Mindfulness and Synchronicity

Posted on July 7, 2012 by Trish and Rob

One of the questions that Dr. Bernard Beitman’s study on coincidences asks  is if we can create synchronicities.  It’s an intriguing question, and while I was mulling this over, I happened to check out the ibooks library for new books and ran across The Now Effect, by Elisha Goldstein.

This book fascinates me. The material is undoubtedly familiar to most people who experience synchronicity frequently and yet, Goldstein never mentions the word, never talks about synchronicity per se. Instead, he talks about mindfulness, about being totally present in the moment – echoes of Eckhard Tolle’s Power of Now and and the Abraham/Hicks material.

Goldstein talks about the importance of “dropping into the moment” through breath work, yoga, and just being present.  I’ve always had a problem with this concept. When I’m  doing yoga, my mind is off into some other zone that has nothing to do with my body and everything to do with whatever I happen to be writing at the time. I’m gnawing away at how I can improve what I’ve written, increase the tension, hone the characters. During meditation, I have a specific set of questions begging for answers. My bottom line seems to be: show me, guide me, and please don’t pull any shifty trickster tricks in the process.

But in reading The Now Effect, I have come to realize that mindfulness is more than the sum of its parts. It’s a state of being. It’s a matter of training your brain to bring itself fully into the moment. When I eat breakfast, for instance,  I am scrolling through messages on my BlackBerry, taking note of what I need to answer  before I head to the gym. I am living a few moments ahead of myself when it would behoove me to actually pay attention to the sweet succulence of my grapefruit, to the beauty of its color, its texture, to how each bite tastes as it slides down my throat.

So this morning, I paid attention  to my grapefruit. I spoke to it – Hey, how’s it going? As I dug out each little wedge, I thought of my friend Nancy Pickard who, after a visit, sent me a set of grapefruit spoons so that I wouldn’t have to struggle to extract those little delicious wedges. I tried to be present for my grapefruit. 

Yes, I know how silly that sounds.  I know how ridiculous it sounds when you’re telling yourself a  story that just isn’t true in this moment – my bills are paid, I am rich, healthy, in love,   my kids are doing great, I have EVERYHING I need.

But there’s a certain raw beauty in recognizing that disparity and not being limited by it as you reach out for more. In the end, we are limitless beings whose experiences reflect and encapsulate  who we are right now, in this instant. And perhaps synchros are the Aha! experiences that tells us how we’re doing in any given moment. Course correction needed. Pay attention. You’re on the right track. Keep doing what you’re doing…

I still don’t know if we can create synchros. But we can certainly invite more of them into our lives by remaining aware of what we think and do and feel moment to moment. Maybe dogs know and practice this far better than we humans.

Nika, having the time of her life, in the moment.

 

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Judy and Hank, continued

Posted on July 6, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Spirit communication is probably one of the most mysterious types of synchronicity. Skeptics, of course, would undoubtedly contend that it never happens because, as everyone knows, there’s no such thing as life after death. But for those of us who believe otherwise, who believe that our loved ones who have passed on do attempt to communicate with us, there are certain motifs that recur.

For Mike Perry, our synchro friend in the U.K. that motif is often a white feather. For Darren, our synchro friend down under,   that motif has been a combination of animals and music – and, occasionally, movies and writers. For Math, who comments frequently here, the spirit communications take many different forms. We included some of their stories in Synchronicity and the Other Side.  One story in that book is called Judy and Hank.

Judy is a friend of mine (Trish)  from college. She’s a professional photographer in Manhattan and for 35 years, she and Hank were partners. He died in 2009 and we’ve posted about her experiences with Hank communications several times on the blog –   here  and here.

Judy is one of these people who sends me holiday e-cards throughout the year. On July 4, she sent one celebrating Independence Day. In thanking her, I asked if Hank had been around. Her response, I think, suggests that Hank is rarely too far from Judy, that the communicition is ongoing, and that he makes his presence known through whatever tools are available to him.

From Judy:

You are so kind to ask me if I’ve heard from Hank.  This one is probably a stretch but maybe…

July 4 was his absolute favorite holiday.  He would go to West Virginia and get some huge fireworks to explode on the 4th. It was  always a good show…either at his best friends’ place in Connecticut or at his family estate in Middeltown.  His dad collected antique guns, never shot any of them except for a very small (tabletop size) cannon on July 4.  The thing would scare the pee out of anyone despite its size.

