In the Between

Posted on April 15, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Today, we took some time off and flew across the state with our friends, Lynn and Bruce Gernon, Rob’s co-author on The Fog.

We flew to Immokalee, Florida in their Skylane, a four-seater 182-Cessna. It took us across the state, over the vast emptiness between the East and West coasts of Florida. It’s mostly Everglades interspersed with farms that grow tomatoes and corn and the ever so lucrative sugar cane. We’ve flown this route before, to various locations, but I’m always astonished by how wild and utterly the middle part of Florida is.

At the airport, as we waited inside the small county terminal for a ride to the casino, Lynn pulled out a small velvet pouch. “Do you know what dowsing is, Trish?”

I was frankly surprised by the question.  I have read the tarot for Lynn, done astrology charts for her and her family, but didn’t realize she was into dowsing. She brought out an exquisite pendulum made by Kathy Doore,  author of a book on Peru’s mysterious stone forest.

“Let’s see what the pendulum has to say about our trip to the casino.” She grinned. “Are we going to win anything?”

Okay, I thought. Here’s the day’s synchro. Rob and I had allotted ourselves twenty bucks apiece for the slot machines.  The last time we were in a casino, in Aruba, we were clueless about the machines – how you placed bets, how they worked, the whole nine yards. But that night, we won and quit while we were ahead. I think we made twenty or thirty bucks, hardly high rollers.

So Lynn and I used the pendulum and the answer was a resounding yes. Now, to put it to the test.

At the check-in counter, Rob and I both received scratch tickets, free draws, because we’d never been to a casino in Florida before. Mine was for $25, his for $10. The clerk said we could use the scratch ticket on every machine except the “progressives.” Once we had placed a bet, we could cash in the value of the ticket. So Lynn led us off to the one-armed bandits.

She explained how you place bets on the various machines – bets from one cent to a quarter. Yes, we started very small. You slide your ID card into a slot, then insert your free ticket, place a bet.. I won $66 on my first try and quit the machine after I cashed out.

What stood out most about the casino was the clientele. Most of the individuals in the place were elderly. Some used canes, some were in wheelchairs, some used oxygen tanks.  This part depressed me. Many of these people seemed grim, sad, their faces locked in a kind of despair. Gotta win that jackpot to pay my doctor bills. That kind of thing.

Then, at the “progressive machines,” where your bets progress upward on  an incomprehensible scale, a woman shrieked with joy. She had just won $237. She was on a roll and she knew it.

“As soon as she gets up, we’ll try that machine,” Lynn said. “You want to use the machines that win.” And she proceeded to explain which machines she had used in past visits that had surrendered their riches.

That’s when I started to wonder if telekinesis is involved in lucky streaks. Do these people, through their intentions, needs, desires, beliefs, somehow merge with the consciousness of the machine to bring about a win? Is this how it works when  a tipping point is reached in any endeavor? Is it how certain movies, books, art or whatever suddenly spill into mass consciousness and become bestsellers?

Here’s a  photo of some of  popular machines – Indiana Jones! There was actually a waiting line!

By the time we left, our winnings were at $130 and Lynn had  won several hundred. Bruce, wise man that he is, sat out those hours with his iPad.  I mean, this is the guy who went through the Bermuda triangle and experienced a verifiable time slippage and not much since then has measured up to that experience. For him, the iPad is preferable to the one-armed bandits.

On the way back, I kept examining those sugar cane fields 3,000 feet below us, hoping to see a crop circle (nope!) and marveling that the pendulum had been right. We had won some grocery money on the machines  where you bet pennies, five cents, a quarter. No blackjack tables for us.

I also realized that casinos – no windows, no sense of the outer world – may be a lot like the state in between lives, where our expectations and  beliefs dictate what we experience. In the between, we enter  Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone, a vast emptiness of probability. So if we go to the casino again, my expectations will be higher  – more zeros at the end of that 13. And that pendulum will be zipping around like a compass readjusting to the new magnetic north.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in casinos and gambling, fl | 17 Comments

The Sky Is Falling…

Posted on April 14, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Remember when, during the 2008 presidential campaigns,  Bush announced that the financial sky was falling? All the candidates rushed to D.C.  and the massive bailouts for Wall Street and banks began.

