MAKE PROPER USE OF YOUR IMAGINATION: The placebo effect can appear as quite the miracle when mind's use of imagination moves in the dimension of the positive.

There are Five Modifications of the Mind

THEY ARE: RIGHT KNOWLEDGE, WRONG KNOWLEDGE, IMAGINATION, SLEEP AND MEMORY.

Imagination - The Third Modification Of The Mind

The placebo effect can appear as quite the miracle when mind's use of imagination moves in the dimension of the positive. Imagination is a double-edged sword. It can also imagine negatively. It can cause much death & destruction when its reigns are not appropriately taken up & used creatively.

The Third modification is imagination. Mind has the faculty to imagine. It is good, it is beautiful. All that is beautiful has come through imagination. Paintings, art, dance, music, everything that is beautiful has come through the imagination. But everything that is ugly, that has also come through the imagination. Hitler, Mao, Mussolini they have all come through imagination.

Hitler imagined a world of supermen. And he believed in Friedrich Nietzsche who has said, "Destroy all those who are weak. Destroy all those who are not super. Leave only supermen on the earth." So he destroyed. Just imagination, just utopian imagination - that just by destroying the weak, just by destroying the ugly, just by destroying the physically crippled you will have a beautiful world. But the very destruction is the most ugly thing in the world possible - the very destruction.

But he was working through imagination. He had an imagination, a utopian imagination - the most imaginative man! Hitler is one of the most imaginative. And his imagination became so fantastic and so mad that for his imaginative world, he tried to destroy this world completely. His imagination had gone mad.

Imagination can give you poetry and painting and art, and imagination can give you madness also. It depends on how you use it. All the great scientific discoveries have been through imagination - people who could imagine, who could imagine the impossible. Now we can fly into the air, now we can go to the moon.

These are deep imaginations. Man has been imagining for centuries, millennia, how to fly, how to go to the moon. Every child is born with the desire to go to the moon, to catch the moon. Through imagination creativity comes, but through imagination destruction also.

Imagination is the third mode of mind. You can use it in a wrong way, and then it will destroy you. You can use it in a right way. And, suddenly your body is healed.

One of the most famous American actresses, Greta Garbo, has written a memoir. She was an ordinary girl, just a homely, ordinary girl, very poor, and working in a barber shop just for small payment, and she would put soap on the customers' faces. For three years she was doing that.

One day one American film director was there in that barber shop, and she was putting soap on his face, and just the way Americans are - he may not have even meant it - he simply looked in the mirror, the reflection of the girl, and said, "How beautiful!" And Greta Garbo was born that very moment!

She writes: suddenly she became different; she had never thought herself beautiful; she couldn't conceive of it. And she has never heard anybody saying that she was beautiful. For the first time she also looked in the mirror and the face was different - this man has made her beautiful. And the whole life changed. She followed the man and became a most famous film actress.

What happened? Just a hypnosis, a hypnosis through a word "beautiful" - worked. It works; it becomes chemical. Everybody believes something about himself. That belief becomes reality because that belief starts working on you.

Imagination is a force, but it is a conjured-up force, imagined force. You can use it and you can be used by it. If you can use it, it will be helpful, but if you are used by it, it is fatal, it is dangerous. Imagination can become madness any moment; imagination can be helpful if through it, you create a situation for your inner growth and crystallization.

Many experiments have been done. Say to a child, "You are dull. You cannot do anything; you cannot solve this mathematical problem, and give him the problem and tell him, 'Now try,' s/he will not be able to solve it. You have closed the door. Say to the child, 'You are intelligent and I have not seen any intelligent boy or girl like you are; at your stage, for your age, you are overly-intelligent. You show many potentialities; you can solve any problem. Now try this," and s/he will be able to solve it. You have given imagination. And they will use it accordingly.

Émile Coué, one of the great psychologists of the West, helped millions of people just through imagination to be cured of many, many diseases. His formula was very simple. He will say that, "Just you start feeling that you are okay. Just go on repeating inside the mind, I am getting better and better. Every day I am getting better. In the night while you fall asleep, go on thinking you are healthy, and you are getting healthier every moment, and by the morning you will be the healthiest person in the world. Go on imagining."

And he helped millions of people. Even incurable diseases were cured. It looked like a miracle; it is nothing. It is just a basic law: your mind follows imagination.

It can be as simply as listening to song, and repeating it to yourself throughout the day. Take a song, a song with positive lyrics, and repeat to yourself throughout the day. With enough repetition it becomes a mantra. It moves into the unconscious layer of the mind. It goes on & on. The seed is planted. The effects can then manifest into your reality.

Take a simple song... make it a mantra... and then, stop going to see the doctor.

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SOURCE: PATANJALI YOGA SUTRAS VOL.1