Chapter 11 Giving your ideal the impluse of action to make it real

There is one more step in the process of making your ideal complete. It possesses infinite energy, but you must give it the impulse of action. How can you do this? In this I differ from many others. I hold that visualization is not sufficient. Visualization, although it often accomplishes wonders, is after all but a picturing of an idea. It does make the idea vivid but it adds to it only one of several elements -only the images of the sight sense.

Instead of visualization I use idealization -the perfect image. This includes the factor of visualization and that of the eleven other factors. Using the other factors -especially those of motion and direction of motion -we give the ideal an impulse to move and this in turn gives it the action power that makes the ideal manifest as a reality.

Visualizing is the act of holding a mental picture; idealizing is the act of perfecting the mental image of all factors, -the picture, the process of securing it and the act of making it real.

You often ignite the heart of your ideal by vivid mental pictures and strong feelings of desire to possess the reality; but unless connected up with your motor power of action, it remains merely an urgent unfulfilled picture of desire within you -an ideal that does not become a reality. Clutching your ideal to action cannot be effectively accomplished by a picture. Let me illustrate this clearly.

Go to an art museum; look at any painting representing a number of people. If, after going away, you close your eyes and visualize the painting, you hold in your mind a mental picture of the painting. With care and practice you can make this mental picture very vivid and increase your ability to re-see in the mind every detail of such a painting -lines, forms and colors of things and people. Yet, it is still a mere picture; it is flat, lacking action, and it does not impel to action. That which I have just described is the visualizing process. Visualizing has produced marvelous results when the person visualizing has turned such mental picture-making into the idealized process, even if they have not recognized that they have done so.

Idealizing, however, is more remarkable because it includes visualizing and adds all other elements to it. Visualization comes from using the stored-up images of but one of our senses, the sense of sight. Idealization comes from using the stored-up images not only of the sense of sight but of all other senses. To attain that which we desire it is necessary, not only to see the visual image, but to act.

Try now another process: Idealize the painting you saw in the art museum; bring it visually to your mind; re-see it just as you did by the process previously described. Then image action, -every person in it in action; feel them doing the thing they are pictured as doing; feel the movement; feel the activities. If it portrays them as speaking, hear the tones, -hear what they say. I might continue with all other elements of the picture, but I think this is sufficient to show you the difference between visualization and idealization. Visualization produces a non-moving, non-active picture in the mind, even though it be vivid and clear. Being non-active, it does not impel to action and hence many of our pictured ideals do not become realities. But if we idealize action, if we use the mental clutch of connecting up the ideal of the thing desired with the process of obtaining that which we desire, action must result; and action is one of the essential factors in making any ideal come true.