The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination (27 page)

It's June 1940. England stands alone against the Nazi horde that has overrun Western Europe, and Hitler looks invincible. Winston Churchill, prime minister for just one month, speaks to the people and warns them of the stakes. If the British people fail to resist Hitler, the world will be plunged “into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”

But defeatism is everywhere. It has rotted the British establishment, and keeps America on the sidelines. How can Churchill transfer the vision of possible victory against terrible odds? He delivers his most famous sentence: “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”

These words seized the imagination of a people. They transferred moral courage and confidence. Let's notice that two distinctive elements in Churchill's vision transfer helped it to take root in the minds of many.

The first is the
time shift
.He carries his listeners with himinto the far future, beyond current dangers into a time where everything has long been resolved. He persuades his audience that victory overHitler is not only inevitable, but was won long ago — so brilliantly that anything that has followed looks like an anticlimax.

Then there is the
shift to the witness perspective
. He stirs us to do our duty now (“brace
ourselves
to
our
duties”). But at the same time he lifts us, with his words, to a place of eagles. We look down on our struggles from a higher level. The bigger self looks down on the smaller self, and says with admiration, “This was their finest hour.”

Churchill brings his audience inside his tremendous imagination, where the war is already won.

We can learn fromChurchill how to transfer a vision to someone in need of a vision. Let's review the two key elements.

First, we take ourselves — and then others — through the power of imagination to a future in which an issue or conflict has already been successfully resolved. We build a happy future we can believe in, and that imagined future gives us traction to get beyond current difficulties.

Second, we inspire those for whom we are spreading a vision to rise above the current worries, and look at everything from a bigger perspective. We invite themto inhabit the Big Story, not the old history and the thousand reasons why success is impossible.

We give them a bigger dream, and invite them to live that dream, and bring the world with them.

EPILOGUE
The INCREDIBLE JOURNEY

T
his is the first day of your new life.

You are embarked on an incredible journey.

It is a journey to absolute knowledge.

There is nomap that will get you there. If you succeed in finding your way, others will make maps of your journey.

There aremany false turnings along the way, many roads that lead away from absolute knowledge.

But extraordinary guides will go with you — the guidance of the Three Only Things — and they will tell you when you have strayed from the way, and they will restore your inner compass.

There is nomap that will get you there, but you can use some tips from those who have traveled this way before, without getting stuck in the gossipy markets of Hearsay, or the stern temples of Closed Revelation, or on the terrible wheel of Repetition, or in the canebrakes of Half-Remembered Things.

THE WAY WILL SHOW THE WAY

Trust that if you lean toward the universe, the universe will support you. Trust what your heart and your dreams are telling you even when friends and colleagues do not understand and press you not to change.

You'll be reminded that true friends are those who will support you and tolerate you during change — even when they don't understand the nature of the change.

Carry these words with you:

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore.

Dream. Discover.

These words are from Mark Twain, a master of the Three Only Things. He came this way before you. One of the things he knew — whichmay ormay not be part of your journey — is that one of the easiest ways of getting to a deeper universe is to imagine yourself becoming incredibly small, so you can enter a world inside a human cell, or slip between the particles of an atom.

HOLD TO YOUR VISION

Tend your vision. Bring it alive in your mind and your senses, as often as possible. Hang out inside it. Play, relax, keep house, create, make love inside it. Do this, especially, on the cusp of sleep, coming or going.

Let the shapes of your vision evolve as you grow wiser and come closer to absolute knowledge.

The house you built in the imaginationmay change, as you do. Itmay develop new levels. The people who share it with youmay change, because while some soul contracts are forever, some are for only a fixed time and a limited purpose.

Check on the goals you have set yourself, the staging posts along the way. Renew the affirmations you have devised to make them firm, and edit and update those affirmations if required.

Hold your vision in your mind, so you do not become lost.

Take these words fromanother traveler, WilliamButler Yeats, who speaks here as magus as well as poet:

Everything we formulate in the imagination, if we formulate it strongly enough, realizes itself in the circumstances of our life, acting either through our own souls or through the spirits of nature.

Make sure your vision is charged with
desire
.

Don't just park your mind in front of it like a late-night classic movie on your home entertainment system. We get the word
desire
fromthe Latin
de sider
, meaning “of the stars.”Unless your vision is charged with desire, you have lost touch with your star and are bound to go astray.

But if your desire is fully invested in your vision, then you cannot help stirring forces in the world to support you.

PAY ATTENTION

Pay attention, at every turning, to the play of the Three Only Things, and to the contents of your heart, your gut, and your head (preferably in that order).

Who are those broken travelers, flopped, exhausted, by the road, or hanging like bats from the bar, or twittering in coffee shops about how you'll never make it? They are people who forgot one of the laws of the journey.

Energy flows where attention goes. When we allow negative thoughts and feelings to claim our awareness, we divert our energy along corresponding channels. We will then encounter our mind monsters on the road. As within, so without. Whatever we think or feel, the universe says yes.

Take this counsel from Thoreau:

A man who stands in his own way will find the whole world stands in his way.

Don't let others block your way by insisting that you accept their version of what is possible and take on their cargo of disappointment or jealousy. Those whose dreams have been broken often try, wittingly or unwittingly, to smash the dreams of others.

