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It’s ironic, if not a synchro, that TM is the well known abbreviation for both Transcendental Meditation and trademark. That’s because TM, the entrepreneurial meditation company, has literally trademarked meditation—or at least that’s how it seems.

Of course, you can meditate without signing up for TM, but if you read their website it sounds as if their option is the one that’s both easy and it works.

As a meditation teacher, I must confess I’ve never gotten involved in TM. The reason: I’m just naturally suspicious of attempts to corral meditation and charge for mantras. It seems crass. I feel the same way about energy companies that want to harness solar energy and sell it as their own product. C’mon, it’s the sun.

So, call me cheap. I never paid for a mantra. But maybe deep down I didn’t like the name, or at least the ‘dental’ part of transcendental. It sounded painful. Maybe that’s why they just call it TM. Okay, I’m making fun.

From all the advocacy for TM generated from the scientific, business and entertainment communities, transcendental meditation apparently works for many people who participate. I guess sometimes we feel that if we pay for something, then it must be worthwhile, and we better practice to get our money’s worth.

TM also homogenizes and Westernizes meditation. The TM website describes it as effortless. “Unlike other techniques, the TM technique involves no concentration, contemplation or control of your mind. It is effortless and enjoyable, and can be practiced sitting comfortably in a chair.”

Wow, sounds like you could be watching your favorite TV show and eating popcorn at the same time. (Yes, I’m making fun again. It beats getting angry.) Meditation is more challenging than that. But  it’s a good come-on to get people interested.

Lynn Stuart Parramore took a TM course in Manhattan and paid $2,500 for it. Writing in AlterNet.org, she disassembles her experience. “Transcendental Meditation is just a fancy name for a common variety of meditation in which a mantra – a word or series of syllables – is repeated with the intention of creating a meditative state. Pretty much any word or syllable will do, despite the hype of TM, which insists that a mantra can only be given by a ‘qualified’ instructor.

The TM initiate is told never to reveal her mantra under any circumstances, lest its magic be lost. My instructor suggested that he had some particular insight into me in choosing my mantra, but this is utter nonsense. People who have taught TM have admitted that they are given a list of mantras they’re supposed to divvy out according to age and gender. Nothing mystical about it.”

You can read Lynn’s entire article here. It’s well written, and an eye-opener.

That said, it’s worth pointing out that more than 350 studies published in 160 scientific journals have found positive results from practicing TM. You’re more relaxed and focused, you’re more in control of your emotions. The practice reduces stress, anxiety, and fatigue, and promotes balanced functioning of mind and body.

Of course, similar results have been found in studies of other types of meditation. In other words, other methods also work, even ones where you don’t have to pay thousands of dollars for a mantra.

If you’re thinking about beginning meditation, should you try TM?  Think of it as one option, an expensive one. If you’re employed with a corporation that advocates TM, and some do, go for it—especially if it’s a perk, or at least you’re getting a corporate discount.

But other methods also work, and you don’t have to pay thousands of dollars for a mantra. The bottom line: OM is free.

On June 23, the temperature in South Florida hit 99, at least according to my weather app. The app, in fact, had been calling for a high of 100.  This temperature is more in line with August or September when temps in the 90s  are combined with incredibly muggy air. But temperatures like this in June are unusual.

Rob was doing some yard work and Noah was outside with him, hoping Rob would toss him a ball or Frisbee. After five or ten minutes, they couldn’t stand it anymore. They dragged themselves into the house, into the air-conditioning, Noah panting hard, and Rob exclaiming how the heat was a “scorcher.”

We usually take Noah to the dog park between four and five, but it was just too hot. Even at 6 PM, the temperature was  94 and still had that “scorched” feeling to it.  “Scorcher” and “scorched” became our favorite words for describing how hot it was. Scorcher, scorched, scorcher, scorched, one a noun, the other a verb.

