The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination (24 page)

The dream of the forgotten contract is an example of one of the Big Stories taking us by surprise. This particular theme can be tracked through myth, and scripture, and folklore memory. I also call it the “Story of the Forgetful Envoy,” and one of my favorite versions is in a Gnostic tale known as “The Pearl.” An envoy is sent on an important assignment from a far country. In order to survive and operate in the new environment, he or she must try to fit in with the locals. In the course of doing this, the envoy succumbs to local habits and eventually forgets the mission. Now a new messenger must be sent, in one form or another, to awaken the forgetful envoy, and this changes everything.

In my own life, with my flawed recollection, I find fourteen stories around a central theme. I see them in mirrors that become living scenes, and these mirrors are on the walls of a courtyard where I find the central character — the theme and identity that connects all these separate dramas — in a pool of water, at the center of all. And I know that when I return to this place of mirrors, and remember these fourteen stories, and the heart of them all, I find new courage and purpose to deal with whatever life throws at me day by day.

There is immense power to be found in remembering and living our personal mythology, our larger stories. Where do we find the stories we need to tell and to live?

In dreams, through coincidence — and by making a date, preferably seven days a week, with the most important book we will ever possess: our personal journal.

If you are not currently keeping a journal, this is the time to start. Find a suitable notebook and start writing. Now would be a good time.

What do you write about?

Whatever comes to you: the color of the sky, the noise of the garbage truck, the taste in your mouth, the objects you can see from where you are sitting. Keep writing until you have filled a page or two. It can be helpful to set yourself a quota until you are really into this and develop a rhythm. As you continue filling the blank space, you'll find that two things will happen.

First, you'll find you have lots more to say than you realized, and that writing like this — without any thought for the consequences — is tremendous
fun
.

Second, you'll discover that while you thought you were just putting words on a page or a computer screen, you were actually going on safari. Writing a journal is taking a walk in the bush. The longer you write, the further you get away from safe places and much-traveled roads. You're now in the wild. And you're in that state of alert relaxation that is going to encourage something large and powerful that lives in the wild to leap at you from hiding and claim you. That's how you get your
big
story, the story that wants to be told — and lived — through you. You go where it can catch you.

The moment you are seized by your Big Story will be fabulous. I guarantee it.

5. THERE IS A PLACE OF IMAGINATION,
AND IT IS ENTIRELY REAL

A green door in a white wall, with a crimson Virginia creeper trailing about it. You push the door, and find it unlocked. You enter, and find yourself in a garden of surpassing beauty, where a lovely friend takes you by the hand and leads you to a palace where a wise woman in a light purple robe shows you the book of your life, in which the pictures are all living scenes. In the garden behind the wall, you are a “wonder-happy” child. When you are cast back into the world of growing up, and getting through school, and earning a living, and making your way in the world, you are still haunted by the beauty and magic of the world behind the green door. From time to time — usually when you are off your usual path, or totally lost — you come upon that door again. But you have appointments to keep, you're under deadline, you're with companions who would not understand . . . and you pass by the green door, until at last the “keen brightness” goes out of your life, and you lose your appetite for the things you have worked so hard to accomplish.

H.G. Wells evoked this place of true imagination in a wonderful short story simply titled “The Door in the Wall.” We can dismiss the story, and the world it vividly brings to life, as the product of childish fantasy, but to do so would be terribly and utterly wrong.

For each of us, there is a place of imagination — maybe many places — that is altogether real.

For me, the door to one of these places is a tunnel that winds through a mountain. On the far side, a path leads through flowering gardens alive with the sounds of water to an amazing building, which combines countless architectural styles without dissonance or confusion, and is guarded by a gatekeeper who asks newcomers, “What is the correct time?” (To which the only correct answer is, “The time is now.”) Beyond the gatekeeper is a gallery filled with the art and artifacts of many cultures and times. To touch any of these objects is to be transported to the place from which it derived. Deeper inside the House of Time — that is its name — is a library of which I never tire. Any book in this library opens another world. The librarian appears as a gentle scholar, but sometimes his shadow throws the profile of a long-beaked ibis against the wall. Master teachers appear in this library. I come here often, and have guided others to this place. When we have need — and sufficient courage — we can inspect our personal Book of Life.

If we are very lucky, we may chance upon the door to a place of wonder as we travel the physical world. I know a garden gate, approached through an arcade of rambling roses, in a mellow brick wall behind a country house in Gloucestershire, that opens into dappled greenwoods where beech trees have voices and beings of an order of evolution older and other than humans lead busy and colorful lives. You cannot see them or hear them if the “wonder-happy” child in you has gone missing. I am not sure which is a sadder condition: to have lost the green door, or to open it and find that there is nothing extraordinary on the other side because you have lost the power to imagine.

The realm of true imagination is known in Arabic as the Alam al-Mithal, the “Realm of Images.” For the medieval Sufi teacher Ibn ‘Arabi, this realm is the “place of apparition” of spiritual beings. It is where higher concepts and sensory data “meet and flower into personal figures prepared for the events of spiritual dramas.” It is the place where “divine history” — the hidden order of events — unfolds. While we suppose that what is going on in the physical world around us is all-important, the
real
dramas are being played out here, on a larger stage.

The Alam al-Mithal has cities and schools and palaces. It is a place to meet the masters. A Sufi who studied with Ibn ‘Arabi in Konya described his ability to journey into the imaginal realm and meet other great minds:

Our sheikh Ibn ‘Arabi had the power to meet the spirit of any prophet or saint departed from this world, either by making him descend to the level of this world and contemplating him in an apparitional body, similar to the sensible form of his person, or by making him appear in his dreams, or by unbinding himself from his material body to rise to meet the spirit.

