A Disembodied Voice

Posted on July 7, 2009 by Trish and Rob

My friend took a 240-mile bike ride a couple of weeks ago. He and his brother rode from Georgetown in Washington D.C. along a mostly paved trail to Pittsburgh. He’s a practical guy, knowledgeable about how things work in the mechanical sense, not a mystical bone in his six-foot frame. He’d come over to look at a leak in our roof when he told us this story.

On the first day, they started early and rode to a restaurant outside of D.C. for breakfast. It was closed. They continued on. No more restaurants. No breakfast, no lunch. They had 60 miles to cover before they reached a bed and breakfast. They figured there would be plenty of time to find a good dinner.

Mid-afternoon my friend gets a flat tire. No problem. He put in a new inner tube. But when he inflated the tire with his hand pump, he realized he was in trouble. The inner tube started to protrude through a three-inch slash in the bottom of the tire. He needed a new tire.

He stayed by the roadside with the swarming mosquitoes while his brother rode off in search of the nearest town and a bike shop. The town wasn’t far away, but there was no bike shop. He was telling a cashier at a food mart about his problem when a woman overheard him and offered to drive him to the next town to a shop. (The woman was in a fight with her boyfriend and he saw her drive off with a strange guy, but that’s not part of this story.)

A couple hours later, the brother returns with the tire and a funny story. He waves a spare t-shirt to keep the mosquitoes off my friend as he changes the tire. Now it’s late afternoon and they have 15 miles to ride to the B&B. They head out and soon the paved road ends and they are on dirt, potholes and roots for a few miles.

Eventually, the road gets better and they’re getting close. But they don’t know exactly where the B&B is located and start to wonder if they’ve missed the turnoff. They come to a huge hill. My friend is tired and can’t make it up the hill. They both get off and walk their bikes.

Halfway up the hill, they hear a voice calling out from the woods. “Do…you…need…any…help?”

They stop and look, but they can’t see anyone. Finally, the brother yells out the name of the B&B and asks where it is.

To their surprise, the voice from the woods shouts out precise directions involving several turns. They yell their thanks and continue on. They follow the directions and find the B&B. They never saw anyone back there. It was just a voice from the woods, and synchronicity.

The B&B is isolated. No restaurants nearby. But there’s a refrigerator and another synchronicity inside it. The last people who stayed there had left behind two hot dogs, two pieces of cake and a pint of ice cream. That was dinner.

My friend laughed at the recollection: “It was like a little kid’s dinner, but it was good. And things got better after that.”

It’s a case where dire circumstances lead to unusual and unexpected solutions to problems. Even my practical friend understood that. But when I pushed him about that voice from the woods, he shrugged and said, “Let’s take a look at the roof.”
***
UPDATE
While on Facebook earlier, someone clicks in with a greeting. It’s my brethren, Rob Roy McGregor, writing from Scotland. We’re Facebook friends, never met each other in person, just through e-mails, mostly years ago. He asks what I’m doing. I mention the synchronicity book, and refer him to the blog. He takes a look while we’re still chatting, and he’s fascinated by this bike trip story. The reason: he’s on a bike trip across the Scottish Highlands, and he knows about synchronicity. “I have synchronicities every day on this trip,” he remarked before signing off, and pedalling away.
Rob

Posted in biking, travel | 12 Comments

Poe Remastered

Posted on July 6, 2009 by Trish and Rob


Working on the book last night, I was about to mention something about Edgar Allan Poe. (We are using a synchronicity related to one of his stories.) But as I was about to utterPoe’s name, I started to say Bob Dylan. Suddenly, in my mind the two men’s images merged, and I blurted out: “I think Bob Dylan is the reincarnation of Edgar Allan Poe.”

There was no Dylan music playing in the background, nothing to reference him. Just as I said that to Trish, our daughter Megan walked up to me with a CD in hand and a shocked look on her face.

The CD was Dylan’s Nashville Skyline, which I’d given her a couple of weeks ago to copy onto her iPod. The photo on the CD shows Dylan tipping his hat in greeting, almost as if in acknowledgment. He’s also smiling, a rarity in his photos. Like Poe, he’s not known for a grinning visage.

