Weird or What?

Posted on February 11, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Today, Rob and I took a break and went biking with the two dogs out at the Grassy Waters Wilderness Preserve, the place where he had a lost dog synchro. I hadn’t been there before and was eager to see it.

My first impression was that the preserve is truly old Florida, the way the state looked before everything was developed and paved over. The paths were shaded by palmetto trees, scrubby pines, and the odd cypress trees whose roots protrude everywhere, little knobs of wood that stick up out of the ground, like dislocated elbows or  knees.

Rob’s bike navigated the damp and sometimes muddy path much better than my bike – which is intended for solid ground, smooth sidewalks. At one point, he and the dogs were well ahead of me and I was coming around a sharp, wet corner and slammed down the tail end of what I think was a snake.  It whipped away from me, and I was so freaked out I didn’t stop to go back for a look. I shouted, “Hey, I think I just ran over a snake, Rob!”

“It’s not a snake,” he called back.  “It’s a palm frond.”

No way, I thought. Palm fronds don’t slither and whip from side to side as they move. Just in case I was right, that I had actually run over a snake, I held an image of it in my mind and apologized. I’m no fans of snakes, but the idea of injuring or killing one is abhorrent. I recalled how years ago when Megan was small and we were living in another house, I walked out into the living room one morning and found what I thought was coral snake, coiled in the middle of the floor, with one of the cats dancing around it. I scooped up the cat and shut her in one of the bedrooms, then ran back into the living room, shouting for Rob to come take a look.

There’s an old saying about how to tell a coral snake from its non-venemous doppelganger: Red to yellow, kill a fellow; red to black, venom lack. The snake in the living room was red to black. Using a broom, Rob got it into a paper bag and released it outside. Not long after this incident,  we got a contract for a writing project. So my thought about this snake was that good news of some sort was on the way.

Considering how wild this preserve is, with vast stretches of open wetlands that we crossed on wooden boardwalks, like the one in the photo above, followed by dense foliage and trees, I had expected to see gators, wading birds, deer, hawks. But the only other wildlife we saw was a squirrel, which the dogs spotted first. In retrospect, the absence of other wildlife seemed as significant as the snake.

So when we got home, I started Googling snakes as totem animals. The snake symbolizes fertility, rebirth, transformation, healing.  Traditionally, the squirrel gathers up the food it needs to survive winter, so the esoteric meaning is about preparation, ridding yourself of what you no longer need – physical stuff, but also negative beliefs.  In South Florida, winter consists of a few weeks now and then between November and February and this year, we’ve had maybe two days of temps in the forties. So I decided that the squirrels out in the preserve may have a different esoteric meaning altogether.

About an hour after we got home, we got an email from a woman who works for William Shatner’s show, Weird or What?  We had been corresponding with her since late January, when she sent us an intriguing email: Could we give her a number where she could call us so we could talk about the Pauli effect?

So we’re going to be flying to Toronto for an interview on Weird or What? and will have a chance to talk about Pauli – and synchronicity. There’s a certain irony about the name of the show. For years, Rob and I felt like the weirdos in the universe because of our beliefs. Perhaps the trickster is at work here?

Here’s a segment from Weird or What with Whitley Strieber.

 

Posted in 7 Secrets, animals as messengers, synchronicity | 11 Comments

Big Brother and the Internet

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Trish and Rob

We recently received an email from a woman who follows our blog. She wished the blog happy third birthday and said she had chosen not to comment publicly because of the way the government now monitors the internet, blogs, website, with greater depth. Here’s the link about it.

“The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS)’s Media Monitoring Initiative (MMI) has been expanded to collect and track information from online forums, blogs, public websites, message boards, and social networking sites, as well as gather “personally identifiable information” (PII) on journalists and media writers,” says the article.

Interestingly, we’ve noticed an uptick in the number of hits by military ISPs lately. These hits often come from Arlington, Virginia or from obscure town in Maryland, or from Washington, D.C. The hits from D.C. are sometimes from the State Department or the “District of Columbia government.”

Once, last year, we got a hit from the White House after one of Obama’s speeches. But that doesn’t count in this context because it appeared that someone in the Obama administration was looking for reactions to his speech out here  in blogland.  What counts here, I think, is that the government realizes blogging is a dynamic way of exchanging information, increasing awareness, of changing minds. They also understand that social media is, of course, as witnessed in the Mideast, a way to organize a revolution, a rebellion, or just a protest.

