Freudian slips and others

I am leafing again through the book in which Freud gave the most complete account of the phenomenon known (after him) as the Freudian slip. First published in 1901 as The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, it's a collection of essays that was probably better-known and more widely read in Freud's lifetime than any of his other works.
    In my favorite local used bookstore, a shelf elf placed a copy of an elderly Macmillan edition, with A.A.Brill's translation, in my line of sight. The paper label on the spine had rubbed nearly away, like the label on a well-soaked bottle of wine, so I had to pull the book off the shelf to see what was facing me, which begins to sound like a Freudian joke in itself.

    The merits of Freud's study of slips of the tongue and memory lapses are threefold. First, he assigns meaning to incidents that many of us tend to overlook. Forgetting the name of a town where you once stayed, or giving the wrong name to someone you know perfectly well, isn't simply a memory lapse or passing confusion; it speaks of something in you and your life situation which merits close attention, because you can learn from it. Second, Freud does dreamwork with these incidents, applying the same principles of analysis to episodes in waking life as he applies to dream symbols. Third, his prime lab rat, first and last, is himself. Like Jung (and unlike lesser scientific minds that fail to realize that knowledge is state-specific) he knows that understanding begins with self-knowledge, and that the most important data on inner events (and their interplay with outer events) must be gathered from first-hand experience.

    We follow Freud down some interesting trails as he studies such phenomena as forgetting names and otherwise well-known phrases and word substitution. He recounts a chance encounter with a fellow-traveler on a train who begins to quote the famous line, in Latin, in which Queen Dido of Carthage issues a terrible curse against Aeneas, the hero who loved her and left her. Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor (Aeneid, IV 625). "Let someone arise from my bones as an avenger."
    In the days where a good education still required Latin, Freud's educated companion would be expected to get the quotation right. But he cannot recollect the harmless indefinite pronoun aliquis. By the end of a long conversation in which Freud guides his travel companion through the free association process he also applies to patients' dreams, they understand that there may be deep significance to the suppression of a seemingly harmless pronoun. In aliquis the speaker now recognizes the echo of "liquid" and "liquefaction" in the Latin word. This reminds him that he's alarmed that his girlfriend may have missed her period. He's scared that he is the "someone" who will be cursed if he abandons his girl and a baby he doesn't want.

    Now we come to the defect in Freud's approach to Freudian slips, which he called Fehlleistungen, which means "faulty actions" or "misperformances.". He wants to insist that word-amnesia and name substitution are related to "disturbing complexes" that prompt the psyche to seek to repress memories and information that may cause us pain. We hear of a man who simply cannot remember the name of a business partner who stole his girlfriend and married her; he just doesn't want to know. Freud can't remember the name of a town he knows well (Nervi) when treating a neurotic at a time when he himself is feeling nervous and may be heading for a migraine.

    While Freud's theory of repression may apply to some of his examples, there's both more and less going on with our slips and memory lapses than he allows for. Common sense tells us that memory gaps can be the result of all sorts of life factors, from fatigue to drug or alcohol abuse to migraine to information overload. Einstein once made people laugh because, asked for his phone number, he had to look it up in the book. He declared that he had so much on his mind that he didn't need to burden it by adding the need to remember things he could easily look up.

    I am generally pretty good with names, so when I call someone I know by a name that isn't their own I pay attention to what may be showing through my slip, In one of my workshops, I kept calling a man "Michael" though I was perfectly well aware that his name was "Don." Finally I asked, "Who's Michael?" Through tears, he explained that Michael had been his partner for many years; Michael had died but Don felt him close and was actually wearing his sweater that day.

     One of my rules for life navigation is: Notice what's showing through your slip. To which I will now add: And don't tag it a Freudian slip until you've explored what else may be going on. 

Text partly adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life, where you will find more on the game of noticing what's showing through a slip.

Photo: RM at Freud's last home at 20 Maresfield Gardens Hampstead

A Seat at the Fox's Bar

 

