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NASA photo of Mercury in retrograde

Three times a year, the planet Mercury turns retrograde – that is, it appears to slow down, then stops, then seems to move backward. In astrology, Mercury is the planet that rules communication, travel, moving parts, learning, siblings, your neighborhood and neighbors, education, and contracts.

During a retro period, communications often go awry. If you’re traveling, your itinerary can change without warning. Appliances break down, your computer acts up, your phone goes down, your iPad crashes, your car goes on the fritz. It’s usually a time of delays and not particularly favorable for launching new projects, making manuscript submissions, signing contracts. To mitigate some of the effects, I advise people to follow the rule of three Rs: revise, review, reconsider.

During the last retro in late January/early February, we had to buy a new dishwasher and then had to hire someone to install it because the laminate flooring we’d had put down in our kitchen was too high to remove the old dishwasher. The repairman was great knew what he was doing and the new dishwasher works perfectly. But the preliminaries were annoying.

The current retro started on May 19, with Mercury in Gemini, my sign, and ends on June 11 – not soon enough for me! During this period I should have followed the advice I usually give to other people. A couple of days before the retro began, two things happened. While updating one of our websites, I made a mistake that couldn’t be corrected and we had to change the URL for our blog. The second thing was that our washing machine stopped working. After Googling around for possible reasons, I hoped it would be something simple and called a repair service.

It wasn’t simple.

As the repairman explained, most washers these days come with computer motherboards and when the motherboards go out, that’s it for the washer. So Rob went online and ordered a new machine from Home Depot that would be delivered in a few days – during the retro period. When I saw the confirmation email, I realized he had ordered a dryer – not a washer – and he had to cancel the order and order again. Now the delivery date had been moved ahead by nearly a week. First big snafu and, oh shudder, no washing machine for nearly a week. I ended up doing a wash at our neighbor’s house.

The washer was installed without any issues over the long Memorial Day weekend. Fantastic, I thought. That was the big snafu for this retro. WRONG. Today I discovered that Time Passages, an astrology program I have on my iPad and iPhone, is available now for iMacs. It’s a wonderful program and I was excited that there was something, finally, available for the iMac operating system.

I tried downloading the demo to make sure it worked on my computer. It didn’t. I emailed support and a few hours later received an email with a link about which demo to download for my operating system. I replied to the support person that I wanted to buy the advanced version of the software but – jokingly- remarked that I should probably wait until after Mercury turns direct. But impatient Gemini that I am, I couldn’t wait for another ten days and purchased the advanced version tonight. I was looking forward to entering a bunch of charts in my new software program.

I received an email confirmation of the purchase, with the enabling codes that would unlock the full features of the version I had bought. But the enabling code didn’t work. I downloaded this sucker half a dozen times, kept cutting and pasting the enabling code from my confirmation email, and it still doesn’t work.

The message? Chill. Slow down. BREATHE. At some point, someone will get back to me and the problem will be fixed. And if it isn’t, I’ll cancel the credit card payment and look elsewhere.

But my Mercury retro snafus pale compared to another retro story I heard today. The son of a friend of ours is a successful videographer who owns some expensive equipment essential for his job. The producer of a video he’s working on now wanted to save money so instead of renting an equipment van, he combined the equipment with the food van.

A large cooler filled with ice was placed on top of his $60,000 camera, the ice melted and the water seeped into the camera, ruining it. Fortunately, the young man insured the camera. But in the years since he bought it, the price has risen to $80,000 and he isn’t sure if the insurance will cover the new full price.

His take? “Mom, I now believe in Mercury retrogrades.”

Even though I believe we write our own destinies, that we create our own realities, there’s no doubt that we are influenced by what the planets are doing. Ask any ER nurse about what happens in a hospital emergency room during a full moon.

Rob and I just finished a proposal called Precogs: The Dynamics of Future-Telling, something we actually started four years ago – okay under a Merc retro to revisit stuff from the past   – but we won’t be submitting it to our agent until after June 11.

In Florida, there are lottery draws every Wednesday and Saturday evenings. You can play the regular Lotto – for just a buck – or you can play the Powerball, for two bucks. Wednesday  afternoon, I decided to go big time and bought a Powerball ticket. The jackpot was $154 million.