Maybe it’s just imagination, but it was definitely synchronicity when Megan appeared at the right moment with the right object in hand. And, hey, the two are both master poets. One is the best known American writer, the other one is the best known American singer/songwriters of all time. And both are known as eccentrics. – Rob

Whatever colors you have in your mind Ill show them to you and you’ll see them shine
Bob Dylan – Lay Lady Lay
***
UPDATE from ‘Rue Morgue Avenue’
There apparently are many recorded references to Poe by Dyan, including this one:

In 2003, interviewed by Robert Hilburn in Amsterdam, Dylan said that in adolescence Poe’s poetry had ‘knocked me out in more ways than I could name.’ Dylan also mentions Poe twice in Chronicles Volume One (2004), and that December, interviewed on US-TV by Ed Bradley, when Dylan says that the burden of being perceived as a ‘prophet’ in the late 1960s made him feel like an imposter, he elaborates: ‘It was like being in an Edgar Allen Poe story and you’re just not that person everybody thinks you are, though they call you that all the time.
bobdylanencyclopedia
(thank you, Gypsywoman)

Posted in Dylan, poets, reincarnation | 7 Comments

Signal Grace

Posted on July 5, 2009 by Trish and Rob


This one comes from Teapots, aka Max Action. After reading the recent post on the history of synchroncity, he pointed out that the Catholic Church not only recognizes synchronicity, which they call signal grace, but suggests that you can make use of it through higher awareness. In the case of The Rosary Foundation, where the following was posted, the suggestion is – as one might expect – to pray the rosary and watch for signal grace.
***
“Signal Graces are signs sent by God to help us make the right decisions in life. Moses saw a burning bush as a sign from God, and other people received signs from God daily. Signal graces usually come about as subtle hints to help keep us moving in the right direction – these signs are truly gifts from God. Remember – there is no such thing as a coincidence, everything happens for a reason! By praying the rosary you will be more conscious of the way that God tries to help you and speak to you every day.”
***
As lapsed Catholics, Trish and I are not likely to follow that suggestion. However, we believe that higher awareness and intent can lead to magical synchronicities that further one’s goals.

We’re focusing on this topic – Synchronicity and Your Intent – in the last chapter of our book. So we’re looking for stories of how people have applied their intent through whatever means – meditation, prayer, sympathetic magic, divination, etc. and followed the leads of synchronicities to change their lives or to reach their goals. Butternut Squash’s story – Reading the Bumps – is one such example. It’s about how she took the cues of an exotic reader and synchronistically turned a trip to China and Nepal into a new career.

Rob

Posted in intention, religion, Signal Graces | 8 Comments

Bucket Brigade

Posted on July 4, 2009 by Trish and Rob


This one was sent in by Robert Perry, an author and head of an organization…well, he explains it in the story. The synchronistic elements involve precognition.

I am the head of a small nonprofit organization called the Circle of Atonement. It is dedicated to serving students of A Course in Miracles, a contemporary spiritual path that utilizes forgiveness as the primary catalyst of psychological healing and spiritual awakening. As with most nonprofits, money is usually tight, and we often find ourselves wondering how we are going to pay the bills.

In February 2003, we were facing a particularly serious financial crunch, so serious that we were wondering if we would need to make changes in staffing—maybe let some people go, cut back on people’s hours, or institute a temporary pay cut. The way our board processes such issues is to first discuss them, then close our eyes, pen and paper in hand, and ask for guidance. What we “hear” comes in different forms. Some of us receive a flow of words, some see inner pictures, some just get an inner sense or feeling. Our ability to hear is not unusual and what we hear is not infallible. However, it is almost always wiser and more helpful than the discussion we had before we asked, and it often sends us in completely new directions.

In this particular case, the guidance of one board member—my future wife Nicola—stood out. She saw an inner picture and heard commentary that explained the picture. Here is her description of what she saw:

I got a picture of a group of people forming a “chain gang” (where items pass quickly along the chain of people). [She saw this as happening in what we call our mailroom, where we ship out our books and tapes]. Everyone was in the exact right place in order to be a useful part of that chain. There were no overlaps, no missing people, just a united and well-functioning group. Part of its efficiency was down to the fact that each person knew their exact spot in that chain, and that others, too, knew exactly who was where. You can’t throw an object to someone if you’re not sure where they are! Another part of its efficiency was simply because people were operating as a team, and everyone was joined and working together towards the same goal.