Read this article by Matt Taibbi about what really happened and why the taxpayers are on the hook while Wall Street enjoys huge bonuses and record profits. The next time you hear some politician scream about our debt and reducing spending, you’ll have the real scoop. Taibbi has done a masterful job of explaining it  all.

 

Posted in politics | 8 Comments

Kundalini Energy

Posted on April 14, 2011 by Trish and Rob

During the two decades that I’ve been involved in yoga, I’ve heard from time to time about the supposed dangers of Kundalini energy. During intense yoga or deep meditations, a dormant energy—mythically, a serpent goddess coiled three and a half times around the first chakra, or root chakra– might be awakened. The energy rises and opens the chakras and the results can be dramatic – the body vibrates out of control, enters spontaneous out-of-body or near-death experiences. In other word, the release of Kundalini energy can bring out states of consciousness that are out of this world.

I’ve never thought too much about it, especially since it never happened to me and I’ve  never known anyone who has experienced the release of that powerful energy. In other words, it seemed that there was a greater chance of a meteorite crashing through the roof during a yoga class than experiencing a sponteous release of Kundalini energy.

But recently that changed.

A couple of weeks ago, Trish came home and mentioned that she saw an emergency medical vehicle arriving at the gym when she left, but she didn’t know what happened. A few days later, another yoga teacher told me that during a brief meditation at the end of her yoga class one of her students began to breathe rapidly, then her body started to shake. The teacher went over to see what was going on, but the woman didn’t respond. She grabbed her cell phone and called 911.

When the EMS team arrived, the woman was no longer shaking. She was breathing, but still wasn’t responding. Now here’s the synchronicity. The lead rescue worker was  a yogi. He was able to bring her out of it. She was examined at a hospital and all the readings were normal. She has never suffered from convulsions of any sort and is in good health.

When she was asked what happened, she said she felt a powerful energy moving through her body and she suddenly found herself outside her body surrounded by an orange ball of light. She was aware of people around her body, but she didn’t want to go back.

Interestingly, orange is associated with the second chakra, which is related to fertility, creativity, sexual energy. It occurred to me that the release of this energy might be related to sexual abuse as a child. I mentioned that to the yoga teacher as a possibility and also sent her a link to a couple of web sites about kundalini energy.

A couple of days later she told me that she’d passed on that information. The woman found the web sites helpful. When I asked about my hunch, the yoga teacher replied, “She said it might be true, but not this life.”

Now that’s a strange idea: a dramatic incident from a past life generates the spontaneous release of kundalini energy during a short meditation in another life. Well, if we’re all connected with each other as a part of Indra’s Net, then it makes sense that each of us is connected with our past lives…and maybe future ones as well.

The woman seems to be undergoing some profound changes physically, mentally, and spiritually. She returned to the yoga class for the next session and nothing unusual happened – at least nothing noticeable. When she was asked how it went, she said she felt as if she were sinking through the floor into the earth during the meditation. But she remained in control and was able to come back at the end.

She plans to see a Reiki therapist, who hopefully will help her explore her meditations while staying in control.

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | 33 Comments

The Long Route Home

Posted on April 13, 2011 by Trish and Rob

We have a shelf of books published years ago by Time/Life. They cover just about every weird and strange thing under the sun – from vanished civilizations to famous hoaxes and deceptions to unusual talents. This evening, I was paging through one called Vanishings and ran across a rather interesting story about a postcard that took seven years to arrive at its destination. We’ve done several stories about lost items that return to their owners in mysterious ways. This story seems to fall in that same odd area.

On September 22, 1918, a man named George Kemp mailed off a postcard to his young nephew, Donald Templeton, who lived in Buffalo, New York. At the time, Kemp was in the trenches in France and WWI was in its last seven weeks.