I land at Washington's Dulles airport late, on a little prop plane that is not the one I was scheduled to take, after one of the bumpiest rides I have ever experienced outside a war zone. 
    I have time before my connecting flight to São Paulo, and I am starving. The only halfway decent place for a sit-down lunch on my concourse is a pub called The Fox and Firkin. It is jam-packed. But wait: a woman is getting up from the bar. A young man helps her to disentangle her luggage. I thank her for providing me with a seat at the right moment. "You'll enjoy this young man," she tells me.
    The young man at the bar is behaving oddly, hopping back and forth between the now vacant seat and the one he was sitting on. He finally decides I may have his previous seat. Clearly there is going to be some kind of engagement here. His baby-blue eyes float up out of a pale and desperate face. "I know you are an elder." 
    He asks me to guess his age. I do. Now he is almost beseeching. "What can you tell me about life?"
    "Never leave home without your sense of humor."
    "I know. But I get so intense, so aggressive. Like, if someone bumps the back of my seat -" he bumps the back of my seat to make his point ["-I want to get up and get in that guy's face."
     "I'll tell you something else I have learned about life," I remark after he hits the back of my seat a second time. "We always have the freedom to choose our attitude."
     He stops banging my seat. "Oh my God, you're right. It's amazing you just sit down next to me and say that."
     He pushes his face close to mine as if he needs to be petted. I am trying to think who he reminds me of. Got it. He resembles Smeagol, the Gollem in Lord of the Rings. The absence of hair on his head is the least notable point of resemblance.
     He wants something from me I can't yet fathom.
     But as he goes on talking, questioning, I begin to sense its shape. He talks about his military Virginia family, his estrangement from his dad. It is clear this has left a deep wound. My guess is that his father has not been able to accept that his son is gay.
     I tell him that, I too, come from a military family and that I was estranged from my father until three years before his death, when we became the best of friends. I tell the young man that if it were my life, I would make it my game to make all well with my dad while he is still in the world.
    "You're giving me goosebumps." He shows me. His whole arm is chicken skin.
    "Truth comes with goosebumps."   
    He is crying now. "You come into the bar, you take a seat, and you tell me the most important things I've ever been told."
     "Here's something else I've learned. The world speaks to us through coincidence and chance encounters. It's a kind of magic."
     "Is that what you are? A magician? You got me crying at the bar for chrissake."
    "Well that lady who gave me her seat did give you a good review."
    He wants to pay for my burger and beer. Of course I won't let him. He asks for a hug. I do give him that. 
    As usual, when plans get scrambled the Trickster comes into play. There is more than what we understand as chance going on in chance encounters. And sometimes they take place for the benefit of someone else.

Drawing by Robert Moss  

Text adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity

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.

 

Nandi on Another Plane

 

Real magic is the art of bringing gifts from another world into this world. We do this when we go dreaming and when we remember to bring something back. We can also walk the roads of everyday life as conscious or lucid dreamers, learning to recognize how the world is speaking to us in signs and symbols. In night dreams and conscious excursions, we get out there; we go near or far into other orders of reality where the rules of linear time and Newtonian physics do not apply. 

Through synchronicity, powers of the deeper reality come poking and probing through the walls of our consensual hallucinations to bring us awake. Sometimes they work to confirm or encourage us in a certain line of action; sometimes they intercede to knock us back and discourage us from persisting in the worst of our errors. Sometimes in those special moments when the universe gets personal we understand that those who live beyond the veil are simply asserting their presence and letting us known we are not alone in our conscious universe.  

I just pulled from my journals a small episode in which we see a dream spilling into ordinary reality and feel the play of greater forces in both realms. The dream could be tagged as precognitive but there is something going on that is surely more important than merely seeing a future event, which I think goes on in dreams all the time though few of us notice or record these experiences, let alone take advantage of them.  

I did not understand the dream until I was on another plane, quite literally. In the dream I drew a line on a statuette of a bull, near a giant statue of the same bull. I knew in the dream that the bull was Nandi, the bull of Shiva, but on waking I had no idea why it featured in the dream. 

The next day I drove to the airport and started out on trip to Europe. On my second long flight to Paris, my rowmate was a pleasant woman from India. She told me she was traveling to rejoin her family in Bangalore, her home city, because her mother had been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. Our conversation immediately went deep and the space we shared continued to deepen over several hours during that overnight flight. We talked about death, and imagery for healing, and many elements in Hindu religious beliefs and practices. We spoke of Yama, the Hindu death lord, and Ganesha, the opener of doors. Then I said, "Nandi". 

My rowmate smiled with her whole being. She told me there is a temple of Nandi in Bangalore , with a giant bull statue carved from granite. She added that she keeps a miniature statue of Nandi close and regards him as another important protector and gatekeeper. We discussed some specific pujas (offerings) her family might now make to call on support from the greater powers according to their traditions. 

The woman from Bangalore said, "Are you sure you weren't born in India? I feel you are here tonight to remind me of some of the deepest beliefs and practices of my own tradition about how to approach death and the sacred." 

It was one of those moments when you feel the nearness of the Otherworld; that the sacred and the profane are forever at play together, that the realms of mortals and the Shining Ones are, as they say in Ireland, fighthé fuaighté,  "woven into and through each other". I was asked in a recent interview, "How can we know more of the Otherworld?" I responded, "Start by recognizing that you are already inside it."