Anyway, yesterday I went to see my nephews’ new summer cottage on the water near Mystic, Connecticut.  It’s a very quiet little cove, lots of families. There was not a bit of noise all day except for the sound of a few kids playing. Incredibly peaceful.

We were sitting on the deck and I was telling the story of Hank’s teeny canon and the blast it made. No sooner did I get the words out than we heard a huge blast from the cottage next door !  I thought they’d  set off an M80. The ground hasn’t rocked like that since I heard that teeny cannon many years ago.

Pretty neat. Even if it wasn’t Hank, I suspect he had something to do with it!

++

In Western societies, we have been so inculcated to discount these kinds of experiences as valid and meaningful that we often ignore or dismiss what we intuitively know is significant.  We are taught to dismiss these intuitive resonances, to deny the validity of our own experiences and beliefs. But when something occurs that enables or forces us to overcome the consensus reality, to risk ridicule from the finger shaking majority who calls us delusional or schizoid or “highly imaginative,” then our entire landscape changes. We are suddenly alive and aware within a network of intimate connections that may resemble the branches of that ceiba tree in the photo, connections that that don’t recognize time or space or death as divisions.

So, Judy, I don’t think the cannon incident is a stretch at all. Hank was saying hi.

 

 

Posted in spirit communication, spirit contact, synchronicity | 7 Comments

Straight from the Mainstream

Posted on July 5, 2012 by Trish and Rob

 

 

(We added those glasses!)

A few months ago, we e-mailed a query letter to the editor of Psychology Today suggesting an article about synchronicity.  We would explore some of the leading edge research on the subject, including the studies of Bernard Beitman, MD, who has suggested a new interdisciplinary field called Coincidence Studies. A couple of hours later, we noticed that we’d received a visit  from Psychology Today. (The visitor’s ISP was linked to a media company which owns the magazine.)  After that, nothing.  No response, favorable or otherwise.  Not even a form letter rejection.

So it was interesting when, barely into July, we happened to spy the August issue of Psychology Today on the newsstand with the cover story SIXTH SENSE: Premonitions, Deja Vu, Coincidences, Near-Death Experiences. As we perused the article, the author quickly assured us that all of these ‘anomalous experiences’ were simply tricks of the mind.

“We often explain such experiences using concepts related to spirits, luck, witchcraft, psychic powers, life energy, or more terrestrial (and extra terrestrial) entities. Such explanations are often more appealing, or at least more intuitive, than blaming an odd experience on a trick of the mind.”

We were also told that these experiences “may be associated with stressful circumstances, personal pathologies, or cognitive deficits.” In other words, if you experience something psychic, you might be stressed, mentally ill or just dumb!

Author Matthew Hutson, a former editor of Psychology Today, makes it clear in the first  few paragraphs that this mainstream science journal was not going to dabble in any unorthodox explanations of such ‘outlier phenomena’ as synchronicity. In fact, the article avoids the term.  What we call synchros, Hutson  refers to as apophenia – the ability to recognize patterns.  Even though he says this ability is helpful for our survival, he warns that sometimes it gets away from us.

He uses the example of Mark David Chapman who, before killing John Lennon, noted 50 connections between Holden Caulfield’s time in New York City in The Catcher in the Rye and his own life.  Hutson suggests that overactive dopamine transmissions help us find meaningful coincidences in things. It’s also called schizophrenia.

Thankfully, he concedes that these experiences also might be ‘healthy inventions’ of the brain, which is often busy searching for patterns. What sends some people into mental illness can lead others to be creative and insightful.

But he quickly returns to mental dysfunction when he notes there is a significant correlation between belief in the paranormal and in conspiracies.  “A key trait that predicts a belief in conspiracy theories is paranoia.”

The article continues with a lot of  generalizing about ‘magical thinking’ and the usual attempts by mainstream science to explain away telepathy, precognition, and remote viewing, as well as near-death experiences, and spirit contact. It’s nothing new, just more of the same rigid thinking on these subjects that mainstream science has generated decade after decade while ignoring hundreds of studies to the contrary by so-called ‘fringe’ scientists. If there’s any crack in the dam here, it’s a grudging recognition that noticing patterns, i.e. synchros, might be a healthy pre-occupation.

