Think about this for a second: there are people—kids  especially—who can venture into other worlds in much the same way Alice plunges down the rabbit hole into Wonderland (Alice in Wonderland), or Lucy climbs into that old mothball-smelling wardrobe and walks straight into Narnia (The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe).

Really.

The real-world people, both kids and adults, who can do this kind of thing are called fantasy prone personality types, a trait influenced by both psychological and neurological factors and said to be behind everything from imaginary childhood friends to grand adventures in fantastic realms and even mystical experiences.

The whole idea that some people might be considered clinically fantasy prone was the brainchild of psychologists Sheryl C. Wilson and Theodore X. Barber, who came up with the concept while studying hypnotic suggestibility back in the early 1980s.

Wilson and Barber observed that their research subjects often showed an over-the-top tendency to fantasize. This got the two so excited that they sat down with these folks and picked their brains about everything from their childhood beliefs in fairies and other imaginary creatures to the number of hours a day each of them spent daydreaming, and much more.

From these interviews, Wilson and Barber developed a list of 14 characteristics of the fantasy prone personality. The two psychologists considered anyone having six or more of their identified traits worthy of being called fantasy prone.

Do you think you might be fantasy prone? To find out, see if you match up with six or more of the following traits…

1. Being an excellent hypnotic subject.

2. Having imaginary playmates as a child.

3. Fantasizing frequently as a child.

4. Adopting a fantasy identity.

5. Experiencing imagined sensations as real.

6. Having vivid sensory perceptions.

7. Reliving past experiences.

8. Claiming psychic powers.

9. Having out-of-body or floating experiences.

10. Receiving poems, messages, etc., from spirits, higher intelligences, and the like.

11. Being involved in “healing.”

12. Encountering apparitions.

13. Experiencing hypnagogic hallucinations (waking dreams).

14. Seeing classical hypnagogic imagery (such as spirits or monsters from outer space).

Also, Wilson and Barber considered (1) confusing fantasies with real memories and (2) having out-of-body experiences as hallmark features of fantasy proneness.

I didn’t quite make it up to the bar let alone over it. All I can say for certain is that I fantasized a lot as a child, and part of this was pretending to be various characters out of the books I read. I especially enjoyed playing Alexander the Great and conquering the world with my broomstick spear and garbage-can-lid shield, but that was more playacting than it was adopting a fantasy identity. The terrors of the night were more likely to conjure up fantasies in my young mind. There was this hat rack in the hall outside my bedroom door that used to stalk me at night, and I heard whispered voices and footsteps in the attic above my bed, but I think this sort of thing is pretty typical.

Although fantasy proneness is considered a benign trait (most fantasizers are relatively well-adjusted people), a number of studies have found an overlap between certain types of mental illness (e.g., dissociation disorder) and fantasy proneness. Of course, like many so-called disabilities, fantasy proneness also might be considered an ability or gift. It has been suggested that people who are predisposed to be fantasy prone also demonstrate high degrees of creativity and include actors, artists, and writers.

Take the Fantasy Proneness Plunge

Are you fantasy prone to some degree? Check out the 14 traits above and see which, if any, apply to you. Do you believe the fantasy proneness traits/experiences that do apply to you are a disability or an ability, a curse or a gift?  Has your fantasizing stimulated and enhanced your creativity in any way? How? Examples: writing, art, music, etc. You’re welcome to share your comments/thoughts/stories in the comments section below.

“I prefer the term ‘the unconscious,’ knowing that I might equally well speak of ‘God’ or ‘daimon’ if I wished to express myself in mythic language.” – C.G. Jung

The following story is a work of fiction, inspired by an ongoing “God Helmet” experiment run by Dr. Michael Persinger of Laurentian University in Ontario, Canada.

Persinger's God Helmet

Peggy is a confirmed atheist and a skeptic when it comes to any supernatural explanation of natural phenomena. So-called mysteries are simply those things which have yet to be explained by science. Today, Peggy has offered herself up as a human guinea pig in the hope of adding to the accumulating body of evidence that points to God as nothing more than a product of the electrochemical processes of the brain, particularly the right temporal lobe.

Peggy has volunteered to enter the God Chamber, the brain-child of Dr. Mike Singer, a neuroscientist who claims that the experience of God, and spirituality in general, springs from the human brain and can be replicated under carefully controlled conditions. As Peggy settles onto a futuristic-looking recliner, a technician carefully positions an elaborately wired metal disk around her head. Meanwhile, Dr. Singer sits on the other side of a sound-proof barrier explaining through a speaker that the ability to sense the presence of gods and ancestral spirits, and even aliens, is wired into the brains of all human beings, and that he’s about to prove it again.

Singer tells Peggy to sit back and relax while he and his team measure her brainwaves on an EEG. “Okay,” says Singer, “In a few minutes I’m going to begin modulating the electromagnetic field around your temporal lobes. Until then, just relax.”

Peggy is beginning to doze off when she feels as if she’s floating up from the recliner. Suddenly alert, she senses someone squatting just behind her chair. She knows that this is what’s supposed to happen, but the hair on her neck rises and she’d like to end the experiment. But it’s too late. Now she senses warm, sweet-smelling breath against her cheek. She knows the smell at once: Doublemint gum. “Mom?” She is surprised by the sound of her own small voice. This is ridiculous. Her mother has been dead for nine years. Peggy struggles to remind herself that these unsettling sensations and emotions are being conjured up by people in white lab coats. But now the once vaporous presence takes on the living firmness of a motherly embrace – her mother’s embrace – and that warm, sweet breath (Doublemint was her mother’s favorite gum) rhythmically feathers her cheek. Again, Peggy is surprised: this time by her own contented sighs. And by a gut-wrenching sense of loss.

When the experiment is finally over, Peggy leaves the chamber and faithfully reports her experience to Dr. Singer. The bottomline: It was creepy, and not really what she expected. As quickly as she can, Peggy walks off the university campus feeling strangely unsettled and on the verge of tears.

As she approaches a crosswalk, the walk light flashes green. But Peggy hesitates for a moment, picturing the image of a green Doublemint gum wrapper. The gut-wrenching sensation returns with a vengeance, and this time she breaks down and cries. In that instant, a car runs the red light and races through the crosswalk. If she hadn’t paused for that split second, if she’d stepped off the curb, she’d likely be dead.

Peggy is shaken up by the near miss. But is she persuaded to believe that God or a guardian spirit saved her life? Not at all. She theorizes that her unconscious mind was responsible for the warning, if warning it was, just as it was responsible for conjuring up her mother and the unresolved grief and pain associated with her early death. Peggy walks away determined to delve deeper into the mystery of her God Chamber experience by undergoing psychotherapy.

Caedmon (Part 1). Brian (Part 2). Peggy (Part 3). All three had Wow! experiences that can be explained rationally; for example, Caedmon’s vision was triggered by fervent belief combined with severe stress and other factors, Brian’s miraculous moment was the result of his temporal lobe epilepsy, and Peggy’s encounter with a benign motherly presence was induced by electromagnetic stimulation of her temporal lobes.

But does science have the final word? All three of our fictional characters had Wow! experiences of the numinous Other in which their lives were significantly touched and made more meaningful, but in different ways. Caedmon found his calling through what he believed was a God-given vision and mission, and the reality of God was a certainty in his day. Brian found healing and personal salvation in Christ, whether the world was prepared to believe it or not. Peggy continued to deny the divine but came away from the God Chamber with a new-found respect for the power, scope, and potential of her own psyche. Three encounters with the numinous Other, three different versions of what many thinkers and mystics have called the greater truth that exists beyond the confines of this world.

I am reminded of an old story…

Once upon a time, a group of five blind men encountered an elephant upon the road. They gathered around the animal and began to touch it in order to determine what it was like in truth. One blind man felt a leg and said, “The elephant is like a pillar.” Another felt the tail and said, “The elephant is like a rope.” One felt the trunk and said, “The elephant is like a tree limb.” “No. It is like a fan,” countered the blind man holding up an enormous ear. The last man grasped a tusk and declared in a loud voice that the others were all wrong. “The elephant is like a solid pipe.” The men fell to arguing among themselves. In time, a wise man passed by and overheard their argument. “Fools!” he said. “All of you are right. But each of you is touching a different part of the elephant. In truth, the elephant is all of the things you mentioned and much more.”

What do you think?

“To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value is quite illogical and arbitrary…” – William James

The following story is a fictional composite derived from case studies of people with temporal lobe epilepsy.

Six months after the surgery to remove a tumor from the right temporal lobe of his brain, Brian still experiences the epileptic attacks his neurologist calls “partial seizures.” They begin with the smell of burning rubber, then he hears bells ringing. Even as these fade, he feels as if he’s caught between the real world and a perilous dream world. An invisible presence, evil and threatening, fills the room. He prays. Sometimes he looks around for a weapon to defend himself. Last week he barricaded himself in his room by wedging a chair under his doorknob and wouldn’t let his mom in. He didn’t recognize her voice. Afterward he threw up, then went to bed with a splitting headache and slept for ten hours.

Brian is fifteen. This Sunday morning he enters St. Thomas Moore Catholic Church with his father Ted and his mother Jean. They slide into the pew and sit quietly. Brian used to hate coming to church, but lately Mass has fascinated him. He’s watched spellbound as the priest moves through each stage of the Eucharist, waiting for the moment when he can get in line and receive the body of Christ. He’s come to feel that the wafer provides him with protection against the darkness that threatens to suck him in and never let him out again.

Today, he finds himself staring up at the crucifix hanging behind the altar, and it is as if the dying Christ has turned his soulful gaze upon him and him alone. Then, without warning, Brian feels as if his heart is beginning to melt. He goes down on his knees, hands folded before him, still staring at the figure of Christ, which is now surrounded by a nimbus of soft white light. He’s always heard the words, but now he feels the truth of Christ’s sacrifice like nails being driven through his hands. Tears stream.

His mom leans forward and quietly asks Brian if he’s okay. Her voice sounds strained, fearful. He nods vigorously, because his heart is now filled with so much love that he feels it will explode, yet still it is not filled up. It’s as if he has awakened from a horrible dream and realized that it is over now. He’s fine. Everything is going to be all right from now on.

Then he hears a voice, gentle and loving, “Rise up and be healed.”

Brian stands. Both his mom and dad are staring at him. Everyone nearby is staring at him.

Finally, Dad takes Brian by the arm and leads him out of the church. “We’d better get you home,” he says.

“I’m okay,” murmurs Brian. “I’m healed.” He wants to run and jump and shout, but his mother comes out of the church, and together his parents hustle him toward the car. “Christ died to save me,” says Brian, wondering why his mom has turned pale and says nothing.