Our friend mentioned that she has seen many blogs simply disappear because bloggers fear they’re being monitored. That’s tragic. The Bush administration’s mantra was,  Be afraid, be very afraid, they’re coming for you, watching you, we’ll protect you….  And in the several years after 9-11, they were successful with their fear message. But as people woke up, they realized Bush was like the wizard in Oz, a small, pathetic man whose power lay in the people around him – Rove, Wolfowitz, Cheney. These guys were the ones who spun the illusions.

If bloggers go silent, if blogs vanish because of fear, if social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook begin to censor, then how are we different from China? South Korea?  Cuba? I emailed the link to several people and one friend who responded  feels that the last remnant of democracy vanished in December …presumably when Obama signed a bill that allows the military to indefinitely detain American citizens without trial. If you look suspicious, if you act suspiciously, you are basically screwed.

In just the last year, the number of names on the U.S. No-Fly list has doubled. Why? Have we been attacked? Are there new threats? Well, if you watch the new TV show Homeland,   and there’s any semblance of truth to it, then the answer is yes, and the people who guard our security are the most paranoid on the face of the planet.

I can’t imagine what a military information-gathering unit can find in posts about the mysterious, hidden, implicate order from which synchronicities unfold. I can’t imagine what material they would find in in any of the blogs we follow that constitutes a security threat. But hey, maybe while they’re checking out these blogs they run across something that resonates for them. Lights go off in their heads, sirens shriek, they are floored, stunned, and their worldviews shift.  Now that would be something, wouldn’t it?

And that’s why no blogger should retreat in fear. We all have something to contribute to the paradigm shift. We all have wisdom to share.

 

Posted in synchronicity | 21 Comments

Psychometry and Cassadaga

Posted on February 9, 2012 by Trish and Rob

You enter a room and hand the person in front of you something that you wear or use, that has touched your skin. The longer the object has been in contact with your body, the stronger the vibe, the frequency, whatever it is that a psychometrist reads about you and your life in that object.

Psychometry is the most mysterious yet plausible kind of psychic ability, at least to me. In my worldview, it makes perfect sense that a piece of jewelry I  wear, that a cell phone permanently pressed to my ear, carries something of me that a psychic might read.

Back in the 1970s,when I was still in my twenties and in graduate school, an impulse prompted me to drive from Tallahassee to Cassadaga for a reading. I’d read something about this Spiritualist town of psychics – probably a Halloween piece,  when the mainstream media back then – and yes, even now – felt it was okay to write about things that go bump in the night.

The actual Spiritualist camp hasn’t changed much in all these decades. The streets remain narrow, the air strangely still, and if you listen closely to that stillness, you may hear the whispers of ghost, spirits, the deceased. Everyone who lives here supposedly believes that there is no such thing as death, that the soul simply moves on. We’ve written about Cassadaga  before.

In spite of spirituality, humans are political creatures and politics in Cassadaga are very much alive. According to the camp board, the folks who live and work across the street from the Cassadaga Hotel are not genuine, and those inside the confines of the camp are the real McCoy. We’ve found both sides to be equally good. You just have to follow your hunches about where to get a reading.

That day in the 1970s, I knocked on the door of the first house that felt right to me, and had a reading from a man confined to his bed, a quadriplegic, a psychometrist. He asked for a personal object and I gave him a topaz ring that I’d worn for years. His hands still worked and his fingers closed over my ring and after a bit, he started to talk. I no longer remember the specifics, but I know he read me backward and forward, inside and out. I kind of staggered out of there.

Some years later, this man, Wilbur Hull, connected Rob and me to Hazel Burley, who had studied under Hull, but as a medium rather than a psychometrist. Years later, Cassadaga was where Rob and I discovered we were going to be creative partners, that we would marry and have a daughter. It’s where Megan learned her Disney internship will turn into a full-time job. And she learned this through Tracy, a psychometrist located in that part of Cassadaga deemed non-genuine. Ha.

After Megan emerged from her reading, her face was lit up like high noon. “She’s incredible. She held my cell phone and shut her eyes and for the first fifteen minutes, I never said a word. But it was like she knew me.” Megan then read from her hastily scribbled notes about what Tracy had predicted for her during the next two to three years, most of it positive and wondrous.

