Hypnotizing Maria

thought instead of chance, atoms arranged by suggestion? And us unquestioning, lapping it up, amplifying all the joy and terror of our cultures’ believings because we learn best when we’re emotionally involved in the lesson we’ve chosen to learn and believing’s the way we get there?
    That’s not impossible, not at all. We don’t live many lifetimes, he thought, but we’re free to believe we do, breath-by-breath excruciating detail. A belief in reincarnations exactly that: a belief we experience so long as we find it interesting, useful, engaging. Disengage and the games are over.
    So if suggestions build the stuff we see around us, and for all the gazillions of’em, what really is a suggestion?
    He puzzled that one out in the dark, fell asleep tumbling down thought-stairs.



CHAPTER THIRTEEN
    J amie Forbes woke to the motel alarm clock, dreams unremembered. Packed his bag, checked the room one last time before out the door, found a note on the stand by the bed, his own handwriting, forgotten, barely legible:
    Sxggxstion = axy Contxct mxkeS us chXnge oxx Pxrceptxxns!
    That’s what a suggestion is, all right—whatever makes us change the way we think, and therefore what we notice. Suggestions the flickering of some future which we can make true.
    By the time he reached the airplane, he knew some contacts made him change his perceptions:
    photos, paintings, movies, computers, schools, television, books, billboards, radio, Internet, instruction manuals, meetings, phone calls, articles, questions, stories, graffiti, fairy tales, arguments, scientific papers, trade journals, menus, contracts, business cards, lectures, magazines, songs, slogans, poems, menus, warnings, games, relationships, parties, newspapers, random thoughts, advice, street signs, conversations with ourselves, with others, with animals, parties, graduation exercises, glances, school classes, emotions, chance meetings, coincidence, and he poured that sea into the oceans he’d found before.
    Every event’s a contact, he thought, walking around the T-34, checking it before flying. Every one’s a glitter, noon sparkles on endless ruffled waters, each milliflash a possibility.
    He knelt to look over the left main landing gear, the brake line, the tire. Tire’s a little worn, he thought, and realized in the daylight: that’s a suggestion.
    Every suggestion intensifies itself.
    Tire’s worn too much?
    If yes: Worn too much ,
    Next suggestion: Don't fly. Change tire.
    In order to change the tire I must find a mechanic to do the work, must locate the proper tire if it isn’t in stock, stay overnight at least to change it, meet and talk with unknown number of people I wouldn’t have met if it weren’t for the tire, any one of whom can alter my life with a word like the hitchhiker in North Platte. My life’s changing now, if I stay one day longer for the tire or three days or twenty minutes . . . new events trigger further new events, every one the result of some suggestion accepted.
    Or,
    If no: Tire condition normal ’
    Every suggestion intensifies itself.
    Next suggestion: Fly on as planned.
    (Trillion other suggestions in box Do something else: Ignored. No intensifying, no effect at all.)
    But if the tire blows out next landing, it could mean big trouble.
    Suggestion: Reconsider original suggestion.
    If yes, Time passes , weather changes , sun rises higher ; coincidence patterns shift.
    If no: Move on.
    Next suggestion: Complete the preflight inspection.
    Ignore suggestion for now.
    Accept suggestion, instead, to think about this seems-insane-maybe-isn't picture:
    Every suggestion of every second, he thought, every decision we make or don’t make is poised on the pinpoint of the decision that’s gone before; the decision before was poised on the one before; each one elected by which suggestion I-nobody-else-I decide is true for me. No one ever makes a decision for me: when I accept advice, I’m the one chose to act on it. I could have said no, a thousand different ways.
    Call suggestions “hypnosis” and all of a sudden here’s a label you’ve been looking for, here’s the pattern—the puzzle fits together. Every day, everybody in the world’s going deeper into their own trance, everybody’s got their own story they’re believing about themselves.
    My story today, he thought, is Guy on a Journey: Jamie Forbes flying through a cloud of decisions which leads to different changes which lead to a different life than he would