Black Magic or Blind Chance?

 

Rob has been cleaning out folders in office closet and ran across some gems. One of the folders was filled with articles on synchronicity that he’d saved from the 1980s and 90s. The title of this post comes from an article that appeared in Reader’s Digest and was written by Edward Ziegler. He based the article on Arthur Koestler’s The Roots of Concidence and Alan Vaughn’s book Incredible Coincidences.

Here’s how it opens:

“You look up an unfamiliar word in the dictionary, then encounter the same word in the next few days. You write a letter to an old friend you haven’t heard from in years, and a note from him crosses in the mil. Blind chance ot something else?

“Orthodox science considers that coincidences like these are merely chance happenings.”

Fortunately, the study of synchronicity has come a long way since this article was written. Thanks to technology, we have practically immediate access to information and we can text and zoom and skype with people anywhere on the planet.

One of the mind-blowing synchros in this article was written about in Richard Bach’s book, Nothing by Chance. Bach isn’t just a bestselling author but also a pilot. While barnstorming in the Midwest in 1966 with a rare biplane, a 1929 Detroit-Parks P 2A Speedster. Only 8 of them had been built. In Palmyra, Wisconsin,

Bach loaned the plane to a friend, who upended it as he came in for a landing. As Bach wrote in his book, they were able to fix everything except for one strut.The repair looked hopeless because of the rarity of the needed part.  But  man came up and asked if he could help. Bach’s reply was sarcastic: “Sure. Do you happen to haave an inter-wing strut for a 1929 Detrpoit Speedster, model P-2A?”

The man walked over to his hangar and returned with the part. Bach wrote: “The odds against our breaking the biplane in a little town that happened to be home to a man with the 40-year-old part to repair it; the odds that he would be on the scene when the event happened; the odds that we’d pushed the plane right next to his hangar, within ten feet of the part we needed – the odds were so high that coincidence was a foolish answer.”

As Koestler noted, the great mathematician John von Neumann called the phenomenon “black magic.”

We call these kinds of synchronicities mind-blowers. Like Bach noted, the odds were staggering.

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Synchronicity & those Old Loops

 

the Caracas valley

Landscape with an aerial view of wetlands in Everglades National Park at sunset, Florida, USA

 

Homesick is one of those odd words that means something different to everyone. It usually involves a particular memory and an emotion that accompanies it. When my parents left Venezuela, I was in boarding school in Massachusetts. It was a November, cold and wet, I remember. My dad’s letter about this move arrived by snail mail. I reaslized I wouldn’t be spending Christmas in Caracas but in Florida, the place whee we would be living. It meant I never got a chance to say good-bye.

It also meant I would be spending my last year in high school in a Florida school. It turned out to be one of the worst years of my life. When you enter a senior class as a first-time student, you’re an outlier. I hated that year, I hated Florida. So when I applied to college, I chose spots in the northeast. Far from Florida.

I ended up in Utica, New York.

When Rob and I traveled to Venezuela in 1987, my parents were with us. Megan hadn’t been born yet. It was our first time back in 24 years. The moment I saw the country from the air, an almost crippling homesickness swept over me. Chavez and Maduro were unknown entities back then.

We saw the building in Las Mercedes where we had lived for years in Caracas. We knocked on the door of our old apartment on the second floor and met the woman and her family who lived there then. In Maracaibo, where we’d lived for 5 years and where my sister, Mary, had been born, the four of us traipsed through what had been an oil camp and was now a maze of streets and confused memories.

I remember asking my dad the address of where we’d lived. He got the street, but not the house number. Suddenly, he shouted, “Number 57!”

Here, we also knocked on the door and the couple who came to the door was gracious and curious. When my dad explained that we had lived in this house, they invited us in and we spent an enjoyable afternoon in the wonderful backyard I remembered.

On the way back from a recent trip to Texas with Megan, I happened to look out the window as we were passing over the Everglades. Now, understood, I’ve only been into the Everglades a couple of times. It’s not home. But it’s part of Florida. That same almost crippling homesickness seized me.

Florida! I was nearly home.

The irony hit me. The place I’d once hated was now the place I called home.
Synchronicity has a way of closing lifelong loops, I think, and allowing old wounds to heal.

 

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The Mystical Underground: Gregg Levoy: Callings

A new episode of The Mystical Underground is live! “Gregg Levoy: Callings”:

Join Trish and Rob for a conversation with…

Gregg Levoy is the author of CALLINGS: Finding and Following an Authentic Life, and Vital Signs: The Nature and Nurture of Passion. He is a former journalism professor and has worked at USA Today among other publications, and is a regular blogger for Psychology Today. He is also a lecturer and seminar leader in the business, educational, governmental, faith-based and human-potential arenas, and has keynoted and presented workshops for numerous organizations.

https://gregglevoy.com

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Happy New Year 2022!

My personal hopes for 2022 are mixed up with my hopes for this country.

