What is truly known

The teaching

As the psychology of mental rehearsal and goal pursuit teaches it.

Rehearsal in the mind

When a person pictures themselves doing something, the mind runs much of the same plan it would run to do it. Imagining a movement draws on many of the regions of the brain that prepare and steer the real movement. This shared working is called functional equivalence, and it is the ground on which every honest use of visualisation stands: the picture trains the doing. It is why going over a speech, a dive or a hard conversation in the mind before it happens does real work.

Rehearsal works best alongside practice, not in place of it. A pianist who goes over a passage in the mind, away from the keys, improves, but less than one who plays it; the rehearsal serves best as an addition to real practice, for the hours when the body cannot play. The picture is a way of practising when the body cannot, and of arriving at the real moment as someone who has been there before.

Rehearsing well

Sport psychology gives the method its fullest form, under a name made of seven initials, PETTLEP. Physical: take the stance, the grip and if possible the clothes of the real act. Environment: picture the very place, or better, stand in it. Task: rehearse the task exactly as it will be, at your present level of skill. Timing: let the scene run at the speed of life, neither faster nor slower. Learning: change the picture as your skill grows. Emotion: let in the nerves and the excitement the moment will bring. Perspective: see it from the point of view that shows the act best, which for most acts is through your own eyes.

A rehearsal of this kind takes a few minutes. It is done sitting or standing as the act requires, and it ends when the act in the picture ends, not when the reward arrives.

The steps, not the prize

The most useful single rule in this teaching is to picture the process and not the outcome. A student who imagines sitting down at the desk at seven, opening the notes, pushing through the dull chapter and closing the book at nine is rehearsing what will earn the mark. A student who imagines only the mark on the paper, and the pleasure of it, is rehearsing nothing they can do. The first picture leads into the work. The second lets the mind feel that it has already arrived.

Why the dream alone slackens

Gabriele Oettingen draws a line between two ways of thinking about the future. An expectation is a judgement of how likely something is, made from what has happened before: I have passed exams like this when I worked for them. A fantasy is a free picture of the wished-for future, pleasant and untested. High expectations go with effort and success. Rich and pleasant fantasies, on their own, go with less of both.

Her explanation is that the mind treats a vivid enough fantasy as a foretaste of having the thing. It relaxes, as the body relaxes after a meal, and the energy that a hard road calls for drains away. The pleasant picture is not harmful in itself. It becomes useful when it is joined at once to a clear look at what stands in the way, which is the method of mental contrasting.

A goal that is clear and hard

Edwin Locke and Gary Latham found that people given a specific and difficult goal do better than people told simply to do their best, provided they accept the goal, have the skill for it and can see how they are doing. A clear, hard goal works in four ways: it directs attention to what matters, calls up effort in proportion to its difficulty, sustains persistence, and sets the person looking for a better way to reach it. A vague wish does none of these, which is why every honest method in this art begins by writing the aim down plainly.

Belief that is earned

Albert Bandura called a person's belief in their capacity to carry out a task self-efficacy, and found it among the best guides to how hard and how long they will try. It is not a general good opinion of oneself. It is particular: I can run three miles, I can speak in a meeting, I can fill in this form.

It grows from four sources, the strongest first. The first is mastery: doing a slightly harder version of the thing and succeeding, so that the belief rests on a fact. The second is watching someone much like oneself do it. The third is the honest encouragement of someone who knows. The fourth is reading one's own body rightly, taking a racing heart before a speech as readiness and not as proof of failure. A practice that wants belief does best to build it this way, in small steps that are true.

The prophecy that fulfils itself

The sociologist Robert Merton named the self-fulfilling prophecy: a belief, false at first, that calls out the behaviour which makes it come true. His example was a sound bank. A rumour spreads that it is failing, its depositors rush to take out their money, and the run on the bank brings about the failure that was only rumoured.

Belief shapes outcomes in this way all the time, and the path always runs through acts. The guest who expects to be welcome smiles at the door and is welcomed; the one who expects a snub hangs back and is left alone. This is the real working of much that is credited to attraction. It works for ill as readily as for good, which is a reason to examine an expectation before acting on it.

What a held aim does to the eye

William James wrote: 'My experience is what I agree to attend to.' Attention is narrow, and an aim steers it. A person who has decided to find new work begins to notice the card in the shop window, the remark of a friend, the name in the paper; they were there before, unseen. Someone who has just learned a new word meets it everywhere the following week.

This tuning of attention is what makes manifestation feel uncanny. Once an aim is fixed, chances seem to arrive. They were always arriving, and the aim has made them visible and the person ready to take them. Writing the aim down and reading it daily keeps the eye tuned.

The line the teaching draws

This teaching keeps the practice and declines the larger claim. Picturing, repeating and intending change the person: what they notice, how long they persist, what they dare, and how others answer them. It does not hold that a thought, with no act and no one acting, moves a market, heals a body or brings a stranger to the door.

It follows, and the teaching says so plainly, that illness, loss and hardship are not caused by the thoughts of the people they happen to. No one fell ill because they feared it, and no one stayed poor because they pictured badly. Imagination is a tool for the one who holds it, used beside a doctor, paid work and the help of others, and never in place of them.

A session, start to finish

A full session in this teaching takes about ten minutes. Write the aim in a single line, as something you will do rather than something you will have. Close your eyes and rehearse, in the first person and at the speed of life, the next real occasion on which you will work toward it: the room, the hour, the first movement, and the moment where it gets hard and you carry on. Open your eyes and write down the first act the rehearsal showed you, with a day and a time beside it.

Then do the act. The next session rehearses the next occasion and uses what the last one taught. Over weeks the pictures grow more accurate, because the doing corrects them, and the belief grows stronger, because it rests on things done.