Ayo Arowolo: Set your imagination loose

In the last lesson, we learnt that our mind is the most important asset we have and we should constantly sharpen it by insightful reading. One idea produced from such habit and correctly executed can turn you into a multimillionaire. So you need to engage your mind.

Interestingly, the next lesson from my mentor is an extension of that truth as you would soon discover. Savour every bit of it. You will be blessed.

It is becoming clear that there are many sides to my Financial Mentor that I possibly don’t know. I walked into his study at exactly 8.00a.m. that Saturday morning as agreed but I was welcomed with a curious coincidence. From all the directions inside the study, there was the spirit-lifting jazz music of Yanni, blasting forth in low pitch. This is particularly surprising to me. It has almost become my trade-mark practice at home that any time I want to go into serious meditation or prolonged intellectual work, Yanni’s most popular title: If I could tell you, is the only one that takes me to the correct state of mind. My children know this. Once Yanni is on, nothing else matters except the assignment at hand. Nobody comes near my study. Not for any reason whatsoever.

Since my friend had warned me that we were going to do a prolonged mental exercise, I had thought that the only way I could flow into the programme without stress is having Yanni playing in the background. So, I had brought my Yanni CD along hoping to convince my friend to allow me to play it while the lesson was on. But here is Yanni blasting away.

Nothing happens by coincidence; everything is ordained. My Mentor walked in while I was still in that state of surprise and excitement. I pulled out my Yanni CD and asked how he knew about my fascination with Yanni. His reply: “My friend, I know far more about you than you think I do.” We both laughed over this. He asked me to share with him what I was able to make out of the two books (The Wonders of Imagination by Sam Adeyemi and Releasing the Supernatural by David Oyedepo) and the four audio cassettes he gave to me at the end of the lesson last month. We both reviewed the themes of the books and the audio cassettes.

“That is very interesting. I am impressed with your sense of recall, but I will help you to push it to an astounding level at the end of today’s exercise. He briskly walked to the notice board and replaced the earlier quote with another one from Genesis 11: 6: And the Lord said, Behold the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do.

God wants us to think in pictures. “Next month, I am going to start giving you the practical capsules that you must take as you begin the journey to the life of abundance where you can fulfil your God-given assignment on earth without any need to worry about money. But this month’s lesson is important. It will show you how ignorance of God’s key principle has pushed many people into a life of frustration and sub-optimal realisation of the God-ordained purpose of their lives. It will teach you how to avoid this trap and chart your way into a life of abundance and prosperity.

“Today, I am going to talk to you on the power of imagination and how you can re-programme your mind to think the way God wants you to think, in pictures. Your mind thinks in pictures and God wants us to use our imagination creatively and positively to claim the promises He has put aside for us.

Psychologists have come up with the astounding discovery that over a long time, the line between what your mind imagined and what actually happens in reality thins out. Stated differently, what you picture vividly in your mind is what you ultimately get in real life. There is nothing that happens to you now that you had not imagined. Some people picture themselves having marital crisis, and turbulence is what they get in their matrimonial home. Some have vivid picture of financial crisis and mounting debts. They will get what they have pictured in their mind in real life. This is a spiritual law that cannot be broken. If the vivid picture you have in your mind is that of yourself and your family living a life of abundance, travelling to countries of your choice on vacation, riding the car of your choice- that is precisely what you will get. Successful people replay the picture of their past achievement and also constantly paint the correct picture of their desired future. Your picture is your future. Your imagination can take you where your physical body cannot be in space and time. You have to change the picture in your mind to reflect what you want to happen in your life.

Consider the widow of Zarephat (as told in the Christian Bible). Until Elijah surfaced in her house, the lady had a dominant picture of want, of famine, and of death. For a miracle to happen in her life, Elijah had to change the picture in her mind to that of abundance, prosperity and life. You cannot change your circumstances until you change the dominant picture in your mind.

Let me illustrate this with this story I read sometime ago. There was a man who was always developing inexplicable cramping pains, boils and violent fever once he saw a rose flower. Many medical doctors had attempted without success to cure the man for years. Then one day, by providence, he met Dr. Macdonald Baynes, a mind doctor who after all examinations came to the conclusion that the patient’s problem was a product of wrong imagination. He did not disclose that to the man, he simply told him to come back the following week after he would have ordered a powerful drug that would cure his illness permanently. What Bayne did a few hours to the time the patient would come, was to paint a paper into a beautiful rose colour and fold it to look like a real rose flower. The “rose flower” was on the doctor’s table when the patient walked in at the appointed time. Once he saw the rose, pains, fever and boils started to manifest instantly. The doctor later dismantled the paper, demonstrating to the patient that his sickness was imagined. It was discovered after questioning that when the man was young, he used to present beautiful rose flowers to a girl he was dating. The girl later jilted him and that made him very sick. Ever since then, he had unconsciously associated roses with sickness. But a few days after his mind was de-programmed, he regained his health without using any drug! You can see that imagination is powerful.

“That is what I am saying. Your mind thinks in pictures and can learn in this mode with the speed of light. Your mind is more powerful than the largest computer that has ever been made and that will ever be made. Just like you can file information in a computer folder, once your memory is trained, it can file an astounding volume of information in a systematic manner that you can recall easily later.”

My mentor took me through a rigorous training on how to recall names, events and other things.  I was left alone in the study to complete the rest of the exercise which lasted for approximately six hours broken down into sections of twenty minutes with my Mentor walking in at intervals to monitor my progress. What happened to my memory at the end of the six hours was mind-boggling. I could see my memory expanding as if I was exercising a muscle. I was able to create more than two hundred and fifty folders in my memory to which I can systematically glue incredible amount of information I want to recall later.

“Let us stop here today’ my mentor said as he accompanied me to my car and I bade him bye.

NUGGET

• Create a picture of anything you want to achieve. Do you want to build a house, buy a car?
• Get an image of that car and place it where you can see it
• Begin to imagine yourself driving in that car
• Figure out what you will need to do to get the money. Start to plan towards the acquisition (don’t day-dream!)
• It may take years, but if you don’t let the picture go, that object will be yours.