Cyclone Yasi

Posted on February 1, 2011 by Trish and Rob

While a 2000-mile stretch of the U.S. prepares for a massive snowstorm, Queensland, Australia is facing the monster in that image, Cyclone Yasi, now a category 5 cyclone. Weeks ago, this same area suffered tremendous floods. According to this article, North Queensland residents have been given just three hours to evacuate. It’s going to hit during high tide, which means a storm surge is expected across much of the North Queensland coast. Winds of 279 kilometers an hour – 173 miles an hour – are expected. That wind velocity matches Hurricane Katrina.

Send good thoughts to our friends down under. Brizdaz, let us know how you weather the storm!

Posted in Australia, cyclone yasi | 43 Comments

Lost Wallet Blues

Posted on February 1, 2011 by Trish and Rob

We’ve all done it – misplaced or lost something practical or valuable and then we tear through our homes and cars and lives, looking for whatever it is we’ve lost. Losing a wallet, for instance, can make you feel like you’re losing your identity. Or, as the illustration shows, it can make you feel naked. Your ID, your credit cards, your personal information, as well as cash, is kept there.  In fact, when we dream of such a loss, it usually symbolizes a concern about one’s identity.

Recently, while at a a local coffee shop, Trish was inside ordering and Rob sat outside with Noah, our golden retriever. His keys and wallet lay on the table in front of him. An odd thought occurred. What if I just walked off and left my wallet here.  What a strange thing to ponder, he thought, as Trish came out and handed him his coffee and they headed to the car. Rob held the dog leash, the coffee cup, the car keys and his wallet. In the process of putting the dog into the car and juggling the contents of his hands, the wallet must’ve slipped out. It fell to the pavement and wasn’t noticed.

A couple of hours later, the search began. It didn’t take Rob long to concede that he didn’t misplace the wallet in the car or house. He’d lost it. He decided to wait before taking any action, just in case it turned up. But he also took out an old wallet, as a replacement. The next morning he called the two banks which held his debit card and credit card. Sure enough, someone had tried to use the cards. So he had an answer to the intuitive question he asked himself just a couple of minutes before he actually left the wallet – not on the table, but the pavement.

This experience reminded Rob of another lost wallet experience, an extraordinary one, that unfortunately was cut from the text of Seven Secrets to make room for other stories. It’s a good one.

 This incident occurred about 12 years ago when we lived in another city about 15 south of our present home.
Rob lost his wallet, but didn’t get frantic about it. He was confident that the wallet somehow would return to him. He’d lost the wallet while windsurfing on a lake near the house and hoped it had fallen out before he went into the water. However, he couldn’t find it on the shore where he’d rigged his sail. He knew that if he’d accidentally taken it with him and lost it in the lake, chances of recovering it were slender, to say the least.

But Rob, in this instance, didn’t do any of the things people normally do when they lose wallets – no calls to credit card companies, no request for a duplicate driver’s license, no contact with his auto insurance company. For three or four days, he visualized the wallet returning to him, visualized it so intensely that he could feel its weight in his hand, in his back pocket. He believed the wallet had been found already.

That same week, a lawn man had stopped by our house, soliciting business. We already had someone doing the lawn, but Rob and the man chatted, then the guy left. A few days later, this same man was fishing with a net in the lake where Rob had been windsurfing and dredged up Rob’s wallet.  He returned it, complete with all the cards and water-soaked cash, and said he was relieved that Rob was alive and not on the bottom of that lake.

So not only did the wallet return, as he’d visualized, but he’d met the man who found it a few days before it was discovered.

Posted in lost objects, visualization, wallets | 23 Comments

Maria and #14

Posted on January 31, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 Paul Klee painting
 

This story is in 7 Secrets of Synchronicity and is about number clusters. It was a post we’d written in the early days of our blog, when we got about 5 hits week, mostly from family and friends.  We’re re-posting it  because we love number synchros!
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Clusters of synchronicities that occur with numbers range from the odd to the truly strange. They can coalesce around a single event or continue over the course of a lifetime. In Maria’s story, the number 14 recurred four times over a period of four months.

One night Maria, a college sophomore, drove into a DUI checkpoint on her way to MacDonald’s. Earlier that evening, she’d had two beers. After performing the field sobriety tests, the policeman determined that she was impaired, arrested her, and performed the breathalyzer. Even though she blew under the legal limit for impairment, she spent 14 hours in jail before she was bailed out.

