Thoughts As Mass

Posted on December 18, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Here’s an essay by Stace Tussel that strives to link thought to mass and synchronicity to physics. You could say that it’s a rather weighty issue.

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An old friend asked me if I thought there might be a connection between fractals and synchronicity.  As we spoke I realised that our conversation was “fractalising,” or creating related branches of thought from which other little branches of thought sprouted, and so on.  I suddenly realised that our thoughts are capable of sending out dynamic neural impulses, resulting in cascading, near-infinite whorls of information exhibiting both independence and connectivity.

Now, in order to imagine how a “thought fractal” could be implicated in the seemingly-spontaneous creation of reality – which I think synchronicity quite effectively represents – we must agree that thought has mass, which is something we can’t prove, but we can imagine.  A thought fractal, or for that matter, any information fractal (e.g., in Mike’s post, one created and/or maintained and/or grown via the internet) would naturally increase in area, if not so much in size, just like any fractal does.

If we accept that thoughts have mass, we’ll also accept that a fractalising thought’s gravity would increase correspondingly.  The entire system of ideas or thought, and of each fractal “arm” within its matrix, would be an expansive area onto which outside information may be drawn by gravitational pull.  In other words, the more massive the thought fractal (i.e., the more complex – like an intense series of thoughts leading up to an epiphany, for instance, or the internet’s ever-growing reach and effect), the more likely that synchronicities, which are among reality’s most enigmatic creations, would result….

Synchronicity truly is a natural result of the scenario I’ve imagined, for all fractals return again and again to their original form. A Mandelbrot set, for example, starts out with a relatively simple shape, which becomes more complex through a series of chaotic manifestations of curves and angles, ultimately coming back to the exact form from whence it started, continuing on infinitely.  What I’m suggesting is that fractalised thought, through a similar process, draws toward it the very “ideas” or thoughts with which it began – thus, synchronicity.

As a very brief example, today at work I came across the last name “Roos.”  I often see names that are new or unusual, but in this case I spent a few extra moments thinking about the name – adding a bit of mass to the thought, perhaps – imagining that the surname might be pronounced “Rose.”  When, just this evening, reading a book published in 1966, considering this article that I’ve been so focussed on writing for hours, to read about an out-of-body experience by one Miss Roos didn’t come as a true surprise.

Once a thought begins to compartmentalise and branch off into new connections (much like the activity that takes place on the internet) it is thus “fractalised.”  The concept thereby becomes more massive, and its gravitational pull correspondingly strengthens – and sometimes this would conceivably result in a domino-effect cascade.  The source of the pulled-in information to which I refer is unknown; I can only imagine that it’s the product of some form of intelligence, innate or acquired.

That said, if we hold the concept that synchronicity may be a product of what we might call “the mass of thought,” we wouldn’t necessarily have to agree that synchronicity is exclusively caused by the gravity of dynamic information fractals, but only that gravity appears to play a role in some cases of synchronicity.

Likewise, intention isn’t a part of the equation.  Chaos reorders itself quite effectively without outside intervention.  I strongly feel that intention may distort or even completely disable, via an artificial attempt to insert order into chaos, a tendency toward synchronicity.  Yet, unlike mere coincidence, the unexpected collision of events in a meaningful way seems to involve more than mere chance.  Gravity seems to be a likely causal factor – but again, only if we allow ourselves to imagine that thought has mass.

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I wonder if some thoughts are heavier than others or is it all hot air? I guess the problem I would have with this modest theory is that it attempts to link synchronicity to causality, ie gravity in this case. In other words, Stace is looking for a way of explaining meaningful coincidence as part of our everyday world in which cause and effect, linear time, and three-dimensional travel rule. We prefer the concept of an underlying reality that exists outside of the everyday world, where everything is inter-connected in a great web of reality that doesn’t rely on the ordinary rules of physics.

But maybe I’ve got it all wrong and am fractally-impaired, and weighed down by my musings. If you found Stace’s essay interesting, you can read the second part here at Inter-Intelligence Communications.

Posted in synchronicity | 3 Comments

The Energy of 12/21/12

Posted on December 17, 2012 by Trish and Rob

 

I’ve been trying to figure out if the weird energy worldwide now is due to the approach of 12/21 and the end of the Mayan calendar. Or whether it’s due to an acceleration of time and an evolution of consciousness. Or if it’s because humanity has reached a significant tipping point where we realize the old ways are just that – old, they don’t work any longer. Or if it’s due to all of the above. Or none of the above.

Rob and I watched Obama’s speech this evening to the families of victims at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. There were more than 900 people in the audience and another 1,300 in a spillover area. His speech was moving, touching the right notes as commander in chief but also as the father of two young girls. He said something that gave us hope: this was the fourth time during his administration that he has comforted the families of the fallen, spoken at memorial services for the victims of mass shootings, and something, he says, has got to change.

“If there’s even one step we can take to save one child, or one parent, or one town from the grief that has visited Tucson, and Aurora and Oak Creek and Newtown and communities from Columbine to Blacksburg before that, then surely we have an obligation to try,” the president told the auditorium.

