I was getting ready to teach a meditation class recently at Moksha Yoga Studio, and was trying to light a candle. I say ‘trying’ because when I open the pack of matches that I’d found on the shelf, it was filled with little sheets of paper instead of matches. Strange. What would anyone use such paper for, too small to clean glasses and not the right kind of paper, either.
I shrugged and found matches in my backpack in a pouch with some jasmine incense. I picked up a large candle out of a basket, and lit the candle wick. But it immediately went out. I tried again, same result.
That’s when I realized, duh, it was an electric candle. A very well disguised one, because I’m used to using electric candles in the gym when I teach yoga. I thought, well, that’s kind of a synchro…fake matches…fake candle. But what does it mean?
Maybe it symbolizes that something here wasn’t seem real. Or maybe nothing was real. After all, in Zen, the everyday world is considered an illusion. Meditation, meanwhile, moves us into a state of awareness where the physical world no longer seems so real. It could’ve been that.
Or, on a more mundane level, the alternative was that my class itself—at least on that day—wasn’t real. In fact, no one showed up, except Trish, and we decided to head home. But first I turned off the electric candle and dropped the fake matches in the basket next to it.
It’s difficult to write about what has happened and is still happening in Ferguson, Missouri. During the past ten days, there have been times when the streets of this small Midwestern town resembled images beamed from Baghdad. Military tanks and military Humvees. Cops decked out like soldiers in full military gear – gas masks, automatic rifles, even guys riding on top of these huge tanks like snipers, ready to take out whoever misbehaved.
All of this was the result of local cops shooting an unarmed black man, Michael Brown, 18. Apparently this killing is pretty much business as usual in Ferguson, a town that is predominately black, but whose 53 police officers are mostly white – 50 out of the 53.
What really appalled me about this story was the revelation that the Pentagon sold surplus equipment from the battles in Iraq and Afghanistan to local U.S police departments under something called the Defense Department’s 1033 program. Its motto is “from warfighter to crimefighter.” These local PDs can also purchase similar equipment through grants from the Department of Homeland Security.
What business does the Pentagon have selling this surplus equipment to tiny police departments like Ferguson where, until the death of Michael Brown, there had been no murders in 2014? Does our community have such equipment?
Night after night, Rob and I watched these events on MSNBC, where commentator Chris Hayes did a stellar job of explaining what was happening. The media in Ferguson were hampered by the closing of airspace above Ferguson to any planes except police choppers. It meant that journalists were denied the larger picture that media choppers might have provided.
Watching these protestors, I was reminded of all the protests during the Vietnam War. In May 1970, friends and I drove from upstate New York to Washington DC for one of the largest protests against the war, the Kent State shootings, and Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia. There were more than 100,000 protestors.
We crashed in a city park that night, with hundreds of other protesters, and readied our meager and ridiculous bandanas with Vaseline, which was supposed to stop the effects of tear gas. Toward dawn, we were chased out of the park by cops and took to the streets.
There’s a momentum that builds in crowds this large. You can taste it, feel it, are swept up in it. People are unified by a singular vision or cause and seek to right a wrong. But in the courts, righting what is wrong takes time. In spite of that protest in 1970, Nixon wasn’t impeached until 1974.
Darren Wilson, the cop who shot Michael Brown, has his side of the story. But he hasn’t told it yet. He’s on paid administrative leave. Nearly two weeks after the shooting, the cops have yet to release details of the autopsy, the police report, or anything else that is relevant. Instead, they have released video that shows a convenience store robbery that may have involved Brown, but which they admit had nothing to do with why Wilson shot Brown. That video seems tailored to disparage Brown’s character.
More than 70,000 people have signed a petition urging the prosecutor to recuse himself from the case. He and the Missouri governor have sparred over this publicly. The governor has the power to appoint a special prosecutor, but he has said that Prosecutor McCulluch should do it on his own. So far he hasn’t.
Prosecutor McCulluch himself has a rather interesting history that could bias this case: his father, a white cop, was shot and killed by a black man.
Some sort of past life scenario may be playing out here. We’ve recognized some synchros, but didn’t jot them down because this whole thing seemed so impossible to write about. How can there be such animosity toward Afro-Americans more than 50 years after the Civil Rights Act was passed?
My daughter and her generation don’t see color. They see human beings. So perhaps there has been some progress on that generational front. But twentysomethings are not in charge in Ferguson. In Ferguson, aging white men dominate the police force and the corridors of power. In national politics, aging white men dominate the scene in both parties, in both houses of Congress.
We are a country so divided that Egypt- EGYPT – urged caution in Ferguson. Wow. The Arab Spring meets racism on the other side of the world. Go figure.
I predict that when Jay Nixon – the Democratic governor- comes up for re-election he will lose. Watch him for a minute and you’ll realize this guy is clueless. He hasn’t even visited Ferguson.
And then watch the video in which two cops gunned down a young black man less than four miles from Ferguson and ask yourself, Is this who we are? Is this the best we can do? WTF?
That’s the name of a new documentary film that that portends to show that UFOs are nothing more than a complicated decades long effort by the U.S. government to deceive its citizens in a grand disinformation project. The basis for the allegations is a 2010 book by the same name.