In Powerball, there are nine different ways to win – at least, according to the website. I came in the door calling out the numbers for Rob. He glanced up from whatever he was doing and said, “What’s the Powerball number?”

“Twenty-three.” I immediately thought of the posts we’d done on that number and recalled that Hexagram 23 in the I Ching is called Splitting Apart.

Rob said, “Oh, good number. What do you win if you get just the Powerball number?”

“Uh, four bucks.” I wondered why he’d asked about just that number.

Around 11:30 Wednesday night, I checked the Powerball website. And yes, you guessed it. The only number on our ticket out of the six was the Powerball number – 23! So, even though we didn’t win $154 million or even a million for getting 5 numbers, I got back the two bucks I’d spent on the ticket plus another $2 and we experienced a straightforward precognition.

A fascinating book that delves deeply into synchronicity is Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, by Richard Tarnas, a philosopher and cultural historian, who has broken away from the mainstream academic world that typically denigrates synchronicity, astrology and divination systems. It took Tarnas ten years to write this 500+ page tome and it’s well worth exploring.

Blurbs on book covers are always favorable, of course, but these are still impressive: “Majestic, sweeping and profound This will be a book for the ages.” – WilliamVan Dusen Wishard…“Cosmos and Psyche is an epoch-making work.” Stanislav Grof….“This is the closest my head has been to exploding while reading a book. – Mary Hynes

What prompted me to write about the book is Tarnas’ comments about the shadow side of synchronicity. Most of us who are fascinated by meaningful coincidences, of course, consider synchronicity in a positive vein—guidance on our path. Tarnas agrees with that assessment, but points out some of the pitfalls. He explains a tendency to overstate the significance of synchronicities. We’ve probably all scratched our heads upon hearing some stories that others attribute great meaning when we just don’t see it. Maybe some of our own stories strike a similar accord with others.

It’s a difficult subject to tackle for a writer, because it’s easy to come off as an arrogant know-it-all. But Tarnas explains the issue well without sounding pompous or self-centered, which ironically is at the heart of the matter. He calls the shadow side of synchronicity, “an exaggeration of the trivial to discover a self-inflating meaning.” Then he moves even darker into the shadow. “Another form this shadow can take is the paranoid’s morbidly narrow interpretation of coincidences in terms of other people’s malign plots cunningly directed at the self, or psychotic delusions of self-reference.”

Yikes! That’s all about the egocentric universe, where in our world is all that counts. But Tarnas has a remedy: “A painstaking cultivation of self-knowledge must be undertaken to avoid succumbing to mere projection….A capacity for acute yet balanced discernment has to be forged, founded not only on an alertness to meaningful pattern but also on a disciplined mindfulness of the large whole within which the individual self seeks orientation.”

Tarnas might sound a bit like a skeptic about meaningful coincidence, but he’s not. “Eventually, there may occur one or more especially powerful synchronicities, unambiguous in their coincidental force and precision of patterning, that have a revelatory effect on the individual and mark a decisive threshold in his or her psychological and spiritual development.”

He adds: “Not infrequently, synchronicities of this category occur in association with births, deaths, crises, and other major turning points in life. On occasion, there may take place a sudden convergence of many such synchronicities, intricately interconnected.”

I think what Tarnas is saying to us about synchronicity—to dumb it down and I’m pretty good at dumbing down—is that you are special, you are unique…just like everyone else.

This post was published during the first month of our blog’s existence. It illustrates how synchros can happen anywhere, at any time. This one occurred in Rob’s yoga class.

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Saturday I was the fulcrum for a synchronicity between two women in my yoga class. Just before class began, I asked one of them, a snowbird, when she was heading north. She said she was delaying her return because it was snowing in northern Maine and she mentioned that she lived in a small town on the border called Houlton. At the mention of the town, the woman next to her said that was where she lived. They talked briefly and found out they had friends in common, not surprising since it was a small town.

But, hey, what were the chances that those two women, who didn’t know each other, would come to a yoga class thousands of miles from where they lived,  find places next to each other, and discover they were from the same town in Maine? What were the chances that I would start a conversation that would result in the name of the town coming up?

