Indra’s Net and the Occupiers

Posted on October 17, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 

FAR AWAY IN THE HEAVENLY ABODE OF THE GREAT GOD INDRA, THERE IS A WONDERFUL NET WHICH HAS BEEN HUNG BY SOME CUNNING ARTIFICER IN SUCH A MANNER THAT IT STRETCHES OUT INDEFINITELY IN ALL DIRECTIONS. IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE EXTRAVAGANT TASTES OF DEITIES, THE ARTIFICER HAS HUNG A SINGLE GLITTERING JEWEL AT THE NET’S EVERY NODE, AND SINCE THE NET ITSELF IS INFINITE IN DIMENSION, THE JEWELS ARE INFINITE IN NUMBER. THERE HANG THE JEWELS, GLITTERING LIKE STARS OF THE FIRST MAGNITUDE, A WONDERFUL SIGHT TO BEHOLD. IF WE NOW ARBITRARILY SELECT ONE OF THESE JEWELS FOR INSPECTION AND LOOK CLOSELY AT IT, WE WILL DISCOVER THAT IN ITS POLISHED SURFACE THERE ARE REFLECTED ALL THE OTHER JEWELS IN THE NET, INFINITE IN NUMBER. NOT ONLY THAT, BUT EACH OF THE JEWELS REFLECTED IN THIS ONE JEWEL IS ALSO REFLECTING ALL THE OTHER JEWELS, SO THAT THE PROCESS OF REFLECTION IS INFINITE.

THE AVATAMSAKA SUTRA
FRANCIS H. COOK: HUA-YEN BUDDHISM : THE JEWEL NET OF INDRA 1977

Indra’s net is certainly at work in the Occupy movement. Look closely at this photo from the AP. It’s from London, England, where the Occupy Wall Street movement drew thousands of protestors against the financial systems that have left many cities and countries impoverished, hungry, desperate and are killing the middle class. Over the weekend, , hundreds of thousands demonstrated in the U.S , Europe, and Asia,and this movement is barely a month old.

If you read this quote about Indra’s net carefully, you understand that it’s not just about how each of us is connected, but how the parts reflect the whole – the hologram. Take any small segment of this movement’s gripes – and you see it reflected, somehow, in your own life or in the experiences of people you know. The unemployed, the uninsured, the recent college grads who can’t find work or can only land minimum wage jobs. Or in your neighborhood, there’s probably someone whose home is underwater – where what they’re paying is well beyond what the home is currently worth.

The banks that were bailed out by the government – by we, the people, by our tax dollars – are now sitting on trillions of dollars and are hoarding their money. These are the same banks who are finding ways to bleed you of more money – $60 a year debit charges, charges for checking accounts, and pretty soon, they’ll be charging you to even walk into the bank to do your business.

Tonight over dinner, our 22-year-old daughter, a recent college grad now working a minimum wage part-time job, asked us about the Occupy movement. She’s not into politics, but probably should be. Rob and I tried to keep the explanation simple, and she said: “But if you push against the rich, if you offer resistance to it, then you’re pretty much resisting ever getting rich.”

This is the Abraham/Hicks material speaking, the law of attraction. Rob gave what I thought was one of the best explanations I’ve heard: “The Occupy movement isn’t about taking down the wealthy, but about elevating the other 99 percent, about creating more opportunities for them.”

Her eyes lit up. She suddenly got it.

Back when our fathers were alive and working, you could earn a decent wage as a factory worker, have full health care and a pension. You could buy a home, educate your kids. Rob’s father spent 30 years working for a brewery. When it was bought out in his later years with the company, he lost his pension. Corporate greed.

The official poverty level for a family of 4 in every state except Alaska and Hawaii is is just over $22,000 a year. Can you live on $22,000 a year? Among seniors, the situation is even more depressing. The stats: “In 2008, 3.7 million Americans aged 65 and older had family incomes below the federal poverty threshold. This translates to a poverty rate of 9.7 percent for all persons aged 65 and older. The oldest Americans had the highest poverty rates. In 2008, 11.5 percent of individuals aged 80 and older were poor compared with 8.5 percent of individuals between the ages of 65 and 69. In addition, 30 percent of all Americans aged 80 and older had family incomes of less than 150 percent of the poverty threshold.”  Take a look at what economists are saying about the movement.