Chancing an Encounter

 

The Book of the Road (Putnik) was on a list of banned books in Tsarist Russia. It was a treatise that attributed high importance to chance encounters. It reflected traditional beliefs about whether it is lucky or unlucky to meet certain kinds of people on the road. To meet a nun, a priest or a blind man is unlucky. To meet someone on a bridge or threshold is ominous  Such views were deeply rooted in traditional Russian culture, even in the mind of Tsars. Ivan the Terrible thought it was a terrible omen if anyone crossed his path when he was setting out on a journey and had such offenders killed. [1]
      I am more in sympathy with the Greek saying that the gods love to travel in disguise, so we should take care of strangers.
     “Mind attracts mind.” Jung observed that this principle is at work in chance encounters where more than chance seems to be involved. Jung described what happened when a stranger sat down next to him on a train. The stranger was a general. “We talked, and although he did not know who I was, he told me all about his dreams, which is certainly unusual for a man of his position. The general considered that his dreams were absurd, but after listening to him, I told him that one of his dreams had changed his whole life, and that otherwise he would have been an intellectual.
      “The general was startled and looked at me as though I were a witch, or at least a person gifted with second sight. But in reality, it was the unconscious which was knowing and directing. The general had sat down next to me because he was unconsciously searching for an answer.” [2]
     Jung felt the general was called to sit next to him because something deeper than his conscious mind was calling for a mentor, to help him make his dreams conscious.
     My friend Carol, a family counselor and addictions counselor or great wisdom and compassion, encountered an elderly man who was praying for an angel.
      Carol went to a pharmacy to pick up a prescription. There were some problems with the paperwork and she was feeling quite grumpy. When she came out into the parking lot she noticed an elderly man pushing a shopping cart, unsteadily, towards his car. When he reached his car, he left the cart by the trunk, still filled with his purchases, and slumped into the driver’s seat, leaving his door open.
    “I knew something was wrong,” Carol told me. “I sat in my car as three people walked past the old man. Then I knew I had to check on him.”
    She walked over to the old man and said, “Do you need some help?”
    “Well, yes. I did ask if you could use some help.”
    “You’re not gonna believe this. Right before you showed up, I was sitting here praying to God to send me an angel. Could you put my shopping in the trunk for me?”
     “ I would be happy to do that.”
      The old man popped the trunk and Carol loaded his shopping bags. The contents felt soft Carol guessed the bags contained products like Depends, for older people whose bodies are failing. She noticed a walker, folded, and two canes in the trunk.
     “I came out too soon,” the old man told her when she had finished loading. He did not explain exactly what this meant, but he told Carol that he was the caregiver for his wife. They were both ninety years old and they had been married for seventy years.
     “Are you sure you can drive home safely?” Carol asked.
    “I’ll be okay. I know there is an angel watching over me.”
    Carol commented later, “If I was an everyday angel for him in that parking lot, he was a kind of angel for me. I felt happy and blessed by this encounter. All my grumpiness was gone.”   
.    Chance encounters may not be caused, in the sense of being made by appointment, but they may be called.

Travel by train, as Jung found, or by airplane can provide almost ideal conditions for a chance encounter with a stranger that may lead to extraordinary things. People are on the move – which may help release them from routine inhibitions – and at the same time the circumstances are contained and relatively “safe”. Contact need last no longer than the ride or the wait at the station or departure gate. 
     On a train in the mountains of Sweden in 1904,a dispirited young Danish artist, Emilie Demant, found herself questioning her calling yet again. A stranger struck up conversation. He was a Sami wolf hunter and trapper named Johan Turi He told Emilie he had a dream of writing a book about the Sami, famous as a shamanic people of the drum. She moved to Sami country and helped him to produce the book and in the process matured into a brilliant artist and a pioneer Sami-speaking female ethnographer, the author of important books from her own fieldwork and fatherig of stories from the grandmothers. Pre-pandemic, chance encounters during my almost constant air travel were a great compensation for missed connections, long layovers, and aching knees. I found strangers willing to open up, drawn together to commiserate about delays or share travelers’ tales. Many clearly felt an active desire to tell and listen to stories, if only to shorten the seeming duration of a flight or a layover.
     Generally, I did not initiate conversation unless I had a positive feeling about the person sitting next to me, or was intrigued by the title of the book they are reading. Often my neighbor on a plane would be the first to speak, especially when I was carrying one of my own books.
     I will never forget the matriarch who took the seat next to me after settling her extended family in various parts of the airplane cabin. She noticed the beautiful cover of the second edition of my book Dreamgates and asked if she could look at it. Naturally, I handed it over. Opening the book at random, she found herself reading a section headed “Designing Your Home on the Other Side.”
     She turned to me in high excitement. “Is that really possible?” she demanded.
     I told her “Absolutely.”
     I explained the group adventures I lead in which we have observed how the creative imagination constructs living environments – and cities, universities and pleasure domes – on the other side of physical death.
    “I will buy this book as soon as possible!” the elegant matriarch declared. “I have spent twenty five years creating a jewel of a home in Carmel, California. I am going to be spending a lot longer in my next residence, and I want to get it right.”

My favorite, indelible experience of a chance encounter on a plane was my ride with the Death's Head Dominatrix.  It left me in no doubt that forces from behind the veil of consensual reality were in play and that, truly, there are things that like to happen together. The episode still gives me delicious shivers.

