Michael Crichton

Posted on June 20, 2010 by Trish and Rob


These book jackets pretty much cover what Michael Crichton is known for – cutting edge, thriller fiction that takes us into what if land. What if some billionaire cloned dinosaurs and turned it into a theme park (Jurassic Park). What if  time travel was a scientific experiment that worked – sort of (Timeline). What if  a gorilla hybrid ape could talk (Congo).

Crichton (1942-2008) the novelist captured what every novelist hopes to capture – suspense from the opening paragraph to the end of the book, you were hooked. There was no opening one of his novels in the bookstore, for a cursory peek,  and oh maybe I’ll buy it. You opened it, read the first few paragraphs, and plunked down your $. It was his gift.

But my favorite among his books is Travels, published in 1988. Nonfiction. Brilliant. It’s the story of Crichton’s journey from a medical student in the mid to late sixties to his vast, exotic travels and his evolution  as a novelist. I first read it around 1990, read it again maybe 10 years ago, and re-read it during our trip to Aruba, I wanted to be reminded of the importance of travel.

“Often I go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am,” he wrote in the opening pages of Travels.” There is no mystery about why this should be so. Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of your food, your closet full of your clothes- with all of this taken away, you are forced into direct experience.  Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That’s not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating.”

My first read of Travels impacted me profoundly. My second read confirmed certain paths I’d taken. This third read, I admit, was twofold: for the travel part of it, but also to understand how Crichton, who had written so brilliantly about mystical elements in the nature of reality, had become a climate change denier.  This from a man who had climbed Mount Kilamanjaro but apparently didn’t think that its lack of snow was telling.

In Travels, he talks not only about his travels, but about chakras, health in the Louise Hay/Abraham/Hicks  mode (we create our realities), about psychics and quantum physics and so many of the topics we’ve posted about on this blog. Every time I read this book, I’m transported. I feel like this is the genuine Crichton, the real guy.  The man in Travels is a guy who read Seth, got psychic readings, traveled to understand who he was and who he might become. What changed him into a climate change denier? I stopped buying his books once I read about his politics.

 In 2008, at the age of 66, he died from cancer. In Travels, he talks about his early days in medical school, and his ultimate views on health echo Abraham/Hicks, Seth, Louise Hay: the mind creates the dis-ease .How did this guy become a mouthpiece for Bush?

I no longer care about how or why. In reading Travels for the third time, I’m blown away by Crichton’s brilliance.
– Trish

 
Posted in crichton, travel | 29 Comments

Synchronicity or Delusion?

Posted on June 19, 2010 by Trish and Rob

 When Rob was in college, he knew a woman who saw signs–signs in everything. He remembers her playing a Beatles’ song, Here Comes the Sun, and where he heard a simple, pleasant song, she saw vast implications that directly affected her life. He and his friends just went along with her. It was the hippie era and people said all kinds of strange things.

They lived in a large house near a college campus and every few months a new roommate would arrive as one moved on. One guy wove fantastic stories about his past that never happened. In one, he was working as a ski patrol and delivered a baby on the side of a mountain. (Women who are nine months pregnant don’t ski down mountains, except in his world. He didn’t ski, either.)  One woman who only stayed a month wore three or four layers of clothing and played the piano for hours. She also saw signs. Rob doesn’t t know what happened to her, but the first woman he mentioned went into a psych ward.

So what’s the difference between delusions and synchronicity? It can be a fine line between genius and insanity. One famous movie director, whose first movie was a huge, huge hit, started seeing signs in everything. It affected his ability to write and direct and his movies declined in popularity and were ravaged by reviewers. Now he has trouble finding financial backers. Carl Jung skirted madness while writing The Red Book. He called it a “confrontation with the unconscious,” but it looked like madness, and he admitted that.

The point where synchronicity crosses the border into delusion occurs when you begin to believe you’re chosen, that you’re somehow special, that it all revolves around you and your mission, whatever that mission may be. Nut houses and prisons are filled with people who live in self-contained universes constructed on quicksand.

Years ago, Trish worked in a prison for juvenile offenders. One young man, while high on drugs,  had strangled a child  because he believed he was delivering her from evil. He heard voices that urged him to commit this act. He saw signs. Another young man had killed an elderly couple because a voice told him it was his mission.  You get the idea here.

