Whether or not you believe in psychic abilities or in the predictive accuracy of fortune tellers, to my mind there is no doubt that in extraordinary moments of one's life there are definite messages that can come through to each of us.

In the early years of the 20th century, my Dad was a young doctor in New York City. One morning he received a phone call telling him of the death of his older brother in a foreign country. We cannot conceive of the lack of communication in those days; there was no television or Internet and most homes didn't even have phone service. So my Dad-to-be went out to the subway, to deliver the sad news in person to his mother who lived in the Bronx.

As soon as he came into her presence, she said, “I know. Andrew was killed in a car accident. I had a dream.”

I remember when I was 8 or 9, playing by myself in the overgrown vacant lot next to our house in the Hollywood Hills. All at once my inner dialogue said, “You know, your dreams should be true. You should be able to fly, and you should be able to control objects with your mind. Experiment and see.”

I willed myself to gently levitate off the ground, but nothing happened. Then I stood in front of a huge green and yellow bush, waved my hands and commanded it to move – again with no result. “Oh, I see,” I said to myself, “That doesn't work here. Okay.” There was no sense of loss at this revelation; it just made me eager to find out what did work in this new place, and to learn its rules.

Thirty years later, my young wife and I were enjoying a group past-life regression led by a local psychic in Phoenix. There was no way of knowing whether any of the entertaining visions we conjured for ourselves had any basis in reality, but towards the end of the evening Patrick asked us to project our thoughts into the future, to see what we'd be doing in twenty years. My vision was just wishful thinking, but my wife, Nora, got very quiet. Later, she confided to me that it had been hard to see herself living at all, but that eventually she saw herself in a wheelchair. Nobody wishes for a vision like that! It turned out to be true.

It was a much better day when we brought our female cockerpoo home from the Humane Society and introduced her to our feisty male Scottish terrier, who instantly fell in love with her. The two of them were busily exploring the back yard, out of sight of the house, when an idea occurred to me. I concentrated my attention and mentally called the Scottie's name: “Augie! Augie, come here!” Three seconds later he came belting around the corner of the house and joyfully jumped up and down in front of me. It was unquestionable; he had heard me call him! And he thought the silent call was just as cool as I thought it was!

Some years later, Nora and I were awakened around midnight by a call from the nurse in my mother-in-law's Hospice unit, saying that if we wanted to see “Mom” one last time, we'd better get in the car and come over right away. When we arrived at 12:30 she was still alive, but unconscious – or mostly so, since they say that one's hearing is the sense that stays with you the longest. We sat on opposite sides of her bed, each holding one of her hands. Every ten or fifteen minutes the nurse would stick her head in the door, and then withdraw with a puzzled expression on her face. It was clear that she had expected the lady to expire within the hour; how was she still hanging on? All at once a voice in my head said, “It will be at four o'clock.” And yes, sure enough – that's when her transition took place.

It seems to me now, at the age of 72, that the hardest task we can set ourselves in this life is to remember that we had all these wonderful moments of spiritual communication; I say wonderful, because even the sad ones were evidence of a higher consciousness connecting us all, and therefore a greater purpose to existence than we usually feel. Life can get so messy, confusing and nasty that our consciousness is constantly kept in the present moment – not in a nice meditative way, but in a hysterical way like the survival consciousness of wartime. (Except, that is, for the 50% of our generation who have already succumbed to dementia and have found what comfort there may be in alternate story telling.) We need to remember that those mystical messages really did come to us in the past. We did not make them up. They really happened!

I try to stay mindful of those memories, realizing that I have no way of knowing what fate may await my own brain cells. Yet, I still see no different way to live except the minute-by-minue, hour -by-hour, day-by-day process of personal evaluation and attention to my duties that I've developed by trial and error over the course of my lifetime.

Actually, the deeper I get into this process and the more scary some of my future possibilities appear, the closer I get to believing that it's all a big, sarcastic joke. The Great Architect of the Universe couldn't have designed the whole thing to have such a pointless, hopelessly horrific end! The very thought makes no sense; it's ridiculous!

I've adopted the little green cartoon “alien” on the cover of “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy” - the one with his tongue sticking out – as the symbol of this concept. (Douglas Adams hated this drawing, so I'm sure he wouldn't mind my appropriating it for another use.) I'm coming to feel that this image symbolizes the truth that underlies everything we hold to be serious and important – in that every time we think we've figured something out, the joke's on us!

We still have to use our talents to fight for the causes we feel drawn to, for that is why we were created; but as Krishna explains to Arjuna in the “Bhagavad-Gita,” we're all just little parts in somebody else's story. We don't have to worry about what happens when our roles are done; we wouldn't be able to absorb all the nuances of the great cosmic screenplay, anyway.

My wife and I have a phrase for the only thing in life that we can know for sure: “You never know, you know.”