In our suburban community, there’s a particular corner where the homeless gather daily to panhandle. They usually carry signs that are heartbreaking – and which may not be true. But nonetheless, as you drive by in your air conditioned car, you feel a certain guilt, a remorse, particularly when the panhandler looks middle class, when he or she could be you.

So when Indra’s Net hums and sings with movement, it behooves each of us to pay attention to the particular melody, pleasant or unpleasant, good or bad or some strange mid-place in between the extremes. Indra’s Net really says that we are all in this together and the sooner we get the message as a society, a culture,  a species, the better off we’ll be. Perhaps that’s the ultimate message of the Occupiers. They really are the collective voice rising up against the 1 percent that has been in power since the 1980s, when ole Reagan, the alleged great communicator, was at the helm.

Perhaps the Occupiers are our collective conscience.

Posted in indra's net, occupy wall street, synchronicity | 41 Comments

UFO video

Posted on October 16, 2011 by Trish and Rob

I came across this video on Whitley Strieber’s site, the best source for this kind of information. Its supposedly from Milan, Italy, and as I was watching it, I thought, Hey wait a minute. If this is from Italy, how come I understand what this guy is saying? He’s speaking Spanish, that’s why. I need to do a bit of research about that discrepancy. It seems the broadcast is coming from a Spanish-speaking  country. Regardless, the video is fascinating.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7-OVU2HqL4&feature=player_embedded

 

Posted in synchronicity | 11 Comments

Indra’s Net

Posted on October 16, 2011 by Trish and Rob

FAR AWAY IN THE HEAVENLY ABODE OF THE GREAT GOD INDRA, THERE IS A WONDERFUL NET WHICH HAS BEEN HUNG BY SOME CUNNING ARTIFICER IN SUCH A MANNER THAT IT STRETCHES OUT INDEFINITELY IN ALL DIRECTIONS. IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE EXTRAVAGANT TASTES OF DEITIES, THE ARTIFICER HAS HUNG A SINGLE GLITTERING JEWEL AT THE NET’S EVERY NODE, AND SINCE THE NET ITSELF IS INFINITE IN DIMENSION, THE JEWELS ARE INFINITE IN NUMBER. THERE HANG THE JEWELS, GLITTERING LIKE STARS OF THE FIRST MAGNITUDE, A WONDERFUL SIGHT TO BEHOLD. IF WE NOW ARBITRARILY SELECT ONE OF THESE JEWELS FOR INSPECTION AND LOOK CLOSELY AT IT, WE WILL DISCOVER THAT IN ITS POLISHED SURFACE THERE ARE REFLECTED ALL THE OTHER JEWELS IN THE NET, INFINITE IN NUMBER. NOT ONLY THAT, BUT EACH OF THE JEWELS REFLECTED IN THIS ONE JEWEL IS ALSO REFLECTING ALL THE OTHER JEWELS, SO THAT THE PROCESS OF REFLECTION IS INFINITE.

THE AVATAMSAKA SUTRA
FRANCIS H. COOK: HUA-YEN BUDDHISM : THE JEWEL NET OF INDRA 1977

 

Posted in #14, indra's net, synchronicity | Leave a comment

The Bigger Picture

Posted on October 15, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Vicky Watt lives on the east coast of Scotland, one of our favorite countries, and wrote after reading the British edition of 7 Secrets of Synchronicity. She had a cool synchro associated with the book. She and her partner also have a great blog.

Here’s her synchro:

syn·chro·nic·i·ty definition

a meaningful coincidence; the coincidental occurrence of events and especially psychic events that seem related but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality —used especially in the psychology of C. G. Jung

I have to admit – I love all this stuff! Apparently, us pisceans are sterotypically dreamy, airy-fairy and very responsive to mysticism – so that explains it. Isn’t it exciting to try and peek behind the veil of everyday life in search of deeper meanings, unseen connections and a richer understanding of life itself? So, given this prior interest – it’s probably no big surprise that when my bus didn’t turn up at the usual time and place in Edinburgh on Wednesday, I decided to walk to the main bus station via the bookshop – where I picked up a book called ‘The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity’. Packed with stories about serendipitous coincidences that change the flow of individual lives – it seemed like a fun way to while away the hours. Sometimes though, while enjoying these types of books, I also try to approach them with a little healthy scepticism. After all, surely if we’re thinking about the idea of synchronicity, we are far more likely to be “on the look out” for patterns and indeed more likely to attribute meaning to random coincidences?

