The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination (18 page)

The words slapped me in the face. They stung me awake. They were exactly what I needed to hear. Caught up in my immediate worries, stressed out and overtired, I had been forgetting one of the secrets of living the Incredible Journey: it's the journey, not the destination, that counts.

The stranger on the London Tube was an example of how we play everyday angels — even gods in disguise — for each other. There is a provocative Buddhist text on this theme entitled
Entry into the Realm of Reality
(in the Thomas Cleary translation). It describes how authentic spiritual teachers — even the greatest who walk this earth — can appear in any guise, as an exotic dancer or as a monk, as a panhandler or a king, as a scholar or a warrior.

We are most likely to run into them when we are in motion, especially when we are crossing a border into unfamiliar territory, when strong emotions are in play, and when we are facing the greatest challenges. They take many forms.

For me, a friendly black dog — especially when it appears in an unlikely place — is a good omen, and sometimes I detect a hint of a superior being traveling in disguise.

As I arrived once at the Fort Mason conference center in San Francisco, on the first morning of a weekend workshop, I wondered if the world would give me a sign of how the program was likely to go.

Our meeting space was a converted firehouse right on the water. As I walked from the parking lot toward the building, a large man in a bright red watch cap appeared right in front of the doors. He was walking a standard black poodle — unclipped, of course.

When we greeted each other, I told him why I was glad to see him with his big black dog, at the gate of our adventure.

He told me the name of his black dog was “Pollo. Short for Apollo.”

Albert's Hash

The gods are not the only ones who travel in disguise. Sometimes — as in the story in the introduction of the woman auditor who believed her mother helped her to get her truck — we feel the hand of a departed loved one in the workings of coincidence.

A friend told me she had been dreaming about her father's death while her father was still very much alive. More precisely, she had been dreaming
beyond
his death, previewing family conversations that might take place some days or weeks after the event. The dreams had a just-so quality. Since we were both well aware of how dreams often rehearse families for a death, we agreed to discuss how she might use these dreams to help prepare her father and others in the family for his
big
journey, and so we met over breakfast at a popular local diner, the Pancake Corral.

On the way to the diner, I asked whether there was anyone in the father's family who had already passed over that he might regard as a friend and guide. “Oh yes,” my friend responded at once. “There 's Uncle Albert.” She explained that her father had loved his elder brother Albert, who had died three years earlier, and he had been shocked when Albert had showed up — “like a friendly ghost” — in his bedroom a week after his death.

We were talking about Uncle Albert as we entered the diner. The place was crowded, and my friend gave my name to the hostess to put on the wait list. “Albert!” the hostess said loudly, writing down the dead uncle 's name instead of mine.

“I think Albert just gave us a nudge,” I joked.

Later that same day, during my workshop, my friend and I agreed to make a conscious dream journey in hopes of contacting Albert. She had quite a long interview with her uncle. I met him, but he was not especially interested in talking tome since I was not family. He did confide that what
he
liked for breakfast was corned beef hash, and that he also liked peach brandy.

When I relayed this information to my friend, she was unable to confirm whether these were, in fact, her uncle 's preferences.

We got a message about that when we returned to the diner two days later. I told the server I didn't need to see the menu; I would have what I had the previous time. “You might want to take a look,” she said. “They've added a new item for the first time since I've been working here.”

I looked at the menu. The new item was corned beef hash.
Albert's breakfast
.

My friend decided to talk to her father. She did not tell him the whole sequence, and she did not say that she had dreamed of his death. She said only that she had been dreaming about Uncle Albert. She asked if Albert had liked corned beef hash. “Al
loved
hash!” her father exclaimed. “He asked for it every time he could.” How about peach brandy? “He drank peach brandy every night before he went to sleep.”

The Mingling of Minds

William Butler Yeats observed that when our minds are working on a challenging line of inquiry, we attract the interest of other and deeper intelligences. This may lead to a “mingling of minds” in which our inner and outer discoveries are supported by past masters in our chosen field.

This evokes my dream of the place of the dead presidents (told in the introduction), in which former statesmen were joining their energies and wisdom to present leaders.

Yeats discovered something very important about this kind of interaction: we feed and entertain spiritual helpers and mentors through our reading and chosen studies. Yeats accepted reading assignments from “spirit instructors.”

I read with an excitement I had not known since I was a boy with all knowledge before me, and made continual discoveries, and if my mind returned too soon to their unmixed abstraction they would say, “We are starved.”

When we approach books with this fervor, that benign entity that Arthur Koestler called the Library Angel becomes more and more active, ensuring that the book we need appears, or falls open at the right page, just when we need it.

9. THE PASSIONS OF THE SOUL WORK MAGIC

The stronger the emotion, the stronger its effect on our psychic and physical environment. And the effects of our emotions may reach much further than we can initially understand. They can generate a convergence of incidents and energies, for good or bad, in ways that change
everything
in our lives and can affect the lives of many others.

We have already seen that when we think or feel strongly about another person, we
will
touch that person and affect their mind and body — even across great distances — unless that person has found a way to block that transmission. The great French novelist Honoré de Balzac, who knew a great deal about these things, wrote that “ideas are projected as a direct result of the force by which they are conceived and they strike wherever the brain sends them by a mathematical law comparable to that which directs the firing of shells from their mortars.”