Hutson, though, seems most comfortable writing about pathologies related to paranormal beliefs and struggles a bit in presenting the concept that exploring psychic experiences has a healthy psychological benefit for many people.

“People high in sensation-seeking–those who search for novelty and exciting stimuli–also report more paranormal beliefs and experiences. Perhaps they’re drawn to the idea of a world inhabited by mysterious forces. So, being a pattern-finding sensation-seeker means you’re more likely to experience odd coincidences in the first place, and then more likely to entertain unconventional explanations for them. A one-two punch.”

When he refers to coincidence, Hutson turns a bit cynical.  “Research shows that we find coincidences involving ourselves much more surprising than identical coincidences involving others, because we feel we’re somehow special. (Yes, I know, you really are special.)”

Bottom line: when it comes to dealing with anomalous experiences, Hutson assures us it’s all in our heads, tricks of the brain. Think you’ve seen a ghost? Think again. “Once you have it in your head that you might see or hear something, your brain is often happy to oblige by presenting a hallucination, especially when you’re tired or scared.” That may be true, but is that always the case, 100% of the time? Hutson implies over and over that it is, which places him squarely in the rear guard of psychic exploration. It’s hard to investigate a subject fairly if you don’t believe it exists.

While pursuing these experiences might be healthy in small doses, Hutson concludes that two thirds of the population is either misguided or mentally challenged when it comes to understanding the source of such phenomena, and some of us are downright crazy.

We probably would’ve reviewed this article even if we hadn’t queried the journal on the same subject with a different approach.  But that gave us an added incentive. We saw a pattern, a connection, one that even extended to Hutson’s own work. He  published a book this year about coincidence and the paranormal, and called it:  The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking. Hmm,  sounds like the mainstream science response to The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity.

Or maybe we’re just seeing things.

 

 

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Denver Airport

Posted on July 4, 2012 by Trish and Rob

There’s something deeply joyful about these flash mob dances. This one takes place in the Denver, Colorado airport.

Happy July 4!

 

Posted in synchronicity | 8 Comments

Birthday Cake Trickster

Posted on July 3, 2012 by Trish and Rob

a normal birthday cake

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Okay, so the story goes something like this.  An elderly gentleman is about to celebrate his 85th birthday.  His four daughters plan the party at a local restaurant and one of the husbands is supposed to order the cake from the local grocery store. The cake is supposed to read: Happy 85th birthday, Dad.

But when the guy arrives at the store, the little Asian woman who decorated the cake informs him that all those words won’t fit across the top.

“Well, can you write it on the plate or something?” he asks.

The Asian woman says that should work and tells him to return in 30 minutes.  He does some shopping,  but is becoming increasingly anxious about time. He’s due at the restaurant shortly, where the festivities are being held. So when he picks up the cake, now boxed, he doesn’t check it.

He sets the cake in the passenger seat and speeds toward the restaurant. His wife and the other three sisters were worried that he was going to be late. They set the cake on the table and  the man’s wife removes it from the box and sets it on the table.  Uh-oh. The greeting is messed up.

“What should we do?” one of the sisters asks anxiously.

“Nothing,” says another sister. “It’s too late to change it.”

And just then, the birthday guy appears, sees the cake and its inscription, and explodes with laughter. Here’s what the cake said:

Sounds like the work of the trickster, doesn’t it?

You hear the oddest stories at the dog park.

Posted in synchronicity | 15 Comments

Paranormal

Posted on July 2, 2012 by Trish and Rob

 

“You can guide your life to a certain extent, and then, if you are lucky, serendipity takes over. It leads you down a path that you would not have considered an option. Once you’ve experienced that path, though, you become comfortable with it and know that it is the path you should have chosen all along,” writes Raymond Moody in his fascinating memoir, Paranormal: My Life in Pursuit of the Afterlife.

