Relax yourself as though your body were a rag doll – floppy and limp. Allow your breathing to assist you to relax every muscle. Let every thought simply pass through you like a moving stream. (pause) In time, you find yourself wanting to follow the stream… (pause) …gently down the hill… down… down… down… until… at last… you come to… the lowest point… at the bottom… of the stream…

Imagine you are sitting comfortably beside a large pool of water. As the image of it comes to you, please describe it… (Notice the description for use in the rest of this imagery)

Now notice a person walking up to you. As you look up, you realize that this person is the future adult growing within you now. This person has a smile on their face and thanks in their heart for the work you have done in their behalf. There is an immediate feeling of love and affection between you that feels like it has gone on forever.

Now the two of you are sitting together looking over the pool. You suddenly realize that the pool you are looking over is your own gene pool and it needs some serious cleaning! You notice, too, that your companion is superbly fit and strong, clean, and easily able and willing to assist you in cleaning the pool.
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When we realize that we are insignificant in the cosmological, geological, and time realms, perhaps we can begin to come to grips with just who we really are.

“Extraterrestrial intelligent life may be almost ubiquitous. The apparent failure of such life to interact with us may be understood in terms of the hypothesis that they have set us aside as part of a wilderness area or zoo.” John A. Ball, The Zoo Hypothesis, Elsevier Science, 1973.

I like this hypothesis – puts humans into perspective cosmologically.

When we realize that we are insignificant in the cosmological, geological, and time realms, perhaps we can begin to come to grips with just who we really are.

There are those who believe we are “created in the image of God” – although it seems to me more likely that god is created by man in his (man’s) own image in an attempt to create a false sense of importance (we like feeling important, you know). This perspective seeks to implant humanity at the pinnacle of importance cosmologically – as “children of God” we are more important than all the trillions of stars, billions of galaxies, millions of galaxy clusters, and the infinite space we call the universe – as well as countless life forms yet to be discovered by us (refer to opening quote).

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What you imagine in your mind impacts what you perceive in the world.

New research from Vanderbilt University has found that mental imagery—what we see with the “mind’s eye”—directly impacts our visual perception. The research was published online June 26 by the journal Current Biology in a paper titled, “The Functional Impact of Mental Imagery on Conscious Perception.”

“We found that imagery leads to a short-term memory trace that can bias future perception,” says Joel Pearson, research associate in the Vanderbilt Department of Psychology. and lead author of the study. “This is the first research to definitively show that imagining something changes vision both while you are imagining it and later on.”

“These findings are important because they suggest a potential mechanism by which top-down expectations or recollections of previous experiences might shape perception itself,” Pearson and his co-authors write. Read the rest of this entry »

Imagining your success greatly increases the probability of your achieving it.

“Imagine yourself passing the exam or scoring a goal and it will happen.” You may think it’s a bunch of newage bunk, yet in a new study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychologists Christopher Davoli and Richard Abrams from Washington University conclude that the imagination may be more effective than we think in helping us reach our goals.

Through a series of ingenious experiments, the authors showed that simply imagining a posture may have effects that are similar to actually assuming the pose. Previous research has shown that we spend more time looking at items close to our hands (items close to us are usually more important than those further away), but this is the first study suggesting that merely imagining something close to our hands will cause us to pay more attention to it.

The researchers conclude that their findings indicate that our “peripersonal space” (the space around our body) can be extended into a space where an imagined posture would take us. They note there may be advantages to having this ability, such as determining if an action is realistic (e.g., “Can I reach the top shelf?”) and helping us to avoid collisions.

The authors conclude that the present study confirms “an idea that has long been espoused by motivational speakers, sports psychologists, and John Lennon alike: The imagination has the extraordinary capacity to shape reality.”

Article “Reaching Out With the Imagination” by Barbara Isanski, Association for Psychological Science