CREATIVE VISION or IMAGINATION
Men and women who have cultivated and used the great gift of Creative Vision—or Imagination—are responsible for the benefits of civilization as we know them today. Examples of this principle are all around us, though perhaps one of its clearest illustrations may be found in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In one particular scene near the beginning of the movie, an apelike creature tosses a bone into the air, and as it spirals skyward, the film transports us tens of thousands of years forward, and the flash of sunlight on the bone becomes the shine of a soaring spacecraft high above the earth.
Creative vision brought into being the motion picture project itself, the screen on which you see that scene, the videocassette player, and television set with which you may have watched it at home. Creative vision also originated everything that was used to make the motion picture: the actors’ costumes, the spacecraft models, the sets, the microphones, and the cameras. Of course, it was through creative vision that writer Arthur C. Clarke crafted his classic novel, and it was through creative vision that Stanley Kubrick turned that book into a landmark film.
That single scene epitomizes the power of the principle of creative vision as well. These lectures also epitomize the great philosophy by Napoleon Hill, the man who exercised his creative vision to bring it to us.
The imagination is the workshop wherein is fashioned the purpose of the brain and the ideals of the soul. Someone said that, and I don’t know of a better definition.
There are two forms of imagination. The first one is synthetic imagination, which consists of a combination of recognized old ideas, concepts, plans, or facts that are arranged in a new combination. New things are few and far between. As a matter of fact, when you speak of somebody having created a new idea or anything new, chances are a thousand to one that it’s not anything new but merely a reassembling of something that’s old that’s gone before.
The second form of imagination is the creative imagination. It operates through the sixth sense, has its basis in the subconscious section of the brain, and serves as the medium by which completely new facts or ideas are revealed.
Any new idea, plan, or purpose brought into the conscious mind, which is repeated and supported by emotional feeling, is automatically picked up by the subconscious brain and carried out to its logical conclusion, by whatever natural means are practical and convenient.
I’ll repeat part of that statement so you can see a very important point in it—any idea, plan, or purpose that is brought into the conscious mind and is repeated and supported by emotional feeling. In other words, ideas in your mind that do not have your emotion, enthusiasm, or faith will seldom produce any action. In order to get action, you’ve got to get emotion into your thoughts, you’ve got to have enthusiasm, or you have to have faith.
Here are some examples of applied synthetic imagination. Let’s first consider Edison’s invention of the incandescent electric lamp. You may be interested to know there is nothing new about Edison’s electric lamp. Both factors that were combined to make up the incandescent light were old and well known to the world long before Edison’s time. It remained for Thomas A. Edison to go through ten thousand different failures before he found a way to marry these two old ideas and bring them together in a new combination.
As most of you know, one of these ideas consisted in the fact that you could take and apply electrical energy to a wire, and at the point of friction, the wire would become hot and make a light. A lot of people found that out before Edison’s time. Edison’s problem was in finding some means of controlling that wire, so that when it was heated to a white heat, it would make a light and it wouldn’t burn up.
He tried all of these experiments—ten thousand, to be exact—and none of them worked. Then one day, as he lay down for one of his customary catnaps, he turned the problem over to his subconscious mind, and while he was asleep, the subconscious mind came up with the answer. I’ve always wondered why it was that he had to go through ten thousand failures before he could get his subconscious mind to act and give him the answer. He already had half of the idea, but after he woke up from that catnap, he knew that the solution to the other half of his problem consisted in the charcoal principle.
To produce charcoal, you put a pile of wood on the ground, set it on fire, then cover it over with dirt, allowing just enough oxygen to percolate through to keep the wood smoldering, but not enough to permit it to blaze. It burns away a certain part of that wood, and the part that’s left behind is called charcoal. You know, of course, that where there is no oxygen, there can be no combustion. Taking that concept with which Edison had long been familiar, he went back into the laboratory, took this wire that he had been heating with electricity, put it in a bottle, pumped the oxygen out, and sealed the bottle, cutting off all oxygen, so no oxygen could come in contact with the arc. Then, when he turned on the electrical power, it burned for eight and a half hours. To this day, that’s the principle upon which incandescent electric lamps operate. Have you ever noticed that if you drop one of those lightbulbs, it pops like a gun? Do you know why? It does that because all of the air has been drawn out of it. No oxygen is allowed inside that bulb, because if it were, the filament would quickly burn up. That’s an example of two old and simple ideas brought together through synthetic imagination.
