Psychokinesis and the Super Psychics

Posted on October 4, 2010 by Trish and Rob

While researching psychokinesis and spirit communication, I pulled a book off our shelves that I had forgotten about: Parapsychology: the Controversial Science, by Richard S. Broughton.

Psychokinesis – the ability to influence material objects through nothing but thought (think Uri Geller and spoons!) – happens frequently in spirit communication: lamps blink off and on, TVs go on and off, books topple from shelves, feathers or other objects suddenly show up where they couldn’t possibly be. I thought Broughton’s book might offer some insights. We’ve had numerous comments about this phenomenon under some of our posts. So anyway, I turned to his chapter on Contemproary Psychokinesis Research and ran across a section called PK Research Chinese-Style.

In the early 1990s, Zhang Baoshen, then in his mid-thirties, lived with his family in a 12-room suite at Bejing’s Institute of Space-Medico Engineering (ISME). He and his family had a chef, nurse, servants, and “all of it is provided by the state,” Broughton writes, “on condition that he doesn’t leave the country.” Why? He’s one of China’s super psychics.

Broughton says that Zhang was brought to the attention of Bejing scientists in 1982, when Chinese parapyschology – known as Exceptional Functions of the Human Body – was going through a rough patch of criticism. Between 1982-1984, Zhang was tested by both supporters and critics of the Party’s National Committee of Science. “After 1984, Zhang was no longer available to scientists outside of the military controlled ISME, also known as the 507 Institute of Spaceflight Department.” Apparently Zhang’s specialty was psychokinesis, specifically the ability to move small objects and insects in and out of sealed tubes.

In one experiment, Broughton writes, “a live insect was marked and placed inside a tube. The tube was sealed so that any attempt to open it would break a fine hair glued inside.” The tube was set on a table in front of Zhang, with two experimenters watching. “Several minutes later the insect, still alive, was outside the tube.”

A similar experiment was performed with specially marked pieces of chemically treated paper inserted in a tube, which was then melted so it was constricted at the midpoint. The ends were sealed with cotton wads that had been treated with a different chemical and  were irreversibly sealed. With four experimenters observing from different angles, it took Zhang about five minutes to accomplish what he had with the insects. “The seal on the tube was undamaged and later inspection revealed traces of chemical reaction on the cotton, suggesting that the papers had passed through the cotton.”

Ok, so this isn’t what Stephen King’s Carrie could do. But it was enough so that Zhang’s work was kept quiet by the authorities. I Googled Zhang with different search phrases and didn’t find much about him now. There are references to the 1997 book called China’s Super Psychics, but I was curious about Zhang in 2010. I found a brief wikipedia entry and an article from 2005.  There were a few others places where his name was mentioned, notably as a qigong master. But I didn’t find much of anything, at least in English, about what this enigmatic figure is doing now. Interesting, though, that qigong was outlawed in China in the summer of 1999 because of the government’s fear that it had attained cult status. New York Times article on that is here.

What began as a search for psychokinesis related to after death communication turned into a weird little mystery about Zhang. So Zhang, if you’re out there, please check in and leave us a comment!

Posted in psychockinesis, spirit contact | 19 Comments

The Ouija Board and Synchronicity

Posted on October 3, 2010 by Trish and Rob

The Ouija board. Maligned by some, considered to be an instrument of the devil by others, this simple board with letters and numbers on it is seems to be as positive or negative as the users’ beliefs about it.

Jane Roberts and her husband, Robert Butts, first became acquainted with Seth through a Ouija board. After the third session or so, Jane began hear the answers in her head before the words were spelled out. Esther and Jerry Hicks also started this way. However it works, the collective psyches and beliefs of the individuals whose hands are on the heart-shaped planchette apparently influence what happens. Other factors involved in the results may be the energies in your own environment, the emotions swirling around the questions that you ask, and the general state of your own physical and mental health. That said, here’s an experience that’s harrowing.

It’s from Jenean, who comments  as gypsywoman, and whose synchros we’ve posted a number of times. It began some years ago, with the death of Jenean’s brother, who died under mysterious circumstances.

