The 13th Sign, Part 2

Posted on February 8, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 Okay, so who is this figure Ophiuchus?

 Well, it’s the only astrological sign based on a real person – Asclepius. To the ancient Greeks in 27 BC, he was regarded as a healer, and in the Roman pantheon, he was a son of Apollo. He supposedly learned the secrets of preventing death when he observed one serpent bringing another healing herbs. He raised the dead using this herb. In order to prevent the entire human race from becoming immortal under his care, Zeus supposedly killed him with a bolt of lightning, then later suffered a pang of conscience and placed his image in the heavens to honor his good works.

Ophiuchus is usually depicted as grasping a snake – thus his name as Serpent Bearer – and has one foot resting firmly against Scorpius (the scorpion).  In honor of Asclepius, snakes were often used in healing rituals and non-venomous snakes were allowed to crawl on the floor in dormitories where the sick and injured slept. Cults grew up around Asclepius and pilgrims supposedly flocked to his healing temples from 300 BC onward. Ritual purification would be followed by offerings or sacrifices to the god, and by spending the night in the holiest part of the sanctuary so that dreams would occur. Any dreams or visions were reported to a priest who would prescribe the appropriate therapy by interpreting what the dreams meant.

Just from the mythology, we can glimpse some of the components of the archetype: healer, alternative medicine, the power of groups (pilgrims flocking to the temples), magic (raising the dead), dream interpretation, cult mentality, violence and violent deaths, sudden unexpected events (thunderbolts), resisting and questioning authority, pushing against the status quo, a greater independence from authoritarian rule (sounds like what’s going on in Egypt) and greater dependence on the self and the local community. 
Other components of this archetype include what author and physician Dean Radin calls “the global mind.”  We posted about Princeton’s Global Consciousness Project, and it’s real time color coded “dot” that  shows the data analysis of these random number generators, so that anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can see changes in the global mind as they occur.

Magnetic fluctuation doesn’t just affect wildlife. It impacts human beings, too. And it may be creating a sensitivity in certain types of individuals that is part of this emerging paradigm. Planetary empaths are individuals who seem to be so intimately connected to fluctuations in the earth that they experience physical symptoms for days and sometimes weeks before a natural disaster occurs. Their “symptoms” are astonishingly similar and often coincide with the change in colors in the GCP Dot.

Then there’s the hoopla surrounding 2012 and the end of the Mayan calendar. This idea started with Jose Arguelles in The Mayan Factor. That calendar ends on  December 21, 2012. But the date simply  marks the end of a 26,000 year astrological cycle. As the date nears, the doomsayers are out in full force, predicting the end times – the end of the world through massive earth changes that might include a pole shift, and the deaths of millions. When you Google December 21, 2012, more than 7 million links come up. These websites and blogs cover the spectrum of speculation – from the ludicrous to the more sobering assessment of science to urban survivalists eager to sell you equipment and freeze-dried food to get you through this global Armageddon.
While the end of the world scenario is fodder for dramatic entertainment in movies, television and novels, a more likely outcome to all this is a paradigm shift, a shift in mass consciousness that  the rediscovery of Ophiuchus presages. 
That said, there are troubling facts emerging that suggest this paradigm shift may occur as a result of global warming, an increase in natural disasters, a widening disparity between rich and poor, increased political and religious strife worldwide. We’ve covered some of the facts in other posts – about the massive deaths of birds and other wildlife, for instance. Here are some additional facts:
In 2010, natural disasters killed more than a quarter of a million people and displaced millions. According to Swiss Re, the largest reinsurer in the world, the financial losses from these natural disasters exceeded  $222 billion.
Greenland’s ice sheet melted at a record rate in 2010.
2010 and 2005 tie for the warmest years on record. 
The last pole shift occurred nearly 800,000 years ago. Some scientists believe we’re overdue. Others believe a pole shift is already underway.

So, this rediscovery of Ophiuchus may be a warning, may be prompting us to really examine our collective beliefs and desires. What do we want not only for ourselves and our loved ones, but for the planet?

