The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination (15 page)

One afternoon, Twain was seized with the passionate conviction that a great book could be written about the silver bonanza in Nevada. He felt his former newspaper colleague “Mr. Wright” would be the man to do it, but Twain was so possessed by the idea that he immediately roughed out an outline and sample chapters to get his old friend started. He was preparing to mail all this material to Wright when he received a package in the mail. Before opening the package, Twain told the people with him that he was going to deliver a “prophecy”; he declared that the package contained a letter from his old friend Wright, with
his
drafts for a book on the Great Bonanza. And so it did.

This incident convinced Twain not only that mental telegraphy is real but that it can be strong enough to transport the complete content of a book across three thousand miles. Fortunately, Twain and Wright were good friends, and Twain had already determined that the Great Bonanza book was to be done by Wright; otherwise, the mental transfer (from Wright to Twain) could have resulted in two books and charges of plagiarism.

Minds resonate with each other, and in doing this, transfer ideas and messages back and forth. Twain was very interested to determine whether we could
pluck
the strings as well as wait for them to vibrate.

A case in point — from Twain's chronicle — involved an American on the grand tour in Europe who was desperate to receive news from his son, who was back in San Francisco and had not responded to his letters in many months. Twain urged the man to send a cable, which might sound like merest common sense. Here's the
un
common sense: Twain further told the worried father that it did not matter where he sent the cable. “Send it to Peking, if you like.” All that mattered was that he should send a cable, and thereby send out a signal to the universe. If he did that, Twain promised, he would have news from his son right away.

The father sent the cable and the next day received a letter from his son explaining that he had left San Francisco months before on a slow boat and was now acting on his first opportunity to post a letter. The cable did not prompt the letter, which was mailed long before, but the two communications
coincided
, just as Twain had promised.

Twain developed what he was pleased to call a “superstition” about this. He decided that if he wanted to hear from someone, he would write that person a letter and then tear that letter up. Infallibly, he claimed, he would then receive a letter from the person to whom he had written. If this was “superstition,” it was fresh minted superstition and of a most practical kind; it worked.

Here is another story on the power of mental telegraphy, and since it involves me, I'll revert to the first person.

I was changing planes, yet again, wearing a suit because I had started leading seminars for businesspeople.

I took a seat at one side of a vast departure lobby. After a few moments, a woman jumped up from her seat on the far side and
ran
to me, heels clattering on the polished floor.

“Robert?”

“Yes”

“Robert
Moss
?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I thought it was you, but I wasn't sure because I've never seen you in a suit. I went to a workshop with you twelve years ago and that experience changed my life. I was driving to the airport at Albuquerque this morning, and I said to my sister, ‘As I approach retirement and try to figure out what the next stage of my life can be, there is one person I would most want to talk to — and that person is Robert Moss.’”

The woman's name was Suzanne, and we swapped seats on the plane so we could sit together. I was able to give Suzanne some insights on how to grow a vision for the next stage of her life and manifest the resources and opportunities to live that vision. In this way, Suzanne got exactly what she asked for, but in a way that cannot be explained by any obvious process of causation — though it may have been caused by factors working behind the scenes.

Mind Moves Matter

Minds not only reach to other minds; they move matter. The phrase “the mind moves matter” was coined over two thousand years ago by Virgil in the
Aeneid
. The engineers of the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands adopted the phrase, in the original Latin (
mens agitat molem
) as the motto of their institution. Engineers are practical people; they know this
works
.

Coincidence can be the result of psychokinesis, another name for mind moving matter. This may be intended or unintended. I'm fairly sure that Wolfgang Pauli did not, for the most part, intend to blow up laboratory equipment or cause other disturbances that came to be known as the Pauli Effect. But he came to enjoy his notoriety so much that one might suspect that he played the trickster at least half-consciously in his later years. In fact, he was given the role of Mephistopheles in a parody skit at a gala to celebrate the first ten years of Niels Bohr's physics institute in Copenhagen.

One more Pauli story: on the opening day of another prestigious institute — the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich — the dignitaries were stunned when a huge Chinese vase flew off a table, for no apparent reason, at the precise moment that Pauli entered the room. The vase burst into fragments, causing a flood of water that put people to flight. Long afterward, Pauli played with the symbolic resonance of this event, noting several possible connections: the “Chinese” researches into the I Ching he had shared with Jung, the dreamlike association between a flood of water and an emotional outpouring, and the homophony between “flood” and “Fludd,” the name of an alchemist Pauli had been studying.

3. COINCIDENCE MULTIPLIES
WHEN WE ARE IN MOTION

Riffs of benign coincidence tend to come fastest at times of change, moments that stir the soul, when our passions are aroused — when we fall in love, or make a leap of faith, or are embarking on a new creative endeavor, or are close to birth or death. Coincidence multiplies when we are in motion, whether that is physical movement or the movement of our hearts and souls.

Serial coincidence may provide powerful confirmation of a path we are testing — or open a path about which we were previously unaware. Strings of coincidence can strengthen us in the determination to follow our deepest intuitions even when they run counter to conventional wisdom and logic and cannot be subjected to rational explanation. Like the exchange of secret handshakes between members of a fraternity, these signals alert us to the fact that we are not alone, that we have invisible sources of support, and that we are on the right course even when the whole world seems to be going the other way.

Love and danger are great triggers for coincidence. “The marvel is that I fled from Woman to
this
woman,” sang Louis Aragon. “A vertiginous journey.” Now, a forward movement of passion that strong is bound to exert a force field that will shift things in the environment!

“The greater the danger, the greater the saving power,” wrote another poet, Hölderlin. Risk and danger also trigger unlikely sequences of events that sometimes leave us in no doubt that an invisible force has intervened in our lives.