The commentary Nicola heard said that in order to form this “chain gang,” we needed to reevaluate how the organization functioned. We had already chosen a focus for the year: to get our message out through publishing an introductory book. Now we had to look at everything, from top to bottom, and ask ourselves how well it served that focus. We were told to reexamine the who—people’s roles—and the what—the organization’s activities, all in light of our larger goal. According to this guidance, we must leave no stone unturned. We needed a shakeup. We needed to shift people’s roles around (the “who”) and set aside certain activities (the “what”), all in order to weld ourselves into a tightly coordinated team that served a single goal.

We sensed that this challenged the whole way we had traditionally functioned. We had always stressed the importance of each individual pursuing his or her own special calling. As a result, our organization tended to do a number of disparate things at once, which were only loosely coordinated. If, then, we actually implemented this guidance, if we saw each person’s function as determined by the needs of a team effort, it would turn our whole way of operating upside down.

However revolutionary the idea was, something felt right about it. While we were discussing it, I pointed out that someone else’s guidance had made similar points, which seemed to lend strength to the basic idea. I also put my finger on the appropriate term for the picture Nicola had seen. She had called it a “chain gang,” but she had told us that wasn’t the right term—since a chain gang is a group of convicts linked together. What she saw, she said, was like the chain people form to put out a fire. It finally hit me that this was called a “bucket brigade” and I mentioned that to the group.

Shortly after I said that, something totally unexpected happened. Our meeting was taking place downstairs and we heard what sounded like falling water in a nearby room—the mailroom. We burst into that room to discover that water was literally cascading through the unfinished ceiling onto the shipping table. Without thinking, we moved the table aside and grabbed several large plastic buckets stacked next to it and arranged them in a row to catch the falling water, which happened to be pouring through the ceiling in a straight line. Staff and volunteers ran downstairs to help; they got rags and began mopping up what they could. Everyone was in motion. As it turned out, a repairman was upstairs fixing the washing machine. He had mistakenly turned the wrong knob, causing water to pour through the floor of the laundry room, which was also the ceiling of the mailroom.

Only once we returned to our meeting room and sat down to catch our breath did we realize we had just performed an eerie reenactment of the picture from Nicola’s guidance. In response to a crisis, we had dropped our usual roles and activities, mobilized as a single unit, and formed a line of water-filled buckets. We had formed a bucket brigade!

Posted in healing, precognition, spirituality | 1 Comment

History of Synchronicity

Posted on July 2, 2009 by Trish and Rob

“The unseen design of things is more harmonious than the seen.” Heraclitus

People recognized synchronicity long before Carl Jung coined the term. It was called names such as ostenta, moira, and destiny. There have been theories about what causes these sudden ‘coincidental’ occurrences for millennia. Heraclitus, a Greek phlosopoher in the fourth century B.C., saw all things being inter-related, or following ‘cosmic reason.’ He believed that events were not isolated happenings but had repercussions across the entire fabric of existence. All things were linked by a web of organization created by the Logos.

Hippocrates, who was born twenty years after Heraclitus died, expressed similar thoughts in a unique way. He said: “There is one common flow, a common breathing. Everything is in sympathy. The whole organism and each one of its parts are working together for the same purpose. The great principle extends to the most extreme part, and from the extremest part returns again to the great principle.”

Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of Jesus, perpetuated Heraclitus’s concept of the Logos as an intermediatry between God and humans. As such, he more or less saw meaningful coincidence as the way the Creator interacts with his creatures. The self-evidence of these acts proved the existence of God, he argued, but conceded these acts of providence didn’t reveal the enigma of his existence or his identity. It’s believed that Philo found his ideas in the mystery schools that existed during and before his time.

Like Heraclitus, he used the term enthousiasmos, which means having God within oneself. The term also dismissed the notion of God as a bearded, autocrat wielding omnipotence and enthroned in the clouds. Instead, God is the unifying spirit of existence that dwells within everyone and everything, the invisible thread tying everything in the universe together.

Frank Joseph in Synchronicity and You in referring to enthousiasmos says: “The term certainly helps define synchronicty, which operates on the principle of meaningful connections established by some unseen force between our inner being and our outer experience.”

Two centuries later, the Roman scholar Agrippa referred to a Fifth Essence, something beyond earth, air, fire and water that held existence together. He also referred to it as the World Soul, which penetrates all things and is a thing in itself. Agrippa’s contemporary Plotinus, wrote: “Chance has no place in life, but only harmony and order reign therein.”

In the Middle Ages the idea was known as ‘unus mundum’ – a collective knowledge that exists independently of us, yet available to us. Meaningful coincidence hence existed beyond our conscious awareness and egos, located at the place where our psyche or spirit and the outside world touch.

