A New Apartment Building

Excerpted from The Law and the Promise

For many years a doctor and his wife “dreamed” about their “stately habitation”, but not until they imaginatively lived in it, did they manifest it. Here is their story:

“Some fifteen years ago, Mrs. M. and I purchased a lot on which we built a two-story building housing our office and living area. We left ample space on the lot for an apartment building — if and when our finances would permit. All those years we were busy paying off our mortgage, and at the end of that time had no money for the additional building we still desired so much. It was true that we had an ample savings account which meant security for our business, but to use any part of it for a new building would be to jeopardize that security.

“But now your teaching awakened a new concept, boldly telling us we could have what we most desired through the controlled use of our imagination and that realizing a desire was made more convincing ‘without money’. We decided to put it to a test to forget about ‘money’ and concentrate our attention on the thing we desired most in this world — the new apartment building.

“With this principle in mind, we mentally constructed the new building as we wanted it, actually drawing physical plans so we could better formulate our mental picture of the completed structure. Never forgetting to think from the end (in our case, the completed, occupied building), we took many imaginative trips through our apartment house, renting the units to imaginary tenants, examining in detail every room and enjoying the feeling of pride as friends offered congratulations on the unique planning. We brought into our imaginal scene one friend in particular (I shall call her Mrs. X), a lady we had not seen for some time as she had ‘given us up’ socially, believing us a bit peculiar in our new way of thinking. In our imaginal scene, we took her through the building and asked how she liked it. Hearing her voice distinctly, we had her reply, ‘Doctor, I think it is beautiful’.

“One day, while talking together of our building, my wife mentioned a contractor who had constructed several apartment houses in our neighborhood. We knew of him only by the name that appeared on signs adjacent to buildings under construction. But realizing that if we were living in the end, we would not be looking for a contractor, we promptly forgot this angle. Continuing these periods of daily imagining for several weeks, we both felt we were now ‘fused’ with our desire and had successfully been living in the end.

“One day a stranger entered our office and identified himself as the contractor whose name my wife had mentioned weeks before. In an apologetic manner, he said, ‘I don’t know why I stopped here. I normally don’t go to see people, but rather, people come to see me’. He explained that he passed our office often and had wondered why there wasn’t an apartment building on the corner lot. We assured him we would like very much to have such a building there but that we had no money to put into the project, not even the few hundred dollars it would take for plans.

“Our negative response did not faze him and seemingly compelled, he began to figure and devise ways and means to carry out the job, unasked and unencouraged by us. Forgetting the incident, we were quite startled when a few days later this man called, informing us that plans were completed and that the proposed building would cost us thirty thousand dollars! We thanked him politely and did absolutely nothing. We knew we had been ‘living imaginatively in the end’ of a completed building and that Imagination would assemble that building perfectly without any ‘outside’ assistance from us. So, we were not surprised when the contractor called again the next day to say he had found a set of blueprints in his files that fitted our needs perfectly with few alterations. This, we were informed, would save us the architect’s fee for new plans. We thanked him again and still did nothing.

“Logical thinkers would insist that such negative response from prospective customers would completely end the matter. Instead, two days later, the contractor again called with the news that he had located a finance company willing to cover the necessary loan with the exception of a few thousand dollars. It sounds incredible, but we still did nothing.

For — remember — to us this building was completed and rented, and in our imagination we had not put one penny into its construction.

“The balance of this tale reads like a sequel to ‘Alice In Wonderland’, for the contractor came to our office the next day and said, as though presenting us with a gift, ‘You people are going to have that new building anyway. I’ve decided to finance the balance of the loan myself. If this is agreeable, I’ll have my lawyer draw up the papers, and you can pay me back out of net profits from rentals’.

“This time we did do something! We signed the papers, and construction began immediately. Most of the apartment units were rented before final completion, and all but one occupied the day of completion. We were so thrilled by the seemingly miraculous events of the past few months that for a while we didn’t understand this seeming ‘flaw’ in our imaginal picture. But knowing what we had already accomplished through the power of imagining, we immediately conceived another imaginal scene and in it, this time, instead of showing the party through the unit and hearing the words ‘we’ll take it’, we ourselves in imagination visited tenants who had already moved in that apartment. We allowed them to show us through the rooms and heard their pleased and satisfied comments. Three days later that apartment was rented.

“Our original imaginary drama had objectified itself in every detail save one, and that one became a reality when, one month later, our friend, Mrs. X, surprised us with a long overdue visit, expressing her desire to see our new building. Gladly we took her through, and at the end of the tour heard her speak the line we had heard in our imagination so many weeks before, as with emphasis on each word, she said, ‘Doctor, I think it is beautiful’.

“Our dream of fifteen years was realized. And we know, now, that it could have been realized any time within those fifteen years if we had known the secret of imagining and how to ‘live in the end’ of desire.

But now it was realized — our one big desire was objectified. And we did not put one penny of our own money into it.” — Dr. M.

Through the medium of a dream — a controlled, waking dream — the Doctor and his wife created reality. They learned how to live in their dream house as, in fact, now they do. Although help seemingly came from without, the course of events was ultimately determined by the imaginal activity of the Doctor and his wife. The participants were drawn into their imaginal drama because it was dramatically necessary that they should be. Their imaginal structure demanded it.

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A New Apartment Building