When you begin to believe you’re the voice of synchronicity, that it speaks through you and only you, and then attempt to use this “evidence” to prove you’re not delusional or to prove that you’re innocent of a crime, you’ve crossed the border. Jung’s translator and trusted friend, R.F.C Hull, read the Red Book and called it the “work of a lunatic.” But he also pointed out that Jung was a medicine man in a long line of shamans who “understood madness and could heal it because at periods they are half-mad themselves.” Even Jung, who coined the term synchronicity, never claimed to be its voice.

Synchronicity isn’t the voice of a god or a devil or an inner twin. It is non-exclusive. It belongs to everyone. Anyone, from any walk of life, can experience it, learn from it, and enrich their lives.

Posted in delusions, signs, synchronicities | 35 Comments

The Wind Was Our Compass

Posted on June 18, 2010 by Trish and Rob

On our first day in Aruba, we arrived late at our cottage at the edge of a desert that two years ago was  designated as a national park. Since it’s a new park, there are no official entrances, no park rangers, no paved roads, just double-track dirt paths through the rocky, rolling landscape. Even though it was dark, Megan and I and her cousin, Avery, who had joined us on the trip, decided to walk out into the desert with a lantern. Trish opted to remain at the cottage, and as it turned out, she made a smart decision. We’d walked along a path for about a quarter of a mile, mostly with the lantern turned off so we could see that vastness of the star-studded sky.

We were about to turn back when we stopped, listened closely, and realized we could hear the ocean pounding on the shore in the distance. So we decided to continue on, walking into the wind. About a mile or so later, we found the beach and explored the rocky shoreline. It occurred to me that it was a great night for an adventure, and I put out a wish to the desert spirits that something unusual would happen. I didn’t know it, but Megan did the same. And, oh, we found our adventure soon enough.

We started back, but became confused about the location of the trail. So, with the lantern on, we headed cross-country along an uphill grade. Big mistake. Soon, we found ourselves surrounded by tall cactuses, imposing rocks, thick hedges of prickly cactuses, steep drops and sharp climbs. There were also golfball-sized cactuses growing low to the ground, and it was impossible to avoid all of them. The spikes pieced Megan’s foam sandals and penetrated the bottom of her feet. I pulled out as many of the thorns as I could by the light of the lantern, but she quickly attracted more of them. Meanwhile, Avery was recovering from a sprained ankle and now it was bothering him. Our forward movement slowed to a crawl. Megan could barely walk, Avery hobbled, and they both yelled at me to slow down and come back with the lantern.

Finally, as we reached the top of a hill, we could see the lights on the cottage in the distance, but we couldn’t move toward it. We were blocked and our intended short hike into the desert was turning into a nightmare scenario in the dark, strange environs. By that time, we were all hoping that Trish would drive the rented car out into the desert so we could see where the path was located…and hopefully catch a ride back. No such luck. The key was in my pocket.

So we decided the only thing to do was to backtrack to the beach, and find the trail, basically starting over on our return trip. That’s when I put out another silent call to the desert spirits. “Never mind about the adventure. We just need to find the way back to the cottage.” I repeated it several times. With Megan’s feet and Avery’s ankle, this journey could take us well into the night.

Megan started shouting for Trish, who we later learned had heard her shouts and started scurrying around the cottage, looking for the car keys, then a flashlight that worked. She started out into the desert several times, but her flashlight kept dimming, forcing her to turn back and scour the storage closet for another lantern.

Meanwhile, we knew the way to the ocean was into the wind, which served as our compass. We covered about a hundred yards when eureka, we found a trail. Only thing…it wasn’t the right trail. At that point, we didn’t care. We just wanted to get out of the rugged desert landscape and onto a cleared path. We followed it for about a quarter of a mile when it crossed another path. This time, I knew it was our path, and we turned away from the wind and continued walking.

When the cottage finally came into view again, it was a great sight, and there was Trish standing outside the porch, her dim flashlight barely penetrating the darkness.  “What happened to you guys?” she called.

“You don’t want to know,” I said.

“Oh God, my feet,” Megan groaned.

“We got lost,” Avery said.

The first night adventure was over, and amazingly, it had lasted barely an hour and a half. The three of us had thought we were out there for three to four hours. How the desert spirits played tricks with us that night.

Posted in aruba, desert spirits, law of attraction | 14 Comments

An act of God?