So, what was at work – or not – when I noted the pretty blue butterfly on the cover of the book as I paid at the counter. Then, a couple of minutes later, as I walked along my unexpected route to the bus station, I looked up to see a billboard featuring a huge blue butterfly and the words “Discover The Bigger Picture”. A couple more minutes later, as I waited in the bus station, I opened the book and was immediately struck by an acknowlegement to the author’s friend – a piscean – who always “saw the larger picture”. I’ve found recently that every time I roll my eyes in an attempt to be level-headed and skeptical about concepts like synchronicity, something happens to send me swimming right back in the direction of believing in a mysterious – yet meaningful – universe! Coincidence or Synchronicity? If you have any synchronistic experiences to share, I’d love to hear…

Meanwhile, the book above is a nice little introduction to the myriad ways that one might experiment with synchronicity – from astrology and numerology to the law of attraction or simply paying attention to potentially meaningful signs, symbols and patterns in daily life. Find out more here.

 

 

Posted in books, synchronicity | 11 Comments

What If…

Posted on October 14, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 

…Al Gore had been president?  I thought about this today when I heard that Gore threw his support behind the Occupiers.

This is the guy who won the popular vote in the presidential election of 2000, who went on to win the Nobel peace prize, became a climate change activist, started Current TV, and always seems to come down on the side of the people.

“With democracy in crisis, a true grassroots movement pointing out the flaws in our system is the first step in the right direction,” he wrote on his blog. “Count me among those supporting and cheering on the Occupy Wall Street movement.”

Would Gore have invaded Iraq, as Bush did? Would he have allowed Wall Street to continue its heinous practices with derivatives? If we’d had 8 years of Gore instead of 8 years of Bush, how would our country be different now? Would  millions of homes be in foreclosure? Would the financial meltdown of 2008 have happened? Would banks and financial institutions that are “too big to fail” still be operating? Would we be in Afghanistan? Would we have universal health care?

I voted for Gore in 2000. But we had recently moved and had so much trouble at the polling station that we had to return two or three times with proper documentation before we were allowed to cast our votes. After the hanging chad debacle in our county that went straight to the Supreme Court, where Sandra Day O’Connor cast the deciding vote that ushered Bush into office,  Palm Beach County switched to Diebold voting machines.   Hardly an improvement.

In 2004, when I cast my vote for Kerry – Bush’s name came up. It took three attempts before I was able to cast my vote for Kerry. We all know who won the election in 2004.

But let’s say Gore had become president in 2000. Would he have invaded Iraq? Probably not, since Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11. Would he have invaded Afghanistan? Probably not. I frankly can’t recall the specifics of what we’re doing in that country, but no one has ever conquered Afghanistan. Just ask the Russians.  Read James Michener’s novel about the country, Caravans. Gore might have cut off our access to Saudi oil, however, and forced the auto and power industries to find alternative solutions quickly.

I remember the embargo of 1973, when I used to sit at a local gas station for three hours, waiting to fill the tank in my aging Pinto. Between then and 2000, when Gore might have become prez, nothing changed. Gas got more expensive, cars got larger and hungrier, the cost of electricity went through the roof.

After Bush came into office and offered tax breaks that facilitated the purchase of a Hummer,  I saw so many Hummers on the road that the vehicle became  symbolic in my mind for the militaristic point of view. The local paper interviewed women who drove Hummers. Their consensus?I feel safer.

Really? Safer from what? IEDs? Sorry, wrong country.  Another woman replied that she liked sitting up high in traffic, so that she could see the the cars. Uh-huh. And while you’re idling in that traffic, you’re using up the gas in your Hummer, which gets – what? Five miles to the gallon?