Kemp was killed in the final weeks of the war and the postcard to his nephew never reached the boy. Finally, 63 years after the postcard was sent, on July 6, 1981, it reached the Buffalo address.  Kemp’s relatives had moved away years before, but  the  current residents traced Donald Templeton to his home in Florida and forwarded the postcard. By then, Templeton was 72 years old.

What’s genuinely curious about this is that the postcard was covered with numerous postmarks. The first was a stamp by a military censor in Frances, postmarked in 1918, the same year it was sent. The second stamp was in 1927, the last in 1981, shortly before it was finally delivered to Templeton’s former address in Buffalo. . The first and the last stamps are usual. But no one can explain what happened to the letter in 1927. The postcard disappeared once, resurfaced nine years later – long enough to get a stamp – and then vanished again for more than half a century.

 

 

 

Posted in lost, Uncategorized | 17 Comments

Dolphin Synchros

Posted on April 12, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Dolphin art, by a dolphin named Elvis

 

Our daughter is an art major. At her college, all seniors are required to write a thesis during their final year. The thesis for art majors has to tie in thematically  with a series of twenty or more paintings that are exhibited in the campus art building during the last month of the school year.

Megan’s theme is about fragmented perceptions, specifically in how we perceive dolphins. She chose watercolor as her medium. Part of her preparation for her series of paintings was spending a month at a dolphin facility in the Florida Keys, where the dolphins live in captivity. We wrote about that here.

During her internship, she took a number of photos, some of them underwater, that she used as templates for her paintings.  Rather than painting a complete dolphin in one , she sliced each photo into several segments, which each became a painting. Individually, they appear like abstract art, creating a sense of fragmentation. But when the paintings are arranged next to each other, you see the whole dolphin.

Whenever she finished a series of paintings, she drove over to a local art and frame shop and had the paintings mounted on foam board – also called foam board – a dry matting process. She told the frame shop how she wanted the paintings arranged, they did the dry matting.

This weekend she came home and had some photos of two series that she had presented to her thesis committee. The synchronicities that emerged are both startling and disturbing and aren’t what she intended when she set out on this venture.

In this first series, you can see that the matting process creates a kind of window through which we’re seeing the dolphins. It’s rather how we felt when we visited the facility on Megan’s last day there – a meet and greet, a kind of window into the world of captive dolphins.

In the second series, the matting process creates something quite different. We’re seeing the dolphins behind what looks like prison bars.

Here’s another little dolphin synchro. When Megan was visiting us recently, she was walking down the hall to her bedroom and noticed one of the family history pics on the wall showng her as a child swimming with dolphins at Dolphins Plus. To her surprise, she recognized the dolphin she was riding at age 11 as Elvis, her favorite dolphin from her time this year working at the dolphin center.

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And yet another synchro. Last night,  4/11/11, Ray Getzinger, who comments on our blog, sent us the following video, with a note: Megan might like this video of a cat and a dolphin playing. Ray knows, of course, about Megan’s dolphin stuff, but he didn’t know we were going to post this today.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in creativity, dolphins | 38 Comments

Cultural Creatives, the Movie

Posted on April 11, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 

Thanks to Lauren at Threads of the Spiderwoman, for this. She posted it on her blog.  I was delighted!

Some years ago, I ran across a book called The Cultural Creatives, about the 50 million people in the world who are doing things differently. This movie is about that phenomenon and the 50 million has swelled to 250 million. So if you ever feel alone in your beliefs, don’t!

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gctdXaglWhY

Posted in cultural creatives, documentary | 23 Comments

Journey to Egypt

Posted on April 10, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 

Jane Clifford of Wales tells us that she’s headed to Egypt in late April, right after Mercury goes direct. Here’s how the trip materialized for her. It seems that it was triggered from the other side.

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Why Egypt? Here’s the deal! A few weeks ago my guide said, ‘You are to go to Egypt.’

