4

Fairy Tales Can Come True

Synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something other than mere chance, namely, a peculiar interdependence of objective events among themselves as well as with the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers.

—Carl G. Jung, foreword to I Ching, or Book of Changes (1951)

I thought with delight that the universe or nature gave up its secretiveness once you started paying attention to the small details of living that we've been taught to ignore…Nature's seeming secretiveness was actually an invitation to us to really look at its events, innocent of our preconceptions.

—Jane Roberts, The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto (1981)

Once Upon a Time in Midwinter…

So there I was, wandering aimlessly about in the dark forest. For all intents and purposes, I was lost. I'd bravely chased after the wily rabbit. But the rabbit had vanished without a trace (or so I thought), leaving me stranded. It wasn't that I had too much male pride to stop and ask directions; there was no one in sight to ask. What to do? What could I do? I muddled along from day to day, waiting for clarity and hoping for direction.

In the meantime, my canine friend (and fellow rabbit hunter), Cynthia's golden retriever, finally succumbed to the thyroid cancer that had begun slowing him down. Sebago had held on for a year after the veterinarians had given him up for dead. But now he was gone. I wondered whether my strange dream had been a forewarning of his imminent passage.

The foul weather didn't help my mood. The winter of 1994 seemed to drag on forever. In the northeast we were hit with a major snowstorm nearly every week. Several times, I had to cancel my classes when I couldn't make it into the college. Then, to top it off, I caught a bad case of the flu and wound up stuck in bed surrounded by piles of dirty Kleenex and cough drops for a good solid week. I knew I was losing my grip on reality when the highlight of my day was watching screaming lowlifes go at each other on Ricki Lake's TV show. The term “cabin fever” didn't even begin to cover it.

The snow continued to pile up. My mound of tissues grew. I was miserable.

My friend the philosopher and paranormalist Michael Grosso notes that “Some dreams give clues to the patterns of our lives—perhaps to the pattern of life itself.”1

How true! Yet, if we are alert and careful readers of the living book of nature (the original meaning of “religion,” remember), we may also detect these patterns during our normal waking experience. The trick (as Socrates said) is to be awake while we are awake, so as not to miss the clues. (Becoming awake during sleep is yet another problem.)

If and Only If Snow Is White

Fortunately, a break occurred in the weather and I was able to return to work. I apologized to my evening class for having missed two sessions (the class only met once a week for three hours). I promised to make up the material.

We began our discussion of Plato's famous early dialogue, the Euthyphro. In the piece, Socrates, the philosopher, asks Euthyphro, a priest of ancient Athens, to supply him with a clear and unambiguous definition of the term “piety.” No problem! replies Euthyphro, as he is a self-proclaimed expert on all things religious. Of course, the priest fails to deliver and makes an ass out of himself to boot—in public, no Jess. Euthyphro turns out to be almost as incoherent as the old comedian “Professor” Irwin Corey (remember him?), who would spout ponderous gibberish as if it were the gospel truth.

After summarizing the basic thread of the plot, I opened up the discussion to the class. Eager hands shot up all over the room. The enthusiasm startled yet heartened me. I recognized Leonard, a tall, dark-haired, intense-looking student in the back row.

“Euthyphro is bullshit,” Leonard intoned dryly as a number of his classmates guffawed in approval. “I mean, he's just playing with words, like all priests do. Socrates showed that he didn't know what he was talking about. ‘Pious' means whatever you want it to mean. Look at all the ways people back up their actions, saying that ‘God' ordered them to kill somebody, or start some war. It's a crock.”

Now all hell broke loose. The room exploded into a confusing welter of charges and countercharges. “You're an atheist!” someone shouted accusingly. “They just don't want us to have abortions,” cried a female student. “Yeah, it's all about sex,” muttered another in a cynical tone. Passions swirled and tempers fared. What had I started?

While part of me was happy to see the students so engaged, the rational (professorial) side was a tad fearful of the discussion degenerating into a shouting match and name-calling (shades of Ricki Lake!). It was quickly getting out of hand—and escalating. I had to regain control before pandemonium took over.

“Look,” I emphasized, yelling above the din. “Granted there are as many different ideas of what it means to be faithful to the divine as there are ideas of divinity. But suppose there is some sort of true definition of ‘piety’—only we don't know, and can't say, what it is. Maybe ‘God' isn't just part of a word game people play with themselves. Maybe the divine is real. But whenever we try to pin it down with words, it's like trying to hold on to a fistful of water: The harder you squeeze, the less you have.”

In the back of my mind, I flashed on a discussion we'd had in one of my own undergraduate courses years before. It concerned a theory of truth proposed by Polish-American mathematician and philosopher Alfred Tarski. Tarski had argued that “truth” is not just an idle word game but a relationship of correspondence between words (or sentences) and things in the world. Of course, for Tarski these “things” are physical objects—and the divine dimension, whatever it is, is not just another physical thing. So I decided not to bring Tarski into the picture, after all. Hell, I didn't want to complicate matters any further. I just wanted to defuse a bomb!

“Okay,” I added. “Let's take our long break.” (When all else fails, call time-out.)

The shouting slowly died down. Small groups of students were talking animatedly among themselves. Some went outside for a smoke or to raid the candy and soda machines. I remained behind to collect my thoughts and breathe a sigh of relief.

Just then a petite curly-haired young woman in an arm cast approached my desk. She apologized for her own recent absences and explained that she'd fallen on a patch of ice and broken her right arm. She asked for a syllabus. I rifled through my briefcase and, quite uncharacteristically, couldn't find an extra copy.

“What's your name?” I asked, as I hastily scribbled a note to myself.

“Rhonda Schnee,” she replied.

Now my ears pricked up. “Oh, ‘Schnee,' that's German for ‘snow,' isn't it?”

“Yes,” acknowledged Rhonda. She looked surprised (but pleased). But I didn't tell her that I didn't know any German. I only knew this because of a book I'd read some fifteen years earlier, in which Alfred Tarski's theory was discussed with the example, “The German sentence ‘Schnee ist weiss' is true if and only if snow is white.”