So I knocked on the door and asked for a reading.   Tracy and I sat in her front office. She explained that she did her readings by holding a personal object, so I handed her my wedding ring. She shut her eyes and started talking. The first thing she picked up on was my dad – an older gentleman in spirit who is emotionally close to me.  And then she mentioned a child in spirit, a boy, a brother, something many psychics have mentioned over the years.  Two or three years after I was born and before my sister’s birth, my mother got pregnant and the baby, a boy, was stillborn.. This is when I knew the woman was genuine. “Your brother facilitates things for you, makes certain things easier. He’s always around you.”

She spoke for about fifteen minutes and, like Megan,  I didn’t say anything and was surprised at how much she knew about me and the people around me. She had some terrific predictions about the next two to three years, so I hope she’s correct.

After the reading, I asked how the information came to her – in images? Words?  Feelings? She explained it was a combination of things. Sometimes she hears whispers – names, for instance, often come to her that way. Other times, she seems images, places, people’s faces. In health matters, she often feels the client’s aches and pains.

I told her my first reading in Cassadaga years ago was with another psychometrist, Wilbur Hull. She remembered him.  “The parapelegic,” she said. “He used to do his readings from his bed.”

“That’s how he read for me. You’re every bit as good as he was.”

With that, she handed me her card, I paid her, and ducked back out into the cool evening air, feeling more upbeat and optimistic than I have in a long time.

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This photo is from inside the Cassadaga Hotel. Cell phone pic, but it gives you an idea of the quaintness of the lobby, like some place lost in time.  That sign on the stand, by the way, is advertising a ghost tour.

 

 

 

 

Posted in Cassadaga, psychics, psychometry, synchronicity | 22 Comments

A Cluster of 11s from Brazil!

Posted on February 8, 2012 by Trish and Rob

 

A reader from Brazil, Rita Galloro,  sent us the following email about the Portuguese version of 7 Secrets of Synchronicity.

Hello Trish and Rob,

I’m just fascinated with this book! I always have been interested about this theme and 3 weeks ago I was at a library and asked for the universe to send me a book to understand some phases in my life. You won’t be surprise to know which book I chose.

I have some synchronicties in my life…some of them are really simple – like taking a  number to be attended to at the hospital and realizing that these 4 numbers are my extension in my office or bills in the same day with the same price. But I can highlight other ones:

1) How I realized I was with the right person, my actual husband. I met him in 2006 and we just felt in love at the first sight. But I’m Brazilian and he’s Argentian. So our 2nd date was 2 years after our 1st date. We started to date and know more about each other. First coincidence: his name is Victor and his sister is named Lorena. When I was young these were the names I chose for any children I would have in the future. Second one: His mother’s name was Maria do Carmo; my mother’s second name is that – Sueli Maria do Carmo. The last one: We both have the same religion, Umbanda. Even though it’s commom in Brazil, in Argentina it’s not so easy to find.

2) When I’m feeling down or insecure some lady bugs just appear for me and disappear! Many times in my room, on my arm, in my clothes. So the first day I left my parent’s home I was in the bathroom asking myself if I made the right decision. I was not surprised when I saw in the mirror a lady bug just looking at me. Oh…just forgot to tell…I’m on the 12th floor in the middle of a busy street.

So…my question is: Is it on purpose that the  material about 11:11:11 is on  page 111? Is it just  in Portuguese edition? And isn’t that a synchronicity?:)

Thanks you both for the enjoyable reading!

Rita Galloro

So we immediately checked the English version of 7 Secrets. The 11:11 material doesn’t begin on p 111 – but on page 92! 9+2=11.

The day before we received Rita’s email, I was at Barnes and Noble and found a book by Gary Schwartz called The G.O.D. Experiments. I looked in the index and found synchronicity listed, then read Schwartz’s personal story – Extraordinary Synchronicity in New York City. His sequence of experiences with 11s launched the search he talks about in this book. I immediately  bought the book – and will review it when I’m done.

So for several days running, there have been clusters of 11s popping up all over the place.

