Transcription
It is a big mistake to want to visualize in this area when you want to be at alpha 10 cycles or to be able to imagine this area when you want to stay at alpha 10 cycles because you will not be able to.
So, in order to break that habit, you must practice with your eyes open. As though you want to imagine something or see something away from you, out of your body, not here at all. You want to get away from here. So, the mental screen is 20° from the horizon up there. All this area is the area of the mental screen. So, whatever we want to visualize or imagine must be placed over there. Not here at all. As though you're away from this screen, you call it a mental screen, project all the images that you have seen and go over them verbally or and mentally in full detail and color and you're visualizing, you're practicing visualization on your mental screen.
Now, why 20° from the level of the horizon? Be- I want to tell you something that took me years to prove and 30 seconds to say. You've been visualizing in the wrong place. Not the wrong way, not with the wrong thoughts. The wrong place. And once I show you where that place actually is you will never picture anything the old way again. Sit with that for a moment because it is a strange thing to hear. We are taught from the time we are children that the mind is a single room. That when we close our eyes and think of something there is only one place for that thought to live. Nobody ever draws you a map of the space behind your own eyelids. Not think more positively, not want it more. Here, a location. A coordinate. A specific repeatable physical place inside your own field of vision where the picture you hold will actually take root, rather than simply flicker and fade the way a dream fades the instant your alarm clock sounds.
Most people, when they close their eyes to imagine something, a better job, a healed body, a reunited family, a debt finally paid, they picture it straight ahead, right behind the eyes, at eye level, as if the mind were simply a second pair of eyelids playing a home movie. Nobody ever tells you that this space has geography, has districts, has a right side and a left side, a near field and a far field, a floor and a ceiling. And because nobody ever draws you that map, you have been placing the most important pictures of your life in the first spot that happened to be convenient, the way a man might build his house on the first patch of ground he stumbles across in the dark, never once checking whether the soil beneath it can hold any weight at all. That is what I mean when I say visualize here instead. That is the mistake. That is the mistake nearly every man and woman alive is making at this very moment without knowing it, without ever having been told otherwise.
I have sat across from school teachers and steel workers, from grieving widows and ambitious young salesmen, and I have asked every one of them the same question, "Where exactly do you see the picture when you imagine your future?" And nearly every one of them points, without hesitation, straight ahead. Level, flat, close, and I tell them what I am about to tell you. That is the room where memory lives, not the room where creation happens. I call the true location the mental screen. It is not a metaphor I invented to sound clever, and it is not a poetic flourish for the sake of a lecture hall. It is a physical functional location a few degrees above the horizontal plane of your eyes projected outward into the darkness behind your closed lids. It is where the mind naturally goes to work rather than merely to remember. I did not invent this location. I discovered it the way a prospector discovers a vein of under the mountain the entire time waiting only for someone patient enough to dig in the right spot.
Here is the error plainly, and I want you to understand it in your bones, not merely in your head. When you visualize straight ahead at the level of ordinary sight you are operating in the same neurological territory as everyday waking beta level thinking. You are wide awake, alert, critical, analytical, the same state you are in while arguing with a shopkeeper over the price of a good or reading the fine print of a contract. And in that state the image you place gets filed the same way a grocery list gets filed. It does not sink in. It does not take root. It stays a picture and never becomes a program. The location of your mental image is not a small detail. It is the whole difference between wishing and creating. A man can wish on that flat closed eye level screen for 40 years and watch nothing change. Not because his desire was weak, not because he lacked faith, but simply because he was projecting his future onto the same screen where he keeps yesterday's disappointments. Is it any wonder the two pictures begin to bleed into one another? Is it any wonder that hope kept in the same room as regret begins after a while to take on the color of the room.
Why does the location matter so much? Mechanically, physiologically. Because the angle of the eyes I will explain this fully in a moment. Is tied directly to the electrical rhythm of the brain itself. Move the eyes upward, even slightly, behind closed lids, and something shifts. The brain slows. The static clears. A door opens. And it is only through that door that the picture you hold stops being a wish and starts becoming a working set of instructions handed to the deeper, quieter, more powerful machinery of your own mind. I am going to walk you through that door with you, step-by-step, the way I walked thousands of students through it across more than 20 years of research. Case by case, mind by mind. In living rooms and church basements and hospital wards, long before anyone thought to put a name to what we were doing. But before I do, I want to leave you with a question because the mind remembers far better what it has been asked than what it has been told. And because open questions have a way of following a man home, sitting with him at supper, waking him at 3:00 in the morning with the beginnings of an answer. If the picture in your mind has a location, what else about your thinking have you never questioned? Hold on to that. We're only getting started.