Carl Jung first devised the term in 1949 when he wrote the introduction to the Richard Wilhelm edition of the I Ching. He brought the term synchronicity into wider use when he presented a paper in 1952 discussing meaningful coincidence. Amongst his findings were the idea that numbers have much deeper significance than simply for counting items. He said that this is why so many divination systems like the I Ching use numbers to synchronously provide the knowledge and answers we need to know.

Jung also saw synchronicity as the reason why independent researchers can come up with the same results or knowledge at the same time. Congealing in the unconscious is the need for answers. So, searching for a solution in their own ways, researchers resolve the problem at the same time. This is known as ‘simultaneous discovery.’

Posted in Greeks, Heraclitus, history | 12 Comments

The Church Choir

Posted on July 2, 2009 by Trish and Rob


This story was first reported in Life Magazine, 1950, and we recently ran across it in Robert H. Hopcke’s There Are No Accidents. It’s a stunning example of…well, you’ll see.
***
A church choir in Beatrice, Nebraska was due to practice at 7:20 PM on March 1. There were 15 people in the choir and all of them, for perfectly legitimate reasons, were late for practice. The minister and his family, for instance, were late because they were finishing up the laundry, another person had car trouble, someone else was finishing homework.

Due to a flaw in the church’s heating system, the church exploded at 7:25 PM.

The odds of all 15 choir members missing the opening of practice was later calculated at one in a million.
***
Group karma? Plain ole synchronicity? Apparently the members of the choir believed a divine intervention was key. Given the earlier discussion in final destination about death calling, you have to wonder about this one. What happened to these people after this experience? Were their lives and belief systems radically changed? Did any of them die shortly afterward? What kind of spiritual lessons are learned from an experience like this? It reminds me of the Bridge of San Luis Rey – Thorton Wilder’s second novel – except that all the people in the book died. All the people in the choir survived.

It’s certainly one of the strangest synchronicities we’ve come across.

Posted in avoiding death, death, miracles | 11 Comments

Hitler and Synchronicity

Posted on July 1, 2009 by Trish and Rob


Okay, this one goes to the heart of the question of the deeper roots of synchronicity.

Most people agree, of course, that what happened in Nazi Germany was horrific, the gassing of millions of innocents as the epitome of evil. Those today who try to justify or say it didn’t happen are regarded as nutcases or worse.

That said, let’s take a look at Hitler’s early life as a soldier during World War I. The following comes from Synchronicity: Science, Myth, and the Trickster, by Allan Combs and Mark Holland.
***
As a courier it often was his job to carry messages along battle lines during vigorous fighting – a dangerous assignment, but one that he seemed to thrive on. Indeed, he seemed to live a charmed life. Once he walked out of his commander’s headquarters just before it was hit by an English artillery shell which killed three persons and seriously wounded the commander.

Time and time again Hitler seemed to come within a hair’s breadth of death and escaped unharmed. This ability was to stay with him throughout his life. He later wrote to a reporter about one episode from his combat experience: “Four times we advanced and had to go back; from my whole batch only one remains, beside me; finally he also falls. A shot tears off my right coat sleeve, but like a miracle I remain safe and alive.”
***
The authors say that Hitler (and also Churchill) “seemed to live under the aegis of fate, as if protected so that they might later play their roles in history.” Synchronicity – those meaningful coincidences – were the means that allowed Hitler – and Churchill – to aspire to their fates. Materialists, of course, would say that it was all just random events that spared Hitler and Churchill early in their lives, just as they say a random mix of particles just happened to come together to create the universe, earth, mankind, etc.

Both men felt they had a calling, that higher forces were at play in their lives. So if we consider the underlying mechanism as synchronicity and whether we relate it to God, the Universe, or the collective unconscious, the issue of evil arises. Uncanny events, outrageously unlikely, led Hitler to become the man-monster of twentieth century history, and Churchill as one of its heroes. But if we consider the Universe as good, we have to wonder why Hitler was spared an early death on the battlefield. Without such a figure, the Nazi Party might never have risen beyond its role as racist agitators and thugs, and maybe we would have been spared the horrors of World War II.

However, it’s probably simplistic to think of synchronicity as something that happens only to ‘good’ people to guide them on their paths. Maybe the big picture, the underlying reality, extends beyond our concepts of good and evil. Maybe the Hitler scenario actually took place for reasons not easily comprehended. Clearly, there’s a hidden reality, and each of us is playing a role. We are all more than the lives we are experiencing.