“In the coming weeks, I’ll use whatever power this office holds to engage my fellow citizens, from law enforcement to mental health professionals to parents and educators in an effort to prevent more tragedies like this,” he said. “Because what choice do we have?”

Does this portend, at the very least, a ban on assault weapons? Renewed funding for mental health facilities?

Twenty years ago, Adelita Chirino  and her husband produced  the video at the top of this post, about America’s love affair with guns. That, in itself, is shocking. 20 years. What has changed? Adelita, a dream student of Robert Moss, has called upon all Dreamers to change the status quo through heir dreams. A heady  challenge, for sure, but not impossible.

During one segment on MSNBC’s coverage this evening, an interview with the family of 27-year-old Vicki Soto, I heard what sounded like a synchro, communication with a loved one who has passed on. Vicki Soto used her body as a shield to protect her first-grade students. Her family talked about her love of teaching, of winter, Christmas, the color green, and snow. Her sister mentioned that when the snow started falling the day after her tragic death, everyone in the family felt it was a “signal” from Vicki that she was with them.

Is this akin to the white feathers that our blogger friend from the UK, Mike Perry, has  reported about communication with his deceased daughter? Is this similar to the red cardinal that Sharon Catley reported about what she felt was communication from her deceased father? Is snow going to be a communication motif for the Soto family?

In this community, Obama was – as far as we could see- the only person of color in a crowd of nearly a 1,000 people. If this is the tipping point, there’s a certain irony that the tipping point may have been reached because this is a wealthy, white suburb outside of NYC, where young kids were killed, and not some inner city gang war where young kids are killed daily.

You second amendment advocates? Fine. Keep your guns. But no more assault weapons that fire with a rapidity intended only for combat zones, for war. Personally, I would prefer to see the 2nd amendment die altogether. The amendment was created in a time of muskets and slaves and has no place in 21st century life. That probably won’t happen, but I can dream, right? I can dream of a time when we humans actually live in peace with each other despite our differences about religious and political differences and do what is right for the greater good of the American people.

But watch what’s going to happen if Obama signs an executive order for an assault weapons ban. Every 2nd amendment wacko will emerge from his or her dark cave and scream that Obama is trying to take away their weapons. Really? With more than 270 million guns in the hands of private citizens in this country, guns aren’t likely to vanish any time soon.

Even our neighbors, Christian folks who are nice people, head to a shooting  range on weekends with their two kids to shoot – doves.

Yeah. Doves. The birds that symbolize peace.

 

Posted in synchronicity | 25 Comments

The Power of Light

Posted on December 16, 2012 by Trish and Rob

 

When we were in Baños, Ecuador some years ago, we went into a small church where one wall was filled with candles that people had lit for loved ones who had passed on. We lit candles for both of my parents, for Rob’s dad, and for friends we had lost over the years. The idea, at least in my mind, is that the illumination helps the departed make their way through the afterlife. It’s a beacon of hope, a message from the living to the dead that they are not forgotten. It’s a statement of belief that the power of light is greater than the power of darkness.

Over the years, I have grown into the habit of lighting candles not only for people who have passed but for pets – my own and those of friends. If I had 26 candles, I would light them all, one for each child and adult who lost their lives in Connecticut. Instead, I lit my big Yankee candle. Interestingly, it shows geese flying across the face of a full moon  and is called Moon on Their Wings, a rather apt phrase for the loss of 20 innocent children and 6 adults, all women.

New details about the massacre are emerging, including the fact that the shooter’s mother didn’t work at the elementary school, as previously reported, and that she was an avid gun collector. She used to take both her sons to the shooting range. No motive has yet been found for why Adam Lanza did what he did. But at this point, his motive seems irrelevant. What’s done is done.

And beyond motives and details, the fact remains that a small, tightly knit community has suffered irreparable loss and tragedy.

I can’t begin to comprehend how any parent copes with the loss of a child. I can’t begin to understand what the families of these youngsters, all between the ages of six and seven, are going through. I don’t understand how anyone can heal from something like this. The Christmas holidays will be forever tainted for their families. Rob and I were talking today about how we hoped there were helpers on the other side who were immediately there for these kids when they died.

“That’s the work the Fids is probably doing,” he said.

The Fids is a nickname for our friend Richard Demian, a psychic with whom we first connected when he wrote Rob  a fan letter about his divination book, The Rainbow Oracle.  Fids straddled two worlds – that of the living and of the dead – and the last time we saw him was in Central Park, near the Imagine tribute to John Lennon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not long afterward, Fids  died suddenly of a heart attack. He was in his early forties. Helping children to cross over is something Fids would do.

Robert Monroe, author of Journeys Out of the Body and several other books, and the visionary who started the Monroe Institute in Virginia, wrote movingly of one OBE he had where he found himself next to a young man who had just been hit by a car.  The young man was standing over his dead body, confused and scared. Monroe offered to help him get to wherever he was supposed to be, took his hand, and they began moving away from his body. It’s how I imagine Fids and other helpers in the afterlife dealing with these young children as they passed.

The problem for us, the living, is that none of us know for sure what’s true or not true about what happens when we die. We have beliefs that tell us one thing or another, we have convictions. But all we actually know for sure is that death is inevitable. Yet, if death is a state of transition, simply a different form of consciousness, then perhaps if we in the virtual world create a circle of light around these children and the adults who died in this travesty, they will see the illumination.

