The Dead Speak, Part I

Posted on June 30, 2010 by Trish and Rob

 One of the chapters in our new proposal is on spirit contact. So while we were working on it, we suddenly ran across several synchronicities about that very topic. This story is from Natalie, who wrote about it on her blog. It’s a zinger.

The Escher lithograph, Magic Mirror, is how I see the kind of work Natalie is doing.

Thirty-one years ago in Australia, over a four month period, three girls went missing. One of them Natalie talks about in this story is Deirdre. The other one we’ll call Anne. Let Natalie tell it from here.
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For many weeks, I was repeatedly awakened in the middle of the night with a song playing in my mind. The song is a recent release, called Mr. Mysterious. (Click the youtube video below to hear the song).

Even more unnerving was when I felt a coldness on my right side, something repeatedly touching my right arm, and then a tugging on my left eyebrow hairs.

This was scaring the life out of me, as there was an ominous ‘feel’ to these visits.

Seventeen days ago, a girl started talking in my ear. No problem there, except she was dead.

She has been missing for 31 years. I knew nothing about this until she started talking to me two weeks ago. She is presumed dead, though no body has ever been recovered.

At first, I thought my over active imagination was making up the scenario she was showing me. She gave me a place name and I had never heard of it. A google search revealed that not only does the place exist, it matched the scenes she showed me 5 a.m. the other morning.

While she was talking to me, she gave me names, family scenes, pictures of siblings, her middle name (which the public wasn’t aware of). She said that other girls were with her in spirit. I think have found one of the other girls on the net, and she looks just like the image I was shown by the first girl.

By a series of really strange ‘synchronicities’, almost all the information she gave me has been verified by an aquaintance of her parents. The meeting of the aquaintance was synchronisitic also. What are the chances of meeting a person who has solid knowledge of a spirit who ‘just happens’ to start talking to me at 5 in the morning, about a case that is so cold it is freezing.

Also, another family friend of this girl came into the shop on my very first day there, and took my business card.

To top this all off, last Monday, Mark and I went to look for The Seven Secrets Of Synchronicity  at a large book store in the city. They didn’t have it yet, but I felt drawn to stand near the New Age section and just get a vibe for another book to read. I was immediately pulled to the very bottom shelf, and in particular to a  new book called ‘Never Alone’. I had been feeling very alone, as I am so often misunderstood, and was  feeling very inward anyway, what with all this stuff going on. The book was written by an Australian medium of note Debbie Malone, who just happened to be a medium helping police find missing people. The first three chapters were about the perpetrator I had been shown. OMG!!!

To make it worse, he wasn’t acting alone, and he was invoved in Satanic rituals which involved the torture of animals and humans. He was also tuning in to the medium and somehow they found out where she lived and they attempted to harm her as well. Along with all that, there were facts about the case that my spirit girl had given me two weeks earlier, suggesting that she was taken by these monsters. 

A few days later while researching on the net,I found out that one of the main suspects was a police officer who blew his own head off during the investigation. One of the victim’s leather jacket was found at his house. He was the head honcho as reported by the medium, but the AFP wouldn’t look into her claims at the time of the investigation.  The article on the net that I found this week, cited his invovement and the police coverup in 1993, was written by a guy who was also subsequently murdered.

To say I am spooked is an understatement.

The ‘coincidences’ are quite staggering to me, but still I can’t do anything about the information I have received so far as:

1. I don’t want to hurt her parents unecessarily if I have my wires crossed…………It is their child after all.

2. I don’t know how to approach the police.

3. I am waiting for the spirit to bring her mother to me, if it is indeed her (the missing girl) that I am talking to. I arranged for two signs from the missing girl, one came the very next day, one is yet to happen.

4. I am scared witless.

5. What if I am wrong?? The implications of this are enormous to the people I have involved so far.

6. What if I am right?? The implications of this are enormous to everyone. 



I have been in ‘lock down’ since this started happening, as I wanted to be as centered as possible, in order to receive her communications. I needed to make sure  that I wasn’t hallucinating. I felt also that all other regular activities were very trivial compared to the enormity of this situation.