Posted on June 17, 2010 by Trish and Rob

You might’ve heard about this one by now, but we couldn’t resist. The headline of the Cincinnati Enquirer’s web site on June 14 read: Act of God Destroys Jesus Statue. Here’s the  story, courtesy of  RoadsideAmerica.com.

***

The congregation of the Solid Rock megachurch in Monroe, Ohio, will have difficulty explaining it: a lightning bolt from heaven — favorite weapon of a wrathful god — has destroyed the church’s “Touchdown Jesus.” (Though if it is a “sign” of some sort… sorry atheists!)

The giant Jesus was built in 2004, appearing to erupt from the ground at the end of the church’s baptismal pond, facing traffic on I-75. Officially titled “King of Kings,” the statue quickly acquired its “Touchdown” nickname, as well as “Drowning Jesus” and “Big Butter Jesus,” the title of a novelty song.

A lightning bolt is believed to have struck the 62-foot-tall statue around 11 PM on June 14, 2010. The plastic-resin-and-styrofoam-Savior burst into flames, a fate similar to the one suffered by the former World’s Largest Turkey. By dawn, all that remained was Christ’s scorched steel framework.
***
God: Make fun of my son, will ya? What next–flash his picture up on the scoreboard when the Bengals score a touchdown? I’ll show ya’ll–heathens, Christians, atheists alike.

Rob: The irony in this scenario is as thick as the oil spewing in the Gulf of Mexico. In a followup article, Christian believers are sounding like atheists, saying that it was just a random lightening strike. Meanwhile, atheists can only keep their mouths shut for fear of sounding like believers. Let’s face it, folks, God is the ultimate trickster.

A final thought. Could this be the beginning of an annual festival in which the burning/cleansing act will be repeated? It could only be called Burning Man-God Project. 

AFTER…
…And Burning Man below…no touchdown.

AFTER

Posted in god, statue, trickster | 17 Comments

Twins

Posted on June 16, 2010 by Trish and Rob
 

In 2005, we got new neighbors, Kevin and Annette and their two kids. Annette has an identical twin, Janet, who recently moved in with her husband and son until they can find a home here.

I was curious whether the research I’d read about the psychic bond between twins was true for them. They attested that it absolutely is. So one evening while we were all sitting around outside, Janet told me several stories. Here’s one of the most powerful.
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Some years ago, Janet was living in Memphis with her the guy she was dating at the time. She worked for Channel, so she had numerous bottles of perfume that lined her shelves.  One night, a loud crash from the bathroom awakened her and her boyfriend bolted out of bed. “Someone’s broken into the house, they’re in the bathroom,” she whispered.

Her boyfriend grabbed a baseball bat and moved quickly and silently toward the bathroom, Janet right behind him. No intruder. But every bottle had fallen from the shelves and shattered against the floor,almost as if someone had swept an arm across the shelves, knocking them down. “Right then, I knew something had happened to Annette. I just knew it.”

Moments later, the phone rang. It was Annette, who lived in another city, and she was hysterical, sobbing. She had just been robbed at gunpoint, while delivering a night deposit to the bank for her employer. “While it was happening,” Annette recalls, “I was praying that the guy wouldn’t kill me. I was telling God that if I was killed, Janet wouldn’t survive it. Kevin would, somehow he would get past it, but Janet wouldn’t. I called her before I even called the police.”

I ask her how the bottles got broken. She just shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“Some sort of telekinesis? A release of energy?”
“Maybe. But I honestly don’t know.”

+++
Now here’s an additional synchro. I’m writing this on May 31 and scheduled this post to go up on the next available date, June 16. And then I suddenly remembered that Annette and her sister are Geminis. I had done Annette’s chart, so I looked it up and sure enough, today is her and Janet’s birthday. Happy birthday, you two!

Posted in annnette and janet, telepathy, twins | 11 Comments

Huh?

Posted on June 16, 2010 by Trish and Rob

President Obama’s speech tonight about the crisis in the gulf was one of the weakest he has ever given. It is the first time Obama has addressed the people from the oval office.

I was hoping to hear at least a ballpark figure about what he would demand from BP for an escrow fund. No figure. No demands.

I was hoping to hear specifics about what was going to happen next. But other than his assurance that the government would stand by the people of the gulf until it was “better than before,” the speech was sadly lacking in details. He talked about severing our dependence on fossil fuels and transitioning to clean energy. It sounds  good – clean energy, like using mouth wash or brushing your teeth. But other than mentioning solar power and wind turbines, there weren’t specifics.

