The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination (25 page)

At one of my weekend retreats, a Midwestern man named Joe told me he was not sure what to do next in his life. He might want to retire — or maybe not. He explained he was a maintenance man for a college, with a bunch of skills and a reputation for problem solving. After some discussion, he decided he wanted guidance on “how I can live the most fulfilling life now.” I asked him to give me a personal image. He offered something that popped up in his mind: a coyote den, with three coyotes of varying sizes around the small opening of a rocky knoll.

I let my mind enter this scene. When I imagined myself inside the den, the coyotes altered their shapes and appeared dressed and standing like humans on two legs, though their faces were still canine. The alpha male wore a hat and puffed ferociously on a cigarette. The coarse tobacco fugged the air and caught in my throat. Inside my vision, the smoker's name came to me; he was Coyote Jack. I knew that his bitch — who now looked like trailerpark trash, in a yellow flimsy dress — was Belle, and their shifty, twitchy pup was Beau.

Coyote Jack gave me a business idea for Joe. He produced a business card that read: COYOTE JACK'S FIX-IT SERVICE.

I was skeptical about this flagrant self-promotion by a notoriously tricky character. But the slogan on the card was irresistible: NO PROBLEM TOO TRICKY.

This was rich. I would have laughed harder except that Coyote Jack was now deliberately huffing cigarette smoke down my throat. This was an entirely real experience; I had a brief coughing fit.

Now Coyote Jack outlined the basics of his business plan. Joe should start moonlighting as a freelance all-purpose fix-it man. He could pass out his business card at workshops like mine. He would develop a client base, and when he retired he would be set to launch a self-employed business. I saw Joe happily driving a van with the slogan NO PROBLEM TOO TRICKY and a stand-up coyote on the side. At this point in his possible future, Joe had made fun, interesting friends, and his social life had really picked up. I saw him chatting up a waitress in a diner who was a real fox to him (but no doubt a coyote girl); he would know her because she would press him to try the carrot cake.

When I had taken a long drink of water to cool my throat, I recounted my vision of Coyote Jack and his business plan to Joe, the maintenance guy. Joe became quite excited as he played with the phrase “No Problem Too Tricky” and the manifold possibilities. As the story circulated among the weekend group, several participants wanted to hire Joe for handyman jobs. He seemed to be on his way.

Shakespeare's New Play

Eric Wolff, a gifted and compassionate Manhattan psychotherapist who attended one of my seminars, grew a vision to help Buck, a client and friend who was dying of cancer, to prepare to meet death with courage and grace. Eric sent me an account of how he subsequently sat at his friend's bedside in Memorial Sloane Kettering Cancer Center and asked his permission to tell a dream:

“I sat down next to him on the hospital bed and held his hand in mine as I told him the dream. He had his eyes closed and he listened intently with his head slightly raised.

“Here is the death dream that he used so well:

“Buck is lying on his deathbed surrounded by his closest friends. I am in this circle, and we are sitting around him and doing a reading of a Shakespeare play. While we are doing this, Buck crosses over. When he arrives on the other side a cheering throng greets him. He is ushered into a grand hall, where he dances from one to another reveler until he finally reaches the front of the hall. There are his parents, excited and proud to see him. They sit him in a throne as the guest of honor, facing the gathering. The crowd parts, and there stands William Shakespeare. He removes his hat, bows, and says, ‘Buck, I present for your enjoyment my newest play. After the performance I would be honored by your company so that I can hear your opinions of it.’

“The play is performed and afterward Shakespeare and Buck go off arm in arm.”

Buck loved this vision, died peacefully soon after — and later appeared in Eric's dreams, surrounded by his new friends.

Vision transfer involves projection, yes indeed. But instead of projecting negative values or expectations onto other people — as we so often do, quite unconsciously — this is about making the conscious choice to project joyful and healing possibilities. It is not an exercise in mind control; we do not try to force-feed a vision to another person. We invite them to take what they can use and to change it around to suit their own style.

Where do we get the material for a vision that can be transferred to someone else? So far as possible, by working with and beyond the person's own images; Eric drew on Buck's love of Shakespeare. We add to that our own dreams and life memories, and the ability of the “wonder-happy child” within us to
make things up
— and let the way show the way.

7. THE STRONGER THE IMAGINATION,
THE LESS IMAGINARY THE RESULTS

Imagine that you can reduce pain with your mind, and that you can develop this ability to the point where you can dispense with medications even when undergoing root canal work or oral surgery.

Imagine surgery without a scalpel or knife, and consequently without any loss of blood.

Imagine that you can make yourself incredibly small and travel inside the body and repair its cell structures and balance its flows from within.

Imagine you can travel across time and visit a younger self and provide the counsel and mentorship that younger self needed in a time of ordeal or shame, or when it was on the brink of making a terrible mistake.

Imagine you can travel to a higher level of awareness and communicate with your self on a higher level, getting a wiser perspective on all the issues that may seem intractable from where you have been — and return with a road map that will get you where you need to go.

Imagine a woman president or prime minister in a country that has never previously had one.

Imagine you can travel into the minds and bodies of your ancestors — your biological ancestors and members of your soul family in other places and times — and help them to make wiser choices and draw gifts of power from them for your present life.

Imagine you can go to a place where you can review your soul's contract — the set of lessons and tasks you may have agreed to undertake before you came into your present life experience — so you can now remember and complete your true life mission.

Imagine a workplace that is no longer toxic or constantly stressed out because people make space every morning to share dreams and play coincidence games and check whether an innovative solution or a fun idea has come to someone in the night or during the morning commute.

I have seen all these things accomplished, through the power of imagination.