I cannot explain the amount of synchronicity that I live with, it is truly remarkable. STILL, I can’t quite grasp that I may be onto something here. There  has only been one more message from the missing girl, and that was to tell me that Mark was about to come home with a bunch of flowers. In less than 5 minutes,  he was home with a bunch of apricot and cream carnations. 

 He hadn’t bought me flowers for months.

Mark and I went for a drive to the area that I think she is in, and the emotions were all over the place. We are going back later this week when we can get a babysitter. It is rugged terrain. I am doing this for her mother, the poor lady is repeatedly in the newspapers still pleading for someone to come forward. She is a tortured woman. I have been told by two other mediums that I will find her, I hope I do.

I am now waiting for her to send her mother to me for a reading, I can do nothing more until that happens. Wish me luck and lots of light, I am gonna need it.

Stay tuned for part 2. 
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To hear the lyrics of Mr. Mysterious, click below.

Posted in missing girl, natalie, spirit contact | 14 Comments

The Medium

Posted on June 29, 2010 by Trish and Rob

Jung placed psychic phenomena under the larger umbrella of synchronicity. Of the many types of psi that exist, mediumship is perhaps one of the most mysterious.

Author Jane Roberts channeled Seth, who described himself as a “personality essence no longer focused in physical existence.” Author Esther Hicks channels a consortium of souls known as Abraham. The TV show The Medium popularized the concept, but we don’t need Patricia Arquette for this story. It comes from Connie Cannon, who we wrote about in Planetary Empaths.
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I’ve been doing clairvoyant readings all my life, and am now elderly.  A middle-aged client from Germany, whom I shall call Jan, made an appointment to see me.  I need to clarify that I do not allow my clients to give me any information whatsoever prior to the reading.  Only their first name.  The source of the information that comes through me is disembodied entities….I am a medium.  It is a rule of mine to never, ever give death predictions, under any circumstances.  I am, however, a voice for spirit,  and have learned to trust their judgment.

On the day of her appointment, after I moved into an altered state, my other worldly helpers told me to tell Jan that she was coming to the light at the end of a very long, hard tunnel, and that from that point her life would improve beyond her wildest imagination.  They went on to tell me that her husband, (whom I learned later was middle-aged and healthy), would sustain a massive stroke in late May, be placed in a full-care nursing home,and that by the end of June he would make his transition to the other side.

They went on to say that her burdens would be lifted afterwards.  I silently argued with my helpers, because it was a prediction of death.  But they instructed me clearly, “TELL HER NOW!”  So, I told her exactly what they had said.  And, we taped the session.

That night, Jan phoned me.  She told me that she was locked into a horrific marriage with a brutal husband from which there was no escape, and that she had purchased a gun and had planned to take herself out that very afternoon.  But after her session with me, she felt as if she had reason to go on, and she disposed of the gun..  This was, by the way, in April.  I heard no more from Jan until the first week in July.

She came by my house that week and told me that her husband John had sustained a massive, debilitating stroke in May; he had been placed in a local full-care nursing home, and at 11:15pm on June 30th, he had expired.  45 minutes prior to the end of June.  I have all of this documented.

In this instance, a revelation of the husband’s departure was obviously deemed necessary, to prevent Jan from ending her own life.  She had had all she was able to tolerate, evidently.  Spirit knew that, but I did not.  I hear from her occasionally.  She owns a small German restaurant, lives in a wonderful retirement community, and has a genuinely happy life.

Posted in clairvoyance, mmediumship | 15 Comments

The Geography of Resilience

Posted on June 27, 2010 by Trish and Rob

Travel, whether it’s far flung or local, is usually a fertile environment for synchronicity.  Sometimes the synchros are obvious. But other times you have to dig beneath the surface and view your environment with a new perspective, new eyes. It’s like microscopic vision. A flash of color seizes your attention or a blur of movement explodes in your peripheral vision. To catch the significance, you have to adjust your perspective.

This photo is of a desert rose. It was in a potted plant on the porch of the cottage in Aruba where we stayed. Although it was outside, it wasn’t in a spot where rain might reach it.  On the day we arrived, it wasn’t blooming. It seemed to be held back, in escrow, waiting for the right time, the right moment, waiting for…well,water. So I watered it. Daily. Every morning, I poured a mug of water into the pot and then went around to the other plants on the porch and in the yard, hoping the water would salvage the little shoots, the promises of color and life.