Moody is the man who coined the term near-death experience – or NDE – with his mega seller Life After Life, published in 1975, when he was still in medical school.  It hit every bestseller list in the world and stayed there for more than three years. It was the first book to examine the possibility of life after death in a non-religious sense, and was the first book to examine the stages in a near-death experience. Moody points out that no two NDEs are identical, but that many share these  traits:

Ineffability:  People have a tough time expressing what happened to them.

Hearing the news: You hear the doctor pronounce that you are dead.

Feelings of Peace and quiet

The Noise: Loud buzzing or a loud ring.

The Dark Tunnel: You feel pulled rapidly into a dark space

Out of the Body: Just want it sounds like. You see yourself from a vantage point outside your body.

Meeting Others:  You meet spiritual beings who are there to ease you through the transition or to tell you it isn’t your time to die.

The Being of Light: An encounter with a light that eventually assumes an “unearthly brilliance.”  Some describe this being in religious terms, but regardless of what it’s called, this being of light helps you to “proceed along a path of truth and self realization.

The Review: The being of light often leads you to review your life, which is displayed in “panoramic intensity.”

The Border or Limit: This is a point people often reach in an NDE. If you move beyond it, you can’t return.

Coming Back: Exactly what it sounds like.

Most NDErs Moody spoke with also shared three other facets of this experience:  They didn’t want to talk about the experience for fear of being labeled crazy.  This may not be as true today as it was in the 70s, thanks in large part to researchers like Moody.

The effect of the experience on these individuals was “profound and noticeable.”

All reported that the experience left them with new views of death.

Even after such groundbreaking work, Moody claimed that his research didn’t prove life after death. It proved a commonality of experiences at the moment of death. But his continued explorations led him into a study of past lives, scrying as a means of communicating with spirits  (John Dee Memorial Theater of the Mind)  and most recently, into the area of shared near-death experiences.

Moody had heard about such experiences over the years but in 1994 experienced it himself at his mother’s deathbed. He was there with his wife, two sisters and their husbands, waiting for the moment of their mother’s death. “As we held hands the room seemed to change shape, and four of the six of us felt as though we were being lifted from the ground. I felt a strong pull like a riptide, only the pull was upward.”

Moody’s sister suddenly pointed at the foot of their mother’s bed and exclaimed their father was there, that he’d come back to get their mother. The light in the room became “soft and fuzzy, like looking into the water of a lighted swimming pool at night.” As Moody later wrote: “It was as if the fabric of the universe had torn and for just a moment we felt the energy of that place called heaven.”

These shared death experiences happen to people who are with a loved one who is dying. “These spiritual experiences can happen to more than one person and are remarkably like near-death experiences.”

Yet, Moody  found four differences in shared NDEs that he considers extraordinary and new:

Mystical music. This music often emanates from the surroundings and is heard by others. It can last for a long period of time.

Geometric Changes in the Environment. The room or space shifts and changes shape.  Moody admits he doesn’t know what it means, but it “seems as though people who are dying, and sometimes those around them, are led to a different dimension.”

A Shared Mystical Light.  This part of a shared NDE is described in many different ways – as a translucent light, a light filled with love, a light that is like being swept up into a cloud.   

Mist-ical Experience. Seeing emissions of mist from the dying.

Paranormal is a fascinating page turner that provides glimpses into the man himself – an undiagnosed illness that plunged him into a depression so severe he attempted suicide; his domineering father, his closeness to his mother; the cost of fame.  Moody is now 68 years old and could have rested on his laurels decades ago. But the unrelenting curiosity that drives his explorations and his joy of discovery come through so powerfully in this book that I’m sure we’ll be reading more about shared NDEs.

Now listen to Moody talk about his own near-death experience.

Posted in NDEs, synchronicity | 15 Comments

Headed Our Way in July

Posted on July 1, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Now that you’ve survived Venus’ retrograde (May 15- June 27),  and we’ve hit July,  here are some highlights:

July 3 features a full moon in earth sign Capricorn. Full moons tend to  bring about culmination, harvest, and can also bring news related to the sign and house in which they fall.  This full moon in Capricorn can help to ground us, keep us focused. Powerhouse Pluto forms a close conjunction with this full moon, suggesting that any news you hear is likely to be transformative. It occurs at 8 degrees and 9 minutes of Capricorn, so if you have planets at or near that degree, you may feel the effects of this full moon more than other people. (Click here  for your free natal chart and here  for the house meanings).

