We love talking with Alexis Brooks. She’s knowledgeable, fun, asks evocative questions and has profound insights. We talk about our new book, Phenomena, and cover the gamut of paranormal and UFO topics.
Full moons are about completion, harvest, illumination. Today’s full moon in Taurus has some intriguing aspects. Notice the moon is at 19 degrees in earth sign Taurus in the 6th house. It forms a positive aspect to Pluto at 21 degrees in earth sign Capricorn in the 2nd house. The moon represents intuition, emotions, our inner world. Pluto governs power, leadership. So there’s an opportunity with this full moon to move into a leadership role in some way and for an expansion of intuition. Emotionally, this one is intense.
The moon also forms a beautiful trine to Saturn at 16 degrees Capricorn. Since Saturn rules structure and physical reality, among other things, your intuition finds a solid foundation and you’re better able to control your emotions.
The moon also forms a harmonious aspect to elusive Neptune at 15 degrees Pisces in the 3rd house. Dream BIG! Follow your gut and your hunches.
And check out the forecasts in the masthead that show how this full moon impacts your sign.
And it’s not too early to mark December 2-3 on your calendar (depending on where you live). That’s the day that Jupiter enters earth sign Capricorn, where it will be until late December 2020. Jupiter rules luck, prosperity, expansion, foreign cultures, travel, and people, higher education, philosophy, the law, spirituality, and synchronicity. Whenever it changes signs, our lives change as well. For clues about how this could play out for you, look back to December 19, 2007 to Jan 5, 2009. What was going on in your life at the time?
More on this Jupiter change as we get closer to it.
If you Google Saturn Pluto conjunction, one of the biggies for 2020, you’ll find all sorts of dire and terrible predictions that range from a breakdown in government, the destruction of old foundations, customs, laws, economic transitions, hardship, loss, all yuck.
These interpretations are derived from the natures of these two planets. Saturn represents structures, self-discipline, responsibility, and karma – a word I really dislike. Pluto governs profound and permanent change, regeneration, obsession, destruction, and power. This conjunction occurs in earth-sign Capricorn, which rules – among other things – government, structures, the status quo.
These two planets have been approaching an exact conjunction since late January 2019, when they were just seven degrees apart. It’s like a game of tag with these two. Gonna catch you, Saturn cackles, then it turns retrogrades and appears to go backward relative to Earth. But during the second week of January 2020, the conjunction becomes exact. This also coincidences with the first eclipse of 2020, a lunar eclipse in Cancer on January 10.
Given all these dire predictions, I went back through the years when this conjunction had occurred before and looked at the events of my own life to get a sense of how this conjunction might play out on a personal level. The last time was 1982, when Saturn and Pluto conjuncted in Libra. Look back through your life to 1982. What events occurred? Rob and I met on November 19, 1981, when the two planets were seven degrees apart. By the spring of 1982, we were living together and in the summer of 1983, when Saturn and Pluto were just one degree apart, we got married.
The difference this time is that the conjunction is in Capricorn. This conjunction should be quite favorable for earth signs Taurus, Virgo, and Capricorn or if you have a rising, moon, or another planet in one of those signs. It should also be favorable for water signs Scorpio and Pisces, (Sun, moon, rising or other planets) but will be challenging for sun sign Cancer and for any planets you have in Cancer because the conjunction will be opposite your sign.
The exact conjunction is on January 12.
Up there in the 10th house, there are 4 planets in Capricorn. Going from left to right, we have Mercury at 23 degrees Capricorn, then Saturn and Pluto at 22 degrees Capricorn, and the sun at 21 Cap. All technically conjunct. And in the 9th house, we have lucky Jupiter at 9 degrees Cap. So, half the zodiac in Capricorn. This means: Keeps things practical, stay focused, plan ahead, have clear goals.
On a larger scale – in politics, government, international news – things may be particularly bizarre. On or around this date is when we could see the complete breakdown of old structures. We’re already seeing some of that in foreign policy and the impeachment hearings.
Stay tuned…
Today we talked about our new book, Phenomena: Harnessing Your Psychic Powers, with author Whitley Strieber for his popular podcast Dreamland. It will go up later this month. During the course of the discussion, Whitley pointed out that “story” is the most powerful means of communication that we humans have. He’s right of course, and since Whitley, Rob, and I are also novelists, we get that. But it’s particularly pertinent to stories that involve people’s individual experiences with the paranormal.