On our third day, a bloom on the desert rose finally opened. The opening seemed to emit a signal – an iguana and a luminous blue desert lizard dropped by for a visit.I felt a kind of silly glee about it and called Rob, Megan, and Avery over for a look. “It’s blooming,” I exclaimed.

At that point, I  was trying to figure out certain elements in my novel, the kind of brainstorming you do in the privacy of your own head. If I do XYZ, then A will happen. In other words, I was looking at plot details. That night I took the color of the desert rose into sleep, into my dreams. I dreamed of rose-colored rivers, rose-colored mountains, rose-colored deserts.

The next morning, while shopping at Ting Wei grocery store, I noticed this color everywhere – in the bins of frozen fish,in the tints of the wines, in the colors of shampoos. When I returned to the cottage, I was struck by the color of the hammock on our cottage porch, so like the color of the desert rose.

 I think this was the point where I realized that my plot was fine. What I needed was more local color for the Aruba scenes, more of what made the island unique and perfect for my characters.

Is it a synchro? Absolutely. What began with the blooming of a desert rose resulted in a creative realization of what was lacking in my novel.

Posted in aruba, creativity, resilience, travel | 10 Comments

Good Lord!

Posted on June 27, 2010 by Trish and Rob

Rob is teaching a six-week meditation course that began June 21. His background in meditation is through yoga and a bit of Zen practice. He wasn’t very familiar with Christian concepts of meditation, except for discouraging comments about Eastern meditation practices from conservative Christians. Since most of his students are Christian, at least in heritage, he decided to Google the term–Christian meditation– to see what would come up. The first site he clicked is called, The World Community for Christian Meditation.
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The above illustration is featured at the top of the site and it immediately caught my attention. Below it are the words: The Shape of God’s Affection. To the right, are the words: Meditation with Children.

Ah…does anyone else find this scenario a bit strange? The illustration appears to show a youth supplicating before a priest, bishop, or cardinal. To me, the inferences are obvious. Maybe this drawing makes the monks all warm and fuzzy, but considering the widespread sexual abuse of children in the church, it seems over the top. I mean, what are we meditating on here?

Now consider the actual text below the illustration.

“Offering a refresher course in Basic Christianity James Alison will remind us what the Good News about God really is. He will help us re-imagine the uniqueness of Christ and explore how the Spirit overcomes moralism and makes room for a more loving church. He points to new ways through the divisions and conflicts in ethical, sexual and social issues which can so distort Christian living.”

Maybe I’m being prudish, but none of the above made me any wiser about Christian meditation.

So I continued my search and actually found a few sites with substance on the topic. I’ve concluded that Christian meditation is about focusing on a subject or scene, preferably from the Bible and thinking about it or visualizing it. In that sense, it’s the opposite of Eastern meditation which emphasizes quieting the mind, releasing the thoughts, and turn inward. I gathered from some comments on Christian meditation sites that there’s a fear of the mystical in these practices, or what might happen if we quiet our minds. Here’s an example:

“If the Bible is sufficient to thoroughly equip us for every good work, how could we think we need to seek a mystical experience instead of or in addition to it?” That is from a site called: “What is Christian meditation?”

I eventually found a Catholic site which gave instructions for the  ‘active mind’ method of meditation. It’s not so different from what Carl Jung called ‘active imagination,’ a form of meditation similar to visualization practices.

However, when it comes to Christian meditation, I’ve decided I prefer to blank my mind…or that image above might creep into it.

Posted in christianity, yoga | 16 Comments

Synchronicity and the G20 Summit

Posted on June 26, 2010 by Trish and Rob

Synchronicities often surround global events. We’ve posted several synchronicities related to global events. Here’s one of the most interesting. So let’s see what’s going on with the G20 summit in Ontario this weekend.

Two days ago, Ontario experienced a rare earthquake – 5.0 – that was felt as far south as Pennsylvania. There was also a tornado in the town of Midland, which devastated a trailer park and left 8,000 people without power. Midland is about a hundred miles from Toronto, where the summit is being held. So, these two events could be addressing the context of this summit.