Epilogue: A year has passed, and Brian hasn’t had a seizure since that Sunday. His doctor credits surgery, medications, and time for this happy turn of events. Brian considers it a miracle. Brian is sixteen. He goes to Mass every day, twice on Sunday. His parents are worried about him; maybe more now than before.

Scientists have little or nothing to say about matters of faith. But, significantly, some neurologists are beginning to suspect that the brain is programmed to believe in God, and that the temporal lobes are the key to experiencing spiritual and religious Wow! moments and ongoing states. Many point to examples of great religious figures of the past, such as St. Paul, and say that he manifested the symptoms of an epileptic seizure on the road to Damascus. Others point to more recent cases of “hyperreligiosity” among people diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy or TLE. Of course, none of this explains the subjective significance, meaning, or value of the experiences in question.

If you were born with or were later diagnosed with TLE, perhaps you have experienced special or extraordinary Wow! states of mind. Perhaps Wow! moments are commonplace or even daily events for you. If this is the case, please tell us your story.

Next: The God Chamber

“I had…an experience. I can’t prove it. I can’t even explain it. All I can tell you is that everything I know as a human being, everything that I am, tells me that it was real.” – Carl Sagan

An experience of the “Other” is always a profound moment, no matter how you label it: a mystical peak experience, an encounter with the collective unconscious, or coming face-to-face with God. There is a numinous, mysterious, secret quality about it, of having stepped behind the curtain of this world and peeked backstage into another, and perhaps more fundamental, dimension of reality.

The following three short stories (scheduled to run as three separate blog posts) are about Wow! moments, states, and experiences resulting from encounters with this numinous “Other.” Each story comes at the subject from different directions and points of view. The first is inspired by the The Dream of the Rood, an early poetic account of Christ’s crucifixion that blends Pagan Saxon and Christian traditions into one. The second story is a composite derived from case studies of people with temporal lobe epilepsy. The third was inspired by an ongoing “God Helmet” experiment run by Dr. Michael Persinger of Laurentian University in Ontario, Canada.

Part 1: A Monk’s Vision

“It seemed to me I saw a wondrous tree soaring into the air, surrounded by light, the brightest of crosses…” – Saxon Poet

The famished, exhausted young monk sits staring into the fire. He hasn’t moved or eaten in hours. He prays. Today, he set out on a journey to take the word of God to a heathen king who has threatened death to any Christian missionary who enters his lands. By this time tomorrow the monk, a brother of the Abbey of Streoneshalh, expects to be dead. Fear sits upon him like a night-black raven.

As his prayers become more fervent, he hears the ringing of a hammer. He looks up to find a muscular giant of a man working at what has now become a forge fire. The huge red-bearded man twists red-hot iron rods and hammers them flat with ease, beating out a sword blade with effortless strokes. Each blow of his hammer sends up a fountain of red sparks like flecks of ruby cast into the night sky.

“Why are you here, monk?” asks the giant smith without breaking from his task.

“I don’t know why the abbess sent me,” says the amazed brother. “I am but a lowly goatherd.”

“Yet here you sit, Brother Caedmon,” says the big man, thrusting the sword into the fire. Taking a deep breath, he blows the coals to roaring life with the force of a hundred bellows, then his hammer rings again. The blade looks nearly finished.

“How do you know my name?” asks the brother. “Are you an angel or a…demon?”

The big man laughs a huge belly laugh. “I was once a power in this land.” He sinks the flaming blade into a barrel of water that wasn’t there a moment before. Shrieking steam rises like marsh mist. Withdrawing the sword, he gazes at his work. “See how the separate rods have become one.” Glowing runes, and the marvelous image of a spreading tree, have appeared on the fire-blued iron.

“What does it mean, this magic?” gasps brother Caedmon, fumbling with the wooden cross he wears about his neck.

But the big man ignores the question. Instead, he says, “Dream now, Brother Caedmon, and take up the tree’s story.” Then, suddenly, he thrusts the sword deep into the young man’s heart. Caedmon throws up his hands and cries out, and for an instant, he feels as if his heart is on fire. Then the pain fades, leaving him knuckling his eyes in a swirling uprush of wind-gusted embers. By the time his sight returns, the smith is gone, leaving no sign he was ever there.

Caedmon begins to pray again. But his mind fills with words and pictures, and his soul is lifted up, and he falls upon his face with tears streaming. God has led him to the bridge across the chasm between Christian and heathen, and he must cross it on the morrow.

The next morning Caedmon approaches the Saxon village in silence. The heathen king emerges from his timber hall to greet the brother with a scowl. He takes up his seat beneath the sacred oak, which stands at the center of the village. Men, women, and children all gather round, murmuring. Caedmon stops and bows low.

The king glowers at him. “How will you meet your death?” he asks.

But Caedmon is not afraid. He stares at the tree and a light comes into his eyes. He approaches and gently embraces the trunk. “If I must die, let it be upon this tree even as the god-hero Christ embraced a wondrous tree and the nails pierced their flesh. The tree, loyal to the end, suffered with the dying Christ but lived to see him defeat death in the end. Would you hear this wondrous tree’s story in its own words?”

The king stares at Caedmon, at the fire in his eyes, and he is moved by the young man’s bravery and by a longing he cannot describe. He stands and bows before the venerable old oak. All of his people bow to the tree. “Tell us this story then,” he says.

The people murmur their assent. And Caedmon begins…

Hunger, fatigue, fear. Staring into a flickering fire. Fervent prayer. Any one of these singly might induce a momentary or more prolonged Wow! experience. Combine all of them in a soul filled with the certain knowledge of the reality of God and a heavenly realm beyond the veil of this world (which people possessed in Brother Caedmon’s day) and wondrous things have been known to happen. Has anything extraordinary ever happened to you as a result of all or any one of these pathways to Wow!

Next: Brian’s Miraculous Moment

Cathedral St-Gatien

Professional photographer and inspirational speaker Dewitt Jones tells a story about two Medieval masons, each chipping away on a block of marble. When asked by a priest what they’re doing, the first mason says he’s shaping a rock; but the second, his eyes alight with the fire of his passion, says he is building a cathedral.

As I write, I’m watching a YouTube video of Jones winding up his cathedral story before a packed house of rapt listeners: “I’m building a cathedral,” he says with evangelical intensity, letting these last words hang in the air for a moment before repeating them very softly, “I’m building a cathedral.” Now his voice rises: “One man was a stone chipper and the other was a cathedral builder, and the only difference was vision – vision.”

Dewitt Jones

Jones has me by the throat. He’s good. I want to hear more, but I pause the video and reach for a novel I’ve been reading: The Heaven Tree Trilogy by Edith Pargeter. Why? Because Jones’ words remind me of the main character, young Harry Talvace, a superb stone-carver and wannabe cathedral builder who, in Paris in the early 1200s, has been offered the job of his dreams by nobleman Ralf Isambard, who wants Harry to return to England and build him a cathedral.

Harry’s Wow! moment has been a long time coming, but it strikes like a bolt out of the blue Yes! Absolutely! I’m your man, he tells the astonished Isambard who marvels at the young man’s audacity to jump at a challenge that should scare him to death.

But Harry has no fear. Instead, he burns with passion for the challenge: “‘In Chartres, in Caen, in Bourges, I have seen the splendour and energy of other men’s creations, and ached for my own. Everything I have learned while I laboured to fulfil other men’s designs has been food to what I have in me. I have carried it a long time, and thought of it much, and longed for it to come into the light. If I will give it to you, you will not be disappointed.’”

And Isambard believes Harry with all his heart.

What Harry has is, in Jones’ words, “an extraordinary vision.”

Yes, Harry has that, but he is also facing an extraordinary test. He’s never seen the site where the massive stone structure will stand; neither has he been in charge of planning, designing and overseeing the building of a cathedral; nor mustered the money, men and materials needed to pull it off. The job will take every ounce of Harry’s vision, passion and purpose, and no small amount of creativity.

But Harry has an ace up his sleeve when it comes to creativity: his “extraordinary view.” That’s Jones again. I return to watching Jones on YouTube – a different clip this time.

Achieving the extraordinary view, Jones tells his audience, begins with understanding and embracing the notion that the source of creativity is to be found in shifting your point of view – “changing lenses,” in photographer speak – to find a new way of “seeing the ordinary as extraordinary.”

Wow! I hit pause again. Jones seems to be saying that if you have an extraordinary vision, there’s a very good chance you’ll get to enjoy the extraordinary view, which is just another way of saying you’ll have more of those from-the-gut creative insights that Jones describes as he flashes killer photographs up on a screen and tells his audience how he kept moving and shooting and changing lenses until he instinctively zeroed in on the money shot that best expressed his vision. He knew what he was looking for, but he had to find it out there in nature.

I return to the novel and find that Harry, the fictional cathedral builder, and Jones, the very real photographer, are right in synch.

The story Harry wants to tell in stone and glass is of “a growing tree” reaching toward heaven and filled with heaven’s light. When he looks to the face of his patron’s beautiful mistress Benedetta to provide him with a model to grace the capital of a column, he doesn’t settle for a conception of her likeness in stone gazing out over generations of parishioners. Instead, he explores her earthbound form for an extraordinary image that will express his grand vision of a Heaven Tree.

“Out of the neck-moulding,” writes Pargetter, “the long line of her stretched throat grew like a lily-stem whitening into the flower, and her face, simplified and yet most vividly her face still, looked up into the sun from between the uplifted wings of her hair. The blown locks, coiling and twining, held up the abacus [atop the capital] as the strong jet of a fountain holds up a roseleaf.”

And that’s not all. Harry gladly spreads out his designs for Benedetta, who sees columns rising like trees arching over a forest glade. And branches. And leaves … “arching, coiling, thrusting leaves, jets of life growing irrepressibly toward the light.” She goes on to exclaim, “They are like nothing I have ever seen anywhere else. Not in Italy, not in France. Those precise Roman capitals I know, but these are of another world.”

This time, when I put down the novel, I leave the video on pause and consider what Jones and Pargeter have revealed: Only extraordinary visions open the shutters on the extraordinary view, which is creative insight. Seems late to be asking this, but where do extraordinary visions come from? In Harry’s case, his native character and intelligence, his life experience, plus his natural gift for carving in stone all percolated beneath the surface until a Wow! moment erupted from that mysterious place that exists deep within each and every one of us. In that instant, the whole world took on the pattern of his vision.

The rest was execution.

Let’s hear from you: What is the source of creativity? What inspires you to be creative? When did you last have a creative moment?

Blinded by a freak accident at school one spring day, eight-year-old Jacques Lusseyran (1924-1971) was suddenly confronted by the total absence of light and color: the world had vanished from sight, filling the boy with panic and despair.

