Fantasy Shows What’s Possible — Visualization Creates What’s Real
You can look at creating from within as a spectrum. On the easier but less powerful end is fantasy. On the more difficult—and far more powerful end—is visualization.
The purpose of fantasy is to see what is possible. Then go for it or don’t. The purpose of visualization is different: you’ve already decided, and now you are doing the inner work to bring it into reality. Visualization is the use of focused attention to create a circumstance in your life that is not yet realized. If it were already realized, there would be no need to visualize it.
The chasm between fantasy and visualization is great, depending on how far away emotionally you think you are from that circumstance.
Why Fantasy Feels Good — and Why It Eventually Hurts
It’s great to get the lay of the land with fantasy, but it’s not recommended to yearn for a circumstance that you don’t have, and you don’t intend to bring into your life.
If you want to fantasize about it so badly, then that is a clue that you really want to bring it into your life.
Logically it doesn’t make sense to continue fantasizing about something you want when you can bring it into your life with visualization.
Emotionally it makes perfect sense to keep fantasizing. Fantasy lets you enjoy a piece of the life you like without facing the fear and effort that is required in order to realize it through visualization.
Continued fantasy creates more yearning. When fantasy ends, it leaves an empty feeling. After the fantasy is over, there is a need to make the fantasy even bigger next time for the same payoff.
Over time this creates frustration due to a growing separation from the fantastical situation—at first on an unconscious level and eventually on a conscious level.
The Real Difference: Excitement vs Knowing
If you have ever tried to visualize something you felt was way bigger than yourself and hit a brick wall of resistance, you’re likely to have a lot of empathy for people who spend their lives in fantasy and never move to visualization.
This is most people in the world. We’ve all been there.
One way to know you’re visualizing is the quiet feeling that “I just know.” It feels simple and sort of inevitable when you’re visualizing without resistance coming up.
If you stay with it, you don’t even need to think “I just know”—the certainty becomes so normal it would be awkward to say it to yourself. It would be like breathing and saying, “I’m breathing.”
When visualization deepens, anticipation fades and is replaced by a kind of surrendered fun, marked by the feeling, “This is just how it is.”
You may feel this during the visualization—until the mind reasserts control and it seems to slip away.
Returning to the visualization again and again allows that feeling to persist even after the session ends.
One sign you’re fantasizing is the excited thought, something like “Wow that would be so great.”
You can get an immediate understanding of that by thinking about all the things you would do if you won the lottery.
Fantasy can be fun in the moment, but there is something within that is not actually owning that it can be real.
Personally, I’ve not met anyone who visualized winning the lottery and won, though I’ve heard stories about it in inner work groups and seminars.
In her autobiographical book The Contest Queen, Helen Hadsell reports winning around 5,000 sweepstakes—including a house—using visualization.
When you read about her methods, you see how disciplined she was—and, if you believe in universal energy, how inevitable her results became.
Visualization carries a quiet knowing that you’re already moving in the direction of what you see.
In fantasy, you see how great it could be but secretly think it’s not for you.
Visualization Works by Letting Go and Becoming
This is precisely how to get from one to the other: by choosing visualization and letting go of the opposition toward it.
In fantasy you see a picture of what it is like from afar.
In visualization, you see yourself in real time—as if it’s happening right now this very second.
You’re not imagining yourself there anymore. You are actually seeing yourself there.
This brings quite a few things up for the logical mind. This is where letting go comes into play.
You let go of the sense of audacity that arises within when you see and feel, “I am there now.”
You are choosing “I am there right now,” and the mind is saying, “Impossible.”
Or if not in words, the silent feeling of opposition emerges.
It’s the feeling that it’s impossible that must be let go of.
Some people use the frame that anything you can imagine already exists as a reality you can merge into through alignment.
Whether you believe this or not is irrelevant. Because adopting it will cause some of the opposition to come up so that you can release it.
The next thing you do, after you can see yourself there in real time, is to feel what it feels like, as if you were there.
If your visualization is about being a hilarious fun person, then you feel what that would feel like.
To laugh and make others laugh. Have a fun time with it, because in reality when you obtain it, it’s going to be fun and the visualization should match what it will be like.
Give yourself permission to have a good time.
But just make sure you are seeing it in real time, and not as some far-off distant thing.
The final—and most powerful—step is to merge into the person you see and look through their eyes, which are your eyes.
As you do this, feel what they feel.
After you can do this a few times, it won’t be hard to keep doing.
The more you end a visualization, stand up, and stay the person you became, the more it shows up as reality in your life.