Uranus, the planet of sudden, unexpected change, forms a challenging angle to this full moon, suggesting an element of irritability, impatience, even anger.  If you feel like stepping outside to bay at the moon, by all means do so!  Even if it annoys your partner or your neighbors, you’ll feel better afterward.

On July 19, there’s a new moon in water sign Cancer. New moons generally usher in new opportunities according to the sign and house in which they appear. Cancer rules home and hearth, your domestic environment, the more nurturing parent,  and is connected to intuition, your inner world. So new opportunities may arrive in any of those areas. Check your natal chart to see where Cancer falls. This moon occurs at 26 degrees and 55 minutes of Cancer.

On July 15, the second Mercury retrograde of the year begins, in fire sign Leo, and it’s in place until August 8, when it turns direct again. Mercury rules both Gemini and Virgo, communication, travel, the conscious mind, contracts. The best rule of thumb for a Mercury retro is what I call the three Rs: revise, review, rethink. For a writer, this is the perfect revision time. For people in other professions it’s smart to tie up  loose ends, work on projects you’ve already begun, and avoid starting anything new.  And be sure you communicate succinctly and clearly to avoid miscommunication.

Travel can be a challenge during a Mercury retrograde. Your carefully planned itinerary suddenly goes haywire, your flight is rerouted or cancelled, you have a flat on the Interstate…well, you get the idea. That said, if you do travel, then at some point in the near future, you may revisit that destination again.

It’s fine to enter into a verbal agreement with someone, but don’t sign any contracts when Mercury is out of synch.  We did that once, mainly because it couldn’t be avoided, and everything about the contract was messed up.  Another area to avoid? Try not to schedule a move during a Mercury retro period. We did that once, too, and it was disastrous – the moving van was late, the people buying our house had last minute demands, and we were late for the closing on the house into which we were moving.

The good news is that Venus (love, romance, money), Jupiter (expansion,  luck), Mars (physical energy, sexuality, your booster rocket) and Saturn (structure) travel fairly close together in air signs for most of July. Their camaraderie helps to mitigate some of Mercury’s shenanigans.

July is a mixed bag astrologically, but there is always some small gold nugget to mine.

 

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Indra’s Net

Posted on June 30, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Kevin Moss dreamed of this image, or something close to it and asked what it might mean. I told him it looked like Indra’s Net. He’d never heard of it and was amazed by what he found out about it, since he very interested in the interconnections among people, as he’d written about here.

“Internet…Intranet…Indra’s Net. What a coincidence?!” he commented.

We’ve written about Indra’s Net in the past, but combined with Kevin’s dream image, it seemed worthwhile to bring it up again. Here’s a quote that nicely illuminates the net.

“The Net of Indra is a profound and subtle metaphor for the structure of reality. Imagine a vast net; at each crossing point there is a jewel; each jewel is perfectly clear and reflects all the other jewels in the net, the way two mirrors placed opposite each other will reflect an image ad infinitum. The jewel in this metaphor stands for an individual being, or an individual consciousness, or a cell or an atom. Every jewel is intimately connected with all other jewels in the universe, and a change in one jewel means a change, however slight, in every other jewel.”

–Stephen Mitchell, The Enlightened Mind

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The Supremes and Health Care

Posted on June 29, 2012 by Trish and Rob

how health care should make you feel!

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As you have probably heard by now, the Supreme Court decided today, in a 5-4 vote, that President Obama’s  Affordable Care Act (health insurance) is constitutional. The individual mandate part of the ACA is about semantics – if you don’t buy into this insurance, are you taxed or penalized?

As self-employed individuals, our health care would have cost us from $12,000-$14,000 a year each for basic care,–about $25k– so we haven’t had insurance for the last 22 years. When we were first married, we bought basic coverage, then when I got pregnant we learned the insurance didn’t cover maternity expenses. We paid more than $8,000 for Megan’s birth – and that was in 1989 – and there was nothing wrong with her, it wasn’t a C-section, and I spent just one night in the hospital. Yes, that was with health care.