What was really astonishing to me, though, was that the two women didn’t seem very surprised. They quickly accepted the unlikely scenario without even commenting on the oddity. I’ve taught that class for seven years and never met anyone from my original hometown, Minneapolis, or even from Minnesota.

The point here is that synchronicities happen all the time and they’re often shrugged off as nothing unusual, nothing special. It’s when we recognize how special they are that we open up to insight on our existence here and how meaningful this existence really is.

I received this interesting email today from Nancy Atkinson, a fellow blogger whom we  met six years ago when our families happened to be traveling in Oregon at the same time. It certainly addresses how synchronicity can speak to us through the body electric!

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I have a new synchronicity for you:

A few months ago my daughter called and said she had a conference in Disney World and would we like to join her there to take our grandson around Disney and Universal Studios while she worked? We readily agreed as it had been on my bucket list to take him sometime after he turned eight. He is only seven and a half, but we felt that was close enough as his mother already had a room, airfare for herself, etc. In other words, it was a good time as part of the trip was already paid.

So I made a pact with myself to walk and swim at least five times a week for the next two months to be in good shape for all the walking we would be doing for three days. (I was coming from a good place – lots of beach walking and swimming three to four days a week.) Well, to make a long story short, I didn’t do a thing! We arrived back home at Lake Tahoe and after living at sea level for six months, I struggled to adjust to the altitude of 6500 feet. (A doctor later told me it takes two months.) So that accounted for at least several weeks of not wanting to work out, but then the weather changed and was warmer and the excuses began to fade. We then started a low-carb diet and that took a week or so to adjust, or so I told myself.

So bottom line – I didn’t do a darn thing to prepare for Disney for two months and the day was arriving fast.

My clothes were lying on the bed ready to go into the suitcase, all the necessary fast-passes arranged at Disney, and a host of very expensive tickets purchased. Two days before we were to leave my back began to spasm! And when I say spasm – it was unlike anything I have ever experienced! Off to the ER the day before we left – with me taking little old person steps into the building. Nothing to do – cold compresses, pain meds, don’t do anything that hurts, was his only recommendation. You mean like riding Splash Mountain? Sitting on a plane for 7 or so hours? Rushing to catch a close connection in Phoenix, a notoriously large airport?

Needless to say, the suitcase left without my clothes or me. My husband met our grandson in Orlando for three days of fun and sun. They walked 12 miles the first day, 10 miles the second day, and on the third they lost count. I would have slowed them down without the “training”, in all probability, but without it I would have been exhausted.

On the day my husband returned, my back was back to almost normal. A day after that it was perfect. This from being flat on my back in bed the whole time he was gone.

The Universe was letting me know if I wanted to be able to keep up and have fun at the ripe old age of 61 – I’d better quit with the excuses and exercise every day. As soon as I said I’d learned my lesson – no more excuses – my back was fine. I missed the trip, but I learned a valuable lesson. There are no coincidences, only subtle and not so subtle nudges.

I’m not sure when I met Ray Getzinger. But at some point in the years we’ve had our blog, he wrote and said he’d read everything I’d written since I published my first novel, In Shadow, in 1985.   That’s a lot of books and I’m grateful he has made his way through the reading list!

Over the years, we have become virtual friends and recently, Ray emailed me that his wife of many years, Millie, had recently suffered a stroke and was going into a rehab facility once she left the hospital. This was around the same time that I’d started Pam Grout’s book, E-Cubed, and had been doing some of the pay it forward experiments with $1 bills. I told Ray I would leave some bills scattered around town in the next few days that would be specifically for Millie’s rapid recuperation and full recovery.

My first bill for Millie was left on a restroom door in a pubic park. Rob was playing Frisbee Golf and Noah, our dog, and I, were accompanying him around the course. The second bill was left in a restroom in a local Mexican restaurant where Rob and I met some friends for dinner the other night.

After I left the first bill, Ray wrote:

Now I know Millie is going to get better. 

She was transferred to the rehab center closest to home. It is less than two miles away. I was called saying she was there before she even got to her room. She was still being wheeled to her bed.

