What is the imagination? The imagination is your power to create and explore perspectives. There are the more conscious, surface levels of your imagination, such as those where you can close your eyes and manifest whatever you would like immediately. There are the middling levels of your imagination, such as those where you manifest aspects of your human life (such as job, home, relationships, interests, etc.) that you can change, but perhaps not so immediately or easily as your sandbox imagination. And there are the more subconscious, deep levels of your imagination, such as those where you manifest the vast world you experience as stable and continuous, and everyone and everything in it: those that seem entrenched and quite formidable to someone just gaining an understanding of Subjective Idealism.
The deeper some tendency to manifest is buried in your imagination, in your mind, the more it operates on its own and seems to be out of your conscious control: the more it is subconscious and othered. The more a tendency to manifest has been unearthed, the more conscious it becomes: the more it is selfed. A conventional person is someone who has buried their tendencies to imagine this reality so deeply that they have forgotten their own subconscious responsibility for those tendencies. Now they call those tendencies other. External. Matter.
Most of you interested in Subjective Idealism here in this space are coming out of a long and dark materialist, objectivist, externalist stupor. I know I certainly am. Almost the entirety of your intent is probably buried in the deepest dungeons of your imagination – caged due to aeons of self-forgetfulness. It’s probable that your project is similar to mine. Dig up most of that intent, examine it, refashion it, bury some of it deep but not nearly as deep as before, keep other aspects of it much closer to the surface, much more readily accessible to the conscious part of the mind.
So, assuming you’ve got some idea of what you want to adjust and what you want to leave alone, how do you unearth and bury parts of your imagination, your will? Well, isn’t it obvious? You use your imagination, your will! Your waking reality is your imagination, habituated at the deepest levels. Practiced for countless lifetimes. You need to start practicing, to start imagining, to start willing, whatever new perspective, whatever new intent, you’d like to manifest.
There’s an important caveat to this. Your sense of self is likely rather small. It would be rather difficult to suddenly honestly and truly exercise a sense of self on the scale of a god with divine powers and all after humaning for so many lifetimes. For most people, it’s probably better to take a gradual approach to expanding your sense of self. If you can’t manage to calm yourself when you get angry, or eat your vegetables for health when you don’t like the taste as much (I don’t mean to imply that you ought to do these things, only that you ought to be able to do these things), then you’ll likely not learn magical healing or wisdom, let alone something like telekinesis. Start where you are. If you begin by learning to do things that are slightly difficult, you will eventually be able to easily do what once seemed quite difficult or improbable, and one day you will be able to accomplish the impossible.
The more you adopt the Subjective Idealist mindset, and the more confidence you develop in yourself, the more you will find yourself considering turning to magic to accomplish things in your life instead of the conventional paths of negotiating with others and manipulating matter with your body. What is magic, according to Subjective Idealism? It’s the alteration of your will, your imagination, often understood as acts that we would conventionally consider impossible. But really even opening and closing your hand is an act of magic. As is the daily maintenance of the waking world.
The ability to magically change something is easier when that something is closer to consciousness and more difficult when it is more subconscious. So, to get good at a given form of magic I suggest two things: (a) pay attention to your mind and learn your tendencies in the domain that you are wanting to master and (b) start practicing. Imagine that something in the domain you want to learn that you wish to accomplish is realized. Yes, in your sandbox imagination, but as soon as possible try to put that imagination, that belief, right onto the waking world as well. See what it feels like. Find out what sorts of ideas you have in your mind that resist it, that fight back, that reject it and dismiss it. These are all your buried, subconscious habits of mind within your imagination. Don’t be hasty. Examine the resistance. Be certain you are willing to give up the limiting belief before you abandon it – consider its advantages, not just its disadvantages. There’s a reason you originally established this tendency. Then, if you’ve decided, abandon it. And if it ever rises again, each time crush it and imagine your new vision, your new magic. It will always take hold eventually if you have the commitment to stick it out. Always.
If you do this, you will gradually unearth the depths of your imagination and your magical power will grow in the newly tilled soil of your mind.