1. W.F. Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia. University Park, PA :Penn State University Press,: 2011) 123-4.

2. Jung in conversation with Miguel Serrano, September 1960. Reprinted in C.G. Jung Speaking ed. W.McGuire and R.F.C.Hull (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978) 464-465.

3. Barbara Sjoholm, "The Art of Recalling: Lapland and the Sami in the Art of Emilie Demant Hatt in Feminist Studies vol 40,no.2 (2014) 356-393

 

Text adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Journal drawing: "Airport Lady of the Veil" by Robert Moss

Woolly Yarn from the Bardo of Air Travel

"I have a story for you," says the lady next to me on the plane, before I have asked for one. I am on the first leg of a trip to California and open, as always, to receiving stories from strangers.
   "Last Saturday was my birthday," he tells me. "I was at the Dutchess County Sheep and Wool Festival, where I volunteer to sell fleeces. A lady at a food stand had ordered her coffee and bagels and had her card ready to pay when she was told they only take cash. She was going to leave her breakfast when I told her I was going to pay for it. It's my birthday and I'll do what I want to."

    "What a lovely thing to do."

    "There's a follow up. Later I was admiring an extraordinary necklace a woman was wearing. I told her it might be the most beautiful necklace I had ever seen. She told me she is a jewelry designer and made it herself. I asked what she would charge if it were for sale. She whipped off the necklace and handed it to me. No charge, she said. Just like that."

     "Wow. You are a poster girl for the old adage that what goes around comes around. "

I am hopeful about any trip that starts with a fresh story from a previous stranger in the Bardo of Air Travel. This was an especially lovely one. I was not disappointed by how the day unfolded.

Waiting for the Spiral Galaxy

I have long suspected that in the end we will have more regret over what we did not do in this life than what we actually did. This suspicion was reinforced by a conversation on a plane during a redeye flight to Europe. The stranger seated next to me explains, when a conversation starts, that he is an astronomy professor approaching his 70th birthday. He has no plans to retire, generally likes his work and gets to travel to many international conferences. I ask him if there is something he longs to do in the years ahead. "Oh yes. I'd like to work on spiral galaxies. I've wanted to do that since I heard a great mathematician, C.C.Lin, explain his theory for the nature of spiral galaxies at M.I.T. back in 1968." I love the theme, but I am puzzled. "You heard that theory nearly fifty years ago. What have you been working on since then?"     "Oh, stars. I can tell you that stars are not round and they're ugly."
    "What about spiral galaxies?."
    "Well the problem is that C.C. Lin ran into big-time opposition. Another titan of science objected to the Lin-Shu density wave theory, contending that spiral patterns are caused by outside interference - by a galaxy bumping up against another galaxy, let's say - rather than integral. The fight got really bad. Anyone who publicly aligned with one side would get shot at by the other."
    "But you've had tenure for decades. Surely you can follow any line of research you like and damn the torpedoes."
    He talks about difficulties with funding and getting time on colossal computers required for galactic simulations.
    I am sad for him. Nearly fifty years after a vision of cosmic spirals set his imagination on fire, he's still not ready to stir the embers.
    "I'm risk-averse," he explains.   
    I reflect on this in the darkened cabin. I review what I regret in my own life, and realize that being risk-averse is not high on the list. For this I am grateful.

Image: M74 spiral galaxy. Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage 
    

A seat in the fox's pub

From my travel journal:

I land at Washington's Dulles airport late, on a little prop plane that is not the one I was scheduled to take, after one of the bumpiest rides I have ever experienced outside a war zone. 
    I have time before my connecting flight, and I am starving. The only halfway decent sit-down restaurant on my concourse is jam-packed. But wait: a woman is getting up from the bar. A young man helps her to disentangle her luggage. I thank her for providing me with a seat at the right moment. "You'll enjoy this young man," she tells me.
    The young man at the bar is behaving oddly, hopping back and forth between the now vacant seat and the one he was sitting on. He finally decides I may have his previous seat. Clearly there is going to be some kind of engagement here. His baby-blue eyes float up out of a pale and desperate face. "I know you are an elder." 
    He asks me to guess his age. I do. Now he is almost beseeching. "What can you tell me about life?"
    "Never leave home without your sense of humor."
    "I know. But I get so intense, so aggressive. Like, if someone bumps the back of my seat -" he bumps the back of my seat to make his point ["-I want to get up and get in that guy's face."
     "I'll tell you something else I have learned about life," I remark after he hits the back of my seat a second time. "We always have the freedom to choose our attitude."
     He stops banging my seat. "Oh my God, you're right. It's amazing you just sit down next to me and say that."
     He pushes his face close to mine as if he needs to be petted. I am trying to think who he reminds me of. Got it. He resembles Smeagol, the Gollem in Lord of the Rings. The absence of hair on his head is the least notable point of resemblance.
     He wants something from me I can't yet fathom.
     But as he goes on talking, questioning, I begin to sense its shape. He talks about his military Virginia family, his estrangement from his dad. It is clear this has left a deep wound. My guess is that his father has not been able to accept that his son is gay.
     I tell him that, I too, come from a military family and that I was estranged from my father until three years before his death, when we became the best of friends. I tell the young man that if it were my life, I would make it my game to make all well with my dad while he is still in the world.
    "You're giving me goosebumps." He shows me. His whole arm is chicken skin.
    "Truth comes with goosebumps."   
    He is crying now. "You come into the bar, you take a seat, and you tell me the most important things I've ever been told. I asked for an elder, and you came."
     "Here's something else I've learned. The world speaks to us through coincidence and chance encounters. It's a kind of magic."
     "Is that what you are? A magician? You got me crying at the bar for chrissake."
    "Well that lady who gave me her seat did give you a good review."
    He wants to pay for my burger and beer. Of course I won't let him. He asks for a hug. I do give him that. 
    As usual, when plans get scrambled the Trickster comes into play. There is more than what we understand as chance going on on in chance encounters. And sometimes they take place for the benefit of someone else. 