Posted in 13th Sign, astrology, Ophiuchus | 24 Comments

The 13th Sign, Part 1

Posted on February 7, 2011 by Trish and Rob

On January 10, the Minneapolis Star Tribune carried an article about a 13th zodiac sign. The story apparently zipped around cyberspace at the speed of light and was picked up by CNN, ABC, and NBC. Network coverage on this topic struck me as weird: since when do they cover astrology?
I suspect it was covered because  an astronomer – not an astrologer – made the announcement about the 13th zodiac sign and also presented new dates for the signs.  Paul Kunkle, who teaches astronomy at a junior college in Minneapolis, pointed out that that the zodiac periods were set up by the Babylonians millennia ago. Since then, the moon’s gravitational pull has made the earth ‘wobble’ on its axis, which has created a one-month difference in the stars’ alignment. “When astrologers say the sun is in Pisces, it’s really not in Pisces,” said Kunkle. “Most horoscope readers who consider themselves Pisces are actually Aquarians.”
Here’s how the new dates line up:
Aries: April 18 – May 13
Taurus: May 13 – June 21
Gemini: June 21 – July 20
Cancer: July 20 – Aug. 10
Leo: Aug. 10 – Sept. 16
Virgo: Sept. 16 – Oct. 30
Libra: Oct. 30 – Nov. 23
Scorpio: Nov. 23 – Nov. 29
Ophiuchus: Nov. 29 – Dec. 17
Sagittarius: Dec. 17 – Jan. 20
Capricorn: Jan. 20 – Feb. 16
Aquarius: Feb. 16 – March 11
Pisces: March 11- April 18

Notice the sign for November 29 to December 17?  In Kunkle’s view, that the 13th sign,  Ophiuchus (OFF-ee-YOO-kuss), the Serpent Bearer.
However, Kunkle’s dates are irrelevant for western astrology; he’s actually referring to sidereal astrology, which is oriented to the constellations. Tropical astrology, the most common form in the Western world, is based on the seasons. It’s geocentric – related to life on  Earth. And in tropical astrology, if you were born between February 20 – March 20, you’re still a Pisces!
The irony is that the ancient Babylonians knew about Ophiuchus, but because they didn’t want a zodiac with thirteen signs, they tossed it out. It was one of the 48 constellations listed by the second century astronomer Ptolemy and is one of the 88 modern constellations. Perhaps in a larger context, its rediscovery signals the emergence of a new archetype and its importance is found in what it may be telling us about humanity and ourselves at this juncture in time.That’s where synchronicity enters the picture.
Planets are archetypes – Mars, for instance, is the mythological god of war; Venus is the mythological goddess of love. A planet’s discovery “coincides” with a shift in mass consciousness that comes about as a result of certain world events and situations unfold. So what kind of archetype might be emerging with the rediscovery of Ophiuchus?
We’ll cover that and the mythology of Ophiuchus in tomorrow’s post.
Posted in 13th Sign, Ophiuchus | 19 Comments

Owls, Again

Posted on February 6, 2011 by Trish and Rob
Synchronicities involving birds as messengers are probably more common than most of us realize. We’ve written before about owls as messengers between the living and the dead  and about owls as players in UFO/ET experiences. The following owl stories come from Jane Clifford, for whom owls are messengers that warn her of impending loss.
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Late one night an owl swept in front of a car in which I was the a passenger.  Knowing  it meant a death, I pretended I hadn’t seen it. That night a huge owl appeared in a dream, flying towards my face with its talons going for my eyes. It said “You will see me!” I never denied seeing another one.
Another time I was traveling toward home with my 12-year-old son.  I had to stop for a creature on the road, which refused to move. It was an owl. It swiveled its head 360 degrees and looked at me. Two days later, my son’s great uncle died.
Yet another time I was traveling by car with a friend who had recently lost his partner and mother. Once again, an owl swept across the road in front of us and I knew it meant more loss for him. Sure enough, his ex-wife, uncle, and his children’s maternal grandmother all died a few weeks apart.
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Has anyone had an owl experience that turned out to be good luck??
Posted in birds as messengers, jane clifford, owls | 22 Comments

The Lost Manuscript and the Herring

Posted on February 5, 2011 by Trish and Rob
Synchronicity and luck often seem to go hand-in-hand. That was certainly the case for Hermann Sudermann (1857-1928) , a German dramatist and novelist whose plays were the basis for more than 35 films in the twentieth century. 
In the early days of his career, Sudermann earned his living by submitting weekly installments of his novels to a newspaper in Berlin. But the newspaper editor was apparently worried that if something happened to Sudermann before he finished a novel, his readers would be left hanging in midair. So one day he informed Sudermann that their arrangement was changing. From here on in, the young novelist would have to turn in the entire book before the chapters were published.
Sudermann wasn’t happy about the change  – too long between paychecks! But there wasn’t much he could do about it except start writing.  He sequestered himself on the family farm and wrote Frau Sorg, about a young man torn between his love for a woman and his devotion to his father. When the novel was finished, Sudermann set out to deliver the manuscript to the newspaper.
He supposedly put the manuscript in his overcoat pocket. This part strikes me as somewhat odd, but perhaps manuscripts back then were written on paper of a smaller size than today’s standard of 8.5X11 inches. He boarded a train for Berlin and in Insterburg, where he was due to change trains, he encountered some old friends. Instead of changing trains, they hit the local watering holes.
The next morning, Sudermann woke in Berlin, but couldn’t remember anything that had happened. Worse than the hangover he probably had was that the manuscript was no longer in his overcoat pocket, which meant he wasn’t going to be paid. Depressed, he headed back to the farm and, that evening, again found himself at Insterburg, waiting for the train to Berlin, which wasn’t due to arrive until morning. He found a place to stay for the night, then hit the local bars again.
At some point, he stopped at a delicatessen and ordered a herring. As was customary in those days, the herring was wrapped in scrap paper and Sudermann was already eating when he recognized the handwriting on the paper as his own. It was a page from his lost manuscript. Elated, he got the rest of the deli’s wrapping paper and recovered most of his novel.
The odds in this story are significant. If Sudermann hadn’t gotten lodging for the night, if  he hadn’t stopped at the deli for that herring, if he’d been too drunk  to recognize his own handwriting, things would have turned out much differently.
 ***
Then there is something darkly symbolic and trickster-like about finding your novel pages put to use wrapping fish. Back when I was a newspaper reporter, we used to be proud of getting our stories on the front page stories, but we conceded that the next day they would under someone’s kitty litter. – R
Posted in luck, novelists, sudermann | 11 Comments