What we can imagine has a tendency to become real in our bodies and our world. At a Mind, Body, Spirit Festival in Sydney, an imposing Aboriginal healer named Burnham Burnham, his great beard lapping over a blue frock coat, grabbed me as we were leaving the platform together. “You're one of mine, mate, so I'm going to show you something.” He drew me to a corner away from the crowd. “Put out your hand.” When I complied, he quickly placed two dart-like objects in my palm. “Do you know what these are?”

“These are your bones,” I said. Actually, one was a piece of sharpened walrus bone, and the other was fashioned from mulga wood.

The Aboriginal elder's eyes flashed like fire opals. “Then you know they can be used to kill or to heal. That's the nature of power. The more of it that's with us, the more we have to
choose
— every bloody day — how we are going to use it.”

Ursula LeGuin goads us to remember that the important thing is that “by offering an imagined but persuasive alternate reality” we can dislodge the mind from “the lazy, timorous habit of thinking that the way we live now is the only way to live.”

I choose to imagine that in the midst of our darkness and war, the Peacemaker will come to lead us into an alternate reality of harmony and healing. “Say my name in the bushes, and I will stand here again” was the promise of the Peacemaker to the Onkwehonwe, the Real People, otherwise known as the Iroquois.

The Peacemaker teaches us to overcome evil by cleansing and healing the minds of our enemies, instead of killing them. To accomplish this, we must begin by cleansing and healing our own minds, and claiming the soul's history, and opening to the wisdom of a deeper self.

The name of the Peacemaker has been spoken in the bushes. Can we imagine his coming? Can we imagine it
now
? How can we not? The man is needed here.

“We will change all things if we can make the imagination sacred,” Yeats wrote in his visionary novel,
The Speckled Bird
. “But all the images and impulses of the imagination, just in so far as they are shaped and ordered in beauty and in peace, must become sacred. To do this they must be associated deliberately and directly with the history of the soul.”

Let's choose now to work with the history of the soul, and to harness the great fire hose of imagination to that, and make sure we have it pointing the right way.

As the poet Tagore reminded us, the stronger the imagination, the less imaginary the results.

CHAPTER 11
BUILDING in the IMAGINATION

C
an you find five minutes every day to indulge your happiest daydreams? Can you afford not to?

It is wonderful practice to spend five minutes a day enjoying — and growing — a special place in the imagination. This can be a place of pure relaxation and enjoyment, a place to get away from the noise and clutter of the day. It can become a place of deep healing and creative inspiration. It can be a place to recover your sense of purpose and direction. It can be shared with others. And what you grow strong in this special place is likely to want to manifest in the physical world.

Here 's a way to begin that is more than a beginning, since it will give you a place of joy and creation to which you can return, year after year.

BUILDING A DREAM HOME

Picture your dream house. Walk through all of its rooms, study the landscape. Inhabit this place with all of your senses. Imagine yourself enjoying a delicious meal, or making love, or doing creative work, or playing a game, or just relaxing.

Your dream home may be the place you will live in the future. By building it in your imagination, you are bringing that future closer. Be ready for serendipity to help out — for that same house to appear in front of you when you take a “wrong” turn, for the right realtor to just happen to turn up at a friend's party.

If you are really fortunate, your dream home may also be the place where you are now living.

Or it may be a place that cannot exist in the physical world because — like an Escher picture — its structure may violate the laws of Newtonian physics. Maybe it's set in a cleft of the branches of the world tree, or has an elevator that goes straight up to the Moon, or has a dragon in the basement.

Whether your dream house is your future home, your current home, or something else, it is a home for your imagination. Go there frequently. Add any features you want. Explore rooms and levels you may not have realized were there. Be open to changes that will take you by surprise.

Making It Firm

What do you want and who do you want in
your
dream home? Go for it. Don't waste a second telling yourself what is and what is
not
possible at your present age, or with your present money, or given your family situation.

If you can see your destination, you are better than halfway there
. Truly.

But I will add a couple of caveats.

Number one: you'll see things, when you visit your dream house, that may not manifest, either because you give up on your vision or because you change your goals.

Remember that any future we can see is a
possible
future. The odds on manifesting any particular future (on eating that fish for lunch, or getting that call from the producer, or anything else in the scene) are constantly shifting.

Number two: dreams require
action
. Growing the vision and holding the vision is absolutely the key. But the universe won't believe our vision unless we take physical action to move decisively in the direction of fulfilling it.

How do we get to the right action?

Step by step.

You have taken the first step. You have exercised your imagination and designed your dream home. If there is anything lacking, go back into that scene and bring in whatever or whoever you need. Give yourself a facelift or a makeover at the same time, if you like.

Now find or construct an object that will help you to hold that vision in your mind. If your dream home is near the ocean, you may want to put a seashell on your desk or your bedside table. If there are flowering trees, you may want to have something near you that depicts a similar landscape or carries its fragrance. You may want to draw or model some part of your dream home.

Next, make a list of the three main reasons why it is difficult or impossible for you to have the things you enjoyed in your vision. There may be a zillion reasons buzzing around your head, but three are quite enough to work on now. Favorite reasons people come up with include:

• I don't have the money.
  
• I'm too old (or I don't have the looks).
  
• I can't do what I want because I've got to take care of the kids.
  

Are you ready for the next step?

Take each of these statements about why you can't have what your heart yearns for and work it over until it becomes a positive affirmation. Ideally, you'll be able to reverse each negative, self-defeating statement — but you may have to work your way up to that. For example, you might go from “I don't have the money” to “I am moving to generate all the money I need,” or “I am open to the universe providing all the money I need.”