1)  an end to this pandemic.

The day before our daughter was to come home for Christmas, she tested positive for Covidand couldn’t come home. The first night was bad, she said, with fever and chills, but the next day was better and within 6 days, she was fine and tested negative. She had received 2 Moderna vaccines. She’s also young and generally healthy.

2) that we move through life with more awareness of how our actions impact others

At Walgreen’s, the cashier told me a story that exemplifies this point. At 8 that morning, an unmasked men came into the story, asking if they had PCR tests or home test kits. She told him that PCRs were by appointment only, for drive-thru and yes, they had at home test kits. The man then said, “I know I have Covid. I need a test.”

The cashier, who is always masked, drew back in horror and ordered him out of the store. What kind of clueless idiot who thinks he has Covid comes into a store maskless?

3) That we are as kind to strangers as we are to people in our personal environment.

Most of us have seen or heard about “Karen” incidents and the meltdown in public places over masks or some other thing. There are men who melt down, too, but those videos and instances seem to be more rare. The men and women who lose it like this are probably most frightening when they melt down on commercial flights.

4) That a voting rights bill is voted upon and signed into law. This would end gerrymandering and prevent the states from overturning an election they didn’t like. Otherwise, our democracy is history and we’ll be living a weird version of life in a kind of Gillead from The Handmaid’s Tale.

5)  That more people recognize synchronicity as the guiding force it is.

Our friend Paula learned that her recently engaged daughter, Isabella, and Jacob, her fiance, set a wedding date of February 11, 2023.

That was Paula’s mother’s birthday and Isabella didn’t know that. She’d never met her grandmother, because she died three years before Isabella was born. I felt the synchronicity might have been spirit contact.

One thing this pandemic has brought about for me is more synchronicities and a variety of them. They usually happen when I don’t expect them, and have come about through precogniton, telepathy, in dreams, and when I’m with other people.

6) That we all flourish in the ways that urge us to evolve.

7) I’d like to know if there’s a significance to the date of 2/22/22. I cast charts for that date at 2:22 am and pm. Here’s the AM chart.

 

And the PM chart:

I need to study these. But at a glance, when I look at the respective rising signs – 21 degrees Sagittarius (the arrow, left hand side of the chart) and the 14 degree Cancer rising in the PM chart, it seems that as a collective we have 2 major things to learn. Sagittarius is a nomad, a truth seeker, always looking for the bigger picture. Cancer is nurturing, feminine, intuitive.

The  only planet in both charts at 22 degrees is Neptune in Pisces. In the am chart, Neptune falls  in the 3rd house of communication. In the pm chart, it falls in the 9th house of  spirituality, worldview, publishing, art.  Neptune rules imagination, the oceans, creative ability that comes from deep within. But it also rules deception and confusion.  It’s as if these 2 different house positions for Neptune on this particular day is challenging us to let  our imaginations soar, to go with our guts, our impulses, but to check our facts so that we avoid deception and confusion.

I don’t know if these charts have any validity at all. I don’t even know if numbers like this prompt other astrologers to make observations. But for me, that number 22 has a special significance. In the I Ching, the 22nd hexagram is called Grace. The line that speaks to me reads:

Through contemplation of the forms existing in human society, it becomes possible to shape the world.

 

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FLORIDA BURROWING OWLS

Recently on a synchronicity site, a member asked about owl symbolism. I wrote him about our experiences with burrowing owls- and an Amazonian owl..

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Twice now, a Florida burrowing owl has predicted an event for me. One owl appeared on a fence outside my dad’s room when he was living with us. At first, I thought it was alerting me that he might die. But the owl was missing its left leg and about 12 hours later, I got a call from the Alzheimer’s unit where my mother was that she was being taken to ER. They believed her left hip had been dislocated. Turned out, her left hip had disintegrated. 2 weeks later, she passed.

Another time, several  burrowing owls perched just above our door, on the edge of the roof. That evening, we got a call that a close friend had passed.

Years ago, Rob and I led rips through the Peruvian Amazon for Avianca Airlines. We traveled on an old rubber hauling riverboat that went from some obscure port in Colombia to Iquitos, Peru. The boat was like the Fitzcarraldo – from the movie. At one place where we stopped, an indigenous man had an owls for sale. I trade a couple tubes of lipstick for the owl and it traveled with us on the boat to Iquitos, where the American owner of the boat had a refuge for Amazonian creatures. My entire life changed after that interaction with the owl, whom I fed and got to know during that two-day trip up the Amazon. So they are also harbingers of hope.

Matthew replied:

For me, these two different stories illuminate an attentiveness to the ecology and psychology of nature, respectively. The former captures ‘the signs’ – yet very tangible practical  ones – that non-human nature can signal for us if we attend to them (they are obviously more attuned to earth than we are these days!) whilst the latter captures the more mythic-symbolic-psychic but which equally serves its very real and practical purpose.

