I Ching Record Book

Posted on October 2, 2010 by Trish and Rob

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

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

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

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

Posted in divination systems, I Ching | 6 Comments

Caterpillar As Messenger

Posted on October 1, 2010 by Trish and Rob

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in caterpillars | 14 Comments

Extinctions

Posted on September 30, 2010 by Trish and Rob

 jeweled lizard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ghosts as Tricksters

Posted on September 29, 2010 by Trish and Rob

 When we posted a synchro called Hank and Judy, Photographers,  there were a number of really great comments, stories unto themselves, and some interesting email that came in. Here are two of them – one from an email, the other a comment.
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This one comes from Sharlie West. We used  one of her synchros in our book. She has the most unusual experiences with ghosts/spirits. This one sounds like ghosts as tricksters!
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My home is haunted. I’ve gotten used to the spirits; they were more active when the house was filled with children. Things still disappear and we never find them. We all kidded about it a lot. One Thanksgiving the family was sitting around the table talking about our occasional spirit visitors. We were drinking wine and gave a Thanksgiving toast, raising our glasses high. My mom said, “If there are any ghosts, let them make themselves known.” We were all smiling until her wine glass broke midair into tiny pieces and splattered all over the table. Dead silence after that. I got chills realizing that although we kidded about the spirits, they were definitely there.
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Under comments, Connie posted this amazing synchro:

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

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

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

Posted in spirits | 38 Comments

The White Butterfly

Posted on September 28, 2010 by Trish and Rob

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in butterflies, chilean miners | 12 Comments

Sydney Synchros

Posted on September 27, 2010 by Trish and Rob

(Unfortunately, synchronicity is misspelled in this image!)

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

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

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

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

But DAZ also offered a second one.

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

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

Jung and Spiritualism

Posted on September 26, 2010 by Trish and Rob

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Posted in Carl Jung, spiritualism | 20 Comments

Animal Companions

Posted on September 25, 2010 by Trish and Rob
Noah at the dog park 

Today on Daily Grail, we ran across an interesting link about dogs trained to predict seizures in epileptics. It sounds like the kind of area that British biologist and author Rupert Sheldrake might be researching.
Eddie is a three-year-old terrier who was abandoned at an animal rescue center in because his owners couldn’t control him. It turns out that his energetic nature made him an ideal seizure alert dog. He was trained at Sheffield Support Dogs, the only facility of its kind in the UK. Seizure alert dogs apparently fall into the same category as seeing eye dogs, but they aren’t just companions. Their job is to predict.

Eddie the terrier ended up with Andrew Eccles, who has never taken anti-convulsants for his condition, but hopes that Eddie may make it possible for him to spend quality time with his daughter and to do nornal things with her – like go to the park. When Eddie alerts Andrew about an impending seizure, he has time to sit down or get himself someplace safe where he won’t hurt himself or his daughter.

One seizure alert dog, for instance, licks his owner’s left hand  “obsessively”  fifty minutes before a major seizure. For a minor seizure, the dog licks her hand three times, then paws her. Quoting from the article linked above: “It’s not known how dogs like Eddie can sense that a seizure is about to occur though there are three main theories; firstly there may be micro expressions that the dog can pick up which precede a seizure, there may be a particular scent generated which the dog is sensitive to and finally it may be that the dog can sense disturbances in the electric field which are caused by a seizure.”

 Finding this article was something of a synchronicity for us. Earlier today, one of the stray cats we feed, Smoke, seemed incredibly lethargic, wouldn’t eat, could barely walk, so we brought her indoors and called the vet.

Smoke first appeared in our back yard when the housing market went south two years ago and people who had lost their homes began to abandon their pets. She wandered into our yard one hot afternoon, timid, hungry, with such soft, plaintive eyes that of course we fed her. Eventually, she moved onto our screened porch and pretty much claimed that area as her own. Our other cats didn’t like her, so she stayed outside, seemingly content to wander around the pool area on cool days, always coming onto the porch at night. We kept trying to convince neighbors and friends to adopt her, but most of the people we know already have pets or have dogs who don’t like cats. So she stayed on our porch.

While she was inside, laying against the cool tile floor, Noah came up to her and sniffed her side. Usually, Smoke hisses at Noah. Not today. Noah kept sniffing, then began to lick Smoke’s side, a slow, loving lick, like he knew something we didn’t.

A few minutes later, our male cat, Simba, moved warily toward Smoke. He usually hisses at her and races past her. But today, he paused and moved closer, sniffing as the same area where Noah had sniffed and licked. It was eerie. It was then we realized that Smoke was seriously ill. By the time we got her to the vet, she wasn’t responding to visual stimuli.

The vet’s prognosis was bad – kidney failure, a possible tumor, diabetes. We made the heartbreaking decision to have her put down. In the moments before the drug took effect, she made a soft, plaintive sound, and her eyes fixed on Megan and me. She knew. Megan and I stood there sobbing, whispering to her, and I felt so ridden with guilt that I hadn’t made a more gallant effort to have her accepted by our other cats.

Unfortunately, the few photos we had of Smoke were lost in various computer crashes. Think: ash gray, amber eyes, a plump Buddha cat. 

May your journey be joyful,  Smoke. Please return to us.

Posted in dogs, epileptics, power of animals, Sheldrake | 15 Comments

From Aliens to Zombies and other stuff

Posted on September 24, 2010 by Trish and Rob

Trish and I are at the Southern Independent Bookseller’s Association today in Daytona Beach, Florida where she is about to sign books. Afterwards, we head to the spiritualist community of Cassadaga, a small town of mediums in a hilly pine forest in Central Florida. We’ve been there many times and have had many unusual experiences among the living and the dead. The rock band Bright Eyes actually entitled one of their albums Cassadaga, and they included a song called Four Winds with these lyrics:…”went to Cassadaga to talk to the dead, they said you better look alive.”

