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In writing Sensing the Future, our book on precognition, I’m confirming what I already suspected: that our concept of time and our approach to science are subject to revision.

In my research, I always go to a book’s index first and scan the listings under P, looking for precognition. Most of the time, if it’s there at all, it’s as a footnote on a particular page. It seems that many scientists are uncomfortable with the term precognition but not with the word premonition. Rupert Sheldrake is a notable exception.

In The Sense of Being Stared At, he has several chapters on precognition. He admits that precognition is the most puzzling of all psychic phenomena. “How could we possibly sense something that has not yet occurred?… It raises deep questions about freedom and determinism. If we know something is going to happen, does that mean the future is fixed? And if the future is fixed, does that mean free will is an illusion?”

It’s challenging to write about precognition without delving into this question. But Sheldrake does a masterful job of explaining that the old paradigm of a mechanistic universe has been turned on its head through recent discoveries in quantum physics. Through attention and intention, he says, “our minds stretch out into the world beyond our bodies…Even the relatively determined near future is predictable only in terms of probabilities.” Take weather forecasts, for instance. Or economic forecasts. Or the forecasts that insurers use. “Indeterminacy lies at the heart of quantum physics. Predictions are possible only in terms of probability. My intentions affect the future.”

Interestingly, his thoughts are echoed in the Seth material, more than 6,000 pages that were channeled by author Jane Roberts and resulted in more than 20 books on the nature of reality. Seth described himself as an “energy personality essence no longer focused in physical existence,” and the basis of his material is that we create our own realities through our intentions, expectations, beliefs – through our consciousness. He stated that every earthly event played out in all its probable states and that we are interconnected with these multidimensional/parallel universes. We just aren’t tuned in yet to that fact.

In this scenario, then, there would be a world in which the terrorists never crashed planes into the World Trade Center, where Al Gore had won the presidency, where the tragedies in Paris never happened. There would be a world where you married your childhood sweetheart and lived happily ever after. This idea, the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics, has been around since 1957, but has gained traction in recent years.

Every consciousness, according to Seth, “is dependent on upon every other. The strength of one adds to the strength of all. The weakness of one weakens the whole. The energy of one recreates the whole. The striving of one increases the potentiality of everything that is, and this creates responsibility upon every consciousness.” In other words, folks, we’re all in this together.

Seth also noted that precognition occurs in evolution so that a species can prepare itself now for changes that will be necessary in the future. Is that why so many people had precognitions about 9-11? About the Boston Marathon bombings? About other man-made and natural disasters?

“The fact is that each of you create your own physical reality: and en masse you create both the glories and the terrors that exist within your earthly experience.”

So, I’m discovering that Sensing the Future is a book in which quantum physics and metaphysics run for awhile on parallel tracks and then blend seamlessly together.

This synchronicity comes from Terry Crowley, a writer we met at the Tallahassee Writer’s Conference last spring. We’ve posted a couple of her synchros before. This one is about how some decisions/situations haunt us for years and then some synchro happens that clears it up! I’m not sure where this falls in the scheme of synchronicity – helpful synchro? Resolution synchro? I think it’s a meld of both.

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One morning, on the way home from running errands, Terry was pondering relationships and thought of an old friend she hadn’t heard from in years. “I didn’t magically hear from her; that’s not the synchro. What I was thinking about was a situation that happened between us.

“I had a meeting I was in charge of and had to attend, but my friend wanted me to be in her wedding.  I decided to change the date of the meeting so I could attend the wedding, but then she changed the date of the wedding to the same date of the meeting again! I was now between a rock and a hard place. I decided I had to decline her invitation and attend the meeting instead.”

For years, Terry beat herself up about this decision. She finally decided to look at O Magazine, which she never had time to do these days. “One of my favorite columnists is Martha Beck, so I turned immediately to her article Right This Ways! (plural “s”), which talks about how some social decisions are just impossible to make, but she provides some ideas on how to make those decisions. Beck described the EXACT scenario I faced 43 years ago!! The exact decision that I have been periodically beating myself up about for all of those years. To make matters worse, I later found out that several of the attendees at the meeting were mad because they had to miss another wedding they wanted to attend, too!

“Thankfully,  I can now let this no-win scenario go. I tried to do the my best for my friend. The circumstance was out of my control, even though I did my best to control it, and much to the chagrin of others. This was a happy synchro to have had because I can now stop second-guessing myself the next time this pops into my head. The article also made me realize how much I have been thinking about this decision from so long ago!”