Now that's odd, I mused—a most peculiar set of coincidences. The snowstorms, the (unmentioned) snow example, and now Ms. Snow, in the flesh, having fallen in the snow. But as the second half of class commenced, my mind turned back to Plato and anxious thoughts of how I was going to cram in the rest of the dialogue in half a session.

Later that evening, I was in bed reading a book when I came across the name of the late Helen Wambach, a California psychologist who had become interested in reincarnation. Dr. Wambach had even used past-life regression as a therapeutic tool in her regular practice. She had also been one of the first researchers to use hypnosis in order to progress volunteers forward in time to the future (or rather, to several, quite different possible alternative futures). This all sounded very familiar.

Instantly, I jumped out of bed and retrieved the cassette tape I'd been playing in the car on my way home from the college. It was a radio interview with Michael Talbot, the science writer and paranormal researcher. I rewound the tape and listened. Sure enough, the interviewer mentioned Dr. Wambach, along with her collaborator, who coauthored the book on their joint study (published after her untimely death), Mass Dreams of the Future. But neither Talbot nor the interviewer could recall the man's name.

Now I remembered that somewhere on my library shelves there lay a copy of Wambach's book, as yet unread. Quickly scanning the shelves, I excitedly pulled out my pristine copy of Mass Dreams of the Future and glanced at the cover.

The name of Dr. Wambach's collaborator and coauthor was Chet Snow.

There it was again!

I felt a familiar chill run down my spine. This was uncanny. I wasn't making it up. I had an eerie feeling, as if it had all somehow been stage-managed from behind the scenes. If I'd been less attentive, I might have missed the clues.

But why snow? Did the universe have a sense of humor? Was I the butt of an in-joke I didn't get? I felt out of the loop. Maybe there was more to it than synchronicity. What was the point of having my nose rubbed in snow?

The Snow Begins to Pile Up

A month or so later I was glancing through a New Age magazine when I came across an interview with a person described by the author as a respected researcher and editor in the parapsychology field. My excitement mounted as I read the piece.

The researcher seemed to be echoing many of my concerns as she confessed her dissatisfaction with the narrow, technical approach of conventional parapsychology with its fetish for repeatable results in the laboratory. She proposed instead that everyone pay attention to their own “Exceptional Human Experiences” (or EHEs)—seemingly isolated episodes in our lives that stand out by their apparent violation of the rules of common sense, the laws of nature, or what society deems possible. But instead of treating them as bizarre if interesting accidents or one-time events in a dead past, the researcher was advocating that we regard them as living seeds of transformation, to be nurtured by the quality of awareness we bring to them. She insisted that if we looked at our lives from the standpoint of these “random” episodes, we would see an emerging intelligible pattern.

Excited to discover a kindred spirit, I immediately sat down and wrote the parapsychologist a letter. I included a brief mention of my most recent “snow” coincidences, as I thought this might arouse her interest. When several months passed without receiving a reply, however, I grew embarrassed at my earlier enthusiasm. Despite all of my academic bona fides, I must have sounded like a loon, going on like that about my experiences.

“Oh, well,” I sighed. At least my ideas weren't so nutty, after all. Here was a reputable researcher saying the same things I had been thinking.

In the meantime, as spring arrived and the winter ice pack finally began to melt, I received Ms. Schnee's term paper. It started out as an interesting discussion of death and the Western belief in an afterlife. But she grabbed my attention when she confessed that her own initial skepticism about such possibilities had recently been shattered by a series of unusual (exceptional?) experiences. (Mind you, I had not yet discussed my own unusual beliefs or experiences in class. I was far too timid back then to do this.)

It seems that a friend of Rhonda's had developed a talent for spirit (or so-called automatic) writing. That's when someone purportedly makes contact with the dead and allows them to communicate in writing by using the body of the medium or channel. Rhonda's friend had contacted some spirits and received information that she could not have known by ordinary methods. Much to the pair's considerable surprise, the information subsequently checked out. That gave them confidence.

One day the friend's father walked in as she and Rhonda were holding a session. He laughed in their faces when they explained what they were doing. He taunted them and accused them of making the whole thing up. Then he decided to “test” them by giving them a question to ask his dead mother. Only he and Mom knew the answer. When the correct answer was returned, he stood there, dumbstruck.

Rhonda was so impressed by these demonstrations that she began to do spirit writing, obtaining results that were, on the whole, equally impressive. As a result, her ideas about life and death, and what is possible, were greatly transformed. It was just the sort of process that the parapsychologist in the magazine had been talking about.

Rhonda's story encouraged me to focus on the EHEs of so-called ordinary people—including, of course, my own. Here was a case in point, in which a person's openness to her own experience had expanded her outlook, her sense of self and reality. It was possible to overcome social and cultural conditioning—even ridicule by authorities. It was possible for people to expand their perspective, simply by paying attention to what was going on around them. No one had to settle for “brainwashing”!

A week or so later, I was perusing the shelves of a local bookstore when I picked up a copy of Ralph Blum's Book of Runes. As a rule, I'm not a fan of divination systems. Some people swear by the Tarot or I Ching, though I could never understand the attraction. But, on a whim, I decided to give the runes a try. I bought a set.

The first rune that I drew was supposed to represent the general overview of my situation. It turned out to be Isa: ice, or freezing. Whoa! The runes now had my full attention. Ralph Blum called the rune I had drawn (Isa) “Standstill”:

The winter of the spiritual life is upon you…Be patient, for this is the period of gestation that precedes a rebirth…In your solitude, exercise caution and do not stubbornly persist in attempting to work your will…Trust your own process, and watch for signs of spring.2

Suddenly, I realized how dense I'd been! For some reason, it hadn't occurred to me to treat “winter” or “snow” (or the color white) as a poet might; in other words, as a metaphor. From that angle, I had indeed been frozen solid, my process stilled. Inevitably, however, comes the thaw: Ice melts and water begins to flow again. The cosmic law of the seasons is akin to the psychological law of our innermost being. Nature is nature, after all. According to the Native American medicine wheel, snow is associated with the power of the north. As the Sioux writer Ed McGaa (Eagle Man) says: “The cold north has Mother Earth rest beneath the white mantle of snow. She sleeps and gathers up her strength for the bounty of springtime. When the snows melt, the earth is made clean.”³

All this made good sense to me. So there was meaning in these odd coincidences, after all. I had just missed it before. These were indeed synchronicities.