He mentioned that we send nearly 1 BILLION a day to other countries for their oil.

He mentioned absolutely  nothing about how workers are getting sick – vomiting, nausea, chest pains, dizziness, frequent asthma attacks. He mentioned nothing about how when workers  use safety equipment distributed by local agencies, they are told to remove the gear or be fired. He mentioned nothing about the 1,100,000 gallons of dispersants that have been used in the gulf and its possible impact on the health of workers, residents of the gulf, and the wildlife.

One curious item that Obama did mention is that within a couple of days, 90 percent of the leaking oil will be captured, and all of it will be contained when BP completes drilling of two accessory wells. As Olbermann noted, where did that figure come from? BP? If so, why should he or anyone else believe anything that BP says at this point?

In fact, Obama left out so much that at the end of his speech Rob and I just looked at each other, got up, and went back to work.

Susan Shaw, director of the Marine Environmental  Research Institute, “The deep ocean is what’s at risk.We’re destroying the food web and we’re poisoning what’s left. If we remove the bottom of the food web, then everything else on top is going to crash.”

As Rachel Maddow noted, Obama’s speech tonight may best be remembered for its reference to prayer. The blessing of the fleet is apparently an old tradition on the gulf, where clergy from different religions come together to pray for the safety of the fishermen and the gulf. It was as if Obama was saying that prayer will get us through this. Well, maybe, maybe not. Prayer or not, right action should also be part of the picture. And as long as BP remains in control – of the cleanup, the media coverage, the lack of safety equipment – the gulf will be in jeopardy.

But does the reference to prayer brings us back to Masaru Emoto? 
– Trish

Posted in BP, oil spill | 42 Comments

R.I.P. Billboard Man

Posted on June 15, 2010 by Trish and Rob

The e-mail read: “The reason I am writing you  is because you wrote to me in a cryptic statement and said: “I am surprised he is alive…” and 2 minutes later I learn that he isn’t.“
  +++
That was from Adele Aldridge, who had given us the peculiar Billboard Man tale about a love/hate relationship with a man on a billboard, who she eventually met nine years later and 3,000 miles away. She continued:

“When you posted my experience on your blog I responded saying that was not the right image of him, and sent you the real one….After scanning the picture, my mind naturally drifted back in time and I was startled by the intensity of energy, as if time was telescoping.”

Not long after that, Adele found a message on her answering machine from a friend in Berkeley telling her that Mr. Billboard Man’s obituary was in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Stunned, she immediately called her friend to learn more. Simultaneously, she signed on to her computer and before she could look up the obituary there was an email from another acquaintance with a link to the same obituary.

“Do you think that some synchronicities are a tad perverse? Just asking.”


There was more from Adele, and for the first time she revealed that she had not only met the Billboard Man, but they became lovers and lived together off and on for a year and a half.

“I went to bed last night unable to process this information. The bottom line,  it is impossible to think of him as dead. I never knew anyone who radiated so much much raw energy, so totally alive.

“I wondered at this business of being entangled in a Karass of synchronicites that echo on and on. Now your book has become a new antenna picking up the echos.”

Before falling asleep, I prayed that I would please, please have a dream to help me. I even asked the Billboard Man to talk to me in my dream since he had reached across time and space and dreams before. I would like to know something now. Anything.

“This is what I dreamed:

“I’m talking to a therapist who looks like Anderson Cooper about my issues and upsets with J and that now he is dead.

The therapist indulged me by allowing me to talk for an hour and 30 minutes, extending the time by half an hour. He then suggested we go outside and have some coffee. He handed me a sweater to wear in case I needed it. I went to the ladies room and looking in the mirror saw that I was wearing a beautiful red velvet suit dress with attractive patterns on it. My hair was long and curly, looking more like me 25 years ago.

“Obviously I need to write my book about this experience. I already know its title: ‘Out of Sausalito.’

