily lives in one of a thousand ways or we wouldn't cook a good meal, clean our bodies well, or even communicate our intentions to others.
The "catch" here, and it is a subtle one, is that while we are required to imagine what we need to satisfy our physical being, such desires are incapable of solving our inherent spiritual/psychological sense of feeling somehow incomplete.
At best, when envisioning some new ideal for ourselves, we are momentarily filled with the positive emotions that come with imagining ourselves out of debt, more loving, respected by our peers, whatever. But, and you will have to work to see this, the whole idea of fulfilling ourselves with any such imagined outcome is born in us from a thought nature that is inherently divided, and therefore incomplete. I will explain how and why this is true.
The object of any desire (regardless of how it comes into creation, i.e., through unconscious appetites pressing themselves upon us for appeasement, or deliberately imagining what we long for) -- is organically powerless to bring an end to the desire that created it. Why? Because no opposite can resolve itself. These longings and their imagined lovers only perpetuate themselves, producing again and again the "need" to keep pursuing yet something "newer, better, greater" to make us feel whole (again).
So, in a word, visualization has its place in athletics, business planning, scheduling the day in Rome while on vacation, even in healing the body, etc. It can change many things, but it is powerless to change the one element that must be transformed before we can know true freedom: the nature of desire itself. (Correspondence, 2006)
Question: Is there ever a time when we should visualize our future goals, or does our developing awareness reveal what is needed on a moment-to-moment basis?
Answer: We must all learn what it means to understand scale and levels. At certain points in our life, it may be that goals and plans are necessary. Perhaps we have children, and so we need to provide for family, or we want a special education, and so we must decide upon a series of steps to take. But for most of us, visualization revolves around ambitions to be someone special, to own special things. This visualization, even when realized, simply leaves us having to devise another set of goals and plans. Then, maybe one day, we see that this kind of visualization is a secret punishment. In that moment we outgrow the self that thought it knew what was needed. Now we can begin to listen for new instructions from a higher part of ourselves.
Excerpted from Seeker's Guide to Self-Freedom, Pages 191-192