Examine the operations of your imagination or the imagination of successful people. In a large proportion of the cases, I think you’ll find that synthetic imagination, and not creative imagination, was used. The ideas of rearranging old ideas and old concepts can be very profitable.
You may have discovered that there’s only one new principle in this philosophy that you’re studying (the law of cosmic habit force). In other words, everything here is as old as mankind, and I’ve only made one contribution that you may not have been familiar with before. What did I do? I used my synthetic imagination and I reassembled existing ideas. In other words, I started out with the salient things that go into the making of success, and I organized them in a way that they had never been organized before in the history of the world. I organized them in a simple form, where you or anyone else can take a hold of them and put them into practical use.
I often wonder why somebody else smarter than I didn’t think of that long before I did it. When we get a hold of a good idea, we’re always inclined to go back and say, “Why in the world didn’t I think of that?” Or, when you do get it, you think, “Why didn’t I get it a long time ago, when I needed the money?”
Henry Ford’s combination of the horse-drawn buggy and the steam-propelled threshing machine is nothing other than the use of synthetic imagination. He was inspired to create the automobile the first time he saw a threshing machine outfit being pulled along by a steam-propelled engine. There it went down the highway: a threshing outfit with a machine attached to the locomotive of the steam engine. When Mr. Ford observed it, right then and there he got the idea of taking that same principle and putting it onto a buggy (instead of the horse). His “horseless buggy” was eventually known as the automobile.
Now let’s look at examples of creative imagination. Basically, all new ideas originate through single or mastermind application of creative vision. What does that mean? It generally means that when two or more people get together and begin to think along the same line, in the spirit of harmony (and with the kind of enthusiasm that all the people in the group begin to get when they’re working with ideas), out of that group will come an idea pertaining to the thing that they’re discussing. In other words, if they go into that discussion for the solution of a major problem, somebody will find the answer, depending on whose subconscious tunes in to the infinite storehouse and picks the answer out first. The answer doesn’t always come from the smartest, most brilliant, or best educated man of the group. As a matter of fact, it often comes from the least educated and the least brilliant person in the group.
Let’s look at some examples of creative imagination, such as the scientific discovery by Madame Curie. All Madame Curie knew was that, in theory, there must be some radium somewhere in the universe. She hoped it would be on this little ball of mud that we call the earth. See, she had a definite purpose. She had a definite idea. She worked it out mathematically and determined that there was radium somewhere. Nobody had ever seen any, produced any, or found any.
Imagine Madame Curie trying to find radium and compare it to the proverbial story about the person looking for a needle in a haystack. In comparison with her task, I’ll take the needle and haystack anytime. By now, I think you might have an idea how she went about searching for it. You don’t think she went out with a spade digging in the ground looking for it, do you? Oh no, she didn’t do that. She wasn’t that foolish.
She conditioned her mind to tune into Infinite Intelligence, and Infinite Intelligence directed her to the source. It’s the exact process you use in attracting riches or in attracting anything else you desire. First, you condition your mind with a definite picture of the thing you want. You build it up, and support it with the faith and belief that you’re going to get the thing you want, and keep on wanting it even when the going is hard.
