The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination (20 page)

The Japanese word for divination is
ura
or
uranai
, and it means getting in touch with “what is behind.” We again have that theme of sneaking a peek behind the curtain of the visible world.

The imperial diviners were drawn exclusively from one family, the Urabe clan. We can assume that in early days this family produced a strong line of seers who were successful at seeing into the world “behind” and at provoking signs and oracles from the other side. They did not need a code to tell them what it meant when the crack in a turtle shell ran a certain way or when birds formed a certain pattern in the sky.

Later, as the diviners became less like wizards and more like civil servants, they followed tedious and elaborate rules. Carmen Blacker, a wonderful scholar of Japanese oracles and shamanism, wisely observes that “these rules, in the form in which they have come down to us, are no more than dead, hardened residues left behind by the passing of the gifted seer.” The decline of true seership into hand-me-down “readings” is common in all cultures.

RULING BY THE BOOK OF CHANGES

The story is similar in China, and even more ancient. The Chinese oracle known as the I Ching probably emerged from the workings of the old bone diviners and turtle-shell crackers around three thousand years ago. It is still going strong. In spring 2005, the big bestseller in the largest bookstore in Beijing (according to a sinologist friend) was a new collection of lectures on the I Ching.

Part of the wisdom of the Book of Changes (as “I Ching” is usually translated) is that it teaches us that there is constancy and stability only through change. At every moment, our place in the world is shifting. You can no more stop the changes than ask the waves to stop rolling in. The art is to learn to read the patterns of what
wants
to happen in a given moment. The Book of Changes reduces the infinite combinations of possibility into a set of sixty-four patterns, or hexagrams — and then multiplies those options by ruling that any or all of the lines in each pattern may be a
changing
line, bringing in further twists and complexities.

The early diviners did not have a book of commentaries and explanations, and they probably paid little or no attention to the numbered sequence of the hexagrams that has been familiar to us since Richard Wilhelm brought the first practical version of the I Ching to the West. They listened to the rustling fall of the yarrow sticks — and probably to drumming — as the binary patterns of broken and unbroken lines emerged. They saw the play of elemental forces and read the will of earth and heaven in those changing lines. The codes pulsed and flashed, bringing directly alive those levels of the mind that are at home behind the curtain and can join the worlds. With offerings and gestures of respect, the Chinese diviners also called on the ancestors — especially past masters of the system — to mingle their minds. The most prized yarrow stalks used in divination were those plucked from the grave site of a previous master of the I Ching.

The early masters of this endlessly fascinating and ever-renewing system for pattern recognition did not segregate it from parallel methods of pattern recognition. This is clear from the story of the great rebellion against the Tyrant of Shang that led to the foundation of the Zhou dynasty.

The cruelty and indulgence of the tyrant and his sexually voracious mistress had alienated most of his subjects. The Duke of Zhou — known to history as King Wu — gathered an army to march on the Shang capital. He came to a river crossing, always an edgy moment for the Chinese, who have reason to fear floods. King Wu was on his boat when a huge and vigorous white fish jumped into the boat with him. King Wu took this as a very evil sign, since a white fish was a symbol of the Shang dynasty, and the one in the boat was big and strong (and got away). So King Wu called off his army's advance.

He spent two years building a bigger army before he led it back, pennants flying, to that same river crossing.

When his troops were gathered on the river bank, King Wu told them he was sure of victory because he had received a favorable response from the Book of Changes, which was
confirmed overnight in a dream
. “It would seem that Heaven by means of me is going to rule the people. My dreams coincide with my divinations; the auspicious omen is double. My attack on Shang must succeed.”

King Wu was correct. The Shang capital quickly fell to his forces, the tyrant was beheaded, and the Zhou dynasty was inaugurated.

