Imagination · “Feel It Real”
Behrend's Mental Picture
Form one clear, detailed mental picture of the desired thing or condition as an already-existing fact, and hold it steadily with the will until it ‘feels real’ — supplying the ‘thought-mould’ into which the formless Universal Substance is believed to flow and solidify.
Decide exactly what you want. Build a detailed mental picture of yourself already having it — walk through the house, notice the windows, feel it real. Hold it with a steady will that quietly refuses every contrary thought, in glad confidence. Go over it morning and night until it feels real. Keep one picture; don’t re-shoot the plate.
What it is
Genevieve Behrend — the only personal pupil of Judge Thomas Troward — built her whole system on one act: making a mental picture of your heart’s desire as an existing fact and holding it steady.
Her governing image is the magic lantern (a slide projector): your mind is the lantern, your pictured desire is the slide, “invisible in the lantern of your mind until you turn on the light of your will,” and the steady “light of the Will” projects it “upon the screen of the physical world.” The picture is the mould: “Your thought-picture makes the model. into which this formless substance takes shape.” This is the Troward-lineage, Mental-Science version of visualization, and it differs from its neighbours.
Where Neville’s “living in the end” foregrounds inhabiting a single vivid sensory scene and its feeling, Behrend foregrounds a constructed, examined picture held by a “strong, steady will” and understood as Universal Mind “specifically exercising its inherent powers of initiative and selection.” Where Troward’s own method (troward impressing the subjective mind) stresses calm intellectual conviction, Behrend translates it into an explicit, repeatable imaging drill with concrete steps — the practical, applied form a student wrote from inside the master’s teaching.
The Method
- Decide, once, exactly what you want. “Over and above everything else, be sure of what it is you really want.” Behrend: “Be sure to know exactly what conditions you wish to produce,” and weigh what their accomplishment will lead to.
- Begin at the beginning and build the picture in detail. “If you want a house, begin by seeing yourself in the kind of house you desire. Go all through it, taking careful note of the rooms, where the windows are situated, and such other details as help you to feel the reality of your picture.” Move the furniture, look in the mirrors “just to see how healthy, wealthy, and happy you look.”
- Hold it with a strong, steady will. Visualizing without a steady will “would be as useless as a magic lantern without the light”; a wavering will is “a light that is constantly shifting from one side to the other.” The will’s job is to “inhibit every thought and feeling contrary to your pictured thought.”
- Go over it until it feels real, with joyous assurance. “Go over your picture again and again, until you feel the reality of it.” The settled, glad confidence with which you hold it is “the very powerful magnet of Faith.”
- See it as an already-existing fact, not a future hope. “No one can think a thought in the future.” Picture the thing “the way you wish it to be as [an] existing fact — though invisible to the physical eye — and living in your picture.” (Sourcing note: quoted phrases are from Your Invisible Power, chiefly Chapters I, II, IV, and “Suggestions for Making Your Mental Picture”; the numbered sequence is an attributed paraphrase.)
Source & Lineage
From Genevieve Behrend (1881–1960), Your Invisible Power (1921), subtitled “A Presentation of the Mental Science of Judge Thomas Troward.” Behrend studied personally with Troward in Cornwall (~1912–1914), then taught Mental Science for decades through her School of the Builders (New York) and a later Los Angeles school.
The lantern/slide model and the “thought-mould / formless substance” language are her vivid renderings of Troward’s Edinburgh and Dore Lectures.
Common refinements
Changing the picture. Behrend’s sharpest warning: re-shooting the same photographic plate ruins both exposures. “Very often this destructive element is caused by the frequency with which you change your pictures.” Pick one and stay with it.
- A wavering, half-hearted will. A picture held “without any ‘ifs’” projects; a flickering one does not.
- Dictating the channel. Don’t insist the result arrive through one specific person or route — “a wealthy relative need not necessarily die. to materialize the $10,000.” Set the quality and direction, not the machinery.
- Strain. “Strenuous effort defeats your purpose” — steadiness is not tension.