Fortunately for Lusseyran, a future World War II French Resistance hero, a profound and life-changing Wow! moment followed soon after, bringing light and color back into his life.

He tells of this moment in his autobiography And There Was Light. One day, out walking with his father, the desperate Lusseyran felt driven to turn his gaze inward. In that moment, he was confronted by a radiance rising up from deep within himself. “I found…light and joy at the same moment,” he writes, “and I can say without hesitation that from that time on light and joy have never been separated in my experience.”

Lusseyran’s inner light flowed out into the world resting on objects, giving them form, then leaving them. With light there was also color. “My father and mother, the people I ran into in the street, all had their characteristic color which I had never seen before I went blind.” One day he met a girl, Nicole. “She came into my world like a great red star…” Drawn to her “gentle beauty,” Lusseyran felt his own light dim when he was away from Nicole. “To get it back I had to find her again. It was just as if she were bringing me light in her hands, her hair, her bare feet on the sand, and in the sound of her voice.”

In his book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, neurologist Oliver Sacks describes Lusseyran as a synesthete. Synesthesia is a intermingling of the various senses, so that one might, say, hear the color red as the musical pitch C, taste the shape of an apple, or see a rainbow pour forth from a symphony orchestra. Sacks explains that the sudden onset of synesthesia following Lusseyran’s accident “suggests a release phenomenon, the removal of an inhibition normally imposed by a fully functioning visual system.”

Lusseyran’s Wow! moment brought him light and color, but it also awakened a whole range of wonderful sensory experiences…

“How could I have lived all that time without realizing that everything in the world has a voice and speaks,” writes Lusseyran. “Not just the things that are supposed to speak, but the others, like the gate, the walls of houses, the shade of trees, the sand and the silence.”

Two months after the accident that cost him his sight, Lusseyran stood on the beach one evening, listening to the “voice” of the Atlantic as wave after wave broke upon the shore. The sound was “precise beyond the power to imagine it,” he recalls. “The waves were arranged in steps, and together they made one music, though what they said was different in each voice. There was rasping in the bass and bubbling in the top register. I didn’t need to be told about the things that eyes could see.”

Lusseyran’s Wow! experience of touch came through his exploring fingers. “If my fingers pressed the roundness of an apple, each one with a different weight, very soon I could not tell whether it was the apple or my fingers which were heavy. I didn’t even know whether I was touching it or it was touching me. As I became part of the apple, the apple became part of me. And that was how I came to understand the existence of things.”

To Lusseyran, the realm of smell was awash in a language all its own. “I began to guess what animals must feel when they sniff the air,” he writes. Each smell was a messenger, sometimes bearing an invitation to reach out; sometimes warning Lusseyran to stand back or run away.

Lusseyran’s remarkable discoveries in the realms of light and his other senses were the result of synesthesia coupled with an adaptable child’s ability to recreate the world anew when required. How many of you have discovered something new after the loss of something familiar? How many of you have similar stories to tell, perhaps not about adjusting to the long night of total blindness, but about tragedy and loss, adaptation and transformation—stories about finding a way to adjust to misfortune, perhaps even discovering that this new way was how you were meant to live the whole time. Please share.

Carl G. Jung

I’ve yet to meet a person who hasn’t been wowed by the power of synchronicity, that strange interweaving of mind and matter that breaks into our everyday lives every now and then. Maybe you remember the 1983 hit song Synchronicity by The Police: “A star fall, a phone call / It joins all / Synchronicity.”

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of synchronicity, here’s the short version: Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), the Swiss psychologist (a free-thinker and dreamer, much like Einstein and perhaps just as important in his field), came up with his synchronicity theory while working in close collaboration with Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958), a subatomic physicist. According to Jung, synchronicities are “meaningful coincidences [that] are unthinkable as pure chance…”

For example, suppose I’m trying to decide if I should take a job in a different city. I don’t really want to move, but it’s way better money. I think of a friend who moved to New York years ago for better money. A moment later, the phone rings and it’s my friend calling to tell me he’s fed up with the New York rat race and is moving back home. The two events are more than mere coincidence. The chill running up and down my spine tells me so, and I say, “Wow! I was just thinking about you!” Ultimately, I decide that my friend’s call, coming when it does, means pulling up stakes for money is not for me, and I follow a different path.

When synchronicities break into our lives they make us question all those purely scientific explanations of how the universe works. Consider the following example offered up in David Peat’s book, Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind. Peat tells of “a psychotic patient who declared that he was Jesus, the creator and destroyer of light. At that very moment, the lighting fixture dropped from the ceiling, knocking the man out.”

Jung explained that synchronicities often accompany periods of emotional upheaval or change in our lives, such as a serious injury, the death of a family member, or the breakup of a relationship. Other happier examples might be starting a new career, marriage, or the birth of a child.

I’m going to list five true synchronicity stories from various sources. (BTW, there are websites out there devoted to publishing people’s synchronicity stories, many of which are merely tales of big coincidences, because they lack significant meaning to those involved.) Consider the following true synchronicity stories and ask yourself if anything similar has ever happened to you.

Scarab Beetle

1. The classic among all of Jung’s synchronicity stories: “A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it few in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle…” Jung handed the beetle to his patient, saying, “Here is your scarab.” The ice broke in that moment, and the woman eventually put her life back together.

Wolfgang Pauli

2. One legendary synchronicity story followed Wolfgang Pauli around his entire life. It had to do with something his fellow physicists called the “Pauli Effect.” The story goes like this: Pauli loved to spend his time theorizing and was “allergic” to lab experiments. It’s said that whenever he was in the vicinity of a scientific experiment something would break or go horribly wrong. One day, a colleague of Pauli’s was running an experiment when a piece of equipment collapsed in his lab. He wrote to Pauli right away, joking that since Pauli lived far away, he couldn’t have been the cause of the accident. But the joke, it seems, wasn’t on Pauli after all, because he had been riding on a train that day, and it had stopped in a station not far from his friend’s lab at the moment of the mishap.

3. The opening lines of Victor Mansfield’s book, Synchronicity, Science, and Soul-Making, recount a striking example of synchronicity as experienced by one of his students. She dreamt she was running with her cousin Carl. They were running for their lives; someone was after them. They ducked into an alley to hide, and Carl squeezed the dreamer’s hand reassuringly as the pursuing footsteps grew fainter. They were safe. But when she looked at Carl, he was disappearing around the corner. She lunged for him but couldn’t reach him. “Darkness overpowered my world the instant he turned the corner. Shaking with terror, I awoke at 12:32 a.m. Early the next morning, my father knocked on my bedroom door. Bleary-eyed, and exhausted from that night’s dream, I rolled over to see what Dad wanted so early in the morning. His face was long and his eyes were bloodshot and wide with shock. He began with difficulty, ‘Your cousin, Carl, committed suicide last—’ ‘What time?’ I asked even before he could finish his sentence. Confused by my initial reaction he answered, ‘Around 12:30 this morning.’”

4. Mansfield collected synchronicity stories, and included many of them in his book, changing names to ensure that contributors remained anonymous. Here’s another. Children, teens in particular, often ask, “Who am I?” “What’s my purpose in life?” “Does any of it mean anything?” One young woman, preoccupied by the question “Who am I?” found an odd stone by the edge of a lake. It had two large “eye” holes, two small “nose” holes, and a “mouth” hole, open as if in song. She took it home. Every night before going to sleep, she would ask the stone, “What song am I to hear?” But the stone did not answer. One day, her brother-in-law found the stone and blew through the holes, making music, and so they named it the “Singing Stone.” Shortly thereafter, she was drawn to a book of Native American stories. Opening it, she was stunned to find: The Story of the Singing Stone. Her spine tingling, the young woman sat and read: It was the story of a girl’s long search for the Singing Stone. Her quest ended in failure, but when she returned home, her family held out their arms and cried, “Welcome home Singing Stone!” The girl was the Singing Stone. The stone had answered her.

5. I saved my own synchronicity story for last. When I was 19, I spent the summer trekking through Europe with my girlfriend. It was great, for a while. But throw two kids (heck, two middle-aged adults for that matter) together for a few months, traveling on filthy buses and trains, frequently sleeping out in the open, often in the rain, and never-ever getting enough to eat, and you build up a certain amount of tension. Anyway, this tension mounted, until one day, riding a bus through Munich, we just stopped speaking to each other. Eventually, we got off and started walking. Twenty minutes and many twists and turns later, I heard my girlfriend groan. I turned. She was sitting on the curb, her head between her knees, sobbing. She’d left her little blue travel case on the bus and had been too tired to miss it. That was it. The last straw. We had it out right there and wound up breaking up. Determined at least to make an attempt to find her case before going our separate ways, we found a police station and went in, planning to report it lost, even though we knew the odds of getting it back were zero. But inside the station, we found a woman beside herself with excitement. She waved us outside. A bus had pulled up. We made a dash for it. The doors hissed opened, and there was my girlfriend’s case, sitting beside the driver. He smiled and pointed at it. “You lucky, ja!” In the rush of relief, the tension broke, and my girlfriend and I made up on the spot. Our relationship wasn’t to last, but we finished our travels through Europe together without having another argument. The experience had changed us.

Okay, now let’s hear your Wow! synchronicity story…

Shangri-La

Of all the Wow! experiences imaginable, stumbling across a paradise hidden away in some far corner of the world has to rate right up there. And I’m not talking about an unplanned layover on a tropical island in the South Pacific or anything like that. No, I’m talking about finding a way into a real earthly paradise and refuge – a Garden of Eden.

Since the time of Gilgamesh, dreams and visions of such a place have stirred the souls of adventurers, luring them into uncharted waters in rickety wooden ships, or across burning deserts by camel, or over high mountain passes on frost-bitten feet in search of wondrous lands of milk and honey, and eternal youth.

I’m talking about a place like Shangri-la.

Turning to my bookshelf, I reach for my copy of the novel Lost Horizon by James Hilton and thumb its pages. Shangri-La is a fictional valley nestled in the shadow of a sacred mountain in Tibet. It is a hidden place of moderation, long life and, most importantly, accumulated knowledge and wisdom. In the novel, set on the eve of World War II, Shangri-La is a beacon of light in a time of gathering darkness. Fantastic stuff, but is Shangri-La no more real than J.R.R. Tolkien’s land of Lothlorien in the The Lord of the Rings?

Michael Wood

In his PBS/BBC television series In Search of Myths and Heroes historian Michael Wood devotes one of four programs to the myth of Shangri-La. In it, he wastes no time answering my question: Hilton’s 1933 story of Shangri-La, says Wood, is based on an account of a legendary kingdom in the Tibetan mountains called Shambala – a kingdom remarkably like Shangri-La – which entered the consciousness of the West for the first time some 400 years ago.