Let's notice the three oracular movements in this sequence. The king gets a spontaneous warning from a natural event, the leaping fish. Then he asks for a message from the universe by casting the I Ching. Then he gets a confirming message from a night dream. He 's letting everything speak to him — the day and the night, the sought and the unsought sign from the deep world and the surface world. We can learn from a man who worked this way to stage a revolution and found an imperial dynasty.

THE GAME BOARD OF THE WORLD

Sometimes we can read the patterns of coincidence and the rhymes in history only with hindsight. Then we become aware of larger forces at play in human affairs, a game beyond our games.

John Lukacs, a brilliant historian of the modern age, has been drawn to study parallelisms in
big
historical events — events that could shatter or remake the world. He studied two examples of this phenomenon from a few fateful months in 1940:

On May 10, 1940, Churchill was called to Buckingham Palace and became prime minister of Britain, while Hitler, from a command post near the Belgian border, launched the full-scale invasion of Belgium and Holland. On the same day, Hitler sent his armies on a sudden, seemingly unstoppable attack that within two weeks made them masters of the “low countries,” poised to invade England and win World War II — while the one man who could persuade Britain's scared elite and his isolated countrymen that “Whatever happens, we'll fight” was placed in the position where he could stop them.

On July 31, Hitler and Roosevelt made vital decisions — without knowledge of each other's plans — that changed the shape of World War II and radically changed the odds on its outcome. Hitler told his generals to prepare in secret for the invasion of Russia. And Roosevelt decided that he would bypass the isolationists in Congress and sell fifty or more “overage” destroyers to Britain, moving the United States to the side of Britain in its fight against Hitler. The conditions were now in place for a two-front war that Germany could not win.

Sometimes it is almost impossible not to sense the presence of an unseen hand. I think of the hand of Winston Churchill, as a young boy, moving model soldiers around the floor of his room, playing out battles and then reversing the outcome or doing something quite different with his miniature men. Then I think of my dreams since early boyhood (when I, too, played out little wars on the floor of my room), in which I find myself inspecting miniature figures in various landscapes. When I look at the figures closely, I see they are alive, and they are no longer just soldiers but men and women and children of all types. In such dreams, I have the choice of acting, as an unseen giant with a hidden hand, to change things way down there, or of shrinking myself to enter a drama and either interact with the players or simply observe them.

In conscious imagination, when I need to understand a situation affecting many people, I sometimes borrow from these dreams and picture myself looking at one of those living panoramas, studying alternate possible movements of the figures involved.

Like coincidence, such dreams feed the imagination. And we may learn from them at every turning. Life invites us to choose between alternate histories — parallel event tracks — in our lives and our worlds. The observer effect comes into play on a human scale, not just in quantum reality. As Rilke says, “Looking
ripens
things.”

We 'll need no small degree of imagination to grasp what this can mean, and that's where we are going now.

PART 3
ONLY IMAGINATION

You can't depend on your judgment
when your imagination is out of focus.
— NOTEBOOK OF MARK TWAIN, 1898

CHAPTER 9
The PRACTICE of IMAGINATION

W
hen have you said to yourself, “It's only my imagination”? I've said it at a moment of strong intuition — intuition that subsequently proved to be correct — that lacked supporting evidence in the moment. I've also said it when I've had a glimpse of a wonderful future — and then betrayed that vision by diverting my energy to listing all the reasons it cannot be.

When we dismiss imagination, we exile the part of ourselves that knows things that matter in an extraordinary way and has the power to re-vision and re-create our world.

Imagination is the faculty of mind and soul that thinks and acts through images, which, as the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge said, are “facts of the mind.”

They borrow from our life memories and our sensory experiences, but they are more than copies; they can reshape and transform the raw materials into something new. And they can take on energy from a deeper source.