Around this time, my friend Nancy Pickard and I had a rather in depth discussion about the Seth material. She said she didn’t have health insurance because she had realized long before that her challenges in this life weren’t about health issues.  She adhered to Seth’s tenets that physical ailments/diseases are about internal disconnects. A light went on in my head; I realized that my  challenges in this life weren’t about health, either. Neither are Rob’s.  After that, we dropped our insurance.

This no  insurance thing isn’t something we’ve talked about with most people.  When we do, the often subsequent silence is uncomfortable, the other person changes the subject, their stance is clear. The Macs are cuckoo.

Fortunately, we’ve been healthy and have been in ER maybe three times. We paid out of pocket. We never expected to be treated for free. While our daughter was growing up, she had fantastic health care through Florida’s healthy kids  program. $5 co-pay. When she broke her wrist when she was nine or so, the entire cost was $20. When Rob broke his foot in a biking accident and went to a walk-in clinic and then an orthopedic surgeon, the bill was $3,000.  After Megan’s healthy kids insurance expired, she broke her foot in a sailing accident. The bill eventually came to $2,500 and that’s without any surgery, just a cast, the doctor’s visits, the X rays.

When Obama proposed the Affordable Care Act, he didn’t even bother proposing Medicare for all. In fact, he set the bar way too low, using what was a Republican agenda that basically turned 33 million people over to the insurance companies in return for: you can’t be denied insurance based on pre-existing conditions (excellent); kids can stay on their parents’ policies to the age of 26 (great, if your parents have insurance); no cap on care (fantastic). But Obama ‘s program doesn’t remove profit from health care.

The irony is that Obama’s program is fashioned after the template that Romney set up in Massachusetts when he was governor. Romney, of course, would prefer to have amnesia about that and even made a statement today that as president, he would make sure the Affordable Care Act was repealed.

While the ACA is a fine step in the right direction it is NOT true universal health care; that would be Medicare for all.  So when you hear liberal pundits talking about how we now have universal health care, it simply isn’t true.

A couple years ago, Nancy turned 65 and went on Medicare. I asked her if she was going to the doctor more often. In typical Nancy form, she laughed. “Naw. I realized I needed more internal clarity, so I’ve been going to a Jungian dream analyst.”

Wow, I thought. What a great way to use Medicare. In June, I became eligible for Medicare and my little card arrived in the mail. I looked at this  sucker that I’ve been paying for my entire working life, and started laughing. Insurance, I have medical insurance. And I immediately wondered if that meant I was supposed to get sick. So I’ve decided to go Nancy’s route and find a Jungian for dream analysis.

In the meantime, I scheduled an appointment  with my eye doctor. If you pay cash, he charges $60 for an exam. And he’s good. So for years, once a year, that’s what we have paid  him. The other day I called his office to make an appointment.

“Are you still private pay?” the receptionist asked.

“Nope. Medicare.” I felt almost smug saying it.

“Supplemental insurance?”

“None.”

“Do you, uh, know about the twenty percent that Medicare doesn’t pay?”

“Yes.” I mean, please. For this appointment, if the doc charges his usual $60, the exam will cost me all of twelve bucks.

“Very good. We’ll see you in July.”

The big question mark here is if the eye doc jacks up his prices for Medicare. I’ll know the answer is about two weeks.

Medicare is as close to universal health care as this country will ever see. It costs me a hundred bucks a month, no questions asked. That’s how it should be for every U.S. citizen. Yet, a friend who lived for a time on Hilo, in Hawaii, said that no one on the island accepted Medicare. So even with this program, there are prejudices.

My Canadian friend, Judi, emailed me today asking about the decision by the Supremes. “As a Canadian I don’t understand why a lot of Americans don’t want health care for everyone. Isn’t it a good thing that children with preexisting conditions are now covered, and that health care premiums cannot just be jacked up for no reason? I’m already reading that some of those opposed to the ruling and socialism, are thinking of moving to Canada – and yet we have universal health care. Isn’t that what they are trying to get away from? What am I missing here?”

Well, what she’s missing is that piece of the American soul that shrieks, Don’t mandate what I have to buy. Don’t you dare tell me I have to eat broccoli. Just make it universal, please, but don’t call it socialism.

So this is where we are. Romney vows to repeal the ruling. The Obama administration considers the ruling a victory. Personally, I think we’ve got a long way to go. But right now, hey, I’ve got my Medicare card. Thank you, Lyndon Johnson, who got this program approved in 1965, in just eleven months.