Sixty years ago, back in the days of Ozzie & Harriet, the paranormal didn’t play much of a role in popular culture. Typically, it was relegated to obscure magazines and journals or to TV shows like Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone (1959 to 1964) or to sci-fi movies like The Village of the Damned (1960). You didn’t talk about this paranormal stuff in public.
Fast forward: In October 2017, Chapman University conducted a survey of “American fears” that included a battery of items on paranormal beliefs. These ranged from a belief in Bigfoot to psychic powers and haunted houses, ancient civilizations like Atlantis, to visits by aliens. The results show just how dramatically beliefs about the paranormal have changed: 55 percent believe that advanced civilizations like Atlantis existed; 52 percent believe places can be haunted by spirits; more than a third believe aliens visited Earth in the ancient past; more than a quarter believe aliens have visited the planet in modern times; and a quarter believe objects can be moved with the mind. The study concluded that 75 percent of Americans believe in some facet of the paranormal.
What’s astonishing about this statistic is how it compares to a study conducted by Baylor University twelve years earlier, which concluded that just 15 percent of Americans believed in the paranormal. What accounts for the increase? How were the studies conducted? Did the phrasing of the questions account for some of the differences in the statistics? Even when taking such qualifiers into account, the Chapman study shows a dramatic increase in interest in the paranormal.
Ironically, this boost in curiosity about such mysterious matters might be related to technology—specifically, social media. Numerous websites, blogs, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram interest groups that focus on psychic phenomena have had a tremendous impact. It also could be the result of a proliferation of books, movies, and TV shows (stories!) about different facets of the paranormal. Then there are workshops, and seminars, an entire cottage industry that has grown up in the last 20 years and revolves around the human curiosity about and need for expanded awareness.
So here are a couple of stories from the book that illustrate the kinds of paranormal experiences people have had – and how fear of ridicule
When artist Renie Wiley was a young girl growing up in South Florida, she used to have visions about future events and thought that everyone had such abilities. Then one day in grade school she had a vision and blurted out what she was seeing. She told the teacher that her car was going to get a flat tire. The next day at her lunch break, the teacher walked out to her car and discovered a flat tire, just as Renie had predicted. She accused the girl of deflating her tire, sent her to the principal’s office, her parents were called in. Renie was suspended from school for several days and it was a long time before she ever again revealed any of her visions.
Renie quietly nurtured her ability over the years, grew into it, accepted it, and eventually worked with South Florida police departments in finding missing children.
Part of the resistance to anomalous phenomena is the result of religious beliefs as well as the posture of mainstream science that largely dismisses the paranormal as nonsense believed by ignorant and gullible people. Even though the weirdness factor isn’t as pervasive in this century as it was decades ago, it still prevents some people from talking openly about their experiences.
When Leiny Krumm was a child growing up in Colombia, she woke one night to see her recently deceased grandmother standing at the foot of her bed. She wasn’t afraid, just startled, and sat up and started talking with her. It happened frequently in her childhood and Leiny’s mistake was telling her parents, strict Catholics, that her abuelita had been visiting her. They hired a priest to perform an exorcism on their home, with special attention on Leiny’s bedroom and on Leiny herself.
Today, she’s a mother of two in her early-forties and still sees spirits and hears voices. The voices are most prevalent when she meditates and offer guidance and advice. Her grandmother’s visits aren’t as frequent as they were when she was a kid, but Leiny still sees her occasionally and is comforted by her presence. “It’s just part of who I am,” she says. “I’ve accepted it, even if my parents haven’t.” This isn’t something Leiny readily reveals about herself. She knows other people might not believe her experiences are real or might view them in a negative way.
Renie’s teacher may have considered her outburst inappropriate, but how did that warrant the principal’s office and suspension? Did the teacher perhaps believe that no one can see the future? Was that the real issue? Leiny’s Catholic parents believed her experiences indicated something evil had entered their daughter’s life and felt it was their duty to call in a priest to help them deal with it.
Fear is a powerful inhibitor.
Here’s our interview with terrific host Alex! Just click continue reading and it will take you straight to his site.
Warning: you might want to become a vegan after reading this blog post!
We’ve mentioned our dog park here previously. It’s a gathering place for people with at least one thing in common – dogs,of course. From there, we’ve found a great deal of diversity in opinions and lifestyles. Trish has written a couple of posts about spirit contact, based on stories that she garnered from her contacts in the doggie domain. She also recently posted a story of a dog park friend whose life changed when her car died in the center lane of I-95 and survived to tell about it.