Rita sent us a link to the store where she bought the book:

 

 

 

 

Posted in 11, synchronicity | 15 Comments

Little doggie synchro

Posted on February 6, 2012 by Trish and Rob


Super Bowl Sunday found me out on a trail ride in the morning in Grassy Waters Wilderness Preserve. The bike trail covers about 18 miles and it was the first time my friend Tacayo and I had explored the preserve. At the head of the trail, the sign said watch for alligators, bobcats, raccoons, opossums, and feral pigs. We saw none of them on this beautiful woodlands and wetlands ride.  But we found, of all things, a lost Pomeranian.

We had been riding for about 45 minutes and hadn’t seen a single person when we spotted a small furry creature on the trail about the size of a baby raccoon. Only it was a tiny dog with a lion’s mane. It was running towards us. We stopped, the dog stopped, then spooked and raced past us along the trail.

We figured its owner was nearby. But after riding ahead a couple of hundred yards and not seeing anyone, we realized the dog must be lost. We turned around and pedaled after it. If we were hiking, we never would’ve caught the dog. As it was, we backtracked half a mile before catching up. Again it stopped. Tacayo offered the pooch water. It turned tail and ran off again. We remounted and gave chase. This time we corralled the dog, a bike across the trail on either side, and I snagged its doll-sized harness.

Once in my arms, the little guy turned passive. I was able to ride with him in one arm as we continued on. Unfortunately, the dog had no collar or tag.  I was hoping it had an implant ID that a vet could find.

After a couple of miles, I noticed a housing development across a canal and behind a high wire fence. We rode another quarter mile when I spotted a woman and child in their backyard.  I stopped and asked if she knew anyone who had lost a dog.

She looked up and said, “Oh my God. That’s my neighbor’s dog. There are signs up all over the neighborhood. He’s been missing two weeks.” I got directions on how to reach the entrance to the development and she promised to meet me at the gate.

We rode on another twenty minutes and just as we reached the parking area, I hit a root and lost control of the bike. I rode into some shrubbery and managed a gentle fall that protected the dog, which never even flinched in my arm. After being lost for so long, it seemed as if it was ready for anything.

A few minutes later, we drove off and met the woman and the owner who were both waiting at the gate. The owner shouted, “Scooter! I can’t believe it! You’re alive.” He was ecstatic and explained how the dog had escaped through an open door, and he’d given chase but couldn’t catch him. He wanted to give me a reward. I said no thanks, but that he could play it forward and pass on the favor to someone else in need.

It still seems really remarkable that we found the owner. Definitely a synchronicity. But there’s another synchro involved in this story. When Megan adopted a puppy a few months ago, she was very curious about its breed. It looked like a smooth-furred border collie with all the right markings. But its head was not as narrow as a border collie, it had webbed feet like a lab, and we thought it might be mixed with a lab.

So we took a DNA swab on the inside of its cheek and sent it out for analysis. When the results came back, we were stunned and puzzled. The lab gave us three generations – great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents…and they were all the same mix. A pomeranian and an Australian kelpie.

Well, Nica looks nothing like a pom and we had to look up pictures of kelpies. They resemble medium-sized shepherds with pointed ears. Nica has floppy ears and doesn’t look much like a kelpie, either.  We decided the results were bogus. But for the past months, we’ve jokingly referred to Nica as a pom. In fact, the Pomeranian has become the default dog at the dog park. So it was somehow fitting that I encountered that particular breed  lost in the preserve. A super Sunday.


Nica – ‘the pom.’ Ha.

Posted in synchronicity | 12 Comments

Manifesting mass disorders

Posted on February 5, 2012 by Trish and Rob

 

In  Epidemics of the Middle Ages,  published in 1844, J. F. C. Hecker described how a nun in a large convent in France began to meow like a cat. Soon afterwards, other nuns joined her. Eventually all the nuns meowed together daily at certain times, often for hours.

As bizarre as it sounds, it wasn’t an isolated case. Hecker tells of dozens of such cases of mass hysteria in European convents.

A nun in a German nunnery one day started biting other nuns. Before long, all the nuns began biting each other. The news of this strange behavior spread, and it wasn’t long before nuns in other convents in Germany began biting each other. The mania spread to Holland and even infected Rome.

At the time it was believed that certain animals, such as wolves, could possess people and in France cats were considered familiar with the Devil. Demons and witches were blamed for these mass outbreaks of hysterical and delusional behavior.