Paw-Note

Mr Fox wants me to add that this scene was played out in a pub called The Firkin and Fox. Of course.



A version of this story appears in my new book Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity. Published by New World Library.

The Salmon, the Fox and The Little Prince at the Boarding Gate

A lady in line  behind me at the Southwest gate at BWI asks about things to do in Seattle. "Start at Pike Place Market," I suggest. "It is a synchronicity magnet. Eat wild fresh salmon."
    She asks whether I am going home or traveling for business or on vacation. "At Mosswood Hollow, it's all three, I tell her." She is amazed that my surname is enfolded in the name of my favorite retreat center in North America, and wants to know what I teach there.
    Soon we are talking about the magic of chance encounters, and how the powers behind the curtain of the world reveal their presence through synchronicity, and how we dream the future and can change it for the better.
   The kid behind her leans in, apparently looking for a way to join our conversation. He finds his moment when the lady asks, "What is the best season for fresh salmon in the Pacific Northwest?"
    "Year round," he says. He got that right. Clearly a native of the Northwest.
     I notice the logo on his sweatshirt. Naval Academy Wrestling. Really? He explains he has spent six days wrestling Navy Seals with his high school team. The Seals gave them the sweatshirts as souvenirs.
    "They gave us Le Petit Prince to read in French class in school," he tells me. "I thought you might know it."
     Indeed. In no time we are talking about alternative translations for the word apprivoisé  in Saint-Exupéry's beloved fable. The fox tells the little prince he cannot reveal the most important secret until he has been apprivoisé. The standard translation is "tamed" but the sense in more like "until we have become close" or "until we have gotten to know each other."
     When the fox delivers the secret it goes like this: “You can only see clearly with the heart. The essential is invisible to the eyes."
     The eyes of the high school wrestler are dancing. Such an intelligent, sensitive face in such a strong frame. A young prince of the Pacific Northwest.
     Our conversation ends when we board because after six days wrestling with Seals, he has to sleep. A friendly wink from the universe: the Little Prince and the wild salmon at the boarding gate.

My black dog's first plane trip

I took my black dog walking stick on his first plane trip on Saturday. Waiting for our connection at Baltimore airport, we pause for refreshments and are immediately invited to play dream ambassadors.
    "What do you do?" asks a lady who strikes up conversation when she notices the black dog.
  . "I teach people how to dream." "Oh my God I need to sign up for that. I've been having all these bad dreams."
    I reassure her that dreams are not on our case, they are on our side. I explain how to go back inside a scary dream to confront the challenge and resolve it on its own ground. 
    Now my black dog deserves a beer. I scan the draft selections. They have an IPA on tap  called Flying Dog Snake Dog. How perfect is that?

    The lady pays for her wine and leaves, but rushes back a few minutes later, saying, "I want to know all about you and which of your books to read." 
     She makes eye contact with my black dog and tells me her family got a black dog for her brother in law because he was depressed. They called the dog Søren Kierkegaard because he was a cross between a Great Dane and a black lab. I observe that this is a doubly appropriate name since Kierkegaard was not only a Dane but a somewhat depressing philosopher He compared life's joys to the momentary thrill experienced by insects who die at the moment of fertilization. Happily, Kierkegaard the dog is apparently a cheery fellow.
     Now the lady tells me her "bad" dream from last night. In it she cut open her husband's skull and hacked his brain to pieces, trying to understand how he thinks. She woke up feeling terrible.
   ."If it were my dream", I say gently, "I would compare what my dream self was doing with the behavior of my waking self. Do I pick at my husband in a way that leads to pain and conflict. I need to understand him better, but the dream is telling me I need to go about that in a subtler and more effective way. Maybe the dream is showing me how he feels about some of our interactions."
     She blushes and nods.
     I talk about how to go back inside a dream to try to work things through. And how -, when she feels the time is right and can do this with humor - recounting the dream to the husband could actually help them to establish better communications.
     Now she is off to her gate, with my books The Three 'Only" Things and Conscious Dreaming on her immediate to-buy list.
     When I join the line for departure at my own gate, I find my neighbor is a cat named Magnolia, going to California in her crate. The conversation with the humans around me immediately turns to the character of cats and dogs as life companions and  therapeuts. My black dog is pleased.
     