“Well, it was not high on my list to go there right now, never been there, in spite of past life memories. Besides,  I would prefer to go during the winter months.

“So I laughed and said,  ‘If you want me to go to Egypt, then find me a travel companion and somewhere to stay that’s not a cheap high-rise hotel package trip.’

“A week later, I randomly put up a guest in my home who was a French vet named Vanessa and who was here for the Keisha Little Grandmother talk. People flew in to my tiny home town from all over the world and some of us locals offered free accomodation.

“Vanessa and I bonded really well. She stayed on a few days and then invited me to Egypt where I could stay in a simple beach hut built in the traditional beduin way on the beach. There’s a recording studio there and musicians play on the beach under the stars–exactly my kind of place and affordable! Its in Sinai and not near the troubles or big the big tourism areas.”

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So did Jane’s guide set up the trip or did the guide foresee it coming? Regardless, an interesting synchro, and I’m sure the trip itself will provide more magic!

Jane also provided a bit of Welsh magic as well, explaining more about Keisha Little Grandmother and her visit.

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“So why would Keisha Little Grandmother visit our tiny town, you might wonder? She told everyone that Great Spirit sent her here to go to a place called Enoch in our mountains nearby. It’s a place where she is told that North becomes South and South becomes North on the compass! It’s also the source of the bluestones that were transported to Wiltshire where they were used to build Stonehenge. No one knows how the enormous stones were moved, but legend says it was by magic.

“Little Grandmother talked about ancient energy stored here that is now being activated to rise again for the 2012 transition. I took the microphone and asked her if she was aware of a stone circle near here where ancient texts reveal that when Christianity arrived, all the wizards of Wales went to cast their magic into the earth and placed a stone stopper over it. There it would remain until it is time for the energy to arise again.

“When I went there recently, I sensed the energy is activated. I was instructed intuitively to walk counter-clockwise outside the circle, then to gradually walk in a spiral to the centre.”

 

 

Posted in Egypt, travel | 29 Comments

Synchronicity and Creativity

Posted on April 9, 2011 by Trish and Rob

From Carl Jung’s Red Book

During Rob’s meditation class tonight, the final for this particular session, we did a shamanic meditation, with drumming. It’s my personal favorite. There’s something about the drumming that   transports your consciousness to….well, elsewhere.  He asked us to pose a question and find a guide during the meditation. My question was:  What is the third synchro book about? What’s the hook?

During the drumming, my inner vision suddenly opened up. It became a camera’s lens and I was in the Southwest, maybe around Canyon de Chelly, where the red canyon walls are simply exquisite and the entire area speaks of all that is ancient on our planet.   I suddenly wished to be an artist who could capture these colors and the starkness of the geography on canvas, like Georgia O’Keefe.

Then the scene switched to what seemed to be a TV studio, with thick cables snaking across the floor of the studio, screens everywhere. I immediately thought of my favorite TV shows – Lost and X-Files, for instance – and wondered how the writers had come up with their initial ideas and then executed them, extended them over multiple seasons and episodes, keeping the characters and plots intriguing enough for viewers to tune in week after week, season after season.

In my new favorite TV show, The Event, the hook lies within the emotions among the characters – a group of aliens who look human, but whose DNA differs from humans by about one percent, and the humans who become involved with them.

Then I thought of the movie Rob and I had just seen – Source Code – which plays brilliantly with the Many Worlds theory of quantum physics, but somehow manages to maintain intense emotional connections among the characters. So I had my answer. The next synchro book is about creativity and how synchronicity is intricate to the creative process.

But what does it mean, really, to be creative? It’s not just writing or painting or taking photos.  Creativity is  also expressed by the small child when she discovers that her legs actually have a function and eagerly crawls around exploring the boundaries of her world. It finds expression in the 80-year-old grandmother who creates elaborate collages from photos in the family album, or in the engineer who designs booster rockets. The teacher who triggers excitement and curiosity in his students is just as creative as the shaman who makes it rain or as the adventurer who climbs Kilimanjaro simply because it’s there.