Let me take you back to the laboratory of the ordinary mind, your own, for just a moment. Close your eyes right now if you're able, and let your eyeballs drift upward as though you were looking at a point on the ceiling through your own eyelids. Just 20°, not straining, not forcing, a gentle lift the way a man raises his chin to catch the first light of morning rather than squinting hard against it. Something happens the instant you do this, something measurable, something the encephalograph will confirm every single time, in every laboratory, on every continent, with a reliability that would satisfy the most stubborn skeptic in the room. The brain wave pattern begins its descent from beta into alpha. The chatter quiets. The static clears. The critical, argumentative, doubting voice, the one that tells you, "That will never happen. You don't have the money. People like you don't get lucky. Who do you think you are?" That voice grows fainter like a radio station losing its signal as you drive out of range, out past the city limits, into open country where the only sound left is your own engine and your own breathing.
Why does the position of the eyes have this power over the state of the mind? Because the eyes are not simply organs of sight. They are extensions of the brain itself, wired directly into it before a man is ever born, and their position influences attention the way a rudder influences a ship, quietly, constantly, without the passengers ever feeling the turn. Where the eyes go, focus follows. And where focus follows, the brain's electrical rhythm follows close behind, the way a shadow follows a man down a long corridor, never quite touching him, yet never once leaving his side. This is not superstition. This is not mysticism dressed up in a laboratory coat, and I want to be plain about that, because I have spent my career fighting off exactly that accusation. This is physiology, plain and demonstrable, tested on machines with dials and needles and paper tape. And it is the very door through which every technique I am about to give you must pass. No shortcuts. No exceptions. Every student who has ever used this method, whether he knew the science behind it or not, walked through the same door to get there.
Now, the correct use of the mental screen, and I want you to listen closely here, because this single instruction separates the men and women who see results from the men and women who spend a lifetime trying to think positive and wondering why nothing ever moves. You do not simply think about your goal. Thinking about a goal is what a man does while shaving half attentive, the thought drifting in and drifting back out before the razor has finished its second pass. No, you project it deliberately onto that screen positioned upward and outward, 3 ft in front of you at that same 20° angle. You view it there the way you would view a photograph pinned to a board in a well-lit room with distance enough to observe it clearly, yet closeness enough to feel it belongs to you and to you alone. And here I must draw a distinction that changes everything, a distinction so simple that most people walk straight past it their entire lives without ever noticing it was there. The difference between visualization and imagination. Visualization is the recall of something already known, a face, a room, the shape of your own front door, the particular creak of the third stair in your childhood home. It is memory replayed. It requires nothing of you but attention. Imagination is the construction of something that does not yet exist in your experience, a future not yet lived, a solution not yet found, an outcome you have never once witnessed with your waking eyes. It requires something far greater attention. It requires a kind of quiet courage because you are in that moment asking your own mind to trust the picture it has no memory to compare it to. Both faculties live on the mental screen. Both are strengthened the same way ordinary muscles are strengthened through repetition, through daily practice, through small and deliberate exercise. The same patient repetition a violinist gives to his scales long after he has mastered the concert piece simply because the fundamentals are what hold the whole performance together.
Try this tonight before you sleep. Each evening at your alpha level visualize your own bedroom exactly as it is. The placement of the furniture, the color of the walls, the particular fall of light through the curtain, a detail you have never once consciously noticed in all the years you have slept in that room. This is visualization. Simple recall sharpened by attention. Then, once that image is steady, once you can hold it without effort, shift to imagination. Picture that same room altered, improved, transformed into something it has never been. A wall moved, a window added, a life lived differently within those same four corners. Notice how one exercise draws entirely on memory and the other reaches beyond it out into territory your senses have never once reported back from. Do this daily, faithfully, without skipping the nights you are tired, and you will find the second faculty growing stronger than you believed possible, stronger in fact than the first because imagination, unlike memory, has no ceiling. Memory can only ever equal what you have already lived. Imagination has no such limit placed [clears throat] upon it.
I want to give you one more exercise here because a foundation is only as good as the number of times a man returns to stand on it. Practice, as well, moving between the two screens deliberately, the near screen of the present and the elevated screen we have just described. Notice, as you do, how naturally the mind wants to drift back down to the flat, familiar, closing screen of ordinary thinking. That drift is not weakness. It is habit, decades deep, and habit yields only to repetition, never to a single afternoon of good intention. But, this brings me to a question I want you to sit with because it is the hinge on which the rest of this story turns, and because I have watched this exact question, more than any other I have ever posed, change the direction of a man's entire life. If imagination can create what has never existed before, why does it sometimes reveal answers we never consciously knew? Think on that. Turn it over the way you turn a stone in your palm, looking for the side that catches the light, because we are about to go somewhere very few teachers of the mind have ever dared to take their students.