Her parents hired an attorney, who felt she had a strong case for dismissal based on the video of her field sobriety tests and because she blew under the legal limit. A prosecutor was assigned to her case. After reviewing the evidence, he was ready to dismiss the charges, but was then removed from the case and another prosecutor was assigned who wanted to press charges. Her court date was set for December. Since it fell during her week of final exams, the attorney asked for a continuance and a new court date was set for February.

Before Christmas, 14 law firms filed a motion that the DUI checkpoints in this particular county were illegal because the police had too much discretion. The motion was heard on January 14 and the judged ruled in favor, which meant that all the evidence would be dismissed in 14 cases, including Maria’s.

The number 14 adds up to 5 – a number about freedom. Shortly before she was stopped, Maria had had an argument with her boyfriend about her freedom.

Posted in number clusters | 8 Comments

The Hidden Reality

Posted on January 30, 2011 by Trish and Rob
I’ve been anticipating the release of Brian Green’s new book – The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos. If you’re unfamiliar with his work (The Elegant Universe and The Fabric  of the Cosmos), then be sure to treat yourself to any of his books. He’s a professor of physics and mathematics at Colombia who, like Michio Kaku, writes clearly about the quantum world.
I haven’t gotten very far in his newest book yet, but I can see that he’s laying out a convincing argument for why, if our universe is infinite, it may be just one of many. In an early chapter, Endless Doppelgangers, he talks about the kind of stuff that comprised my science fiction as a kid.  “In the far reaches of an infinite cosmos, there’s a galaxy that looks just like the Milky Way, with a solar system that’s the spitting image of ours, with a planet that’s a dead ringer for earth, with a house that’s indistinguishable from yours, inhabited by someone who looks just like you, who is right now reading this very book and imagining you, in a distant galaxy just reaching the end of this sentence.” In other words, your doppelganger.

For those of us who have experienced doppelgangers – Mike Perry comes to mind immediately! –  this chapter should hold considerable interest. In one of Jane Roberts’ Seth books, she and her husband, Rob, experienced doppelgangers in a place where they had gone dancing. Her sense was that the couple looked like she and Rob might have if Seth had never been a part of their lives – old and bitter.

Greene says that if the universe is infinite, then there are infinitely many doppelgangers, infinitely many yous. He proceeds to knit together the cosmology and the scientific principles to show why “the issue of whether space is finite or infinite has a profound impact on the very nature of reality.” He takes us through both possibilities with such elegance that even a non-scientist like me can get it.
And now, back to the book!
Posted in brian greene, hidden reality, quantum physics | 15 Comments

Meet and Greet the Dolphins

Posted on January 30, 2011 by Trish and Rob

We went down to the keys this weekend to move Megan back home – and then back to college. Her internship is over and was a great success. Rob, Jo (the woman Megan stayed with) and I drove over to the facility for the meet and greet. What a wonderful experience it was. At the end of the post is a video of Rob doing his meet and greet. You can hear their clicks, their chatter.

We learned some interesting facts about dolphins. They have 88 teeth.  Their teeth are small, perfect, utterly ivory white. In the wild, the fish they eat hydrate them. But since these dolphins are fed frozen fish, they have to be hydrated daily. They are given cubes of Jell-O and also learn to swallow a hose (no gag reflex) so that several liters of water can be poured down their throats. The dolphins we met were a mother and baby. The baby is almost three, continues to nurse, but also eats frozen fish. The trainer said the baby will nurse until the mother decides enough is enough.

There are just 13 dolphins in this facility. To bring in fresh DNA, some of them are transferred to other facilities to mate. One dolphin is on birth control – yes, you read that correctly. She’s on birth control so that when she mates with her son, she isn’t impregnated. Dolphins aren’t discriminating in their sexual partners. Anyone will do. No one is allowed to touch this female because the birth control substance seeps into the dolphin’s skin and if you touch it, the substance seeps into your skin.

The water in the tanks comes in through the canal, through a wire mesh fence. This keeps the tank clean, fish often swim into the tank, so the dolphins sometimes get to eat actual live fish. There are many aspects of their lives as captive dolphins that struck me as bizarre and unpleasant – like that hydration hose. And the fact that they are trained to beach themselves on a platform for when they have to be moved to other facilities or taken out of the way of a potential hurricane. Pros and cons. Renee Prince, who has worked with captive dolphins, whose synchro  we posted last year, knows a lot more about this part of it than I do.

But today I also realized these dolphins are intensely  curious about people. As soon as we appeared four of them swam over to see  who we were and then hung out, watching us, as we videotaped them and took pictures.We, of course, talked to them like they were our pets and they probably were laughing at us. But I wondered if dolphins, like humans, choose their experiences. And does their knowledge spill into the morphic resonance of all dolphins, so that even dolphins in the wild learn about us?