+++
“While I was still in Louisiana, my brother, with whom I was very close, died in Arkansas under very suspicious circumstances. His death was sudden, unexpected, he was just 46, three years younger than me. I left within a few hours of hearing the news and headed to Arkansas.”

There was a lot of trauma surrounding his death, many unanswered questions, enormous emotional  upheaval for her brother’s family and for Jenean and her family. 

“After I got home, a close friend and I decided to ask my Ouija board about his death. We were sitting on my bed with the Ouija between us. We had turned off the lights and had six or seven large red pillar candles burning in the room. In any event, we began with more mundane questions, and then began to ask about the recent death of my brother. I don’t recall the specific question we asked, but the pointer began moving rapidly, all over the board. And then each and every one of the pillar candles exploded.

“I don’t mean that they just burned out. They exploded, spewing hot red liquid wax onto the furniture, the walls, carpeting, everywhere. The carpeting was so ruined it had to be replaced. And that ended our little Ouija session for the evening.”
+++
Tomorrow, Jenean moves back to her home state of Louisiana. Bon voyage, Gypsy!

Posted in death, Jenean, Ouija | 15 Comments

Is It An Alien?

Posted on October 2, 2010 by Trish and Rob

On Whitley Strieber’s site, there’s a tab called out there that lists worldwide UFO sightings. Some of these come with photos and videos. That’s how we ran across one of the strangest you tube videos to date.

Posted in aliens, video | 14 Comments

I Ching Record Book

Posted on October 2, 2010 by Trish and Rob

That’s the title of a new book, written by Adele Aldridge, who has provided a number of fascinating synchronicities for this blog as well as a couple that appeared in 7 Secrets. Interestingly, the sub-title of the I Ching Record Book is Tools for Creating a Synchronicity Journal. Indeed, the I Ching is a form of divination, and divination is a close encounter with synchronicity.

Adele’s book is both a primer for learning to use the I Ching and a workbook that provides the reader with space for recording readings for each of the sixty-four hexagrams. Adele also provides a list of sample questions readers might ask the I Ching on matters of relationships, health, career, dreams, and more.

The workbook doesn’t provide interpretations of the hexagrams. For that, readers will need one of the code books. The classic is Richard Willhelm’s I Ching, and Wilhelm’s interpretation now can be accessed on-line .  Others are also available on-line.

The record book is a handy adjunct for I Ching readings, and it also has an on-line version available free to those who purchase the book. The book would make a good gift for both beginners with an interest in the subject, and avid users of the I Ching. You can find more information at I Ching Meditations.
Rob

Posted in divination systems, I Ching | 6 Comments

Caterpillar As Messenger

Posted on October 1, 2010 by Trish and Rob

We recently posted a story about an orange centipede as an animal messenger. Today, we ran across this post about a caterpillar on Threads of Spiderwoman, and asked Lauren if we could repost it. At one time, I didn’t look at little critters like ants, centipedes, caterpillars or anything similar as messengers. Then I realized this was a kind of human arrogance on my part. If a creature as small as a hummingbird can be a messenger, why not a centipede? If an inanimate object like a feather can hold synchronistic meaning, why not a caterpillar? After all, caterpillars, like frogs, begin life as one thing and end life as something else. They’re about transformation. It’s not their size that matters. It’s their message.

After I read Lauren’s story, I asked what caterpillars represented for her. That’s the last part of the story.
+++

This morning I went to my mother’s house to prepare her breakfast, and beside the door, on a “cat rug”, was a strange looking fat green thing, curled into a little spiral. At first I thought it was a bit of plastic the cat had dragged home, but then it moved! Keep in mind that I live in Southern Arizona, where it is currently about 102 degrees, and there are very few leafy trees. I’ve never seen a caterpillar like this here, although obviously they are around.

I put it on a potted plant, the only thing I could find it might like to eat, although, sadly, the poor thing looks none too well for its encounter with a cat.

Can’t get over the fact that just yesterday I was writing about, and reading about, “The Chrysalis Effect” in my previous post!

