More than a decade ago, I would have never linked physics with visualization. After all, imagination is a creative outlet that is often played with to escape stressful conditions aka day-dreaming. It seemed unrealistic to assign a scientific function to creative thought or consider that it could be applied beyond legendary story-telling. This is far from the truth.
Before technology captured our attention and compressed it into ten second snapshots, and small bytes of information to influence what we imagine and perceive, we could transport ourselves anywhere and create conditions that we dreamt of in our own minds. Just through the power of words, people gathered together to share and tell stories. Words, tone of voice, gestures of the storyteller fuelled the imagination to create it’s own snapshot inside the mind.
We can still imagine. What makes it more interesting is that quantum theory supports visualization’s potential to transform our physical reality.
Quantum physics posits that infinite potential and possibilities exist until the observer perceives it. Only then, will all possibilities, time and space collapse into a single option. This phenomenon was verified in experiments with optics and a double-slit [controlled interference]. Initially, this experiment was conducted to prove that light travelled as waves and as particles. But in 1961, the same double-slit experiment was conducted using electron beams. What happened was unusual. Scientists produced results depending on how they perceived the experiment. Perception, in other words, was responsible for creating outcomes.
The prospect of shifting science results through perception gives the entire experience of visualization a more powerful and quantum physics attribute. Science also confirms that our imagination can influence our inner space; our physiology and our memory. We already know that people who believe that they will recover from an illness or injury are thirty percent more likely to succeed compared to others who have a pessimistic outlook.
Is there a difference between imagination and visualization?
Imagination allows us to receive random ideas and images. Thoughts float through our minds. It helps us to imagine and play out different scenarios, solve complex problems, create great stories or open our thoughts to new ways of looking at things.
Visualization, on the other hand, creates desired images/conditions in our minds and then focuses on how we feel and perceive them. It is a more focused form of imagination. Although, some might consider the two inseparable because creative thought sits at the heart of both. And, because imagination is needed to be engaged first in order to give rise to focus and visualization. Visualization also uses self-mastery to focus, to imagine and perceive how a desired outcome actually feels. The mere act of perceiving has quantum physics backing incredible results.
No one knows for sure how imagination works, exactly, with energy inside or outside the body. But what matters is how we observe what we visualize and create and how it makes us feel. The results will speak for themselves.
“To raise questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science”. Albert Einstein
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