Not all synchronicities are biggies. Some occur just to remind us we’re in the flow.
I walked out into the kitchen to tell Rob about an article I’d just read and saw the cut fruit he was preparing for a salad. Then I walked outside to get the mail and found this, the cover of Life Extension Magazine:
An image nearly identical to what’s on the cutting board.
The message seems obvious: Get more Vitamin C!
A new episode of The Mystical Underground is live! “Halloween Special: The Devil’s Chair”:
Join Rob for a special Halloween episode as he reads from Trish and Rob’s short story collection “The Outliers”…
“The Devil’s Chair is a story based on an urban legend about a brick chair that faces two gravestones in a cemetery in central Florida, north of Orlando. The cemetery is located outside the spiritualist community of Cassadaga, which offers weekly ghost tours of the town. In this story, the spookiness is enhanced when a reporter looking for a Halloween story visits the cemetery at midnight as he investigates the urban legend.”
*MacGregor, Rob; MacGregor, Trish. The Outliers. Crossroad Press.
Available in print and digitally on Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/yskzkk6m
At some point in my love affair with astrology, I read that the degree of your natal sun usually corresponds to a pivotal event in your life that helped to shape who you are. Possibilities include: parental divorce, a significant move, the birth of a sibling, the death of a loved one. In other words, a significant, PIVOTAL event, something that influenced the course of your life.
When I first learned this, I tested it on the charts of people I knew well, starting with my own chart and that of my family. My Gemini sun is 16 degrees and 12 minutes. Five months after my 16th birthday, my parents left Venezuela, where I’d been born and raised, and moved to Florida. The significance of that move once prompted my dad to remark that since that move, I was reluctant to call any place home. And he was right.
Rob’s sun is 25 degrees and 27 minutes of Taurus. His corresponding age was around 25 – or 1973. He received a pardon from Gerald Ford for dodging the draft and refusing to go to Vietnam, for which he was convicted in 1972 and sentenced to alternative service.
Our daughter’s Virgo sun is 8 degrees and 32 minutes. Around that age – third grade – I had her I.Q. tested and she was admitted into a gifted program, which changed the course of her public school education.
My dad had a 26 degree 44 minutes Libra sun. He was around 27 when he met my mother on a blind date.
Recently, I did Bernie Beitman’s chart. He’s the psychiatrist who started the Coincidence Project, part of his serious study of synchronicity. His Pisces sun is at 8 degrees 30 minutes. So I asked him what pivotal event had occurred between the age of eight and a half and nine. Here’s his response:
That is when I lost my dog and I got lost and found him. That set the stage for my interest in human GPS, a subset of coincidences.
It’s easy to find out the degree of your natal sun. Cafe Astrology offers free astrology charts here.
Just enter your name, place and date of birth. If you don’t know the time, use noon. The sun travels a degree a day, so you’ll be able to see the degree but the minutes may not be correct. Take note of the sun’s degree, think of it as a year in your life. What pivotal event occurred for you that year? If you find something, please let me know.
I recently read an article in The Guardian about the burgeoning – and totally unregulated – life coaching industry. The article focuses on the queen of life coaching- Brooke Castillo.
She founded the Life Coach School in 2007. Its central idea is that anyone who works hard can build a thriving career as a life coach. “Last year, with more people than ever anxious, indoors and online because of the pandemic, the company made $37m in gross revenue.”
That’s 37 MILLION. How the hell did Castillo earn that much? The Guardian gives us a breakdown:
Castillo offers two streams. One stream is called Self Coaching Scholars. The cost? $297 monthly membership program. Not sure what you get for that. Initially, those who wanted to become coaches could take a six-month online course for $15,000. “The current course is three months long and costs $21,000; by comparison… tuition for Georgetown University’s professional certificate in life coaching runs $13,995.”
This queen of life coaching adapted ideas from other self-improvement gurus. “From inspirational speaker Byron Katie, she learned not to blame outside circumstances for her problems. From channeler Esther Hicks, she learned about the law of attraction (later popularized through the book and film The Secret), and practiced vibrationally aligning herself with tens of millions of dollars. From entrepreneurial guru Tony Robbins, she learned to claim her personal power and transform her life from ordinary to extraordinary,” the article says.