A secret tail wag from the universe

Hilo, Hawaii

As I waited for my first flight en route to Hawaii on Sunday morning, I was thinking about who I need to include in the Acknowledgments for my new book. It his me that I must express special thanks to the dogs who have shared my life, including the little dogs who take me on daily walks when I am at home in a small city in the Northeast, constantly bringing me to "sidewalk oracles". I sometimes journal my daily observations of synchronicity as my Dog Walk Chronicles.
     On the long second flight from Chicago to Honolulu, my rowmate told me she had left from the same home airport and - like me - travels far afield almost every week for her work. "What are the chances?" I reflected that when synchronicity magnets are operating, the chances are pretty good.
     "Tell me a story from your life," I invited her. I do this with strangers all the time. She thought for a moment, then beamed. "I got my husband a yellow lab puppy for his birthday." She told me how their beloved yellow lab had died three years ago and it had taken that amount of time to feel ready to replace her. She decided on a puppy because her daughter begged for a dog they could watch grow.
"It's extra work, but we are all so happy. My husband plays with the puppy like a little boy."
      I observed that dogs love you know matter what, and thanked the stranger on the plane for communicating a tail wag from the universe. Yes, I must start by thanking the dogs when I write those acknowledgments.

Indiana Jones leaves his jacket on the plane

I have just strapped myself into my seat for my first flight home from Seattle on Southwest when a flight attendant calls for our attention.
    "Is anyone missing a brown leather jacket. Looks like it's worth a few hundred dollars. We'll start the bidding at five bucks."
    This inspires chuckles but no claimant.
    "Let me read the label and see if that rings a bell," the flight attendant carries on. "Raiders by Peter Botwright."
     I know that name. I sit very still in my seat, wondering whether he is on a plane with me, again. Nobody claims the jacket. I relax a little, but my mind is back in a scene from ten years ago, when I met Indiana Jones on a plane.
     The details are almost incredibly specific, and personal.
     Back then, I was playing with an idea for a thriller that would involve time travel and jumping between parallel universes. A key plot line would unfold in Churchill's time, and would involve a group of magicians with access to him. The whole thing would be fast-paced and humorous, with Indiana Jones touches.
    Before I set off for the airport one morning, I put a question to the world. I wrote it down like this: "Should I write a thriller with Indiana Jones elements, involving Churchill?"
    My game was to receive anything unusual the world gave me, during my trip, as a commentary on my theme.
    My first flight was uneventful. But when I located the departure gate for my connecting flight, reality tilted. There he was, at the counter. Indiana Jones, in full rig - hat and jacket and Sam Browne belt and boots. This was really too much.  
    I was almost ready to pretend I had not seen him - until he took the seat next to me on board the plane. I put down the book I was reading, a memoir by one of Churchill's bodyguards.
   "Do you have the whip?" I asked Indiana Jones.
   "I've got it at home," he responded. "Listen, this is the real thing. It's authentic."
   "What do you mean, authentic?"
   "This is the genuine-article Indiana Jones outfit, as worn in Raiders. It was made by Peter Botwright. He creates costumes for the movies. He's a former bodyguard of Winston Churchill. Here's his card."
     Not the same former Churchill bodyguard who wrote the book I was reading. But another rhyme,
    Did I get a response to the question I had put to the world? You bet. What astonished me was how specific the response proved to be. I got the feeling that a production crew behind the scenes had crafted and custom-tailored this special moment with Indiana Jones, dressed by Churchill's bodyguard, on the plane.
    Did I follow the message and write that reality-bending thriller? Not yet, though I do have some drafts and files.
    I am not feeling pressure about this today, since Indiana Jones was not actually on my flight last night. Still, he left a marker. I was here.

After recent grueling travels, I was not looking for new adventures in yesterday's journey. Instead, I received winks and hints and subtle magic. A priest who took the seat next to me gave me his drink vouchers. Truly, life is a dream.