Megan said that one day, a group of vets suffering from PTSD came to the facility to swim with the dolphins.  She said it was gratifying to see how happy the swims made the vets and that the dolphins seemed buoyed by the experience, too.  Does this information also get filtered into the morphic resonance of all dolphins?

The facility has just one sea lion, who is off by himself and allegedly quite happy that way. They used to let him in to the dolphin tank to swim with them, but he disliked it. I guess he’s a loner. He’s now going blind from cataracts and is supposedly going to have an operation to remove them.

I’m personally bothered by captive anything. I try to imagine myself in a human tank controlled by aliens (for lack of a better metaphor), who seduce me to do tricks because I know I’ll be fed. I try to imagine myself turning over on my back so tourists can see my underbelly, the internal nipple from which my baby suckles, the “slit” where my sex organs are. This is how that part of the meet and greet was explained to us. I tried to imagine these aliens explaining how I can make only three distinct sounds (most of which are audible on this video). But the trainer added these sounds are what these dolphins make, but there “may be more.”

Really? Has she read John Lily? 

Yet, I confess to a certain admiration for Dolphins Plus. Their intern program is well-organized, their trainers seem to be genuinely committed to the welfare of the dolphins, and the dolphins seem happy and well-adjusted to their situation. The vets and handicapped children swim for free. The trainers apparently love what they’re doing. The young woman who conducted our meet and greet had started off as an intern, like Megan, and had been there for four years.  Megan’s fellow intern, Erin, is majoring in marine biology at Eckard College and is a bright, articulate young woman who loves what she’s doing and whose knowledge of dolphins (she’s 20) is impressive.

During my meet and greet, I was astonished at how soft and smooth the dolphins’ bodies are, silken to the touch. The trainer showed me the track marks on the mother’s fins where blood is drawn once a month or so to determine the dolphin’s health. Their blowholes are much larger than I recall from when we swam with them years ago. When these two dolphins touched my face – the kissing part of this meet and greet – I felt I had been touched by a superior being who was amused at the whole spectacle. 

They are such magical and mysterious beings that all of us came away from the experience just sort of floating on air.

Posted in dolphins, internship | 10 Comments

Amazing Twins

Posted on January 29, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Here’s another astonishing story of twins separated at birth.  They were born in 1940 and didn’t meet until 1979.
Yet, the similarities – which could be seen as synchronicities – are amazing.

Both were named Jim–Jim Springer and Jim Lewis. Each married a wife named Linda. Each divorced and each twin married a Betty. Each one had a son named James Allan. Each one had a dog named Troy. They both frequently vacationed out of state at the same Florida beach town. They both chain-smoked, had migraine headaches, and had basement workshops.

It goes on. Both were former sheriff’s deputies when they met, and each one occupied a house that was the only one on the block. Writer William B. Stoecker figures the chance of that string of so-called coincidences occurring is 1 in ten billion, but it’s probably much higher than that.

Posted in separated, twins | 10 Comments

Baby Grand Piano in Biscayne Bay Rescued by…

Posted on January 28, 2011 by Trish and Rob

This is part of Florida’s high strangeness, the kind of stuff that happens in this state and nowhere else:  a baby grand piano on a sand bar in Miami’s Biscayne Bay. The piano, according to NBC, weighs at least  650 pounds and sits at the highest part of the sand bar, so it won’t be inundated at high tide.

Two days after this story appeared in the news, a 16-year-old kid confessed he was responsible. He said he was “trying to beef up his college application.” We’re not sure what this has to do with beefing up a college app, but hey, it’s been awhile since we were in college and maybe this is what it takes these days. Turns out the kid is the son of a production designer for “Burn Notice.”

A little synchro here with that name: on New Year’s Eve, some party folks went a bit nuts when they lowered  the piano – an old movie prop – onto the sandbar and set it on fire.

On January 28, the piano was finally rescued by Carl Bentulan, a day trader and musician, a bass player – get this, another synchro weirdness – in a Police tribute band called Synchronicity.

 So another Miami urban legend was created here.

Posted in piano biscayne bay | 18 Comments

Wikileak Rumors

Posted on January 27, 2011 by Trish and Rob

We wrote recently on the continued unwillingness of the U.S. government to release its UFO files as other countries have done. Supposedly, Julian Assange has unreleased cables about UFOs. Here’s what he told one interviewer.

“Many weirdos email us about UFOs or how they discovered that they were the anti-christ whilst talking with their ex-wife at a garden party over a pot-plant. However, as yet they have not satisfied two of our publishing rules. However, it is worth noting that in yet-to-be-published parts of the cablegate archive there are indeed references to UFOs.”