There is a hemisphere of your brain that has been sitting largely idle throughout your entire education. Your schooling, from the first grade onward, trained one half of you almost exclusively, the left hemisphere, the seat of language, of sequence, of arithmetic, of logic marching in a straight and orderly line from premise to conclusion. It is a magnificent tool. It built the bridges and the calendars and the courtrooms of civilization. It taught you to read this very sentence, word following word, in the order a disciplined mind demands. I do not for a moment ask you to distrust it. But, logic, for all its power, has a limit and every honest scientist, every honest inventor, every honest man who has ever stared at a locked problem until 3:00 in the morning will tell you the same thing. Logic can only rearrange what it already has. It cannot, by its own method, produce a genuinely new answer, only a new combination of old ones, shuffled like a deck of cards that was dealt to it long ago. Ask the logical mind to solve a problem for which it has no prior reference, and it will spin and stall and hand you back your own confusion dressed up in the confident language of an answer, when really it has given you nothing new at all.
The right hemisphere works differently. It does not march in a line. It perceives the whole, the pattern, the relationship, the shape of a thing all at once, the way an artist sees a canvas before a single brushstroke is explained in words, the way a mother knows something is wrong with her child from across a crowded room before a single symptom has been named. And it is this hemisphere that Alpha awakens. This is what Alpha actually allows the mind to do. It lowers the volume of the analytical sequential left hemisphere just enough, not silencing it, only quieting it, to let the perceptive holistic right hemisphere step forward and offer what logic alone could never produce. Think of it as two partners in a business, one loud and constantly talking, the other quiet and rarely given the floor. Alpha simply asks the loud partner to sit down for a while, so the quiet one can finally speak.
I have called this faculty in my own research a form of clairvoyance, and I ask you not to flinch at the word, not to dress it up in candlelight and mystery, not to picture the carnival tent and the crystal ball, because that is not at all what I mean, and it never has been. I do not mean fortune telling. I mean something far simpler and far more probable, the capacity of a trained mind at the alpha level to perceive information, connections, and solutions that lie beyond the reach of ordinary waking five-sense logic. Call it intuition if the other word troubles you. Call it insight. The name matters far less than the fact of it, and the fact of it I have watched proven again and again in front of witnesses, in front of skeptics who arrived determined to find the trick and left without having found one. How does this insight actually arrive? Rarely as a thunderclap, almost always as a quiet certainty, a name that surfaces for no traceable reason, a solution that appears whole while you are washing a dish or walking a familiar street, a sudden knowing that arrives without the usual scaffolding of because. A businessman I once worked with could not, for the life of him, explain why a certain contract felt wrong to him, only that it did, and he was correct as the following month proved beyond any argument. That is the right hemisphere delivering what the left hemisphere never could have assembled on its own, no matter how many hours it was given to work the numbers.
And I want to be exceedingly clear on one because it is the difference between a gift and a danger, and because I have never once, in all my years of teaching, been willing to skip past it for the sake of a more dramatic lecture. This faculty of the mind, in every case I have studied, functions only when it is aimed at constructive, ethical, healing purpose. Turn it toward harm, toward greed, toward the invasion of another's private affairs, toward any use that would shame you to speak of in daylight, and it grows dim, unreliable, and finally silent, the way a well runs dry when it is drawn upon for a purpose it was never dug to serve. It seems to answer only to the better half of the one who calls upon it. I have watched this whole true without a single exception in over two decades of observation, and I have stopped being surprised by it, though I have never stopped being grateful for it, which leads me to the question that will carry us into our final chapter, the one I consider, of everything I have ever taught, the most important question I have ever asked a student to sit with, because everything that follows in this film depends entirely on how honestly you answer it. If the mind can perceive possibilities before they exist, where should those possibilities be placed? Stay with me, because the answer to that question is the answer to everything, and it is at last the answer to the very title of this film you are watching. Visualize here instead. We are finally about to arrive at exactly where here is.