Signs & symbols surround us and many of them hold messages that we should heed. Guidelines. Insights. Hints about the future that may transpire.

In October when we were in Asheville, we went into a shop where Megan decorated a ceramic plate that was a tribute to and a gift for her roommate, Erin. I don’t recall what it said, but do remember that it was a nice tribute to their friendship. The plate was to be delivered once it was fired.

A few weeks later Rob and I were visiting Megan and noticed the ceramic plate from Asheville on the counter. It was broken and chipped. A tube of super glue sat beside it. “What happened?” Rob asked.

“Oh, Erin put it in the dishwasher and it broke when we took it out,” Megan replied. “I’m going to fix it with super glue.”

Later that evening, Rob remarked, “That’s not a good sign, Trish, about her continuing to live here.”

“Oh, c’mon,” I said, “They’ve already agreed that she’ll sign a new contract on December 2. It’s fine. The broken plate is a fluke.”

Erin, after all, is a woman Megan has known for a decade, since she was 16 and she and Erin were interning at Dolphins Plus in Key Largo. They maintained a friendship over the years and when Megan moved to Orlando, she and Megan reconnected. In late 2014, Erin’s parents bought a great little house on an acre of land that backed up a lake, and Erin asked Megan to live with her. Nika, Megan’s dog, had a great yard to run around in and chase squirrels and Megan had her art room filled with paintings. An ideal setup. The house was close to Megan’s dog walking clients and her Paint Nite venues. She has been really happy in this house.

But Rob kept referring back to the broken plate, how it was like a symbol from a dream that you’re supposed to pay attention to. We had both been reading Robert Moss’s book, The Boy Who Died and Came Back, and I felt we were unduly influenced by it. I mean, c’mon, sometimes events are just stuff that happens, right?

Shortly before Thanksgiving, Megan and I returned from a trip to Asheville, North Carolina, where we attended an Abraham-Hicks two-day conference. The conference was wonderful, the trip was great, but as soon as we walked into Megan’s place in Orlando, there was that plate still on the counter chipped and broken, still not repaired. That night when Erin got home from work, she seemed strangely preoccupied, uneasy, and I felt that maybe she resented my presence there as Megan’s mom. She said she was just stressed from work. I felt otherwise.

I kept obsessing about the broken plate, that broken tribute to a friendship.Fast forward to November 30. Megan had arrived back in Orlando after the Thanksgiving holidays and had gone out and bought a Christmas tree for the house. Our neighbor had given us some Christmas ornaments that I passed on to Megan and I’d found some Christmas lights on sale that I passed on to her.

But when she walked in the house that evening, Erin informed Megan that her brother had gotten a job in Orlando and wanted to live in the house and Megan would have to move out. All this, despite the fact that they had discussed the renewed contract and living together for another four or five years. She had known this since before Thanksgiving- when I’d felt her unease.

Erin’s argument? He’s my brother, what can I say? Well, the only thing to say here is that Erin’s parents own the house.

My dad bought me my first property, a one bedroom condo in Vero Beach, back in the day when 15 grand was a lot of money. He never tried to control what I did with that place, who I invited there, who I lived with, nothing. It was mine. My rent went to him. When I sold the place, I kept the profit and used it for a down payment on another condo, in Fort Lauderdale. In other words there were never strings attached.

Rob recognized the sign and Megan and I refused to acknowledge.

I don’t know if the friendship is as broken as the plate.But the living arrangement is broken. The big question now is: what’s next? We’ve found a one bedroom-place that may work, in the same general area in Orlando. We’ll see what signs and symbols have to say and proceed from there. Never again will I dismiss a sign as some random event. As Robert Hopcke said in his book by the same name, There Are No Accidents. We do not live in a random universe. The only question is simple: Are we paying attention?

If there’s no trickery involved in this video – and it doesn’t look like there is – then this 9-year-old girl is astonishing!

If I were going to have my dreams analyzed by a psychiatrist, I would choose Bernard Beitman, a visiting professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia. Never mind that he claims he is no expert in dreams. He’s a Jungian, who also happens to be the first psychiatrist since Jung to embark on a serious study of synchronicity. His book, Connecting with Coincidence, will be published in March 2016, by the same folks who published Chicken Soup of the Soul.

Dr. Beitman also blogs for Psychology Today, where this particular article appeared.

Beitman believes that coincidences can be useful to psychotherapists in their treatment of patients. As he develops his coincidence studies, he looks to the usefulness of coincidences. “I analyze the role people play in creating their own coincidences. While shaping this previously abstract, philosophical topic into a more solid science, magic is not lost on me. In fact, it is that transcendental feeling created by coincidences that started my quest. I suppose this is the case to a certain degree in all scientific exploration,” he writes.