So it’s fascinating to read in the paper recently that in the twenty-first century such mass disorders still occur.

In the Middle Ages, young girls were often forced to join isolated religious orders that practiced ‘tough love’  in confined, all-female living quarters. Along with vows of chastity and poverty, many nuns endured near-starvation diets, repetitious prayer rituals and lengthy fasts. They were flogged and incarcerated for even minor transgressions.

No wonder they lost it. In such conditions, they easily could have been open to possession from lower entities. (Young initiates in shamanism are also typically experience sensory deprivation in order to make contact with the spirit world. But in shamanism, the initiates are guided toward positive spirit contact.)

Of course, mainstream medical authorities don’t accept the demon explanation or even refer to such cases as mass hysteria. They call it a stress-induced psychological disorder – ‘mass sociogenic illness’ – or ‘conversion disorder’ – a puzzling name.

Whatever it’s called – and whatever the source – such cases are still happening. The most recent one involved 15 teenage girls who underwent a mysterious outbreak of spasms, tics and seizures in upstate New York. A few weeks ago, 600 girls in a Catholic boarding school in Chalco, Mexico suffered fever, nausea and buckling knees that caused many of them to lose their ability to walk. In 2007, eight girls in Roanoke, Virginia high school developed  symptoms like the upstate New York teens, and in 2002, ten teenage girls in a rural North Carolina high school had epileptic-like seizures and fainting spells.

One consistent finding among these recent cases was that doctors were unable to find any physical cause for the mass incidents. Also, most cases involve teenage girls.

Some researchers think that the way girls are socialized to deal with stress plays a role. In fact, one pediatric neurologist who interviewed ten of the girls in Le Roy, N.Y., the site of the latest case, said they all had ‘something big that happened,’ such as divorcing parents or some other major life transition.

Such mass disorders are also an example of synchronicity. Inner experiences of some sort are manifesting as physical symptoms and mysteriously spread from one person to another. The inability of modern medicine to find a source to such mass disorders leaves open the possibility of a link between unseen worlds and our everyday world.

 

 

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Posted in psychology, synchronicity | 13 Comments

Birthday #3

Posted on February 4, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Three years ago today, we put up our first post on this blog.  We had no idea where any of this would take us. Up until then, the people we knew who were even remotely interested in what fascinated us could be counted on one hand.  But over time, it became apparent that we had never been alone, that there were people all over the world experiencing the same kinds of phenomena we were and asking the same kinds of questions.

Now, three years later, something miraculous seems to be happening globally. More and more individuals are awakening to this underlying order in the universe, what physicist David Bohm called the implicate or enfolded order, a kind of primal soup out of which everything else, even time, is born. Synchronicity and all it entails seems to be one of the many voices of this enfolded order. It speaks to us constantly through signs and symbols, hunches and impulses and metaphors. Sometimes, it has a sense of humor, sometimes it’s dark and strange, but always, it attempts to seize our attention. Hey, you, listen up, this message is important.

We thank all of you for profoundly deepening and enriching our understanding of synchronicity, of psychic phenomena, of all that is hidden and unseen. Thank you for sharing your stories and experiences, your hearts and your souls.

Here’s the link for our first post on February 4, 2009.Tempus fugit, as my mother used to say. Time’s awasting’. I’m still trying to figure out where the last three years went!

 

Posted in synchronicity | 22 Comments

War, Neptune, and Hit Counters

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Trish and Rob

NASA’s pic of Neptune

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Hit counters like sitemeter and statcounter have various categories that provide specific information about the visitors to your blog or website. One of the most intriguing categories is the search term visitors use.

Whenever a word or phrase appears repeatedly over the course of several days, particularly if it’s something  I haven’t seen before, I take notice. That term could be a kind of oracle that points to an emerging pattern in the collective unconscious. In the past several days, we’ve had multiple hits for the word war.

Granted, with 7 billion people in the world, there are probably millions who daily Google that word. But in the three years since we started this blog, this word has never appeared as a search term in sitemeter. Never. I mentioned it to Rob in a sort of offhanded way, and explained that all these individuals landed on this post,  for its image.

The searches came from all over the world – war.  Why? War certainly isn’t a new concept. The Iraq and Afghanistan Wars aren’t new. But there it was, over and over again in sitemeter. War, war, war.

