two

RIBBONS OF LOVE

All day I think about it, then at night I
say it. Where did I come from, and what
am I supposed to be doing? My soul is
from elsewhere, I’m sure of that ... Who
says words with my mouth? Who looks
out with my eyes? What is the soul? ...
If I could taste one sip of an answer, I
could break out of this prison for
drunks.... Whoever brought me here
will have to take me home.

JALAL AD-DIN RUMI

 

 

 

 

ASK ANYONE, even a stranger on the bus, and you’ll get a tale of inexplicable illumination, the bolt from the blue, or intuition. I was talking to Elise, one of my fellow physical therapy patients (broken arm: horse), who told me that when she was in college at Randolph-Macon, her roommate’s troubled boyfriend had once telephoned at two o’clock in the morning, looking for his girl. Her roommate was out, but hearing the desperation in the young man’s voice, Elise told him to wait, not to hang up, that she’d go find his girlfriend. There were several obvious places to look: the library, the art building, where students worked late at night, the student center. Instead she found herself moving to the room of a mutual friend. “Do you know where Mary is?” she asked, and stumbled upon her next door. What intuition led her there?

Often a premonition comes in dreams. One woman told me she had a vivid dream of losing her wallet in London. Yet even in the dream she knew she wasn’t in London, for if she had been, she’d have carried her wallet in her waistband as she always did when traveling in a foreign country. On waking, she didn’t understand the dream at all. Until later that week, when her friend Judy telephoned to report that she had lost her wallet in London and how upset she was; and then my friend realized that so connected was she to Judy that in her sleep, with her conscious mind turned off, she’d picked up images of her friend’s distress.

 

HOW DO WE KNOW THESE THINGS? What’s going on? In his engaging book Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality, Dean Radin, senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in Petaluma, California, suggests it’s evidence of subatomic entanglement, a term coined in 1935 by Nobel laureate physicist Erwin Schrödinger to describe a particular connection between quantum systems—and now we can’t continue without the briefest (and crudest) explanation of what it means to affirm that “the wave functions of particles are entangled.” Quantum mechanics describes physical behavior from atomic to cosmological domains as a vast web of particles (or waves) all interlacing from the first moments of Big Bang creation to the present nanosecond, and all remaining in contact across the boundaries of Time and Space. Entangled photons are in a kind of grey area. Einstein, who was skeptical about quantum mechanics, derided it as allowing “spooky action at a distance,” which he believed could not be possible. But physicists put it to the test, for example, by sending two particles that had been created in the same event to two locations many miles apart and observing whether each would do its own merry thing or if each somehow “knew” what the other was doing. Turns out they knew. It is not as simple as one photon turning right when the other does, but unimpeachable evidence demonstrates the connection. (So Einstein was right in saying it was spooky but wrong in concluding it couldn’t be true or that quantum mechanics must be wrong as well.)

What do the particles “do?” If two particles are created in the same event, their combined spin is often known, while the spin of either one is unknown. If you measure the spin of one particle and find it is plus one, then you immediately know that the other must have a spin of minus one (because the sum of the spins is zero). That remains true as long as the two continue to be “entangled” (meaning they don’t collide with other things, or deviate, attracted by the wink and wiggle of a closer, more seductive photon, as they would if they were in air instead of a vacuum). And this holds true for miles. In May 2009, physicists transmitted a pair of entangled photons from La Palma to Tenerife, a distance of about ninety miles. It was an important milestone in the effort to transmit entangled photons from a satellite.

What does all this mean? First, it suggests that the connection occurs through “other” dimensions. Indeed, modern (super) string theory says that there may be ten or eleven dimensions, not the three (plus Time) that we generally acknowledge. Second, it proves “entanglement” exists.

Radin suggests that we humans likewise operate as bundles of entangled subatomic particles, reaching out and engaging with one another in invisible ways. And it may be so. Except that our atoms and molecules are packed so tightly together that they are anything but unperturbed. They bump into each other all the time. Yet ... sometimes we have remarkable intuitions!

For millennia, mystics have claimed that all is One, that everything is composed of the suchness of God, and that all these heightened sensitivities, intentions and angels, psychic and luminous powers are normal. And now I’ll go out on a limb. I think they are carried on ribbons of love.

I mean it literally.

Once my daughter and I were in India visiting my spiritual teacher. When it came time to leave, he escorted us to the bus station, helped us on the bus, and stood back to wave us off. We watched him across the parking lot. Suddenly the bus was surrounded by a crowd: men, women, all shouting, singing, waving their hands high in the air, crying out—a riot? I was startled by the noise, the waving saris, the bare arms, the glowing faces, the outstretched hands, when suddenly I realized they had grouped below our window, hands lifted to us, my daughter and me, all reaching out in praise and adoration. I looked over at Maharaj beyond the crowd and felt his love pouring out toward us in a golden ribbon: you could have walked on it, and the crowd, ecstatic, was caught in that energy, dragged along like the pull of a comet’s tail, captive to his love. A moment later, and the bus moved off. The guru turned away, and instantly the crowd dispersed. I’ve often wondered, did these people remember that for one mad moment they had stood beneath a bus window shouting and crying out in praise? Were they embarrassed? Did they go home and tell their husbands or daughters, “I did the oddest thing today—”? Did they feel touched by the Divine? Or seen by Divinity? Or did the guru give them the gift of forgetfulness?