Yet were these just metaphors describing my inner condition? Or were they outer signposts as well, pointing me in new, perhaps unsuspected, directions?

Signs of Spring in Winter, Signs of Winter in Spring

Then one warm June day I went to the mailbox and found a letter from the parapsychologist! She apologized for the delay and agreed that we were on the same wavelength (I'd sent along copies of some of my papers). She also encouraged me to write up my experiences with the snow/white synchronicities. If I did, she promised to consider publishing the piece in her new journal, Exceptional Human Experience, of which she served as editor-in-chief.

Alas, nothing came of my efforts to write the article. I would make a few notes, then give up in frustration. I told myself that the episode was too convoluted to explain. Mostly, though, I felt uncomfortable talking about my experiences. After all, I was trained in the academy. I wrote philosophy papers in which I dissected someone else's theories. Making my own inner experiences the centerpiece of the discussion ran counter to everything I had been taught. It was indecent—gauche, even.

So, you see, I generously gave myself heaps of excuses not to write that paper!

But the parapsychologist kept after me, urging me on. She said that the act of focusing my attention on the experience was part of the experience itself, and that it would provide me with fresh insights into its meaning. Also, she casually let drop a remark regarding something to which, until that point, I had been oblivious.

The parapsychologist gently reminded me that her name was Rhea White.

That was it! It was like water breaking through a dam. Everything flowed easily and smoothly after that. I wrote the paper in no time, in a frenzy of inspiration.

I now felt certain that Rhea herself (or rather, our connecting) was part of the meaning of the whole episode. She had also suggested that I look up a good friend of hers who taught in the psychology department at the college. She described him in glowing terms as “a most highly evolved” individual. He was an open-minded psychologist interested in parapsychology and philosophy. His name was Steve Rosen.

Steve and I hit it off instantly. Our friendship was cemented when we discovered that we'd spent our respective childhood summers in the same seaside town on the New Jersey shore. We also had much in common at the level of ideas, including a willingness to question conventional ideas, especially as they limit inquiry into the paranormal.

At our second meeting, Steve gave me a copy of a short article he'd written for Rhea's journal. In it he described an unusual experience that he'd had many years before in graduate school. In retrospect, he felt sure that this episode marked a decisive turning point in his career and, in fact, in his development. Before then, he'd been a conventional experimental psychologist, not seriously unhappy with the reigning paradigm of rat-in-a-box behaviorism and mechanistic materialism.

Later that night, I read Steve's paper, which included the following:

At the time when I was still working on my doctorate in psychology, I was lying in bed one night, my wife reading beside me. I was half awake, half asleep, and went into a spontaneous reverie and saw myself moving along on a sled through the snow. I had the feeling that the snow was very soft, comforting, enveloping, and I was gliding very smoothly—no bumps—just the flow. There was something very serene about it.

And then the sled began to rise into the air. It started to lift off, and as that happened, I felt a tremendous intensity building up within myself. It was directly correlated with the elevation of the sled. The intense feeling built up to the point where I sensed that every cell of my body was on the verge of exploding with ecstasy. It was a joyous and painful experience—painful in a joyous kind of way The intensity of it became so excruciating that with an effort of will I had to shut it down.4

I could hardly believe my eyes: snow again.

Steve smiled warmly when I pointed out the snow connection at a subsequent meeting. He hadn't noticed it before. He also elaborated on his written report, noting that after this episode he was visited by a powerful series of revelatory insights. It was only much later that he connected these insights with the ecstatic sled vision. But it was this inspiration that led him to view reality (and himself) in radically new ways. It also sparked his new fascination with quantum physics, mathematics, cosmology, and parapsychology.

Steve may have shut down the ecstatic sled experience, but it had nevertheless opened him up in surprising and unexpected ways. It was an EHE.

Gone was the old scientistic dismissal of the intangible and immeasurable. Gone was the depressing view of the cosmos as a meaningless accident, a burlesque clown circus of separate bodies (matter-in-motion) haphazardly bumping and grinding up against each other in dead empty space against the background of the dour tune of entropy.

In its place was a spectacular vision of the cosmos as a dynamic process, or, in Steve's words, “just the flow.” But an intelligent and all-embracing flow that could somehow find equal room for such polar opposites as joy and pain, spirit and matter, intellect and intuition, language and silence, and, above all, oneness and separateness.

Steve could no longer accept the Western view that breaks down all living wholes into isolated mechanical parts (atoms and subatomic particles). But neither could he endorse those Eastern mystics for whom only pure, absolute consciousness is real, and all diversity—the entire realm of physical bodies and individual personality—mere illusion (maya).

According to the twentieth-century Hindu sage Sri Aurobindo, for example, “Even the highest individual perfection, even the [most] blissful cosmic condition, is no better than a supreme ignorance. All that is individual, all that is cosmic, has to be austerely renounced by the seeker of Absolute Truth.”5 All is indeed One—but not just one. It is many, too. As above, so below. But as below, so above! The flow of influence runs both ways, from the invisible to the visible, and from the visible to the invisible. “Earthly” is not second best.

Or, to borrow a familiar image: The ocean is not the mere sum of its drops. But neither do the drops simply dissolve, without residue or remainder, into the ocean.

Steve became obsessed with finding images that could express, or at least suggest, this flowing yet paradoxical wholeness he had intuited. (His quest reminded me of the quixotic Richard Dreyfuss character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind when he kept trying to model the vision of Devil's Tower that had been implanted in his mind.) Steve fastened on the mind-bending art of M. C. Escher, and also on the Möbius strip, a bizarre mathematical curiosity with unique properties (it's a cylindrical ring that has been given a half-twist, rendering it at once single- and double-sided).

During this period Steve also “accidentally” discovered the work of the world-renowned physicist David Bohm, who had independently arrived at ideas strikingly similar to his own. (This was the early 1980s—when I, too, “accidentally” stumbled upon Bohm's work.) He and Bohm struck up a correspondence that evolved into a deep dialogue.6 Steve later visited the famous physicist in England where they continued their collaboration.