The radar and the radio, for example, are by-products of creative imagination and the Wright brothers flying machine. Nobody had ever created and successfully flown a heavier-than-air machine until the Wright brothers produced theirs. The Wright brothers had no encouragement from the public when they announced that they were going to fly the machine. Until then, they hadn’t flown it successfully, but they were going to demonstrate it again at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. When they announced that to the press, the newspapermen were so skeptical, they wouldn’t even go down there. Not one single solitary newspaperman went there for the biggest scoop in the last hundred years. They were smart-alecks, wise guys who knew all the answers. How often does that happen when somebody comes up with a new idea? There are always people who don’t believe it can be done because it’s never been done before.
There is no limitation to the application of creative vision. The person who can condition his mind to tune in to Infinite Intelligence can come up with the answer to anything that has an answer. Anything, no matter what it is.
Look at Marconi’s invention of wireless communication and Edison’s talking machine. Before Thomas Edison’s time, nobody had ever recorded or reproduced sound of any kind. Nobody ever did that, or anything even resembling it. As far as I know, there hadn’t even been any talk about it, or stories written about it, and yet Edison conceived that idea, and almost instantaneously. He took a pencil and a piece of paper or an envelope out of his pocket, and drew a crude sketch of what later became Edison’s Incredible Talking Machine, as they called it. It’s the one that had a cylinder on it, you know, and when they tried it out, the thing worked the very first time.
It was quite a contrast from his earlier experiences. You see, the law of compensation paid him off for those ten thousand failures, when he thought he was working on the incandescent electric lamp. Don’t you see what a generous, and fair, and just thing the law of compensation is? Where you seem to be cheated in one place, you’ll find it’ll be made up in some other place, in proportion to your efforts, whatever they may be. That works with penalizing, too. Maybe you escape the cop at one corner because you run a red light. Maybe you escape him again, too. But, the next time, he’ll catch you on two or three counts. You’ll find he eventually catches up with you. Well, somewhere out in nature, there’s a tremendous cop and a tremendous recording machine. It records all of our good qualities and all of our bad ones, all of our mistakes and all of our successes. Sooner or later, they all catch up with us.
Let’s look at creative vision in evaluating the great American way of life. We still enjoy the greatest privilege of freedom and greatest opportunity for riches mankind has ever known. However, we need to use vision if we are to continue to enjoy these great blessings. If you looked back to see what traits of character have made our country great, here they are. First of all, the leaders who have been responsible for the American way of life made definite application of the seventeen principles of the science of success with emphasis on the following six. At that time, they didn’t call these principles by these names, though they were probably conscious that they were applying these principles. One of the strangest things about all of the successful people that I’ve worked with is that not one of them could sit down and categorically give me a step-by-step modus operandi about how he succeeded. By sheer accident, mind you, they stumbled upon these principles listed here.
In fact, I want you to go back and measure the fifty-six men that signed the Declaration of Independence by these six principles. See if you can trace the application of these principles to their act: 1) Definiteness of purpose, 2) going the extra mile, 3) the mastermind principle, 4) creative vision, 5) applied faith, 6) personal initiative. They made way for the American way of life. They did not expect something for nothing. They did not regulate their working hours by the time clock. They assumed full responsibilities of leadership, even when the going was hard.
Looking back over the past fifty years of creative vision, for instance, we find that Thomas A. Edison, through his creative vision and personal initiative, ushered in the great electrical age. He gave us a source of power the world had not previously known. Think of how one man ushered in a new age—the great electrical age—without which all of this industrial improvement that we’ve had—all the radar, all the television, all of the radio—would not be possible. What a marvelous thing one person did to influence the trend of civilization all over the world. What a marvelous thing Mr. Ford did when he brought in the automobile. He brought the back woods and Main Street together, he shortened distances, and he improved the value of lands by causing marvelous roads to be built through them. He gave employment directly and indirectly to millions of people who would not have otherwise had employment. Now, millions of people have businesses supplying the automobile trade. Wilbur and Orville Wright changed the size of the earth, so to speak, shortening distances all over the world—just those two men, operating for the good of mankind. Andrew Carnegie, through his creative vision and personal initiative, ushered in the great steel age that revolutionized our entire industrial system and made possible the birth of myriad industries, which could not exist without steel. He was not satisfied with the accumulation of a vast fortune of his own. He raised scores of his associate workers into sizeable fortunes they could not have accumulated without Carnegie’s aid. He finished up his life by inspiring the organization of the world’s first philosophy of personal achievement, which makes the know-how of success available to the humblest person. What a marvelous thing one man can do, operating through one other man.