Phantom Kangaroos

Posted on February 4, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Speaking of ghosts, this story has been kicking around our dashboard for weeks. It seems an appropriate time to hop to it, and get it posted.

Kangaroos, as every kid knows, are unique to Australia. But are they?
This next story is another one of those Fortean oddities that don’t seem to have any explanation and underscore the incredible mysteries of the world and reality we inhabit.
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In Mayama, a mountainous region about 220 miles north of Tokyo, there have been more than 30 sightings in the last seven years of kangaroos. Obviously, this area doesn’t have any indigenous kangaroos.Now journalists are supposedly flocking to the region, hoping to capture photos of these elusive creatures.

Interestingly, phantom kangaroos are fairly common in Fortean literature. Colonies of kangaroos have shown up in England, France, Germany, Scotland, and yes, in the U.S. In the U.S., they seem to appear in certain areas for a short period of time – usually in the Midwest – then vanished just as mysteriously as they appeared.
Jerome Clarke, in his book, Unexplained! says that sightings date back to 1899, when a woman in Virginia saw a kangaroo in her backyard.

Throughout the 20th century, there were sightings in Ohio, Utah, Illinois, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Colorado and California. Canada has also reported sightings.

So how do these creatures get to these areas? If you’ve seen any in your area (other than in Australia!) we’d love to hear about it.

The original article is here. 

How many of you saw the lunar eclipse??

Posted in disappearances, kangaroos | Leave a comment

SIGNS of our time

Posted on February 4, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Last year, Robert Perry came to our blog and offered an interesting synchronicity in which an idea manifested in a short period of time into a physical experience that mimicked the idea. Perry was working with an organization called Circle of Atonement, which was following the guidance in The Course of Miracles. They were holding a meeting to discus how to streamline the organization when one of the members came up with an image of people working together in a chain to improve efficiency. Perry remarked that she was describing a ‘bucket brigade,’ where a team fighting a fire forms a chain passing along buckets of water.

Astonishingly, minutes after making this remark, a plumbing accident flooded a nearby room, and the group formed a chain and passing buckets to clear the water from the room. A great synchronicity, that. Perry calls such incidents signs, as the title of his book above indicates. Here, we would be a bit more specific and call it a trickster synchro.

Robert Perry has written a book called, SIGNS: A New Approach to Coincidence, Synchronicity, Guidance, Life Purpose, and God’s Plan. Here’s another story of  a sign from Perry’s book, and again it sounds like the trickster to us.

 Feeling guilty at having neglected his family, Perry went out with his 13-year old son to play Frisbee. At one point the boy lay down on the ground to rest, and Perry amused himself by trying to get the Frisbee to land on him. That evening they watched a Simpsons episode in which Krusty the Clown discovers he has a daughter and takes her to play Frisbee. He  lies down and asks her to throw it on him.

The matching incidents drew attention to an underlying theme. Krusty is in despair at being a useless father, and for Perry this underlined his own feeling that he hadn’t  spent enough time with his kids. The fact that he was being likened to a degenerate clown, who first didn’t know he was a father and then discovers he is a terrible father, was not exactly inspirational. But it was a good example of how the trickster works. It’s the sense that It’s the absurd coincidences that make you think that someone is out there making a joke at your expense.

Perry offers three possibilities about three possibilities how synchronicity works. He suggests that similar events cluster in time and space according to some unknown law that one day might be explained by quantum physics. Another possibility: it’s a physical manifestation of some wise element in our unconscious. The third explanation is one that Perry has come to adhere to more than the others. The signs or synchros emanate from God.