These owl stories are so telling and echo my own experiences and those of several of my interviewees. I cannot think of another animal whose association (in this this case, with death/crossings over/liminal life-death space) finds so many cross-cultural commonalities (in many parts of Africa, owls are widely persecuted because of this association but that’s akin to “killing the messenger”) . Of course , it’s not like every owl spells portent or doom – there’s an ecology and psychology to every interaction. Owls are allowed to just “do their thing”. But it’s those unusual and repeated visitations which beckon our attention and deciphering.

 

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The Mystical Underground: Trish MacGregor: Star Power For January 2022

A new episode of The Mystical Underground is live! “Trish MacGregor: Star Power For January

January 2022”:

Join Trish for the January 2022 astrological forecast!

If you prefer the written version, it’s in the masthead at the top under January star power forecast.

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MERRY CHRISTMAS

Merry Christmas from all of us to all of you!

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The Queen of Hearts

Today on our podcast, we talked with Gregg Levoy, author of Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life. The way he describes callings in his book is similar to how synchronicity “calls” to us

He was a fantastic guest and related one of the most powerful and unusual synchronicities I’ve ever heard. In 1982, Gregg was eager for a change in career. He’d spent eight years as a journalist with the Cincinnati Enquirer and was given “a most elegant job offer.”

The company that owned the newspaper, Gannett, was starting up what they were calling America’s first national daily, USA Today, and they took 100 or so reporters from nearly that many of its newspapers and offered them a kind of trial subscription. “If, at the end of four months, the paper flew and you fit, you became a journalist in Washington D.C., working for the nation’s newspaper,” Gregg wrote. “If it didn’t fly or you didn’t fit, you were guaranteed your job back at whatever paper they took you from. I leapt at the chance, and considered it a mere technicality that I sublet my apartment in Cincinnati instead of closing up shop. It never entered my mind that I would be coming back.”

When he returned because he hadn’t made the grade, he felt completely lost and unable to answer the question, Now what?

“A few days after returning, I was driving home from work listening to a song by The Eagles called Desperado. As I pulled to the curb in front of my apartment, the last line I heard before turning the engine off referred to the queen of hearts, and as I opened the door and stepped out, there on the curb next to my left foot was a playing card: the queen of hearts.”

Here are the lines in the Eagles song that Gregg is referring to:

Don’t you draw the queen of diamonds, boy
She’ll beat you if she’s able
You know the queen of hearts is always your best bet
Now it seems to me, some fine things
Have been laid upon your table

But you only want the ones
That you can’t get

Dumbfounded, Greg didn’t know what to make of it. “Even more remarkable than finding that queen card when I did, was that over the next few years, as I searched for a sense of direction, I found five more queen playing cards, in improbable locations such as a sand-dune in Oregon and a mountain wilderness in Colorado six miles from the nearest trailhead. It made the Twilight Zone seem like Mister Rogers’ neighborhood.

“Each time I found another queen card, the sheer unthinkability of it took another giant step forward, and eventually the synchronicities went so far beyond the laws of probability that I only barely hesitate to say it’s impossible that there was nothing more going on than blind chance and dumb luck. Such an adroit arrangement of events and timing– such stagecraft–seems orchestrated by something with wits.”

He started researching queen, the archetype. “I came to understand this rather profound administering of chance as directing me toward something that both my writing and my life needed at that time: more heart, less head; more intuition, less intellect, more confessing, less preaching, more of the inner life, the emotional life, the life of the senses; more listening, more following, more of what Carl Jung referred to as the anima, the force of the feminine in a man’s life. The Queen, of course, is the archetype of femininity–of powerful femininity–and I felt myself being compelled toward this energy by the kind of meaningful coincidence that Jung called synchronicity.”

Think about it, the staggering odds that within seconds of hearing that line about the queen of hearts, he gets out of his car and sees a queen of hearts on the ground next to his left foot. And then over the course of a couple years, found more  six queen of hearts cards in random places around the country.

And he finally followed his heart. He left journalism and made the leap to his “calling,” to freelance. He has been doing it ever since.

His book is terrific.

 

 

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HAPPY WINTER SOLSTICE!

Winter solstice. December 21. Vector watercolor splash paint

What I like most about today is that tomorrow it will get dark a wee bit later!

 

 

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The Mystical Underground: TMU – 0097 – David Wilson – Crossroad

A new episode of The Mystical Underground is live! “TMU – 0097 – David Wilson – Crossroad”:

Join Trish and Rob for a conversation with…

DAVID NIALL WILSON has been writing and publishing horror, dark fantasy, and science fiction since the mid-eighties. He is an ex-president of the Horror Writers Association, and a multiple recipient of the Bram Stoker Award. His novels include Maelstrom, The Mote in Andrea’s Eye, Deep Blue, the Grails Covenant Trilogy, and many others.

https://crossroadpress.com

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