For years, ufologists have suspected that the government was hiding information on UFOs and the film contends that the allegation is true. However, what they were hiding was the disinformation program. Mirage Men even uncovers a former government agent, Richard Doty, who played the role of one of the notorious Men in Black.
“The UFO community is a textbook case of a gullible group susceptible to manipulation. Having spent too long watching the skies and The X-Files, it’s implied, they’ll readily swallow whatever snippet of ‘evidence’ suits their grand theory,” according to an article in The Guardian about the documentary. The article was recently re-published here in Raw Story.
The Guardian tells us that Mirage Men “unearths compelling evidence that UFO folklore was actually fabricated by the US government. Rather than covering up the existence of aliens, could it be that the real conspiracy has been persuading us to believe in them?”
If what The Guardian says about the documentary is true, then it sounds like a reductionist simplification of the UFO phenomenon. In other words, since there is a documented pattern of disinformation regarding UFOs, then there are no ‘real’ UFOs.
As I was reading the article, I kept wondering if there’s nothing to UFOs, and ufologists are basically nut cases, then why the need for disinformation? What’s the point?
Finally, in the last paragraph the writer seems to wake up to that fact when he concludes: “As always in the conspiracy-theory hall of mirrors, it’s possible to flip the hypothesis on its head: what if the lies and hoaxes Mirage Men reveals are simply a smokescreen for the fact that the authorities really do know secrets about extraterrestrials? What better way to conceal them than by getting ‘found out’ in their disinformation tactics?…Perhaps we’re no closer to knowing if the truth really is out there, but we can be sure the lies are.
We’ll probably watch the documentary and hopefully it won’t be as one-sided as the article implies. Clearly, there is more to the UFO phenomenon than disinformation.
This synchronicity comes from Melissa, whose synchros we’ve posted before. When our daughter was much younger, Melissa used to babysit her. She and her husband, Jon, now live in New York.
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As you may or may not know, Coca-Cola has a campaign going where you “share a Coke with ____” and the bottles/cans have various names on them. We have yet to find one with either Melissa or Jon…
Yesterday morning Jennifer (Melissa’s sister) texted me a picture of a 12-pack of Coke and it said “Share a Coke with a Star.” She tried to find a single can or bottle for me but there were none, so we had to settle for the picture. Star is our cat. Here’s Star contemplating the Coke can with her name on it.
Fast forward to dinnertime that same day – we ordered Chinese take-out, which usually comes with a soda or two, depending on what we’ve ordered. Jon was emptying the bag of take-out, not paying too much attention. As I walked by I noticed we had gotten a can of Coke (they usually send Sprite!) and I thought, “That can better say ‘Star’ on it…” We had been having a pretty bad couple of days and when I picked it up, sure enough, it said ‘Star’ and I just held it up to Jon.
I took it as a sign from the universe that things will be looking up, and it worked for at least a moment, everyone was cheered up!
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Later that same day, Melissa emailed me again and said she now believed the synchro was actually a trickster. She and Jon had rented a car so they could drive to a party in Connecticut. The rental was pricey – $160, but she knew about the price ahead of time.
“The toll pass we got didn’t work and we were stuck in the EZ pass lane and got yelled at by a cop and then got lost even with directions and the GPS. I had an anxiety attack and we didn’t make it to the party and went home.”
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This is how the trickster seems to work at times. Hey, here’s a synchro for you, and what a good one it is. Then, later, things turn out differently than you expected and you can almost hear the trickster laughing.
Back in September 2013, our daughter, Megan, had her first exhibit of her dolphin art. As a result of that show, she sold three of her dolphin pieces, and others followed later on.
The first piece, which had hung on our living room wall, went to our friend and novelist Nancy Pickard. A second one went to our friend and fellow blogger, Nancy Atkinson. A third and fourth eventually went to a local couple, Rose and Dwayne, who is an artist himself.
I’m always curious what people do with the art they buy, and now I know! Nancy Pickard’s piece was the largest and she said it was going to look great on her bedroom wall. A few days ago, she sent me a photo of the dolphin in her redecorated, very Zen bedroom. The dolphin looks quite pleased, with plenty of color to swim in.
Nancy Atkinson thought her dolphin would fit perfectly in the condo she and her husband own on Maui, and asked Megan to ship it to Hawaii. She gave the dates when she was going to be in Hawaii, and asked Megan to mail it to that address. Mercury, which rules travel and communication in astrology, was retrograde during that period and I had reservations about the painting being mailed during the retro.. Long story short, the dolphin never arrived and eventually found its way back to Megan’s apartment. She subsequently mailed it to Nancy’s home on the mainland. So her dolphin traveled more than 11,000 miles before Nancy finally received it. The full story is here. Her dolphin, whom I fondly call Nomad, will probably end up in Hawaii.
The dolphin that Rose and Dwayne bought was framed and hung on a coquina rock wall in their living room. I think this dolphin looks quite happy, too!
Rob and I also bought several of her pieces and framed the smallest. That painting graces the living room wall with two other pieces that are done in panels. We call that wall The Dolphins’ Place.
