Consider dreams. Is it unrealistic to dream of something: to change the world or the minds of mankind, to own and fly an aircraft, to live in your dream house. Reason would say that it is, yet these things happen to those who follow their dreams.
To some, the fulfilment of dreams is seen as something mystical, divine; as though there were a hand of God to make their dreams come true. This is not so: the only God is us. We alone can take the myriad events and opportunities that surround us, and turn these into the Will of God. To do this, we must have faith in that God of Ourself. We have to believe that somehow, in the confusion which is the world, it is possible for Ourself to create a pattern, sensitively, in a way that leads us to our dream.
How can all this be? Is there some contradiction in what I have written here? In the multitude of opportunities and the constancy of dreams?
Consider two things: A statistic on coincindences, and a trick of magic. I may not be able to explain clearly how they fit into what I am saying. Simply consider them and they may fit.
How many people do you need to have in the same room for there to be an odds on chance that two of them share the same birthday? An instinctive answer might be 365, or 364. Not so. That is the number to have a particular day as a birthday, one you have already specified in advance of doing the experiment. Your birthday, perhaps. The right answer lies between 19 and 20. For each person in the room who has a birthday, there is another who may or may not share that birthday. Twenty birthdays may or may not be shared by one of the other people in the room, not one. When you don't put preconditions on coincidences there can be many more of them than you might expect.
We live in a world of possibilities. Millions of them. So many that if you were to add up all the things that had a million to one chance of happening, there would probably getting on for a million of them. Sooner or later one of them must happen.
Coincidences happen so many and so often that each of them represents an opportunity, a continuum of opportunity, to bend the life around us to fit the patterns in which we are walking. Bend it not break it.
Our minds survive, are defined, by their ability to form patterns. A thing happens, we fit it into a pattern of what we already know. This becomes part of knowledge, our knowledge. We look for patterns too in the lives we lead. To some these patterns may be the mind of God, the way of the sky, the Tao. To others, more versed in a reductionist, scientific view of the world, there is no Way, no pattern into which life can fall. Instead, they bend the world into the patterns which their minds have willed. Sometimes successfully.
I ask you to pick a number, between 1 and 10. You suggest one. 7. I reach over to my desk, pick up a sealed envelope, open it, and there, on a piece of card, is the number 7. Magic!
What you don't see is the number 3 on the back of the door, the sealed envelope with "NINE" on it in my shirt pocket, the book lying casually on my desk which has "The number chosen today was 4" on it... Each of these things is designed to look as if it were the next and only thing I could have done to produce your number. But it wasn't.
This is the secret of magic. Not only the magicians magic, but the magic of life. Many things may happen next; many coincidences are more than we can accept as being purely coincidental. Many tides, taken at the flood, lead on to greater things, things we could not have imagined or thought possible but which have their origins in that little seed of coincidence, that little impossible event which, wondering, we have picked up and woven into our dream.
This is the secret of the dream: We must be true to it. If we simply follow every wave of incident, every little pointer as though it were from some divine hand beyond us, we will drift for ever. Life will be interesting, in a frustrating sort of way, but we will have no direction as long as we expect direction from beyond ourselves. To make the dream happen we must make it our own, hold to it through disasters and successes. Believe that we can weave the strands of destiny around us in a way that leads, miraculously, to our dream.