Imagination · “Feel It Real”
Embody the Desire in an Ideal
Convert a bare wish into a force that completes itself by giving the desire a ‘body’ — building it into a perfect, complete mental image (an Ideal) and then carrying out Landone’s three-step act of making the reality yours.
Find the desire under the wish. Upgrade your idea into an ideal by making the mental image complete and perfect — miss no detail. Embody the desire in that image; project it onto the real place. Then do the three-step act: idealize your attitude, unify the ideal’s substance with the real, and take actual possession / step into the conditions. No action, no reality — “unless it manifests in action, it is not an Ideal.”
What it is
Landone’s foundational move, and the spine of How to Turn Your Desires and Ideals into Realities (1921). His distinction is the whole technique: “An idea is an image in the mind. An ideal is a perfect image in the mind.” Ideas, he says, “seldom materialize”; ideals “always come true.” Every ideal, moreover, “has always a heart of desire” — and the engine of manifestation is to “give a desire a spiritual body — that is, embody it in an ideal — and it will always come true.” So the practice is not “picture what you want” in general; it is the specific act of taking a loose desire and building it up into a single, perfected, complete image, then performing his three-step “Act of Making the Reality Yours” (Ch.
13). It belongs in imagination assumption because the operative act is forming the perfected image; what distinguishes it from generic visualization is the idea→ideal upgrade (completeness/perfection of the image) and the bolted-on possession-and-action step.
The Method
- Find the desire under the wish. Landone: “Every desire is the heart of some ideal.” Locate what you actually, strongly want — the live desire is the seed the ideal grows around.
- Upgrade the idea into an Ideal — make the image complete and perfect. A mere idea is “imperfect, partial.” An Ideal is “a perfect image in the mind.” Fill in every detail until nothing is missing or vague: “Image each detail of your Ideal.” The completeness is what makes it an ideal rather than a passing idea.
- Embody it — give the desire a body. “Give a desire a spiritual body — that is, embody it in an ideal — and it will always come true.” The desire now lives inside a fully-formed image rather than floating as a hope.
- Project the ideal onto the actual place. “Image each detail of your Ideal, project it out of your mind to the place of the actuality” — place the perfected image where the real thing or condition would be.
- Perform the three-step “Act of Making the Reality Yours” (Ch. 13): 1. “Idealizing your attitude” — bring your own inner stance to the standard of the ideal.
- “Unifying the substance of the Ideal WITH the substance of the real” — knit the projected image together with the material details you want, “missing none.”
- “Making the actual thing a part of your possessions or placing yourself in the actual conditions that you have idealized and desired” — the outward step: take possession, or move yourself into the situation. The ideal is not finished until this is done; for Landone, “an Ideal always manifests itself in action and becomes a reality. Unless it does so, it is not an Ideal.” *(Sourcing note: quoted phrases are verbatim from How to Turn Your Desires and Ideals into Realities; the step ordering is an attributed paraphrase of his Ch. 13 structure.)*
Source & Lineage
Brown Landone (1847–1944), American New Thought teacher, in his best-known book How to Turn Your Desires and Ideals into Realities (1921). The idea/ideal distinction and the “heart of desire” framing are his signature. → (landone brown).
Common refinements
Stopping at the idea. A partial, fuzzy image is, by Landone’s own definition, not yet an ideal. Complete every detail.
- Skipping step three. Idealizing the attitude and unifying the image, then never taking possession or entering the conditions, is the failure he explicitly rules out (“unless it does so, it is not an Ideal”).
- Embodying a wish with no real desire. “An ideal has always a heart of desire.” A cold target has no engine — pick something you actually want.
- Confusing intensity with completeness. The upgrade is about perfecting the image (missing no detail), not merely wanting harder.