Power of Mental Imagery | Page 7

you, give your
undivided attention to your consciousness of them.

THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION

[Illustration]
CHAPTER V
THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION
[Sidenote: The Process of Creative Imagination]
There is another type of imagination from the purely reproductive
memory imagination of which we have been speaking in this book.
There is also Creative Imagination.
Creative Imagination is more than mere memory. It takes the elements
of the past as reproduced by memory and rearranges them. It forms new
combinations out of the material of the past. It forms new combinations
of ideas, emotions and their accompanying impulses to muscular
activity, the elements of mental "complexes." It recombines these
elements into new and original mental pictures, the creations of the
inventive mind.
[Sidenote: Business and Financial Imagination]
No particular profession or pursuit has a monopoly of creative
imagination. It is not the exclusive property of the poet, the artist, the
inventor, the philosopher. We tell you this because you have heard all
your life of the poetic imagination, the artistic imagination, and so on,
but it is rare indeed that you have heard mention of the business

imagination.
The fact is no man can succeed in any pursuit unless he has a creative
imagination. Without creative imagination the human race would still
be living in caves. Without creative imagination there would be no
ships, no engines, no automobiles, no corporations, no systems, no
plans, no business. Nothing exists in all the world that had not a
previous counterpart in the mind of him who designed it. And back of
all is the creative mind of God.
[Sidenote: How Wealth is Created]
Mind is supreme. Mind shapes and controls matter. Every concrete
thing in the world is the product of a thinking consciousness. The richly
tinted canvas is the physical expression of the artist's dream. The great
factory, with its whirling mechanisms and glowing furnaces, is the
material manifestation of the promoter's financial imagination. The
jeweled ornament, the book, the steamship, the office building, all are
but concrete realizations of human thought molded out of formless
matter.
Mind, finite and infinite, is eternally creative and creating in the
organization of formless matter and material forces into concrete
realities.
[Sidenote: The Klamath Philosophy]
Says Max Müller in his "Psychological Religion": "The Klamaths, one
of the Red Indian tribes, believe in a Supreme God whom they call 'The
Most Ancient One,' 'Our Old Father,' or 'The Old One on High.' He is
believed to have created the world--that is, to have made plants,
animals and man. But when asked how the Old Father created the
world, the Klamath philosopher replies: 'By thinking and willing.'"
[Sidenote: How Men Get Things]
We get what we desire because the things we desire are the things we
think about. Love begets love. The man who is looking for trouble

generally finds it. Despair is the forerunner of disaster, and fear brings
failure, because despair and fear are the emotional elements attendant
upon thoughts of defeat.
Behind every thing and every act is, and always has been,
thought--thought of sufficient intensity to shape and fashion the
physical event.
Mind, and mind alone, possesses the inscrutable power to create.
Your career is ordered by the thoughts you entertain. Mental pictures
tend to accomplish their own realization. Therefore, be careful to hold
only those thoughts that will build up rather than tear down the
structure of your fortunes.
[Sidenote: Prerequisites to Achievement]
Creative imagination is an absolute prerequisite to material
achievement.
The business man must scheme and plan and devise and foresee. He
must create in imagination today the results that he is to achieve
tomorrow. He must combine the elements of his past experiential
complexes into a mental picture of future events as he would have them.
Riches are but the material realization of a financial imagination. The
wealth of the world is but the sum total of the contributions of the
creative thoughts of the successful men of all ages.
[Sidenote: How to Take Radical Steps in Business]
With these principles before you, you can plainly see that the creative
imagination must be called upon in the solution of every practical
question in every hour of the business day.
Consider its part in two phases of your business life--first, when you
are contemplating a radical change in your business situation; second,
when you are seeking to improve some particular department of your
business.

[Sidenote: How to Take Radical Steps in Business]
In the determination of how best you can better yourself, either in your
present field of action or by the selection of a new one, take the
following steps: (1) Pass in review before the mind's eye your present
situation; (2) Your possible ways of betterment; (3) The various
circumstances and individuals that will aid in this or that line of
self-advancement;