I think Gore would have accelerated the creation of alternative fuels, green jobs, all the buzz words you hear these days from Democrats. But if Gore had won, would he be the activist and visionary he is today? How have these events shaped who he is now?If we’d had eight years of Gore, would Obama have won he presidency in 2008? That depends.

If 8 years of Gore had left this country in a more prosperous place, with more peaceful and environmentally aware policies, people might not have been so desperate for change. Then  McCain and Palin might have won. Sobering thought, that if Gore had won, we wold now have   a Veep who thinks she can see Russia from her front porch.

So in the bigger scheme of things, how would that alternative history play out? I can’t even go there.

In the end, perhaps it comes down a few simple tenets. We are where we are, the U.S. government is like a two-year-old in the midst of a temper tantrum, no one is held accountable for anything.  But, oh yeah, there’s a ray of hope in the Occupier movement that grows by leaps and bounds. Maybe it all comes back to that, the grass root movements that usher in real change.

The right wing has stopped just short of calling them terrorists. They are anti-American, un-American, anti-capitalism. Yet, when a few hundred Tea Party protestors got together last summer, the extreme right lauded them as heroes. The left wing has been reluctant to endorse the Occupiers – oops, we can’t rock the boat here, we don’t want to look too much to the left – but more of them are crawling on board each day.

Listen to what Matt Taibi, a writer for Rolling Stone who has been following the Occupiers since the beginning, has to say about this movement. 

And since Gore didn’t win and Bush did and Obama did and I’m living in this version of history, I’m off to make an Occupy sign to stick in my front yard.

 

 

Posted in synchronicity | 22 Comments

Finding your true love

Posted on October 13, 2011 by Trish and Rob

We watched an odd movie called Timer recently. It had the feel of an extended soap opera or a made-for-TV movie. The concept was that, as a result of a new invention, people had an opportunity to find their true love – that perfect person – by having a timer-strip injected into your wrist. The strip is visible, about two inches long, half an inch wide. On it is a digital timer ticking down to the moment when you’ll meet your true love, who will show up with his or her own timer simultaneously ticking down to zero–the moment of truth and true love.

Although the story was intriguing in a humorous way and the characters surprisingly believable, the concept didn’t seem very well thought out. For instance, the main character’s timer was blank. No explanation was given and she didn’t seem interested in a refund. Finally, when she wanted it removed, it wasn’t because it didn’t work, but that she didn’t want to play the timer game any longer. The clinician who was going to remove it confessed he had never heard of anyone doing such a thing. So apparently no one had their timer removed after their true love was found. Why not?

We also wondered why so many people would want a timer to lead them to true love. Timers were wildly popular and you were a dork if you didn’t have one. In spite of the plot flaws and obvious questions raised by a digital implant guiding, if not directing,  your love life and future, we enjoyed the movie.

But as I watched it, I started thinking there was something somewhat familiar about the concept. Something from my past. At first I thought it might’ve been a story I’d read or maybe one I’d written long ago. Then I remembered.

Back when Trish and I first met, I took a course in hypnosis and started leading people – mainly friends and family – into past life regressions. I seemed to have a knack for it. Trish was my favorite subject because she was susceptible and imaginative. She had great past life stories, went very deep, and usually remembered none of it. I guess it was the latter fact, combined with the time the sessions took, that eventually led to her to decide that she didn’t want do it  any longer. Essentially, we both stopped at the same time and moved onto other things – mainly our writing careers.

Somewhere in my closet I still have a notebook filled with notes from those regression sessions. One of them, interestingly, involved a true love timer! In that regression, Trish moved into an alternate reality. She had just met me – an alternate Rob – and speeding ahead we were making love for the first time when alarms attached to Rob’s bed went off, ringing loudly, filling the room with sound. Rob bolted up, and shouted: “You’re the one!”

Apparently, he had invented a gizmo that allowed him to monitor his compatibility with women that he bedded. The alarm had a variety of tones that allowed him to judge the level of compatibility. Apparently, nothing had ever happened even vaguely close to the alarming reaction set off by Trish’s appearance in his bedroom.

I mentioned that regression to Trish while we were still watching the movie, but she had absolutely no recollection of it.  I’ll have to dig out those notes someday.

