Law of Attraction, Visualization, Manifest and Self-Hypnosis

An Ancient Egyptian philosopher known as Hermes Trismegistus is said to have enunciated the Seven Hermetic Principles, later presented in the 1912 book The Kybalion. The first of these Principles is known as Mentalism, which maintains that “all is mind”. That being the case, it follows that all that exists does so as a result of mental creation. Our very present lives have been created by our own minds, even if we are unaware of it. Now you have an opportunity to study the Principle of Mentalism and use it to get anything you want and save the world too.

In order to begin creating anything you want mentally, consider that even those aspects of your life that you dislike were created by you. It is important to let go of the past, to forgive yourself, so that your mind can be freed to create positivity from now on.

You will learn how to actually get anything you want and save the world by first following the examples of three people who used the Principle of Mentalism, and later by participating in an exercise of mental creation.

Actually there are six more Hermetic Principles, in addition to the Principle of Mentalism. Another principle is that of Cause and Effect, which basically states three ideas: There is no cause that does not generate an effect, there is no effect without a cause, and cause and effect are one. It is this last idea that we must focus on prior to visualizing anything.

The outcome you obtain from your visualization is an effect; the visualization itself, or the primary intention behind the visualization, is the cause. Given that the Hermetic Principle of Polarity connects cause and effect, if you wish the effect to be positive, the cause must also be positive. The first step then, even before you actually visualize anything, is to undergo a profound analysis of the motivations that compel you to creatively visualize what you are about to.

The actual determination of what constitutes a “good”, a “just” or a “moral” cause is usually not useful. It is up to you to search your own conscience and soul, until you are satisfied that the motivations behind your intention are not selfish in any way. Evidently a selfish motivation for visualizing something would result in a consequence that would have to be compensated in some way.

The human mind manifests itself in two aspects that we understand as the conscious and the unconscious. Visualization is a feature of the unconscious aspect of the mind. In order for you to creative visualize something, therefore, you need to have some degree of conscious access to the unconscious. The conscious access refers to the intent for the visualization, and the unconscious is the aspect that actually does the creating.

Your best opportunity to contact your unconscious actually happens during sleep. However, precisely the feature of sleep that makes contacting the unconscious favorable is that which makes it difficult to drive the intent; that is the fact that during sleep the conscious aspect of the mind is inactive.

Ideally then we need a state of dual awareness, one in which we become conscious of the unconscious. Fortunately this state occurs naturally when the conscious mind relaxes. At first it is not so easy to be sure that the conscious mind is indeed relaxed, so we use the physical body as a sort of mirror to look into the mind. Because physical voluntary muscular contractions occur as a result of thought and intention, part of the conscious mind, it follows that a physically relaxed body, limp and loose muscles, result from a relaxed mind.

You will quickly develop the ability to relax your body, and thus your mind. If you need help with this aspect, look for our course The Fundamentals of Hypnotherapy right here on Udemy.

Here is how you actually create what you want. This is called End result Imagery.

Our three friends will help us understand the method.

Causes become effects by way of something known as “manifestations”. As you learned in lecture 2, causes and effects have the same polarity, hence the importance of identifying true intentions, but manifestations have the opposite polarity. These principles explain the old adage that says “things get worse before they get better”.

It is important to really understand this idea, because we are all confronted with examples of people and situations where “crime does seem to pay”. When a person propels a negative intention, or action, such as a crime that harms others, it is possible to temporarily derive a benefit from that negative cause, that is the manifestation, which is short lived. In fact all manifestations are short lived. The negative manifestation that follows a positive cause is also short lived, but a lesson must be learned.

It is critically important not to turn a negative manifestation into a new cause, negative in this case. Do not shy away from the apparent crisis that follows every creative visualization; instead ask yourself what is the lesson you must learn, and learn it, so you can open the way for the final effect you created.

What we call the manifestation is what happens after you visualize something. There is no specific time frame for the manifestation to occur, hence the importance of keeping a journal (Lecture 8), but it always occurs because it is the means by which a cause is transformed into an effect.

When a cause is positive, when your intention is positive, the manifestation will feel to you as a problem or a crisis. When you notice the manifestation brewing, it is important to emphasize the depth of dialogues with the pertinent people and to introspect profoundly in order to discover what part of you needs to change and improve. Meditation and self hypnosis help in this case.

People who feel attracted to the study of esoteric sciences in general, such as the use of creative visualization, tend to score high on the altruism scale; thus the intention to use what they learn as a tool to help others is always a possibility.

Having said that, one caveat must be observed. The idea is that one would not need to spend much time examining his intentions behind the use of creative visualization because no selfish motivation can come from the attempt to help someone else. This logic seems clear, but in practice, this is where most problems actually occur.