“So since you included the story in your book, I’m thinking you must be the therapist. I know you don’t look anything like Anderson Cooper but Anderson Cooper is on CNN – world coverage. And your blog attracts readers from around the world. 
+++
The reason I told Adele that I was surprised he was still alive is because two other Winston men, who appeared on billboards advertising the brand of cigarettes, died of lung cancer. Now a third has joined them. – Rob

Posted in Billboard man | 8 Comments

Synchros That Are Prescient

Posted on June 14, 2010 by Trish and Rob
 

This synchro is one of those stories that spans decades. It has some similarities to two posts  we put up last year, The Friendship Book, and The Girl with the Red Hair, which happened to Ray, who posts here often. This one actually made the Orlando news, probably because it involves Disney World.
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Alex and Donna Voutsinas of Boynton Beach, Florida met at work, fell in love, got married. Nothing too unusual there. But one day while they were still engaged, they were going through old family photo albums – much as Keith did in The Friendship Book, and Donna found an old photo of herself as a kid at Disney World.  She showed it to Alex, who was noticed a man in the background, who was pushing a child in a stroller. He recognized the man as his father.

“Just to be in the same picture with my wife when we were basically toddlers, it’s unbelievable,” Alex said.

But for anyone who undertand the geography of synchronicity, that’s business as usual! The original story is here. 

Thanks to Julie and Gabe for alerting us to the story!

Posted in disney world, love | 10 Comments

Masaru Emoto’s Prayer for the Gulf

Posted on June 13, 2010 by Trish and Rob

On new year’s day 2010, we did a post called Mind Over Matter, about Masaru Emoto’s research into how focused intentions change the energy of water.  If you aren’t familiar with Emoto’s astonishing work, be sure to read the first link first.

Today, a friend sent me a prayer that Emoto had supposedly issued about the oil spill in the gulf. I had to poke around for awhile on the Internet to make sure it was actually from him, and found it. Here’s the prayer:

To whales, dolphins, pelicans, fishes, shellfishes, planktons, corals, algae and all creatures in Gulf of Mexico
I am sorry.
Please forgive me.
Thank you.
I love you.

Posted in emoto, prayer for gulf | 11 Comments

Day 55

Posted on June 13, 2010 by Trish and Rob

We encountered these wind turbines two days ago on Aruba’s northeastern coast where the trade winds hit hard. There are ten of them, huge things visible for miles across this desert geography, giants on the landscape when you are up close and personal. Ten more are being built and once they are functional, they will generate 36% of the island’s electrical needs. Aruba gets it. Wind is their friend – so is solar power, for that matter, but wind seems to be the direction in which they are moving. But we in the U.S. we’re still talking about, unbelievably, more offshore drilling for oil–in spite of the massive spill, in spite of the fact that all the oil in the Gulf would power the U.S. for merely one year, and that is, if it was all used in the U.S. It’s actually sold on the open market.

Oil lobbyists, meanwhile, whisper that those wind turbines are a monstrosity, a blight on our environment. We found them somewhat alien, creatures from the future–possibly. Yet majestic and stoic. Maybe like other technologies they will be replaced by smaller, more powerful versions over time.

There is a synchronicity coming up in this post, but not quite yet. People are puzzled and disgusted with what seems to be happening on the gulf – which is nothing. According to an article in huffingtonpost, BP is still controlling everything, including media access to the damage. The estimate of oil gushing from this disaster has risen from 1000 barrels a day to 40,000 and that’s probably a low ball figure. One expert figured this disaster was the Exxon Valdex happening every 7 to 10 days.

We Americans pride ourselves as being the best and the brightest, a frankly arrogant assessment on where we are right now with the Gulf catastrophe. Even if BP capped the gusher now, this instant, the devastation will extend for decades.  Ways of life are already ruined and those ways of being will pass on into history – or, centuries from now – into myth. Maybe the synchronicity in all of this is that it’s British Petroleum–as if the Brits are finally retaliating against their rebellious colonists for dumping tea in Boston Harbor, spurring revolution and independence. Yet, now, neither country is independent of the addiction to oil, and BP has nothing to gain by their disastrous and criminal lack of preparation for such an accident.

To our readers in the UK, we aren’t blaming you. The blame here lies in greed, in capitalism gone bad, in a system so incestuous that the U.S. is now virtually run by corporations whose bottom line is always profit. It’s the result of eight years of efforts to keep government off the backs of business, and allow self-regulation to do it’s thing…and it has. 

If an island like Aruba, with a population of 100,000, can generate 36% of its electricity from 20 wind turbines, what might we accomplish from  electricity generated from wind, solar, water? Can we change our paradigm? Can corporations act responsibly in the public interest? Can government effectively regulate those corporations that only seek only obscene profits?  Can we become one happy island of sustainability?

Posted in oil spill, wind turbines | 17 Comments