As Wood tells it, in India in the year 1624, a visiting Jesuit priest and explorer from Portugal, called Father Antonio de Andrade, had heard stories about a Christian community living in the remote mountains in a land called Tibet. An old priest even handed Andrade a map that situated the Christians near a place called Lake Manasarovar.

Carried away by his desire to find these lost Christians, Andrade set out in the company of wandering pilgrims on the road across the high mountains, where he suffered the agonies of sickness, frostbite and snow-blindness before the end of his journey.

An historian and adventurer, Wood goes wherever the story and his local guides take him, and this time it had him trudging high up into the biting winds of the Himalayas in the footsteps of an Andrade.

Across the mountains at last, says Wood, Andrade arrived in a land of sacred peaks where he was met by “mysterious ambassadors” who led him down into a vast labyrinth of canyons to a hidden city carved out of living rock. The city’s name was Tsaparang, the capital of the ancient Buddhist kingdom of the Guge in the Garuda Valley.

The Guge women crowded the rocky balconies to see the first European enter their world — a Wow! moment for them as well as for Father Andrade. It was not a Christian community after all, but a valley filled with temples and shrines, criss-crossed by “sparkling canals, green fields and fruit orchards,” says Wood. It was a paradise.

Wood notes with interest that the city of Tsaparang was founded in the ninth century, just before the legend of Shambala first appears.

The Buddhist Kalachakra tantra tells of a land behind the far mountains of Tibet, ruled by a wise king – a land free of war and sorrow, a place of peace and harmony. In his BBC blog, Wood quotes a commentator on the Kalachakra tantra: “‘Shambala is a kingdom where humanity’s wisdom is spared from the destructions and corruptions of time and history, ready to save the world in its hour of need.’”

This might have been written for the back-cover of Hilton’s Lost Horizon, published on the eve of a world war. For Shangri-La, as its High Lama tells the story’s hero at a critical moment, will weather the coming storm and survive, and when the world comes “seeking its lost and legendary treasures…they will all be here, my son, hidden behind the mountains.”

So what became of the real city of Tsaparang?

“As so often in history,” says Wood, “the arrival of the Europeans was the beginning of the end.” Neighboring rulers waged war against the King of Tsaparang for allowing the Christians to enter the capital. The hidden city fell in 1685 and the royal family and their retainers were beheaded.

The hidden valley is now desolate, the city a well-preserved ruin.

But Shambala and Shangri-La both live on, one as a spiritual goal and the other as a remote and tiny paradise of the human imagination, untouched by darkness. Which is precisely the lesson Wood imparts in the end. “If you ask me,” he says, “paradise can be found anywhere on this earth, but only on this earth.”

Where’s Your Shangri-La?

I’ve my own personal Shangri-La, and I’ll bet you have one too. Mine is near a place called Sunriver (even sounds Shangri-Laish) in Central Oregon. It’s a place in the high desert surrounded by Lodgepole pine and juniper. Ah, wish I could bottle that smell and bring it back home. The minute I get there, no matter how amped-up I am, I power down and relax. No other place has this effect on me.

So what about you, have you found a Shangri-La yet? Where is it? What makes it Shangri-Laish? Heck, it might be a corner of Central Park or up in a tree. If it is, share it. If you don’t want to reveal its exact location, don’t – just tell us about it.

Then we’ll have a vote for the Top-10 most unusual, unexpected and intriguing Shangri-Las – places that make us stop and say, you guessed it, Wow! Let’s call it “The most unlikely Shangri-La imaginable.”

It’s said that an earnest young man once asked the 19th century philosopher and satirist Thomas Carlyle how he should go about reforming the world, and Carlyle told him to “start with himself.”

The same might be said for making the world a happier place: start with yourself. Decide to be a happier person.

But can one simply decide to be happier? Or, looking at the subject from an even more practical perspective, can one approach something as elusive as happiness as a self-improvement project?

There are reasons to suspect that you can. There are even reasons to suspect that you should if you ever want to move beyond the pursuit of happiness as some ideal future state and actually attain a bit of of it in the here and now.

Intrigued? Read on.

One sodden gray morning in April, a cross-town bus pulled up to the curb on New York’s upper east side. The doors hissed open and off stepped Gretchen Rubin, head still reeling from a life-changing Wow! moment.

Gretchen Rubin

She details this moment in the opening chapter of her book The Happiness Project (which is also an ongoing blog): While staring out the rain-spattered window of the bus, Gretchen was struck by the unsettling notion that her life was rolling by just like the scenery, which included a woman Gretchen felt looked disturbingly like herself, talking on a cell phone while rolling a baby in a stroller.

Watching that woman unleashed a cascade of thoughts in Gretchen’s mind, starting with “That’s me!” quickly followed by “Is this really it? What do I want from my life, anyway?” The upshot is Gretchen quickly realized that she was happy with her marriage, her two children, her work – just about everything in her life.

She just wanted to be happier still.

Now this is the point at which most of us would just stop and tell ourselves to get a grip and get on with the day. But Gretchen seized the moment. “I’ve got to tackle this,” she told herself. “I entertained a brief vision of myself living for a month on a picturesque, windswept island, where each day I would gather sea shells, read Aristotle, and write in an elegant parchment journal. Nope, I admitted, that’s not going to happen. I needed to find a way to find happiness here and now. I needed to change the lens through which I viewed everything familiar…”

To accomplish this, Gretchen stepped from the bus to the sidewalk determined to launch a happiness project.

At first blush, the words “happiness” and “project” seem light years apart. But Gretchen had been trained to approach problems methodically. At Yale Law School, she was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal, and she clerked for Justice Sandra Day O’Conner before leaving the law behind to pursue a career as a writer.

As Gretchen turned the problem around and around in her head, she realized that if she wanted to be happier she’d have to find specific areas of her life to work on and measure the results over time, her goal being to achieve incremental increases in happiness at the end of each day, week, and month through the end of the year. By which time she hoped to gain an overall increase in her general state of happiness.

To begin, Gretchen decided to break up her Happiness Project in to twelve separate resolutions. She’d tackle one resolution per month, integrating it into her life before taking on the next. Her resolutions were cumulative and included: boosting her vitality, remembering love in her marriage, aiming higher at work and enjoying it more, lightening up as a parent, getting serious about play, making time for friends, investing money in being happier (spend a little money), contemplating eternity, pursuing her passion for books, paying attention to small details, and keeping a contented heart. The last month was set aside for a juggle-all-the-resolutions-at-once boot camp. In addition, she developed a separate list of Twelve Commandments to “help me as I was struggling to keep my resolutions.”

Rules? Structure? Commandments? For happiness?

Sounds like work, doesn’t it? But then Gretchen might tell you that rules are the secret of her success. Through defining her happiness tasks, holding herself accountable, and measuring her efforts to achieve specific happiness goals – such as being more energetic, a better wife and mother, a more involved friend – Gretchen’s sense of being swept along through life was largely replaced by an almost moment-by-moment awareness of herself and her relationship to her family, friends – the whole world.

It appears to be paradoxical but true that if we approach activities without formal rules, limitations, and measures, the potential for creativity, growth, and enjoyment is largely dissipated. Take, for instance, a formal Japanese tea ceremony vs. making yourself a cup of home brew. There are many separate steps in the tea ceremony, and so many subtle movements and gestures that few have attained the status of master in this ritual art form. Masters or not, those who practice the tea ceremony say it is deeply soul-satisfying if performed with precision and the proper state of mindfulness. The home brewer, on the other hand, just wants the tea, and that’s pretty much all he or she gets in the end.

It was Cicero who wrote, “We are slaves of laws so that we can be free.” Any tea master or Haiku poet would say the same thing. So would Yoda – in fact, in one of the Star Wars films, he says, “Your focus determines your reality.”

“Pay close attention to the minute details of your environment, discovering in them hidden opportunities for action that match what you are capable of doing, given the circumstances,” writes Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (yes, it’s a tongue twister), author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Mr. C goes on to say, “Set goals appropriate to your situation and closely monitor your progress through feedback. Whenever you reach a goal, up the ante, setting increasingly complex challenges for yourself.”

Practitioners of Zen Buddhism are told to approach even the most mundane activities with a beginner’s mind and rules for engagement. Even if this involves something as simple as counting the petals on a flower, you can increase your moment-by-moment awareness and your sense of enjoyment in the present, opening the way for Wow! experiences and personal growth.

This is precisely what Gretchen has done with her Happiness Project. She has intentionally and mindfully focused her attention on daily activities and behaviors she believes have made her life and the lives of others happier. As a result, a new reality is emerging. She documents the emergence of this new reality in her book and daily blog:

www.happiness-project.com

“Winds tore over the earth and lightning fell from the sky. When it was quiet, the islanders said that some mighty spirit had passed away.” – Plutarch

The brazier emitted a fierce orange glow. Otherwise, the cell was dim and filled with shadows. Thamus, naked, lay strapped to a plank. His sweat reeked of fear. The questioner held up the red-hot flaying knife for Thamus to inspect. For an instant, the man looked like a blacksmith showing off his work. “What was the message?” asked the questioner. He had a kind voice, but somehow that made it so much worse.

“Would you have me disobey the gods?” pleaded Thamus, undone by fear. “What would become of me?”

The flaying knife descended until he felt the searing heat of it singe the dark hairs covering his right pectoral muscle. The sharp smell terrified him. “Please nooo!” he cried and burst into tears.

“Then tell me and spare yourself,” said the questioner.

Thamus squirmed under the scorching heat of the knife, which had yet to burn and char his tender flesh. He would tell. The gods would spare him. He would hold his wife and his daughter in his arms again and shower kisses on them. The very thought of little Kara with her huge blue eyes and pouting lower lip made him whimper. How could he not talk given the circumstances? Yes, he would tell this kind man everything he wanted to know, and he would return home.

But the questioner was no longer looking at him. He was staring at the door to the cell. Thamus looked there, too. A tall figure, cloaked and hooded, stood in the doorway. It lingered for a moment before advancing into the room. The questioner sucked in his breath, then bowed and drew back not lifting his head.

The hooded figure circled Thamus looking down. The face within the hood was hidden in shadow, but a voice spoke out, sounding mystified, “Thamus of Alexandria, you are indeed a brave man.”

“Great Caesar!” gasped Thamus. “I am only a simple man.”

The Emperor of the World stopped and threw back his hood. He looked very much like a bird of prey in the hellish half-light of the chamber. “Yes, brave and simple.” Caesar almost seemed to smile. “It should have occurred to you that your friend also heard the message, and he was eager to tell his Emperor everything.”