 According to the European Union Times  the U.S. went on its highest alert ever on June 10, 2004 as a result of a “massive fleet of UFO’s that “suddenly emerged” from the Southern Ocean and approached Guadalajara, Mexico barely 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) from the American border. Prior to reaching the US border, however, this massive UFO fleet is said in this report to have “dimensionally returned” to their Southern Ocean “home base”.

The southern ocean referred to in the report is the Antarctic Ocean – apparently this is where the fleet has underwater bases. The danger (says the report) is that when the fleet erupts from under the water, tremendous waves and currents are created that can sink ships.Recently, “the Clelia II, an Antarctic cruise ship with 160 people onboard, was nearly capsized when hit by waves generated by these UFO’s emerging from the Southern Ocean…” reports the E.U. Times.

This article also mentions that the fears of the Americans began with the July 1991 solar eclipse when the same types of craft appeared over Mexico City and other parts of that country and were witnessed by thousands. But the American media refused to air any of the footage. That’s true for the mainstream media, which seems to accept the disinformation about UFOs without much of an investigation of the matter. However, cable channels that specialize in these subjects have played the videos.

Here’s the Mexican video. What’s next?

Posted in ufos mexico | 35 Comments

Hawk in the Library of Congress

Posted on January 26, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 Thanks to Rodney Small for bringing our attention to this one!

We know that birds often act as messengers and have done a number of posts on various kinds of birds that performed that service. Now here’s an odd one. A hawk – believed to be a Cooper’s Hawk – has taken refuge in the main reading room at the Library of Congress. It was first noticed on Wednesday, January 19, and is believed to have flown in through a broken window at the top of the 160-foot high dome and hasn’t found its way out. The article and the actual photo of the hawk.

So what can this hawk’s characteristics tell us about its message?

Well, they’re predators, skillful flyers, and can often be seen around backyard feeders, looking for an easy meal. According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, they catch their prey with their feet and squeeze it to death. They hold their prey away from their bodies until it’s dead. They’ve also been known to hold their prey underwater until they die. These hawks are now seen in urban and suburban areas; some studies indicate they are more common in these areas than in their natural habitats of forests.

Life is difficult for the male hawks. They tend to be smaller physically than the females and are also somewhat submissive to them (well, maybe the size difference has something to do with that!), The male hawks build the nests and provide all the food for the female and young for 90 days, until the young can survive on their own.

Hawk, of course, is a term used for people who are pro-war. But since this hawk is in the library of congress, the place where all books published in the U.S. are housed, then perhaps its message suggests that we should look to the history books when making decisions about war. It also might address the predatory nature of politics – both domestic and international – and the divisiveness generally in congress. The fact that the hawk hasn’t found a way out of the library, that you’ve got librarians with binoculars watching it, trying to identify definitively what sort of hawk it is, is also intriguing. Might it suggest that if you ignore history, you’re doomed to repeat it?

Perhaps the hawk is telling us that the old paradigm –  the U.S. as the world’s cop, corporate takeover of democracy, hidden and predatory agendas – is trapped within itself, caught in a loop of its own making. Honestly, if you look at someone like Michelle Bachman, who is positioning herself as a supposedly viable presidential candidate in 2012, then we may be on an irreversible course toward the sort of destruction 2012 doomsayers have been talking about. Bachman is worse than Palin. She isn’t just a balloon head, as one commentator remarked this evening, she’s the kind of person who would promote laws based on her revisionist history.  Just this week she said the founding fathers abolished slavery. Wrong. They were slave owners.

As for Obama’s state of the union speech tonight, Iraq and Afghanistan merited a sentence or so each. No talk about how these two wars are sucking our economy dry.

But hey, maybe it’s also true that I’m making too big a deal out of this. Maybe the hawk just took a wrong turn.

Posted in animals as messengers, hawks, library of congress | 19 Comments

A Telepathy Experiment with Rupert Sheldrake

Posted on January 25, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Telepathy: mind to mind communication. In the larger Jungian picture, telepathy falls under the umbrella of synchronicity.  We’ve written about this phenomenon before, as in Jung and the Sympathy for All Things,  and have also written about British biologist Rupert Sheldrake.

Now this visionary biologist is conducting a telepathy experiment open to anyone who lives in the U.S. Basically, it goes like this: you need a cell or land line, people to whom you’re close who also have a land line or cell and live in the U.S. Further instructions are provided after you register and log in. Rob and I are game. Here’s the you tube video that explains telephone telepathy according to Sheldrake. Here’s the link for joining up.

Posted in experiment, Sheldrake, telepathy | 22 Comments