Darren alerted us to this video on Mike Clelland’s blog. Michael Talbot was a brilliant writer whose Holographic Universe came into my life at a time when I needed to know that I wasn’t nuts for believing what I believed. His book impacted me at such deep levels that language is inadequate in describing the ramifications.
…my novel, Romancing the Raven is now available in the Kindle Store.
Here’s a description.
When we travel, we move away from what is familiar and known and the uncertainty creates a fertile environment for synchronicity. During our weekend visit to Toronto, we experienced so many synchronicites that Rob made a list of them and we talked about who would write what.
At one point in the weekend, I remember opening my eyes, orienting myself to daily life, and thinking, OK, Rob is sitting over there in that chair reading Stephen King’s most recent novel, 11/22/63, time travel, JFK, I get it. But suppose I am time traveling too?
When two writers are married to each other, weird environments surface. Some are great, others are blind spots. This story is about a blind spot.
Our first morning at the Pantages, we went downstairs to the restaurant for breakfast and discover it’s $12.99 – let’s call it 13 bucks, higher if you’re paying with America dollars – for a rather sad buffet of cereal, yogurt, toast. Or, as Rob put it – the sort of continental breakfast that is often free of charge at business hotels. We’re already annoyed because the production company hasn’t paid for the $12 daily charge for internet for our room or for any of our meals. Yes, we’re also at fault here, we did not negotiate beforehand.
Rob is really irritated by the price; right then, I’m frankly too hungry to care. He orders scrambled eggs, and that’s what he gets – eggs, nothing more. I go for whatever is in sight, the cereal, the toast, the yogurt. We bite the bullet and vow to find a less expensive place for breakfast the next day.
After the interview for Weird or What? the director, Stephen Grant, asked us where we were staying. When we told him, he said, “Oh, you’re very close to Fran’s, a local hangout that’s open 24 hours and serves breakfast day and night. You should go there.”
The next morning, in fact, we asked the woman at the front desk for directions to Fran’s. She looked at us sort of oddly and pointed to double doors on the far side of the expensive bar/restaurant. “Right through there,” she said.
So, about 30 feet where we had sat the morning before, griping about the price of the buffet breakfast, lay the alternate universe called Fran’s. It was as if time at Fran’s had stopped around 1950. The menu offered a lot more food than the hotel’s buffet and at half the price.
We had seen those double doors the morning before and I thought they led into the hotel kitchen or some other employees only place, even though there was no sign to that effect. So our lack of curiosity about where those doors led, our limited perception, had kept us out of Fran’s until it was recommended by the director at Weird or What?
For me, it was an important lesson about exploration, something we usually do well when we’re traveling. But for some reason, with those double doors, we wore blinders that blocked our peripheral vision, our doors to perception, as Aldous Huxley put it.
So after we ate our fantastic, inexpensive breakfast, we left through Fran’s front doors and snapped some pics. That’s Rob, peeking around the edge of the building like some time traveler from the 1950s who has dropped in for a peek at 21st century Toronto.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0dKsIvJZ4vc
Imagine it. You’re a woman, single or not, who has made the difficult decision to have an abortion. But before you can have the procedure, you are mandated to have a transvaginal ultrasound, where a probe, a wand, is inserted into your vagina. According to Medline Plus, “this probe sends out sound waves which reflect off body structures. A computer receives these waves and uses them to create a picture. The doctor can immediately see the picture on a nearby TV monitor.”
The point of such an unnecessary procedure, of course, is to get the woman who wants the abortion to look at the ultrasound image and change her mind about the abortion. It’s one more weapon in the right-wing arsenal to overturn Roe V Wade. In Florida, in fact, if you refuse to look at the ultrasound image, it will be noted in your medical records. So, let’s say fifteen years later you’re in the midst of a bitter divorce and custody battle and your spouse’s attorney requests that your medical records be submitted as evidence that you’re an unfit parent. She wouldn’t even look at the ultrasound image.
The most recent battleground over this issue was Virginia. According to the Washington Post: “In Virginia, the bill began muscling its way through a legislature that recently came under the rule of GOP conservatives. It moved ahead despite an outcry from women and Democrats, including a female lawmaker who called it ‘state-mandated rape’ and another who made her point with a failed amendment requiring rectal prostate exams for men seeking Viagra prescriptions.”
Nearly 1,500 women silently protested this bill in Virginia’s capitol and presented Governor Bob McDonnell with petitions that had than 30,000 names protesting the bill. Then the bill was lampooned on Saturday Night Live and uh-oh, suddenly the popular culture was informed. And apparently the Republican politicians realized they were on the wrong side of this bill. The governor backed down. Maybe it finally dawned on him that the majority of voters are women.
