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This woman’s encounter/sighting was suppressed for a long time, then was included in a documentary in the 1960s. Fascinating.

With the popularity of The Hunger Games – books and movies – I started hearing the word dystopia more often. Dictionary.com defines the word as “a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, depression, disease, and overcrowding.” Its antonym, of course, is utopia.

The Hunger Games  wasn’t the first dystopian novel. Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and 1984 by George Orwell are probably two of the most famous. I’ve always had a fascination with dystopian novels, probably because they illustrate the worst WHAT IF  scenario – what happens when a world, civilization, or society  goes to extremes to control its people. These novels expose the dark underbelly of humanity.

Since the 18^th century, there have been numerous dystopian novels. Here’s a partial list of the better known novels:

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

The Time Machine by HG. Wells (1895)

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

The Trial by Franz Kafka

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis

Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Minority Report by Philip K. Dick

Anthem by Ayn Rand

Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Logan’s Run by William  F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson

This Perfect Day by Ira Levin

Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy

 The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula LeGuin

The Running Man by Stephen King

The Children of Men by P.D. James

The Giver by Lois Lowry

The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Special by Scott Westerfield

The Passage by Justin Cronin

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

The Road by Cormanc McCarthy

The Day After Tomorrow (based on Whitley Strieber’s book the Coming Global Superstorm)

Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut

A number of these titles were also made into movies. Sometimes, the movies were better than the novels. They breathed life and color and texture into the dystopian world.

Today, I came across a fascinating website, Dystopia Tracker, that keeps track of how many of the concepts in dystopian novels, movies, TV shows, and games have become a reality. They even have categories for these concepts: State & Control, Body & Mind, Relationships & Communication, Work & Business, Leisure & Entertainment,  Cities & Environment, and War & Geopolitics.

There are excerpts from the various novels and movies.  Beneath a startling number of them, you see the number of realizations that visitors have noted.  Under the quote for Farenheit 451, for example, there are 2 realizations.

When you click it, you’re taken to a page that actually shows 3 realizations. The third one is rather curious: a Kindle user claims that you don’t really own your ebooks, that Amazon wiped out his entire Kindle library without explanation. I supposed that would be a form of book burning!

So when I was poking around on the site, I wondered what I have always wondered: do storytellers tap into a future that’s fixed? Or are they tapping into a quantum field of possibilities?  If the future is NOT set in stone, if we create it collectively, moment to moment, then do these dystopian stories help us to avoid the future they depict?

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Happy Summer Solstice! May we collectively create a more humane and loving world.

The video speaks for itself.

You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter by Dr. Joe Dispenza, was recommended to us by Nancy Pickard and it may be the most important book I’ve read in years.

In April 1986, Joe Dispenza was a 23-year-old athlete and chiropractor, competing in a Palm Springs triathlon. He had just finished the swimming segment and was in the biking portion of the race when a red four-wheel drive Bronco going 55 mph slammed into his bike from behind. He was catapulted into the air and landed on his backside. The Bronco kept coming toward him and in order to avoid being run over, Dispenza grabbed the bumper and was dragged down the road before the elderly driver of the Bronco realized what had happened.

The diagnosis wasn’t good. He had broken six vertebrae and a number of shattered bone fragments went back toward his spinal cord. The orthopedic surgeon told him that in order to contain the bone fragments he needed surgery to implant a Harrington rod. This would entail cutting out the back parts of the vertebrae from two to three segments above and below the fractures and clamping two 12-inch stainless steel rods along both sides of his spinal column. If he didn’t have the surgery, paralysis seemed certain. Three other orthopedic surgeons concurred with the first surgeon.

But Dispenza decided against the surgery. “I believe that there’s an intelligence, an invisible consciousness, within each of us that’s the giver of life. It supports, maintains, protects, and heals us every moment.” He was taken by ambulance to the home of a friend and began his journey toward healing. For two hours twice a day, “I went within and began creating a picture of my intended result: a totally healed spine.”  

His description of this process is riveting. He admits that in the beginning, he didn’t really know what he was doing, but now he does. “I was actually starting to think about all these future potentials that existed in the quantum field, and then I was emotionally embracing each of them. And as I selected that intentional future and married it with the elevated emotion of what it would be like to be there in that future, in the present moment my body began to believe it was actually in that future experience. “ And his spine began to heal.

Dispenza said that what he was learning during this process is one of the main principles of quantum physics: that mind and matter aren’t separate, “that our conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings are the very blueprints that control our destiny. The persistence, conviction, and focus to manifest any potential future lies within the human mind and within the mind of the infinite potentials in the quantum  field. Both of these minds must work together in order to bring about any future reality that potentially already exists.”

