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(without actually moving your arm), take the imaginary brush, and lift it slowly to your head and brush your hair. Feel your arm moving all the way as you do this in your mind's eye. Feel your hand pulling the brush through your hair over and over, without actually moving. This is constructive imagination (fantasy or visualization) only. Finally, return the imaginary brush to the imaginary table. You must feel all these movements as you construct them in your mind's eye. Do not try to see this happening, imagine and feel it happening. If may help if you consider that you are using your projected double's arms and hands to perform these actions. You have just successfully created a construction of pure imagination (a complex fantasy or visualization) in your mind's eye. Any visualization or imagination exercise, no matter how lengthy or detailed, is simply an extension of what you have just done in these two exercises. One last constructive imagination exercise: with your eyes closed, remember what it feels like to walk barefoot across a beautiful lawn on a lovely sunny day, with trees and shrubs and flowers all around you. Construct this from your memories in your mind's eye, and ^/yourself as being there inside your creation. Remember a time when you actually did something like this, or remember a scene from a movie you can use for this purpose. Feel yourself walking across the lawn toward a massive ancient tree with heavy leafy branches hanging down all around it. Some of these branches are touching the ground. Imagine the tree becoming bigger and bigger as you approach it. Walking through a small break in the branches, you now move into the restful shade under its leafy boughs. You find yourself standing inside a secret clearing behind the branches. You can smell the living wood and leaves of the tree, intermingled with soft, earthy smells like moss, bark, decaying leaves, and damp earth. Walking around closer to the great bole of the ancient trunk, you see the shape of a comfortable chair carved into the wood and massive roots of the tree. Soft green moss is everywhere and you can feel its friendly touch underfoot. Moving over to it, you sit in this chair and relax. Leaning back, hands clasped behind your head, you close your eyes and listen and feel and smell the secret world around you. You hear the wind gently whispering and murmuring through the branches. You hear small birds fluttering and fluting and insects humming and buzzing all around you, calling and chirping softly to each other. Sit here a while, feeling totally relaxed and at peace with the world, letting all your cares and problems melt away into nothingness. You have just successfully constructed a detailed fantasy scene in your mind's eye. This was full of actions, sights, sounds, smells, and tactile perceptions, based entirely on your memory and imagination. This is exactly what you need to do when you follow any led meditation, where a voice leads you through a fantasy scenario while music and special effects help stimulate your imagination and transport your mind there. You don't actually see what you are visualizing or imagining, but you can generate a detailed mind's-eye perception of it all the same. Nonsighted Adjustment If you are blind and cannot imagine in a sighted way, please convert the exercises in this book into more tactile imagination exercises by replacing the colors, scenes, and sighted descriptions with something from your own nonsighted memory. Use your remembered perceptions of a lovely walk taken in a park and adapt the exercise to suit. Enhance all exercises like this to take into account enhanced perceptions of sound, smell, texture, taste, and spatial awareness. This can easily be done with any constructive imagination or visualization exercise, and can also be done with any led meditation containing sighted details or instructions. Note: Some of these early exercises may cause slight feelings of vertigo or localized dizziness in the stomach and lower chest areas, and even some bone-deep tickling sensations in the arms and legs. Many of these exercises move a point of body awareness outside the bounds of the physical body, which tends to affect the etheric body and often causes energy-movement sensations. 46