So this evening, February 2, 2012, I heard Wolf Blitzer on CNN talking about the possibility of Israel attacking Iran.  And if Israel attacks, that means it happens with the sanction of the U.S. and, perhaps, of other countries, too. (Good explanation about what’s going on.)

This news coincides with an astrological event that no one alive on the planet has ever experienced: today, at 2:03 EST,  Neptune enters Pisces, where it will be until 2026. It hasn’t been in that sign since 1844. History is our best measurement here about possible events, so let’s look back to some of the major events that occurred.

Neptune rules spirituality and escapism, our personal unconscious and dreams, our ideals and our blind spots and our illusions. It can be the archetype of the victim, the martyr, and dissolves the boundaries between ego and other. It urges us to reach and help others, to give something back. It is deeply inspirational, creative, innovative, intuitive, psychic.

Neptune  also rules religious fervor and zealotry, a kind of spiritual ping pong where each side is convinced he is right and knows it in his gut. But because Neptune is a subtle trickster,  neither side turns out to be spiritually correct. In fact, words like right and wrong no longer mean anything at all. There are only opinions and beliefs and all of them are flawed in some way. We can visualize the ideal, but it eludes us unless  we surrender to whatever it happening, go with the flow, read the synchros.

2012 isn’t about Armageddon. It’s about how we, as a human collective, as a mass consciousness, react to the events around us.  Do we cower in fear and or do we reach out and help a stranger? Do we allow ourselves to become victims or martyrs or do we become heroes when we step up to the plate and live our ideals? Do we start wars or try to negotiate peaceful, idealistic settlements?

I want to say that Neptune in Pisces is about living from the heart. That’s part of it, but not the whole picture. Yes, this 14-year transit is about compassion and empathy, but it’s also about intuitive understanding and  manifestation. If we can imagine it, if enough of us desire peace, tolerance, good will, and freedom for all and back this desire with powerful emotions, then the quantum wave becomes quantum particles and crashes into physical existence.  And then the world by 2026 is going to be a very different place.

I’m not sure how a post intended to be about hit counters and words as oracular patterns became a statement about war and Neptune and the choices ahead of us, but here you are. It must be an early taste of Neptune’s entrance in Pisces. Who am I? Where do I fit? Why am I here? How can I make a difference? These are Neptunian questions and they beg for answers.

 

Posted in astrology, Neptune, synchronicity, war | 17 Comments

Synchronicity and the Pauli Effect

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Last year, I bought Deciphering the Cosmic Number: the Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung. The book, by Arthur I. Miller, is fascinating and every so often, I pick it up periodically and read for the sheer delight.

Wolfgang Pauli, whom we’ve written about before,  was a theoretical physicist nominated by Einstein for a Nobel. He won the prize in 1945 for the “exclusion principle,” which involves spin theory and the periodic table of chemical elements and atomic structure. Thanks to Einstein, who called Pauli his successor, Pauli was offered permanent positions at Columbia and at the Institute for Advanced Study.  In 1946, he was granted U.S. citizenship and could have stayed in the United States just as Einstein had chosen to do. Instead, Pauli returned to Zurich partly because he missed his good friend Carl Jung. The two eventually began collaborating on a study of synchronicity.

In 7 Secrets of Synchronicity, secret 3 is that synchronicity is the granddaddy of all paranormal phenomena, telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, remote viewing – and telekinesis.  This means that Pauli was a testament to synchronicity. “From early on in his career, colleagues couldn’t help noticing that whenever he entered a laboratory, equipment spontaneously broke down,” wrote Miller. “The Pauli effect, as it became known, was obviously impossible; it had to be just a matter of coincidence. But nevertheless, it happened again and again.”

Over time, most of the scientists with whom Pauli worked knew about the Pauli effect. Physicists at the university in Hamburg where he worked were convinced that Pauli’s presence anywhere near a lab led to a breakdown in equipment. Otto Stern, a fellow physicist, forbade Pauli to enter the lab.

One of the most comical anecdotes about the Pauli effect occurred in the late 1920s, when Pauli met Erwin Panofsky, an art historian and expert on Kepler.  They were introduced by a mutual friend at an outdoor restaurant in Hamburg. Miller notes that for Panofsky the meeting was unforgettable for many reasons and one of them was that it “provided him with a personal experience of the famous Pauli effect.” At the end of the three-hour lunch, the three individuals stood up and Panofsky and the mutual friend discovered they – but not Pauli – had been sitting in whipped cream for the entire lunch!