PS: It was suggested that I consider what this synchronicity might mean symbolically to me. I think caterpillars represent, to me, what we are as a global humanity, adolescent, trying to mature, to transform. We’re presently, like a caterpillar on a leaf, mindlessly gobbling up our world, eating up everything in sight. The hopeful thought is that there is an impulse, a greater force, within our collective instinct that will lead us into, and eventually through, the Chrysalis, the “imaginal” stage. So that we might become, at last, “winged, whole”. Pollinators…….
+++
Another possible explanation, on a personal level, is that Lauren’s life is about to undergo a significant transformation. Another synchro of hers that we posted concerned a black butterfly, and butterfly (or moth) is what the caterpillar becomes.

Posted in caterpillars | 14 Comments

Extinctions

Posted on September 30, 2010 by Trish and Rob

 jeweled lizard

Aside from the obvious tragedy of mass extinctions, what do they mean on a metaphoric level? What prompted me to wonder about this was an article in National Geographic News about how, if global warming continues at its present rate, many lizards will become extinct.

The study, conducted by Barry Sinervo, a herpetologist at Berkeley, concludes that no matter what we do to combat global warming from this point on, at least 6 percent of lizard species will go extinct. By 2080, the study estimates that 1 in 5 lizards will be extinct.

Extinctions since 2000?  Take a look at this list: Pyrenean Ibex, the bajii (China’s freshwater river dolphin), three  Hawaiian species of birds – the Po’ouli,  the Kama’o, and the Hawaiian Crow, Western Black Rhino, the Golden Toad, Spix’s Macaw. This list doesn’t include plants and invertebrates.

Another animal that now faces extinction is the tamarind monkey, which lives in zoos and the forests of Colombia.There are just 7,000 of them left. The original article is here. 

In one of Jane Roberts’ Seth books,Seth specifically addresses extinctions. If memory serves me, Seth said something to the effect that extinct animals reappeared in probable realities. If that’s true, could it be one explanation for why certain animals that are deemed extinct suddenly reappear?  These creatures, often referred to as “Lazarus species,” include  the New Holland Mouse, for instance, first discovered in 1843. It vanished for more than a century and then  reappeared in a national park north of Sydney, Australia.

Maybe the Dodo bird, which went extinct around 1800, is alive and well in some probable reality and is simply waiting for an opportune time to resurface. I hope that’s how it works.

Posted in extinctions, global warming, lizard, tamarind monkey | 14 Comments

Ghosts as Tricksters

Posted on September 29, 2010 by Trish and Rob

 When we posted a synchro called Hank and Judy, Photographers,  there were a number of really great comments, stories unto themselves, and some interesting email that came in. Here are two of them – one from an email, the other a comment.
+++
This one comes from Sharlie West. We used  one of her synchros in our book. She has the most unusual experiences with ghosts/spirits. This one sounds like ghosts as tricksters!
+++

My home is haunted. I’ve gotten used to the spirits; they were more active when the house was filled with children. Things still disappear and we never find them. We all kidded about it a lot. One Thanksgiving the family was sitting around the table talking about our occasional spirit visitors. We were drinking wine and gave a Thanksgiving toast, raising our glasses high. My mom said, “If there are any ghosts, let them make themselves known.” We were all smiling until her wine glass broke midair into tiny pieces and splattered all over the table. Dead silence after that. I got chills realizing that although we kidded about the spirits, they were definitely there.
+++
Under comments, Connie posted this amazing synchro:

During the final three days of my Mom’s life, she was in a S. GA hospital in a terminal coma. (She was 63) My aunt, her older sister, who was a born-again fundamental Christian, was sitting beside me at the foot of Mom’s bed. There was a very loud CRACK! in the air over Mom’s head, and my Aunt and I looked up from our books. I was accustomed to seeing spirits, but was not accustomed to being with other people who could also see them.

There was a Catholic Clergy in the white and red robes of a Cardinal or Bishop, (my Mom was Baptist), and he was leaning over my Mother’s bed very clearly giving her rites of some kind. My poor Aunt saw him as clearly as I did, and she burst into tears, dropped her book on the floor, and flew from the room. The Priest faded in a few moments, but every day at exactly the same times, for three days, he came and gave my Mom rites. He was there at the moment of her death.

