How To Use Visioning To Find Your Life Purpose | Michael Beckwith

So I want to ask you guys, how many of you here use creative visualization? Most of you would say yes, because creative visualization has been popularized through media, through television, through documentaries, through books, for almost four decades now. It started with Shakti Gawain's famous book, Creative Visualization. But you can go back to the 70s, and Jose Silva was teaching it as part of the Silva method. But today, there are techniques beyond creative visualization to help you move towards a vision in your life. So what I wanted do is I want to share with you the big limitation of creative visualization and what I learned on how to overcome this limitation and a far better, more advanced process that Michael Beckwith calls visioning. So Michael Beckwith is the founder of the Agape Spiritual Center. He's an incredible teacher. I've learned a ton from him. One of the things that Beckwith and I have discussed is that there is a problem with goal setting in the modern world. The problem with how we set goals is that often these goals are not set based on what is inside our heart, what is coming to us from our own inner self, but instead what is coming to us from outside influence, from our media, our society, our religions, our cultural expectations, our parents, our friends. And so we're not really setting goals that come from within. We're setting goals that come from outside. But the second problem is that we're setting goals based on a limited paradigm of what life is. How many people here, at some point in their 40s, have woken up or are going to wake up going, what on earth happened to my life? How did I end up in this job that at one point I dreamed about, but now I feel so miserable, and how did I end up in such an unfulfilling life? Health, body, marriage. You fill in the blank. So the problem that's going on there is that from an early age, we are taught to copy, to follow goals that come from an outside influence. So rather than truly turn our life into a beautiful canvas, a beautiful painting of our own design, we are pretty much photocopying the goals, the lives, the ideas of other people. Now, creative visualization then becomes nothing more than a way to bring into your life rapid photocopies of other people's rooms, of other people's visions, of other people's idea of. Of what success might be. So the way to overcome this is to put goal setting and put creative visualization aside for a moment and go into a deeper process that Beckwith calls visioning. Visioning is about tuning in and asking yourself whether it's from your soul or from whatever higher power you believe in. What are you meant to do? What are you here to do? Tapping into that and then moving towards that vision for yourself. Here's Michael Beckwith explaining the difference between creative visualization and vision.

Everyone pretty much knows about creative imagination or visualization. Many people have cut their teeth on that kind of practice. You see what you want, you feel that you have it. You bring it into manifestation. There's nothing wrong with visualization at all. It's a wonderful evolutionary stage in an individual that's walking the spiritual path. The only thing about visualization is that it has a level of limitation. Because you can only visualize what you know already. You can take a picture out of a magazine and do a vision board. You can look at somebody else's life and visualize that for yourself. You know, so it's within a certain paradigm. Visioning is catching an idea outside of your present paradigm so that you're making yourself receptive to the spiritual idea that the universe wants to birth through you that you may not know about. In other words, you may be enculturated by your society, by your religion. In the Western world, we have all these models of success. You're successful if you have a house and two kids, a picket fence, two cars. You know, people get that and they're not happy. But someone could visualize that and manifest it and realize, oh, my God, I'm still unhappy. Visioning is different. Visioning begins with the spiritual idea that there is planted within each and every one of us a powerful destiny, A powerful, unique way that the universe wants to express itself. So instead of telling the universe what we want, we instead ask a question. How does what does you know? What is the universe's idea of my life? We begin to catch that idea. What is my growing edge? What must I become to manifest that vision? What do I already have in my house that I can use to serve the vision? What must I let go of? What does willingness look like? We ask a different kind of question because here's a hierarchy of questions. Behind every problem, there's a question trying to ask itself. Universe being progressive. Behind every question, there's an answer trying to reveal itself. Behind every answer, there's an action trying to take place. And behind every action, there's a way of life trying to be born. So a problem. The word problem comes from emblem. It's emblematic of the content of consciousness that's being projected onto the screen of life. Because the universe is progressive, the universe wants you to ask a question. So if you have a problem, you have to ask a question. What is the nature of reality? What is the nature of prosperity? What is the nature of love? The universe will start to answer that. After it answers that, he'll start to give you an action to take. And then it'll birth itself into a way of living. So visioning begins with the question. You can say, what is God's idea of itself as my life? So analogies are poor sometimes to use. But if an acorn were to go into the visioning process, it would say, you know, what is God's idea of itself as my life? It would begin to see an oak tree. An oak tree that had never existed before. An oak tree that is so unique that there would be no other oak tree like it. And it would, it would say, what do I need? What do I need to become? For this oak tree to manifest well, you're going to have to die to your littleness. You know that the acorn is going to have to crack open. It's going to have to be planted in the right condition. It's going to have to let go of its smallness. It's going to have to embrace the infinite field of divine possibility within its own. Eventually the condition is right. It becomes an oak tree. There are things within us that we have no idea that are even there because we've been indoctrinated by the society in which we are living. A high tech, low touch society, consumerism, materialism, fear, doubt, worry. And so we visualize what we think we want to be happy. Nothing wrong with that. But beyond that, there's a gift, a talent, a capacity within us all that's trying to emerge. Robert Browning indicated, you know, there's an inner splendor, you know, that's trying to escape. So the visioning process invites the inner splendor to come up. That may shock our surface mind. It may surprise us as to what's trying to emerge and what we must become. And now, outside of our present paradigm, the miraculous is there. It's something trying to happen through us. And we keep growing and growing. So visualization is a stage of our spiritual growth. It teaches us there's a law in the universe, teaches us the friendliness of the universe. It teaches us that our thoughts transmute themselves into things. It teaches us that things don't just happen, they happen just. It's a good teaching stage. But then once we become comfortable and realize that the universe is friendly, we can begin to give up control and ask a higher question. And now we lose control. We move into surrender. That's the big game.

So if you enjoyed that idea, I want to invite you to to join me and Michael Beckwith on a deeper conversation on visioning, where you're actually going to learn how to bring visioning into your life in an effective way so that you're not seeking to manifest other people's ideas or other people's goals, but you truly get to live life like an artist and create a beautiful vision for your life that's coming from within. Join us on this master class.