Nine and a half weeks after the accident, Dispenza  was able to walk again. And his true journey began.

The book’s content has many parallels to the Seth material and to Abraham/Hicks philosophy that we all create our own realities through our thoughts, beliefs, and emotions. But You Are the Placebo breaks things down in a way that demysitifies the process of manifestation. He includes fascinating stories about the placebo effect in the brain and the body, and illustrates how thoughts change both body and brain.

In one chapter, he dissects the nature of beliefs, illustrates how they originate, and how we’re suggestible only to what we consciously or unconsciously believe to be true.  And what we believe may limit us in some way, keep us from getting well, or make us utterly miserable!

In order to change a belief, says Dispenza, you have to begin by accepting that it’s possible. Then you have to alter your energy with heightened emotion and then allow your biology to reorganize itself. “Once the amplitude or energy of that decision becomes greater than the hardwired programs in your brain and the emotional addiction in your body, then you are greater than your past, your body will respond to a new mind, and you can effect real change.”

Included in the book are three stories of personal transformation – three different women of various ages – and their journey toward healing and wholeness. The focus in part 2 is on meditation, specifically on how to change beliefs and perceptions through meditation.

Dispenza’s afterword is entitled Becoming Supernatural. It’s stunning. Here’s a taste of it:

“Imagine a world inhabited by billions of people…living as one, where everyone is embracing similar uplifting thoughts connected to unlimited possibility, and these thoughts allow people to make more inspired choices, demonstrate more altruistic behaviors, and create more enlightening experiences.  People would then no longer be living by survival-based emotions we’re so familiar with now: feeling more like matter than energy, separate from possibility. Instead, they’d be living by more expanded, selfless, heartfelt emotions – feeling more like energy than matter, connected to something greater.  If we could do this, then en entirely different world would emerge, and we would be living by a new credo based on the open heart.”

 We’ve talked before about how the Internet facilitates synchronicity and this certainly was the case with an email we received recently.

Joanne emailed us through the synchro secrets website with a question about a sighting that Jenean – gypsy woman had in the late 1960s, that we wrote about in Aliens in the Backyard.  She said she’d done a search for newspaper articles about the sighting, which took place on a bus in Louisiana, and couldn’t find anything on the Internet. She was curious about how other people on the bus had reacted.

So I wrote Jenean and asked her if the story had received coverage in the local press at the time. She replied that it had. She and her son clearly remembered that the media had written it off as a “cloud” from a nearby industrial plant in Sterlington. Jenean noted that she had Google Joanne’s name and sent the link.

I was surprised to learn that Joanne lived in Clarksburg, West Virginia,   just a few miles from our friend, Millie Gemondo. In a subsequent email, I mentioned it Joanne. She replied that her friend had graduated with Kim Gemondo from Shinston High School in 1970, but her friend didn’t know if Kim was related to Millie. She was excited, though, that Millie was a psychic.

I knew Millie had graduated from that same high school and recalled that she’d once told me that she was probably related to any Gemondo in her area. So this afternoon I called her and told her the story and asked if she was related to a Kim Gemondo. She laughed. “Sure am. He’s my nephew, my brother’s son. He’s the editor of the local newspaper.”

So what are the odds on something like this? Jenean doesn’t know Millie or Joanne.  She simply was curious about Joanne and Googled her, something I didn’t do. I think this is an example of Indra’s net, where we are all connected at some level. That conscious, visual connection used to be six degrees. Now it’s much less. Will this one lead somewhere? Who knows? But it is certainly one of those oddball synchros.

Here’s a clip from a new film about synchronicity by Katy Walker. In The Synchronicity Highway, we wrote about an encounter she had years ago in Germany. We’ve posted several of her synchros on the blog, too. There’s a 24 minute clip on her website.  We look forward to seeing the full movie when it’s released!

As I drove to the Moksha Yoga Studio on a recent morning, I was thinking about writing a blog post about a somewhat obscure topic called ‘bodhichitta,’ which was to be the theme of my meditation class at the studio. I was hedging a bit because there wasn’t any obvious synchronicity related to the subject. Then, on NPR, a story came on about an artist who was working with Moksha Art Collective.

What were the chances that as I headed to one Moksha, another one would be mentioned on the radio. (Moksha is a Sanskrit term that means enlightenment and liberation.) So that little synchro impelled me ahead to address this other Sanskrit term, the topic of the post.

So what is bodhichitta?