Thamus swallowed. “Then, why Great Caesar? Why?”

The Emperor walked slowly around Thamus. “Because I wanted to see if you would honor the gods even in the face of torture and death. Such men are rare these days. But you are such a man. Tell me, what makes you believe it is true, this message.”

Then, since Caesar already knew the message, Thamus told him of his dream, and of the voice booming across the sea from the island, and of his night in Pan’s sanctuary when the god’s reflection vanished from the pool.

“Hmm,” said Caesar scratching his chin, “What you say adds credibility to your message and weight to your errand. We seem to be at an impasse. Either you fulfill the will of a god or gods with my aid, in which case the Empire is rocked to its foundations, or I stop you and court their wrath.

The Roman Forum

“There seems to be only one thing to do, Thamus of Alexandria. We will go to the Forum together and you will deliver this message. I will then have my augurs refute it incontrovertibly. You will have performed the will of the gods, and I will have nipped a panic in the bud before word of your deed takes wing for the four corners of the Empire. Actually, the sooner you do this thing the better. Your friend has…vanished, but he told us there were others onboard your ship who heard the message and have no doubt begun to spread it far and wide.”

“But, Great Caesar, you seem to fear the gods. Do you dare refute their message?”

“I, too, am a god, or have you forgotten?” said Caesar in an imperious tone. “You were charged by a god to deliver a message, that is all. And it shall be delivered. Beyond that, we are free to believe or disbelieve the contents of your message.”

“But, Great Caesar,” said Thamus. “If you anger the gods…”

“Even if the message is true,” interrupted the Emperor, “and Great Pan is dead, I so honor the god that I would not have his sanctuaries and alters abandoned or cast down. How can the gods fault me for that? Speaking of the other gods, who’s to say it will stop with Great Pan? Chaos would ensue, I tell you. We need the gods. Without them, our whole world would vanish. Do you understand, Thamus of Alexandria?”

“Yes, Great Caesar.”

“Good.”

As before aboard ship on the night he heard the booming voice, Thamus was stricken with the certainty that something momentous was happening and that he was poised at the very hub of the revolving wheel of the Cosmos. Again, the weight of this knowledge bore down upon him like mountains. His chest ached, and he struggled to draw breath with which to speak his heart: “Great Caesar, my dream…I believe Great Pan is dead, and I do not believe he will be the last. It has been said in Alexandria that many of the oracles have fallen silent. The world is changing. I feel it.”

“As do I, or I wouldn’t be here with you now,” said Caesar. “But when that change comes, I fear the Empire will also die. It is my sacred duty to forestall such a catastrophe as long as possible.”

An inner voice told Thamus that the Emperor spoke the truth. Still, he opened his mouth to utter the obligatory response, Surely the Empire with last forever, Great Caesar… But his tongue caught, and he was forced to begin again.

The Emperor stopped Thamus with an impatient gesture. “It is time to deliver your message, Thamus of Alexandria, and while we know that you are the honored herald of gods who, I fear, announce the coming end of their world and ours, we will exercise the free will they granted us to disbelieve and refute your message. It shall be so.” The Emperor sighed heavily. “And may the gods absolve you of all blame in this matter. Come. Perhaps the end may be delayed for a few lifetimes of men or more.” To Thamus’ surprise, the Emperor of the World began to unbind him with his own hands. “Yes, perhaps the gods will grant us a glorious sunset before the coming of night.”

Thamus’ eyes brimmed with tears. If the gods accepted Caesar’s compromise, then he might live to see his wife and little Kara again. “Yes, Great Caesar,” he said in a choked voice, and he wept hot tears of relief and longing, and the weight of mountains was lifted, and he breathed freely. It was in this moment that Thamus noticed Caesar’s strained expression and the sag in his shoulders, as if the Emperor were bearing a great weight.

Epilogue

The Roman Empire thrived for centuries after Thamus’ time. Yet the oracles continued to dwindle and pass away. As for the gods…The Emperor Constantine made Christianity the official state religion of the Roman Empire in 312 A.D. The Emperor Theodosius threw down the alters of the gods and banned pagan worship in 393 A.D. Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410 A.D. The Western Empire fell in 476 A.D. By this time, much of the city of Rome lay in ruins, the ancient world had come to an end, and darkness had descended upon the West.

Let’s talk about this.

Plutarch’s essay The Passing of the Oracles, on which this short story is based, was written at the height of the Rome’s power and dominance, yet it leaves the reader with a melancholy sense of the passing away of Thamus’ age and its beliefs – as if this great passing away was in air, as they say. But then Plutarch was a priest of Apollo at the Oracle of Delphi, and would be a likely candidate to have premonitions about the future?

As with dreams and signs & portents, you might have experienced at some point in your life a premonition or vision of what the future holds for you, for those close to you, or even for humanity. Such Wow! moments and insights have been known to herald future events. In the fall of 1913, the eminent psychologist C. G. Jung was seized by an overpowering vision of a great flood sweeping across much of northern Europe, carrying the rubble of civilization before it. Then the sea turned to blood. His premonition was realized less than a year later with the onset of World War I.

What does your gut tell you? Have you ever had a powerful premonition or vision of the future that has come to pass or that you have good reason to believe will come to pass? Care to tell us about it?

“So there is no navel-stone, center of the earth and ocean; And if there is, it’s known to the gods but hidden from mortals.” – Oracle of Delphi

The morning dawned fair with a favorable wind, as did every morning thereafter. And the merchant ship was wafted from port to port toward its destination – Rome, mistress of the world. For the remainder of the voyage, Thamus’ fellow passengers cut him a wide berth and whispered behind his back. Even Heracleon, though he smiled and spoke as a friend, was short on his usual friendly banter and long on awkward silences.

At last, on a hot afternoon, Thamus and Heracleon arrived in Rome. Heracleon had spent that morning walking the dusty road in the company of his own thoughts. But as the two men joined the press of sweating humanity passing into the city, he moved up beside Thamus and said in a subdued voice, “Surely you don’t mean to go through with this…this madness?”

“What choice have I?” asked Thamus, weary from lack of sleep. “You heard that voice as well as I. A month has passed and yet I still hear it, as clearly this moment as upon that night. A god or demigod commanded me to do this thing. How can I disobey? Would you?”

Heracleon sighed and was silent for a long while. “I thank Jove that I do not have to choose either way. But let me ask you this: How do you know that it was not some grudge-mongering satyr who commanded you to pronounce the death of his master so that people would cease to make sacrifice to Great Pan?”

“I do not know,” groaned Thamus.

“Then,” said Heracleon, “I propose that you wait three days and, during that time, pray to the gods for guidance and keep your eyes peeled for an omen.”

“That is good advice,” said Thamus. “Thank you, my friend.”

Heracleon’s brow furrowed. “You know I like you, Thamus, but I can no longer travel with you. I-I have a family to consider…You do understand.”

Thamus sighed at the thought of his own wife and daughter. “Yes.”

“Then it is good-bye,” said Heracleon. “Do not rush to do the bidding of this stranger who called to you from out of the night to pronounce the death of Great Pan.” And with these words he left Thamus standing at a bustling crossroads in the city of Rome.

For three days and nights Thamus prayed to Phoebus and to the other Olympian gods and to the lesser gods and demigods, and he looked for signs and portents, but he neither saw nor heard anything that struck him as profound.

There was in Rome, in Thamus’ day, a shrine in a grotto dedicated to Great Pan. Late one afternoon, Thamus sought out this shrine and, once there, fell to his knees before the sacred spring, praying that the awful message shouted to him over the water was not true. And he prayed to be released from the awful command to deliver it to the world. He prayed well into the night.

Great Pan

At last, the Moon rose full and bright, shining ghostly white upon the god’s alter and upon an ancient fig tree, casting its leafy image upon the surface of the spring. Thamus gazed upon this watery phantom and appealed to it, but then a gust of wind blew through the grotto, rippling the water, and the image of the tree vanished. Thamus quaked with fear. It was the sign. The god was no more.

That night Thamus again dreamed his dream of the departure of the deathless gods from Alexandria and the mortal world.

He arose in the morning, clammy with sweat, and prepared himself to go to the Forum and deliver his message. As he was donning his robe, there came a pounding at the door of his rented room. Drawing his dagger, because one couldn’t be careful enough in Rome, Thamus went to the door and spoke, “Who is it?”

“In the name of Caesar,” barked a deep and commanding voice, “open this door, Thamus of Alexandria.”

Casting his dagger on the bed, Thamus opened the door at once.

Two Praetorian guards in full armor pushed their way into the room. Thamus shuffled back, his mouth open in surprise. “You are Thamus of Alexandria?” demanded one of the guards.

“Y-yes,” stuttered Thamus.

“Caesar commands that you present yourself at the imperial palace within the hour.”

Thamus began to tremble, his heart to race. He wondered, Why? Heracleon enjoyed his wine. Perhaps a few cups full had loosened his lips at the wrong time and in the wrong place? It was said that the Emperor’s spies were everywhere in the city. In spite of his fear, Thamus had no alternative but to obey. He bowed his head. “I am at Great Caesar’s command.”

An hour later he stood in a small, richly decorated chamber in the Emperor’s palace on the Palatine Hill, his mind awash with a number of unpleasant possibilities, all of which turned his bowels to water.

Caesar

A moment later, the door opened and a tall man with gray hair entered the room. He was clad in a simple robe bordered with purple. Thamus bowed deeply.

The man approached and waved him up. “Thamus of Alexandria?” he asked.

“Yes, Great Caesar.”

“I have been expecting you.”

“Expecting me, sire?”

“A month ago, my augurs foretold that, within one cycle of the Moon, a man from Alexandria would enter Rome with news that might cause panic throughout the empire. Well, you can imagine…I have been keeping an eye out. You have a friend, one Heracleon. Someone in my service overheard him in a tavern, and here you are. So, what message do you bear that might shake my empire?”

“Great Caesar, I do bear a message that might well upset people, but I was commanded to deliver the message in the Forum here in the Capital.”

“By whom were you commanded?” Ceasar’s voice had risen.

“By one I believe to be a divine messenger, perhaps even a god, sire.”

“What is this message?” demanded Caesar.

Thamus struggled to swallow the lump in his throat. “The Forum, sire, the god commanded…”

“Enough!” shouted Caesar. “If you do not tell me this news, then I will have you taken to the Mamertine and there have it extracted from you. Trust me, you do not know the meaning of suffering until you have been a guest at the Mamertine.”

Thamus’ knees gave way and he fell upon them before Caesar. “Great Caesar, how can I disobey a direct command of the gods? Would you?” With these insolent words he knew he had sealed his fate.