While I’m a proponent of the idea that our thoughts and beliefs create our personal realities, I’m not a proponent of this kind of bullshit, where you pay someone else an extravagant amount of money so that you, too, can rip off the gullible. The desperate. I don’t believe a life coach guru can coach you into making a zillion bucks. Or becoming a successful entrepreneur. You’re the only one who can change your beliefs and attitudes. No one else can do that for you. We all have the creativity and intuition to do what we need to do to achieve a dream.
As the article points out, Castillo’s rapid rise raises questions about an unregulated industry “at a time when the demand for mental health services is outpacing supply.”
The article covers Castillo’s beginnings, quotes women who have taken her courses and become disenchanted, and talks about one riveting incident that had a cascade effect.
“Then, last spring, after George Floyd was murdered and businesses scrambled to prove their antiracist bona fides, LCS was conspicuously silent. Castillo’s staff pushed her to issue a statement, or at least a Facebook post, decrying racism and voicing support for their Black members, but she refused. Instead, on 1 June, LCS published a vague Instagram text post –“Love is always the answer” – that seemed like an attempt to sidestep the national reckoning on race. It had the exact opposite effect. LCS social media was flooded with furious comments; on the internal Slack channel, coaches called Castillo out. The school was inundated with cancellations and demands for refunds.”
The article is riveting.
Because of the mental health angle, I sent a link to the article to Chris Mackey, a clinical psychologist in Australia who is also in the synchronicity group I meet with via zoom. Here was his response:
“Around ten years ago I remember Martin Seligman, the founder of positive psychology, saying that the coaching field was like the Wild West. It was an interesting comment as the numbers of coaches attending positive psychology conferences was dramatically increasing.
“Sadly the coaching field is completely unregulated, but it’s easy to learn a lingo to exploit vulnerable people and to make it sound as though you have sophisticated ways of helping people change. Most lasting change comes down to persistent hard work. Most of the principles and strategies that Brooke Castillo refers to (taken straight from CBT) are outlined in free web-based programs. It sounds like she exploits the lure of the “law of attraction”, related to synchronicity, to add some extra colour and appeal.
Brooke Castillo does sound a bit like a cult leader. She reminds me of Elizabeth Holmes who sucked in so many people with her company, Theranos, that pretended to have wonderful new ways of doing all sorts of blood tests using just one drop of blood. But at least that claim had an objective way of being disproven, whereas Brooke Castillo can just blame people for having negative thoughts as a reason for their dissatisfaction with the product. Concerning stuff! Thanks again for sending the link.”
A new episode of The Mystical Underground is live! “Trish MacGregor: Star Power For November 2021”:
Join Trish for the November 2021 astrological forecast!
Photos taken on the grounds of The Monroe Institute
At your next family gathering, bring up the topic of spirit communication. The reaction of the group will tell you quite a bit about how people generally regard the whole subject of ghost/spirits and contact with the dead. There are likely to be three types of reactions: snickers and rolling of the eyes, intrigue and fascination, and family members or relatives who eagerly relate their own experiences with spirits and spirit contact.
In 2012, when we originally posted this story, the percentage of Americans who believed in life after death was, according to a Huffington Post/Yougov survey, 64 percent and 45 percent believed that ghosts or the spirits of the dead can interact with the living. These statistics were startling different from a 1978 survey that indicated only 11 percent of people believe in ghosts and spirits. However, the problem with polls is how are the questions phrased? Is as religious organization or publication asking the question? Where does the belief stand in 2021?
In 2021,YouGov stats says that about half of Americans belief that demons and ghosts really exist. Given the proliferation of blogs, websites, books, movies and social media sites, I find that drop from 2012 hard to believe.
Regardless, the next time you’re with family or friends, bring up the subject and note the reaction – and the stories.
Another question to consider: as more people become aware that spirit contact is possible, does it happen more frequently? We believe so and that’s why we wrote Secrets of Spirit Communication.
Today my dad, whom we ultimately called Buddy after Megan was born, would have been 108. Born on October 20, 1913 in Quincy, Illinois, one of five siblings, he grew up during the great depression. His childhood wasn’t ideal. He was the third of six kids – three sons, two daughters, one brother killed in WWII.