The G20 and G8 summits, held in two separate locations, are where the world’s leaders, finances ministers, and central bank ministers come together to discuss how the world is run, who runs it, who buys and sells it, and, well, all the rest of that. Canada is footing the huge bill for this, estimated to cost around $893 million in just security.

When you add in another $500 million in Canadian dollars for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, $2 million Canadian for a marketing and meeting pavillion, it’s no wonder that some in the Canadian media refer to the summit as “a billion dollars waste of time” (national weekly MacLeans). Columnist James Travers, writing in The Toronto Star, the country’s largest newspaper, was even less kind: “There’s a nagging sense police, public servants and politicians are wallowing in a bottomless trough they figure Canadians will constantly replenish.”

So perhaps these leaders and finances ministers should pay closer attention to the synchronicities that precede this summit – the earth rocking and rolling, a tornado…even Reuters noticed the coincidences and asked, “Might a plague of frogs be next?”

Interestingly enough, as I was writing this post, a Google alert showed up in our inbox about the synchronicity of these events. It’s from the examiner.com , located in our area, and the author notes, “People have been gathering for many years to protest the secret plans of our world leaders. It seems Earth may be joining that protest now.” He ends his piece on a humorous note (that may not prove to be so humorous in the end): “Take a hint, guys, or Gaia will getcha!”

Not only Gaia, but the cosmos are also aligned against the G20, since they chose this particular date to kick off the summit. Astrologically, today, June 26, is not the best day for such an event. A fairly rare astrological aspect, a cardinal cross, creates all kinds of stress and tension among people, within the earth, and in weather phenomena. Read about that here.

Stay tuned.

Posted in earthquake, G20 summit, global, tornado | 51 Comments

The Sparrow Hawks of Aruba

Posted on June 25, 2010 by Trish and Rob

Aruba’s desert is a desolate place, filled with all the stuff you expect to find in deserts – cactuses, arid land, mysterious culverts that hold water, plants that have adapted to the lack of water, and critters that call the desert home.

One evening, we were sitting on the cottage porch reading when, suddenly, in my peripheral vision, I saw what looked like a small hawk hovering just above the fence of the house next door. But it looked too small to be a hawk and by the time I stood for a closer look, it had flown off and alighted on a cactus on the other side of the road.

The next day, we drove to some of the tourist spots – a donkey rescue farm, a place called Casibari where gigantic stones (origin unknown) create a mysterious park, and an ostrich farm. The farm has 28 ostriches that are like pets for the people who own the place. They supposedly aren’t killed for their meat or oil, but are primarily a tourist attraction. While we were sitting there, a young woman held a bird on her arm. It was a sparrow hawk, chewing away at a piece of ostrich meat.I realized this was the species of bird I had seen that night on the porch.

Megan asked if she could hold it and the bird climbed onto her hand, the bit of meat still in its claws. Rob and I both petted it and the sparrow hawk didn’t flinch or try to bite us.

“Is it a pet?” I asked.

“No, not really,” the young woman said. “It just likes people.” She flashed a quick smile. “And it likes the meat.”

After awhile, the sparrow hawk flew off. It obviously wasn’t a pet in the traditional sense. But the young woman said it would return at dusk, for another piece of meat.  What I found curious about this encounter is that the sparrow hawk reflects the people of Aruba.

In esoteric terms, the hawk symbolizes the search for a higher truth and broader perspective, the sparrow is about creativity. Starting in 1953, the island began to sculpt its image as a tourist destination. It capitalized on its strengths – fantastic beaches, the intriguing desert geography, and its location in the Caribbean, a spot outside the hurricane belt. Over the years, the idea of Aruba as “one happy island” took root in the collective consciousness of its people. As one local gentleman put it, “The island is too small to hold grudges.”

Aruba covers 70 square miles, is about 20 miles long and and six miles wide. Four languages are taught in schools – Dutch, English, Spanish, and a local dialect, Papiamento. But Chinese is also spoken here. Most of the supermarkets are owned and run by the Chinese.