We decided to take Noah to the park after dinner, when it might be moderately less of a “scorcher.” Rob put some chicken breasts on the grill and I went back to work until dinner. Suddenly, he comes into the house carrying the plate with our chicken breasts on it.

“The temperature on the grill went nuts! The chicken breasts are scorched!” I could almost hear the trickster chuckling when I snapped a photo.

Fortunately, the chicken was still edible, just blackened on the outside. 

Awhile later, I clicked onto Huffington Post and saw a headline announcing that May was the hottest month – globally – in recorded history. How did the article open? “This past May was a scorcher.”

I think that’s a cluster for SCORCHER.

We’ve all heard the phrase, ‘That would never happen in real life.’ It’s often said about over-the-top scenes in movies in which characters seemingly have super human capabilities. Action films, of course, are full of such characters, who in real life would never survive the stunts they pull off on the big screen. But it’s not always action films where unbelievable scenarios are played out.

Imagine this set up: a master hypnotist searches for a truly susceptible person, one who would assassinate a VIP on command and then walk away without knowing what happened. In my novel Romancing the Raven, which takes place in the early 19^th century and present day, Edgar Allan Poe has just been expelled from West Point when he is unknowingly enticed into a scheme aimed at turning him into a hypnotized assassin. His target: Andrew Jackson.

When I wrote the book, I was aware that the idea of a hypnotized killer was controversial. Sirhan Sirhan had said he was hypnotized to assassinate Robert Kennedy, but there was never any proof. So I was surprised to find out about an experiment that became an episode of a show called Curiosity on the Science Channel. Called Brainwashed, the second season episode involved master hypnotist Tom Silver who started out with 185 participants in his search for one person who unknowingly would be turned into a killer and would ‘assassinate’ a foreign dignitary in a staged event. The participants were not told the true purpose of the show.

Silver screened the participants and found that 16 of the 185 were susceptible to  hypnosis. He reduced that number to 11 when he weeded out those who might be psychologically damaged by the experiment. The remaining participants were divided into small groups and taken to busy restaurants for lunch. They were hypnotized first and given the suggestion that their chairs would be extremely hot when they sat down and they would immediately strip to their underwear in the restaurant. All of the subjects complied to varying degrees, but 7 of them were eliminated because Silver thought they were merely playing along or weren’t suggestible enough to fully follow the suggestion.

The remaining four faced a tougher test, one that they could not fake. They were told to settle into a metal bathtub filled with 35-degree ice water. There was no way to fake this test. Under hypnosis, they were told the water would feel like a warm, comfortable bath. Each subject was monitored to test body temperature, heart and breath rate. Normally, someone exposed to water this cold begins gasping, shivering and their teeth chatter. Most people under hypnosis would typically snap out of their trance.

Three of the participants did just that. One lasted 18 seconds, the others just a few seconds. But the fourth subject, Ivan Santiago, remained two minutes in the icy water. Here’s how Joe Dispenza describes what happened to Santiago in his book, You Are the Placebo.

“Although Santiago’s heart rate was high before the experiment, once he stepped into the water, his heart rate calmed down immediately. There wasn’t so much as a flutter of his EKG or a single blip in his respiratory rate. Santiago sat among ice cubes as though he were soaking in a warm bathtub; indeed, that’s exactly what he believed he was doing. The man never flinched nor did his body fall into hypothermia, and the researchers knew they’d found the subject they were looking for.”

They then proceeded to thank Santiago for participating, and told him that he was being dismissed from the show, but asked that he come back  for a final interview. The next day, during a break in that interview, Silver entered the room and instantly put Santiago under hypnosis with a tug on his arm, a pre-conditioned cue. Silver proceeded to tell him that a bad guy was downstairs. “He’s got to be erased. We’ve got to get rid of him, and you’re the one to do it.”