The Guttmacher Institute, which researches abortion-related issues, is keeping close tabs on this issue. Here’s how they break down the ultrasound laws around the U.S.:
Existing laws: Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas
Enjoined laws (not currently in effect): North Carolina, Oklahoma
Bills pending that require ultrasounds: Alabama, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia
Bills pending that require doctors to offer ultrasounds: Iowa, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey
Even in conservative Mississippi, a bill that would have banned most forms of contraception, was dropped.
This assault on women’s health and choices is appalling and horrifying. We live in the 21st century and Roe V Wade has been federal law since 1973. And what’s with the attempts to ban birth control?
As Rob has said repeatedly, to a Republican, you’re a person only until you’re born. After that, sorry, you’re on your own. You can’t have health insurance, we’re going to take away your public education, we’re going to make life so hard for you that you’re going to wish you were just a fetus again.
Is this the reality we desire for democracy??
We never tire of synchros involving 11, 111, or 1111. This cluster of 11s comes from Vicki Watt, whose blog is here. It does seem as if some of us are shadowed by these numbers. In the tarot, card 11 is Justice. In the I Ching, hexagram 11 is Peace. Perhaps there are hints in these two divination systems about Vicki’s synchro clusters involving 11s.
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I saw your 11 post earlier in the week and wondered what you make of this – my own week has been full of 11s, or 111s.
All this week, my partner and I have been watching Lord of The Rings. I noted that Bilbo’s Birthday Party was for his 111’th birthday.
Yesterday, I realized that the Valentines post on the blog I was working on was my 111’th post.
Later in the day, I was working on my partner’s music blog and glanced at his Facebook ‘Like’ box. He has 111 likes.
Today, I realized on my walk along the coast to a neighboring fishing village, that it’s the 11th of February 2012.
If you break down 11 02 2012 into 1s, you get 111 111 111 (Also, this total’s 9 – my numerology birth number)
Later, as I detoured from my usual route, I walked up through an old lane in the village and glanced at an old door, the number on it was 11.
Also, a few days ago, I saw the book Chocolat at a friend’s house and asked if I could borrow. I briefly glanced at it and noticed that each chapter began with a date in February. I thought that was cool because this is February – and it’s also my birth month.
However, I’d completely forgotten about this detail today, as picked up where I left off, a couple of pages into Chapter 1.
As I finished the first chapter, I realised that Chapter 2 begins ’12 February’. So, I looked back to see which date was given to Chapter 1. 11th February – today!
We’ve written about this topic before, usually somewhat disparagingly, since synchronicity hasn’t favored well in the world of traditional science.
Now comes a paper called Synchronicity Studies, by Bernard D. Beitman, MD, a visiting professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia. Beitman, you might recall, is the author a series of studies of synchronicity that were published in the December 2011 issue of Psychiatric Annals, and reviewed here. The paper accompanied those studies, and Dr. Beitman has asked us to read and comment on it. He would also like to receive comments from others.
Beitman makes three interesting points near the beginning of the paper. He notes that one out of three people notice coincidences taking place in their lives. He adds that reports of coincidental events seem to be increasing. His third point: “Many people, especially people with scientific training, dismiss coincidences as simply a matter of chance: accidents or anomalies generated by randomness.”
He goes on to say that such a dismissal without a review of evidence is hardly scientific and he calls for the establishment of a new transdisciplinary field called Coincidence Studies. He describes three types of coincidence: synchronicity, serendipity, and seriality. Just as Carl Jung coined the term synchronicity to describe meaningful coincidence, Beitman has coined a term, “simulpathity,” which incorporates empathy with coincidence. We’ve written about planetary empaths – people who feel earthquakes and other disasters as they happen or shortly before they happen – and their experiences might be an example of simulpathity.
Beitman discusses the environments in which synchronicity occurs and this part of his paper bears a striking resemblance to what we wrote about in 7 Secrets: that synchronicity occurs frequently during times of major transitions in our lives. He also mentions a personal experience that may have led him into Jungian territory: a choking episode that coincided with what was happening to his father as he choked to death.
Beitman refers to ‘coincidence-prone’ people, an interesting concept. He says such people tend to be self-referential, intuitive, emotional, optimistic, and meaning-seeking. We have quite a few coincidence-prone folks visiting this blog. Creative people experience synchronicities frequently because synchronicity is part of the creative process.
