It can be said that man is a product of his past choices. And his past thoughts and actions not only created his present conditions, but they do far more than that. His memories of the past bind him to his present conditions. The past is alive in his imagination as he reacts emotionally to his memories. The past lives in the realm of imagination, and it is real.
As you are seated here now reading this, you can close your eyes and imagine a place that you have just left. Maybe you are now at home, and you can imagine your office, or the supermarket which you frequent. Your office and supermarket, although these places are not present to your sense of touch, sight, smell right this moment, but they exist in your imagination. And you call them real. So it is with your Past. Your past is as real as the supermarket or office that you can imagine now in your mind’s eye. All places and events that are not perceived by your 5 senses now are alive in your imagination.
Man carries around with him a reality that he created in his imagination. The Past influences our Present, and our Present affects our Future. By changing our imagination the past, present or future, we can create a change in our life.
Late one night after doing some writing I was cooking install soup noodle, and while I was taking the bowl of hot soup to the table the bowl of soup which was filled too full to the brim, spilled onto my right hand and I was scalded by the hot boiling soup. The skin on my hand was red, and the pain was unbearable. The burning sensation continued for the whole night. I tried putting my hand in a bowl of cold water, it didn’t help. Then before I went to sleep, I decided to revise and change the past. I imagined the event differently that my hand was never scalded. I imagined to the point that it was so vivid as if it were real.
The next morning, I awoke and I was puzzled at first why there was a small bowl of cold water next to my bed (I had used the cold water to soak my hand to ease the burning sensation the night before). Then I remembered what actually happened. I felt my hand, the was no redness, no pain, nothing that indicated that I was scalded the night before. All that remained was a bowl of water next to my bed to remind me of what really happened – yet that reality seemed so distant to me. In my mind, the revised past seemed more real and more valid than the actual event. Now this revised past has become alive in my imagination. It was as though I came from that revised past.
(You may think, “Well, just boiling hot water, of course nothing serious happened.” Well, just 2 weeks ago I was in a hotel bathroom and turned on the hot water to wash my hands. The water was too hot (not boiling), and I scalded both my hands. I didn’t do revision. The next day, the skin on the back of both hands turned pink (about 0.5cm in diameter), and then over the next few days it turned black until it fell of after new skin replaced it. You will think the hot water from the hotel tap will not be as hot as the boiling hot soup I made!)
The past is alive in the world of imagination. You can create the future, and you can also create the past.
Charles Koh is the author of Creating Your Personal Reality(available from amazon.com) and Secret Techniques Of Manifesting With Imagination.