Caesar was quiet for a moment. “You are a brave man, Thamus of Alexandria. What if you and I were to go together to the Forum, now, and you were to deliver your message quietly to me and only me? Would you be keeping faith with this god who sent you?”

Thamus’ heart sank deeper. “He commanded me to proclaim this news in the Forum. I know in my heart he meant for me to proclaim it to all the world.”

Caesar turned his back on Thamus. “Your answer is regretful.” He said no more. At that moment, the two Praetorian guards entered the room and took Thamus by the arms.

“Take him to the Mamertine and pry the message from him,” said Caesar in a low voice.

“Yes, Caesar,” said the two men as one.

“Great Caesar, I beg you,” cried Thamus, shuddering, his eyes filling with tears. But the Emperor remained standing with his back turned.

The guards hauled Thamus away.

Next Week: Thamus faces Death and Worse…

Let’s talk about this.

In the ancient world, people looked for signs and portents in the movement of stars and planets, in the entrails of animals, in the shifting winds, in the play of sunlight and shadow – everywhere.  Roman augurs read the flights of birds to interpret the will of the gods in all matters involving the peace, good fortune and well being of of the Republic and later Empire.

In our rational age, we have no organized system for seeking messages in the flights of birds or other natural phenomena. Yes, many people still read their daily horoscope, but I have no idea how many take this form of divination as seriously as the ancients did. Surely some do. Do you believe the stars determine your fate?

Even if you don’t believe your future is written in the stars, there has probably been a time in your life, a Wow! moment, when the natural world seemed to speak to you in a voice both loud and clear. For example, one day, as I was weighing the decision to name a new business venture Corvus, LLC (Corvus is Latin for Crow), I looked out the window and noticed that my lawn was covered with several dozen crows. The sight brought goose bumps and a curious feeling in the pit of my stomach. Was this an omen? Good? Bad? I took it as a good sign. The eminent psychologist C.G. Jung coined a word for such a meaningful coincidence: synchronicity (more about synchronicity in a future post).

Have you ever had anything like this happen to you? Care to tell us about it?

“For two are the gates of shadowy dreams, and one is fashioned of horn and one of ivory. Those dreams that pass through the gate of sawn ivory deceive men, bringing words that find no fulfillment. But those that come forth through the gate of polished horn bring true issues to pass, when any mortal sees them…” – Homer

Not all Wow! experiences are joyous. Some might be described as burdens, trials, or even ordeals. I based the following story (fiction) on an essay entitled The Passing of the Oracles by Plutarch, the first century historian, biographer, and essayist.

Thamus awoke in a cold sweat, threw off his cloak and stood on the gently heaving planks of the merchant ship, breathing deeply to quell his shuddering heart. The evening breeze smelled of the wine-dark sea and of wood smoke.

Unable to stifle his feeling of unease, Thamus hastily stepped over his snoring friend, the Gaul Heracleon, and moved to the rail. From here he could see the ghost-pale contours of an island shimmering under a full Moon. The flickering light of a fire reached his eyes. Perhaps a watchman kept his lonely vigil upon that wan shoreline.

Thamus leaned on the rail, breathing in the sea-tang and smoke. For the seventh straight night on this voyage to Rome he had dreamed he was home in Alexandria, sitting at his desk, opening a letter from the Pythia at Delphi…

Oracle of Delphi

His hands shake so violently he has trouble breaking the wax seal and unrolling the papyrus without dropping it, and all the while his mind races: What could the Pythia possibly have to say to him? Without knowing why, he senses the letter contains an earth-shattering revelation.

At last he unfolds the note and, in trembling hands, holds it up close to the flame of his reading lamp. The papyrus sheet is blank! At that very instant, he hears an eerie wail rise up somewhere in the great city.

Still clutching the letter, he runs to the window. A great gale, pushing a colossal wall of sand, envelops Alexandria, spreading through every street and alley, blotting out every building. In seconds it is upon Thamus, like a swirling mist. As he stares into this gray void, he can make out the undulating shapes of towering figures, both human and bestial, trudging past his window, moving from east to west. He thinks he can hear a vast and terrible wailing and moaning even as people in the houses around him wail and moan in their pitifully small voices. Then he hears one of those voices rise above all the others, crying, “The gods are departing! They are leaving us forever!”

Seizing the ship’s rail, Thamus shuddered at the vividness of his dream. He felt so alone at sea. He missed his wife. He especially missed his little golden girl Kara with her huge blue eyes and pouting lower lip. Then he heard voices, ordinary voices. Several men were moving about the deck at this late hour, drinking wine from wooden bowls, chatting and laughing. Thamus was calmed by their idle talk of whores and Egyptian wheat prices. Slowly his fingers relaxed their talon-like grip.

Then, suddenly, from the island, the night breeze carried a booming voice across the sea: “Is there one aboard called Thamus?”

The talk and laughter on deck flickered and died. Heracleon and the other sleepers awoke and rose. All stared out toward the island in silence.

Thamus stood stricken. Slowly, and with the certainty of one who has been visited by a true dream, he understood that something momentous was happening and that he was poised at the very hub of the revolving wheel of the Cosmos. The weight of this knowledge bore down upon him like mountains. Under sagging shoulders, he bent his head over the rail and prayed to Phoebus to deliver him from this awful and unsought fate.

Then the voice boomed out again, “Thamus? Thamus do you hear me?”

Thamus could not speak, but Heracleon stepped to the rail beside him and shouted, “Who calls for Thamus of Alexandria? Do not be a stranger. Tell us your name.”

“I will speak only to Thamus!” boomed the stranger.

Heracleon turned his wide-eyed gaze upon his friend.

Thamus choked before finding his voice. Clearing his throat, he cupped his hands round his lips and rasped, “I am Thamus.”

Then he and all aboard ship strained to hear what the stranger had to say, but only the sea replied with the sound of plashing waves on creaking timbers.

Great Pan

After what seemed like an eternity, the stranger’s booming voice carried across the water. It had increased, grown more resonant, more god-like. “Thamus,” said the stranger. “Go and proclaim in the Forum in Rome that Great Pan is dead!”

Everyone aboard ship gasped. Those closest to Thamus, even his friend Heracleon, edged away. A general commotion broke out: “Who was that? What does he mean, Great Pan is dead?” But the raging storm within Thamus’s soul drown out all but his own inner voice: He speaks the truth, this dreadful messenger? But why did he choose me to bear such a message?

Next Week: Thamus Continues His Wow! Adventure…

Let’s talk about this.

In the time of Thamus, most people believed that the god Morpheus ruled over a vast realm of gods, daemons, and spirits who shaped and populated the dreams of mortals. Foremost among the beliefs of this age was that some dreams are prophetic. The ancients also believed that the Olympian Gods made their will known to mortals through dreams. In Homer’s The Iliad, Zeus sends a “murderous” shape-shifting dream to Agamemnon to “rouse him” into attacking Troy while the matchless warrior Achilles sits idle by his ships.

In our own time, dreams are often dismissed as mere fancies or the brain’s nightly housekeeping. Yes, we may have big dreams on occasion, but unlike the ancients, most of us tend to be far more wary of assigning prophetic or other mysterious qualities to our dreams. Still, I’m sure many of you no doubt recall a dream or two from sometime in your past – perhaps even early childhood – that left you covered with goose bumps or awed for days or even years.

Where do you stand? Are dreams nothing more than a daily housekeeping chore performed by your over-stimulated brain, or do you believe they have some higher purpose and meaning? Do you believe in prophetic dreams? Have you ever had one? If yes, care to share the dream and what later came to pass that makes you believe it was prophetic? Do you believe a dream has ever been “sent” to “rouse” you to take action, or to present you with an opportunity, or to burden you with a responsibility? Again, care to share?

C.S. "Jack" Lewis

C.S. “Jack” Lewis (1898-1963), author of The Chronicles of Narnia, often spoke of a Wow! moment from his childhood he called being “surprised by joy,” a phrase he later chose for the title of his autobiography.

In short, the story goes something like this…

One day Lewis’ brother tracked him down to showoff a “toy garden” he’d made, which was little more than a biscuit-tin lid covered with moss, twigs, and flowers. Simple it may have been, but Lewis was enchanted by it. “That was the first beauty I ever knew,” he writes in Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life.

Young Jack Lewis – who would grow up to pen stories about a green land of mythical talking beasts ruled by the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve – lost himself in his brother’s toy paradise for a time. And although the world very quickly turned commonplace again, he took away from the experience the memory of an intense feeling of “joy” which endured throughout his life.

Lewis, better at putting his feelings into words than most, lived many years before he was able to say of his childhood fascination with the toy garden and the joy it brought him, “It was something quite different from ordinary life and even from ordinary pleasure, something, as they would now say, in another dimension. It was a sensation of desire. But before I knew what I desired, the desire was gone…” Yet Lewis was left with the indelible impression that for one perfect moment he had held paradise in miniature in all of its “cool, dewy, fresh” exuberance.

Here Lewis has put his finger on a sensation you’ve probably experienced at least once in your life. Perhaps you stopped on a cold winter night and watched the full moon emerge through tattered fingers of cloud, and you saw it as if for the first time. Or walking in some high place you came upon a shimmering mountain lake and thought, This is it! There’ll never be a more perfect moment. Or you looked at your four-year-old leaping in a pile of autumn leaves or splashing in the tub and somehow you were transported elsewhere for an instant, and you still can’t find words to express the sweet thrumming that filled your heart. You only know that, for a moment, you were overwhelmed by the most wonderful sensation of being alive. The intensity of that moment has faded, but you still bask in its mild afterglow and probably will for the rest of your life.

Like Lewis, why not just call it: Surprised by Joy. Or how about Wowed by Joy.

Help me build a list. For now we’ll call it 10 Tips for Inviting Joy to Wow You. I’ll start it off; you add to it. If we get lots of tips (and I hope we do), then we’ll vote for the top 10, and I’ll post them. I’ll assume everyone who posts is speaking from experience. No fair just passing along an idea because sounds good. Here goes…

10 Tips for Inviting Joy to Wow You

1. Get up at, oh, 4 or 5 a.m. on a clear morning (crisp fall morning’s are ideal). Before you’ve had a chance to fully wake up, drag on a coat, if you need one, and stumble outside. Now look up. Take in the moon, if it’s up, and the stars, which take on a shimmering clarity at that early hour. Just stand there and stargaze in the moments before the heavens fade into a rosy dawn. Soon enough your mind will cough and sputter then turn over like an obnoxious lawn-mower engine as it engages some “big” problem that you have to deal with today. But until that happens, have a nice Wow! moment. ☺

2. Your turn…

Reflections on time, change, and eternity can result in profound Wow! moments and states. The 1985 film Chronos offers just such an experience of devouring time, if you relax and allow it to play out.