Over the years, Panofsky witnessed other instances of the Pauli effect.  Once, when Pauli entered a lecture hall, the chairs of the women sitting on either side of him collapsed simultaneously.  In another example, “Pauli was on a train when, unknown to him,  the rear cars decoupled and were left behind while he proceeded to his destination in one of the front cars,” wrote Miller.

After Pauli and Jung began collaborating on their research into synchronicity, even Jung witnessed the Pauli effect. During the opening of the Jung Institute in Zurich,  which Pauli attended, Jung drew attention to  Pauli’s work in bringing together psychology and physics. No equipment broke down, but a vase overturned, spilling water everywhere.

In 1955, at the Zurich Physical Society, Pauli was to give a lecture on Einstein to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary  of the discovery of the special theory of relativity. Three of his friends met up beforehand for a dinner – minus alcohol.  Afterward, they left in their respective vehicles to attend the lecture. David Speiser, a young Swiss physicist, realized his scooter was low on gas and stopped to fill it up. Then it caught fire and although he put out the fire, the scooter was destroyed and he had to walk to the lecture. Arman Thellung, another Swiss physicists, had to walk, too, because he discovered his bike had two flat tires. Ralph Kronig took the tram and although he’d made this journey numerous times, he missed his stop and also had to walk to the lecture.

Marcus Friez, Pauli’s assistant and close friend, contended that Pauli himself believed in his effect.  He wrote, “He has told me that he senses the mischief already before as a disagreeable tension, and when the anticipated misfortune then actually hits – another one! – he feels strangely liberated and lightened. It is quite legitimate to understand the Pauli effect as a synchronistic phenomenon as conceived by Carl Jung.”

We’ve heard some personal stories  about Pauli effects – stoplights that turn green when you approach, transformer boxes that explode during arguments,  clocks that stop at the time a loved one dies, that kind of thing. At the end of one of Rob’s meditation courses, we experienced our own Pauli effect . As we’re chanting I’m sorry, please forgive me, I love you, thank you – chanting it 108 times – the lights suddenly went out. And the lights were NOT on a timer.

Anyone have similar stories?

 

Posted in pauli effect, synchronicity | 22 Comments

Underwater Magic

Posted on February 1, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Years ago, I recall a trip to Disney’s Epcot theme park and the one memory that stands out is walking through the park’s enormous and incredible aquarium. The visitors move through the center of the aquarium viewing the creatures through glass wall on their side and above. Fish of all sizes and varieties hovered in their silent world, eyes bulging.

I remember a pair of enormous tiger sharks that cruised by near the glass and seemed to stare at us as if we were all potential meals. It was almost like being in the watery environment with them. Almost, but not really.

Then I saw something that really caught my attention. A person in the tank! A scuba diver. He also swam over to the glass and waved at the visitors in the central tunnel. I wasn’t certain what he was doing in the tank. Maybe he was there to feed the fish or clean the tank. I marveled that while he was waving to children, he was unaware that one of the sharks was cruising by behind him. Maybe they were used to divers. Hopefully, they were well fed.

Megan was with us. She was young. Maybe four or five, and she has no recollection of that trip, much less the aquarium. But she was one of the kids who stood at the glass and waved back at the diver.

So it seems quite incredible now that Megan at 22 years old is working in that same tank, one of Epcot’s scuba divers. Some of them feed the fish, others clean the tank, and yes, Megan says, they wave to the children the other side  of the glass.

Originally, she thought she would be working in Disney’s Animal Kingdom, but when she arrived to start her job she found out she was assigned to the Epcot aquarium, mainly working with the dolphins.

Yesterday in the mail a brochure from Disney arrived, offering a 35% discount to Florida residents who buy a three-day package. It sounded like a good idea, a chance to see Megan at work. A nice little synchro it seemed. Then it enlarged. Megan called a short time later, and during the conversation mentioned that not only does she have free passes for all four of Disney’s parks…but so do we as  family members! We also get a speed pass, allowing us to skirt the long lines and get into the rides quickly. Wow!

Trish could hardly believe it when I told her. We’re going. We’ll be there. Definitely. Can’t wait.

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