Visualize your way to victory

                  By Bayo Ogunmupe
       The older prosperity manuals are often the best. And Genevieve Behrend's books provide a charming entry point to the genre. It is fascinating to sit down with 'Your Invisible Power' after reading contemporary manifestation and 'law of attraction' books, like The Secret and Ask and It Is Given as you realize that many of their ideas are not new; with Behrend having studied and written about this material 80 years previously.
       Behrend was the pupil of the British philosopher Thomas Troward, a former judge in the Indian Punjab, who in his spare time had studied the arcane books of the East, therefrom becoming a master of metaphysics. Troward propounded the laws governing the relationship between the individual and the Universal Mind. In his book 'The Creative Process in the Individual', Troward argues that the fulfillment of our personalities is vital for the evolution of the universe. His thinking was seminal to the emergence of the New Thought movement and the science of the mind in the 1930s.
       Thus, Behrend summarized these ideas in her book that combines spiritual principles with anecdotes of her researches to help people appreciate their abundance. Compared to its modern counterparts, Behrend's Your Invisible Power is more focused on visualization to achieve desires. It is also distinguished by its concept that every person is God in miniature. This means that when you have feelings of lack, you have forgotten your divinity or divine connection to Divine abundance. Since you are Godlike, what your mind can conceive and believe, you can achieve.
       What we visualize tends to come into being. Use this invisible power to turn any desire into reality. There is nothing mysterious in turning our pictured desire into material reality. Everything in the whole world, from your hat, shoe and cellphone, first existed as a picture in the mind. It then comes into existence as a projection of human thought. Through the law of growth and attraction, whatever you desire becomes yours.
       Behrend's first point is that visualization brings order to your mind. The Universe and the Mind behind it is perfectly in order and your use of vivid imagination allows this order to be expressed. We now have airplanes and telephones because someone first visualized that such things should exist. All great advances are a triumph of principle over circumstances. Reality is a blurry concept when you consider that all things are first created in the human mind. At the moment that they are being imagined, they are already part real. Which is why whatever you imagine you can achieve because of your divine nature.
       Therefore, in visualizing the object of your ambition, you are not changing natural laws; you are only fulfilling them. A strong mental image summons the mysterious but unfailing law of attraction to allow your ambition to materialize in accordance with your imagination. With such strong images, the success of your goal takes on an air of inevitability. We all create our futures first in the mind before they are played out in physical reality. For example, the United States railway magnate James Hill, whose railroad stretched from one U.S. coast to the other, first built it in his mind decades before the first track was actually laid. What Hill did to achieve his goal was to visualize what he wanted strongly enough to pull him into action. Upon all, action is the soul of success. Without action nothing can be achieved. All rests on the Biblical promise: "All things whatsoever thou wilt, believe thou hast received, and all thou shalt receive."