Yet the initial trigger for all this had been Steve's (aborted) vision of the snow ride.

I kept returning to his poignant account of that experience. His description of it as “very serene” reminded me that Isa is not just a frozen zone, a time of waiting, standstill, or dormancy. Winter works its own, special brand of magic. After all, what can match the stark glistening beauty of a new snowfall as it covers the landscape with its clean white blanket? The recent snowstorms had annoyed me as a “responsible adult” because they made travel difficult and complicated practical life. But these were the very qualities I most prized as a child. I relished escaping from school for a day—guilt free. I loved how quiet it got when no cars were zooming down the street, and all you could hear was the rhythmic crunch, crunch as you trudged through the drifts. Everyone had to slow down and take it easy, instead of rushing around. So peaceful.

Steve had also described the snow as “very soft, comforting, and enveloping.” These are typically feminine traits. They suggest nurturing and caring. But what about the ecstatic, expansive energy that had nearly blown Steve's mental circuits—perhaps the very energy that subsequently fueled his insights into the nature of reality?

At the time of his vision, Steve knew nothing about the kundalini energy that, according to the Tantric traditions of yoga, lies dormant, coiled up like a little (female) serpent, at the base of the spine in the first, or root, chakra, one of the seven subtle energy centers. Much later he speculated that the episode might have been a spontaneous awakening of kundalini that he aborted. Even so, it had proven to be a major boon.

It dawned on me that snow/white and Eve were fast friends. Rhea had sent me some of her earlier published essays and unpublished papers. I began to comb through them in search of evidence that I might use to test my new hypothesis.

Snowstorm

Young Rhea White dreamed of playing professional golf on the women's circuit. She yearned to be a champion. Carefully and methodically honing her skills, she played in statewide matches, at one point even making it to the quarterfinals of the New York State Women's Golf Championship. She was well on her way to realizing her dream.

Then came an experience for which she didn't even have the words. At least, not until decades later, in the 1970s, when philosopher and physician Dr. Raymond Moody Jr. would coin the term: near-death experience (NDE).7 Rhea remembers it this way:

My near-death experience occurred when I was a junior in college and had driven my 1936 Ford from Penn State to Syracuse University to pick up a friend whose car was being repaired. He was to be my guest at a big weekend at Penn State. A terrible driving snowstorm developed. Visibility was almost nil as we started back south. There is a long hill as one leaves Syracuse, and try as I might, I could not get to the top. I was not the only one. Both sides of the road were lined with stranded cars. My friend asked me if I'd like him to try, and although my father had told me never to let anyone else drive my car, I answered fatefully, “Well, we'll never get there with me driving!” So we switched. My friend Stu was a very good dancer; he had a light touch on the gas pedal. He got us over the hill and we continued, going about fifteen miles an hour. Then, out of the swirling snow ahead came a coal truck. As it approached it began to skid toward us.

The next thing I knew I was up in space, or so it seemed, as if looking down on the Eastern seaboard, pinpointing State College, PA, which steadily receded as I rose higher. As I relinquished my fixation that we had to get there in time for the festivities, it dawned on me that this being pulled away from Earth was what it was like to die. Obviously not being able to do anything about it, I relaxed, as if leaning back into space, and then I felt the “everlasting arms” encircling and cushioning me from behind. Then it was as if a voice said to me, “Nothing that ever lived could possibly die,” as if by definition. I felt a sense of living stillness, peace, wonder, pure aliveness—and then I woke up on the hood of my car, in pain, unable to move, with the sound of the metal of the car tinkling as it settled, my head turned so that I could see cars creeping along the slippery road with people inside craning their necks to look at us…. Stu was killed instantly when the truck totaled the car, entering on the driver's side .…I had eleven fractures and was in and out of a drugged state for days, but when I was conscious, I could sense this singing stillness. It was what I had felt when I thought I was dying. It combined a sense of deep peace and a kind of poised expectancy, as when a child wakes up on his or her birthday. And as the days went on, I could feel myself healing, my bones knitting. This was an exceptional experience in itself, because somehow I felt I was aware of this gentle fizz of healing energy like ginger ale in my bone cells.⁸

Believe it or not, it took me a few more readings before I noticed it: snow again.

That did it. Now I was sure I was on the right track. I had to understand what had happened to Rhea. How did she get from her NDE to an EHE?

After her recovery, Rhea was able to resume her golfing activities. But her heart was no longer in it. The dream of becoming a professional athlete had mysteriously faded. In its place was an insatiable hunger for knowledge. She was consumed by a desire to read through the world's spiritual literature. Although she didn't think of it in this way at the time, she needed to figure out exactly what had happened to her when she was dead, yet not dead. She could not yet even talk about her experience. Yet it drove her to pore through every dusty tome she could get her hands on. She eagerly read hundreds of books, on all sorts of topics: religion, philosophy, mysticism, psychology psychiatry, and psychical research. She also began to meditate.

Then Rhea discovered that the creaky old psychical research of the nineteenth century was busy transforming itself into the streamlined, more intellectually respectable, twentieth-century discipline of parapsychology. Philosophers, classical scholars, and other humanists who specialized in collecting anecdotes of people's strange experiences and speculated about the nature of consciousness had dominated nineteenth-century psychical research.

But the new “hard” science of parapsychology hoped to provide definitive, verifiable, statistical proof in the laboratory of the reality of such phenomena as telepathy, precognition, and psychokinesis (direct movement of matter by mind). Speculation and storytelling were out; the white lab coats and clipboards of social scientists and physicists were in. The pioneering dean of this new movement was one Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine, a respected psychology professor at Duke University.

Something clicked. Rhea made her way to Duke. Apprenticing herself to Dr. Rhine, she learned his methods and became an assistant in his laboratory. That was more than forty years ago. It marked the beginning of Rhea's lengthy career as a parapsychologist.

All was not well in parapsychologyville, however. Over time Rhea would grow disillusioned with her chosen profession. To an outside observer, it was easy to see why. Rhea was like a skyrocket fueled by a burning desire to understand her extraordinary journey beyond death. For all the good it did joining up with Team Rhine, she might as well have become a short-order cook in a greasy spoon or a bean counter in an accounting agency. She was bound to walk away dissatisfied.

