Prophet

I received this email from Patti yesterday and I wanted to share this with everyone.

YOU ARE A PROPHET

Your imagination is the single most important asset you possess. It's your
power to create mental pictures of things that don't exist yet and that
you want to bring into being. It's the magic wand you use to shape your
future.

And so in your own way, you are a prophet. You generate countless
predictions every day. Your imagination is the source, tirelessly churning
out images of what you will be doing later.

The featured prophecy of the moment may be as simple as a psychic
impression of yourself eating a fudge brownie at lunch or as monumental
as a daydream of some year building your dream home by a lake or sea.

Your imagination is a treasure when it spins out scenarios that are aligned
with your deepest desires. In fact, it's an indispensable tool in creating
the life you want; it's what you use to form images of the conditions
you'd like to inhabit and the objects you hope to wield. Nothing manifests
on this planet unless it first exists as a mental picture.

But for most of us, the imagination is as much a curse as a blessing.
We're often just as likely to use it to conjure up premonitions that are at
odds with our conscious values. That's the result of having absorbed toxic
programming from the media and from our parents at an early age and
from other influential people in our past.

Fearful fantasies regularly pop up into our awareness, many disguising
themselves as rational thoughts and genuine intuitions. Those fearful
fantasies may hijack our psychic energy, directing it to exhaust itself in
dead-end meditations.

Every time we entertain a vision of being rejected or hurt or frustrated,
every time we rouse and dwell on a memory of a painful experience, we're
blasting ourselves with a hex.

Meanwhile, ill-suited longings are also lurking in our unconscious mind,
impelling us to want things that aren't good for us and that we don't
really need. Anytime we surrender to the allure of these false and trivial
and counterproductive desires, our imagination is practicing a form of
black magic.

This is the unsavory aspect of the imagination that the Zen Buddhists
deride as the "monkey mind." It's the part of our mental apparatus that
endlessly spins out pictures that zip around with the energy of an
agitated animal. If we can stop locating our sense of self in the relentless
surge of the monkey mind's slapdash chatter, we can be fully attuned to
the life that's right in front of us. Only then are we able to want what we
actually have.

But whether our imagination is in service to our noble desires or in the
thrall of compulsive fears and inappropriate yearnings, there is one
constant: The prophecies of our imagination tend to be accurate. Many of
our visions of the future do come to pass. The situations we expect to
occur and the experiences we rehearse and dwell on are all-too-often
reflected back to us as events that confirm our expectations.
Does that mean our mental projections create the future? Let's consider
that possibility. What if it's at least partially true that what we expect will
happen does tend to materialize?

Here's the logical conclusion: It's downright stupid and self-destructive to
keep infecting our imaginations with pictures of loss and failure, doom and
gloom, fear and loathing. The far more sensible approach is to expect
blessings.

That's one reason why I'm reverent in composing my messages for you. If
I'm to be one of the influences you invite into the intimate sanctuary
where you hatch your self-fulfilling prophecies, I want to conspire with
you to disperse fear and invoke relaxation and joy.

(thank you, Rob Brezsny)