The word, pronounced BODI-CHITTA, translates to ‘awakened heart,’ but what does that mean? It’s hard to define precisely, but essentially it’s a meditation practice that aims at overcoming fears, suspicions, aggression and defensive posturing. By practicing bodhichitta, you become exposed and vulnerable. But you also become a spiritual warrior, one who aims to change the world through inner transformation.

So what do you do to become a spiritual warrior?

You remove your mask, drop your shield, pull down the protective walls made of opinions, prejudices, barriers built on a fear of being hurt. You face the world with an open heart. It’s not a cozy, comfortable experience, but one with high potential.

“These walls are further fortified by emotions of all kinds: anger, craving, indifference, jealousy and envy, arrogance and pride,” writes Pema Chodron, author of Bodhichitta: The Excellence of Awakened Heart. “But fortunately for us, the soft spot—our innate ability to love and to care about things—is like a crack in these walls we erect. It’s a natural opening in the barriers we create when we’re afraid. With practice we can learn to find this opening. We can learn to seize that vulnerable moment—love, gratitude, loneliness, embarrassment, inadequacy—to awaken bodhichitta.”

According to Chodron, we all have the possibility of pursuing bodhichitta. Even the toughest, meanest person on Earth has a soft spot, a feeling of tenderness and open-heartedness toward something – though it might be a double cheeseburger. In essence, an open heart is considered the most important tool for creating a better world, and overcoming the common theme that what’s wrong with the world is the ‘other guy’s fault.’

But what if we take personal responsibility and change ourselves? As more and more people practice mindfulness and focus on the meaning of an open or an awakened heart, on compassion, we move toward an enlightened society, one where cooperation is more valued than aggression or defensive posturing.

Numerous scientific studies have shown the value of meditation, how it can help you relax and become more in control of your life, and improve your health and well being. Now I would like to see a study showing that meditation can change the world.

Oh, and how did my meditation go? Did we change the world? Nope. On that day, for whatever reason, no one showed up for class. Maybe that was one of those trickster synchronicities. You think people are ready to change the world by opening their hearts? Well, think again. Or, maybe, You think you can teach bodhichitta? You better open up your own heart first.

Maybe so. But I will try again, and maybe when the teacher is ready, the students will show up.

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Happy Friday the 13th! May good luck and synchronicity be yours!

the Amazon jungle

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For years, the established procedure for an unpublished writer was fairly straightforward: find a publisher who looks at unsolicited manuscripts or find an agent.

Ordinary People by Judith Guest was an unsolicited manuscript and was published to great reviews, fantastic sales, and was made into a movie. But that outcome was rare. Today, I don’t think there’s a traditional publishing house anywhere that takes unsolicited manuscripts. Everything must go through a literary agent.

In the past,you queried agents until you found one that asked to see your manuscript,  and if the agent liked it, then the submission process began. I found my first agent, Diane Cleaver, through a referral from another aspiring writer who had met her at a writers’ conference. She had recently left Simon & Schuster, where she’d been an editor, and was looking for clients. The first five novels I wrote didn’t sell. My sixth novel, In Shadow, sold on its 24^th submission to Chris Cox at Ballantine Books.

Today, there aren’t 24 publishers left in New York. There are five conglomerates with multiple imprints.

Part of the former established procedure when a book was published was to schedule publicity. Books by authors paid huge advances (Stephen King, for instance) were promoted and publicized. Books by midlist authors got far less – a few bookstore signings.

It was a fine idea when there were multiples chain bookstores and many independent stores.  Now, there is one large chain left – Barnes & Noble, with Books a Million trailing behind it in second place. Borders is defunct. Little Professor is history. Walden Books is long gone. Brick & mortar chain bookstores may eventually go the way of the dodo bird, just as brick and mortar record stores and video stores have. 

There are several stellar independent bookstores that will still be standing when the dust settles: Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, and The Tattered Cover in Denver, Colorado. But chains? It doesn’t look good.  In fact, the other day a writer emailed me about an article he’d read that Barnes & Noble might close its doors in early 2015.

The other part of the established procedure was to attend writers’ conferences, my favorite part. You networked, made friends with other writers, traded publishing stories, and spoke to a group of attendees about your book, your work. You signed and sold books. This part of the established procedure still exists.

When the Internet came into being for the general populace, the landscape for writers began to shift.  When Google and Amazon were born, when ebooks became a viable venue and not just a passing fad, when the iPhone was born in 2007, when social media exploded, the landscape changed dramatically. Suddenly, you didn’t need an agent to get published. You didn’t even need a publisher.