I’ve got a different kind of tale. I was talking with a couple of good ole boys, older lifelong Floridians who remember when Florida was a lot more rural than it is today. One of them, Jerry, grew up in the Pandhandle where his family owned 6,000 acres. He spent of lot of his youth outside, he told me the other day. He held up his cell phone and said he went more than 60 years “without looking at this thing and I survived.”
What he did do was a lot of hunting, and he told me about the time he shot a 500-pound boar with a .12 gauge shotgun, and the boar continued charging him. “I had to climb a tree and shoot it with my .375 Magnum. Then he started talking about hunting squirrels and eating them, and that led to a story about hunting something called a nutria. “What the hell’s a nutria?” I asked.
“A big rat, up to 40 pounds. They’re good eating like the boars and deer, if you know how to cure them,” Jerry said.
A 40-pound rat? I went home and looked it up. A nutria, Google told me, was a large rodent that looks just like a huge rat.
According to an article in The Business Insider, the nutria is a web-footed animal with shaggy, brown outer fur and large, orange teeth, originally from South America. “The swamp creature was brought to the United States in the early 19th century and farmed for its fur. But as fur declined in popularity over the next century, many farms were shut down. Some animals were released into the wild by their owners, others are believed to have escaped.”
I don’t think I would care to eat one of these creatures, although the old boys were impressed when I told them that I ordered guinea pig once while in Ecuador where it is considered a delicacy. It was bony and tasted terrible. I couldn’t finish the meal and was sick for two day. No more guinea pigs for me!
So all this conversation led to Jerry asking about iguanas. There must be people catching and eating them, he said. I’d never see iguanas, except in the Florida keys, until a few years ago. But now they are on an enormous growth spurt and apparently don’t have too many predators. But Jerry figured that some people were eating them, just as some people here eat alligator meat, which is the tail.
Just hours later, with no effort on my part, the answer popped up on my phone. An iguana synchro.
It was an on-line article from the Palm Beach Post about a guy who sells more than 10,000 pounds of iguana meat every month. Anshu Pathak’s California-based company, Exotic Meats, buys all the iquana tails he can get from Florida trappers.
Apparently, iguanas aren’t a pest like in South Florida, and Californians have developed an expensive taste for them. One pound of iguana meat sells for $60, and a jumbo piece, five to 10 pounds, runs $260. Back here in Florida, we just chase them away. But apparently in Central and parts of South America, iguanas are a food staple, and are called, “chicken of the trees.”
I think I’ll pass.
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I was looking for a nutria image for this post, having trouble uploading it, so I paused to make a move in a game of Words with Friends. I was juggling my letters and realized a word I could make: nutria!
As we enter the next to last month of 2019, we still have some major astrological events coming up. I’ll be posting in more detail on each of these, but for now, just keep these dates handy.
Mercury retrogrades in Scorpio from October 31- November 20. Look at the October 30 post about the specifics on this one. The good news is that the planet of communication and travel will be in direct motion during the Thanksgiving holidays so guests probably won’t be late to dinner and you won’t miss your flight!
November 12: Full moon @ 19 degrees Taurus. Full moons are about harvest, completion.
November 26: New moon @4 degrees Sagittarius. New moons are about new opportunities.
December 3: Jupiter enters Capricorn, where it will be until December 20, 2020.
December 12: Full moon @19 degrees Gemini.
December 26: solar eclipse @4 degrees Capricorn ET, December 25 PT. Like a double new moon.
In January 2020, we’ve got some real heavy hitters coming. Stay tuned!
Happy Halloween from Nigel
We were interviewed recently by Mark Johnson and Irene Allen-Block for Paranormal UK Radio, a show based in Wales. As we talked about our new book, PHENOMENA, we experienced, well, phenomena in the form of three synchronicities during the hour-long interview.
We were talking about one of the chapters that focuses on people who hear voices and were discussing why some people find these voices terrifying and others consider them helpful guidance. Mark made the point that it depends on what those voices are saying to you. He noted that if they’re telling you to go kill yourself, that’s a good reason to find such inner voices disturbing.
As we were talking, I received an email from someone we’ve been corresponding with who not only hears voices, but records them, and has been sending the recording to us from time to time. These recordings are strange and require headphones with the volume turned up. They come through as almost metallic sounding, and are supposedly from inter-dimensional beings who our correspondent is in touch with during her 2-3 hour daily meditations that sometimes involve out-of-body travel.
