Imagination · “Feel It Real”
Idealizing
Build the ideal so vividly and completely — in detail and in every sense — that you can run through it eyes-closed without confusion or mistake, projecting it onto the real place before you act.
Sit, close your eyes. Image every detail of the ideal — see, taste, feel and touch it as already real. Run yourself through the whole sequence, doing each step. Repeat until it’s “impossible to be confused, impossible to make a mistake.” Then project the finished image onto the real place and act.
What it is
This is Landone’s actual technique of imaging — the “how” beneath his idea→ideal doctrine. Where is the principle (give the desire a body), this entry isolates the method of building and projecting the image.
Landone’s hallmark is completeness and multi-sense vividness: you do not glance at a fuzzy picture, you “image each detail” of the ideal and “project it out of your mind to the place of the actuality.” His own demonstrations are concrete and procedural — closing the eyes and running through a route or an operation until error is impossible: “Then I closed my eyes to visualize both the new and the old routes… After this, it was impossible to be confused; impossible to make a mistake.” A reader’s testimonial captures the sense-fullness he aims at: “see, taste, feel and touch every part of my desire as already being real.” It sits in imagination assumption as a pure imaging drill; its distinctiveness is the errorless-rehearsal standard and all-senses instruction, not just “see it.”
The Method
- Sit and close the eyes. Landone’s repeated practical instruction is literal: take the description/plan, “read it carefully. Then I closed my eyes to visualize…” Remove outer distraction so the inner image is the only field.
- Image each detail — leave nothing partial. “Image each detail of your Ideal.” The image must be complete; a partial picture is, in his terms, still only an idea, not an ideal.
- Use every sense, in the present tense. Build it so you “see, taste, feel and touch every part of [the] desire as already being real.” Not a flat picture — a fully sensed scene happening now.
- Run yourself through the sequence. Where it is an action (a route, a procedure, a piece of work), rehearse yourself doing each step: “I pictured myself on the cars, changing where … changes must be made.” Move through the whole thing internally.
- Repeat until errorless. The completion test is performance, not effort: after enough idealizing “it was impossible to be confused; impossible to make a mistake.” If you still feel hazy or unsure, the image is not yet complete — image it again.
- Project it onto the actual place, then act. “Project it out of your mind to the place of the actuality” — overlay the perfected image on the real situation, then carry out the act in the world (his idealizing always terminates in doing). (Sourcing note: the subway/eyes-closed phrasing is verbatim from The Success Process; “image each detail … project it out of your mind to the place of the actuality” and “see, taste, feel and touch every part … as already being real” are from Desires and Ideals into Realities / its testimonials. Step order is an attributed paraphrase.)
Source & Lineage
Brown Landone (1847–1944). The imaging method is taught across How to Turn Your Desires and Ideals into Realities (1921) and demonstrated repeatedly in The Success Process (1920), where idealizing is shown as a practical, eyes-closed rehearsal of routes, plans, and operations. → (landone brown).
Common refinements
A vague, half-built picture. “Image each detail.” If you can’t run the scene without confusion, it isn’t finished.
- Sight only. Landone wants taste, feel, touch — all senses — to make it “already real.” Recruit them.
- Imaging the outcome but not the doing. His demonstrations rehearse the sequence of action (the route, the operation), which is exactly the form of imagery that transfers to performance.
- One pass and done. The standard is errorless; repeat until “impossible to make a mistake.”
- Never projecting onto the real place / acting. The rehearsal exists to feed real execution — project, then do.