There’s much more. It’s a long article. If you want to get analytical about synchronicity, this article won’t let you down. Here’s an example:
“The resolution of conflicts among coincidence theories could take three forms. One possibility is that a superordinate theory will encompass all others, explaining all instances of weird coincidence. A second possibility is that different theories may account for different types of coincidences. A third possibility is that each theory explains one aspect of a meaningful coincidence.”
From the academic perspective, there’s a need for theory to explain meaningful coincidences, and justify the concept of coincidence studies. Beitman should be congratulated for his efforts. After all, most academics consider people who take such co-incidents seriously to be dabbling in magical thinking, a term related to superstitious beliefs or behavior. Probably the only subject currently more tarnished than coincidence in the academic realm is the study of UFOs.
Beitman also talks about the idea of being able to predict a coincidence. That sounds suspiciously like applying cause and effect to a phenomenon that essentially is a window to an underlying reality that exists outside of cause and effect, outside of linear time and three-dimensional space. The bottom line is that it would probably take a synchronicity to predict a coincidence!
All of that said, coincidence studies could serve as an important vehicle for studying synchronicity in all its myriad forms. We would like to see how such a study would illuminate the experiences of planetary empaths. Perhaps such a study could somehow make use of their often painful experiences , save lives, and help empaths to focus their abilities in a way that can predict the location of catastrophic events.
Beitman is curious about how to energize people who are helped in some way by coincidence so that a tipping point can be reached to bring synchronicity into major public awareness and academic study. Specifically, here are his points/questions:
1) How can we gain enough energy to reach the tipping point into public and academic awareness?
2) What parts of the Coincidence Studies paper do you resonate with and what seems to need developing and what seems wrong?
3) The Coincidence Studies paper is a Manifesto–it outlines the future of a new field. What is needed to help this new field grow and flourish?
4) How can you help?
There’s a second paper that was published in EdgeScience Magazine which you can download for free. Click the link above, then the PDF link for issue 9. This article is much longer and talks about involving “citizen scientists” in the research of synchronicity.
So here we are, people from all walks of life, different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, and spiritual beliefs who experience synchronicity frequently, learn from it, are illuminated by it. How can we help in the scientific/academic exploration of this phenomenon? How can science expand our understanding?
After our first night in our ‘urban chic’ studio apartment in downtown Toronto, we were ready for a leisurely breakfast. Trish had gone over her notes about Wolfgang Pauli and the Pauli effect at least a hundred times it seemed and she was ready for the interview.
The actual topic was an unusual story of a human rights lawyer named Cheryl Welch, who is convinced that the U.S. government is not only spying on her, but has targeted her in a wide-ranging mind control experiment. Trish was to provide one of several alternate explanations.
So as we left the room for breakfast on the interview day, I found a newspaper hanging on our door. It was the weekend issue the National Post, which appears to be a cross between the New York Post with its huge front page headlines and the dour, conservative perspective of the Wall Street Journal.
What caught my attention, of course, was the top-half of the front page, pictured above. Those scowling eyes and the headline: They’re Watching – What does the government already know about you?
I showed it to Trish and said: “Mind control?” It seemed that the newspaper had pre-empted Weird or What? with their own story of supposed government intrusion.
Such experiments definitely took place in the 1950s and ’60s in an experiment called MK-ULTRA, a code name for illegal and covert experiments run by the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence. Targets were subjected unknowingly to hallucinogenic drugs and a variety of mind control techniques including hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as various forms of torture.
In the mid-1980s, I was approached by a medical doctor who said he had a patient who believed the government was beaming microwaves and other energy fields at her. It was affecting her health and mental stability, he said. I was working as a journalist and something I’d written prompted him to contact me.
When I met the woman, she lived in a spotless, but impersonal environment, a condo in South Florida high above the Atlantic. She said she could hear voices seemingly broadcast from her teeth. Interestingly, Cheryl Welch mentions the same phenomenon happening to her. I eventually wrote an article about the woman’s experience. It was a peculiar piece because I introduced the woman to a former police officer who had left law enforcement to become a psychic working as a consultant with police departments. He felt the woman was telling the truth, as she perceived it, but he was unable to pick up any energy fields or the source of such fields. So, as with many such cases, this one was difficult to verify.
So are these covert experiments still taking place and is Cheryl a target? William Shatner’s Weird or What? set out to find out and included three alternate explanations. The Pauli effect was one and we were contacted to explain it. Trish initially wanted me to be the interviewee since I’d done a couple of TV shows related the Bermuda Triangle. But it was her turn and she grudgingly agreed to sit before the camera.