She had no idea we were doing a radio show and talking about voices when she sent a very disturbing message about a being who can best be described as a dark entity. Here’s what she wrote: “It keeps trying to come in when I meditate or try to sleep. It fills my head with growls and when I threw it back yesterday it filled the house with roars of protest and anger. I tell it to f**ck off. The fight is on. I have faced dark energies, but this is different. I can do this.”
So the comment, which I read without identifying the source, fit right into what we were talking about. Several minutes later, we had moved on to talking about twins who experience telepathy, and Mark mentioned that he was a twin, but he and his brother only rarely picked up on something happening to their twin counterpart. Mark went onto say that his brother had died a few years ago and mentioned his name.
Seconds later, Irene spoke up and said that she had just gotten a Facebook request from a person with the exact same name – first and last. “That’s my brother,” Mark said with a laugh, “He’s coming through.”
We’ve been on their show a couple of times and it’s always enjoyable. It never seems like a formal interview, just four people talking about weird stuff that happens. However, we had forgotten that the show runs two hours and we hadn’t asked Mark beforehand. Unfortunately, we told him we had to bail out after the first hour because of other commitments. He and Irene said they understood and would continue the show without us.
The hour went by really fast and we didn’t really notice the time until abruptly the phone line went dead. Trish and I didn’t know what happened, but we both looked at the time and were amazed that it was exactly 5:00 p.m. Our time was up, but Trish called back and asked what happened. They didn’t know. Mark said he was asking us a question, and suddenly we were gone. I mentioned that we called back just to let them know that we didn’t just abruptly hang up because it was 5 o’clock. We said our farewell, noting that the show was ending with a third synchronicity, this one dealing with time.
The link to the show is here.
Happy Halloween and hello, Mercury retrograde! But, also take a look at the November forecasts in the masthead!
At 11:42 am EST on October 31, Mercury turns retrograde – in Scorpio- for the last time this year. This one lasts until November 20, when Mercury turns direct again in Libra
Mercury governs communication, travel, contracts, anything with moving parts. So there are a list of DO NOTs when this planet turns retrograde:
Don’t sign contracts. Otherwise, you’ll be revisiting the terms at some point.
Don’t make travel plans. Buy tickets on either side of the retro. But if you do have to travel, remain flexible because your schedule is apt to change unexpectedly.
Double check all appointments.
Don’t submit manuscripts.
Don’t buy anything with moving parts – a car, bike, electronics.
Don’t put your home on the market and don’t buy a place during a retro.
These retrograde periods favor revising, rethinking, reconsidering.
If you do travel during a retro, it’s likely that you’ll return to that location at some point.
The good news is that Mercury won’t turn retro again until Feb 17, 2020!
In our years of writing about synchronicity, we’ve done a lot of radio shows and podcasts, more than 50, with many repeats. Each show and podcast is different and appeals to a different audience. But what most of them have in common is a host who is intrigued by the paranormal. Today, we did one of the most interesting podcasts yet – Skeptico with Alex Tsakiris.
We were invited to the show as a result of a recommendation from one of his listeners, who had emailed me two really interesting synchros. I can’t remember the man’s name, please forgive me for that, but thank you for the recommendation! Skeptico was one of the best shows we’ve ever done and a lot of fun. Alex is well-versed in everything we write about. From synchronicity to UFOs, abductions, ghosts, hauntings, mediumship, psychics, you name it, he knows something about it. He also looks for the science behind it, specifically the tipping point in science. For us, the big question was what Rob and I have often asked ourselves: Who’s orchestrating this stuff?
We talked with him for about two hours and at some point, it occurred to me that Alex had to be a Gemini or had a Gemini moon or rising because of his communication skills. So during private time at the end, I asked him what sign he is. I always feel sort of weird when I do this. It sounds like a silly, shallow question – Hey, what sign are you? But to an astrologer, it’s the one question that really matters because it’s a challenge: Are you the archetype I think you are? It turned out he was born on June 8, I’m June 7, so yes, he’s a Gemini.
This helps to explain his open mind on all things paranormal and his search for the tipping point in science that supports/explains psi. Right brain, left brain.
In preparation for the show, Alex created this image. He calls it Skeptico’s Jeopardy. It’s a PDF, so just click on it. It’s a really clever and creative way to select what you want to talk about – and to make clear what’s off limits.
Our show will be up in about three weeks. In the meantime, check out Skeptico’s interviews. Alex has talked with many of the heavy hitters in metaphysical field. He’s a man on a quest.