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DMT and Talking to Aliens?

Posted on June 28, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Some  years back, I was browsing in Borders (that’s how far back this was!) and ran across DMT: The Spirit Molecule, by Rick Strassman, M.D. It’s a riveting read about Strassman’s five-year study at the University of New Mexico, where he administered 400 doses of DMT to 60 volunteers. Strassman’s research was the first new human studies with psychedelic drugs in the US in over 20 years.  He was led to the study of DMT through earlier research on the pineal gland as a “potential locus for spiritual experiences.”

DMT is a naturally occurring psychedelic compound that is widespread throughout the plant kingdom, occurs in small amounts in mammals, including humans.  From Wikipedia: “Structurally, DMT is analogous to the neurotransmitter serotonin, the hormone melatonin, and other psychedelic tryptamines. When ingested, DMT acts as a psychedelic drug. Depending on the dose and method of administration, its subjective effects can range from short-lived milder psychedelic states to powerful immersive experiences; these are often described as a total loss of connection to conventional reality with the encounter of ineffable alien realms. Indigenous Amazonian Amerindian cultures consume DMT as the primary psychoactive in ayahuasca, a shamanistic brew used for divinatory and healing purposes.”

Yet, no one really knows what DMT does or what its function is in humans.  DMT levels elevate while we’re sleeping, so perhaps dreaming is part of what DMT facilitates.

Strassman believes that elevated levels of DMT in the brain might help to usher the soul into the body at birth and out of the body at death and my be responsible for spontaneous mystical experiences and NDEs. Many of his volunteers experienced different worlds, some that were downright bizarre, others that were peaceful, and still others that were structurally different from our three-dimensional world.

Strassman writes that when he was reviewing his notes for a chapter entitled, Contact Through the Veil, he was surprised at how many of the volunteers reported “making contact” with “them” or other beings.  The volunteers described these other beings as entities, beings, aliens, guides, helpers.  One man summarized his encounter with these beings in a way that sounds remarkably like what UFO abductees report: “During the experience, there is a sense of someone or something else, there taking control. It’s like you have to defend yourself against them, whoever they are…It’s like they have an agenda…”

He also heard stories about intrusive procedures these beings performed on the volunteers. Sound familiar?

Today I ran across an article by David Jay Brown, who writes for the Santa Cruz Patch and recently interviewed Strassman. In the interview, Brown asked Strassman if he thought there was an objective reality to the worlds visited by people when they’re under the influence of DMT, and if he thought that the entities so many people have encountered on DMT actually have an independent existence or not.  Strassman’s reply is intriguing:

“I myself think so. My colleagues think I’ve gone woolly-brained over this, but I think it’s as good a working hypothesis as any other. I tried all other hypotheses with our volunteers, and with myself. The “this is your brain on drugs” model; the Freudian “this is your unconscious playing out repressed wishes and fears;” the Jungian “these are archetypal images symbolizing your unmet potential;” the “this is a dream;” etc.”

”Volunteers had powerful objections to all of these explanatory models–and they were a very sophisticated group of volunteers, with decades of psychotherapy, spiritual practice, and previous psychedelic experiences. I tried a thought-experiment, asking myself, “What if these were real worlds, and real entities? Where would they reside, and why would they care to interact with us?” This led me to some interesting speculations about parallel universes, dark matter, etc. All because we can’t prove these ideas right now (lacking the proper technology) doesn’t mean they should be dismissed out of hand as incorrect.”

Is it possible that contactees and abductees have elevated levels of DMT in their brains? Could that be one of the reasons certain people have these experiences? Wouldn’t this be something that is relatively easy to check?

Brown speculates that Strassman’s work could mark the beginning of a new scientific field, one  that “systematically explores the possibility of communicating with higher dimensional entities, and this might prove to be a more fruitful endeavor for establishing extraterrestrial contact than the SETI project.  What they may be able to teach us, we can only imagine.”

Suppose it turns out that contactees and abductees register larger amounts of DMT in their brains? Wouldn’t they be the natural ambassadors for contact? Just saying…

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in abductees, aliens, DMT, synchronicity | 26 Comments