Thanks to her Paint Nite classes, she is now expanding to other types of paintings and uses acrylics.
Communication between the living and the dead may occur more frequently than we realize. In Synchronicity and the Other Side, we included dozens of stories of spirit contact, experienced by people from all walks of life. Synchronicity, as a kind of connective tissue between our daily world and the world of spirit, often plays an integral part in such communication.
As you’ll see from the following story, spirits can use virtually anything to communicate with the living. This story comes from Anne Strieber and is about her and Whitley’s friend, Margo Adler, a Wiccan and author whose book, Drawing Down the Moon is a classic about paganism. Adler died recently.
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Our good friend, wiccan Margot Adler died last week. Margot was an NPR reporter and she was also a Wiccan. We never knew for sure if she believed in an afterlife, but as the dead now so often appear in our lives, I wanted to get in touch with her spirit. But how to do this?
I remembered that Laurence Gardner told us that green was the color of magic, and Margot was as magical a person as I have ever met. So I decided to look for things that were green. But since we were visiting in the country, there was green all around us. Whitley said that I should look for things that are not normally green, if that was where I was hoping to find a sign.
I walked into a green hallway, saw several men wearing green shirts, but none of this seemed somehow right. These were just ordinary experiences, not communications. Then I sent Whitley out to replace some tweezers I had mislaid. One pair was an ordinary sliver color, but the other, to my great surprise, was the only pair of GREEN tweezers I’d ever seen in my life.
It was a sign to me that Margot—or my love of our dear friend—was still around, working her Wiccan magic.
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I have never seen a pair of green tweezers, either! I asked Whitley if the original tweezers had ever been found. He said no, that Anne had come home with the silver and green tweezers.
Our blogger friend Adelita at Lita Dreaming sent me the following story through Facebook. I asked her if we could post it. The woman who experienced it, Wanda Burch, is a friend of Adelita’s and an author whose book, She Who Dreams, is now on my must read list. Here’s the story, in Wanda’s words:
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Ron and I have known each other since the sixth grade, began dating in college and married 43 years ago today. Marrying your best friend is a special journey.
The graduate school years placed us hundreds of miles apart, Ron in North Carolina, me in upstate New York; but occasionally we talked about where we would marry and what kind of wedding it would be. Mademoiselle Magazine featured “folkloric” wedding gowns in 1970, and I was in love with the cover gown, a Romantic dotted Swiss dress with puffy sleeves ending in long Victorian cuffs. I tucked the magazine away among my class notes where glimpses of it would pop up as I fingered through my assignments. I had no income and no hope of owning such a dress but it hovered like a remembered night dream.
That spring my housemate asked if I would like to spend the weekend in New York City while she visited family. Never having been to New York City I eagerly accepted. As I packed, I pulled the magazine from its hiding place and looked on the “where to find merchandise” page: Lord & Taylor, New York City. Maybe I could just try it on.
I made myself at home in an old hotel, barely sleeping through the unfamiliar sights, sounds and aromas of Manhattan. Early Saturday morning I made my way to Lord & Taylor. I told the saleswoman my hapless tale of loving the cover gown and, like a fairy godmother fulfilling a dream, she happily filled the dressing room with all the wedding gowns featured in the pages of the magazine.
In the midst of trying on gown after gown and saving my dream gown for last, a floor attendant burst into the dressing room and said: “You’re the perfect size.” She told me a young woman and her mother were on the floor to “see” gowns, but the model had not shown up. Would I do it?
I had little choice. She had already pulled the first gown over my head. I spent an hour or more walking in circles while the young woman and her mother selected a gown. I returned to the changing room, looking one more time at the beautiful gown from the magazine cover. It was still my favorite.
The attendant walked in and saw the gown in my arms. “Take it,” she said.
“What?”
“Take it. We have no contract with you as a model, and I was wondering how to pay you. Take the dress.”
Ron and I were married August 7, 1971. I wore the cover gown from Mademoiselle Magazine.
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It’s the gown in the photo at the top of the post, which was on the cover of the magazine in the spring of 1970.
Frequently, bizarre trickster synchronicities occur during mass events or stories that are covered globally by the media. One such synchronicity came to light today concerning the death of Robin Williams. Thanks to CF, who first found this synchro on Facebook and alerted us to it. The you tube video of Joseph Campbell talking about the trickster seems appropriate.
According to the Mirror (U.K.), minutes before William’s death was announced, the BBC ran an episode of the cartoon Family Guy about Robin Williams that featured a failed suicide attempt. “Viewers were shocked over the uncanny timing after watching the episode called Fatman and Robin, where Peter Griffin is cursed with the ability to turn everything he touches into Robin Williams,” said the Mirror. “During the episode Peter tries to commit suicide in a desperate attempt to stop the clones appearing…”
A spokeswoman for the BBC called it an “uncanny coincidence” and noted that episodes are scheduled two weeks ahead of time. Full story here.
Synchronicities like this always cause me to wonder about the nature of time. Perhaps there is no time and it’s only our perceptions that divide it into past, present, future. Or maybe the scheduling of the episode was precognitive on the part of the BBC. Or maybe something else entirely is at work here.