We both have My Chart that gives lab and X-ray results 48 hours after the test. I have been checking since she was admitted. Up to two days ago everything kept getting better. I didn’t know she was leaving the hospital until I got a call late this afternoon.

I wrote Ray that a friend had sent me some Yankee candles and that I had lit one for Millie. The one that is burning is called crackling peach mango! Beautiful scent.

He replied: Interesting. Her favorite food is peach yogurt and she loves Yankee candles. Maybe that’s part of the way it works.

After I left the second bill in the Mexican restaurant, he wrote: Millie was awake more today than any day since being in the hospital. One of her favorite games is Sudoku. I got her a new book and she is working on the puzzles. One thing though, she was reading the “First” magazine I brought. She pulled the subscription card out and said she sure would like to read the magazine. I told her she was and she acted surprised. She will be carrying on a perfectly normal conversation and come up with something like that. She is making progress. Her speech doesn’t seem to be affected, only her thought patterns since the first couple of days. 

She has been out of breath when just going to the bathroom for years. She tried to get her doctor to order supplemental O2. Now at least she is getting the oxygen she needs. I hope there is now proof enough for insurance to pay for it when she comes home. 

On my end, a couple of great things have occurred:

I finally finished my revisions to my new novel and it went off to my agent

I got a lead for a new health app from the people we had dinner with at the Mexican restaurant and passed it on to my sister, a nurse in the elder care field who is looking to expand her venue. She is excited about the app and plans to present it to a friend who is also in the same field, and hopes it translates into a new job for her.

I received an email from a friend who gifted me a psychic reading with a woman in New Orleans who was remarkable in detecting patterns in my life. It was exactly what I needed at this point in time. I can’t prove that any of this is directly related to the dollar gifts for Millie, but it feels to me that it’s all interconnected.

An unexpected royalty check arrived.

This technique of Grout’s really is about paying it forward.

We recently abandoned our home offices during working hours to see Ex-Machina, a fascinating tale about artificial intelligence. The story is well written and the acting excellent. The fact that the three main actors are virtually unknown in the U.S. added to the reality, since we didn’t have to get past the idea that we were watching a famous actor or actress playing another role. That made it easier to drop the sense of disbelief and get into this compelling story of advanced artificial intelligence in the form of a very human-like robot that becomes more clever than its creator.

In Ex-Machina, we have a robot that apparently possesses a sense of self-awareness. However, according to Korean quantum physicist Daegene Song, that will never happen. According to an article published in techswarm.com, Song has shown that computers will never be able to duplicate human consciousness or be programmed to do so. The reason, he says, is that consciousness doesn’t exist in the brain.

By representing consciousness mathematically, Song’s quantum computer research shows that consciousness is not compatible with a machine. Among conscious activities, the unique characteristic of self-observation cannot exist in any type of machine,” Song explained. “Human thought has a mechanism that computers cannot compute or be programmed to do.”

An article in Unknown Country notes that the neuroscience community has been working for many years to replicate consciousness in a machine by increasing the number of pathways between memory chips, but now it appears that, no matter how large the machine brain, it will never be self aware. A general assumption among scientists is that consciousness is a side-effect of brain activity, but Dr. Song’s math suggests that this cannot be true. If he is correct, then a fundamental change not just in science is implied, but also in the way we view ourselves. It would appear that consciousness may be something that the brain accesses, but does not generate.

In a related study of consciousness, described  in phys.org, physicist Sir Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff tussle with the same issue in their study of consciousness.

“The origin of consciousness reflects our place in the universe, the nature of our existence. Did consciousness evolve from complex computations among brain neurons, as most scientists assert? Or has consciousness, in some sense, been here all along, as spiritual approaches maintain?” ask Hameroff and Penrose in the current review.

“This opens a potential Pandora’s Box, but our theory accommodates both these views, suggesting consciousness derives from quantum vibrations in microtubules, protein polymers inside brain neurons, which both govern neuronal and synaptic function, and connect brain processes to self-organizing processes in the fine scale, ‘proto-conscious’ quantum structure of reality.”

