The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination (26 page)

Eventually, I would like to hear you say, “I have all the money I need” or “I am enjoying abundance.” And then I'd like to get bolder and come up with a number and a date for full manifestation, such as “I am manifesting a million dollars in personal financial assets, and this will show up in my portfolio on or before October 1 next year.” Then — because the universe is listening and
will
respond — I would like you to add a statement like, “I am doing this in an easy and positive way that harms none and will benefit all.”

The words you use should suit your own style. They must also resonate with your body and your whole energy field. So listen to your body as you change your negative mantras into positive affirmations. We often fail in our goals because we operate just from the head. The true magic of manifestation lies in growing an authentic vision, through the bold and frequent practice of imagination, and then taking action — including creating the right affirmations — that the body believes.

In the sound of the word as in the Latin root, to affirm something is to make it
firm
. We want to grow a vision, and we want to keep it firm.

BUILDING COMMUNITY VISION

We can “do the vision thing” in a group of any size, and we need to.

For this to work well, create an environment that is sufficiently quiet and relaxed for people to slip outside the box.

Then, give the group a clear statement of intention and an image that can serve as the gateway for an imaginal journey. The gateway image could be a shared symbol, a powerful dream that is relevant to the issue, or a location in either ordinary or nonordinary reality.

I enjoy using a physical locale that is known to only one or two members of the group. If we agree to travel there at the start of the journey, we can often harvest impressions that can be confirmed (or otherwise) by the person who suggested the rendezvous point. When we discover that we have seen something during the journey that we do not otherwise know about, this provides confirmation that, in a quite literal sense, we have gone somewhere together.

For example, in one group that wanted to grow a community dream of bringing dream education into schools, a dreamer from Virginia suggested her neighborhood elementary school as a gateway point. Many of our group journeyers were able to provide accurate descriptions of details of the school that had not been described — the circular drive, the position of the flagpole, the locker rooms, and so on — as well as a panoply of creative ideas on manifesting the group intention.

After the group journey, one of the participants should take on the role of rapporteur and cobble together a group report. This may be told as a collective dream, weaving together elements from all the journeys into a single memorable story. The process concludes, as always, with an action plan.

In summary:

1. Formulate a group intention.
   
2. Agree on a gateway for a group journey. This may be a locale in physical reality that is relevant to the group intention.
   
3. Use heartbeat drumming or meditation music to assist the journey.
   
4. Choose a member of the group to act as rapporteur. He or she will keep notes while group members share journey reports.
   
5. Take time for group sharing.
   
6. Have the rapporteur weave the individual reports and impressions into a single report — a group dream.
   
7. Decide on a group bumper sticker and action plan.
   

CHAPTER 12
MASTERS of IMAGINATION

W
e can grow our practice of imagination by studying with past masters. Here, we 'll take lessons with three of the greatest masters of imagination: Leonardo da Vinci, Joan of Arc, and Winston Churchill.

AROUSING THE INVENTIVE MIND
LIKE LEONARDO

He noticed how mountains become bluer the further away they are, asked why, and came up with a theory far ahead of his time. He looked at the crescent moon in the night sky, and wondered why a ghost disk floated above it — and grasped that he was looking at Earthshine, the reflected light from Earth, and described this effect in a way that NASA found quite exact more than five centuries later. In 1502, he designed a single-span bridge like a pressed bow, to span the Golden Horn — the estuary that once divided the European part of Constantinople — but his plan was rejected because everyone else agreed it was impossible to build. In 2001, when technology had caught up with his vision, a bridge that exactly followed his specifications was constructed at Aas in Norway. In May 2006, the Turkish government ordered the construction of his bridge, following his original plans, over the Golden Horn.

Before 1500, and shortly after, he designed prototypes for the helicopter, the tank, the hang glider, scuba diving equipment, a submarine, a calculator, a mobile robot, and something akin to a programmable analog computer. IBM put up the money to build forty working models of his inventions, which are on display at the Chateau of Clos Luce at Amboise, where he spent the last three years of his life as the guest of King Francis I of France. He was also an anatomist, an astronomer, and one of the greatest — if not
the
greatest — painter and sculptor of the Renaissance, an age of titanic artists.

He was, of course, Leonardo da Vinci. The secret of this polymath's immense imagination is of endless fascination. We won't understand him unless we grasp that his power was, quite simply, the practice of
imagination
.

Leonardo has left us clues as to how we can exercise imagination as he did, and these clues are more thrilling — and vastly more practical — than anything you will find in a conspiracy thriller. In his
Treatise on Painting
, he gives us “a way of arousing the mind to various inventions.”

The preferred method, he suggests, is to
stare at a blank wall
.

He specifies that the wall must not be literally blank. The ideal wall will have stains and cracks and discolorations. You stare at these until images begin to form in your mind, and then change and quicken. You may see many different landscapes, “graced with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, great valleys, and hills in many combinations.”

Or you can exercise your director's power and let the scenes evolve into battles or great dramas, with “figures darting about, strange-looking faces and costumes, and an endless number of things which you can distill into finely rendered forms.”

He does not spell out that the things “you can distill into finely rendered forms” may include a new invention that goes centuries beyond current technology.

Leonardo tells us we can read patterns on a stone as easily as on a wall and get similarly fabulous results.

We can also take a break from visual thinking and see what comes when we devote our fullest attention to another sense: hearing. To switch from visual mode to auditory mode, he advises listening with undivided focus to the sound of bells or the sound of running water. As you let your imagination stream with the sounds, words and music will come to you, and if you let it flow, you will soon be in creative flow yourself, bringing through fresh words and new ideas.