And because light is more powerful than darkness, because light exposes darkness and strips away its secrets, maybe  this horror will prove to be the tipping point for gun violence in America.  Our candle is lit. Please join us.

 

Posted in massacres, synchronicity | 21 Comments

The New American Story?

Posted on December 15, 2012 by Trish and Rob

 

Imagine it. A Friday morning, the Christmas holidays just days away. Your elementary school child has just finished breakfast, has her backpack ready to go, homework inside. You drive her to the school near your home and she gives you a quick hug and hops out of the car, eager to join her classmates.  You have no idea you will never see her alive again.

The parents and families of 20 young children are now struggling to come to terms with the fact that their children are dead, victims of the second deadliest school shooting in the history of the U.S. Only the mass shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007 were deadlier – 32 died.

But there is something particularly horrifying about this mass shooting – at an elementary school in Connecticut, where the 626 students range in age from 5-10, Kindergarten through fourth grade. Kids. Little kids.

The shooter, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, allegedly  shot his mother first, at her home, then drove her car to Sandy Hook Elementary, where she taught Kindergarten or first grade, we’ve heard reports that cite both. At 9:40 AM Lanza allegedly entered the school wearing a mask and black clothing. He first killed the principal and the school psychologist execution style, then went into the class where his mother taught.

He was armed with three weapons – A Glock, a Sig Sauer, and a Bushmaster .223 – an assault rifle, a combat weapon that allows the shooter to fire up to six bullets a second.  According to some reports, he fired at least 100 rounds,  mowing down 20 young kids.

How many more horrors is it going to take before lawmakers in this country change the gun laws? How many more Gabby Giffords, Columbines, Virginia Techs, Sikh Temples, Oregon malls and Aurora Colorados is it going to take before lawmakers wake up to the fact that the second amendment was written in 1791 and that world no longer exists? How many more tragedies will  it take to break the hold the National Rifle Association has on lawmakers?

Assault weapons aren’t used for hunting. They’re used in combat zones, in war, to kill people.  Why should any ordinary citizen have the right to purchase one of these things?

As with so many stories that reach a tipping point in the media, global stories, there’s a strange synchronicity with this one: the guns were registered and bought legally by Nancy Lanza, the shooter’s mother. A dark trickster synchro, this one. And dark trickster synchros sometimes reveal, over time, other elements that played into the tragedy.

When I first heard the news that Nancy Lanza had purchased these weapons, my initial reaction was simple: Why would any parent buy an assault weapon? What was really going on here?

We may never know the full truth. We may never know why a twenty-year-old man killed his mother, then drove her car to the school where she taught and killed 20 of her young students. Psychologist are already having a field day with this one. A psychologist interviewed on MSNBC gave what sounded like a Freudian explanation. Adam killed the person he loved (mom) then killed the youngsters whom she loved. Somehow, that explanation sounds too simplistic.

I think there’s a whole other layer to this story that may explain why Nancy Lanza, an elementary school teacher, bought an assault weapon. Maybe it involves her divorce, her ex; maybe it’s something else altogether. But as an ex-teacher, an ex-prison librarian, and a novelist who has written about the dark side of human nature, I smell something really rotten here. It’s the stink of family dynamics that have been spoiled and festering way too long.

The bodies of the young children are still in the school, where they fell, while authorities work to establish positive identities. Throughout the day, parents waited in a nearby firehouse for news about their children, to be reunited with them. At one point the governor told these parents: “If you haven’t been reunited with your children by now, there will not be any reunion.”

I can’t imagine being one of the parents who had not yet been reunited with their child.

Interestingly, the NRA has been silent on this. No tweets, no public statements. Yet, when Rob and I heard the story today, he went on their website and read  their usual pap: More guns means greater safety, or something to that effect.

Twitter users are expressing their anger at the NRA:

I’m calling my family to make sure my 6yr old niece in CT is safe.

Are you purchasing a firearm for someone this holiday season?

So the shooter in Connecticut must have been defending himself, right NRA? Keep up the good work!

Well, you won, NRA. Come on forward and claim your prize.

 How many of your agents do you have visiting the families of gun violence victims to explain why firearms proliferation is a priority?

You get the idea here. Most of us recognize that the world has changed since 1791. As one tweeter said: The 2nd amendment was written by people who owned muskets and slaves. May be time for an update.

As a country, can’t we do better than this? I mean, really. Little kids. Mowed down at school.  Is that the new American story?

UPDATE

As ore information comes out about the Lanza family, we learned today that Nancy Lanza, the mother, was an avid gun collector and often took her sons to a local shooting range. Also, she didn’t teach at the school, so the whole scenario the psychcologist from MSNBC piece together is wrong.

Posted in global synchro, synchronicity | 12 Comments

Her Dad, the Cardinal, and Spirit Communication

Posted on December 14, 2012 by Trish and Rob

 

This stunning story about spirit communication is from Sharon Catley of Canada. It’s long, but well worth the read!