In this respect, Rhea might be compared with the late writer Susy Smith, who wrote more than thirty books on the paranormal. (When I was eight years old and my friends were collecting baseball cards, I faithfully toted around a dog-eared paperback I'd bought off a drugstore rack—Susy Smith's ESP.) Back when she was a newspaper reporter and columnist, Susy began communicating with the spirits of the dead, including her own deceased mother. Making her way to the Rhine laboratory at Duke, she was warmly greeted by “this imposing group of academicians.” But when she explained that her interest was in the issue of the survival of bodily death, she was politely told that real scientists could not get into the messy business of “ghost-chasing.” Instead, they gave her the keys to the library. “What I stirred up at Duke was a lot of complete indifference,” Susy confessed.9

Susy Smith's story of her reception at Duke's famed parapsychology laboratory hit a nerve, and not just because she'd been one of my childhood heroes. Her outsider status at Duke closely matched the trajectory of Rhea's career, the story of which I'd pieced together from the numerous essays (her unpublished and published papers) she'd sent me and the correspondence we'd exchanged over time. It wasn't just that official parapsychology proved to be too timid in the face of the big questions concerning immortality and death, or that it looked down on “merely anecdotal” evidence for psi as scientifically irrelevant. There was more to it than that.

I was angry. I identified with both Rhea and Susy. I found myself cheering them on. Having been guided by synchronicity to Rhea's work, I knew I had to understand my emotional reaction. What was it all about?

When I was younger, maybe nine or ten years old, one of my prize possessions was a book entitled Great Men of Science (or something to that effect). My parents had given it to me as a present, and I'd read it from cover to cover many times. It told the stories of courageous individuals, such as Galileo and the Curies (an occasional woman slipped into the male club), who stood up for knowledge in the face of ignorance and superstition. This, at least, was the familiar myth.

In reality, however, I came to see that science as an ideology and as an institution is concerned with shifting power from the individual to itself. It wants to cancel out the individual, and thus as part of its agenda promotes self-mistrust and a lack of self-confidence in our private judgments about our personal experiences. (In this respect, science is little different from the Christian churches, which use the doctrine of Original Sin to the same end.) Nor is this an accident. It goes to the heart of the scientific enterprise.

When the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) said that “in history we see the mind occupied with quite individual things for their own sake,”10 he was not being complimentary toward history. In Schopenhauer's time, natural science was becoming the new path to truth (and technological power). Science seeks to discover general principles, the universal laws of nature, in order to predict and control that nature. It loves rules. History, on the other hand, adores exceptions. It wants to understand the causes and effects of singular events, like a war, or a stock market crash. Science has abstract mathematical formulas. History, like a grandma or grandpa, tells stories. How trustworthy are these stories? “Clio, the Muse of History,” said Schopenhauer, “is as thoroughly infected with lies as a streetwalker is with syphilis.”¹¹

What Schopenhauer says about the unreliability of history as a discipline also applies to the human faculty of memory. This is key. Our individual life stories are as unreliable as Clio's, says science. If you want truth, you won't get it by asking the individual to introspect (or retrospect). Don't tell them to reflect or write their biography. Give them a personality test. People lie, but statistics don't. The wide sample cancels out the vagaries of individual distortions. In other words, the outside experts know you better than you know yourself. In fact, they know better, period. You are thus no longer your own authority. Left alone, you are prey to your own bizarre irrationality. Reason is the organ of sanity, of consensus.

Now I understood why I felt a kinship with Rhea and Susy. They were standing up for their own experiences. It was they who were like the characters of my childhood book that celebrated the great heroes of science. Unlike the old style of hero worshippers, however, they were encouraging everyone else to be heroic in their own way, too, and not simply to look up to them.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not against the true spirit of scientific inquiry. Indeed, quite the reverse. The Latin origin of our English word “experiment” is experientia, which means to try or test for oneself. That's exactly what we must do.

Yet that's exactly what we're discouraged from doing by institutionalized official science (including much of parapsychology), which operates like a secular priesthood, bestowing its selective blessing of “reality” only on phenomena that can be replicated in the laboratory and statistically measured. Like the medieval church, modern science sees itself as the exclusive custodian of Truth. The sacred language of science is not Latin, but numbers. “Indeed,” writes the renowned remote viewer Ingo Swann (one of the most “tested” psychics ever), “it is quite understood that parapsychologists adapted to quantitative statistics with a vengeance.” This move was based, says Swann, “on the political assumption that doing so would permit the full acceptance of parapsychologists into the ranks of the mainstream-funded modern sciences themselves.”12 In other words, if you want recognition and funding, it pays to be holier than thou.

The rub is that the unique and unrepealable events of our daily lives—including the “paranormal” ones—do not unfold within the parameters of controlled conditions. We should not ignore or dismiss these events simply because they cannot receive the priest's blessing. To allow the institutions of science (even those of parapsychology) to define reality for us alienates us from our own natural sensitivity and inner critical authority.

This does not mean that we are debarred from understanding psychic phenomena. Indigenous peoples may not have had science, but they knew an awful lot about nature, in both its physical and nonphysical forms. Why? Because they paid close attention to what happened in and around them. Like them, we have to go to the phenomena.

This, in effect, was what the older psychical researchers had done. The famous Harvard professor William James (one of the founders of psychical research) was both a medical doctor and a psychologist. But primarily he was a philosopher—what used to be called a man or woman “of letters.” He belonged to what C. P. Snow famously called “the literary culture” of readers, as opposed to “the scientific culture” of number crunchers.13

James sat patiently for hundreds of hours with trance mediums gathering data on the after-death survival question. He read through volumes of reports containing anecdotal evidence of ghosts, apparitions, and out-of-body experiences. He even made his own bizarre dream experiences the subject of a brilliant essay (“A Suggestion about Mysticism”) in which he offered incisive speculations about the nature of consciousness. In short, James was entirely comfortable with what he called life's “buzzing, blooming confusion”—the sometimes bewildering variety of experiences that make up our lives. He felt that a true philosopher must take nature as it comes—wild and spontaneous.