When Beitman was in his late twenties, he felt like a kid who had found his way into a “strange new land that it seemed few people had visited.” Sound familiar? You bet. Many of us who experience synchronicity have felt this very thing. Bernard writes that he felt like he’d wandered into the “Coincidence Forest,” where magic resonated. “I ran back through the tunnel to tell other people what I saw. Most of them did not know what I was talking about.”

Years ago, I recall saying this very thing to my former college roommate. “Don’t you ever wonder how it all fits together?” I asked.

She was a family court judge at the time, a woman who determined whether you would get custody of your children, how your joint assets would be split in the divorce, that kind of meaty, fundamental stuff. And she replied, “Sure. I wonder. But I don’t obsess about it, Trish.”

And yes, maybe there is some obsession in here about synchronicity. It’s such a strange but familiar phenomenon that when it happens repeatedly in your life, aren’t you compelled to figure it out? Or, at the least, to figure out what it means for you?

When Beitman was younger, he woke up choking one night. He later found out that it happened at the exact time that his father was choking to death in his home thousands of miles away.  His name for this type of synchroncity is simulpathity – feeling another’s distress at a distance. It’s synchronicity and empathy slamming together at the same moment. Mothers often experience this kind of thing with their children. Identical twins experience it, as we wrote about here. But any of us can experience it with people we love.

For Jung, this journey started with the scarab beetle that appeared on the window of his office just as a patient was relating a dream about such a beetle. He opened the window, a beautiful symbolic gesture that enabled his patient to make the connection between her dreams and the real world.

As Beitman says: “Jung saw a need for ‘human understanding’ to break through his patient’s resistance to his treatment. Though it isn’t clear what ‘human understanding’ meant to Jung in this case, we can infer that it contrasts with the excessive rationality that Jung says characterized the patient.   It is clear that he sees the coincidence as a way of achieving his therapeutic goal.”

In his study of coincidence, Beitman has found that its creation “favors the prepared mind.” In other words are you open and receptive to meaningful coincidence?

Jung, says Beitman, was a conduit for the scarab coincidence. “Had he not opened the window and let the beetle in, the connection might never have been made between the woman’s inner and outer worlds. The scarab beetle also had significance for Jung. It had appeared previously as a symbol in his own visions. Perhaps this added to his instrumental role in creating the coincidence.”

What Beitman hopes to do with his book and with Coincidence Studies is to illustrate how meaningful coincidence is an actual force that enables us to live more creative, happy, and loving lives.

Sounds good to me. I cant wait to read his book!

HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL OUR FRIENDS IN THE U.S. !!

History has a version of Thanksgiving about pilgrims and the new world. But for me, it’s always been a time to be thankful for what exists in my life now.

Rob and Megan: hub and daughter on the dog beach in Jupiter, Florida. That thing in the sky is a kite; kite boarders were everywhere today.

Our dogs, Nika and Noah:  at the dog beach.  I think Noah is whispering in her ear and trying to get her to do something she doesn’t want to do.

The beach: This is the dog beach. No leashes. See all those prints in the sand? Dog prints! The wind was really blowing and the surf was rough, but it wasn’t hot!

Nika, pooped after excursion at the dog beach, resting her head on Noah’s butt.

Books: we’re surrounded by them. Here are two of our messy bookshelves.

Writing:  that’s my dad’s ancient typewriter. I wrote my first 5 unpublished novels on a similar machine. This artifact reminds me of where I started.

That redhead in the background is Esther Hicks. Megan and I attended a two-day Abraham-Hicks workshop in Asheville, North Carolina, at the Grove Park Inn.   It was strange, surreal, and powerful. But that’s a separate post.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL OUR FRIENDS IN THE U.S. But honestly, if the day is about gratitude, isn’t it international? Universal?

We’ve written about travel-related synchronicities  here a number of times, even wrote a related book called The Syncronicity Highway. When traveling it seems more opportunities arise for meaningful coincidence. Here’s a good one we noticed on Facebook that was taken from a London newspaper—a doppelganger synchro.

These two men are not brothers. On the flight in late October from London to Galway, 32-year-old Neil Douglas was surprised to find a man that looked exactly like him sitting in his seat. The doppelganger, 35-year-old Robert Stirling, had changed seats so that a couple could sit together.