The greatest secret of the
true
Da Vinci Code is hidden in plain view, and audible to anyone — as soon as we adjust our senses.

FINDING A PLACE OF VISION LIKE JOAN OF ARC

She saw things and heard voices. In this way, she received secret intelligence that amazed the greatest political and military leaders of her time. She foresaw the outcome of battles and the death of lords; she knew what was in the secret mind of a king; she saw troop movements and battle lines at a distance and was able to base winning tactical decisions on her remote viewing. Her personal magnetism enabled her to rebuild the will of a broken nation, and she came to embody its spirit. To those who loved her, she was God's chosen; to those who reviled her and burned her at the stake, she was a witch.

The mystery concerning the Maid of Lorraine cannot be unfolded in a few lines. But there is at least one element in her mode of seership that we can all learn from and seek to emulate. In her way of visioning, Joan of Arc is connected to an ancient tradition shared by many, if not all, of our ancestors. It is the way of the tree seer. It involves the understanding that trees may be wiser than humans, and also that doing “the vision thing” may require finding and maintaining a
place
for vision.

In the sculpture gallery of the Met in NewYork is a magnificent painting of Joan of Arc by the Lorraine artist Jules Bastien-Lepage. In this imagined scene in her family garden, the Maid's wide and beautiful blue eyes reach for something above and beyond the rustic scene around her, though the scene is pulsing with magic. Her left arm is outstretched, and she is clasping something green. Perhaps some leaves from the tree under which she stands. She is leaning against the trunk. She always found strength among trees.

The mottled colors of the bushes and the old stone wall behind the peasant girl in her long brown skirt are embroidery in paint. The subtle weave dissolves the planes and releases a shocking revelation.

You don't see him at first, hovering in midair behind Joan, in golden armor. Even when you notice him, it is easy to miss his female companions. They are translucent, their forms a thin mist through which the background landscape is clearly seen. One of them appears to be carrying her own head. What kind of visitors are these? They are her saints — Catherine and Margaret — and her archangel, Michael, to whom her visions were later attributed. The thing to notice is they are coming to her when she is with a special tree.

The most famous tree associated with Joan of Arc was known as the Lady Tree, L'Arbre aux Dames, a great beech in an oak wood near Domrémy in Lorraine.

The men who were bent on killing her interrogated her about the tree after her capture. It's the third day of her public trial, on February 24, 1431:

Question
:What have you to say about a certain tree which is near your village?

Joan
: Not far from Domrémy there is a tree they call the Ladies' Tree. Others call it the Fairies' Tree. Nearby, there is a spring where people sick with fever come to drink, as I have heard, and to seek water to restore their health.

Old folk say they have seen fairies at the tree. One of her godmothers has seen them. Joan will not say what she has seen.

The Lady Tree no longer stands. But there is another tree, in the Loire country, associated with Joan of Arc in oral tradition. Through an amazing riff of coincidence, I found myself staying at a chateau near Orleans in the summer of 2005. The grounds of the chateau include a deer park and a
châtaignier
— a sweet chestnut — under whose branches (or
in
whose branches) Joan is said to have spent the night before leading the relief of the city of Orleans, her first and most famous military victory.

The
chatelaine
was delighted to showme the tree, guidingme across rough ground strewn with pine cones and twigs. The old
châtaignier
had survived the lightning. “What do you feel?” asked my hostess. “What do you see?”

I stood with the tree, holding it and leaning my head against its trunk.

Immediately, I received a vision in brilliant, living color, of a knight wearing a white surcoat with the figures of three red lions over his breastplate. An English knight, I was sure. He wore a coronet over his helmet, whose visor was open. A nobleman, then, a duke or an earl. But why was I looking at an
English
knight?

As I continued to look into the scene, other figures appeared. A massing of soldiers around a walled city. I realized that I was looking at the positions of the English besiegers of Orleans as Joan might have seen them, performing a psychic scout before she led the French into battle.

How did she see this way?How exactly did she receive her inspiration?

No sooner had I formed the question in my mind than I sensed a greater-than-human being approaching from above and behind, descending in a beating of wings. I felt its intent driving home, like an arrow or a bee sting, at the nape of the neck.
Le cou
, an inner voice confirmed. I felt no pain, but sensed the pain Joan might have felt, in her visioning — and later learned that before shemarched toOrleans, she predicted that she would be wounded by an arrow, as she was indeed, in the field.

At her tree of vision, I sensed a continuity between Joan of Arc and the ancient Gallic female seers who climbed into trees, or into towers constructed from tree limbs, to scout and direct battles for their warriors.

We can learn from Joan of Arc how to grow the power of vision by connecting with a tree and using this as a place to see and to recover our inner compass.

Picture a tree in the natural world that you know and love, a tree that knows you. Go to that tree, if you can, and sit with it.

If you can't go to that tree with your body, go there with your mind and your inner senses. Use all of your senses to remember and taste and smell and touch the tree and the place where the tree stands.

Feel yourself putting down roots into the earth, like the tree. As you breathe in, feel yourself drinking sunfire. Relax into the dream of the heartwood.

When you are sufficiently relaxed, let yourself rise up — or climb up — the tree to a perch in the upper branches. From up here, you can see across great distances, in time as well as space. You can examine whatever issues or situations you need to understand from a higher perspective.

You can take flight from this place of observation, if you choose, and swoop down to take a closer look at whatever it is you need to envision clearly, for yourself or others.

SPREADING A VISION LIKE CHURCHILL