Two-bit Guru | Visualizing What You Want | Photo of a visioning board.

Do you visualize what you want and then some time after discover that very thing in some unexpected way? Visualizing a desired outcome is something I have learned from a number of sources. I practiced the various techniques over several years with mixed results. Sometimes it seemed to work, more often it didn’t.

I tried seeing a desired object in my mind, sometimes picturing myself in possession of it. I made several visioning boards, pasting up magazine cutouts of big houses, a lake, a nifty car, money in cash and coin, packing it all in to my dream collage, or what I imagined my dream ought to be. Once as a test, I pictured a one-pound butter dish, but no such dish ever appeared in my path.

Visualizing what you want seems at first consideration to be a reasonable way to go about finding things. If you have an image in your mind, shouldn’t that image manifest itself in the material realm? If not, I asked myself, what kind of maladroit mystic are you, anyway?

Eventually it dawned on me that my visualizations were about thinking up things that I wanted, or events I wanted to have happen. With the visioning boards I had to work at it to think about what I wanted and there I was, settling for the cliches of materialistic life: house, car, money. So? The visualizations were constructions of the conscious mind and they were about wanting. Like asking God for things in the material realm rather than asking for, say, good feelings.

A different technique that has worked for me is to not visualize at all but to leave it up to the universe entirely. Here’s how it works for me. I once had the bright idea to mount a small squirrel cage blower on the exhaust duct of my root cellar. I didn’t want to pay retail. Without thinking about it, I knew that the Restore Store had one. I’d never seen such a blower there before but, sure enough, they had one squirrel cage blower for a couple of dollars.

It seems to me that the squirrel cage experience, and many, many more like it, were successful because it was less about wanting and more about needing. I needed a blower. The universe provided. I didn’t go through the process of picturing the blower, or picturing it in my possession. I didn’t think about it at all. I just knew.

We are better off not wanting but rather, engaging in our activities and letting the Source guide us to what is best for us. Even though I don’t understand it, I know that this happens when we are in tune with the universe, when have feelings of good will and harmony.