There are luxury resorts – the Marriot, the Hyatt – but there are also smaller, family-owned places like the Boardwalk and the North Shore Cottage where we stayed. These places cater to windsurfers, kite boarders, sun worshippers, and tourists seeking respite, fun, and the silence that only deserts and exquisite beaches can provide. Here, you can parasail, skydive, go tubing, horseback ride through the desert and along the beaches. Or you can float in the swimming pool of one of the luxury hotels and sip Margaritas until dawn. You name the activity, someone will provide it.

The people of Aruba are as adaptable and independent as that sparrow hawk that perched on Megan’s hand, allowed us to pet it, photograph it, and then flew off into the afternoon light, following the lure of the wild, its bit of meat still clutched in its claws.
– Trish

This post is a bit lighter than the oil one. Yet, one darker note: The people of Aruba are also worried about the oil spill, hoping it doesn’t come their way. So far they are well out of the range of the spill.
– Rob

Posted in aruba, birds as messengers, hawks, travel | 11 Comments

Days 65-66

Posted on June 24, 2010 by Trish and Rob

Day 65 of the oil gusher in the gulf doesn’t look much better than day 64. Or day 58, 57, 56, 55. In fact, every day the disaster continues looks worse than the day before it. Last night on Countdown, there was a discussion about the worst case scenario – that the gusher can’t be stopped. I wondered what my dad would think of this.

He spent nearly 30 years working for Exxon in Venezuela. He went there in 1937, on the heels of the depression in the U.S., a young man hungry for adventure, the touch of the exotic, and a steady paycheck. He wasn’t an engineer, wasn’t one of the oil rig guys. He was an accountant, a numbers man.

His first assignment was in Carapito, on the shores of Lake Maracaibo, one of 17 ancient lakes on the planet, created more than 36 million years ago. It’s rich in oil,  now filled with wells and rigs. In those days, the Rockefellers were just beginning to tap into the wealth of oil in that lake. My dad lived in an oil camp, a kind of makeshift village where the gringos were housed. He was single in those days and the women he dated were nurses, teachers, women imported from the U.S. and other countries.
 

My dad knew the score. From the start, he realized that the U.S. was exploiting Venezuelas’s resources.But he, like the fishermen and shrimpers now cleaning up the gulf coast, needed the work. The alternative was bread lines in the States. There are points in every life where ideology simply can’t trump necessity.

He returned to the U.S. when war broke out and enlisted. He traveled to India and at some point in a furlough, returned to Tulsa, Oklahoma and met my mother on a blind date. Within six months, they were married, and within a year, he took her to Venezuela, where they lived until 1963.

My sister and I were both born and raised in Venezuela.  We were oil brats. We lived in Maracaibo and in Caracas. This photo is of Caracas  – 3,000 feet above sea level.

 As Exxon’s profits escalated during those years, we flourished. We weren’t rich by any stretch of the imagination, but we weren’t hungry, either. We loved Venezuela – its eccentricities, its mountains and valleys, its dramatic beauty. In the U.S, there are snow days and hurricane days, but in Venezuela, we had revolution days, when the political situation was so unstable that there were runs on grocery stores, gas stations, when everything shut down.

After ninth grade, I went away to boarding school in the states.  There weren’t any good alternatives for high school in Caracas, so Exxon paid for it. I was15. The culture shock was considerable. I was Heinlein’s stranger in a strange land. I hated it, hated the Massachusetts winter, the restrictions, the way the school tried to shove religion down your throat. I begged my parents to let me return to Caracas to go to school. But in my junior year, the Venezuelan government nationalized the oil industry and my father took early retirement from Exxon and he and my mother moved to Boca Raton, Florida. He was younger than I am now. In those days, Boca consisted of maybe three stop lights.Today, it’s a traffic jam.

In later years, my dad became a memeber of Mensa, the high IQ society. It’s not like he was an active member. He just liked  knowing that he, a guy with a high school education, qualified. He often reflected on his three decades in Venezuela as the best he had lived – psychologically, emotionally, spiritually. He regretted certain decisions he’d made, applauded others. But he knew the bottom line was larger than him or his life and that eventually our dependence on oil would suffocate us. He was a Republican, and yet at the end of his life he grew disgusted with politics. He knew the struggle went well beyond how you voted and who was in office.