In the midst of the depression, he was living in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a numbers guy unable to find work, so he and his older brother, Joe, applied for accounting jobs with Standard Oil in Venezuela. I think he was 25 or 26 at the time. Standard Oil’s subsidiary, Creole, hired him and Joe.
I think Joe and his wife Rosie, traveled to Venezuela first, then my dad followed in 1937 and settled in an oil camp in the town of Las Salinas, on the shores of Lake Maracaibo, which contained large reserves of crude oil.
When WWII broke out, my dad signed up and his travels sent him all over the world. On a leave in Tulsa, he met my mother on a blind date and six months later, on December 12, 1941, they were married. He returned to Venezuela with my mom. I mention this because to do this back then required guts. You essentially became expatriates who worked for an American company in a foreign country that was as wild as the wild west in this country in the 1800s.
And there, my sister and I were born, attended American schools, learned the language, the culture, and were always guided by our parents’s values. Work toward what you love, love what you do, love the people who are closest to you, be honest in all you do.
In the early 60s, I remember standing on the balcony of our apartment, watching a procession of cars fleeing the country, the dictator – Perez Jimenez – in one of those cars with $13 million embezzled from the government. He settled in Miami Beach. Not long afterward, Venezuela nationalized the oil industry and droves of Americans, including my parents, left the country. It was November 1963, a turning point in my life.
We have returned to Venezuela twice since then. In 1987, Rob and I traveled there with my parents and experienced a powerful synchronicity that was one of the earliest we posted on this blog. hWe even found the house in the oil camp where we’d lived in Maracaibo, the city where my sister was born.
We returned when our daughter was old enough to windsurf with Rob on the island of Margarita. In the years since, Venezuela has fallen into a black hole. Greed is to blame – not socialism, not the Republican talking points. This country, because of its natural oil resources, has always been prone to corruption.
In the 1990s, my mother developed Alzheimer’s, we had to put her in a facility, and my dad eventually moved in with us. Those years were pretty dark, involved a move to a larger house so everyone could have a room, and in retrospect what stands out for me is CHESS. My dad had been playing chess since he was a kid, and he and Rob, then he and Megan, played almost nightly. My dad never went to college. But he was a member of MENSA and Megan definitely follows suit.
Buddy died in late September 2005, just five years after my mom, a few weeks short of his 92nd birthday. He was tired. He had Parkinson’s. His wife had been dead for five years. He was in an assisted living facility in Georgia where my sister was the head nurse. A few weeks earlier, I had shown him a video of Carol Bowman’s interaction with James Leiniger, a young kid who reportedly remembered his life as WWII pilot. At the end of he video, my dad was crying. “That’s the most convincing evidence I’ve ever seen for reincarnation.” I believe that video released him.
So, dad, happy birthday. And thank you and mom for all you did back then and since…
The magazine, Psychology Today, underwent a revolution of sorts over the past 10-15 years. The magazine used to focus on hard-core Freudian anti-paranormal psychology. Any articles about synchronicity and other aspects of the paranormal were written by skeptics, non-believers, writers who would refer to synchronicity as a pattern-seeking tendency of some of us. The bottom line was that the patterns were meaningless, it didn’t matter how many 11:11s you saw in a single day or week. Silly you.
Then along came article or two suggesting that people who took synchronicity seriously weren’t necessarily deranged or in need of counseling, but they were expressing a growing belief system, one that was not grounded in science.
But then the old guard must’ve been swept out of office, or at least they couldn’t control the on-line version of the publication which was blooming with new life, and a new perspective. Bernard Beitman, a psychiatrist associated with the University of Virginia, began a column on synchronicity and described himself as the only psychotherapist since Carl Jung to take a deep search of the subject and told of his own experiences.
But Beitman wasn’t alone. Other writers and researchers were seeing the same light. One of them was Gregg Levoy. Here’s a fascinating column by Levoy that appeared in the Dec. 17, 2017 issue of Psychology Today.
“I used to be a reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer, back in my 20s, and for roughly half of my decade-long tenure there I kept hearing a call to quit and become a freelance writer, a decision I largely ignored for years because it was Scary Stuff.