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My friend Karen was diagnosed with lung cancer about two years ago.   She was feeling scared and lonely so asked her parents who were both deceased for a sign that everything would be okay.  Several weeks later she was walking across the rug in her living room and stepped on something sharp.  She looked in the rug and found the little silver faith, hope and charity charm that her parents had given her years ago.

She could not figure out how the charm got into the rug as the last time she saw it was in a box, within another box in her underwear drawer.  She asked her partner Tim if he had brought it out but he did not know what she was talking about. She had not told him about her request for a sign from her parents.  As it was a mystery how the charm they had given her was in the rug she took it as a sign to have hope and faith.  She felt reassured.

Because I believe that things like this can happen she told me about it.  My father had just passed on. She knew I was missing him and encouraged me to ask for a sign that he was okay.  That night as I was going to bed I made my request. “Dad, if you are okay let me know.  Please send me a sign.”

Nothing happened for a few weeks and I had almost forgotten about my request.  I was visiting my mother in Calgary and helping her clean up the basement when the series of coincidences that I now believe were communications from my father began.

At this position in my story I have to digress back to a time when my Father was still alive.  He had multiple sclerosis and spent a great deal of time in his bedroom resting, sleeping and watching television.  He did not have enough energy to do anything else.

He was always very hard to buy gifts for but my daughter Lisa is very good at such things.  Before his illness my father spent little time indoors and she knew how much he pined for the contact with nature that he had previously enjoyed.  He especially missed watching the birds and squirrels that came to feed in the backyard.  On one of Lisa’s visits she installed a little shelf right by the head of his bed.  On the shelf she put three realistic china birds.  She put down some bird seed in the middle of them.  It looked as though they had just landed and were preparing to feast on the golden seeds.

The brightest and most noticeable of the birds was a vibrant red cardinal.  For many years these little creatures kept Dad company in his room and they would be the first thing he saw on arising and the last thing he saw before he went to sleep at night.

When Dad’s health deteriorated to the situation that Mom could no longer look after him at home he had to go into a facility where medical care was always available. Mom took his birds in with him so that he would feel more at ease in the strange new surroundings. Then my daughter came from Toronto for Christmas and she bought something else to brighten up Dad’s room.  It was a large stained glass piece depicting a group of stunning red cardinals which she hung in the window.  Everyone visiting commented on how beautiful they were.  The sun shining through them made a rosy glow.

We lost Dad in March and on his passing we collected up his belongings and put them in Mom’s basement.  After the funeral, before she left for home my daughter asked for the little birds and the stained glass cardinals to save as a remembrance of her Grandfather, so they were packed up and taken to Toronto.

While I was growing up I would never have described my parent’s relationship as romantic.  Although undemonstrative in public they cared deeply for and were devoted to each other.  When Mom was asked what was the happiest day of her life she said it was the day she married my Father.  When he was gone there was a big lonely hole in her life.  The day my Father died was also the day my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer.

I have now arrived back to the place in my story from which I had regressed – the point from which I believe I started to receive my sign. As I said I was helping Mom clean up the basement in Calgary a few weeks after my Father’s death.  I was walking across the rug and stepped on something sharp.  Looking in the rug I found a tiny piece of bright ruby red glass that could only have come from the stained glass cardinals.

After this cardinals started showing up everywhere in my life.  I would open a magazine and there would be red cardinals.  Looking around in a store or browsing a catalogue I would see red cardinals adorning scarves, towels, cups, napkins, t-shirts, wall hangings and dishes.  Every one of them I saw reminded me of Dad.  I just thought that maybe there had always been cardinals everywhere but that I had never noticed them before or that they had somehow just become a popular decorating item.

It was not until the first Christmas following my Dad’s death that I knew for sure that the cardinals were deliberately being sent to me.  That year I received about eleven Christmas cards.  Seven of these had red cardinals on them.  I thought this must be a trend – that red cardinals were in fashion that year.  To test my theory I went out to the reception area of the company I work for.  At Christmas my company receives about two hundred cards from other businesses and my friend, our receptionist Marilyn tapes them up on the wall there.  I perused the cards.  There was not one red cardinal on any of them – only my cards had red cardinals.

Then a week or so after Christmas I was walking by the front desk where my friend Bonnie was opening the early morning mail. There was a pile of cards that had not arrived in time for Christmas. She called me over and said “Come see how cute this card is”.  The card showed a grove of birch trees in the snow.  Nestled in the branch of one of the trees was a tiny red cardinal.  Up to this point I had said nothing to anyone about Dad’s cardinals but on my next trip to Calgary I decided to tell Mom about them.

My Mom was a very practical lady – things like this make her uncomfortable.  Then the cardinals started showing up in her life too.  At first I had to point them out – the little cross stitch bird on the wall of her Doctor’s office, on a free notepad that arrived in her mail, cardinal wind chimes hanging in a waiting room, on the side of a wish box from my cousin.  Over the next months during our daily phone calls she would often mention a bird that Dad had sent.

Mom’s cancer took a turn for the worse and over the next year she was in hospital after hospital.  Always there was a cardinal somewhere close, in pictures hanging in the hallway or on keepsakes sold in the little gift shops.  It cheered her up when I told her when and where I found them.