RIBBONS OF LOVE. One day when I was just a young mother, I was writing in my home office. Down the corridor my baby, Molly, lay sleeping on a bed barricaded by pillows, though she was still too young to move—she hadn’t even tried to roll over yet. I was deep in thought, concentrating on my work, when suddenly I jerked alert: “Molly’s falling off the bed!”

I raced down the hallway ... and caught her in midair. It seems impossible. How did I know she was about to fall? It wasn’t telepathy; she’d sent no message. At that age, the baby didn’t know what “roll over” was, much less “fall.” Premonition? Precognition? What bonds of love so enfold a mother and child (or father and child) that we know what’s going to happen even down the hall?

Not only are children the repositories of infinite
possibilities, but they also have within them still the
murmur of angel wings, an essence of divinity, unscathed.
With adults ... I have often felt unspoken challenge ...
With children it is different. They believe. They accept.
They do not doubt in the terms of adult doubt. They wait
upon the spirit in the fullness of their child wonder ...
their innocence opens the gateway of faith—and healing.

AMBROSE WORRALL, healer and aeronautical engineer

How can the mind reach into the future? And if it changes a future event, was it the future anyway? In his book The Power of Premonitions, Larry Dossey tells of a mother who woke up from a dream in which the chandelier in the baby’s room fell and crushed the infant in its crib. Her husband told her to go back to sleep—it was just a dream—but she was so shaken that she actually got up and brought the baby into bed with her. Later that night they heard the crash as the chandelier fell on the empty crib.

 

I AM NOT A SCIENTIST, but I am convinced that the greater your empathy and the higher your spiritual development, the more intuitive experiences you will have, until such things become so ordinary that you hardly notice them anymore. No longer rare and dramatic, they fall like soft rain into our lives, brushing aside all logical consciousness.

Yet for many people, our intuitions and precognitions are anything but normal. They usually concern danger either to us or to those we love. Your daughter is in trouble, and you wake up, having seen it in a dream! Your husband has been shot in a distant war, and you feel the bullet enter your own body. You needn’t wait for the confirming telegram. We are hooked into life by the mystery of love, as we ourselves are love, our very atoms formed of love, and why should it be otherwise when our very thoughts would merge in love?

Once, while working quietly at my desk, I felt my heart jump, torn by a pain so searing I thought it had split in two. I almost fainted. A moment later I was able to breathe again. I sat there, trembling. Had I had a heart attack? I seemed all right. Should I see a doctor? Reaching out mentally, searching, I came to a man I loved who lived on another continent. Had he been hurt? When I managed to reach him a few days later, I discovered he’d had a heart attack at that time. So intimately were we connected that I think I simultaneously experienced his pain.

What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our
physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate
school. ... It is my task to convince you not to turn away
because you don’t understand it. You see, my physics
students don’t understand it either. . . . That is because
I don’t understand it. Nobody does.

NOBEL LAUREATE RICHARD FEYNMAN

I have a friend, Susan, who was engaged to a man she deeply loved. They were waiting only for his divorce to come through to marry. One evening, as he opened the apartment door, she felt a jolt of sheer rage. It shook her to the core as she watched her dog leap joyously toward this man, tail wagging, mouth open, grinning as only dogs can do. “Major!” she shouted at the dog. “Come here!” She pulled the dog off by the collar. She didn’t want him even to touch her lover, much less offer welcome. She stood, arms crossed before him, trembling. She knew before he said a word: He was going back to his wife. Oh, they talked that evening. They talked and talked. But what amazed Susan was that she had known with utter certainty, with his hand resting on the outside doorknob, the decision he’d already made.

I remember once turning to an acquaintance and blurting, “Oh, you’re going to get married!” The words shot out of my mouth.

“Who told you that?” I thought he was going to hit me.

“No one.” I cringed before his wrath. “I’m sorry. Forget it. I don’t know why I said that.”

But, of course, six weeks later he announced he’d secretly married a woman thirty years younger to whom he’d been engaged eight weeks.

Even those of us who live in cities, who rarely see the moon and stars and don’t practice psychic gifts, telepathy, sixth sense, vibes, or extrasensory perception—we too occasionally hear whispers of the Divine ... and marvel at the implications.

The greater your empathy and the higher your spiritual development, the more intuitive experiences you will have.

“Our lives are like islands in the sea,” wrote William James, the philosopher, “or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves, and ... [the islands] hear each other’s foghorns. But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean’s bottom: Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness ... into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir.”

We are islands joined deep beneath the sea, but the wind is also ruffling the shimmering green tips of the trees that rise up high above our loamy shore, making it hard sometimes to read the signals at our roots.