His energy was so powerful that several medical people could see him, and personnel were coming from all over the hospital trying to catch a glimpse of him. He disappeared on the Sunday that she passed, and I could see her “essence” up in the corner of the room, like a flowing blue-white mist. No one else saw that. I’ve always wondered why a Catholic Clergy Spirit came for her. It was an awesome, awe-inspiring experience. My aunt never recovered from it. She was completely spooked by it, no pun intended. For me it was magnificent.
+++
Some of the followup comments to this were terrific, with speculation about whether Connie’s mother had been Catholic in a previous life and that perhaps this representative of the church was someone she had known or simply a symbol she would recognize.

Posted in spirits | 38 Comments

The White Butterfly

Posted on September 28, 2010 by Trish and Rob

During the early afternoon of August 5, Jorge Galeguillos and Franklin Lobos were driving into the Copiapo mine in Chile in a pickup truck when a huge slab of rock collapsed behind them.  The collapse blocked the road behind them, so they had nowhere to go but forward. As Jorge wrote to his brother,  “We had been up to the workshop and as we were driving back down, a slab of rock caved in behind us. It crashed down only a few seconds after we drove past. Just ahead, I saw a white butterfly. After that, we were caught in an avalanche of dirt and dust.”

Keep in mind that the butterfly was 500 meters or more than 1600 feet beneath the surface. What was this little insect doing that deep in the earth? The two men, perhaps struck by the oddity, slowed their truck as the dust cleared to get a closer look at the butterfly.  It prevented them from driving right into the fallen rocks  and cave-ins that had been triggered by the initial collapse and they were eventually able to make their way to the 31 other miners trapped deeper in the mine.

Jorge’s brother, Eleodoro contends that “our grandfathers knew it was a good omen to come across a white animal in the dark of the night.”

These butterflies are sometimes sighted around purple flowers that blossom for just a few hours in the Atacama desert when dew or fog is present. But as mining consultant Miguel Fortt noted, the closest cluster of these flowers lies two kilometers from the mine. “People who are religious would call this a miracle,” Fortt says. “From a scientific perspective, the butterfly may have flown into the mine on air currents. You can draw your own conclusions but that butterfly saved their lives.”

It’s interesting that in esoteric traditions, butterflies represent transformation, resurrection, the spirits of the dead. As Eleodoro remarked, “Maybe it was just a little angel passing in front of them…”

Posted in butterflies, chilean miners | 12 Comments

Sydney Synchros

Posted on September 27, 2010 by Trish and Rob

(Unfortunately, synchronicity is misspelled in this image!)

Here’s a couple of synchronicities that came to us from DAZ in Australia, who experienced the synchros while reading our book. Again, this is an example of the first secret of synchronicity. When you think about synchronicity, you tend to notice more of them in your life. It also qualifies as a cluster.

* * *

I just started reading your book “7 Secrets of Synchronicity” and already the synchros are going off like fireworks and I’m only up to page 20.

Here’s one of them. I read that you had taken over the Sydney Omar astrology series…my middle name is Sydney…which got me to thinking about the city of Sydney and how haven’t been there for nearly 20 years. I feel I should visit soon…then as I’m reading and thinking this, an advertisement comes on TV about Sydney (which I haven’t seen before). The catch phrase in this new ad is…Sydnicity.I was nearly falling off the chair in disbelief…looks like I have to visit Sydney ASAP.

***
We followed up on this ad and found it on Facebook. Not only is one of the slogans Sydnicity, which sounds like synchronicity and Sydney combined. But on the Facebook version, right next to the Sydnicity headline is another one that reads: Syncronicity (misspelled!) That’s the illustration above. If you click it, it leads to some cultural arts events taking place in Sydney.

But DAZ also offered a second one.