If you wanted to write, you wrote and published the book yourself through any number of venues that have cropped up in recent years. One of the largest of these venues is smashwords. You still had to market the book, of course, but it didn’t entail sitting in a bookstore for a signing and hoping that people showed up.

Amazon, the behemoth, may prove to be the nemesis for traditional publishing, but it’s an absolute treasure for writers, although there are plenty of writer who disagree. Here’s why I think Amazon is the game changer in publishing:

In traditional publishing, where the books go to an actual physical bookstore, the publisher sets the price of the book. From that price, the author receives between 8-15 percent of the cover price. For a paperback selling for $6.99, the author receives about 56 cents per book. For a hard cover selling for $25, the author receives $3.75 a book. Then there are agent fees – usually 15 percent, taken out of the author’s money. For that $6.99 paperback, that means the author is actually receiving about 47 cents a book. Not bad if you sell 100,000 copies and not bad IF the publisher is honest about their accounting procedures.

Now, let’s say the publisher publishes your book as an ebook and overprices it at $12. From that, you receive 25 % of the cover price – $3. And then your agent takes 15% of that, leaving you with $2.55 Except, oh wait. If you’re being paid on the net price, it means that the publisher first deducts the 30 percent they pay to Amazon, so that leaves $8.40  from which you’re paid your 25% – $2.10. From that, your agent deducts 15%, leaving you, the writer, with about $1.75.

Scratching your head yet? Wondering where the rest of that money goes?

Now, let’s say that in this changing paradigm for writers, you’re fortunate enough to connect with a visionary company that is signing up authors with extensive backlists. These authors have gotten their book rights reverted to them. And this company, Crossroad Press,  brings these books back as ebooks and audio books, at no cost to the author. They also publish original books in trade, hardcover, ebooks and audio.

They do the covers, scanning, formatting and uploading to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple, Kobo, for free. They price the books reasonably – $4.99. Let’s call it $5 for math purposes. And yes, they pay Amazon and the other online stores their 30%,  – so we skim $1.50 off that $ immediately. BUT – and it’s a huge BUT – they pay the authors 80% of the money they receive.

So from the $3.50 Crossroad receives after Amazon’s cut, the author receives $2.80 for each ebook sold. And there’s no agent cut involved because the contracts for many of these backlist titles were negotiated in the days before ebooks. For new, original books, there aren’t any agents fees because you’re dealing directly with the publisher.

In the changing paradigms for writers, the Internet, ebooks, and social media are the locomotives of change.

Not surprisingly, traditional publishing companies have clashed with Amazon. Publishers want to set their own prices for ebooks, balk at the steep discounts Amazon offers, and Amazon wants a bigger cut of the sales. This whole issue has already gone to the U.S. justice department after the five main publishers were accused of fixing prices on books in collusion with Apple.

But now, Hatchette Books and Amazon are butting heads and Amazon has retaliated by not offering pre-orders for books published by this company. Bestseller lists are compiled from pre-orders, so this means that Hatchette sells fewer books. Bestselling authors are outraged.

But the bottom line here is that the traditional publishing model is flawed and Amazon has exposed that flaw.  

Amazon sells 41 percent of all new books in the U.S., making it the largest single book retailer in the country. Arguments are made about how books are “culture” – as opposed to business products – and do we really want a business selling culture?  Please. It’s a specious argument.  The publishing industry in the U.S. is about profit. It’s a business, just like Amazon.  To a publisher, an author is only as good as the sales of his or her last book.  How is that about “culture?”

Other concerns I’ve heard: what will happen to “culture” when Amazon controls 80 percent of the book market?  What will happen, I suspect, is what usually happens – some start-up company will see a niche that can be filled and will come up with something new that will grow and flourish. Competition will still be the name of the game.

For writers, there’s now greater creative freedom. No one is telling you what you may or may not write. What you produce is your vision, no one else’s. You can let your muse run wild! How is that a terrible thing?

There’s always a question of whether a synchronicity is a sign that you are on the right path, or a warning that you’re in danger if you continue on a certain path. Although Laura, an artist, doesn’t express the issue in that manner, as you read her story about paying attention to the signs that appear on her path, you’ll see how synchronicity can be a double-edged sword.

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I have been pondering on about signs, symbols and synchronicity and how I often see things in my environment reflecting something I am thinking about, questioning or moving towards.One experience was so strong that I have never doubted that it truly pointed towards a greater truth.