“However, after years of trying to ignore this call, the signs pointing toward it took on a whole new tack. This is how it began:
“I was driving home from work one day, listening to a song on the radio called Desperado, by the Eagles, and as I pulled up to the curb in front of my house, the last line I heard before I turned off the car was “Don’t you draw the Queen of Diamonds, she’ll beat you if she’s able; the Queen of Hearts is always your best bet.” I turned off the ignition, opened the door, stepped my foot onto the curb, and there at my left foot was a playing card—the Queen of Hearts.
“I just sat there utterly dumbfounded, and wondering, of course, what it meant?
“When I mentioned the incident to a friend that evening, she said, with an extravagant quality of assuredness, that when you’re on the right path, the universe winks and nods at you from time to time, to let you know. She also said that once you start noticing these little cosmic cairns, once you understand that you’re on a path at all, you’ll begin to see them everywhere. It’s what happened, she reminded me, when I bought my Toyota and suddenly started seeing Toyotas everywhere.
“I didn’t know I was even on a path, I told her, much less whether it was the rightone. I simply found myself unable to make heads or tails of the episode, and ended up filing it under “Unexplained Phenomena,” along with esp, deja vu, spoon-bending, water-witching, spontaneous remission, and certain incomprehensible acts of human forgiveness.
“But even more remarkable than finding that Queen card when I did, was that over the next two years, as I searched for a sense of clarity (and courage) about this call, I found five more Queen playing cards, in incredibly improbable locations all around the country: a sidewalk in Cincinnati, a conference room in Santa Fe, a sand dune in Cannon Beach Oregon, a mountain wilderness in Colorado six miles from the nearest trailhead. The whole thing made the Twilight Zone seem like Mister Rogers Neighborhood.
“And every time I found another Queen card, the sheer unbelievability of it took another giant step forward, and eventually, it went so far beyond the laws of probability that I only barely hesitate to say that it’s impossible there was nothing more going on here than a statistical aberration. This was orchestrated by something with wits. Which shot my rational view of the universe pretty much to hell.
“I come from a family of scientists, detectives, journalists, non-fiction writers, and New Yorkers—and you don’t get a more cynical bunch than this—and this stuff just doesn’t happen in our universe. And yet, though the phenomenon became more inscrutable with each find, in a way it also began making more and more sense. A pattern—more, a passageway—seemed to emerge.
“I came to understand that this rather profound administering of chance was directing me toward something both my writing and my life needed at that time: more heart, less head. More intuition, less intellect. More of the inner life, the emotional life, the life of the senses. More listening. More of what Carl Jung referred to as the anima, the force of the feminine in a man’s life. And the Queen, of course, is the archetype of powerful feminine energy, which I felt myself being compelled toward by the kind of meaningful coincidence Jung called synchronicity.”
The column goes on at some length about the mystery of synchronicity and is worth reading. Levoy ends the column with this intriguing comment. “No one has been able to fully explain synchronicity, so perhaps you should simply accept it as a wild card and an ordering principle, the height of absurdity and the depth of profundity, and a crack in the door through which you can catch sight of the universe and its mysterious ways.
You can find the complete column at this link.
Gregg Levoy is the author of Vital Signs: The Nature and Nurture of Passion and Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life. Gregg will be a guest on our podcast, The Mystical Underground on Dec. 12.
A new episode of The Mystical Underground is live! “Christine Clawley: Lucid Awakening”:
Join Trish and Rob for a conversation with…
Christine Clawley received her MA from Pacifica Graduate Institute in 2015 and became a licensed professional counselor in Colorado in 2018. She is currently a clinician in private practice and has a Jungian and depth-oriented practice in Arizona that helps clients heal from traumatic experiences, as well as supports individuals who have also had near-death experiences or other spiritually transformative experiences.
After overcoming the life-threatening Necrotizing Fasciitis at age 24, she embarked on a journey of healing and self-understanding through exploring various holistic techniques, including a mindfulness practice, meditation, yoga, self-hypnosis, and indigenous healing modalities. Prior to contracting this illness, she received many dreams and messages that foreshadowed her illness. While spending nearly a month in a medically-induced coma she had many dreams that mirrored what was happening to her on a physical, emotional, and spiritual level. Upon awaking from the coma, she experienced increased intuition, empathy, and an increased frequency of lucid and precognitive dreams. These experiences have led her to research topics related to near-death experiences, consciousness, non-ordinary reality, synchronicity, dreaming, and shamanism.
www.lucidawakening.com
