Preface
To delve a little deeper into the topic of imagination—two articles are barely adequate—I need to first talk about two visionaries who changed my life. I urge the reader to consider the links and other resources I have provided for more details.
Photo by Josh Hild from Pexels
Robert Monroe, who founded the institute named after him, was a broadcasting executive and engineer. He was also a man who, while studying and experimenting with sleep-learning, had what may be called spontaneous out-of-body experiences (OBEs). In fact, he has been credited with coining the term. He was almost driven out of his mind because of the OBEs, and thought about being committed, when he finally learned that he was not crazy, or anything even close to crazy. Eventually, he furthered his work and became a known researcher into the field of human consciousness. Two very interesting things arose due to his work:
1. He developed Hemi-Sync technology, which among its many purposes in clinics and informal settings, helped others achieve altered states of consciousness.
2. He ‘charted’, and I’m sorry but I can’t think of a better word, the afterlife.
For those of you interested in learning more about Robert Monroe, or The Monroe Institute, you can follow the links above, or read about his fascinating discoveries in his first book, Journeys Out of the Body.
After Monroe died, I, and I think a whole lot of other people, were yearning for more. Yes, there was Hemi-Sync (I have a drawer full of CDs, and in addition, Ana and I have a collection of MP3s). But as I thought more about the afterlife and wanted to be an explorer in some small way like Monroe was, I learned of a gentleman named Bruce Moen. Bruce died in 2017, but not before writing several books and delivering workshops, worldwide, on the afterlife, on accessing the afterlife, and at times, on finding and ‘bringing back’ to full consciousness verifiable information from it.
Like Monroe, Bruce was another scientific mind, an engineer. He was famous for beginning his afterlife workshops by saying “Trust is always the first issue.” My ex-wife and I attended one of his two-day workshops here in Toronto. He also said we needed to use ‘imagination as a bridge’ (not his exact words). And again, importantly, on imagination he said we could use imagination as a tool to retrieve verifiable data about non-physical journeys. And that is where I come in. That’s where these two articles come from. There are many links I could point you to with respects to Bruce Moen, but one of the best is the Afterlife Knowledge website. Another is to pick up one of his Exploring the Afterlife books (e.g., Voyages into the Unknown), which can be obtained at Amazon, as well as many other bookstores.
Magic = Imagination = Magic
In the near future, you will be able to read here about a workshop on… magic. For now, I want to speak briefly about how magic, and imagination are related. In an earlier article for this newsletter, I wrote about five key ingredients for successful magic: Need, Desire, Timing, Imagination, and Will. Here, I am focusing on Imagination.
If we have trust issues, as Bruce Moen was wont to say, we may similarly have issues with imagination. Our imagination. We may not trust it. Insert your own cliché here, but one that comes to mind is this one: ‘imagination run wild’. This is not a good thing, because implicit in this statement is that there is no control. The statement also implies that what you are experiencing is not real. For an interesting take on this, see the definition of “imagination” courtesy of ReversoDictionary.
I submit that you can put controls and intention behind your imagination, thus fulfilling two of the many ingredients (beyond the five I spoke about earlier) of successful magic. There are many ways to do this, but often some ritual or ceremonial text, or even a guided journey (which you can record yourself), will fit the bill and can be used with great effect.
Let me simply add this before moving onto a practical suggestion (Part II of this series).
Wish Magic. There, I said it.
It is a fairly strong bet that most, if not all of you wished for things in your childhood, and again, perhaps all of you continue to do so. I do. Here’s a real example, a recent one, taken from my own life. For over two decades I wished I could pay off my credit card debts. I wished—and here is where the bad stuff came in—and I fretted, and I doubted, and I knew it would never happen. So, every month I could, I paid more the minimum on every credit card. After two decades, that hardly made a difference. And to what end anyway? I was only paying interest. The banks had long since made their principle back. But I tricked myself into believing my efforts were courageous, even ‘manly’, and were the way to proceed. I was ‘owning up’ to my debt, wasn’t I?
But there was a better way. And it was Ana who sparked my imagination on that. Without one simple sentence from her, I would never have been able to say this: at the end of February 2022, after a concerted 2.5-year effort, I will be debt-free.
In Part II of this series, I will talk about some simple steps you can take to put your imagination to work for you. And on you.