Studies show that two problems can occur. One is when the person you intend to help has not requested your help; in these cases we have a simple case of attempt to trump someone else’s free will. We would caution you to refrain from ever attempting to help someone else with a specific intention, unless they specifically ask your help.

The other issue that arises when trying to help someone has to do with what constitutes actual help, and what is what amounts to covert manipulation. In family situations this often happens, one family member attempting to help the other actually becomes an enabler to the very issue that one is said to be against.

When working with someone else, thus, you must be sure to double or triple your efforts to remove from your creative visualizations any hint of personal gain from the process.

Years ago, as a student, I worked as a waiter. I remember how difficult it was to serve food when I was very hungry. I came to understand the same logic when it comes to the use of creative visualization. The best use of creative visualization is in fact to help others, but we must first help ourselves live a great life. If we do not derive some personal benefits at first, it would be analogous to serving food while very hungry.

So, you should use creative visualization to improve any aspect of your life you feel needs improvement, especially those where you have already worked on humanly, and discovered that the problem persists. You are blessed, and are meant to live a blessed life!

You learned the basics of creative visualization through the first seven lectures. Hopefully you also feel inspired to use this skill in order to improve the quality of your life. That is good.

You learned that each idea you visualize generates a manifestation whose function is to promote a change in you. It is important to recognize manifestations for what they are, and not confuse them with new problems. As a result, you will need some form of journal that works for you. Your journal could be some elaborate computer program or a simple notebook; whatever feels familiar and comfortable to you.

Your journal has to start with an accurate and impartial inventory of what your life is like today. What are your strengths and weakness? Problems? Issues? This initial inventory, call it a baseline, is a very important assessment of where your life is at as you embark on this journey. Make this journal entry as complete and honest as possible, but please refrain from attempting to make it so complete that you never start your visualization program.

At first, once the inventory is documented in your private journal, visualize only one outcome at a time. Visualize something very simple, such as a stranger smiling at you, sometime during the day. The simpler the better. Keep repeating the visualization at least once and up to three times a day, until you notice that what you visualized happened. Note all results, even if you feel nothing happened, each day on your private journal.

Once one goal is achieved, give thanks, and proceed with another goal. This way you will always recognize a manifestation for what it is, and you will document your success. Following this program you should note in your journal periodically a significant improvement in the quality of your life.

At some point, the joy will overflow and perhaps you will feel inclined to ask yourself about the possibility of using creative visualization to make the world a better place.

Philosophers of religion inform us that two types of prayer are common: petitionary and gratitudinal or spontaneous. In petitionary prayer, the person asks God for a favor of some type. In gratitudinal or spontaneous prayer, the prayer thanks god for the concession of a miracle.

Notice the basic difference between these types of prayer: in petitionary prayer there is an implicit assertion that what one seeks is not available or even possible in some cases. In gratitudinal prayer, the prayer is thanking god in advance for something that is sure to happen; there is certainty.

From the perspective of the subconscious mind and creative visualization, petitionary prayer as such would possibly create the opposite effect of what is supposedly intended because of the implicit counter affirmation.

Having said that, there is no question that intense spontaneous prayer has been associated with interesting effects. From the perspective of creative visualization, it is clear that the intense mental and emotional state entered into by spontaneous prayer is analogous to what can be achieved with creative visualization. I would simply caution the student not to inadvertently embark on a petitionary journey when the intention is to create a particular outcome.

You can find references to people discussing different ways of producing a better world since the world itself begun. In general, we can divide these ideas into two groups: those that are outside-in, and those that are inside-out. Outside-in are those programs, usually public, that aim at solving a particular problem. History shows that each one of these programs in the long run has produced negative unintended consequences and eventually had to be discontinued.

Inside-out ideas, on the other hand are those that occur as a fundamental change within the individual. Since each of us affects many other people all the time, by changing some of us, it is literally possible to make the world a better place.

We do not promote the use of creative visualization to solve social problems for this reason: every social solution becomes the seed of another problem. Instead, creative visualization can be used to encourage those around us, starting with each one of us, to be kinder to others, and visualize those others being kinder to others still.

You can watch a YouTube video to get an idea of what we are talking about. Simply type: "kindness boomerang" in the search box of You Tube.

We have no knowledge of, or association with, the producers of that video, or any of the advertisers that may be depicted in the video clip. Someone once showed me the clip and I was touched by the idea shown in it. When preparing this course, somehow that video came to mind, so we mention it here because we can use creative visualization to increase the likelihood of random acts of kindness happening around us. Because of the exponential propagation of kindness, we can literally have a part in making the world a better place. Thank you!