Then Dad stopped sending the birds.  A few would show up here and there but not in the quantity or with the regularity that I had previously experienced.  I thought he had perhaps moved on to some other phase of the afterlife as he did not seem to be around anymore.

Just after Christmas my Mother entered the final phase of her life and was placed in hospice.  I was able to take three more trips out to see her before her death.  On the last trip, while I was on my way home to Vancouver, I stopped in at the little Virgin Records Store near my departure gate at the airport.  I don’t like to fly and it is my ritual to always treat myself to a new book to occupy myself with during the flight. I had about ten minutes of worth of “spare” time to look around and make my purchase before I had to be through security.

While I was browsing the books I noticed that the last three songs playing on the store’s intercom had all been older ones performed by the band “Heart”.  I was thinking there must be a new Heart “Greatest Hits” CD out as they usually play whatever they are currently marketing at the time.  I quite like Heart so thought I would pick it up while I was there.

Looking at the clock I noticed I had already used up all my browsing time but I did want that CD. So I quickly ran over to the CD section and looked through the H’s finding no Heart CDs at all.  So I looked on shelves above where the new releases were and at the other various free standing CD displays – no Heart CD.  There was still the bargain bin but I thought there would be little chance of it being in there as they usually play new releases but I gave it a shot.  My eyes are not that good anymore – the last two times I had my glasses replaced I was supposed to move on to bi-focals but then people would know my age for sure.  There was one CD I could not read the writing on so I put my hand in the bin pulled it out.  There it was – “Heart Greatest Hits”.

While he was ringing up my purchases, I told the cashier about the synchronicity of finding the CD (hearing the music, wanting the CD, picking a single CD from the bargain bin and it being the one I wanted.) He said there were no bosses around today so he decided to hook his personal IPOD to the intercom and listen to his own music.  The CD was from 1998 and he was surprised that they had it in their stock.

With the funeral and all I did not get around to playing the CD until Mother’s day which came three weeks after my Mother’s passing.  It was going to be a sad one for me this year so I decided just to stay home and clean the house.  Chores are always more pleasant with some music and I remembered the Heart CD.  I had not taken a really good look at it before as I was in such a hurry in the airport and as I said my eyesight is not that good anymore.  I knew there was a folk art painting on the cover but now taking a better look at it I could not believe what I was seeing and that I had not seen it before.

If you look below you will see what I saw.  To me it means my (red haired) Mom and my Dad are back together again and happy once more. Is this just the end of a series of co-incidences or is this a message from my Mom and Dad?   (p.s. lately the sightings of the cardinal are rare and when sighted he is usually accompanied by a bluebird or a golden cardinal whom we think is the spirit of my Mother)


 

 

Posted in synchronicity | 6 Comments

A Skeptic analyzes coincidence…poorly

Posted on December 12, 2012 by Trish and Rob

 

Shermer & agent

 

Here’s an article about what many of our readers here would call an obvious synchronicity – a meaningful coincidence. But to arch-skeptic Michael Shermer, the fact that it’s an unusual experience, out-of-the-ordinary, is the very reason why he thinks there’s nothing significant about it. Read his synchro and follow his logic…or try to.

COINCIDENCES AND CERTAINTIES

by MICHAEL SHERMER, Dec 04 2012

On the morning of Friday, November 16, 2012, I wandered out of my hotel in Portland, Oregon—The Crystal Hotel, an exotic boutique hotel with rooms decorated in the theme of a musician, poet, or artist (I stayed in the Allen Ginsberg room staring at a portrait of the beat poet and realized why I write nonfiction). In search of breakfast, I could have turned left or right as I exited the lobby. I turned right. At the first intersection I could have continued straight, gone left, or gone right. I went left. There were breakfast restaurants on both the left and the right side of the street. I chose one on the right. The hostess asked if I wanted to be seated near the window or next to the wall. I chose the window. About half way through my breakfast I happened to look up to see a man walking by who looked familiar. He looked at me with similar familiarity. I waved him into the restaurant. He spoke my name in recognition. I stuttered and stammered and hemmed and hawed and finally admitted, “I’m sorry, but I can’t remember your name.”

He said, “Uh, Michael, it’s me, Scott Wolfman, your agent!”

After I recovered from my embarrassment and momentary fear that I’d never get another speaking engagement, we had a laugh about it all, but then got to thinking—what are the odds of something like this happening? I’m from Southern California and Scott is from Connecticut. And we happened to run into each other in Portland, Oregon, a city neither of us normally has any business being in. I was randomly walking about the town, as was Scott. We were stunned. It sure seemed like something more than a coincidence, and we both joked about how there must be some sort of scheduling god who makes these things happen.

But Scott and I are good skeptics. We know how to think about such events. Even though such coincidences as this really stand out as unusual—and they are when I describe it in this manner—most people forget to consider all the other possibilities: the thousands of people I know who didn’t happen by that diner, the delay at the diner talking to Scott when I might have left earlier and had something else unusual happen that now didn’t, all the other cities I’ve traveled to and dined in when I didn’t see anyone I knew, and so on. And the same for Scott: he has hundreds of clients and knows thousands of people in the lecture business, any one of which he would ever happen to bump into in any given city he happened to travel to, would stand out as unusual.

