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Three years ago, I was at the dog park and saw my friend Colleen eagerly reading something on her phone. I asked her what it was. “Oh my God, this book is incredible,” she gushed. “50 Shades of Grey. You have to read it, Trish.”

I asked her what it was about. She handed me her phone and I reads a steamy passage about a young woman in a sadomasochistic relationship with a handsome man who was, of course, a billionaire. A hackneyed plot. I passed. Then a couple of days later, I read on the Internet that the author of the book would be doing her first signing at Books & Books in Coral Gables, one of the best independent bookstores left in South Florida. I learned that the book started as fan fiction for the Twilight series and got so many downloads that a major publisher had picked it up for an exorbitant amount of $ and thought, Okay, I need to take a look.

I downloaded the book and got through half of it before I put it aside. I thought the female protagonist was kind of an idiot and that the billionaire guy had some major psychologist issues. Erotic fiction is tough to write and the author has to have the soul of a poet – like Anais Nin, in her novel Henry & June, about her affairs with author Henry Miller and his wife, June. That novel is brilliant because Nin was able to dig deep into the psychology, spirituality, and inner lives of her characters. 50 Shades is, ironically, completely lacking in shading, in nuance.

All that said, the book went on to sell zillions of copies, and became a movie that opened over Valentine’s Day weekend here in the U.S. As a result of my review about 50 Shades three years ago, we had a sudden uptick of hundreds of hits on our blog. Many of these hits came were the result of the query phrase: the deeper meaning of 50 shades of grey.

Huh?

I went back and looked through the first book – and the second, which I eventually downloaded – and I just don’t see any deeper meaning to this title. The premise is simple: young woman meets billionaire with control and S&M issues. She submits. They eventually fall in love. The premise was explored in the book and movie 9 and ½ Weeks (1986) 5/ with Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger, but the 21^st century version is more graphic.

The movie reviews of 50 Shades have been pretty bad, but for probably the wrong reasons. Is sex supposed to be a war? A torture chamber? A platform of domination and submission? Are we so messed up as a society that sex is the final summary of who we are as human beings and as a species? Is sex the personal equivalent of endless war?

My sister visited recently and I asked her if she’d seen the movie. She hadn’t, but her son and his wife had. They hated it. I asked if she’d read the books. Yes, she had, all three of them. What did she think?

“I liked them. I thought they showed the evolution of their relationship.”

On its opening weekend, the movie grossed more than $80 million.

So what the hell do I know about what appeals to a mass audience? Well, apparently not much!!

Recently, I was in Barnes & Noble looking for something interesting to read. I usually find a book and then search for it on Amazon to see if it’s an ebook, and download that for a fraction of the cost for a print book. But when I plucked The Sociopath Next Door off the shelf and opened it, I experienced an odd synchro. The first chapter was called The Seventh Sense, the title of one of my novels. I turned to the introduction.

“Imagine – if you can – not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful or immortal action you’ve taken.”

Okay, I thought. The author, Martha Stout, is describing the antagonists in many of my novels. I need to buy this book. And I did.

You can read this book from cover to cover in a single sitting, if you’re so inclined, if you don’t mind being inundated with some heavy duty stuff about sociopaths. I have been leafing through it, reading a chapter here and there at the gym, at night, while eating a meal. As loath as I am to admit it, I think Stout is really onto something with her material.

The character she describes is the antagonist in countless mysteries and thrillers, in movies, and in real life. Think: Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, David Berkowitz, Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono (Hillside Stranglers). But clinical psychologist Martha Stout points out that 1 in 25 of every American is a sociopath. This person could be your spouse, neighbor, friend, sibling, or kid.

Many years ago, I worked as a librarian and Spanish teacher in a minimum security youthful offender facility. One of the inmates who frequented the library was a 15-year-old kid who was doing three years for raping and murdering a four-year-old girl. Yes, you read that correctly. Three years. His sentence was short because he was underage and was adjudicated as a juvenile. Both of his parents were psychologists.

Roland and I used to sit around in my office talking about books and music and the world outside. One day, I asked him to tell me about the crime that had landed him in prison. At first, he claimed he was too high to remember anything. But as I pressed him with questions, he became somewhat agitated and then admitted that the girl was there and he was there, so why not? He raped and strangled her because he could. No remorse.

Roland was a sociopath.