Here we present three examples that come to mind of how powerful the effect of focused intention and creative visualization can be. These examples are definitely not the only ones available or even necessarily the best ones; they are just examples that came to mind as we were preparing the course.

The first example illustrates the power of focused intention and creative visualization on one self. That is the example of Norman Cousins, related in his book Anatomy of an Illness. The second example shows the positive effect a small group of visualizers can have on a specific group of people at one time in history. Here we refer to the experiments of Dr. Elizabeth Targ during the early days of AIDS. Finally we relate the effects that a very large group of visualizer can have on the crime rate of a large city, such as Washington DC.

Norman Cousins (1915 – 1990) contracted a serious disease in 1964 from which medical specialists had never seen a full recovery, although he was told his chances were 1 in 500. He says in his book that the low likelihood of survival gave him a lot to think about and served as the motivation to formulate his own survival plan. His doctor supported Mr. cousins plan and exclaimed that there was nothing undersized about his will to live. Norman Cousins recovered completely from that illness. We take his “will to live” and decision to formulate a recovery plan to be equivalent to a focused intention and creative visualization.

Dr. Elizabeth Targ’s work was funded by agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, and published by prestigious medical journals. Dr. Targ was able to show through randomized double-blind studies that a group of AIDS patients who received distant healing experienced significantly fewer outpatient encounters, fewer hospitalizations and days of hospitalization, fewer AIDS-defining diseases, and a significantly lower illness severity level than the control group. In these experiments, up to 40 experienced visualizers worked with a large number of patients in San Francisco, California.

Finally, the World Peace Group put together what is arguably the most impressive display of the power of focused group visualizations by a large group. During the summer of 1993 up to 4000 people trained in Transcendental Meditation visualized a reduction in the rate of violent crime in Washington DC. A number of rigorous measurements and independent scrutiny showed that during that period violent crime was reduced by 23.3%, and promptly returned to typical levels once the experiment was terminated.

Imagine what we can do together!

Before we discuss what you can do, I would like to propose one idea, and make one request. The idea is simple: you don’t have to do anything you do not feel comfortable with. In fact, you don’t have to do anything you don’t strongly desire to do. This is important because, in the past, students have participated reluctantly in exercises meant for causes other than the ones they joined a class for. So, whatever your intentions for joining this class, feel free to use what you have learned only for the purposes you want to.

As for the request, you may already have guessed that it is related to the idea just presented. Please only don’t attempt to join in on these exercises if you feel fully committed to the cause presented. If you feel strongly motivated to participate in an attempt to make the world a better place, then by all means join in, but do so full heartedly.

Once you have improved your personal life sufficiently through the use of creative visualization, if you wish to join many others working to make the world a better place, you will set some time aside everyday to visualize an expanding energetic field around yourself that motivates those around you to be kind to others around them, and for the effect to be reproduced by the recipients of kindness.

Imagine if everyone around you simply became kinder to others around him or her, and those who received kindness from those around you also felt like being kind to others around them. You can see how a blanket of kindness would quickly cover the whole world, indeed making it a better place. Please keep in touch and let us know how you are doing.

Here you will find a sample guided visualization preceded by a guided relaxation that you can use for your daily “making the world a better place” exercise.

You can download the audio portion into an audio player if you wish.

This is the same guided visualization, audio only. The music in the background is used with permission. Feel free to download this visualization into your music player and enjoy it anywhere - except while driving a car!

Just as we do not need to know everything about electronics in order to use a telephone, we don’t need to know everything about much in order to use and benefit from creative visualization. But, just as in the case of the telephone, one would have to practice some procedures and sequence of tasks, the same goes for creative visualization.

The information presented in this course is by no means complete and exhaustive; in fact we do not even touch on a hypothesis as to how it all works. Instead we focus on how you can benefit from a procedure that you are entitled to and endowed with. You will find that with diligent practice it all becomes more effective and your journal entries will reflect your success.

Some of you will feel naturally inclined to participate in an attempt to make the world a better place. For those of you who feel called to join in this noble effort, I would like to say that no effort goes unnoticed by the cosmic, and that ultimately we always collect the rewards for the effort put fourth.

Finally, I want to emphasize the importance of NOT saying goodbye. This course, by design is not finished. Please make ample use of the discussion and comment features in Udemy to report the results, both personal and collective you achieve. Feel free to message with problems and questions as well, and from time to time we will update the course with responses to the more prevalent issues.

We feel excited about the opportunity to share these notions with so many wonderful people such as all of you, and look forward to a continued collaboration and the making of a better world for us all.

Blessings to all of you,

Flavio Souza-Campos