In other words, after the fact we construct all the contingencies that had to come together in just such a way for one particular event to happen, and then we only notice and remember (and later tell stories like the above) about the events that we noticed as extraordinary, and conveniently forget to notice all the other possibilities. Here’s an article opening you’ll never read:

“A remarkable thing happened to me this morning. When I went out for breakfast I didn’t see a single person I know.”

And yet I’ve had thousands of breakfasts just like this one in which I see nothing but strangers. And, of course, I don’t bother to take note of that uninteresting fact, and I do not give it a second thought. The main cognitive bias at work here is the hindsight bias.

The hindsight bias is the tendency to reconstruct the past to fit with present knowledge. Once an event has occurred, we look back and reconstruct how it happened, why it had to happen that way and not some other way, and why we should have seen it coming all along. Such “Monday-morning quarterbacking” is literally evident on the Monday mornings following a weekend filled with football games. We all know what plays should have been called…after the outcome. Ditto the stock market and the endless parade of financial experts whose prognostications are quickly forgotten as they shift to post-diction analysis after the market closes—it’s easy to “buy low, sell high” once you have perfect information, which is only available after the fact when it is too late. In this story, the hindsight bias was my noticing after the fact all the particularities that had to come together in just such a way for Scott and I to run into each other.

What would have been truly and extraordinarily beyond coincidence is if I had computed ahead of time the odds of running into my lecture agent at that very time and place, and then it happened. But that’s not what happened. My account here is a post-diction—an after-the-fact analysis—instead of a prediction. Unfortunately, most people who are not aware of such cognitive biases fail to consider all the other possibilities, and how the sum of all these possibilities is certainty—something must happen, and 99.99% of the things that happen are uninteresting and unimportant and so we don’t notice or recall them later. This cognitive shortcoming is, in part, the basis of a type of superstition and magical thinking that finds deep meaning in coincidence, while ignoring entirely the certainties that must happen according to the laws of nature and contingencies of history.

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Two things struck me about the logic of his argument. First, according to Shermer’s criteria, coincidences apparently aren’t meaningful to him because of all the times when life is ordinary, functioning on linear time and cause and effect – when there are not coincidences happening.  This seems a strange argument because obviously part of the magic is that such co-incidents DON’T happen all the time.

His second argument is even stranger and reveals a lack of understanding about the nature of synchronicity. Shermer says that people who believe in meaningful coincidence have a ‘hindsight bias.’ In other words, they figure out the synchro after it happens by retracing the events leading to it. Shermer seems to think that a real synchronicity would be one that is predicted. But, Mike, that’s precognition, another matter.

Here’s the difference. If I were thinking about people who are skeptical about psychic matters and Gabe Carlson sends me the above article, that’s synchronicity. But if I were to say ‘I have the feeling that I’m going to hear about someone’s skeptical point of view on synchronicity,’ then the article arrives, that’s a premonition or precognitive event. It could also be seen as a synchro, of course, but what Shermer is doing is upping the ante.

However, before anyone presents Mr. Shermer with an example of precogniton, keep in mind that he does not believe that psychic abilities exist, so he would not be impressed. I predict that he would have another contorted explanation for it.

Bottom line: Shermer was pretty baffled by the incident, so much so that he forgot the name of his literary agent. In fact, he was the one who played Monday-morning quarterback and tried his best to re-fit a neat synchro into an ordinary event.

Posted in synchronicity | 20 Comments

What Animals Teach Us

Posted on December 11, 2012 by Trish and Rob

joy

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Now that Obama has won the election, now that the Repugs are licking their wounds and are showing themselves to be very poor losers, we’ve got a new brand of politics at the dog park.

At the park now,  the losers sit at the far end, grumbling about why their party lost and talking incessantly about 2016. Seriously? We’re already discussing the presidential campaign of  2016? Meanwhile, the rest of us sit around in the shade, gabbing, tossing Frisbees and balls for our dogs, and notice that the snowbirds who arrive at the park now believe they own it. This means they believe a service sweeps in every afternoon and scoops up the dog poop (nope)   and that they have carte blanche – i.e., your dogs do whatever he/she wants to do in this wide open space.

Well, not quite. Today a young man arrives with two dogs, both of them intact males. The human is a horse person, seasonal, and has his dogs are on lead ropes, like what horses in training are accustomed to. But dogs are not horses, and as soon as he enters the park, Cody is all over his dog.

Cody – cooling off this past summer

Cody is a husky – affectionate toward the humans he knows, protective of puppies, endlessly playful. He doesn’t have an aggressive bone in his body. So Cody is ready to play with these two dogs as they come through the gate. The owner freaks out. He starts kicking Cody, then slaps him in the face and over the head with the lead ropes, shouting at him. A group of us are sitting in the shade as this is happening and are suddenly on our feet, moving collectively toward the gate.

Cody’s human, Karin, the paragon of non-confrontational, rushes past all of us, toward her dog  and this jerk who is slapping him and yells, “Hey, cut it out, he’s not hurting your dog!