As you watch and listen to Chronos, remember the phrase Sum quod eris: “I am what you will be.” For it speaks of continuous change, of eternal transformation, the one constant of life on this Earth. As our planet cycles through the days, years, centuries, millennia, and aeons, change remains the one constant. One after another, the skeletal ruins of past civilizations and empires call out to ours from across the ages: Sum quod eris: “I am what you will be.”

No one knows this better than Destruction of the Endless, one of seven super-supernatural beings featured in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman graphic novel series.

Destruction of the Endless

Destruction, pony-tailed and lantern-jawed, is a personification of devouring time, of the endless stream which one can never step into twice, for the stream and the person are never the same twice (Heraclitus). Ironically, Destruction would like to pretend that there is some permanence in the Cosmos, so he abandons his post, though the universe still changes and evolves toward its ultimate destiny. In The Sandman volume Brief Lives, Destruction of the Endless walks the Earth under a clear night sky in the company of his brother Dream and his sister Delirium, “I like the stars,” says Destruction…

“It’s the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they’re always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend…I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don’t last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend.”

Enjoy the film…

I believe if this film had a written narrative, it would be this brief excerpt from the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses

“Full sail, I voyage
Over the boundless ocean, and I tell you
Nothing is permanent in all the world.
All things are fluid; every image forms,
Wandering through change. Time is itself a river
In constant movement, and the hours flow by
Like water, wave on wave, pursued, pursuing,
Forever fugitive, forever new.
That which has been, is not; that which was not,
Begins to be; motion and moment always
In the process of renewal…
Time devours all things…
Nothing remains the same: the great nenewer,
Nature, makes form from form, and, oh, believe me
That nothing ever dies. What we call birth
Is the beginning of a difference,
No more than that, and death is only ceasing
Of what had been before. The parts may vary,
Shifting from here to there, hither and yon,
And back again, but the great sum is constant…”

“Everything changes, nothing perishes.” – Ovid

Your thoughts…

Helen Keller

On a bright, summer-like day in March 1887, Anne Mansfield Sullivan arrived at the home of six-year-old Helen Keller, who later described the day as the “the most important in all my life…”

Deaf, dumb and blind since she was 19 months old, Helen lived more like a wild animal than a human being (her howling, dish-smashing temper tantrums were legendary). Yet somehow she knew that Sullivan had come to lead her out of the “dense fog” she’d inhabited for the past five years.

A month after her arrival Sullivan was still battling (almost literally) tooth and claw to introduce Helen to a form of sign language for the deaf that involved spelling words into her hand, beginning with d-o-l-l for the doll that she had brought Helen as a present. The girl smashed the doll.

It seemed as if the teacher would never succeed when Helen suddenly experienced the Wow! moment of her life. Helen describes it in her autobiography The Story of My Life.

“We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten – a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.

“I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me. On entering the door I remembered the doll I had broken. I felt my way to the hearth and picked up the pieces. I tried vainly to put them together. Then my eyes filled with tears; for I realized what I had done, and for the first time I felt repentance and sorrow.

“I learned a great many new words that day. I do not remember what they all were; but I do know that mother, father, sister, teacher were among them ­– words that were to make the world blossom for me, ‘like Aaron’s rod, with flowers.’ It would have been difficult to find a happier child than I was as I lay in my crib at the close of that eventful day and lived over the joys it had brought me, and for the first time longed for a new day to come.”

What happened inside Helen’s head in that Wow! moment is so important as to hold the keys to unlocking the secret to what it means to be a thinking human being, according to novelist-philosopher Walker Percy (1916-1990) in his acclaimed book The Message in the Bottle, first published in 1975.

“For a long time I believed,” he writes, “and I still believe that if one had an inkling of what happened in the well-house in Alabama in the space of a few minutes, one would know more about the phenomenon of language and about man himself than is contained in all the works of behaviorists, linguists, and German philosophers.”

Unfortunately, says Percy, he’s not in a position to say what happened. Helen’s breakthrough was and is a mystery. In the short space of a day, she went from being little more than an animal to fully human, in the sense of crossing a vast but invisible language-understanding barrier that most children leap easily sometime around their second birthday.

Percy goes on to describe Helen’s breakthrough as similar to the Wow! moment a young human species must have experienced sometime in the far-distant past, as a group of hunter-gatherers sat huddled around the fire under a star-lit sky and one grunted the sound for Bison there! And the others, for the very first time ever, instead of leaping to their feet and looking for the dangerous but tasty beast, looked into the speaker’s eyes and knew what he meant: not Bison here now, but rather, Dudes, remember that bison hunt today? Wasn’t it great? Aren’t we an awesome bunch of hunters, huh, really?

If Helen’s reaction to her breakthrough is any indication, those hunters probably spent the rest of the night drunk on their new-found power to tell stories about the really big one that got away.

We might be justified in calling this the Wow! moment that changed everything. A cause-and-effect loop as old as the universe had been “short-circuited,” and in its place was “something new under the sun, evolutionarily speaking,” writes Percy.

Yes, breaking the language-understanding barrier was and still is a huge Wow! moment, although two-year-olds don’t seem to get too excited about it. Or do they? I certainly don’t remember ever getting jazzed about it, but then I don’t remember back that far. However, I do remember my son having a Wow! moment connecting the words backhoe and truck to the objects those words represented, enough of one to sing and dance around and point out every truck and backhoe he saw for months. I’ll never forget the day I turned a corner and passed a construction site, and, there, alongside the curb were eight yellow backhoes, parked shovel to scoop. A hush from the bumper seat, and then a loud exclamation, “Oh my goodness! Backhoes!”

Do any of you have similar stories?

Hayden Planetarium

Thirty years ago, in an episode of his groundbreaking TV series Cosmos, Dr. Carl Sagan imagined radio telescopes on Earth receiving a message from deep space containing a vast Encyclopedia Galactica. An advanced civilization somewhere nearby in the Milky Way, say within 200 light years, had made contact with us at last.

Sagan went on to imagine humanity tirelessly poring over the Encyclopedia Galactica, learning of other intelligent creatures, civilizations, and of the treasure-trove of life-bearing planets – gems set against the velvet backdrop of deep space. Perhaps the message would provide the impetus for our first long-term global initiative to venture out among the planets and stars, once and for all – no looking back.

We have yet to receive the message bearing Carl Sagan’s Encyclopedia Galactica, but it seems that we’re well on our way to building our own. It’s called the Digital Universe Atlas, developed by the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) and the Hayden Planetarium. Work began on the 3D atlas in 1998 with the purpose of bringing a new perspective to our place in the Universe and redefining our sense of home. The atlas is maintained and updated by astrophysicists.

The Digital Universe Atlas provides the basis for software called Uniview™, which allows a computer user to travel to distant reaches of the charted universe, encountering stars, planets, galaxies, giant gas-and-dust clouds, quasars, and other extraordinary objects along the way.

The Point-of-View flight path you are about to experience in the embedded video, The Known Universe by AMNH, was captured live off the laptop computer of Carter Emmart, program presenter; director of Astrovisualization for the Rose Center for Earth and Space, while he sat in a café on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Emmart’s breath-taking journey through space and time – a Wow! experience – starts just above the Himalayas and moves through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the very edge of the Cosmos and back to Earth in all of six minutes. The film was created by the Museum to be part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan in 2010.

Enjoy the voyage…

It is the twenty-seventh century B.C.

High up in what will one day be called the White Mountains of California, a bristlecone pine seedling has taken root in the arid soil of a grove set in a hostile landscape. Gnarled old trees surround the young one, eking out an existence.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, pharaohs and gods rule in Egypt upon the River Nile. Across the wide, uncharted world it is an age of immortals – gods who, men believe, will live and rule forever.

Ages of the world come and go.

Generations of humankind are born and die.

It is now the summer of 1957 A.D. The ancient gods are all dead and gone. Their temples are in ruins. Their shrines are no more. And yet, though some trees are nothing more than husks, the bristlecone pines high up in the White Mountains still stand. And the young seedling has become the Old One of the grove.

A man moves among these ancient trees, gasping because of the wonder this place evokes and because he is desperately out of breath. He should not be working 10,000 feet above sea level. But this is his life, and he has an assistant with him to take samples. The ailing man rests a gentle hand upon the Old One of the grove. His name is Edmund Schulman, a dendrochronologist. He has walked upon the Earth for a mere forty-eight years – just a few quick turns around Mother Sun in the life of the Old One. With a diseased heart laboring in his chest, Schulman has only months left to live, but today he stands on the very brink of the Wow! moment of his life. For he will soon learn that he has just discovered the oldest living thing yet to be found dwelling upon the Earth.

But the Old One of the grove knows better. There are other trees, undiscovered, which are older still. They, too, saw the gods die. These are the Old Ones.

When Schulman finally calculates the great age of the Old One of the grove he will call it Methuselah in honor of a long-lived man, and he will dream of finding the secret of longevity buried within its ancient heart.

But, so far, only the Old Ones know immortality.

Clock of the Long Now

The idea of a clock that ticks for 10,000 years has sci-fi action thriller written all over it. Here’s the concept: Sometime in the future, a party of hikers comes across a crack in the side of a desert mountain in what was once eastern Nevada. They enter to find a hollowed-out chamber in which a huge, alien-looking device is ticking away. Scientists determine it has been on earth for at least ten thousand years and is counting down the last few weeks to Doomsday.

Okay, lose that part about scientists and Doomsday. Oh, sorry, the movie studio executive isn’t interested now that you’ve redlined the Doomsday part.

Okay, so let’s put a dystopian spin on it. Say two post-apocalyptic road warriors are running from a rival gang, and they find the crevice, the ticking device and the library that goes with it, and they somehow manage to decipher it all and use their new-found knowledge to fight the forces of anarchy and begin to rebuild civilization, but this time they’re gonna get it right.

No?

Well, then try this…It’s no fiction, but a very real Wow! possibility…

If the folks at The Long Now Foundation have their way, and our civilization eventually vanishes, as civilizations have a tendency to do, people of the future may very well come across a ticking object in a mountain in eastern Nevada and have no idea who put it there.

Danny Hillis

It’s variously called the Clock of the Long Now and the 10,000 Year Clock — an ingeniously conceived, monumentally large mechanical clock that designer Danny Hillis, co-founder of the The Long Now Foundation, hopes to build in a hollowed-out chamber deep within the heart of Mount Washington sometime in the not-too-distant future. Long Now is currently constructing its first monumental 10,000 Year Clock, called Clock One, near Van Horn, Texas.