At some point during the three years I worked at this prison, an inmate in solitary hung himself. It was later discovered that he committed suicide because he had been raped by the prison’s assistant superintendent, who was bringing inmates on outside patrol to his trailer for sex. This perpetrator, a short, cigar-smoking ha-ha sort of guy, was asked to resign and did and collected his pension and was never charged with anything.

He was also a sociopath.

“About one in twenty-five individuals are sociopaths, meaning, essentially, that they do not have a conscience,” writes Stout. “It is not that this group fails to grasp the difference between good and bad; it is that the distinction fails to limit their behavior. The intellectual difference between right and wrong does not bring on the emotional sirens and flashing blue lights, or the fear of God, that it does for the rest of us. Without the slightest blip of guilt or remorse, one in twenty-five people can do anything at all.”

In the days before email and the Internet, I published a novel called Dark Fields, about a female serial killer. Despite what Hollywood and fiction would have you believe, serial killers are rare. There are more men than women, but when a serial killer is female, she is probably more brutal than her male counterpart. A few months after the book came out, I received a fan letter from a female serial killer who was currently doing time.

She was a sociopath.

Stout’s book is a fascinating and profound look inside the mind of a sociopath and helped me sculpt the antagonist in my novel. Her conclusion: “One way or another, a life without conscience is a failed life.”

So what or who is the antithesis of the sociopath? Gandhi? Okay, great. I can buy that. But on a personal level, what does it mean? How are any of us are like Gandhi? It seems that most of us have a moral code, but what is it in man that produces a Bundy? A Son of Sam? What is it that corrupts some humans from the inside out? That deems torture of our fellow human beings as OK? That glorifies war? What is it in man that produces a Gandhi? A Dalai Lama?A Hitler? A Mussolini?

Quite often, the ending sentences or paragraphs in a novel or book have an important message to convey, just as the beginning does. I love Stout’s concluding paragraphs:

For most of us, conscience is so ordinary, so daily, and so spontaneous that we do not even notice it. But conscience is also much larger than we are. It is one side of a confrontation between an ancient faction of amoral self-interest that has always been doomed, both psychologically and spiritually, and a circle of moral minds just as ageless.

Stout says she votes for the people with conscience, for the ones who are loving and committed, for the generous and gentle souls. They are people who have been gone for hundreds of years and the baby who will be born tomorrow. They come from every nation, culture, and religion. They are the more aware and focused members of our species. And they are, and always have been, our hope.

This seems like a Happy Valentine’s Day message, animal style!

In March 2013, we published a post about the Ariel School sightings that occurred in Zimbabawe in 1994. It’s one of the most compelling mass sightings ever and involved 62 elementary school kids. John E. Mack, author and professor of psychiatry at Harvard, investigated the incident. Here’s a recap of what happened:

The morning of September 16, 1994 probably started like any other morning at the Ariel School, a private elementary school in Ruwa, a rural farming community in Zimbabawe. But by mid-morning, when the kids broke for recess, the lives of 62 children and their teachers would be forever changed.

During the recess, most of the teachers were inside the building at a meeting and the kids, ranging in age from five to twelve, were outside. The only adult supervisor at recess was the mother of one of the children, who  operated a snack bar that sold soft drinks and snacks.

At around 10:15, some of the children saw three silver balls in the sky over the school.  These balls suddenly vanished in a flash of light, then reappeared elsewhere in the sky. This pattern was repeated three times before one of the UFOs began to move down toward the school. The craft either hovered just above the ground or landed in an area about three hundred feet from the recess field. The ground here was densely wooded with trees, thorn bushes, and shoots of bamboo. The only path through the area had been carved by tractors when they tried to clear the land.

A “small man” about three feet tall appeared on top of the UFO, then walked a ways across the rough ground. According to the children interviewed by Cynthia Hind, a South African UFO researcher, the man wore a tight-fitting, shiny black suit, had long black hair, and a “scrawny” neck.  His face was pale, his eyes immense. When the man became aware of the children, he allegedly disappeared. He or someone similar to him reappeared at the back of the UFO, which then took off.

Some of the children ran in terror toward the woman who was operating the snack bar, telling her what they had seen, but she didn’t believe them.

Hind arrived at the school the next day. She had already asked the headmaster to have the children make drawings of what they had seen so she reviewed the sketches and then began interviewing the children.

In Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters, John E Mack,  wrote about his involvement in the investigation of the Ariel School sightings.  He and his research associate, Dominique Callimanopulos, had already scheduled a trip to Zimbabwe that was unrelated to the Ariel sightings. So when the BBC bureau chief faxed Mack and his associate  the drawings the children had done at Hind’s request,  Mack decided to investigate and he and Dominique arrived at the school in early December and stayed for two days.