And he isn’t. Cody is doing what all dogs do when fresh meat enters the dog park, sniffing, nipping, evaluating, playing the dominance game, I’m bigger and faster than you, chase me, c’mon, let’s play. Karin is a short woman, not exactly intimidating, and this horse guy towers over her. But she’s in his face, waving her arms, screaming at him and the man is somewhat taken back, you can see it in his body language.

“Your dog was going to attack mine!” he yells.

“Going to?” someone else shouts at him. “Pal, that’s like saying you shot the homeless guy who was going to rob you.”

He becomes really flustered, stabbing his finger toward Cody. “Get him outta this park, he’s dangerous.” He tugs on his dogs’ lead ropes, pulling them away from Karin, toward the middle part of the park, where some humans are still sitting, watching this spectacle.

“Her dog attacked mine,” he says, as if the humans in the shade are the jury. “You saw it, right?”

Colleen, whom we call the dog whisperer, just rolls her eyes.  “You bring  two intact males into the dog park, what do you expect?”

By then, I’ve back toward the sitting area to find Noah, but he’s standing under the tree, watching, wise enough to keep his distance from these disturbances. Cassie, who owns Willow, a border collie, just looks at me and whispers, “Spare me. Another Republican.”

Another woman who brings her three dogs daily to the park, turns to him and snaps, “You kicked Cody and hit him with the rope. That’s a fact. We all saw it.”

At this point, the horse guy gets really huffy. “Well, it’s obvious you’re all friends here. We’re leaving.”

And we’re all thinking the same thing: Don’t let the gate hit you in the butt on your way out, guy.

Most of these skirmishes at the dog park –  as in politics and in life-  happen because of the humans – not the dogs. Dogs seem to have an innate understanding about the rules of engagement where they can run free with other dogs, even dogs who are unfamiliar to them. When a new dog enters the park, the other dogs sniff, check things out, wag their tails – or don’t – and behavioral parameters are established quickly.

One of the honored traditions at the dog park involves an American bulldog, Diesel. He’s a gentle giant, an intact male owned by a Dutch woman who also brings her other two dogs. Here’re Diesel and Noah:

When the dogs in the park hear the woman’s truck pull into the parking lot, many of them they line up along the fence, waiting for Diesel.  He’s the star. Why? Because when his human lets him off the leash,  he tears along the outside of the fence, barking furiously, and within seconds, a pack of dogs inside the park are answering the call. For fifteen or twenty minutes, dozens of dogs race back and forth along the length of the fence, barking and howling and snapping at the wire mesh until they are all so exhausted they seek refuge and solace at the water bowls.

But if you take away the fence, the dogs just frolic and play.

The other day, a man with a young Ridgeback who runs daily with the Diesel pack, decided he didn’t like it and shouted at the Dutch woman to bring her dogs into the park. When she regarded him with puzzlement and pointed out that his dog runs daily with the pack that barks at Diesel,   he called the cops. And this is a guy who completely ignores his dog when they’re at the park. But suddenly, he doesn’t like what Diesel is doing so he calls the police?

Drama. A battle of human wills. We weren’t at the park when this happened, but Cassie told us about it over dinner one evening. “And oh, guess what?” she says at the end of her story. “He’s a Repub, too.”

I know what she means. But I also know some Republicans who treat their animal companions with the same love and attention they shower on their families and children. So maybe the political thing is too facile. But the lesson is valuable. As my dad frequently advised my sister and I, If you want to know what someone is really like, take note of how this individual treats animals, pets. It will tell you everything you need to know about whether you should invest time and energy in the relationship.

He was right. It has been one of my criterion ever since.

Posted in dogs, synchronicity | 14 Comments

More Exorcists on Call

Posted on December 10, 2012 by Trish and Rob

The Catholic diocese of Milan, Italy started an exorcism hotline in November 2012, and doubled the number of exorcism-practicing priests from six to 12. The diocese hopes to keep up with an apparent increase in calls over the past 15 years.

“From the number of calls we receive, the need has doubled,” Monsignor Angelo Mascheroni — the diocese’s chief exorcist since 1995 — told the news website Incrocinews. “We get young and old, men and women, people with different levels of education, from school-leavers to graduates.”

Mascheroni also said that one priest was reportedly seeing as many as 120 people a day.

A special switchboard has been set up where people can call Monday through Friday between 2:30 p.m. and 5 p.m. for all their exorcism needs. Mascheroni gave out the phone number to Incrocinews. Beginning with the country code, it is: 39-02-8556457 (If dialing from the U.S., you need to add 011 as the first three digits).

But Americans shouldn’t expect much help from the Milanese crew. The exorcists don’t want to travel too far from their home base and their website is in Italian, suggesting that foreign folks should take their demon problems elsewhere.

Interestingly, Mascheroni says that the demonic forces aren’t necessarily getting stronger. Rather, he says, cases of mental illness are increasing. He also suggests that the rise in exorcist calls could be related to the number of parents having discipline problems with their children.

Yeah. That’s especially true when the kids spin their heads around, spew green pea soup, and turn the room into a refrigerator.

 

 

 


Posted in synchronicity | 19 Comments

Joke, Hoax, or Something Else?

Posted on December 9, 2012 by Trish and Rob

I came across this bit of video on Whitley Strieber’s site, then clicked around, looking for other sources for the story.