When other people — especially when they are family or close friends — invite you to buy into a view of reality or possibility that is less than generous, withhold your consent.

Check on the personal history youmay still be carrying in your energy field. You can defeat your own goals if you are freighted with the burdens of past shame and pain and failure so that your body does not believe you.

The traditional Hawaiian healers known as kahunas have a profound teaching about this. They say that the ordinary mind has very little to do with creativemanifestation. The best that can manifest in our lives comes through the creative partnership of the dense energy body (which they call the
unihipilli
) and the Higher Self (or
aumakua
). Get them working and playing together, and the ego will come along.

DON'T GIVE UP

When the world seems to knock us back, when we suffer losses, we need to remember that failing to succeed in a certain situation does not make us a failure. A person is not a failure because he or she fails at this or that. Aperson is a failurewhen he or she gives up.

If we give our best to something we truly believe in, and fail to achieve certain results, the project may be assessed as a failure. But that doesn'tmean that
we
are failures, especially if we are willing to learn from what went wrong and try again.

Letting go is not giving up.

We may come to the conclusion that, however hard we try, a certain project is not going to succeed. The project may be keeping an elderly person alive, or writing a book, or earning amillion bucks in real estate. We take a long clear look at things, and decide to release that cause, to let it go. This is not failure, and it is not giving up.

Winston Churchill was aman who experiencedmany failures in his long career, and he was often written off as “finished” — yet he survived to lead one of the decisive victories for humanity over barbarism and active evil.

Churchill said, “It is not enough to do our best; we must do what is
necessary
.”

So you fell down — even down a wholemountainside, into an abyss. Get up. Climb back up. Do what is
necessary
.

REMEMBER TO PLAY

The journey to absolute knowledge is so serious it can only be approached in a spirit of play.

An earnest man at one of my lectures once asked me to “bottom line it” for him. “What's this all about?” I had the answer right away, and I gave it to him. “Remember to play.” And he proceeded to write that down, very carefully. “Excuse me,” I said as gently as I could, “I don't think you've got the message.”

We give the best of ourselves to our favorite games. These may be games that involve winning or being ranked or being first across a finish line, games in which success comes with prizes and titles. The winnings may include a truckload of money, or an Emmy or a Nobel prize, or survival against adversity, or getting our kids through school — or the prize may be meaningless to anyone who is not sitting on the other side of the table.

The games we play with the aim of winning, philosopher James Carse reminds us, are
finite
games. We give our
very
best when we are conscious of playing the larger game, which he calls the
infinite
game. Infinite players don't play to win; they play for the sake of playing.

There 's nothing wrong with playing to win, or playing for money, as long as we remember that when we do this we are
choosing
a finite game, within the infinite game. The problems arise when we forget that we chose the game. If we are doing something because we believe we
must
do it, if we tell ourselves we have no choice, we are not playing.

Sometimes this happens because we agree to take on one role or another in a game we choose, but end up by losing our identity in playing a certain role. We forget that we
chose
to be an engineer, amother, amail carrier, or even a golfer. We spend our days trying to meet our obligations, or lower our handicap, or fatten our bank accounts, because this is what we think we must do. Carse calls this “self-veiling.” It is a very serious thing, because it kills the spirit of play.

Though the spirit of play is a characteristic of the child, it can be crushed early on in our children. I think of a very successful businessman who came to one of my California seminars. For all his wealth and status, he was burdened by a profound sense of sadness and futility. “I have to keep busy all the time, winning, winning, winning — or else I'm consumed with the sense that I've done nothing that matters.”

We probed the source of his frustration. “I need to create,” he decided. “Somewhere along the line the part of me that is the creator got stopped dead.”

I helped him to look back over the whole course of his life — to
really
look, inwhat I call a “goaded”meditation — to try to identify themoment his creative spirit got stuck. He found himself looking into a scene fromearly childhood. “I'mabout four years old. I'm making a fantastic structure with Lego blocks, having a whale of a time. My mother comes in and she says, ‘That's great. You'll grow up and make lots of money as an architect or engineer.’” With high emotion, the businessman — who had indeed become an engineer, as well as a CEO — told me, “That's the moment my creative self was crushed. Because it wasn't about play anymore, it was about consequences. I never wanted to play with blocks again.”

He agreed that one of the things he would do to release his creative self was to get himself a set of blocks, make space on his desk — and play with them. In doing this, he not only invited his inner child to come out of the shadows; he began to function as an infinite player, who plays for the pure delight of playing.

A similar lesson infuses the luminous movie
The Legend of Bagger Vance
. Based on the novel by Steve Pressfield, it's a parable of how a man finds his “authentic swing” on a 1931 golf course in the midst of the Depression — an analog for the game of life — with the help of a mysterious guide disguised as a black caddie. The player is given the chance of a lifetime, in an exhibition match with the two top golfers in the country, but is headed for humiliation until the caddie helps him to understand that his real opponents are not the heavy hitters but his own self-defeating behaviors and attitudes. He begins to
see the field
. Seeing the field involves knowing such things as which way the grass bends as the sun moves across the sky, or whether a light iron works better than a wood for a drive under a high wind.
Playing
the field is about coming into harmony with everything that is in the field in a given moment. It's about giving our best without fear of consequences, for the love of the play.