Indiana Jones jacket created by Peter Botwright's Wested Leather Company
    

Drum spirits and real church

Paradise Island, Bahamas

After my last workshop at the ashram, I walk up the beach to the Atlantis resort in quest of some tiger food. The closest I come is a Caribe Spicy burger. A little black kitten jumps up on the windbreaker I have placed on the next chair and waits patiently until I share my late lunch with her, breaking off pieces of burger from the side not coated with jerk sauce.
   On the way back, there is an empty lifeguard's chair, the perfect throne for me to occupy while I watch the Atlantic waves and feed more of my spirits with a good cigar. A dark-skinned man approaches me. I recognize him from the ashram. He appreciates the cigar, telling me that another of his teachers, Malidoma Some, was often to be observed smoking a cigar in breaks from his workshops. We agree that we must feed our spirits, and different spirits require different sustenance.
   He tells me he is a drummer, and assisted Babtunje Olatunje, the renowned Yoruba drummer, in some of his performances at the Esalen Institute, where I am teaching again in April. He is eager to explain how he dreamed his way to a prize drum, made in Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) over a hundred years ago. It has an unusual design, featuring huge hands and a pair of female breasts and other fertility symbols below the drumhead. In one of his dreams, he saw the shape of those great hands, clasping something unseen, and was told by a voice that he must take up drumming.
    After the message came again, he found himself in an antique shop in California filled with artifacts from many indigenous cultures. In the African section, he discovered the drum with the hands and the breasts and was certain it was the one he had dreamed. he ran his hand across the surface in a glissando. This sent out singing vibrations through the store that brought the owner running to see, "What was that?"
     Of course, my new friend wanted to buy the drum but he was a poor student at the time who did not even own a car. Playing another drum in a pop-up concert, he earned enough in donations to lay down a deposit, and then unexpected helpers came to enable him to complete the purchase - an anonymous benefactor, a generous reduction in price by the owner.
     "The drum was calling you," I commented. "And its spirits like you. They made everything possible."
     He agreed. "I know I am the custodian of this drum, and that those who came before are playing with me and through me."
     The conversation continued in this vein. I told him some tales of my own connection with spirits of Africa, especially the Yoruba. 

      He told me he had discovered an old, abandoned church nearby - "only the spirits live there now" - and after we parted company I set off to take a look. The atmosphere about the church was slightly sad and eerie, and I decided not go through the broken doorway.
     Then, just behind the church, late sunlight fell on a remarkable tree, a grandmother banyan. I approached her with reverence, offering the last of my tobacco. I knew that this tree is the real church, ancient and ever-living.

photos (c) Robert Moss

Manhattan transfer and used karmas at O'Hare airport

I am changing planes at Chicago's O'Hare airport and stop in at a bar restaurant near my gate for refreshments. A well-dressed older woman comes in and asks for a manhattan. That's a classy bourbon cocktail you don't often hear ordered at 10:00 a.m, except maybe by Don Draper in "Mad Men".
     Before the bartender has mixed the drink, she switches her order and asks for bourbon with ginger ale. I can't resist. I say to this stranger, "You raised the tone of this establishment and then you dropped it down again."
     She laughs, then peers at me and screeches, "We know each other!" I don't recognize her until she introduces herself. She came to some of my workshops twenty years ago. We last saw each other on a group adventure in the high Andes in 1999. How come she's in the bar now? Three of her flights were cancelled, she had to stay overnight at an airport hotel.
    "Do you have a story for me?" I ask.
    "I've been going deeper into Buddhism," she tells me. "I just came from a Buddhist retreat in Wisconsin."
    "Okay. Always good to ground and balance after something like that. Cheers!" We clink glasses. I am an Australian. I'll have a beer anytime I feel like it when traveling, especially when I have been up since 3:00 a.m. But I'll leave the morning manhattan to someone coming off a Buddhist retreat.
    She is earnest about what she has been studying. She wants to know my opinion about karma.
    I tell her I think there are consequences or everything we do, and that it's important to think about how we are collecting karma of every kind in our present lives, as well as carrying karma from other lives. "I like the Buddhist idea that we can be released from all of that in the moment of enlightenment," I say. "Tathagata time!" We toast again.
    More serious now, I reflect on the apparent contradiction between the idea of linear karma and the probability that in  the multidimensional universe everything is going on Now - and on limitless parallel event tracks. Einstein suggested that time and space, as we commonly think about them, are just a human convenience, not a fundamental reality. It may be convenient to step out of them, or across them.
    If I think that the Scottish druid who lived and died 1,500 years ago and the Royal Air Force pilot who was killed in World War II are part of my story, and that I have inherited karma from what they did or did not do, maybe I can reach back to them, launching from the moment of Now. Maybe my thoughts and actions now help or hinder in their own time - which is also now - and may be more helpful as I rise to greater consciousness of how all this works.
    It is possible to operate with these two seemingly contradictory visions of reality: linear karma in Chronos time, and the simultaneity of experience in the multiverse in a spacious Now. It is like the observation in physics that something can be both a particle and a wave, and you will see it one way or the other according to how you observe it.

- from my travel journal for Friday, January 9, 2015.