According to an AP site, Russia’s Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev was giving a TV interview on Friday and “joked that each Russian leader gets two folders with information about extraterrestrials that visited our planet – and stayed here,” reports the AP.

His off camera comments to a journalist from REN TV, which according to Wikipedia is one of the largest private federal TV channels in Russia, is the  brief snippet you’ll hear. So is this a hoax, a joke, or a hint about impending disclosure?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=VZSNSAiCBw4

 

 

 

 

Posted in synchronicity, UFOs | 11 Comments

Synchronicity and iPhone5

Posted on December 8, 2012 by Trish and Rob

 

I had a Blackberry for about five years, through T-Mobile. In the beginning, I loved it. It was a real workhouse, able to accommodate just about anything I asked of it. Except. Whenever I tried to download an app, the download didn’t work. And the apps were nowhere near as extensive or interesting as the apps that Apple offers.

Last year, I got disgusted with T-Mobile. I had called to remove Megan from the account because she’d gotten an iPhone through AT&T. No problem, the tech said, it’s cancelled. But oh, by the way, he said, since your plan has now changed, since it’s just you on the account, we’re extending your contract by two years and charging you the $200 cancellation fee. I told the young man that T-Mobile was making a big mistake by doing this to a customer who had been with them for fifteen years. “You can count on this,” I said. “As soon as I can afford it, I will be breaking my contract with you.”

He sort of laughed.

Fast forward to October 7, 2012. I headed out that morning to the Apple store to do my research on iPhones. I spent a couple of hours in the store, playing with the iPhone 4S and the iPhone 5, and decided I was going to switch. But when I finally talked to a tech, he informed me the store was sold out of both phones. “See that line over there?” He pointed across the room. “All those people are waiting to pick up iPhones that they ordered online last night.”

OK. I went home and started calling every AT&T store within ten miles. The story was always the same. We’re sold out. We don’t know when we’re getting another shipment.   Then I found an AT&T store tucked away in a shopping area less than a mile from our house. I called, yes, they were open, and they had iPhones in stock. So at 3:30 that afternoon, I headed over there  and before I’d gone even half a block, my car sounded like the engine was coughing up marbles. Steam billowed from under the hood.

The car had stalled out during Tropical Storm Isaac, which dumped 14 inches of rain on us in about 24 hours. Our neighborhood looked like this (that island out there is our mailbox):

At any rate, the engine was shot and we got the car towed to our local garage.  Once I learned that insurance would pay for a new engine, I finally got to that little AT&T store just as they were closing.  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” the young man said. “Can you come back tomorrow?”

“Just a quick question,” I said, and asked about iPhones 4S, which were then selling for less than a $100. I explained that my daughter already had an iPhone with AT&T and asked what kind of plan they offered for two lines. The upshot was that they were sold out of the iPhone4S but had one iPhone5 left and was I interested?

One iPhone5?  Really? When the Apple store and every other AT&T store in the area were sold out? Synchro? Law of attraction? Interested? “Absolutely.”

“Come on in,” he said, and for the next hour he and another clerk got me set up.

Politically, I’m no fan of AT&T. They donate zillions to the Republicans. But the competition around here is pathetic. And because we already have our Internet landlines,  one cellphone, and TV service with them, the addition of my iPhone5 will save us more than $100 a month.  In addition, these two clerks went the extra mile, showing me the ins and outs, advising me to do this and that to save even more $.  I was impressed. I realized that any company, any corporation, is only as good as its employees and these two guys were stellar.

And hey, I loved the synchro. They’re closed, they have only one iPhone5 left – and were apparently the only store in our corner of Palm Beach County that did – I’d been pursuing this all day. At six PM I walked out with my new iPhone5.

I confess that I love gadgets, I enjoy figuring out how things work, and the iPhone5 may be the coolest thing yet. It’s lightning fast, lightweight and sleek, the apps download, email is flawless. The camera is as good as Rob’s high-end Canon, and I can actually get a signal in the house, which means, eventually, good-bye landline, another savings. I found the onscreen keyboard a bit tight, but then I discovered Siri, the strange female helper who translates your voice commands into text messages and emails and finds you a good restaurant or a gas station regardless of where you are.

Books I have downloaded onto my iPad can be pushed onto any other Apple device, including my new phone. When I got stumped on some facet of the phone, a young woman at the dog park talked me through it. And that’s the thing. If you get stuck on how to do something with this phone, ask anyone under 30 how to solve it. One woman’s husband called her in a panic from an airport about something he couldn’t figure out on his new iPhone5. Karin’s reply? “Warren, find someone under thirty and ask them.” He did and the problem was solved.

One of my issues with Macs is that there’s no good astrology software for the operating system. The only half decent software is clunky and doesn’t do a fraction of what my old Winstar program can do. So the other night I was searching for an astrology app  and found Astro Gold, which I downloaded for $30. This little app does nearly everything my expensive windows astrology program ($300) does. And now I’ve got it on my iPhone and my iPad.

Our daughter, 23,  is still bugging me to trade my 5 for her 4.   Ha. In your dreams.

My phone’s name? Synchronicity.

 

Posted in synchronicity | 13 Comments