The family of a young girl, Sally, who was suffering night terrors, asked for my help. I gave Sally a toy soldier from my childhood — a Roman centurion — and told her that henceforth this would be her night guardian and would keep terrible things out of her space. I ran into the girl three years later, when she was about ten. “Lex is great,” she told me. “Who is Lex?” I inquired. Sally was scandalized that I had completely forgotten the incident. “He 's the Roman soldier you gave me!” She stamped her foot. “He 's now ten feet tall, and whenever there 's anything yucky around at night, he 's right on it. I never have nightmares now.”

This is an example of how an image borrowed from one level of reality can become a container for energy from several sources. I could simply have given Sally the
idea
of a night guardian, but it seemed appropriate, with a young child, to give her an object that embodied that idea. Through the power of imagination, that object took on a larger and autonomous life. A miniature figure became ten feet tall, and it appeared spontaneously, with the strength to send off psychic intruders. It became a storehouse for protective energy. This was partly the result of wishful thinking (nothing wrong with wishing), but I believe it was also the result of a transpersonal energy — and energy from a realm beyond worldly forms — coming to take up residence in the container that had been made available.

There is nothing
imaginary
(in the sense of unreal) about an image that comes alive in our mind. As the English philosopher H.H. Price put it: “Paradoxical as it may sound there is nothing imaginary about a mental image. It is an actual entity, as real as anything can be.” We experience mental images, and “they are no more imaginary than sensations.” The confusion comes in because we put down the imagination, wrongly believing that to “imagine” is to entertain false ideas or wander off into empty daydreams.

Since
imaginary
is so often equated with “unreal,” we may save some time and clarity by substituting the adjective
imaginal
. This has a longish pedigree in the English language; it first appears (according to the OED) in 1647 in this context: “That inward life 's the impresse imaginall of Nature 's Art.” The word
imaginal
has begun to acquire currency in recent times among both scholars and healing practitioners due to the influence of Henry Corbin's work on the realm of images in Sufi and medieval Persian philosophy.

The realm of images is a real world, as well as a creative state of consciousness. It is the region of mind where meaning takes on form and where objects take on meaning. True poets, in all ages, have understood that the realm of imagination is the fundamental ground of knowledge.

LIFE IN VIRTUAL REALITY

Honoring our imaginations is of the most urgent and practical importance because, as the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius said, “A man's life is dyed in the colors of his imagination.”

We live by images. They control everything we think and do, from brushing our teeth to making love to speaking or not speaking in an office meeting. Images generate and constitute our experience of reality.

We tell ourselves that reality is out there, but we do not experience that reality directly. “What we experience directly,” says physicist David Deutsch, “is a virtual-reality rendering, conveniently generated for us by our unconscious minds from sensory data plus complex inborn and acquired theories (i.e. programs) about how to interpret them. . . . Every last scrap of our external experience is of virtual reality. . . .Biologically speaking, the virtual-reality rendering of their environment is the characteristic means by which human beings survive.”

Our lives are more or less authentic according to whether we are aware of the role of images and of our own ability to choose and discard or transform the imagery that rules our interactions with everything. Hermann Hesse put this very precisely: “There's no reality except the one contained within us. That's why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself.”

THE CRISIS OF IMAGINATION

The greatest crisis in our lives is a crisis of imagination. We get stuck, and we bind ourselves to the wheel of repetition, because we refuse to reimagine our situation. We live with a set of negative or confining images and pronounce them “reality.” We do this because we let ourselves get trapped in a particular version of the past or in a consensual hallucination. We do it to cling to the familiar, not daring to give up what we are or have been for what we are meant to become.

The crisis of imagination is pandemic. The 9/11 Commission rightly pronounced that the horror of the worst terrorist attack in American history was “a failure of imagination.” With only a few exceptions, those responsible for security could not imagine a terrorist group executing a plan as bold and horrendous as attacking major targets on American soil with hijacked American planes. Yet the plan had been “in the air” for years, and it was certainly dreamed by many people who had no other access to information about it. In the fall of 1998, a New York woman shared with me a terrifying dream she could not understand, in which American planes were attacking targets on American soil, in Washington, DC, and elsewhere.