Seeing Is Believing . . . Is Reality

An important key to getting where you want is visualization. So many successful people have achieved their goals using visualization techniques, as Rhonda Byrne and many others have written and spoke about. What is visualization exactly? And how do we understand it from a Torah point of view?

Visualization is using your mind as a movie maker. No, really. Brian Tracy explains in many of his tapes, the human mind is unable to distinguish between images created by the imagination and images of memories that have already happened. This means that you can trick your mind into actually believing something has happened, just by seeing the image of it in your mind. Once your mind believes it has happened, and the more you see it and therefore believe it, then you will be attracting that exact event to occur in your life. This can be applied to any goal, and in particular that of marriage.

While many have written and lectured about this method of achieving goals recently and within the past century, it is not a new idea. Hashem is the first one to have told us about this. The Torah commands us that on Pesach we must imagine ourselves having gone out of Egypt at the Redemption. It is not enough merely to remember the Jewish people leaving Egypt, rather each and every Jew must visualize him- or herself literally walking out of Egypt. When I was little, in school, we used to cut out pictures of our faces and paste them onto a drawing of a person walking together with all B'nei Yisrael out of Egypt. This way we would be able to visualize ourselves more easily, as we were still young and perhaps did not understand the concept at hand.

But you don't have to be a fourth-grader to paste your face on an image of a woman wearing a wedding dress to help yourself imagine getting married! (It's a lot of fun!) Or you can lie back in a comfortable arm chair, close your eyes, and produce an exciting movie in your mind, starring you and your Kallah walking down the aisle, standing under the Chuppah . . . whatever you want to achieve. It has to be in your imagination, using pictures that your mind creates. The more you concentrate on these images, the more energy you will give to them and Hashem will return that energy back to you a thousandfold by actually bringing these life events your way.