This is confirmation from a great tradition of spiritual
experience
of what the “wonder-happy” child inside each of us already knows: there is a place of imagination, and it is altogether
real
.

6. WE CAN GROW A VISION
FOR SOMEONE IN NEED OF A VISION

Look around you — at your friends, your workmates, your neighborhood. How many people do you know who are in need of a dream? This might be an image for self-healing, a sense of purpose and confidence, a vision of brighter possibility, even a path to the afterlife.

We have the ability to grow a vision for someone who lacks a vision, and when we do this well enough — so the imagery we offer takes up residence in the beneficiary's mind and inner senses — we can do a world of good. We can work this vision transfer with one person at a time, or with a whole group or community. Great visionary leaders can wrap a whole people in their vision, as Winston Churchill did in the darkest days of World War II (see chapter 12).

How do we embark on performing a vision transfer?

Picture yourself with someone you would like to help. Maybe this is a person who is ill, or depressed, or heartbroken, or has simply given up their
big
dreams, crushed by the accumulated pressure of compromises and disappointments.

If you are going to bring the right vision to another person, you need to understand who they are, where they are, and how they wish to be helped. You are not going to force some ideas of your own on this person. You are going to invite them to be fully present to their own opportunity to be energized, healed, or inspired. You need to start by being fully present to them, which involves
attending
.

To “attend” is to stretch your understanding. You are not only watching and listening to that other person; you are stretching your means of knowing, paying attention to shifts and tingles in your own feelings and energy, and to little “pop-up” impressions that come to you, including memories from your own life. Sometimes, the personal life memories that come to us in the presence of another person are one of our ways of knowing things about them that supposedly we
cannot
know. This is a very practical form of everyday intuition once we learn to recognize that the personal stuff that comes to us in the presence of another person isn't necessarily just about us. This phenomenon is an example of what I like to describe as “What the Bleep Do We Know That We Don't
Know
We Know?”

If I am getting ready to attempt a vision transfer, I need two things from the intended beneficiary: an intention and a picture.

Whether I am working in a formal setting or chatting with a stranger on a plane, I'll seek out their intention by asking, “What would you most like guidance on — or help with — in your life right now?”

Getting a clear response to that can take a while. You may need to help your friend to come up with the right words. They should be clear and simple. “I would like help in healing.” “I would like guidance on my life path.” “I would like to find creative work that also feeds my family.” Those are all good specimens of a clear and simple intention.

Next you ask your friend if there is a picture that comes to mind when he or she is focused on that intention. This could be a life memory, a dream, a scene from a movie, anything at all, so long as it carries some juice. The picture is your portal into that other person's imaginal space. By using it as your point of entry as you embark on your imaginal journey to grow a vision for them, you ensure that you are going into the right territory.

With those two things — an intention and a picture — plus your ability to slip into a state of relaxed awareness and to use your imagination in a good cause, you are ready to do some dream growing for the benefit of another person. Your aim is to come up with a vision that is tailored to their exact needs, carries them forward to a place of healing or empowerment — and is fresh and strong enough to provide traction to move beyond current problems.

Let me give some examples of vision transfer from my own practice.

The Charred Core Becomes Sacred Space

After her hysterectomy, Dawn felt “gutted.” She wanted healing on all levels, and her image came right from inside her body. “There's a black hole inside me, a place where I have been burned and nothing will grow.”

When I entered this image, I found myself moving into a space in nature that I knew well. I was inside the blackened, hollowed-out core of an immense California redwood that had survived a forest fire. Despite the gutting, the great tree was vigorously
alive
, hurling its green spray toward the sky two hundred feet up. And it had become a sacred space. The fire had created a chamber that was not only large enough for a small circle, but had extraordinary acoustics, bouncing song and speech back and forth across its walls.

I told this vision to Dawn as if her body was the tree. I told her, “You have become sacred space.”

I invited her to take any part of the vision that she liked and tell it back to me in her own way, claiming it as her own. When she did this, she rose to her feet, spreading her arms as branches of the tree — and burst into song.

She made the redwood image part of her daily meditation, and soon the vision — in the way of true images — took on spontaneous life. She entered the blackened chamber one day to find it had become the nest of the phoenix, and she saw and felt herself rise, on shining wings, from the ashes of her pain and loss.

Cherry Blossom Time

A couple, Charles and Marie, had separated, and they wanted help in understanding whether there was any hope they would come together again and regrow their relationship, which had once been wonderfully passionate and loving but had foundered on a series of bruising career setbacks and associated fights. I gently sought for an image that had deep meaning for both of them. After sifting and setting aside a number of dreams and life memories, they both settled on a lovely image: of coming together, as if in a wedding bower, under the pink glory of a wild cherry tree in spring bloom.

I let my imagination run. I saw them separated from each other, and the wedding tree, by a wall. They were on opposite sides of a gate. The gate was locked on both sides and could only be opened if Charles and Marie agreed to insert and turn their separate keys at the same time.

This was a clarifying vision, rather than a resolving one. They took from it the clear understanding that if they were to come together again, it must be as fully equal partners — there had been imbalance before — each choosing and acting with independent volition. They also felt that the time for this, if they made that choice, would be when the cherry trees bloomed in the spring.

No Problem Too Tricky