Thoughts?
Rob

Posted in global, history, Hitler, war | 7 Comments

Electric Avenue

Posted on June 30, 2009 by Trish and Rob


Jim Banholzer sends this one from the San Bernardino newspaper. Instead of blaming the fence, the headline should read: “Lightning jolts six people on Electric Avenue.”
***

Lightning jolts six people near fence in San Bernardino
By Andrew Edwards
Posted: 06/03/2009 07:58:16 PM PDT

Six people received a jolt after lightning struck a metal fence they were leaning against in a north San Bernardino neighborhood.

Emergency personnel responded to the call about 6 p.m. today near Electric Avenue and 40th Street.

Witness Aaron Sallis said he and the others were hanging out when the lightning bolt hit.

Sallis said all six young men seemed to have experienced electrical burns, but were conscious.

Firefighters treated four people at a nearby convenience store, and Sallis said the other two left the area.

Additional details from the San Bernardino City Fire Department were not immediately available.

Posted in lightning, nature, weather | 5 Comments

Hexagram 39

Posted on June 29, 2009 by Trish and Rob

Rob, now on crutches and in a cast, asked the I Ching about the meaning of his broken foot. He received Hexagram 57, Proceeding Humbly, with two changing lines that resulted in a second Hexagram – 39, Obstruction. The Wilhelm version wasn’t much help in understanding his question, so we brought out the Alfred Huang version and were struck by the interpretation and pictograph for #39, which Huang calls Hardship. Look at the symbol above, then read on:

“The ideograph of the gua shows its original meaning – a lame person having difficulty walking…At the top of the ideograph is the roof of a house with a chimney. Below it, there is an ideograph of a person. At the bottom, there is an ideograph of a foot. On each side of the foot and underneath the person a pair of crutches is drawn.One can visualize the crutches under the armpits of the person…”

Again the Ching is eerily literal.
& yes, hobbling around on crutches with a broken foot is definitely an obstruction and a hardship!

If that’s not strange enough, another interpretation found by Googling Hexagram 39 labels the hexagram ‘Difficulties’ or ‘Limping’. “It describes the experience of a perpetual uphill struggle: just one thing after another, grinding on and on, battling with handicaps or with the elements or with an unforgivingly inhospitable world…
…and it also describes the moment when you turn this around.
Clarity

Posted in accidents, divination, foot, I Ching | 10 Comments

Reading the bumps

Posted on June 27, 2009 by Trish and Rob



Ammonite fossil…and the Himalayas

This story is from Butternut squash, who has left insightful comments on this blog a number times. Her synchronicity involves travel and places to which we feel deep and mysterious connections.
***

When I lived in Japan, I had a street psychic read the bumps on my head. One of the things that he told me was that Nepal was a country that would be very good for me. I did not know anything about Nepal and had no plans of going there. I did have a plan to go to China and taking the Trans Siberian Railway across Mongolia to Europe.

A year later, I started on my travels with a girl friend. On the way we met a couple of boys, not too unusual. What was strange is that without any planning we ran into the same two young men in three different cities in China. China is immense with billions of people, what are the chances that we would meet them three times hundreds of miles apart?

We decided that traveling together must be fated so we traveled all over China with a plan of going on the Trans Siberian Railway together. When we got to Beijing, we were told that there had been some political trouble at the border and there would be no possibility of a trip to Europe via the Railway for months. One of the young men traveling with us picked up a brochure about Nepal and read “kayaking” and “great food,” and with that, we decided to go instead overland through China to Tibet and Nepal.

It was a difficult but fantastic journey! In Nepal we parted amicably, but for no particular reason. It was as if these young men chaperoned me to the place where my life began. Certainly, I would not have traveled as far as I did without one of the young men who was a Mandarin Chinese speaking Scotsman. On that trip, without any real planning, I started a business from Nepal and I have been going back regularly ever since.

On that first trip to Nepal I found a Salagrama in a river bed. It is a black rock that when split open has a fossilized ammonite, a spiral with radiating lines, hiding inside. In Nepal it is believed that when you find a salagrama it means that you are on your correct path in life. I thought you would like the symbolism of the concentric rings with lines radiating out of them, it seems the symbol of synchronicity to me.

Posted in ammonite, Nepal, psychics, travel | 10 Comments