Mack’s background in child psychiatry was apparently a powerful asset. He met with twelve of the children, interviewed the headmaster,  and met with most of the teachers. Each child they interviewed told a similar story, “that at 10:15 on that Friday morning, a large spacecraft and several smaller ones, from which one of more ‘strange beings’ had emerged, were seen hovering just above the ground or had ‘landed’ in their schoolyard.” At one point, Mack played devil’s advocate  with one of the kids and suggested the possibility that she had made up the story and gotten the other kids to tell the teachers this story as a prank.  Her reply was that she could understand how an adult might think that, but “that’s not what happened.”

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Fast forward. Mack died in 2004. But in 2007, Dominique Callimanopulos and filmmaker Randall Nickerson began production of a non-commercial, edited video program presenting John Mack’s interviews with the schoolchildren and faculty. A year later, Randall Nickerson left for Africa to cull additional information about the Ariel sightings. He stayed for nine months and interviewed many of the now-adult witnesses.  Click here for his findings.

Today, we received an email from Anne, a production assistant for “Ariel Phenomenon,” a documentary that’s being made about the sightings. She provided us with an update about the film and a link to the movie trailer. The trailer runs about five minutes and it’s fantastic.

From Anne:

I am working with Randall (Nickerson) on this film and would like to post an update for your readers. There is a website for the film now which is www.arielphenomenon.com and also a Facebook page “Ariel School Documentary” and Twitter account @arielschoolfilm for people to follow. The film website has an exclusive trailer for the film. We are also conducting a fundraiser through the film website to raise much needed funds to finish the final interviews and complete the film this year. Can you please share this important information with your readers? People are welcome to contact me at arielschoolfilm@gmail.com with any questions. Thank you for your help and support! Anne Krzanowski Production Assistant, “Ariel Phenomenon”

My new book on meditation, The Jewel in the Lotus: Meditation for Busy Minds, is out as an e-book, and will be coming out in print in a few weeks. Here’s an excerpt, a spiel about non-attachment.

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Non-Attachment

Maybe you’ve heard about meditation teachers who say visualization is just another way of thinking, that it’s not true meditation. I’ve heard that, too, many times. Those same teachers might tell you to focus on letting go of attachments and seeking a state of nothingness. If you try that, you might find yourself floating in a void during your meditation. That can be pleasant, but it’s actually another form of visualization—visualizing nothing.

Buddhists are great promoters of non-attachment. It’s one of the central themes of the religion. That’s fine if your focus is on detaching yourself from obsessive behavior related to people or things. But how far do you take that concept? Being non-attached to your children, for example, is probably a bad idea, one that could cause you to lose your children. In other words, there’s a fine line between being non-attached and uncaring.

Some Buddhists say that happiness is not a viable goal of meditation, that happiness is a passing condition and an attachment. But so is unhappiness, and it seems there are plenty of unhappy Buddhists, weary of the world and all of its everyday attachments. As a result, casual observers tend to profile the Zen crowd as meditators who look on the world with a scowl and a sense of disgust about anything that hints of attachments. Insiders, however, will tell you that they are not unhappy. It’s just that they don’t ignore painful matters. In fact, they feel the way to deal with pain and difficulties is by focusing on such issues rather than running away from them.

My perspective is that it’s better to meditate on what you want, imagining that you already have it, than to focus on what’s lacking in your life. That only attracts more of the same. Sure, being preoccupied with material goods can drag us down and divert us from our spiritual quest. But having a dream, seeking abundance and other positive goals through visualization and affirmations should never be considered detrimental.

Wealth and prosperity are states of mind that are usually augured by money. Yes, money allows us to accumulate stuff, and possessing more objects is not a sure-fire pathway to inner peace and happiness. Certainly, there are people with lots of money who are unhappy, and there are people who misuse money and look only to possessions for meaning in their lives.

Of course, there are plenty of people without money who are bitterly unhappy. But happiness comes from within, not from the size of your bank account or the number of toys in your possession. Abundance is more than financial security. It’s about living in the present moment and experiencing life to its fullest. After all, we are here in the physical world to feel and experience. If we think of ourselves essentially as spirits engaged in physical existence, then we can engage in life with a renewed interest and learn from our experiences, all the while knowing that it’s transitory and our true home is the spirit realm.