 

 

Posted in synchronicity | 14 Comments

A Healing Meditation

Posted on October 12, 2011 by Trish and Rob

from Soul Cards

 

Rob periodically teaches a six-week meditation course at our gym or at a yoga studio.  In the past, I’ve had some unusual experiences during these one hour sessions.  During one particularly vivid meditation, I saw both of my parents in the corner of the room. They looked young, healthy, happy.  As soon as they became aware that I could see them, they faded away.  Unfortunately, I can’t seem to locate that post on the blog!  But here and here are some of the others.

Before the last session in August, I noticed that a lower tooth didn’t feel right. I dreaded having to go to the dentist during a Mercury retrograde, but figured that would be where I would be spending the next day.  The session that night involved a shamanic meditation with drumming,  my personal favorite. There’s something about the drumming that transports me and because the meditation is long – twenty minutes – there’s time to really sink into an altered state.

At one point, I became aware of Rob’s voice directing us to heal ourselves of some physical, emotional, or spiritual injury. So I focused on my tooth. I asked it to please be healed. I felt confident that it could be healed, that such a healing was not only possible, but that it was going to happen. Suddenly, I was aware of a brilliant light, on the right side of my head. It was so bright I thought that Rob had turned on a lamp and was holding it up to my face.  The light went into my face.

My eyes snapped open and the room was still dark. Rob was walking over to his iPod to turn off the drumming and I thought, Wow, what was that about?  Awhile later, as we were walking back to the car, I tasted the infection and the pressure in my tooth had let up considerably.

Now, it’s been two months and the tooth is still fine.

He has just started a new meditation class. I can’t wait to see what sorts of experiences happen this time!

 

 

Posted in healing, meditation, synchronicity | 13 Comments

Week 4 of Occupy Wall Street

Posted on October 11, 2011 by Trish and Rob

occupiers in washington square, NYC, 10-8-11

Watching the Occupiers  as their numbers mushroom, as the cities they occupy proliferate, is really a flashback to the sixties. It’s the same kind of movement – grass roots, organic, spurred by an emotional and intuitive certainty that something is very wrong in this country. And when enough people feel this, the masses take to the streets. And when the 99% take to the streets in such great numbers, the media snaps to attention, even the politicians who live on the planet Pluto can’t help but notice.

Some media outlets have criticized this movement because it doesn’t have, well, you know, an agenda. In media speak, that means: What are the talking points? What’s the declaration?  Who are your leaders? Who speaks for you? I actually think that in the beginning, the lack of an agenda was a plus. But now the movement is so much larger that it may be time to flex its political muscle.

During the protests of the sixties, the war in Vietnam was the issue. The draft still existed. People saw the draft as sanctioned murder. We also had great music that infused us with a kind of primal rage toward a system that we knew was unjust and  plain wrong.

On May 4, 1970, four college students at Kent State were murdered by the National Guard during a protest. Here’s a timeline of the events that led up to this horror. As a result of this travesty, on May 9, 1970, 100,000 marched on Washington, D.C. to protest the shootings and Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, which many of us saw as an expansion of the Vietnam War.

On the night of May 8, 1970, I drove my old VW from Utica, New York to D.C. and it was jammed with people. We were three deep in the front seat, four in the back. In those days, the trip took about eight hours. I remember that we camped that night in a park with hundreds of other protestors.  The people I was with had come well-prepared – food and water, sleeping bags, even pillows, and, more importantly, they had handkerchiefs  coated with Vaseline, which was supposed to protect you from tear gas or whatever else might be sprayed through the crowd.

That night, as I looked out across the park where we all camped illegally,  I could see pinpricks of light – cigarettes, candles, flashlights –and knew I was a witness to history, that something important was shifting. The next day, as a hundred thousand of us converged on D.C., I saw only a sea of humanity. I heard the cacophony of a collective voice that you can hear now from the occupiers of wherever you live. Their message is layered –  not just war, but economical tyranny of the 1 percent, the domination of corporatism at the expense of everyone else,  unemployment,  class warfare, corrupt politicians. But really, the bigger message is the same: the existing paradigm no longer works. Capitalism is now a monster.