Indiana Jones, dressed by Churchill's bodyguard

I fly rather a lot, in ordinary reality as well as in dreams. On average, in the course of a year I am on four different planes every week. One of the things that sustains me is that I am constantly having "chance" encounters that often prove to have rich story value, and sometimes give me messages from the world. This is the story of one of my all-time favorite encounters with a stranger on a plane. I have lifted the narrative here, unedited, from my journal. There is a polished version in the Introduction to my book The Three "Only" Things.

January 6, 2006

Indiana Jones, Dressed by Churchill’s Bodyguard

I dreamed that the poet Yeats – a frequent presence in my mind when I was writing The Dreamer’s Book of the Dead - wanted me to dress in a decent suit because he was taking me on a visit. When I was correctly dressed, he led me through St James's Park in London, past the swans, and eventually to Number Ten Downing Street, where he left me to have a private moment with Churchill, who seemed to be engrossed in receiving information on the telephone relating to the magical battle of Britain.

The dream excited and intrigued me. Subsequent research – studded and guided by coincidence – led me to understand that Churchill was deeply interested in the occult and in alternate history. I had always admired Churchill, and I now felt drawn to study him and to write about him. In my imagination, I played with an idea for a fact-based novel with some “Indiana Jones” touches, in which Churchill and his personal network – including one of his bodyguards – do battle with Nazi occultists, among others.

Since I had several other book projects on my desk, I decided to seek a “second opinion” on whether this book plan was really a good one to pursue.

As is typical any week of my year, I had another plane trip coming up. I decided that whatever came up during this trip would be guidance on my theme. To make sure there was no vagueness or confusion about that theme, I wrote it down on an index card:

I would like guidance on whether writing a novel about Churchill with an Indiana Jones flavor is a good idea.

On the first leg of my trip, I had an interesting companion, a woman who had recently decided to make radical changes in everything that was central to her life. She had left her husband and her job, sold her home and her furniture. After spending two weeks with a friend, she was now traveling back to an uncertain future. I suggested to her that “if you can see your destination, you are better than halfway there.”

I asked her to reach down deep inside and tell me what she wanted of life.

She began to talk about an old dream, of founding a center in her home town that would support women who had been abused or simply defeated by life and help them to find their voice and their power and their healing.

I asked her to take me there – to help me see and smell this center, to go there with all of the senses. She warmed to this task, and soon we were both there, in her dream center. She realized as she described the neighborhood that she now had the address – an old building in need of TLC – and that she had identified all the key players, including the financial sponsors, who could make this happen.

When we parted company at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, she was juiced and confident.

But she held my arm for a moment and said, “What do I say to that part of myself that’s going to rise up and say, It’s just your imagination?”

“You’re going to say what the poet Tagore said – The stronger the imagination, the less imaginary the results.”

This was a pleasant exchange, and I like to believe that the center we grew in the imagination now exists. But there was no definite guidance here on my very specific theme, about the Churchill novel with an Indiana Jones touch.

Now I am hurrying along the C concourse at O’Hare, dodging electric carts and milling crowds, heading for my departure gate.

I stop in mid-stride because at my gate is….Indiana Jones.

He has the whole kit: the hat, the jacket, the Sam Browne belt, even the canvas dispatch case. Everything except the whip and the gun.

He does not look like Harrison Ford, however. He’s considerably chubbier.

And while I am thinking this may be my sign, a part of me is also saying,  This is absolutely over the top. Just too much. Don’t trust this.

So I get on my plane telling myself the verdict is still not in on the theme I have proposed to the universe. I settle down to my in-flight reading, which is a copy of The Duel, a masterful study of the personal contest between Churchill and Hitler in the critical months of 1940 when Britain and her Commonwealth stood alone against the Nazi evil. I had just gotten to a page describing Churchill driving with his bodyguard to Number 10 on the day he became Prime Minister when Indiana Jones loomed over me and said, “I’m sitting next to you. I swapped seats with a guy so he could sit with his family across the aisle.”

I made room for Indiana Jones, noting that it is always interesting to track what is happening when seating plans (or other plans) are scrambled.

“Do you have the whip?” I asked Indiana Jones when he was buckled up.

“It’s at home,” he explained.

“How about the gun?”

“Got that too.” He knew about guns, he explained. He was in the Coast Guard, working Homeland Security.

He thumbed his shoulder belt and announced proudly, “You know, this is the real stuff. It was made by Churchill’s bodyguard.”

“What did you just say to me?”

“These clothes were made by Peter Botwright. He used to be Churchill’s bodyguard. He went on to make clothes for the actors in James Bond movies, and then in Indiana Jones. I’ll give you his website. You can see for yourself.”

I showed him the open page of my book, where my finger had come to rest on a line describing Churchill in the car with his bodyguard.

“That’s quite the coincidence,” said Indiana Jones.

“You have no idea.”

Postscript

Did I write the adventure with an Indiana Jones flavor? Not yet. But I feel the play of the shelf elves in the way this 2006 journal report popped up just now. A smart editor I know once said that if a story is really worth telling, it will come back to the teller, after years or even decades....