I’m all for releasing attachments, such as negative emotional patterns that hold us back. But there’s also value in pursuing goals through directed meditations. They not only provide structure that many beginning meditators need, but they work.

However, before we move into the directed meditations, let’s briefly explore a meditation about true non-attachment. Our typical idea of non-attachment might be giving away all your possessions, leaving your home and family, maybe keeping a robe, sandals and a begging bowl. This is possible, though not prudent, especially in the Western World. True non-attachment, while impossible in the physical world, can be explored in meditation. Here’s how:

Letting Go

Move into a comfortable position and take a few deep breaths. Scan your body, relaxing as you go. Settle in, slowing your breath.

Now start to let go of your identity. Begin with your name. Let it go. Imagine not having a name, or any role. Let go of all of your titles and roles: ie. mother, father, son, daughter, your career or job title, your qualifications, your history. Let it all go.

Let go of your religion, your race and nationality. Let go of your language. Let go of your gender. Let go of your body. How does it feel to be neither male or female. No name, gender, role, title, race, nationality, language. No body, merely a spark of awareness, exploring the unknown, touching upon the unknowable.

How do you feel? You’re free, peaceful, immortal and eternal. You’re connecting to your original self, linked to your creator, merging with higher awareness.

M-E-D-I-T-A-T-E

That’s true non-attachment. It’s worth exploring those ideas and feelings so you can face any fears of the unknown, of losing all that you are. In doing so, you connect with your deeper, eternal self, where you recognize that your physical life is but a blip. Yet, it’s an important one where you face challenges and opportunities to expand your awareness.

For the second winter, we have a boarder with us, a woman I’ll call Carlie. She’s a groom, a part-time resident here, who travels with her boss, ‘Amber,’ a wealthy young woman who rides really expensive horses. It’s her lifestyle, and her life. She competes with some of the world’s best jumpers who winter here and perform at the Horse Show, a stadium and grounds about two minutes from us.

Carlie takes care of the horses, cleans up after them, makes vet and farrier appointments, and saddles the horses so her young boss can ride up to four horses a day. Carlie leaves the house at 6 a.m., returns at 5 p.m. for dinner, then leaves at 7 p.m. for night check. She’s usually in bed between 9:30-10. She does that six days a week.

This evening she was excited about watching Downton Abbey with us. But first she was being taken out to dinner by the mother of her boss-rider. The mother is the mistress of a fantastic 8,000-acre estate with an enormous mansion on it. The family no longer resides in the mansion, which is now a popular tourist attraction. The name itself is synonymous with great wealth, and the family is the American version of aristocracy.

So maybe you see the synchronicity here. Carlie was anxious to watch the well-known drama about the posh lifestyle of British aristocracy in the early part of the twentieth century. But, meanwhile, she was on her way to dining with one of the heads of a famous American household. It turns out that her dinner and evening events ran right through the TV show. But hey, she was living the real thing—American style.

The interesting twist is that a century ago, the mistress of a great house would never be seen taking a groom to dinner. Besides that, I noticed that Carlie went to dinner in jeans and a T-shirt, totally acceptable in even the top restaurants here. Times have changed in some way, but not so much in others. To Trish and I, Carlie seems to live a life ‘in service,’ just like the servants on the ‘first floor’ of Downton Abbey. But she loves it, and that’s what counts.

Ian R  asks this question: Does anyone have synchronistic messages from friends or family who have passed away?

Well, we’ve heard some stories. In fact, we gathered them together in Synchronicity and the Other Side: Meaningful Connections with the Afterlife (Adams Media, 2011). But maybe if we’d heard Ian’s own story about his friend, we would’ve included it. Especially because of the name and nickname of Ian’s friend.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Ian began by saying that he was convinced that his father was repeatedly contacting him over the past two years. He was doing so through the medium of music. There’s a popular song from 1988 that Ian associates with his father. He has been hearing it again and again. He even saw someone on the street performing the song. He also noted that he doesn’t listen regularly to the radio limiting his expose to music.

“The first time I affirmed a request to hear from him, I literally picked up the phone to call a company, was transferred to the other side of the world to a customer service centre, and was placed on hold. The song playing whilst I sat waiting was the song from 1988. Subsequently, I have had the same synch with other friends and family here in Prague. And on one occasion sat down with some ‘informed’ parties at a a cafe, to hear a street performer singing it live .”

Then Ian went on to talk about his late friend.