The story is about a guy that I met and ended up dating who had some pretty dark energy in his past. The first night I met him, he insisted on going out with me and wouldn’t take no for an answer. He gave me lady bug earrings. Overwhelmed but curious, as I had an affinity towards ladybugs, I accepted them and placed them under my pillow before I went to sleep.

I woke up a few hours later, jolting upright in my bed, feeling an intense dark energy in connection to him that was like looking in a very deep and dark, multi-generational well. I immediately prayed for protection and felt the room lighten up and the energy disperse.

I asked a healer about this and she suggested I put the earrings in salt to cleanse the energy. I wasn’t able to say no to him at the time and went out with him anyway. In a way I started to enjoy his company and his attention, but also saw negative and questionable behaviors that I didn’t know how to stop or walk away from. I started to see the same darkness emerge in him and began to have nightmares of what would happen if I stayed with him.

I finally spoke with a woman more experienced then I and she helped me to see that the negative things I was experiencing were signs of an abusive relationship, as one by one, I said ‘yes’ to all the identifying questions she asked me. Then she asked what I was going to do and I then realized that if I continued on this path with him, I would be the one responsible for allowing myself to be hurt. And so I left the relationship.

I felt very raw and confused after walking away, but decided to move back to my home state, where doors opened up to receive a new job and a place to live for the summer, house-sitting.

After getting some distance from the relationship and working through my own issues regarding choosing that type of partner, I finally reached a place of compassion for him, seeing in his struggle to control and hurt others, that he was actually suffering on a very deep level. It saddened me tremendously.

At that moment, I was sitting on the floor, holding a square photogram of different objects, including a butterfly pin. I interpret this image as a box of darkness, in which the butterfly becomes lost, but there is a stream of light coming through an opening at the top. The butterfly is not perceiving the opening to escape, but the light is still there. I said out loud, from the depth of my heart, please give me a sign that he is going to be okay. Then I looked up and saw a small butterfly pass outside of the lawn through the glass door I was sitting by.

When I saw this, I had no question in my mind that this prayer had been answered, that he would be okay and find his way into the light. I haven’t doubted this since.

You would think that if you saw a UFO, especially if you and a close friend had an impressive sighting, you would remember it, even if it took place decades ago. That’s what a man I’ll call George thought. But he was surprised by the response he heard from his friend when he mentioned their mutual sighting.

George is a government employee in a mid-sized city in Florida, who annually attends professional conferences with colleagues from around the country. One of those colleagues is his old friend, Rick. At a recent gathering, George met with Rick and decided to mention their mutual sighting. They had never spoken of it since the event.

As kids, they lived near a river where they used to play and fish. One summer day, they were out in separate boats, had tied them together, and were laying on their backs soaking in the sun as they drifted along. That was when they spotted a large black disc moving overhead.

So George said to Rick, “Do you remember that time we saw a UFO?”

“Oh, yeah,” Rick responded, readily. “We were on the hill with that old castle.”

George knew the place. The castle had been imported from England and rebuilt on a hill  in Connecticut. From the hill, you could see the skyline of New York City. But George had no recollection of any UFO sighting at that location. And, when he explained where he recalled the sighting had taken place, Rick shook his head. He had no such memory.

How could the two men have such different memories of the same event? 

One explanation might be that both events took place, and there was more involved than a mere sighting. The UFO abduction scenario is replete with incidents in which the memories of abductees were erased, and later recalled through hypnotic regression. It could be that was the case with George and Rick.

What makes George’s story even more intriguing is that he’s married to Sandy, the retired veterinarian whose experiences with alien beings has been discussed on Whitley Strieber’s Dreamland radio show and also here on the blog. George has never taken a great interest in the UFO or paranormal fields. He doesn’t read books on the subjects. But he has had some experiences with entities, who apparently have visited Sandy and George in their home.

Sandy’s experiences have taken place over decades and she’s convinced that the entities led her to George and, to a degree, have guided her life through synchronicities they generated.  She and George are well aware that such ideas are controversial and could endanger their professional and personal reputations, if they were identified.

George told me about his UFO sighting during a lunch in Cassadaga, Florida. He also noted a synchronicity related to the UFO scenario. One day, a top administrator asked him what he thought about UFOs and aliens. That surprised George, because the man knew nothing about George’s on-going events with Sandy or his own UFO sighting or encounter.

What followed was a series of closed doors discussions over a number of month in which the man detailed his decades-long history of alien encounters, beginning in his childhood. So George has found the ‘taboo’ UFO-alien subject permeating both his personal and professional life. He’s not sure what to think about these experiences, but he recognizes that synchronicity is involved.