He told Santiago that once he exited the building, he would see a red backpack on a motorcycle, and inside would be a gun. He told Santiago that he would grab the backpack and walk over to a velvet rope, where he would wait for a man, who would be carrying a briefcase. Then he told Santiago that as soon as the man came out the door, he was to shoot him in the chest. “But as soon as you do it, you’ll simply, completely, totally forget that it ever happened.”

Meanwhile, the scene was set. A stuntman playing the foreign dignitary was strapped with blood packs, and an Airsoft prop gun was placed inside a red backpack and laid on the seat of a parked motorcycle right outside the entrance of the building. A velvet rope line was set up  and staged paparazzi were in place with their cameras. Two SUVs were parked on the street, looking ready to drive off with the VIP and his entourage.

So what happened? Santiago was a good guy, a trusted employee, a devoted son, a loving uncle. Not the type of person who would agree to kill somebody in cold blood. Would Silver succeed in turning him?

When Santiago walked out of the building, one of the producers shook his hand and said: “Ivan, you did a spectacular job.” That was the trigger that was supposed to send Santiago back into a hypnotic trance. It worked. Immediately, Santiago looked around, saw the motorcycle, moved over to it, and picked up the red backpack. He walked over to the velvet rope line where the paparazzi were huddled, and slowly unzipped the bag.

Moments later, a man with a briefcase walked out the door. Santiago pulled out the gun and shot the man in the chest several times. The blood bags erupted, and the stuntman, posing as the dignitary, collapsed to the ground. Silver and a psychologist ushered Santiago away from the scene. Moments later, they told him what had happened. Amazingly, Santiago didn’t remember a thing—until Silver suggested that he would.

It’s a pretty scary scenario that someone’s mind could be so manipulated. Now we know that it’s actually possible to program a person to kill. Not just anyone, of course. But someone like Santiago, who is highly susceptible. That part of my novel has now been verified…and it could happen in real life.

I frequently experience simple little synchros—sometimes silly ones—recognize them, but within a day or two they’ve faded from memory. So I decided to jot this one down before I forgot the details. However, as I did it so, it just getting bigger…or weirder…or both. Take a look.

6-20-14: I went on Facebook and saw a message in large type that said: “What is a name that starts with Z? 99% of people fail. I thought about that a moment, then noticed that I’d received a friend request. I clicked it and it was from someone named Zoa. I approved her, went back to the post and commented: “Zoa. I must be in the 1%” and explained how I’d just gotten the name.

When I started writing this post a couple of hours later, I went back to look for the original Facebook post, and was distracted by an artist’s painting. I clicked it to get the full image and the message above the painting said: “Zaria Forman is no ordinary artist.” So there was another one. A double synchro.

But that’s not quite all. After writing the above, I returned to a chapter I was editing on The Jewel in the Lotus, my meditation book. I read a couple of paragraphs and came to this one:

In fact, the night before I began this chapter I had a dream that I was an FBI agent from the city of Z, and I was investigating someone who was also from Z who was making fraudulent claims. But when someone interviewed me about the case, the interviewer questioned my authenticity. “Are you really an FBI agent from Z?” That was when I woke up at 4:30 a.m., thinking ‘No, I am not an FBI from Z.’

You’ll have to read the book to find out what that’s about, but for the purpose of this post…there it was: another Z name. This time a city named Z.

This woman’s encounter/sighting was suppressed for a long time, then was included in a documentary in the 1960s. Fascinating.

With the popularity of The Hunger Games – books and movies – I started hearing the word dystopia more often. Dictionary.com defines the word as “a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, depression, disease, and overcrowding.” Its antonym, of course, is utopia.

The Hunger Games  wasn’t the first dystopian novel. Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and 1984 by George Orwell are probably two of the most famous. I’ve always had a fascination with dystopian novels, probably because they illustrate the worst WHAT IF  scenario – what happens when a world, civilization, or society  goes to extremes to control its people. These novels expose the dark underbelly of humanity.