Sadly, the number crunchers won out. As we have seen, even humanistic fields like philosophy were cannibalized by the quantitative-analytical mentality. It began in James's own day, with the birth of modern advertising agencies in the last decades of the nineteenth century ¹⁴ Around I 91 0 or so came the rise of modern market research techniques that were used to target specific consumer groups. Following the First World War, the brand new social sciences—psychology in particular—had their heyday. More influential than even Freud and Jung with their concept of the unconscious (the submerged fears that advertisers sought to exploit) was the pioneering work of Professor J. B. Watson, who published his groundbreaking paper on behaviorism in 1913.15

To Watson, human beings were mere automatons whose responses could be conditioned by the right stimuli. Consciousness and introspection (not to mention spirit or soul) were myths; the observable behavior of the physical organism was the only reality. With the arrival of new mass audience outlets in the 1920s and 1930s—the cinema and radio—the mass hypnosis of the mass media was no longer a pipe dream, but a fast-approaching reality. Watson's behaviorism, in cahoots with Madison Avenue, reduced the human being to a programmable lab rat, a guinea pig worthy of study and manipulation—a statistic.

In this atmosphere, what could not be quantified or expressed in terms of mathematical equations was deemed irrelevant. Phenomena that could not be replicated at will within the highly controlled conditions of a scientific experiment were not considered real, or worthy of study. “Nature” meant only what could be predicted and controlled—and, of course, exploited (economically or otherwise). This was true even for a subject as esoteric as ESP, which of course always struggled to pass muster with the “hard” sciences like physics. Any psi effect that could not be studied and repeatedly duplicated in the confines of the laboratory was “merely anecdotal,” “subjective,” “soft”—in a word (the kiss of intellectual death), “unscientific.”

William James insisted that people's inward experiences as they unfold in the (messy) course of their lives are as much a fact of reality as anything else. By the 1930s, though, James was considered a dinosaur. The old literary culture, which saw context and story as essential to meaning, was in full-scale retreat. Scientists might be inspired by their own exceptional experiences, but they had better keep that under their hats. Inspiration itself was not scientific. It could be a source of shame and embarrassment.

Yet what if this new method were all wrong for the phenomenon—like trying to examine a snowflake on a hot stove? What if it promised only misunderstanding rather than understanding? What if the very point of an anomalous event were lost when it was not seen from the perspective of the experiencer, as an episode in his own life story? What if we had to develop a talent for listening to these experiences speak to us in their unique terms, rather than trying to fit them into the narrow artificial boxes of our cookie-cutter categories, our prefabricated concepts, and our controlled experiments?

I think that these were the sort of questions that finally drove Rhea away from orthodox parapsychology. They were my questions, too.

I began to grasp why she called these EHEs (she had already identified several hundred different types, from apparitions to xenoglossy) catalysts for change, or “seed” experiences. For if we water them with our careful attention, and give them the bright sunlight of whatever understanding we can muster, they will grow and blossom in the rich soil of our lives. Rhea was convinced (as am I) that everyone has had at least one such experience. All we have to do is look at our life.

While I was writing this chapter, I happened to mention near-death experiences in one of my classes. A young woman came up to me after class. She told me that she had just recalled a weird event that had slipped her mind. It had happened when her daughter was born, about eighteen months before. She had suffered complications from the birth and had hemorrhaged. But as she lay comatose in her bed, close to death, she felt herself get up and walk to the neonatal unit. There she lovingly beheld her newborn baby, sick with a fever. Only no one else seemed to know! Instantly, she awoke in her bed, crying and pleading with her father to go check on her baby. Her father then asked the nurses to check on his granddaughter. It turned out the baby was sick, just as my student had known. She thanked me for reminding her of this forgotten out-of-body experience.

So instead of emphasizing regularities or what can be controlled and predicted, we should focus on those tantalizingly odd and unbelievable, often unforgettable, frequently disturbing or even frightening episodes that we would otherwise tend to write off, dismiss, or deny. We should treat them as invitations to further inquiry. Once we see our lives from this “underside” perspective, we will have a different life story to tell. Attending to our EHEs will act as a trigger for self-transformation, for finding and making hitherto unsuspected connections. New meanings and new experiences will emerge in due course. Hence Rhea's constant refrain: Write your EHE autobiography!

Now I understood why she had been pushing me to write that synchronicity piece. It was an act of respect, a means of paying homage to nature and her invisible bonds—the magical threads that wind their way through, inside, around, and beyond us. These EHEs were not simply messages sent from the grander universe to us; they were living tendrils straight from the Source. Grabbing one was like taking a lifeline meant to connect us to the All.

Snow-Blind

One day out of the blue I mentioned something about my snow /white synchronicities in an email to a friend named Suzanne, a psychology Ph.D. and a keen sensitive.

“Oh, yeah,” she replied, “the Snow White archetype is really powerful.”

Snow White?

This is where it gets embarrassing. You see, I had always written the phrase “snow-white,” or “snow/white,” but never, ever Snow White. It never occurred to me that I was dealing with a famous character out of a fairy tale. Or rather, that she was dealing with me. That yet another cultural myth was alive and well and messing with my life (even if it was for my benefit) had been the furthest thing from my mind.

So I dusted off my edition of The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales. 16 I read Joseph Campbell's scholarly commentary. I poked around here and there. I took a look at the extensive work on fairy tales done by Marie-Louise von Franz, a longtime student and colleague of C. G. Jung. I also read the poet Robert Bly's book on the Iron Hans fairy tale.¹⁷ I won't bore you with the details. It wasn't that methodical in any case. I just followed my nose wherever it led. I'll share a few thoughts, and leave it at that. (The experts can pick it apart as they like.)

First, a few preliminaries:

1. Walt Disney was not the first to ‘Disneyfy' these stories by cutting out “offensive” details. The Brothers Grimm themselves bowdlerized the oral stories they collected and wrote them as they saw fit. Sometimes these details matter.