Hopefully, we’ll gather more spirit contact stories for our next synchro book. I guess it’s now a good time as any to mention that we’ve been offered a contract for our proposal and we have accepted. Adams Media, which published The 7 Secrets, will publish our ‘spooky’ sequel, which tentatively will be called: Synchronicity and the Other Side.

But back to the conference. Since I’m here officially as a blogger, I better blog something about it. So, late this morning Trish was on a panel with four other writers. The name of the panel: From Aliens to Zombies. Needless to say, there were a lot good laughs. Most of the writers were authors of freaky alien-monster fiction for children and young adults.

One author, Adam Troy Castro, talked about his alphabet series, the A-Z of  Horror. Each letter apparently gets two pages: A is for Apocalypse, H is for Howl, Q is for Quiver, V is for Vampire, Z is for Zombie…etc. 

David Halperin, a retired professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina talked about his novel, The Journal of a UFO Investigator. He said when he was a teenager he was involved in a group investigating UFO reports and now that he’s retired, he’s returned to his youthful interest. He mentioned in passing that you can’t get tenured very easily as a UFO investigator. That got a few laughs.

Another author, Jessica Rene, talked about her Sleepy Hollow ghost series and told the audience that not only is Sleepy Hollow an actual town, but she will be there on Halloween to do a book signing… in the town graveyard. Yikes!

Then there was Ursula Vernon who talked about her Dragon Breath series for 8-12 year olds. The new one has an unusual title: The Curse of the Were-Weiner. She said it’s mostly for boy, but some girls are interested, too. Okay. Moving on.

Trish of course talked about her new novel, ESPERANZA and nudged by a question from the audience revealed that Johnny Depp’s production company has taken an interest and asked for more time to consider it. Yay! Fingers crossed on that one.

After the seven-minute introductions, the audience asked more questions and the panel also questioned their fellow members. That’s when Trish got on the case of the UFO Investigator guy, who didn’t believe or disbelieve in aliens or UFOs. Trish pushed him to take a stand, and he said something about no UFOs have landed on the White House lawn. Trish responded, “Why do they have to land there?” David H. shrugged and said, “I suppose they could land on Sarah Palin’s lawn.”

That’s when someone shouted that she can see aliens from her back porch in Wasilla. And with that, the panel discussion closed.

Posted in Uncategorized | 15 Comments

The Event

Posted on September 24, 2010 by Trish and Rob

Meet cutie Jason Ritter (Sean Walker), whose girlfriend has disappeared from the cruise ship they’ve been on. There’s not even a record that she was ever there. Or that he and his girlfriend even had a room on this ship. Intriguing premise. Then you toss in a black Latino president who discovers there’s a secret facility in Alaska that the CIA has been covering up, where 97 “others” have been held for years. Then there’s an assassination attempt on the president shortly after he has met the female leader of the “others.”

We missed the actual premiere, but after several people wrote and recommended it, we streamed the premiere. Although we found the jumping around in time somewhat distracting, this show has disclosure written all over it. And there’s one harrowing scene with a jet (shades of Lost?)that really hints at something alien.

Since many ideas are first introduced via TV and movies, let’s assume for a moment that disclosure is around the corner. How would that change our lives? Our worldviews? Our religions? Governments?

The X-Files explored this question, but not as overtly as V, where the aliens (really bad guys) have parked their giant ships over strategic cities worldwide. The MIB movies took a humorous look at the men in black phenomenon. Independence Day and War of the Worlds showed us the aggression and warlike nature of the aliens. ET, of course, showed us a gentler, more humane side of the aliens. Carl Sagan’s Contact illustrated the elusive nature of time and ETs.

Stephen King has explored the UFO stuff in some of his novels. Whitley Strieber and Budd Hopkins knows this terrain personally.A number of people who comment on our blog have experienced sightings, contact, abductions. These individuals have unusual abilities – and they have memories, some of them incredibly weird and scary.

But on a day to day basis, how would disclosure change us?

First, there’s the Big Lie that has been perpetuated since Roswell. If Roswell happened – either in Roswell or in some town nearby – how has it been covered up for so many years? How has such a vast disinformation campaign existed for all these decades? We would have to wrap our minds around that, how the skeptics, the true left-brain types, the ones whose lives are a study in hard logic, have outnumbered the rest of us for so long. That does seem to be changing, though. Given the uncertainty in the world, the inexplicable nature of many events, the approach of 2012, people are looking for answers. The internet has facilitated the luminal exchange of information to such a degree so that if you have an abduction experience at 11:01 PM, you’re on facebook and twitter as soon as you have the mental capacity to write and that experience is blasted around the planet. 

Disclosure means to reveal. So disclosure  through physical evidence might mean UFOs above major cities, ETs visiting the heads of governments in full view of the press, ETs as hybrids, ET technology as the source behind the vast and rapid acceleration of technology in the last 50 or 60 years. However it manifested itself, it would mean rewriting the nature of reality. Could disclosure be the tipping point for our planet?

In Jung’s day, the UFO phenomenon was still in its infancy. According to Deirdre Bair’s biography, he studied UFOs from the 1950s and changed his mind over the years about what they actually were – “a rumour with concomitant singular and mass hallucination or a downright fact.” But he wrote a book on UFOs, and shortly after it was published in the U.S., Jung met with Charles and Anne Morrow Lindberg. When the conversation turned to “flying saucers,” Lindberg was astonished to hear Jung refer to them as “factual.”

If memory serves me, Jung wrote about UFOs as an emerging archetype of wholeness. Whatever this phenomenon is, we’ll tune into The Event again. It’s always interesting to see if a creative venture might shed light on the truth.

Posted in disclosure, TV, UFOs | 14 Comments