The Masque of Synchronicity

I began my Tuesday evening meditation class recently with a quote.

“Meditation takes us from survival to creation; from separation to connection; from imbalance to balance; from emergency mode to growth-and-repair mode; and from the limiting emotions of fear, anger, and sadness to the expansive emotions of joy, freedom, and love. Basically, we go from clinging to the known to embracing the unknown.”             – Dr. Joe Dispenza, You Are the Placebo

As soon as I mentioned the name of the author, one of the students, a middle-aged man named Gary who was taking my class for the first time, called out. “I know Dispenza. I read that book and went to his three-day workshop. He’s fantastic.”

After class, I spent half an hour talking to Gary about the workshop, and his story was rife with synchronicity. Earlier this summer, he was with a friend who said she wanted to go to a bookstore and find something to read. Once they arrived, she had no idea what she wanted. So Gary walked up to a nearby bookshelf and just randomly snatched a book. It was Dispenza’s Placebo. He’d never heard of the book or author. He took a quick look at it and handed it to his friend. “Get this one.”

That weekend he read the book from cover to cover, spending nine hours in one stretch studying it. When he finished, he wanted to find out more about Dispenza and his workshops, so he went to his website. To his surprise, Dispenza was leading a workshop the following weekend in Miami, 70 miles to the south. He signed up for it, and the following Thursday took his 88-year-old mother with him for the two-hour introductory session.

Afterwards, they headed home and he kept wishing that he had someplace to stay that was closer so he wouldn’t have to get up at 5 a.m. and fight traffic to Miami Beach in order to arrive on time. He was so focused on the idea of a closer location that his mother asked him what he was thinking about. As he explained how he wanted to apply Dispenza’s technique for changing your reality to his current issue, his cell phone rang.

It was a banker friend who had some information about a money transfer. The banker asked him what he was doing and Gary told him about the workshop that he would be attending all weekend, driving back and forth from West Palm Beach. “Why don’t you stay in Miami?” the banker asked, then added: “I’ve got the perfect place for you. It’s a two-bedroom condo. It goes for $685 a night, but I can get it for $180 a night. The owner is my client.”

When Gary asked where it was, the address was only five blocks from the workshop. “Turn around right now and go there,” the banker said. “I’ll set it up for you.” Gary and his mother stayed the weekend on Miami Beach, and he walked to the workshop.

When I came home from the class, I told Trish about Gary’s story. She had written a blog post on Dispenza’s book and now here was someone who had attended the recent workshop in Miami. We might’ve gone to it ourselves, but that weekend we were out of town.

I wasn’t going to write anything here about Gary’s synchro, because we’ve already written about Dispenza and his new book. But then something peculiar happened. Back at my desk, I’d returned to working on my next book: Bump in the Night: Ghosts, Spirits & Alien Encounters. I had just Googled a short story by Edgar Allan Poe Poe called, Masque of the Red Death, that I was considering for a chapter on ghosts in literature. I scrolled down the article, which was a summary of the eerie tale about a ghost wearing a disguise to a party of wealthy people who thought they were insulated against an epidemic called the red death that was ravaging the countryside.

Halfway down the article, I came to an ad inserted into it. The ad was for You Are the Placebo and featured a photo of Dispenza. What an odd place for it—a book about healing in the midst of a story about disease and death. And what timing. Synchronicity. I knew then I needed to write Gary’s story. Thanks, Edgar.