For example, in the 1819 Grimm's edition, Snow White's mother dies after giving birth and it is the evil stepmother who tries to murder her stepdaughter out of jealousy. This is the way most of us know the tale. But in the earlier 1812 edition, there was no stepmother: the murderous queen is Snow White's own biological mother. This was too shocking for the tender ears of good German burghers! So the Grimms fudged the text.

However, the original scenario makes it much clearer that the villainous queen and the super-naive, ultra-pure Snow White are strictly symbolic figures. After all, one could rationalize that her stepmother in disguise might fool a young seven-year-old girl. But how likely is it that a daughter would fail to recognize her own mother—three times, no less? The sheer preposterousness of it jolts you into another level of awareness. Take away the absurdities, and you inadvertently remove the cues that guide the reader toward a deeper understanding and appreciation of the story's true meaning.

So, from here on in, I'll just assume that you've tossed your Disney video and at least familiarized yourself with a decent translation of the 1812 edition of Grimm. That way I can skip the tedious process of retelling the story and cut to the meaty parts.

2. No one knows how old these stories are, who wrote them, and why. Joseph Campbell insists that fairy tales are fragments of high culture myths that have degenerated. Robert Bly, on the other hand, believes that the origins of these oral tales may go back thousands of years, to the animist prehistory of Europe, well before the agricultural revolution and the arrival of “higher” civilizations. Who is right?

My suspicion is that stories like Snow White were created during the transition period between prehistoric animism and the birth of “higher” civilization. The ancient shamanic ways were being replaced (and repressed) by new myths and new, more complex and hierarchically structured societies. The people who made up what we call fairy tales experienced this transition as a tragic, terrible loss and were aware of the dangers involved. Fairy tales warn of these dangers and offer help to those who mourn the loss.

3. This conjecture agrees with an intriguing suggestion offered by Marie-Louise von Franz, perhaps the greatest student of fairy tales ever. In An Introduction to the Interpretation of Fairy Tales, she suggests that the origin of most fairy stories is an actual “supernatural or para-psychological experience” (in other words, someone's EHE). She cites an anecdote about some unfortunate events that befell a nineteenth-century Swiss family:

The family still lives in Chur, the capital of Graubün-den. The great-grandfather of the people who are still living had had a mill in some lonely village in the Alps and one evening he had gone out to shoot a fox. When he took aim the animal lifted its paw and said “Don't shoot me!”, then disappeared. The miller went home, rather shaken because speaking foxes were not part of his everyday experience. There he found the mill-water racing autonomously around the wheel. He shouted, asking who had put the mill into motion. Nobody had done it. Two days later he died. In spiritualistic or para-psychological records this is a typical story. All over the world such things sometimes happen before someone dies: instruments behave as if alive, clocks stop as if they are part of the dying owner, and various queer things occur.18

As we have already seen, to an individual living in an animistic culture, talking animals, helpful trees, and living, conscious tools imbued with their own distinctive personality (say, a prized bow or axe) are not so out of the ordinary. Such events were only perceived as unusual or supernatural as animistic attitudes became forbidden fruit, for theological and social reasons. In line with Dr. von Franz's hypothesis, certain events were especially memorable and served as the core around which popular tales were spun because they (unconsciously) reminded people of what they had lost, or were in the process of losing. This catastrophe occurred as people found themselves trapped inside a culture that ridiculed and despised their innate sensitivity—the same sensitivity we all possess and can exercise, if we but know of its existence and grasp the rules of its use.

Perhaps by now you've already guessed the real identities of Snow White and the evil Queen. So without further ado:

Snow White is none other than our lost intuition, despised, feared, and abandoned. Exiled and left for dead in a dark wood, sentenced to hard labor in the mining camp of the dwarves deep in the bowels of the Earth, and finally thrust into the cold storage of a deep, dreamless sleep of suspended animation, poor Snow has been through the mill.

As for the villainous Queen Mother, she, of course, is Eve. Forced by the new culture to dismember herself and cast away her curiosity and sensitivity, she has become a cold, cruel, calculating machine, capable of the cruelest trickery and deceit. Looking into the mirror of reflection, the waking rational ego sees, and loves, only itself in its imagined splendid isolation. Reason cut off from the depths of heart and soul has become a devouring monster of self-regard, a cannibalistic banshee out to eat her own dearest child: the spontaneous, vulnerable part of herself that she can no longer accept.

In the meantime, Snow White has not developed; indeed, she has regressed. When cut off from the rest of the personality, our intuitive sensitivity atrophies like an unused limb. (Compare this with the classical Greek myth of Narcissus and Echo. Narcissus, gazing into the magic mirror of the pond, is enamored only with himself. Echo has lost the power of significant speech and can only parrot back what has been said to her.) Naive Snow White no longer “recognizes” her own mother, just as the queen no longer recognizes Snow White as her own and longs to extinguish every vestige of the ghost that haunts her.

After eating Mother Eve's poisoned apple, Snow White falls into a coma and is presumed dead by the dwarves, who lovingly place her miraculously intact body in a glass-topped bier. She is rescued by “a King's son”—a Prince—who, after glancing at the sleeping beauty, cannot part with her. “I cannot live without seeing Snow White,” he declares. By accident (as if there were any such thing), as the bier is being transported by the prince's servants, they stumble over a tree stump, and the bit of poison apple lodged in Snow White's throat is dislodged. The spell is broken, and she awakens from her enforced slumber.

The meaning of this seems clear: Any real change must come from within; it cannot be imposed from the outside. The young prince, though part of the rationalistic male patriarchy (the king), represents a new creative impulse for reform—a masculine willingness to embrace nature and her magical side. The tree stump (like the tree stump in my hare dream) signifies intuitive growth that had been cut short. Where you stumble, there you will find your treasure. The psychic impulse is reawakened, and the personality is healed—or at least on the mend.

Snow White is thus the basic program guide for recovering our whole self.

These were my conjectures, at any rate, when I received some support from an unexpected source: John Layard's book on the hare/rabbit, which I hadn't opened in years. Something made me look there. I noticed a section entitled “Association with Whiteness and Snow,” where I read: “Whiteness—usually described as ‘silveriness'—is also commonly connected with the moon,” that is, lunar knowledge or the “pure light” of psychic sensitivity. And, most telling of all, among the Algonquin Indians the Great Hare was said to have a close relative: “my brother, the snow.”19

So my old rabbit friend hadn't abandoned me, after all. Merely changed costumes!

