Look for the Hidden Hand

 

I was walking with a friend in the New Forest in Hampshire. We were both undergoing major life changes, which is not always smooth sailing. We had had a major row the night before, drinking too much and bumping up against darker sides of each other’s personalities. Now we were walking, detoxifying, working it through. We walked all day, traveling fifteen or twenty miles on those forest trails, losing track of distance and — we finally noticed — direction. England may be a rather small country, but the New Forest is not a small wood. We looked at each other and laughed, realizing that in our effort to find ourselves, we had become utterly lost.

I said out loud, “I wish a guide would just appear out of nowhere and show us the way. Wouldn’t that be fabulous?”

My friend laughed like a crow. We had seen no one in the forest that day.

But within a minute or two, a runner appeared on our trail. He waved to us cheerily. “You two look lost. Need some help?”

“Yes, please.”

“Mustn’t break my stride. I’ll leave you markers.”

A minute later, he had vanished in the dappled wood. We followed his lead. At the next fork in the trail, we found he had indeed left a marker — an arrow formed with three sticks — showing us the right way to go. We found a succession of these arrows at every crossing or forking of the trail, along the whole two-mile distance back to the main road.

The Greeks say the gods love to travel in disguise. In Greek folk tradition, it’s good policy to be nice to strangers, and to pay attention to what they say, because you never know who is traveling behind their masks.

On another visit to England, I landed at Heathrow on a red-eye flight, exhausted and burdened with financial worries. I was carrying too much baggage and had to wrestle an oversize suitcase down the steps to the Underground.

As I collapsed onto a seat on the train, a roly-poly man, bearded like Santa Claus, winked at me from the seat opposite. He said with a broad grin, “The Buddha says — walk on the bridge, don’t build on it.”

The words slapped me in the face. They stung me awake. They were exactly what I needed to hear. Caught up in my immediate worries, stressed out and overtired, I had been forgetting one of the secrets of living the Incredible Journey: it’s the journey, not the destination, that counts.

The stranger on the London Tube was an example of how we play everyday angels — even gods in disguise — for each other. There is a provocative Buddhist text on this theme entitled Entry into the Realm of Reality (in the Thomas Cleary translation). It describes how authentic spiritual teachers — even the greatest who walk this earth — can appear in any guise, as an exotic dancer or as a monk, as a panhandler or a king, as a scholar or a warrior.

We are most likely to run into them when we are in motion, especially when we are crossing a border into unfamiliar territory, when strong emotions are in play, and when we are facing the greatest challenges. They take many forms.

For me, a friendly black dog — especially when it appears in an unlikely place — is a good omen, and sometimes I detect a hint of a superior being traveling in disguise.

As I arrived once at the Fort Mason conference center in San Francisco, on the first morning of a weekend workshop, I wondered if the world would give me a sign of how the program was likely to go.

Our meeting space was a converted firehouse right on the water. As I walked from the parking lot toward the building, a large man in a bright red watchcap appeared right in front of the doors. He was walking a standard black poodle — unclipped, of course.

When we greeted each other, I told him why I was glad to see him with his big black dog, at the gate of our adventure.

He told me the name of his black dog was “Pollo. Short for Apollo.”

Jung famously called synchronicity an "acausal" connecting principle. We may see no mechanical or reasonable process of push-pull when coincidence strikes. Yet when we feel its significance in our shivers, we may sense a hidden hand and feel that the universe just got personal. 

People used to describe found money in the street as "pennies from heaven", suggesting that departed loved ones are giving a sign of their presence. The old ones called coincidence "God's way of remaining anonymous." I think there is great good sense in these old saws. 

When we go dreaming, we get out there: we travel beyond the fields we know into other realms and meet beings who live there. Through the play of synchronicity, powers of the deeper world come poking or probing through the veils of our ordinary perception to give us a wake up call.

Text partly adapted from The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.