The imagination can restore the past. It can review a future that has not as yet existed.

A whole industry, the entertainment industry, has grown around visually representing futures that exist only in our mind's eye.

Unfortunately, the imagination is also misused. When a small misfortune appears, our minds have a tendency to leap into the future and make it even worse.

If, for example, a bill shows up in your mailbox and you don't have enough money to cover it at the moment, your imagination may instantly take off to configure the most dire consequence. Before you know it, your imagination has you standing on the street corner with a cup in your hand begging for quarters.

The imagination gone astray is worry; the imagination gone wild is neurosis; and the imagination gone berserk is psychosis.

Yet, by the same token, the imagination can be used to build fantastic futures, and the reason why our century looks very different than a millennium before is because we have over time imagined different things and found new knowledge and invented new experiences for ourselves.

The imaging faculty of the human mind can do incredible, even impossible, things. You can imagine yourself on the moon in seconds. Now, here's the rub. Some of these incredible, even impossible, things can come true.

President John Kennedy imagined that a time would come when a man could walk on the moon. When he declared this image as a goal, then the forces of knowledge were put to work to invent the technology that would make it possible.

He did not extrapolate on what already existed. He made a leap to a new dimension of possibility.

As an individual, you can, in a similar way, harness the power of imagination to create what you not have enough of right now. You can imagine much more money, spending more quality time with the love of your life, or achieving some pinnacle of success that really turns you on.

The imagination, then, is a double-edged sword.

You can use it to take some uncomfortable personal incident or something terrible you saw on the TV news channel, and blow it up to an extent that frightens the living daylights out of you.

Politicians use imagination to incite people to go to war; and insurance agencies make billions of dollars from it. Imagination. It's powerful stuff.

On the other hand, you can take full control of your imagination and create something wonderful. You can start rehearsing your dreams. You can start reliving your most joyful moments.

The proper use of imagination demands that you become more conscious, more aware, more attuned to how a single thought, inspired by a book, a movie, or a real live event can expand rapidly and in a huge way.

An aware person will not allow a negative idea to go to far and will allow a positive idea to go much farther.

Using your imagination can raise you to the zenith of hope or plunge you to the nadir of despair. It all depends on what you want in life. A great wonderful, prosperous, happy, fulfilling life is only a thought away. You are not a creature of circumstance, but the creator of your reality. And the way you do it all is through your imagination.