There is a theory running around everywhere concerning what has been labeled the Universal Mind or UM. The basic idea is that there is in the universe a massive stream of information up to date on everything that can be tapped into with your mind under the right conditions. It is all there, some say, just for the tapping. If you need simply any knowledge you can access it from the UM. The key is your own mind’s situation.

On occasions, it is said, such information is pushed down on certain people unbidden, and for no known reasons. This one thing I believe because I have had the experience of acquiring significant information without consciously asking for it. Let me explain.

When I was a young man of 30, I decided to write a novel, and proceeded to think it through, and begin an outline, a set of characters, a theme, and a general idea of the beginning and end. Moving along, I outlined each chapter and started writing the first three chapters, and some key actions at the climax in the next to the end.
Then I happened to go to a drugstore and after a bit of shopping, I looked at the paperback books on display. So, I picked up a novel called “The Quiet American” by Graham Green. When I got home, I began to read it, and went into total shock! Chapter by chapter, character by character, even by the same names, the theme and the ending, all were what I had painfully and carefully though out for my novel. It was as if I had read Green’s novel and started copying it almost word for word! But I had never seen or read his novel, that was for sure.

Green’s novel was written in 1955, and I was writing mine in 1960, so there was every chance that I had somehow read it earlier and forgotten it. But that was most certainly not the case. I knew for a fact that I had never had anything to do with this work. Yet I somehow had, it seems!
Did the Universal Mind push down on me another man’s novel? I believe so, and it put me off from trying to write a novel for several years.

This cannot persist, I thought some four years later, so I began the same procedure. Plotting, character definition, naming the characters, themes, both major and minor, outline of chapters, and a smashing ending. This time, before doing a lot of writing, I decided to look into possibly similar novels at the local library. With considerable anxiety I discovered a novel called “The Adventurers” by Harold Robbins (1966). It was startlingly close to my whole scheme yet again! So close that I could see my characters and predict the chapters and the ending before I got to them. I almost cried!

Crushed again in 1970 by this thing called the UM!

At the time, I simply thought I was cursed or something. It was extraordinarily coincidental, two times! What should I believe about these events? It is not hard to believe that I had indeed been favored by an unbidden push down from the Universal Mind.

To this day, I am fearful of setting about another novel, though I console myself that I must have talent for it, witness what I could do two times! Or did I?