By: Hettie Basil Lighttower

Last week we got in touch with our imaginations. We reminisced about our youth and childhood and the times we shared with our imaginary friends. We imagined a caterpillar turning into a butterfly and imagined a caterpillar using its imagination. I once learned from a lady who opened up a local art center that this center was a dream of hers. She wanted to provide a safe haven for children and adults alike to have a space to do art free of judgement or criticism. You see, when she was a child in grade school and the assignment in the art class was to draw and then paint an elephant, she got discouraged. After drawing her elephant she painted it her favorite color. Her teacher scolded her saying “Have you ever seen a purple elephant!!? Elephants are gray not purple!”. She was embarrassed and heartbroken and never wanted to do art again. She followed her imagination and someone smashed it.
Let me ask you…. Has this happened to you? Was there a time in your life when you recall great sadness or disapproval or embarrassment through criticism because you had used your imagination? “Boy do you have a vivid imagination” or “you are letting your imagination run wild” or “it’s only your imagination” or “stop day-dreaming”. I have heard all of these in my young life. Sadly, the grownups involved, primarily teachers and relatives, did not know how to foster proper use of imagination in these instances. It was a foreign concept that imagination was useful in ways pertaining to anything serious. Nor did they know the magnificence of it and that it could actually be used for manifestation!!! Unless you are fiction writer or cartoonist or inventor, imagination has had no proper place in the disciplined world of accountability. And when there is work to be done, there’s just no time for it! At least that’s what was ingrained in me over the years. I’m lucky that my imagination stayed intact at all with the piled-on responsibilities and requirements of being successful in life.
In recent decades, I have learned a few things about imagination. But before that, I will go back to a conversation in the mid-80s that I had with my grandfather. He was intrigued by the new thing called micro chips that had been developed and put into computers to make them work. This was before cell phones. But he acquired one of these chips and was showing it to me and was amazed at how much information is stored in this little thing about the size of a nickel. “This little thing holds so much information. And think about how small it is and think about how large our brains are. We should be able to hold so much more information in our own brains. Our brains are so powerful, but we don’t know how to use 90% of it!” he exclaimed. “There is so much more that our brains can do but we haven’t tapped into it”, he added. I was intrigued by this proclamation and was humbled that he was entrusting me with this valuable secret about our brains. But he did not talk about it again and it wasn’t until after he died 10 years later or more that I discovered certain books from his library that explored the greater potential about our brains and mental power. To this day I am grateful to my grandfather for having that moment with me and it has stayed vivid. It is as if a magical event took place that day and this was erected like a monument in my inner imaginary garden.
I’ve had the opportunity to read these books of his and learn about meditation in college. Both the books of his library and the knowledge of guided meditation have made it very clear that our imaginations are more than a child-like past time. Imagination is the beginning of creating anything. ANYTHING. Creating something and bringing it into your life is called manifesting. The most common and most familiar form of this is called PRAYER! We don’t think of prayer as using our imagination. However, do we not visualize what it is that we are asking for when we pray? We visualize or imagine a person well, or we imagine our bills get paid, or we imagine we are safe in a situation and then we pray and ask God to make it happen. We have to imagine it AND HAVE FAITH in it because it is not physically present before our eyes or the event has not happened yet and we are imagining how it needs to go for the best outcome and we ask for God’s help. Some of you are probably thinking…. Now wait a minute!! ie… You: “It is not a game but very real when we pray to God.” YES! Indeed, YOU get it…. not a game. It is very serious and we have all seen God answer prayer in our favor. This is the main point I am trying to make. Prayer does real things. Imagination is NOT A GAME or child’s play. It is a real thing. It does real things. It is the building block to our reality and the things we have in life. Our thoughts are even real things. We just can’t SEE thoughts or prayer or imagination but they exist and accomplish much for us. These unseen forces are as much REAL if not more real than our actual physical world.
Imagination is not to be shunned or stifled. It just needs to be understood and “seen” for what it is. It is a super power we all have and we all take for granted. It is found in one of those hidden gray-matter areas of that 90% that we haven’t “tapped” into yet. Or have we but not recognized it (our example of prayer for example). Next week I will talk about heart/brain coherence(feel free to look that term up before next week) and how we can use our imagination to assist in the healing of our bodies.