 ***

Here’s one more from “7 Secrets” before I forget.The part about Joseph Campbell and the praying mantis made me think of the DVD “Microcosmos,” which I had placed in the shopping basket a couple of weeks ago on a site where I buy my DVDs. I had also placed a copy of “Pleasantville” in there and couldn’t decide if I wanted to get that as well. I kept reading “7 Secrets” until (boom), on page 18 you start writing about “Pleasantville.” Problem solved, movie purchased.
***
Well done, DAZ!

Posted in 1st secret, clusters, names | 15 Comments

Jung and Spiritualism

Posted on September 26, 2010 by Trish and Rob

While thumbing through Deirdre’s Bair wonderful biography of Jung, I ran across some fascinating insights into Jung, the mystic.

According to Bair, Jung’s interest in psychiatry as a specialty dated from his first year in medical school, when two inexplicable events happened  that led him to “read widely about Spiritualism, then considered a related adjunct to psychiatry.” (Spiritualism – communication with spirits – as a related adjunct to psychiatry? Wow. How times have changed!)

One summer afternoon, Jung was studying in his room when he heard a loud noise, like pistol shots, coming from the dining room. He ran out into the dining room, where a 70-year-old walnut table, a family heirloom, had split down the middle. Bair notes that the split had nothing to do with the constructions or the weather.The day was hot and humid – as opposed to a cold, dry, winter day when “such mishaps might be expected.”

A few weeks later, Jung got home to find his mother, sister and the maid in turmoil. There apparently had been another noise, from a “solid piece of Swiss nineteenth century furniture.” The women had been too frightened to look for the cause, so Jung looked. At the side cupboard, where the bread was usually stored, “there lay a bread knife, its blade neatly severed in several places in a manner that could not have occurred naturally.”

Jung took the knife to a cutler, who insisted the knife could only have been broken intentionally. After this, Jung began to read widely about Spiritualism. Emmanuel Kant’s Dreams of a Spirit Seer was one such book. He also read Zollner, Crookes, and Swedenborg.”…the more he read, the more he was convinced that there had to be something to the worldwide coincidences, where the same seemingly unexplainable phenomena kept being reported over and over. He did not surrender entirely to the total authenticity of these views, but they were nonetheless the first sustained accounts he had read of objective psychic phenomena.”

From descriptions in Bair’s biography, it’s apparent that Jung’s mother, Emilie, was probably psychic. As a youngster, she had visions, and she grew up in a large clan of nephews, nieces, and cousins who had similar visions, “believed in ghosts and visits from various spirits, and some even talked in tongues.” It was Emilie, in fact, who after the first incident with the splitting of the dining room table, spoke in her No. 2 voice: “Yes yes, that means something.”

While growing up, Jung attended seances, experimented with “table tilting,” and  Ouija boards. Later, his doctoral dissertation was entitled, “On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena.” The dissertation was well-received by the medical community because Jung was fastidious in presenting established case histories from the writings of William James and others. But he also used one of his relatives as a case history, disguising her with initials, which fooled no one in the family. When the dissertation was published, his family was ticked off.

So here was Jung –  the man whose explorations gave birth to terms like synchronicity, the collective unconscious, archetypes – who seemed to have been primed from a very young age for his mystical leanings. In his later years, after he began building his “castle” on the shore of Lake Zurich, Jung had several experiences with spirits. In the winter of 1924, Bair writes, “Jung spent long periods alone at the tower, and he too, experienced ghostly presences. He heard music, as if an orchestra were playing; he envisioned a host of young peasant men who seemed to be encircling the tower with music laughter, singing, and roughhousing.” Jung writes about these experiences in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections. 


Even in a biography as exhaustive as Bair’s, even with all that has been written about Jung, even in his autobiography, he remains elusive, mysterious, unknowable. Even the best writings don’t really reveal the secrets that lay within Jung’s heart. What did he think and feel when he sat beneath a tree that would, on the day of his death, be split in two by lightning? How did he reconcile his relationship with his mistress, Toni Wolff,  with his long marriage to Emma? We have hints, but will never really know. 

What we have, though, are the kernels of Jung’s brilliance, his inventiveness, his immersion in the greatest mysteries. He left it to the rest of us to figure out!
– Trish

Posted in Carl Jung, spiritualism | 20 Comments