There is no legitimate reason why that which you imagine cannot have a place in your everyday earthly existence. You may say I’m a dreamer, but…
There are different levels on which a dream can come true. For instance, a person may think, “I’d like to paint.” To make that happen, a person could simply go to the nearest arts and crafts store to pick up the equipment and supplies, then go home and put brush to canvas. Voila! Color!
Eventually the thought comes, “I’d like to show my paintings somewhere.” Resistance mounts. Galleries are full. There isn’t much receptivity in general. People other than friends aren’t enthusiastic about your work. What’s wrong? At this point, you can lose interest or confidence. You may take a self-negating attitude and never show anything to anyone. Or, you may take the initiative, find out how to improve your technique and you follow through by making basic improvements that lead to sweeping breakthroughs in your style. Your paintings are accepted, loved and sold to admiring art connoisseurs.
The key element in realizing your goals is intention. By this I mean will, volition, determination, decision, passion and resolution. These are all synonyms taken straight from my thesaurus. Without this frame of mind, nothing happens. Wayne Dyer says in his book, The Power of Intention, “Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change.”
We make things happen by our will. This goes well beyond the arts. Any aspect of life is governed by our will. Are we always successful in making our dreams come true? Obviously not, but it doesn’t mean it can’t happen. When we apply ourselves to reaching a goal, we are likely to draw closer to that reality. Dogged persistence and high energy will bring it more and more into focus. At the bottom of it, though, is not just activity. It’s that decision piece that formulates the new reality–a song, a novel or a sculptural masterpiece.
If we fail to even ponder a potential accomplishment, it will never materialize. If we dare think about doing something we never have done before, but we think we’re not up to it, we have sunk the ship before putting it in the water. In Richard Bach’s Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, the Saviour’s Manual includes the line, “Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.”
My accomplishments are modest, but there have been a few times when I rose above my normal operating state and brought about positive change in my world of the artistic dream. At one point, I settled in Santa Barbara for the winter. I wanted to make my living as a musician and writer. I was new in town and knew few people. I practiced my music, made up largely of original songs, and started promoting to various venues where they might pay me to play. I wasn’t even that good, but I found work and supported myself through my music.
Years later, I was turning out comedy screenplays and teleplays with a good friend. The problem was we did very little marketing. When I finally sent out about twenty copies of a feature length comedy to producers, one saw how funny our work was and included us in some of his projects for a couple years afterward.
It was a couple years ago that I broke through that marketing barrier again and sent the manuscript of my novel, Boundless Trust, to approximately twenty book publishers. The dream of a lifetime materialized when it was published by Black Rose Writing. None of these accomplishments would have become reality without the intention to make them so.
To manifest our dreams, I believe there is a specific component that must be present. Ernest Holmes wrote of this in his book, The Science of Mind. It was first published in 1926 and is still in print today. He wrote about Mental Equivalents in one chapter. He discusses making a “demonstration,” a word he uses for a result everyone can see. He states, “A demonstration, like anything else in the objective life, is born out of a mental concept. The mind is the fashioning factor, and according to its range, vision and positiveness, will be the circumstance or experience.”
On the next page, he expands more, “It follows, then, that the range of our possibilities at the present time does not extend far beyond the range of our present concepts. As we bring ourselves to a greater vision, we induce a greater concept and thereby demonstrate more in our experience. In this way there is a continuous growth and unfoldment taking place.”
Visualize with absolute certainty your dreams as an artiste and they will materialize. And so it is.