I thought back to my dream of many years before. The rabbit had mournfully told me that it had fallen asleep under the tree. Now I knew for sure that this was the same “sleep” experienced by the disowned and despised Snow White.

I now knew what I had to do. I not only had to write my own EHE autobiography. I also had to get my students to pay attention to their own EHEs. Anyway I owed it to Snow White, Eve, and the rabbit. We had to help others wake up.

Espresso for the Soul

I would not be disappointed. Rhea's hypothesis turned out to be valid. As soon as I started talking openly about my own EHEs and encouraging others to do likewise, the accounts from my students poured in. Here are three fairly typical ones (the titles, and editing, are mine):

“The Girl Who Fell Down and Visited Heaven”

“Elaine” is an eighteen-year-old college freshman majoring in liberal arts.

When she was eleven, she attended a family barbecue. Elaine was running around in the backyard playing a chasing game with some of her cousins when she fell against the side of a brick wall and hit her head. During the time that her mother was pouring water on her face and frantically trying to revive her, Elaine experienced what she later called “heaven.” She was filled with an incredible sense of peace and contentment unlike anything she had ever experienced before or since. “I remember feeling so at ease with myself,” Elaine recalls. “Everything was perfect! There were no problems to think about or solve; there was nothing to worry about! Just a blissful feeling of total freedom.”

Elaine doesn't think that the experience of “visiting heaven” changed her or her outlook on life in any way, but she admits that she's not so sure. Recently, she was at work when she had the sudden impulse to stand by the window (which she never does). On the street below she watched as an elderly woman slowly crossed the intersection. In her mind's eye, Elaine saw a white car hit the old woman. Seconds later, she was horrified when a white car turning the corner ran into the elderly woman. She is not comfortable having such premonitions.

“Seeing Things”

“Nicole” is thirty-eight and works part-time in a home decorating center. She is a full-time student majoring in travel and tourism.

When she was about seventeen or eighteen, she spent the weekend at a friend's house. In the middle of the night, she turned over on her back when something at the foot of her friend's bed caught her attention. At first she couldn't make out the form. Then she realized that it was the figure of a dark-skinned man dressed in a white suit. He just stood at the foot of her friend's bed, staring straight at Nicole. Nicole admits that she was not sure whether she was completely awake, or in the twilight state between sleeping and waking. She observed the man and seemed to know what he was thinking. He was surprised that Nicole could see him. She wondered whether he had lived in the house before and had come back to “visit.” Finally, she became angry that he kept staring at her. Annoyed, she rolled over onto her stomach and fell asleep. At no time during the experience did she feel afraid, though she was surprised by her lack of fear.

The next morning, Nicole told her friend's mother and her friend about the apparition. The mother matter-of-factly responded, “I didn't know you could see ghosts.” Evidently, the man in the white suit was a regular “guest” in the house.

Since then, Nicole has premonitions and often knows beforehand when someone close to her is going to die. “I think I can sense things around me,” says Nicole. “Sometimes I sense people around me that might have the same insight.”

Nicole admits that her unusual experiences have forced her to ask herself difficult but important questions. “Now when these things happen,” Nicole says frankly, “I ask myself, Who am I? Am I an old soul from long ago living in my body that doesn't want to go to the other side? What am I? A partly gifted person who has special powers and does not know how to use them? Will these powers be helpful or harmful? Why am I here?”

“A Field Trip to the Other Side”

“Kaito” is in his early twenties. He came to this country from a small village in Japan to study English.

When he was twelve, Kaito went on a field trip with his class to a park in Yokohama to celebrate their graduation from elementary school. While playing with his schoolmates, Kaito suddenly had a strong desire to visit the sole kiosk in the park. As he approached the front of the kiosk, Kaito says that he “felt something very strange.” Then, as he circled around to the left of the building, he was overcome by feelings of dread. “I felt I should not have come to this place,” Kaito recalls. “I felt something terrible happened at this corner.” This was followed by sensations of physical pressure all about his body, as if something were attempting to invade his organism. Kaito fed the area and went back to join his friends. By the end of the day, he had completely forgotten about the unpleasant incident. As far as he was concerned, he had had “a nice trip.”

“Coincidentally,” several days later one of Kaito's teachers lent him a book on social problems in Japan. The title of the book was Yokohama Street Life. The author of the book described his experience taking on the life of a homeless person in order to get an inside view of what it was really like to be homeless in Japan. Several of the homeless people he interviewed told him about an incident that had happened in the 1970s, when a street gang killed a homeless man and dumped his body in a trash can next to a kiosk in a city park.

It was the same park, the same kiosk—indeed, the same spot on the side of the building—where Kaito had been assaulted by horrible feelings of terror and dread, and the sense of being pressured physically by an external force.

When he realized this, Kaito remembers, “I felt awful.” But such things are no longer unusual in his life. “I hated this kind of weird ability,” he admits. “But I feel responsible now. Not so many people can feel this kind of thing. My mother also has this kind of weird ability. So I just let this kind of experience happen to me.”

I noticed that what at first seems like a bizarre, one-time event (visiting heaven, seeing a ghost, experiencing the anguish of a murder victim's final terrifying moments) turns out to be the opening act in an ongoing show. Strange coincidences follow; further abilities manifest; and, most important, questions mount (even if they are temporarily shoved aside). Important, philosophical-type questions. There's a definite ripple effect.

Could these gentle ripples be joining together to form a great tidal wave of change?

Well, what's to prevent it? True, I knew from my own experience that the trail might suddenly grow cold, and that one could easily get discouraged, or even bored, during dry spells. And then there was the fear factor. Social fears, to be sure, like the fear of being considered odd, crazy, or just plain antisocial. But there was something else, too, something much deeper and darker. There was a bogey I had not yet faced.

I began to suspect that these EHE accounts might only amount to whistling past the graveyard. Unless I could confront my deepest fears, I began to suspect that the “tidal wave of change” might only be so much wishful thinking.

I had to face the goblin.