"There is a Jewish story saying that when you are about to be born, God takes you to a field covered with bundles. Each bundle represents a particular set of troubles. You can choose any bundle, but the one you choose you have to take to Earth with you. The rabbis say that if, at the moment of death, God were to take you back to that field and let you choose another bundle with which to relive your life, you would always pick the same one.

"What may be true for the bundle of sorrows is probably also true for the bundle of joys. J.G. Bennett, a radical English thinker who was a close disciple of Gurdjieff, described this picture more fully when he said:

" 'We labor under the misapprehension that we have to think up what we have to do. The truth is that this is not our responsibility, because the pattern of things is far greater than we can imagine . . . the direct perception of our pattern belongs to . . . the unconditioned side of our nature.

"In the retreat house where I first met Maria, life showed me beyond all doubt how its deeper current was living me, and not the other way around. It showed me, too, the wisdom of a dream. On our last day there, Maria gave me a card as she was leaving for home. We had already agreed that our encounter was so out of ordinary time that we needn't exchange phone numbers or addresses. If the pattern of life that had brought us together intended our relationship to flower, it would surely arrange circumstances accordingly. As her car left the driveway, I opened her card. It was Botticelli's Birth of Venus. Only then did it dawn on me: the dream I had had six months earlier of the woman's face in the scallop shell — that face was Maria's, and now, with no knowledge of my dream, she had given me the scallop shell! I wandered through the hay meadow, saying out loud to myself, 'That woman is my wife!' Two years later, we were married.

"The pattern of things, then, is there from the start. Who you are is there from the beginning. Your task in life is to discern that pattern, listen for it, and give room for it to emerge. More commonly, though, we are all too busy trying to make things happen — to make ourselves happen. We may push and shove through most of a lifetime before realizing that another voice is whispering beneath the fret of our efforts and strategies."