Since the 18^th century, there have been numerous dystopian novels. Here’s a partial list of the better known novels:

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

The Time Machine by HG. Wells (1895)

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

The Trial by Franz Kafka

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis

Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Minority Report by Philip K. Dick

Anthem by Ayn Rand

Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Logan’s Run by William  F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson

This Perfect Day by Ira Levin

Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy

 The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula LeGuin

The Running Man by Stephen King

The Children of Men by P.D. James

The Giver by Lois Lowry

The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Special by Scott Westerfield

The Passage by Justin Cronin

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

The Road by Cormanc McCarthy

The Day After Tomorrow (based on Whitley Strieber’s book the Coming Global Superstorm)

Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut

A number of these titles were also made into movies. Sometimes, the movies were better than the novels. They breathed life and color and texture into the dystopian world.

Today, I came across a fascinating website, Dystopia Tracker, that keeps track of how many of the concepts in dystopian novels, movies, TV shows, and games have become a reality. They even have categories for these concepts: State & Control, Body & Mind, Relationships & Communication, Work & Business, Leisure & Entertainment,  Cities & Environment, and War & Geopolitics.

There are excerpts from the various novels and movies.  Beneath a startling number of them, you see the number of realizations that visitors have noted.  Under the quote for Farenheit 451, for example, there are 2 realizations.

When you click it, you’re taken to a page that actually shows 3 realizations. The third one is rather curious: a Kindle user claims that you don’t really own your ebooks, that Amazon wiped out his entire Kindle library without explanation. I supposed that would be a form of book burning!

So when I was poking around on the site, I wondered what I have always wondered: do storytellers tap into a future that’s fixed? Or are they tapping into a quantum field of possibilities?  If the future is NOT set in stone, if we create it collectively, moment to moment, then do these dystopian stories help us to avoid the future they depict?

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Happy Summer Solstice! May we collectively create a more humane and loving world.

The video speaks for itself.

You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter by Dr. Joe Dispenza, was recommended to us by Nancy Pickard and it may be the most important book I’ve read in years.

In April 1986, Joe Dispenza was a 23-year-old athlete and chiropractor, competing in a Palm Springs triathlon. He had just finished the swimming segment and was in the biking portion of the race when a red four-wheel drive Bronco going 55 mph slammed into his bike from behind. He was catapulted into the air and landed on his backside. The Bronco kept coming toward him and in order to avoid being run over, Dispenza grabbed the bumper and was dragged down the road before the elderly driver of the Bronco realized what had happened.

The diagnosis wasn’t good. He had broken six vertebrae and a number of shattered bone fragments went back toward his spinal cord. The orthopedic surgeon told him that in order to contain the bone fragments he needed surgery to implant a Harrington rod. This would entail cutting out the back parts of the vertebrae from two to three segments above and below the fractures and clamping two 12-inch stainless steel rods along both sides of his spinal column. If he didn’t have the surgery, paralysis seemed certain. Three other orthopedic surgeons concurred with the first surgeon.

But Dispenza decided against the surgery. “I believe that there’s an intelligence, an invisible consciousness, within each of us that’s the giver of life. It supports, maintains, protects, and heals us every moment.” He was taken by ambulance to the home of a friend and began his journey toward healing. For two hours twice a day, “I went within and began creating a picture of my intended result: a totally healed spine.”  

His description of this process is riveting. He admits that in the beginning, he didn’t really know what he was doing, but now he does. “I was actually starting to think about all these future potentials that existed in the quantum field, and then I was emotionally embracing each of them. And as I selected that intentional future and married it with the elevated emotion of what it would be like to be there in that future, in the present moment my body began to believe it was actually in that future experience. “ And his spine began to heal.

Dispenza said that what he was learning during this process is one of the main principles of quantum physics: that mind and matter aren’t separate, “that our conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings are the very blueprints that control our destiny. The persistence, conviction, and focus to manifest any potential future lies within the human mind and within the mind of the infinite potentials in the quantum  field. Both of these minds must work together in order to bring about any future reality that potentially already exists.”