Scientific experiments have shown the ability of the human mind and emotions to change physical matter: studies by Masuru Emoto have shown that human emotions can change the nature and composition of water, and the Findhorn experiments have taught us that good thoughts positively affect the growth of plants. Conversely, rage or grief can produce disturbing and sometimes terrifying effects in the physical environment. Many of us know people who stop watches or blow up computers when their emotions are running high and uncontrolled. That's just the start of it. An angry person can be a fire starter. I've seen major fires generated by the force of someone 's violent rage. I've seen punishing windstorms and freak, localized snowstorms generated in a similar way. These things don't just happen in Stephen King novels.

So let's talk about passion.

Our passions can lead us into madness. They can also give us the creative edge to do our best and most original work, and the magnetism that generates extraordinary opportunities and serendipity.

The passions of the soul work magic. This observation, attributed to the great Dominican scholar and magus Albertus Magnus (and loved by Jung), is possibly the most
practical
sentence you will read in this book.

There are two conditions for working positive magic this way.

The first is that we must
choose
to take the primal, pulsing energy of our strongest passions and direct it toward a creative goal. The passion that is throbbing and surging inside us may be love or lust (or both), the fierce desire to give birth or the desperate wish to end it all. The passion may be wild rage or terrible grief. Whatever its origin, the strongest passions of the soul produce the energy to remake our world — if we choose to direct that energy. Imagine a vast body of pent-up water, engorged by a pounding thunderstorm, that is going to burst through a dam with irresistible power. We can choose to harness that force, turning it into hydroelectric power that can light our city and warm our homes. Or we can let it swamp everyone and everything in its path, bringing misery and devastation.

The second requirement for letting the passions of the soul work magic is that we must seize the moment when they are running strongest and give ourselves completely to acting in the power of that moment. The time is always
now
, but when the passions of the soul are at work the time is also
go
. I know this as a writer. Often my best work is done when I am in a state of great turmoil, when my passions are running strong but my heart and mind are also conflicted. Such moments give us an edge. I know, from experience, that my best and most original work can come through
now
— if I use that edge and make myself available to the work
any
time it is coming through. In these states, like Balzac, I often write for fifteen hours a day, fueled only by coffee, and sleep only a couple of hours out of the twenty-four — and stream into joy, the joy we all know when we are in the zone, whatever our field of endeavor, and are giving our best.

Balzac was a master in his literary depiction of the workings of passion and desire. He understood the fundamental unity of mind and matter, and that there is a law of
spiritual
gravitation as well as a law of physical gravitation. His view of reality — and his prodigious literary production — were driven by a vitalist belief in the power of will and imagination. His early novel
Louis Lambert
is a tale of the strange life of a young explorer in consciousness who is awakened by a precognitive dream to the fact that the world is much deeper than can be explained by reason and Newtonian physics. He comes to believe that man can become a creator by
concentrating
a whole reality — even an entire world — inside himself, re-visioning it, and then
projecting
the new image to fill his environment. But the protagonist comes unstuck and unhinged because he can't ground his understanding in the physical world.

The Balzacian hero is a man of desire and imagination who must also ground his passions in the body, in healthy sex, in social engagement with the world — or else go mad.

Balzac's version of what becomes possible through exercising the passions of the soul is wonderful. Acts of mind, fueled by passion, abolish time and space. “To desire is immediately to be where one desires to be, instantaneously to be what one desires to be.” Time is devoured by the moment; space is absorbed by the point. “For the man in such a state, distances and material objects do not exist, or are traversed by a life within us.”

What kind of desire makes these things possible? “A desire is a fact entirely accomplished in our will before being accomplished externally.” The passion that works magic is “the will gathered to one point” so that “man can bring to bear his whole vitality.”

A person who carries a great desire is surrounded by a certain “atmosphere,” a “magnetic fluid” that moves in waves, like sound and light, and touches others. That person produces “a contagion of feelings.” Passion of this kind magnifies sensory abilities; we can see and hear and sense things vividly across distance.

Coincidences multiply around such a person because things now happen through “sympathies which do not recognize the laws of space.”

CHAPTER 7
ASKING the EVERYDAY ORACLE

I
t is deep December, and I am worried about a situation that seems to offer no happy outcome. I am walking around the lake in the local park, past a beautiful lakehouse festooned with Christmas snowmen. The sunlight glints on green water. As I follow the winding path, I notice that the city has put up signs on many of the trees that border the lake. The signs caution DO NOT CROSS. BEWARE OF THIN ICE.

The dissonance hits me after I have read this message half a dozen times.

Because we are having an unusually mild December, the lake has not yet frozen. In fact, there is no snow or ice to be seen anywhere in the park. The announcement is premature.

Then something more exciting hits me.
I have just been given a message by the world
. Actually, there are two of them. The one that gives me hope is: don't assume this situation is frozen. The one that gives me caution is on the literal sign:
Beware of thin ice
.

Thin ice can mean more than ice on a lake.

The Romans paid a great deal of attention to the way the world speaks to us through natural phenomena and odd little daily incidents and signs that are all around us, waiting to be noticed at the right moment. The Romans distinguished between two broad categories of omen: those that are given (
omina oblativa
) and those that are provoked (
omina impetrativa
). The message in the THIN ICE signs was something that popped up uninvited, a simple gift from the world.

When I sat down at the end of that walk in the park, I decided to cast the I Ching to “provoke” an omen. I threw a fearsome hexagram, number 29, the Abyss. The ideogram shows a human figure falling into a chasm. The pattern of water upon water evokes a tremendous life storm. The commentary says, “You'll only get through by following your truth and your heart.”