Here at last is the map, and once you see it, you will understand why so many people work faithfully with their imagination, and still watch nothing change, and why the answer was never a matter of trying harder, but of standing in the right place. I call it the hidden map of time, and it exists on your mental screen whether you have ever been told of it or not, the same way a room has corners whether or not you have ever bothered to walk into them. The past belongs to your left. The present sits directly before you at eye level, close and immediate. This is the flat, familiar screen we spoke of earlier, the one nearly everyone mistakes for the only screen there is. And the future, the future belongs to your right and slightly elevated, out at a greater distance as though it were a country not yet arrived at, visible on the horizon but not yet beneath your feet. This is not arbitrary and it is not a convenience I have invented to make a tidy lecture. At the alpha level the mind organizes time spatially the way a man organizes a room he has lived in long enough to walk through in the dark without ever striking his shin against the furniture.
And this brings me to the single most common error I have watched sincere well-meaning people make year after year, student after student without exception, regardless of how devoted their practice or how sincere their faith. They place their desired result in the present. They picture the healed body, the reunited family, the thriving business close in at eye level as if it were already so right now today. And when they open their eyes to a present that has not yet caught up because the world, unlike the mind, still moves on the slow and stubborn clock of ordinary time, a quiet disappointment sets in. And with disappointment comes doubt. And doubt, once it is allowed onto that screen, spreads across it the way a single drop of ink spreads through a glass of clear water and the whole structure collapses not because the technique failed but because it was never given the correct address to work from.
This is why I say and why I have built this entire film around saying it, visualize here instead, not there at eye level crowded in beside the present and its worries. Here, to the right, elevated out at a believable and comfortable distance in the country where the future is still being built and has not yet been asked to arrive early. You never place your desired result in the present. You place it in the future and you let your mind travel toward it rather than demanding that it materialize beneath your feet before it's time, the way an impatient traveler demands to arrive at a destination he has not yet finished the road to. This is the foundation of what I call the three scenes technique, and I will give it to you now exactly as I have given it to every student who ever sat before me in exactly the order that has proven time and again to work.
Scene one. At your alpha level, project onto your mental screen the problem exactly as it stands today, honestly, without exaggeration, without despair, without softening a single hard edge of it. This is simply an act of recognition, not resignation. You are not dwelling here. You are only taking an honest photograph before you begin the journey.
Scene two. Shift your gaze in imagination to that future position, out to the right, elevated, and there construct the scene of the problem already resolved. Not resolving, resolved. Finished. See the result complete, whole, no longer a hope but a fact, and see yourself within it feeling what you will feel once it has come to pass, the particular quality of relief, the particular weight lifted from the particular set of shoulders that are your own.
Scene three. This is the scene most students skip in their eagerness to sit in the comfort of the second scene, and it is the one that makes the whole technique work. Picture the specific action, the tangible step, that carried you from the first scene to the second. A phone call made, a door opened, a word spoken to the right person at the right hour, A hand extended that might otherwise have stayed in a pocket. This third scene is the bridge. And a mind will not cross a river it cannot first see a bridge across, no matter how badly it wishes to reach the far shore. This is the creative process laid bare with nothing hidden and nothing held back. Recognition, resolution, and the bridge between them held faithfully on the correct portion of your mental screen practice daily without force, without [snorts] desperation, only quiet patient expectation, the same expectation a farmer holds toward a field he has planted correctly and has no need to dig up every morning to check on.
And so, I leave you with the final rule, the one rule beneath every technique I have ever taught. The one rule I would ask you to remember above all the others if you remember nothing else from this film. Use this gift only to build, never to harm. And it will serve you for the whole of your life. I have watched a mother locate a lost child. I have watched a man without medical training describe with uncanny accuracy the illness of a stranger he had never met. I have watched the poor become steady and the frightened become calm and the hopeless, for no reason logic could ever explain, become hopeful again. Not through magic, through a screen, a slight lift of the eyes, and a willingness to place the future exactly where the future belongs.
I think often of a woman who came to one of my classes in the early years carrying a grief she had stopped even trying to name out loud. She had spent two years visualizing, praying, hoping, always at eye level, always in the present, always demanding of today what today was never built to hold. Within a matter of weeks of moving that single picture, only moving it, nothing else, she wrote to tell me that something had shifted that she could not fully explain, only that the heaviness she had carried for 2 years had, without ceremony, begun to lift. I did not perform a miracle for her. I only showed her where to stand. That is all I am asking of you tonight. You were given this faculty at birth. Nobody stole it from you. It was simply never pointed out until tonight, until this film, until this one sentence found its way to you at whatever hour you happen to be watching it. So, close your eyes. Lift them gently 20°. Let the picture rise to where it was always meant to live, up and to the right, out past the crowded, worried present, into the quiet country where your future is patiently waiting to be built. Visualize here instead. And watch patiently, faithfully, as your reality begins quietly to change.