“There are two great truths that you must know about thought:

  • the first, that the power of thought is real and
  • the second, that you can use it to project yourself into the future and experience it in advance.

The power of thought is real, both in a negative and a positive sense, and we must learn, therefore, to use it positively.

This is something that everybody knows: we live in terror or hopeful anticipation of events before they happen. But why live only in the near future that will be upon us today or tomorrow? By contrast, the future I am speaking of is the very remote future that will be ours much, much later, in millions of years from now, perhaps. When I see what people think of as the future, it seems so near that, from my point of view, it is already the past. Yes, for what I call the past is men’s distress and suffering, all their doubts, torments and anguish. They keep repeating this past because they keep projecting it into the future. By expecting to find suffering in the future, they experience it already, in the present, without realizing that what they think of as the future is already the past.

The past, as I understand it, is a deplorable state of consciousness where there is always something missing, whereas the future is a perfect state of consciousness. All the imperfect states of consciousness that you experience, therefore, all those fears and apprehensions, etc., even if they concern the future, actually belong to the past, for the past is disorder, vice, illness and brutishness. The future, on the contrary, is enhancement, maturation, for we are all on our way to perfection. As long as you continue to project the imperfections of today onto the days to come, you will continue to reproduce and repeat the old past; your future will be composed entirely of the bits and pieces of the past that you have projected in advance. It will be a projection, of course, but a projection of all that is most vicious and putrid.

Whereas, if you project all that is most beautiful, luminous and perfect, you will live, in advance, in the future that is in store for you. Your future will have already come true, since you are already living in it. When you feel something in the present, it is proof that, even though it may not have materialized on the physical plane yet, it does exist in another form, on the plane of thought, and that is already very important.

So, this is what you must learn to do: practice this and you will see that you will be incapable of living as you lived in the past; it will become impossible. All you have to do is launch into this spiritual work, and the first step is to keep an eye on your thoughts. Whatever the circumstances, always be sure to glance inward and make sure that you know where your thoughts are and what they are doing. You must be constantly alert, lucid and aware…”

Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov
Izvor Book 224, The Powers of Thought