He writes: “It is a feeling that grows in one through long and repeated contact, a feeling that doesn’t need the support of religious belief systems, a feeling that one may never even articulate to oneself, but that is simply an innate response to the presence of a greater mind.”

Our take: if God is behind these stories then She is a master trickster.
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Today is the 2nd anniversary of our blog and we just want to thank all of you who have contributed so much to our collective knowledge about synchros!

Posted in dark trickster, Robert Perry, signs | 32 Comments

UFO Over Jerusalem

Posted on February 3, 2011 by Trish and Rob

There’s a certain synchronicity about this event occurring now, given the turmoil in the Arab world. This video has been circulating since January 28, with various versions taken by different people from different areas. This one, the 4th, is the clearest.

Posted in UFO jerusalem | 41 Comments

Another Earth

Posted on February 3, 2011 by Trish and Rob

This movie, which just won at Sundance, sounds like it goes hand-in-hand with Brian Greene’s new book, The Hidden Reality. A second earth. Parallel lives. Take a look at the trailer, then check out the link for more extensive information about the film.

The other link.
Thanks to musing egret for letting us know about it!

Posted in another earth, movies, parallel lives, sundance | 5 Comments

Revolution #49

Posted on February 2, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Here’s an interesting I Ching reading from Adele Aldridge related to the Egyptian uprising. She sent this to us around noon today.


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I couldn’t resist sharing this with you.

While eating lunch and watching more news about this fascinating revolution going on in Egypt I decided to indulge in a quick question of the I Ching. I asked, “What will happen in Egypt now?”

The response I got was #49 Revolution with the two yin lines changing to Hexagram #1, The Creative. Of course just getting the hexagram named revolution is statistically improbable and what keeps me hooked.

Adele
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Other name for Hexagram #49 are Radical Change and Throwing Off. The changing line leading to #1, the creative, is interesting. Let’s see what happens.

Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments

ESP

Posted on February 2, 2011 by Trish and Rob

We mentioned this study after the New York Times wrote about it last month–and the reaction–but now here’s more details.

ESP. Extrasensory perception. Despite all the studies done by J.B. Rhine, despite Carl Jung’s writings on the subject, despite the fact that most of us experience it from time to time, it remains an ugly stepchild in the psychological community.  But now, an article in a prestigious journal may change all that. Or not.

The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology has agreed to publish an article about nine unusual lab experiments conducted over the last ten years by Daryl J. Bem, a professor emeritus at Cornell. Hard to argue with an academic from Cornell, right? In a nutshell, Bem tested the ability of college students to “accurately sense random events, like whether a computer program will flash a photograph on the left or right side of the screen.”  The study included more than 1,000 students. For the nuances of the experiment, click here.  
What’s more intriguing than the experiment itself is the resistance from other mainstream psychologists that Bem’s experiment is pro ESP – i.e., that it exists, that it’s real. Quoting from the NY Times article: “It’s craziness, pure craziness. I can’t believe a major journal is allowing this work in,” Ray Hyman, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University Oregon and longtime critic of ESP research, said. “I think it’s just an embarrassment for the entire field.”
Really? An embarrassment? Bem’s article was subjected to peer review by four reviewers in the field. And all four decided that the paper met the journal’s editorial standards, says  Charles Judd, the editor of the journal, a psychologist at the University of Colorado. He added: “…there was no mechanism by which we could understand the results.”
We’re not sure what he means by “mechanism,” but this seems to be the bone of contention among those who object to the article. “The problem was that this paper was treated like any other,” said an editor at the journal, Laura King, a psychologist at the University of Missouri. “And it wasn’t.”
Because the paper concerns ESP, a “paranormal” phenomenon, it apparently should be subjected to more rigorous standards. In the end, it all boils down to this: “…if ESP exists, why aren’t people getting rich by reliably predicting the movement of the stock market or the outcome of football games?”
Why does ESP have to translate to wealth and riches? Why is that the bottom line validation for whether it’s real? What about the child who reaches out telepathically to a parent in the middle of a crisis and the contact averts a tragedy? What about  the feelings you experience with a partner, a friend, a sibling, those moments when your minds connect in an inexplicable and beautiful way? ESP is as common and ordinary as breakfast.  
 It’s tough to dismiss someone like Bem – Cornell, Harvard, Stanford, considered to be one of the imminent social psychologists. And maybe that’s why the rebuttals have been so vociferous.  The rebuttals seem to be the dying gasp of the old paradigm, no different than the dying beliefs in politics or religion. Change will come regardless of what the naysayers and skeptics say. It will sweep into our lives in such bold, dramatic ways that rebuttals will make us laugh. 
Posted in telepathy | 75 Comments