When you begin to analyze it, you see what can take place when one individual gets together with another individual and forms a mastermind alliance. They begin to do something useful. There’s nothing impossible for two people working together in the spirit of harmony under the mastermind principle. Without that alliance, even if I’d had a hundred lives to live, I could never have created this philosophy. However, the inspiration, faith, confidence, and go-ahead spirit I got by having access to a great man like Mr. Carnegie enabled me to rise up to his level, something I never could have done without this mastermind principle and creative vision. There have been times, if I had listened to what would seem to be logic and reason, I would have quit this philosophy and gotten myself a job, as one of my former relatives said she thought I should have done. I could have gotten a job as a nice bookkeeper somewhere, bringing in seventy-five dollars a week. I’d have been very secure and it would have been wonderful to be at home every night (well, most every night), and everything would have been lovely. Believe you me, I had to fight that argument for quite a while, but I did fight it successfully.
I saw bigger things in life. I began to use not only my synthetic imagination but also my creative imagination (and particularly the latter). It enabled me to pull aside the curtain of discouragement and despair, look into the future, and see there what I now know is taking place all over the world as a result of my having passed this way. All of that through creative vision! How marvelous to be able to tap that thing called creative vision and through it to tune into the powers of the universe. I’m not making a poetic speech, I’m citing science, because everything I’m saying is practical, and is being done, and it can be done by you.
Here is a brief bird’s-eye view of what men and women with creative vision and personal initiative have given us. First of all, the automobile, which has practically changed our entire way of living. Those of you who have been born in the last twenty-five, thirty, or even forty years have no concept of what the vibrations of this nation were under the horse and buggy age, in comparison with today. In those days, you would walk down the road, or could ride down the road—safely. Problem is you can’t even cross the street where there’s a policeman watching in safety, unless you are very alert. The whole method of transportation and the whole method of doing business changed as a result of that one thing called the automobile. Airplanes now travel faster than sound and have shrunk this world to where peoples of all countries know one another better.
Maybe the Creator intended it this way. Instead of these worries and things that we’ve been having in the past, maybe reducing the world in size would bring the people of all nations within traveling distance, so they would become better acquainted, and finally be neighbors or brothers—under the skin as well as on the skin. If the brotherhood of man ever takes place, it’ll be because of these various marvelous things that the imagination of man has uncovered and revealed, bringing us together in ways that make it more convenient for us to assemble and to understand each other all over the world.
You can’t carry on a war with a person that you are doing business with each day. You can’t fight with the neighbor that you’re living by each day and have any peace of mind. Try to get along with the people that you have to come into contact with. You’d be surprised at how many good qualities there are in people you previously didn’t like, when you come to know them as they are.
Have you ever considered the radio and television, which give us the news of the world almost as fast as it happens? Without any cost to us, they provide the finest of entertainment to the log cabins of the mountain country and the city mansions alike. It’s quite an advance from the days when Lincoln learned to ride on a back of a wooden shovel in a one-room log cabin. It’s quite a way from the mountains of Tennessee, and the backcountry of Virginia, where I was born (at that time, only famous for mountain feuds, corn liquor, and rattlesnakes).
You can turn a little knob and tune in the finest operas, the finest music, and the finest everything. You can know what the world is doing almost as fast as it’s doing it. You know, if we’d had those conveniences when I was growing up, I doubt if I would have made my first definite major purpose that of becoming a second Jesse James. I probably would have wanted to become a radio operator or something of that sort. My, how all this has changed everything for those mountain people down there, throughout the country, and throughout the world. Just think of all the things the mind of man has brought forth to introduce people to one another.