Nine and a half weeks after the accident, Dispenza  was able to walk again. And his true journey began.

The book’s content has many parallels to the Seth material and to Abraham/Hicks philosophy that we all create our own realities through our thoughts, beliefs, and emotions. But You Are the Placebo breaks things down in a way that demysitifies the process of manifestation. He includes fascinating stories about the placebo effect in the brain and the body, and illustrates how thoughts change both body and brain.

In one chapter, he dissects the nature of beliefs, illustrates how they originate, and how we’re suggestible only to what we consciously or unconsciously believe to be true.  And what we believe may limit us in some way, keep us from getting well, or make us utterly miserable!

In order to change a belief, says Dispenza, you have to begin by accepting that it’s possible. Then you have to alter your energy with heightened emotion and then allow your biology to reorganize itself. “Once the amplitude or energy of that decision becomes greater than the hardwired programs in your brain and the emotional addiction in your body, then you are greater than your past, your body will respond to a new mind, and you can effect real change.”

Included in the book are three stories of personal transformation – three different women of various ages – and their journey toward healing and wholeness. The focus in part 2 is on meditation, specifically on how to change beliefs and perceptions through meditation.

Dispenza’s afterword is entitled Becoming Supernatural. It’s stunning. Here’s a taste of it:

“Imagine a world inhabited by billions of people…living as one, where everyone is embracing similar uplifting thoughts connected to unlimited possibility, and these thoughts allow people to make more inspired choices, demonstrate more altruistic behaviors, and create more enlightening experiences.  People would then no longer be living by survival-based emotions we’re so familiar with now: feeling more like matter than energy, separate from possibility. Instead, they’d be living by more expanded, selfless, heartfelt emotions – feeling more like energy than matter, connected to something greater.  If we could do this, then en entirely different world would emerge, and we would be living by a new credo based on the open heart.”

 We’ve talked before about how the Internet facilitates synchronicity and this certainly was the case with an email we received recently.

Joanne emailed us through the synchro secrets website with a question about a sighting that Jenean – gypsy woman had in the late 1960s, that we wrote about in Aliens in the Backyard.  She said she’d done a search for newspaper articles about the sighting, which took place on a bus in Louisiana, and couldn’t find anything on the Internet. She was curious about how other people on the bus had reacted.

So I wrote Jenean and asked her if the story had received coverage in the local press at the time. She replied that it had. She and her son clearly remembered that the media had written it off as a “cloud” from a nearby industrial plant in Sterlington. Jenean noted that she had Google Joanne’s name and sent the link.

I was surprised to learn that Joanne lived in Clarksburg, West Virginia,   just a few miles from our friend, Millie Gemondo. In a subsequent email, I mentioned it Joanne. She replied that her friend had graduated with Kim Gemondo from Shinston High School in 1970, but her friend didn’t know if Kim was related to Millie. She was excited, though, that Millie was a psychic.

I knew Millie had graduated from that same high school and recalled that she’d once told me that she was probably related to any Gemondo in her area. So this afternoon I called her and told her the story and asked if she was related to a Kim Gemondo. She laughed. “Sure am. He’s my nephew, my brother’s son. He’s the editor of the local newspaper.”

So what are the odds on something like this? Jenean doesn’t know Millie or Joanne.  She simply was curious about Joanne and Googled her, something I didn’t do. I think this is an example of Indra’s net, where we are all connected at some level. That conscious, visual connection used to be six degrees. Now it’s much less. Will this one lead somewhere? Who knows? But it is certainly one of those oddball synchros.

Here’s a clip from a new film about synchronicity by Katy Walker. In The Synchronicity Highway, we wrote about an encounter she had years ago in Germany. We’ve posted several of her synchros on the blog, too. There’s a 24 minute clip on her website.  We look forward to seeing the full movie when it’s released!