“The other day I thought about one of my closest friends who sadly died in his early 30s. I wondered why I had never had any messages from him. His name was Darren. As I finished that thought, I was entering a park with my dog. I turned a corner, and there in huge letters (5ft by 5ft) was the name ‘Daz’ spray-painted on the wall. Daz was Darren’s nickname.”

So, besides the synchro for Ian  with his deceased friend, there’s the oddity that we know another Darren, who visits here frequently, who has the exact same nickname—Daz. Is this a common nickname for people named Darren? we wonder. If not, then it’s really a peculiar synchro.

This video was taken by participants in a recent workshop with Dr. Stephen Greer. It’s quite interesting. At first, we wondered if the twin lights seen in the video were lights from boats. But they seem to be well above the water. Greer is known for being able to “conjure” UFOs. But his week-long workshops are pricey -$2500 that doesn’t include food, lodging, or transportation. For that price, I would like a guarantee: yes, you are definitely going to see UFOs!

In a time when the daily news cycle brings such horrific stories – not just daily, but hourly- it’s uplifting and encouraging to run across a story about human kindness. This story also illustrates the power of the Internet to connect and empower people in an immediate way that changes lives.

James Robertson, 56, a guy from Detroit – the city that’s famous for its cars- can’t afford a car on the $10.55 an hour he earns at Schain Mold & Engineering. So he walks 21 miles to his factory job every morning and then walks 21 miles home after work. He leaves at eight a.m. and doesn’t get home till four a.m. He relies on public transportation, rides from good Samaritans, and his feet. He has been doing this for a decade, since his 1988 Honda quit on him, and has a perfect attendance at work.

After the Detroit Free Press did a story on Robertson, it hit the Internet in a major way and within 24 hours, Robertson’s life was transformed. From the Huffington Post:

“Evan Leedy, a student at Detroit’s Wayne State University, set up a GoFundMe account to help raise money to buy Robertson a car. It began with a simple goal of $5,000 and skyrocketed to over $200,000 from thousands of people after Robertson’s story was picked up my media outlets around the world.” As of the evening of February 3, while I’m writing this, the total has reached nearly $300,000.

Robertson can now afford a luxury car, if he wants one But he told the Detroit Free Press that he’s a Ford fan. “I remember the Taurus. They look comfortable, nothing fancy. They’re simple on the outside, strong on the inside — like me.”

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This story made my month! It certainly rocks the prevalent stereotype of black inner city residents as lazy slackers collecting welfare checks.

I clearly remember the moment six years ago. Rob had gone to a yoga class and I was sitting outside in January sunlight, when the weather in Florida is usually at its best and was doing my usual fretting about where we would go now. In this marriage, I’m the fretter and Rob is the copasetic guy, the Don’t worry, it’s all okay guy.

 I was trying to figure out where we were supposed to be going as writers. Or, at any rate, where I was supposed to be going. I was finishing up a novel called Esperanza, which sold four or five months later, but at that moment outside in the sunlight, I thought about synchronicity. It had intrigued me ever since I was a freshman in college and read Jung’s intro to the Richard Wilhelm edition of the I Ching. That intro was written in 1949 and was the first time Jung had mentioned synchronicity publicly.

To me, synchronicity seemed to be the evidence of a divine intelligence afoot in the world, but I wasn’t at all sure what that meant. I really felt a need to explore it. After all, on my first date with Rob years before I’d asked him if he’d heard of synchronicity. This was in the early 80s, before the Internet, PCs, iPad, iPhones, any of the new stuff. It wasn’t like he could run off and Google the word. To my utter shock, he knew the word and what it meant.

So when he got home from yoga that day in January 2009 and came outside, I said, “I think we should start a blog on synchronicity.”

He looked at me like I was nuts and laughed. “Yeah, right.” He turned to go back inside the house.

“Why not?” I hurried after him, really irritated by his triple earth sign natal chart that screamed, Prove it to me, prove it, prove this is worth my time and effort. “We’ve been living it for nearly thirty years.”

“Well, yeah, there’s that,” his body said.

And on February 4, 2009, we launched this blog. I did an astrological chart for the date and time and it looked good. I figured that Facebook had launched on that date, different year, but still… The promise of that chart has seen fruition. Four books on synchronicity, dozens of radio shows, and many new friends also interested in what synchronicity is and how it operates in our lives. Lots of people using synchros to improve their lives, understand their lives.

Here was our first post.

Thanks to everyone who has visited and contributed over the years and added to our collective knowledge of synchronicity!