Back then, we didn’t have the Internet, Facebook, cell phones, Twitter. We were a disconnected, disenfranchised group and we knew it, and it didn’t matter. We were connected by something deeper, more mysterious,  a passion that knew no bounds.  Just like the occupiers.

And yet, even after that protest in 1970, it took three more years before military involvement in Vietnam ceased and until April 1975 for the war to officially end. I was in graduate school when the military involvement ended. I remember being in the apartment of  a friend and caught a snippet on TV and thought, Wow, what was this about again? Nearly 60,000 Americans killed, more than a million others, I mean, really, what was the point?

Now, more than forty years later, what has changed? War is still big business, but there’s no more draft. The U.S. is still  the world cop,  we support dictators and supply them with weapons, only to turn against them when the tide of pubic opinion has turned. For a list of such dictators and the policies that support them, Google Naomi Klein. She wrote the definitive book about these American tactics in The Shock Doctrine. Economist Paul Krugman nails it, too. 

My hope is that the occupiers continue to occupy, that those vested in the existing paradigm keep howling about how un-American it is, and that the change doesn’t take 3-5 years. One thing is obvious: the existing paradigm won’t end with a whimper. The 1 percent will fight the 99 percent all the way. But if we’re a country of the people and for the people, change will come. The 99 percent will win.


 

 

Posted in occupy wall street, synchronicity | 23 Comments

Wolf Medicine

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Trish and Rob


Here’s a visual synchronicity related to my new novel, TIME CATCHER, that just came out. Notice the cover above, and the one below. Both have a wolf theme. Yet, wolves play a minor role in each one and the books came out under different publishers with different art directors.

While both novels are part of the same series, TIME CATCHER is a departure from the previous three in that the saga jumps ahead in time. Rather than a high-school aged student, Will Lansa is now an adult, an anthropology professor at Rocky Mountain College. About to embark on a vacation between semesters, he’s  called back the Hopi Reservation by his grandmother to pursue a metaphysical mystery related to the Hopi prophecies and Pahana, a legendary figure from Hopi mythology.

The wolf in TIME CATCHER is a seriously over-sized creature that enters the world through an inter-dimensional portal in Canyon de Chelly. In Double Heart, the wolf is a shape-shifter.

The dueling wolf covers made me wonder about wolf medicine. Here’s what I found when I made a quick on-line perusal. As a totem, Wolf is the pathfinder, the forerunner of new ideas who returns to the clan to teach and share medicine. Wolf is a wild spirit.

The senses of Wolf are very keen, and the moon is its power ally. The moon is the symbol for psychic energy, or the unconscious that holds the secrets of knowledge and wisdom. Baying at the moon may be an indication of Wolf’s desire to connect with new ideas which are just below the surface of consciousness.

I think Wolf is my new power animal!

 

 

 

 

Posted in synchronicity, totem animals, wolf | 7 Comments

Kicking the Co-Exist bumper sticker

Posted on October 9, 2011 by Trish and Rob

You’ve probably seen the ubiquitous Co-Exist bumper sticker that includes symbols of all the major religions. Right? Megan has one on her car. So does one of our neighbors. I’ve always thought it was one of the better bumper stickers because it doesn’t attack anyone.

But Florida Rep. Allen West has other ideas. It seems that West, who happens to represent the district where we live, thinks co-existing is bad news.

Take a look at what he says about the sticker. What’s particularly jarring is that West is black and co-existing is what blacks have been trying to do in this country for 300 years. Shame on Allen West. He should know better.

Here he is in his own words:

“Because as I was driving up here today, I saw that bumper sticker that absolutely incenses me. It’s not the Obama bumper sticker. But it’s the bumper sticker that says, ‘Co-exist.’ And it has all the little religious symbols on it. And the reason why I get upset, and every time I see one of those bumper stickers, I look at the person inside that is driving. Because that person represents something that would give away our country. Would give away who we are, our rights and freedoms and liberties because they are afraid to stand up and confront that which is the antithesis, anathema of who we are. The liberties that we want to enjoy.”

So apparently, according to West, in order to enjoy our freedom and liberty, we need to repress those who are different from us. What a guy. I’m voting against him…again in 2012.

Posted in synchronicity | 15 Comments