In Western society, we tend to believe that creativity is the exclusive domain of the Lennons, Spielbergs, Rowlings, Kings, Picassos, Streeps, Ophrahs, Harrison Fords. We forget that we are all born creative, that if it weren’t for creativity, we probably would still be living in caves. And at every step in our creative expression, synchronicity is there to guide us, inform us, and remind us that we are here to create and to do so joyfully.

Sure, there have been plenty of dysfunctional creative people – Nicola Tesla, despite his brilliance and creativity, battled constantly against poverty and emotional pain. Van Gogh chopped off his own ear and never made a penny from his art. F Scott Fitzgerald drank himself into an early grave and Hemingway put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

But for every creative misfit, there are many more individuals who have the creative equivalent of the Midas touch, a magical something that transforms the mundane, the utterly ordinary, into something unique. When we enter their homes or workplaces, that magic is evident everywhere, an ineffable quality that’s hard to pin down. We immediately sense they are connected to something larger than themselves, that that have tapped into a creative flow that spills over into every area of their lives.

One of our neighbors, for instance, can fix anything. A washing machine, a water heater, an AC unit, a plane’s engine.  Give him an engineering or mechanical challenge, he’ll solve it. He doesn’t even acknowledge that synchronicity exists, but he recognizes connections between inner and outer events.

Then there’s the Reiki healer who shifts energy around in the physical body, correcting whatever is wrong. Or the medium who connects with the departed and brings messages to the living that offer hope.

Creative  dreamers are able to glean information about the past, present and future through their dreams. In some instances,  they appear to communicate with other dreamers of their ilk and may help to bring a new paradigm or belief system into being.

Planetary empaths are so intimately connected to the magnetic fluctuations in the earth that they experience physical symptoms before a natural disaster occurs and are able to determined whether the disaster is an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, or something else.

Creativity is our birthright regardless of our culture, skin color, religious beliefs, the stuff that so often divides us. It is endemic to all life – plant, animal, human, other (visitors).  It’s the grease in the cogs, the driving force of life, the very thing  that makes us what we are. And synchronicity is its voice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in creativity, synchronicity | 37 Comments

The Synchros of a Government Shutdown

Posted on April 8, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Just the phrase, government shutdown has such a forbidding tone to it.  But what does it mean when the U.S. government shuts down? Well, that seems to depend on which political party is trying to explain it.

The right wing Tea Party types rage about the out of control spending in the government. Yet, during the eight years of Bush, they never let out a peep about the massive amounts of $ that went into the creation of the TSA, Homeland Security, or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, that administration gave tax cuts to the wealthiest one or two percent of Americans.  Since the Obama administration foolishly extended those tax cuts, the conservatives want to cut social programs – Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. Meanwhile, they refuse to touch 88 percent of the budget that largely includes defense spending. They actually want to give the Pentagon more money.

They want to cut education, too, you know, that socialist program that enables every child to receive a free education from kindergarten through high school. They want to eliminate unions that represent employees of these social programs – you know, teachers and policemen and firemen. The real core of this whole thing, though, is the social agenda, which boils down to two things: cut funding for Planned Parenthood and to the EPA. In other words, deny women access to health services and don’t bother regulating the pollution in the air we breathe.The dems say they won’t cave on these two issues. But we wonder.

It seems they always cave to Republican demands. Even when they had the majority, they caved in the interests of “bipartisanship.” John Boehner, the majority leader for the Repugs, wanted 32 million in cuts; the Dems gave him $33 million. Or is it up to $35 billion? But money really isn’t the point. It’s those two critical social issues for them.

From a Huffington Post article on this topic: “A government shutdown  occurs when a government discontinues providing services that are not considered “essential.” Typically, essential services include police, fire fighting, armed forces, utilities and corrections. Interestingly, Congress and the President are exempt from the furlough and continue to receive compensation despite the fact that other services are suspended.”