“It’s always the same,” he said. “We pillage a country that’s rich in natural resources, we cut corners, we create disasters – and then wonder how the hell it happened.”

He might have been describing the present debacle in the gulf.
– Trish

Posted in childhood, oil spill, Venezuela | 39 Comments

SHORT SYNCHROS

Posted on June 23, 2010 by Trish and Rob

Here are several short synchronicities that serendipitously came together about the same time. We’ll start with a couple related to the number 11. 
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There are days when even the synchronicities seem to be working against you, it seems, possibly nudging you to become aware of certain patterns in your life. That was the case for Natalie when the number 11 kept coming up, seizing her attention.

“I have some not so good ones from yesterday….Our car got a flat at 1:11 yesterday afternoon, our daughter vomited all through her bed at 11:11pm, and then my washing machine flooded the laundry at 1:11am. Sheesh!”

It’s up to Natalie to decide what pattern in her life attracted those experiences. Or maybe it was just the trickster, tweaking her awareness in trickster fashion!But, given what has come up recently for Natalie (subsequent posts) the 11 may have been telling her that her psychic work was about to take new, unprecedented directions.,
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As we’ve written before, Jung considered numbers to be archetypes and when we experience a cluster of a particular number, that archetype has been activated in our psyche. Mike Perry has heard all about the 11 phenomenon, but until recently it never part of his own life. 

“I’ve never had clusters of 11’s in my life until this morning. I got on the scales and found my weight was (in UK measurements) 11 stone 11 lbs. This showed on the scales as 11:11. Haven’t been this weight for years, so was a surprise. Later that morning my wife was in the garden and asked me what the time was, and it was 11:11.”

BTW, 11 stones, 11 pounds converts to 165 pounds. Numerologically, that translates to 111, by adding the 6+5. Or, 11+1. So either system, Mike still gets 11’s in the tablulation. For Mike, the experience seems to be a matter of awareness. Now he’ll probably notice more and more such clusters.

Could all the 11 synchronicities being reported somehow relate to the idea that we are in the ‘eleventh hour’ as the Hopi elders said in their message a few years ago?
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Moving on, here’s one from Jane Clifford of Wales about a travel trailer, or caravan, as they’re called in G.B

“In summer I like to have a small caravan as a spare bedroom. I had my eye on one that I could see from my house for a year, but it was not for sale. If it had been, it would have been beyond my budget until, that is, a little water got in one window over the winter. So it needed a little attention, and went on the market. Now it is mine and at a bargain price! I was as happy as a kid with a new playhouse! Yesterday, a friend passed on a novel, and the first page was about a family excited with their caravan!

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Jane happened upon an old magazine and found a couple other short ones–the first is surprising, the second astonishing. .

Mrs Williard Lovell of Berkely, California had locked herself out of her house and was trying to get in for 10 mins when the postman delivered a letter from her brother containing the spare key he had gone off with the previous week. (Talk about timing!)

Charles Coglan, a Shakespearian actor, dropped dead on stage in Calveston, Texas while playing Hamlet in 1898. Since his home on Prince Edward Island was 3,500 miles away, he was put in a vault in a Galveston cemetery by the sea. Soon after a hurricane hit, flooded the cemetry, and his coffin floated away. Eight years later, some fisherman on Prince Edward Island spotted a battered box floating near the shore. Coghlans body had come home and he was re buried for a second time near the church where he had been christened!  

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Finally, here’s one that happened to Rob on the evening that we returned home from our trip to Aruba.

“While unpacking, I happened to pick up a copy of Yoga Journal from a stack of magazines in my office. I glanced at the cover and focused on the title of an article. It was called: 9 Poses to Ground You after Traveling.

“Synchronicity.  I was still feeling somewhat ‘up in the air,’ so I decided to read it. The author, Ross Rayburn, explained that his teacher, John Friend, believes that ‘travel results in decreased apana vayu, the downward-moving, or rooting, energy of prana.’  So Rayburn designed a sequence of poses to root your energy down in order to help you feel physically strong, mentally clear, and energetically balanced after returning from a trip.

“I tried it, and it helped!”
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That one’s a good example of how we can attract the energy that we need when we need it. It’s about being in alignment, being in the right place at the right time. That’s the essence of synchronicity.