If these scientists are correct, we might not have to worry about self-aware robots taking over the world. But we’ll still potentially have to deal with programmed robots following the coded orders of their makers. Who knows what they might eventually be capable of doing.

Tree of souls

The crash of Germanwings Flight 9525 leaves many puzzling questions, but foremost among them is that if the copilot deliberately crashed the plane, why did he do it?

The other question I find myself asking is if, in a disaster like this, where people die so violently and could be heard screaming on the voice recorder, what happens on the other side in the immediate aftermath?

Is the trauma of that death – an air disaster – carried into the afterlife? Is it carried into another life as a theme, perhaps as a fear of flying or some other phobia? Is there an emergency team on the other side that deals with the souls of these 150 people? Are there certain souls on the other side who are “trained” to do this kind of work? What about disasters where thousands die, like the tsunami in Indonesia in 2004? A war? A disaster like 9-11?

I Googled the question: What happens to souls in the aftermath of a disaster? A lot of Biblical stuff and emergency preparedness stuff came up. But nothing that really shed any light on this question. So I asked our psychic friend, Millie Gemondo, if she thought there was an emergency team of first responders in the afterlife. “Great question,” she laughed. “I know there are souls who help after you have passed over, but a team? I have no idea. I do feel, though, that more and more people will be choosing to pass on in mass deaths, like in natural disasters, war, plane crashes.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” Millie said. “It’s just what I feel is happening and going to happen during this time.”

I asked author and past-life regressionist Carol Bowman the same question. In her regression work, she has found that certain themes carry over from life. Let’s say that in one past life, you strangled to death; in this life, you might be born with the chord wrapped around your neck. That’s a simple example. Carol’s response:

I’ll get back to you when I die.  In the meantime:

From what I understand, there are always guides/souls waiting on the other side to help. With a sudden and traumatic death like that, they were already out of their bodies before the plane hit, as far as I know.  You know those NDE stories of people in horrific car crashes who are standing beside the mangled car and their injured bodies wondering what happened?  They shot out of their bodies before the moment, or at the moment of impact.  They’re just confused by the suddenness of the death.  

There seem to be souls who specialize in these types of deaths, and, I imagine, in mass events like this one. 

That’s what I’ve put together from the NDEs and from the regression work.  

I also asked our friend Nancy McMoneagle, the director of The Monroe Institute, this same question. The institute explores the nature of consciousness, so I found her response particularly insightful:

I do believe once anyone crosses over for any reason, there are others to meet him/her.  A special non-physical team dealing with disasters?  Why not?!  We actually have a program at the Institute called “Lifeline,” which is very much about helping people out who have passed on who may not be aware of it, or who might be stuck.  

In fact, “The Unexplained” TV show did a story on the Lifeline program a few years ago.  My sister  was one of the trainers for it.  Her funniest comment was how she called this group “Club Dead.” (Club Med’s counterpart?!)  One of the participants talked about a guy who had died in Ohio, gave his last name, info on his family, etc., etc., and the film crew actually found these folks – and she had no  knowledge of him or his family whatsoever.

I’ve got a few other people to ask about this, but what ideas do you all have?

At the end of April, we posted a story called Revisiting the Straight Pins. It’s about spirit communication.

One of the comments came from Vicki De Laurentis, whose synchros we have used in several of our books. Her story, like that of the straight pins and Mike Perry’s numerous white feather stories, illustrates that spirits can use virtually anything to communicate with the living.

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When my mother -in-law passed away, my daughters remembered her Italian tradition of putting, I think, 13 or 16 pennies in the casket in order to “pay St. Peter”.
We were at a hotel and only found about 5 pennies.

Well, for the next two days of preparations my daughters kept finding pennies everywhere! I even added “pennies from heaven” to my Eulogy. It helped all of us as we felt she was with us the entire time making sure we had her pennies! Even now and then we will find a random penny in very unlikely places.

Later that same day, Vicki returned to the blog and left a second comment:

Funny thing, since I wrote that I’ve been finding pennies! I guess she liked my sharing that story!

Simone from Rio de Janeiro read the Portuguese edition of The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity and began compiling her own synchronicities. Here are three that she sent to us. The first one is about that mysterious repetitions of the number 23, which we’ve written about here.

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