In fact, it’s possible that you — depending on your age (the younger you are, the greater your chances) — could make a pilgrimage to the Nevada desert site, dotted with ancient Bristlecone pines, for an encounter with the 10,000 Year Clock and for what the folks at Long Now hope is an indelible Wow! moment that transforms the way you think about humanity’s long-term future. Ponder their idea, and the image of a clock makes sense.

But ten thousand years is a long, long time; twice the length of time since the Great Pyramids of Egypt were built — a span of time stretching all the way back to the first pottery makers working in conglomerations of mud-brick dwellings called “cities” at the dawn of history. So, naturally, Hillis and his partners in this venture, particularly Stewart Brand and Alexander Rose, are frequently asked, “Why a 10,000 year clock?”

Alexander Rose

Brand attempts to answer this question in an essay posted on the foundation’s web site:

“Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span…Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed — some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility…”

Brand says Hillis’s clock is the answer:

“Such a clock, if sufficiently impressive and well-engineered, would embody deep time for people…Ideally, it would do for thinking about time what the photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment. Such icons reframe the way people think.”

Here’s another way to think about it.

Yes, ten thousand years is a long, long time. But Brand’s right: We have to begin to think long and deep if we want to survive and thrive as a species. To survive we need to address the big long-term problems of overpopulation, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, dwindling planetary resources, and global warming to name just a few. And we won’t solve all of these problems in a few decades or even a hundred years, unless they’re solved for us, and you know what that means — cue the funeral music. Seriously, you have to wonder: What’s going to be left for our kids?

Stewart Brand

But suppose, with the help of the iconic image of the 10,000 Year Clock burned into our psyches, we’re nudged to start thinking longer term, and we begin to solve our present problems, and there turns out to be a future for our kids after all. And suppose it isn’t a dystopian nightmare al la Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games.

What might this future look like? Just considering Hillis’ clock makes you think about the future in more optimistic terms. Take Star Trek. In the Star Trek universe, we narrowly avoid catastrophe and turn things around. Instead of blowing ourselves up, we master warp-drive technology, meet up with the Vulcans, and head off into the galaxy (which includes colonizing our own solar system).

In the Star Trek universe, we accomplish this in a mere three hundred years or so. More realistically, our venture beyond the gravitational pull of the sun to nearby star systems will take much longer. I have a book called The Millennial Project by Marshall T. Savage somewhere on my shelf that proposes a thousand-year plan to colonize at least our corner of the Milky Way galaxy, and that may be far less time than is actually required to do the job. Yet — if our species survives its technological infancy, and errant comets — few doubt that it will be done.

In the centuries after we’ve colonized and terraformed Mars, Jupiter’s moon Europa, and countless other moons and worldlets farther out in our solar system, perhaps millennia from now, we will be inventing new technologies as strange to us as Voyager might be our distant ancestors living in those first mud-brick cities. In this future, wrote the late Carl Sagan in his lovely book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, the human race will certainly undertake to build ships that transport us to nearby and more distant stars.

“The day will come when we…will begin to soar through the light years and, as St. Augustine said of the gods of the ancient Greeks and Romans, colonize the sky. Such descendents may be tens or hundreds of generations removed from anyone who ever lived on the surface of a planet. Their cultures will be different, their technologies far advanced, their languages changed, their association with machine intelligence much more intimate, perhaps their very appearance markedly altered from that of their nearly mythical ancestors who first tentatively set forth in the late twentieth century into the sea of space.”

So what does this do for us in the way of movie ideas?

The sky, or should I say, the galaxy’s the limit.

Perhaps several thousand years from now a party of Sagan’s nonhuman-looking humans returns to Earth in starships bearing the stylized emblem of a strange and wonderful device — a device that looks something like…the 10,000 Year Clock!

Now, for some hollywoodish reason, the earthlings of the civilizations after ours have forgotten all about the clock and their brethren out in space. As far as they’re concerned this is planet Earth’s very first encounter with extraterrestrials, and it’s been a long time coming.

After the tickertape parade, the President, or whatever he or she’s called in the year 9,999, asks the “alien” delegation what the emblem on their ship stands for. A tall man (the hero) steps forward and answers, “The marking has stood as a beacon of hope for hundreds of generations. Always, when some catastrophe has loomed, threatening to destroy the vulnerable interstellar wanderers who came before us, they rallied around and were buoyed up by the symbol of the 10,000 Year Clock.”

“Why a clock of all things?” asks the President.

“If the Old Ones had the audacity and optimism to build a clock to last for ten thousand years,” says the visitor, “then surely they expected us to survive our long wanderings through time and space, and perhaps even to thrive. And so we have. And now, to honor the Old Ones, we have made the journey back across the light years to our ancient home.”

“Old Ones? Wanderings? Home?!” sputters the President.

Now comes the shocking reveal: The tall man announces that the ancestors of his people originally came from Earth. Jaws drop. Then he asks to visit the 10,000 Year Clock, which still exists, it is said, deep within a mountain somewhere on Earth, and perhaps there is even more than one such clock. The President and all her advisers are stunned. There is no such thing…

You tell me, where does the story go from here? And remember, our movie producer wants butts filling seats in movie theaters around the world, so your idea better be good.

Photos Courtesy of The Long Now Foundation (http://longnow.org)

Abraham Maslow

“I think of the self-actualizing man not as an ordinary man with something added, but rather as the ordinary man with nothing taken away.” – Abraham Maslow

A profound Wow! moment is an extraordinary state of mind, which can’t necessarily be induced by following a prescribed set of steps. Whatever your approach – from being an artist to free-falling in zero-gravity – Wow! either happens or it doesn’t.

What I can say with some confidence is that certain attitudes/stances/views/values are more conducive than others to bringing about a Wow! experience. I don’t ask you to take my word for this, but the word of the renown psychologist Abraham Maslow (1908–1970).

In addition to his famous Hierarchy of Needs, Maslow researched and developed a profile of exemplary individuals he called the self-actualizers. Now, the term self-actualizer doesn’t by definition mean success in the material sense of the word; rather it indicates success in living a human life fully and well, in accordance with one’s deep inner impulses toward growth and positive transformation. Self-actualizers are continuously self-actualizing. The process has no end point at which you become certifiably and fully self-actualized.

So just what does all this mean? Suppose you’re a young student aspiring to write the next great American novel or to find a cure for cancer. If you’re a self-actualizer you heed the inner call and follow your dreams, no matter what, ignoring your perceived shortcomings, the obstacles in your path, and the naysayers along the way whose mantra is You can’t do that! Rather, Maslow said self-actualizers ask themselves, If not me, who? This kind of inner certainty leads to mastery and mastery leads to flow: that extraordinary state of mind we’re all so familiar with from watching world-class athletes deliver stunning gold medal performances while making it look easy.

In addition to making the choice to grow to their full potential, self-actualizers are also more open to what Maslow called peak experiences, that is, having profound and meaningful Wow! moments as a result of being fully engaged and present in the activities they choose to take up (flow again). And don’t be led to believe that being a self-actualizer requires a certain upbringing, talent, or education. I once heard a story about a street sweeper who pursued his job with such energy, passion, and purpose he would no doubt have been classified by Maslow as a self-actualizer.

In his book The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, Maslow claims to have found almost as many self-actualizers among business people, industrialists, managers, educators, and political people as among the professionally “religious,” the poets, intellectuals, musicians, and others who are supposed to be self-actualizers and are officially labeled as such. The bottom line is that your potential to achieve profound Wow! experiences is positively, but not exclusively, connected with self-actualizing.

I have Maslow to thank for inspiring the following condensed Top-20 list of self-actualizer traits. See how many apply to you. The more that do, presumably the more likely and able you are to achieve Wow! And it’s never too late to start.

Self-actualizing is for everybody! Achieving Wow! is too.

So, let’s run through the list…

1. You have probably already experienced to some extent what I am describing as a Wow! moment or state and are aware of the Wow! moments in your life to date.

2. You are open to the extraordinary. Perhaps you are bored with the ordinary routine of life and you imagine yourself living out a wonderful adventure.

3. You are often restless and filled with a longing for something higher or better. Perhaps you even feel destined to accomplish something new or great.

4. You are tuned into an inner sense which tells you when you are living authentically and in accordance with your true nature and when you are not.

5. You might write, paint, or play music; and/or read poetry or romantic high adventure (fantasy). Other people might describe you as creative, imaginative, and/or as a daydreamer.

6. Although you might not be conventionally religious, you are deeply spiritual. Perhaps you are even seeking a more profound spiritual or mystical awakening.

7. You are knowledgeable, perhaps even a scientist, yet the more you learn and grow in knowledge, the greater your sense of awe, mystery, and wonder.

8. Like a child, you are often fascinated by the workings of the world: the rippling reflection of clouds in a puddle, the swirling of autumn leaves, or the flashing movements of a trout through sun-dappled water.

9. You are at peace in the natural world. Sights of forests, fields, and the sky overhead inspire your sense of enchantment.

10. You know that there is more to yourself and others than meets the eye, and you tend to have a “sixth-sense” about the people you meet.

11. You tend to like or dislike people upon first meeting them. You are not the least bit afraid to consort with people others might consider to be nerds, freaks, or outsiders.

12. You can see beauty in the ordinary, or you sense beauty, value, and deeper meaning just beyond sight.

13. You consider yourself one with the world rather than separate from it. Thus you trust in providence and tend to be optimistic about your chances in everything you do.

14. You are liked by, loved by, or held in high esteem by many others. Perhaps you are a leader.

15. When you are engaged in something you love to do, you often lose your self-awareness and your sense of time. You become fully absorbed. This flow state is in itself a Wow! experience.

16. You probably work in a job that you consider a calling. Therefore, you do not work for the money alone, but for the value and meaning you derive from the work, and for the contribution you can make to society as a whole.

17. In your work, you are never satisfied with the status quo, but you are always looking for ways to innovate and improve on things.

18. Closely related: You see both the way things are and the potential (the way things ought to be) in the world around you, including the people you meet.

19. You long to live in a better world, thus you are deeply disturbed by what you perceive to be the blind stupidity of the human race. Yet you still believe that man is capable of overcoming his dark, selfish side.

20. You are more likely to love unconditionally, rather than to give love only to gain love, or to fulfill selfish needs and desires.

A word of caution: There may be people who embody all of the above traits and more (Maslow provides a comprehensive profile of the self-actualizing person in his book The Farther Reaches of Human Nature). But it’s important to remember that self-actualizing is a journey more than a destination. What’s important is to be headed in the right direction. And the more of a self-actualizer you become, the more likely it is you’ll also experience Wow!

What do you think?

Have you experienced the connection between self-actualization and achieving Wow!? Tell us your story.