“I asked him to move and when the guy looked up, I thought: “Holy s***, he looks like me” Douglas told Daily Mail. “I later checked into my hotel in Galway to find my doppelganger checking into the same hotel ahead of me…We ended up socializing and quite a few people pointed out that we looked very similar.”

Cheers!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvqtO6lgFyI

The title of the post doesn’t do this guy justice. This man may be the paragon of synchronicity thru passion, creativity, art.

This photo was taken inside a bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina, one of the dog friendliest cities I’ve ever visited. Noah isn’t quite sure what he’s doing inside a place like this, which is expressly forbidden in bookstores in South Florida, but he eventually relaxes into it.

The Arcade Bookstore has a coffee and wine bar inside, and zillions of amazing books – mostly used. Here, I found autographed first editions by Carl Sandburg and a number of other authors. I realized these books were part of people’s passion for rare first editions. They were pricey, but fascinating to see. I have recently been re-reading William Goldman’s Control, and  in the store found a signed edition of Marathon Man, which I bought for ten bucks.

This is the kind of bookstore where book people love to wander, browse, sample, and sit awhile. There are tables, chairs, and couches everywhere. Here, book people walk around in a kind of stupor, touching, marveling, opening books at random. I could live in here. I often wonder if places like this are found in the afterlife.

Everything in the store is labeled, well-organized, by genres, authors, topics. This is the kind of bookstore where you and your dog arrive, find a book, buy a coffee, and settle in for the day.

The Arcade Bookstore is vastly different from some of the other bookstores in town, more traditional stores that don’t allow dogs. Inside, these stores have a lack of couches and chairs that invite you to sit down and stick around for awhile. Although these stores are independent, they followed the same type of bureaucracy that chain bookstores do.

I checked out the astrology section in this other bookstore, for instance, to see if Unloocking the Secrets to Scorpio was included. It wasn’t, so I approached the clerk at the front desk and handed him a postcard for the book. He gave me the name of the head buyer and suggested that I email her. I did. I never got a reply. In my mind, her silence became synonymous with the fact that they don’t allow dogs in their store- i.e., not too friendly.

When this connection first occurred to me, my  left brain dismissed it as silly, irrelevant. But my right brain knows better. Part of that is because not too long after we left the bookstore, we headed toward the general store, where Rob and I took turns waiting outside with the dogs. While I was out there, an employee came up to me and said the dogs were welcome inside. This general store is larger than the bookstore, has more delicate things that can be broken by unruly dogs. But the dogs behaved just fine.

And that’s how it is with dogs. They’re curious but not naturally destructive. They listen, they understood, they go with the flow regardless of how strange it is to them. They would be more inclined to carry off merchandise from the general store than from the bookstore that won’t allow them inside.

Overall, I was truly impressed by the welcome mat that Asheville has set out for dogs, bowls of water outside most places, treats for the dogs, lots of pats. They ate it up. And so did we.

Here’s a Jungian description of terrorism. Worth reading.

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“Terrorism is a manifestation of the psyche. It is time we recognized the psyche as an autonomous factor in world affairs.

“The psychological root of terrorism is a fanatical resentment – a quasi-psychotic hatred originating in the depths of the archetypal psyche and therefore carried by religious (archetypal) energies. A classic literary example is Melville’s Moby Dick. Captain Ahab, with his fanatical hatred of the White Whale, is a paradigm of the modern terrorist.

“Articulate terrorists generally express themselves in religious (archetypal) terminology. The enemy is seen as the Principle of Objective Evil (Devil) and the terrorist perceives himself as the “heroic” agent of divine or Objective Justice (God). This is an archetypal inflation of demonic proportions which temporarily grants the individual almost superhuman energy and effectiveness. To deal with terrorism effectively we must understand it.

“We need a new category to understand this new phenomenon. These individuals are not criminals and are not madmen although they have some qualities of both. Let’s call them zealots. Zealots are possessed by transpersonal, archetypal dynamisms deriving from the collective unconscious. Their goal is a collective, not a personal one. The criminal seeks his own personal gain; not so the zealot. In the name of a transpersonal, collective value – a religion, an ethnic or national identity, a “patriotic” vision, etc. – they sacrifice their personal life in the service of their “god.” Although idiosyncratic and perverse, this is fundamentally a religious phenomenon that derives from the archetypal, collective unconscious. Sadly, the much-needed knowledge of this level of the psyche is not generally available. For those interested in seeking it, I recommend a serious study of the psychology of C.G. Jung.

– from the Archetype of the Apocalypse (1999), “Editor’s Preface,” p. xvii.