On the other hand, negative synchronicities and countercurrents tend to multiply when we are resisting change or insisting on following an ego-driven agenda.

The easiest way to test this yourself is to make a date with coincidence when you are in transit, as I do when I fly on airplanes. Pay attention to what happens on the train, on the bus, in your car, or simply walking through the market, which has long been a fertile ground for meaningful chance.

The Marketplace Oracle

The Greeks thought a market place was a good place to go in order to pick up messages from the world. A popular oracle in ancient Greece, at Pharai in the Peloponnese, was located in a walled market. At the center of the market was a simple rough-hewn statue of Hermes, who plays messenger between gods and humans.

Consulting the oracle was as simple as this. You enter the market through the gate in the wall toward the close of business, as the vendors are packing up their stalls. You bring your question for the oracle with you. You walk to the statue of the god and whisper that question in his ear. Then you plug your ears, or press your hands over them, shutting out external sounds as you walk back to the gate. At the exact moment you reach the gate, you unplug your ears. The first sounds you hear — a snatch of conversation, the cry of a bird, the creak of an overloaded wagon — will be the response of the oracle. The god will speak to you directly through the everyday noise of the world, once you have set a clear intention and put yourself in a frame of mind to receive the message.

We can reinvent the oracle of Pharai in our own neighborhoods. Give yourself five minutes in your favorite super market — or one you have never visited before — with a question in mind and see what the world says to you. There are certain special markets where I particularly like to play this game, like the Santa Fe Flea Market and the Pike Place Market in Seattle. Ah, the market. . . .

The Peach Factor

I am in Seattle; I wake up early and decide to take a morning stroll around the Pike Place Market. I notice that the produce stalls are bursting with fresh fruit; the peaches look especially ripe and juicy. I consider buying some fruit, but do not want to carry it back to the hotel. However, as I leave the market, I have second thoughts. I just have to sample some of those peaches. I choose Sosio's stall, where a sign above the mounds of fruit reads O MY GOD PEACHES. I joke with the vendor that the sign should actually read O MY GODDESS.

I now exit the market a couple of minutes later than I would have had I not gone back for the peaches.

As I walk along the street, a VWbug slows to match my pace. A woman's arm reaches out the driver's window and plucks at my sleeve. “O my God! Robert!” she cries. “You got me pregnant five months ago! We have to talk!”

I am so stunned I don't immediately recognize the woman in the car. She reminds me, as we move slowly along the street together, that she came to a workshop I led in Seattle five months before. At the time, she and her husband were trying to have a baby through in vitro fertilization. She reminds me that I helped her to journey to meet the soul of the incoming child, and to develop a ritual to add spiritual depth to the medical procedures. She tells me she feels that our work helped. Though she is forty-five and her doctors had anticipated difficulties, there have been none; she and her baby are happily on their way.

She is on her way to the market and asks if she can take me for coffee or breakfast to celebrate. She has a sudden craving for clams, and it requires some negotiation to get them at a restaurant at this early hour. As I watch her sucking down her clams, she tells me, “It's incredible meeting you here. I came for the peaches. Sosio's in the market is the best place in the world for peaches.”

“I know,” I smile, displaying my bag from Sosio's stand. “You came for the peaches and I came back for them.”

She then tells me that she is going to buy two dozen O My God Peaches to make peach pies for a very special picnic — a picnic in a cemetery. She and several of her friends had lost close family in a tragic Alaskan Airlines crash a few years before. The survivors had agreed to hold a picnic, as well as a memorial service, to celebrate the dead and the living. As we speak, I feel the presence of her parents. Her father wants her to bury a personal item at his gravesite; I receive the clear impression of a corkscrew with a twisty wooden handle. I might feel awkward about passing on the message if synchronicity had not opened our path. She identifies the corkscrew immediately; it is a fine one with a vine root handle, one of many her father had collected. Since most of his body had vanished underwater, it feels right to lay something more of him in the earth on the occasion of the peachy picnic.

Everything that happened around the market that morning was charged with meaning. From the moment I bought the O My God Peaches, I seemed to have stepped out of ordinary time, into a deeper, juicier reality. The mother-to-be and I met because of the peaches, yet I took my walk with no thought of buying any kind of fruit, and the odds on our meeting in that way, with that connection, are beyond astronomical. There were important reasons for us to meet, involving birth and death.

But I was unaware of these at the time of our meeting, and had not thought of the mother-to-be since the workshop five months before, while on her side — though she had apparently had fond thoughts of me — she had no inkling that I was visiting her city that morning. Whatever brought us together was operating from far beyond the conscious mind, or any plausible notion of probability. As we enjoyed the shared sense that we had entered the play of larger forces, it seemed entirely natural that her parents should join the party — from the other side of death — to announce their wishes for the peachy picnic before it took place.

What is to be said about an episode like this? The first words that come to me are “
Thank you
.” The mother-to-be and I both felt blessed to have entered a realm of natural magic, where things operate according to dream logic, and the veil between the worlds thins.

Making a Double Magnet

Traveling in tandem with someone with whom you share a strong passion or a common interest can help to multiply your experience of coincidence, as if the two of you are becoming a double magnet, sending out a stronger traction beam than either of you might do individually.

In his remarkable memoir
L'Amour fou
(“Mad Love”), the surrealist poet and provocateur André Breton described an example of this doubling, from an experience of wandering around a Paris flea market with his friend the sculptor Alberto Giacometti. The sculptor was thinking about the undefined face of a woman in his current piece, and he found an odd mask that spoke to his need. Breton had developed an odd caprice; he wanted to have an ashtray made for him in the shape of a woman's high-heeled shoe. He found and purchased a curious wooden spoon in the flea market that had the identical shape, its handle resting on a woman's high heel.