The last time this happened was in 1995, under Clinton, when Gingrich was majority leader. Even though Clinton came out of it stronger in the polls, look at what happened to him afterward – the Lewinsky scandal, impeachment,  a personal shutdown. Clinton recovered, of course, and has gone on to become, like Carter, a stellar ex-president.  But what does this bode for Obama?

On March 23, he was locked out of the White House, certainly not a good sign for keeping the government functioning. In fact, if the shutdown occurs, the lockout was a precognitive synchronicity.

If the government shuts down, it means our massive interest payments on debt to China and other countries won’t be paid. That alone could spell cataclysm to financial markets. On a personal level, Social Security checks will be delayed, no new applications for SS or Medicare will be taken, even checks to the troops will be delayed. During the last shutdown in the 90s, about.com reports that more than 800,000 calls about SSD claims went unanswered, that FHA mortgages and loans were delayed,  and forget obtaining a passport. Oh, and don’t count on a tax refund getting to you any time soon.

Of course, certain functions within the government are exempt from a shutdown. The war machine continues. Members of Congress continue to receive their pay checks and benefits and so do employees in the executive branch. But if you tighten the torture screws on the general populace  to the point where  the pain becomes unbearable, revolution ensues, something shifts, and it isn’t because of weapons and violence. It’s due to a tipping point in consciousness. And that’s what 2012 may be about.

If Obama, the man who ran on a mantra of change, wins the 2012 election, it probably won’t be by the huge margins that ushered him into office in 2008. The synchros and signs seem clear on that. Part of the reason  is the disenchantment of the Left, which sees Obama backtracking on closing Gitmo, getting out of Iraq, rescinding the Patriot Act, and eliminating big tax breaks for the richest Americans. If those voters stay home in 2012, Obama is in trouble.

Meanwhile, he continues to attempt to appease conservatives, who are not impressed. Whatever action Obama takes, they’re opposed to it. Libya is a great example. The warmongers, who supported and continue to defend Bush’s two wars, suddenly turned into war critics. Talk about hypocrisy.

We’re entering a period of transition where nothing is certain, there are no guarantees. That’s why so many are grasping for the good ol’ days, clinging to the past. But it’s all up for grabs and where these chips fall seems to depend on our collective consciousness, on how closely we listen to and follow our personal synchros.

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in global, obama, politics | 58 Comments

A Ghostly Invite

Posted on April 7, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Earlier this week, Trish received a call from a writer friend on the other coast of Florida, who in the course of their conversation invited us to come for a visit. She explained that her middle daughter, L, has been experiencing ghostly encounters in her room at night, and she won’t sleep in the room any longer. She also insists that the only person who can rid her room of the ghost is Trish.

That comment baffled Trish. She has never attempted to chase away a phantasm. We’ve met the girl in question a couple of times. She’s in her mid-teens, seems to possess psychic abilities, and has a strong interest in the subject.

Since we were planning to visit daughter Megan in a couple of weeks as she finishes her college undergrad studies, the invitation will work out. But even before making the trip we’ve experienced a couple of related synchros.

The day following that conversation, the copyedited galleys arrived for Synchronicity and the Other Side, and we were busy reading the chapters when we got a call from Megan. She was alone in the art building working in her studio when she heard a chair moving on the other side of the partition. When she heard it again, she decided to take a look to see who had quietly arrived.

No one was there. She returned to her studio, started painting again, and heard the chair moving and bumping against the partition. At that point, Megan headed for the door, and called Trish.

Hmm, two ghost-related calls in the same week.  But here’s what prompted me to write about it. Just as Megan called and told her story, I’d taken a break from reading the galleys. After the call, I went back and the very next line I read was: “I’ve heard rapping sounds that have no apparent cause.”

It’s the first line of the second paragraph of chapter 9, Objects of Interest, which is about how spirits use objects to communicate….yes, like rolling a chair into a partition. That one isn’t in the book, but maybe it should be.

 

 

Posted in spirt communication | 48 Comments