Cheryl Welch believes that the government is not only affecting her, but others around her. If she goes outside in a crowd, she says people will shout obscenities and spit at her. Supposedly, these people are either plants or innocent bystanders temporarily subjected to the same mental manipulations.
As an alternative explanation, Trish proposed that Cheryl might have some telekinetic abilities, similar to the Pauli effect, which would explain some of the strange things happening around her. She also suggested that Cheryl might be experiencing ‘like attracts like’ or the law of attraction. In other words, she is so convinced that she is a victim of mind control that she attracts related experiences.
Oddly enough, it’s a case where the psychic explanation just might be more reasonable than the one based on cause and effect, ie. government mind control.
I briefly wondered if the newspaper on our hotel door could have been created for us and planted by a government agent as a means of intimidating us before the interview on the related subject. That would fit with Cheryl’s scenario.
In our experience, stuff like that is more likely to emerge from the underlying world that exists outside of cause and effect, space and linear time, the realm to which synchronicity serves as a doorway–the unconscious or the collective unconscious.
Certainly, government agents do silly wasteful things, but that newspaper was not one of them. We saw other copies of that newspaper around, including one on the airplane during the return flight. For us, it was a case of synchronicity, one of many that we experienced in Toronto.
Over the weekend, we went to Toronto to be interviewed for William Shatner’s show, Weird or What? We were supposed to talk about Wolfgang Pauli, the theoretical physicist who won a Nobel in 1945 for his exclusion principle and also collaborated with Carl Jung on synchronicity. Specifically, we were there to talk about the Pauli effect – i.e., the spontaneous breakdown of laboratory equipment in his presence. And this seemingly psychokinetic effect was to be presented as a possible theory for what’s happening to a woman who believes she’s the victim of government mind control.
Pauli was also known for his connection with the number 137, one of the unsolved mysteries of modern physics, the value of the fine structure constant , the DNA of light, as author Arthur I Miller put it in his book, Deciphering the Cosmic Number: the Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung. 137 is a prime number – a number that can be divided by 1 and by itself. Or, put another way, a prime number is a positive integer that cannot equal the product of two smaller integers.
The number became so puzzling to physicists that the famed Richard Feynman, who won the Nobel Prize in 1965 for his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, said that physicists should put a sign in their offices to remind themselves of how much they don’t know. The sign would be simple: 137.
This number confounded Pauli for much of his adult life. When at the age of 58, he entered the hospital for routine surgery and discovered he would be in room 137, he reportedly told a friend: “I won’t get out of here alive.” And he didn’t. He died before he could be released.
Now here’s the synchro. We were picked up at the airport on Friday evening by a service Shatner’s production company provided. The car was spacious, comfortable, and gave us a chance to sit back and take in the city as the driver made his way through Friday rush hour traffic. At one point, the line of cars came to a complete standstill and I glanced up from whatever I was doing and couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
There, on my right, was a building with prominent white numbers on the front: 137, Pauli’s number. And we were here to talk about Pauli.
I quickly nudged Rob and we both laughed. Then I noticed that the building was a gym – Good Life Fitness – which struck me as strangely ironic. 137 had proven to be Pauli’s death number, but we were here to talk about one facet of his life.
Something similar and more dramatic happened to physicist F. David Peat when he was invited to speak at the 50th anniversary of the opening of Jung’s institute in Zurich. But in both instances the message was the same: we, like Peat, were to talk about Pauli when the number appeared.
The synchro, though, continued. On Sunday, we had some time before we were to be picked up at our hotel, so we walked around downtown and found ourselves on Yonge Street, where the gym was located. I wanted to get a picture of the 137, so we walked until we found it and I took the photo at the top of the post. We continued our walk and after a few blocks one of us mentioned Pauli again. At that moment, we both noticed a prominent sign across the street: WE’VE MOVED to 137 YONGE. It was apparently the former site of the gym.
When we returned to the hotel, we sat in the lobby and I started emailing the photos on my Blackberry to myself so I could download them to my computer. I emailed the 137 picture to a couple of friends whom I knew would enjoy it and as I checked my iPad to make sure the photos were going through, I suddenly noticed that the 137 photo had been emailed at 1:37. I snapped this photo of my iPad:
Pauli greeted us hello as we entered the city and waved good-bye as we were waiting to leave.
Well worth the eight and a half minutes. Enjoy!