Posted in 11, local travel, short synchros, yoga | 14 Comments

Paradigm Shift?

Posted on June 22, 2010 by Trish and Rob

 I’m not sure  where Jung would put paradigm shifts. He experienced several during his lifetime, wrote about them,  and the shifts he lived through certainly influenced his search and his writings. But are paradigm shifts strictly cause and effect? If they are mass events, there are invariably synchronicities associated with them even if they aren’t immediately apparent. We’ve posted several of them.

 As we enter day 63 of the oil spill, it appears that the repercussions of this catastrophe could be triggering a paradigm shift about a world energy based in fossil fuels. It may not be huge shift yet, it may not be at its tipping point, but there seems to be progress. According to the article here, Britain has tightened its oil rig inspections. Bulgaria dumped plans for a new oil pipeline that would have carried Russian oil to Greece.  China is upgrading its blowout preventer system. Canada is tightening oversight of its deepest oil drilling ever,
off the coast of Newfoundland.

Despite muted responses from countries in the Mideast, the most important sentence in the entire article linked above may be this one: “The Gulf catastrophe also has sparked a debate over the practice of deepwater drilling itself – with some viewing the spill as reason to ban it altogether.”

Interestingly enough, we ran across another article about research being done by a Cambridge professor, Nicholas Boyle, that points to 2014 as a doomsday moment that will “determine whether the 21st century is full of violence and poverty or will be peaceful and prosperous. In the last  500 years there has been a cataclysmic ‘Great Event’ of international significance at the start of each century. Occurring in the middle of the second decade of each century, they include events which sparked wars, religious conflict and brought peace.” The past dates?  These are intriguing:

1517: Martin Luther and the rise of Protestanism and church reformation

1618: start of 30 years war and  decades of conflict in Europe

1715:  establishment of the Hanoverians, who ruled Britain, Ireland, and Hanover
 (in Germany).

1815: after the defeat of Napolean, the Congress of Vienna occurred and ushered in
 a period of relative stability in Europe.

1914: WWI breaks out

Boyle sees the economic collapse that began in 2007 as the trigger for this doomsday moment. “Big economic changes lead to big political changes and we have not seen them yet.’My thesis is that we have got another crisis to come, and you can already see that in the questions being raised over the debts of nations rather than private credit debts.”

He believes  that because of the colossal power of the U.S. military, America is key to which direction events may turn. “Everything, in the end, may depend on whether America can react more imaginatively to that decline than Britain was able to do in the years before 1914. The only conceivably peaceful route to that goal
is through a continuation of the pax Americana. “But both the world’s understanding of America, and America’s understanding of itself, will have to change fundamentally for that goal to be achieved.”
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The questions I have about Boyle’s research are about other obvious turning points in history: WWII, Vietnam, Iraq. Yet, there does seem to be a glimmer of hope in terms of a paradigm shift and oil. But after I read this Naomi Klein article here,  I’m wondering if the shift is just in its infancy.

Here’s a bit of the Klein article that intrigues:

“In the late 90s, an isolated indigenous group in Colombia captured world headlines with an almost Avatar-esque conflict. From their remote home in the Andean cloud forests, the U’wa let it be known that if Occidental Petroleum carried out plans to drill for oil on their territory, they would commit mass ritual suicide by jumping off a cliff. Their elders explained that oil is part of ruiria, “the blood of Mother Earth”. They believe that all life, including their own, flows from ruiria, so pulling out the oil would bring on their destruction. (Oxy eventually withdrew from the region, saying there wasn’t as much oil as it had previously thought.)

“Virtually all indigenous cultures have myths about gods and spirits living in the natural world – in rocks, mountains, glaciers, forests – as did European culture before the scientific revolution. Katja Neves, an anthropologist at Concordia University, points out that the practice serves a practical purpose. Calling the Earth “sacred” is another way of expressing humility in the face of forces we do not fully comprehend. When something is sacred, it demands that we proceed with caution. Even awe.”

Posted in oil spill, paradigms | 32 Comments

The Festival of Solstice

Posted on June 22, 2010 by Trish and Rob

Posted in Uncategorized | 11 Comments