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According to the BBC, the attendance at the summer solstice at Stonehenge this year may  number 40,000 or more. Even though I’m not crazy about crowds, I would love to be there!

According to efestivals in the UK, here’s the scoop:

Access

Access to the stones themselves is expected to be from around 7pm on Saturday 20th June until 8am on Sunday 21st June, with it being a Sunday these hours may be extended. The Stonehenge visitor centre closes at 3pm on Saturday for Summer Solstice. Last admissions will be at 1pm, and will be closed all day Sunday, reopening at 9am on Monday 22 June.

There’s likely to be casual entertainment from samba bands & drummers but no amplified music is allowed. When you visit Stonehenge for the Solstice, please remember it is a Sacred Place to many and should be respected.

Van loads of police have been present in the area in case of any trouble, but generally a jovial mood prevails. Few arrests have been made in previous years, mostly in relation to minor drug offences.

Facilities

Toilets and drinking water are available and welfare is provided by festival welfare services. There are normally one or two food and drink vans with reasonable prices but huge queues, all well away from the stones themselves.

Sunrise is at around 4:45am.

Conditions

Rules include no camping, no dogs, no fires or fireworks, no glass bottles, no large bags or rucksacks, and no climbing onto the stones. Please use the bags given free on arrival and take them out, filled with your litter, to the skips provided. Please respect the rules so that we’re all able to enjoy the solstice morning at Stonehenge for years to come.

Getting there

Where possible, please travel to Stonehenge using public transport. The local bus company, Wilts & Dorset, will be running a service from Salisbury railway and bus stations to Stonehenge over the Solstice period. Access to Stonehenge from the bus drop off point is through the National Trust farmland.

Global synchros are invariably intriguing, mystifying, and always prompt me to wonder about who is orchestrating this stuff. Religious types will say it’s evidence of the hand of God; skeptics says it’s random. I suspect the truth lies somewhere in between.

In 7 Secrets of Synchronicity, the seventh secret is about global synchros, when the universe seems to be addressing us as a collective. I was doing some research today and ran across some of my favorite global synchros. Some are dark tricksters that sneak up on you like monsters that hide in pockets of darkness in your bedroom.   Others are so obvious and in your face they feel offensive. And some, like the synchro that follows, address a societal issue that screams for repair:

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On July 20, 2012, a mass shooting during a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises left 12 dead and 58 injured in Aurora, Colorado. A gunman, dressed in tactical clothing, set off tear gas grenades and shot into the movie theater audience with several weapons. The sole suspect was James Eagan Holmes, who was arrested outside the cinema minutes later.

On December 14, 2012, another mass shooting occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School when 26-year-old Adam Lanza opened fire and killed 20 children and six adults in the village of Sandy Hook in Newtown, Connecticut. Before driving to the school, Lanza had killed his mother at their Newtown home. As first responders arrived, Lanza committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.

Two mass murders five months and 1,800 miles apart attracted widespread media attention and triggered emotional and heated debate about gun control. The synchronicities that link these two tragedies are documented on film. In The Dark Knight Rises, the name Sandy Hook is written on a map in the movie. As it to highlight the connection, the name Aurora also appears in the Batman movie. It can be seen on the top of a skyscraper in the backdrop of another scene.

Most recently, the shootings in Charleston, South Carolina have prompted a movement to remove the confederate flag from government buildings. This flag symbolizes the dark time of slavery in the U.S., when the south wasn’t just racist, but was blinded by hatred.

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The issue that begs repair is gun control. The second amendment to the Constitution dates back to 1791, when George Washington was prez and life in America was pretty much about trial and tribulation.

Google that year. The right to bear arms was undoubtedly necessary for survival. But it’s now more than two centuries later and life is not quite the same thing in the 21^st century as it was in the 18^th century. Yet, according to Pew Research, the number of Americans who own guns falls between 270 and 310 million. That’s a lot of weapons.

But as a gun owner said to me in the gym the other day, “I might give up my guns, but how can I be sure that the rest of the gun owners in this country will do the same?”

Is a fear-based society the best that we can be?

A few weeks back, a neighbor called the animal care and control and the local cops because our dog had barked at his dog. I mean, really? Dogs bark for the same reason that human beings speak. It communicates something. The animal care person was a short, intense woman who asked to see our dog’s rabies tag and said the complaint was that on Christmas Day, our Golden Retriever, Noah,  had run over to our neighbors’ yard and barked at his dog. All dogs must be leashed, even on the short trip from house to car.

“Hey,” Rob said. “That neighbor keeps his German Shepherd on a short leash in his garage, in conditions that are against the rules set by your agency.”

The woman rolled her eyes. “I know. He was just issued a warning. If he gets another complaint, there’s a fine.”

Later that day, Rob drove past the neighbor’s house and pointed at the poor dog, still tethered on a very short leash. An hour later, a cop showed up at our front door. He seemed really uncomfortable as he informed us that a neighbor had reported that Rob had driven by his place and shot him the finger.

At this point, I’m wondering if we’re living in The Matrix and just don’t know it yet. We explain the situation to the cop, about how Animal Care & Control had already stopped by earlier and how this neighbor is really the big crybaby in the neighborhood.

And then I say, “Do you think this guy (our neighbor) is armed?”

The cop looks at me with his big dark eyes. “Ma’am, I assume that everyone is armed.”

That statement, from a cop, pretty much sums up what’s wrong here. I understand that in some ways we are still a society tuned into the Wild West. But it seems to me that the second amendment has wreaked more havoc than it’s worth.

I ran across this video on twitter. See what you think:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Xx-FVgS9eE&feature=youtu.be

Dr. Erlendur Haraldsson, professor emeritus at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik, has examined cases of children who not only seem to recall their past lives, but remember lives as Buddhist monks. In some of these cases, the memories were recorded right after the children recalled them – in other words, without any elapsed time in which the memories could become distorted. These memories seemed to correspond to historical information about real monks who had died.

“What makes these … cases particularly interesting is not only the alleged memories but also the behavioural features that the children display. Each child shows behavior that is considered appropriate and even ideal for monks,” wrote Dr. Haraldsson and Godwin Samarartne in a 1999 paper titled, “Children Who Speak of Memories of a Previous Life as a Buddhist Monk,” published in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research.

Duminda Bandara Ratnayake

Duminda Bandara Ratnayake was born in 1984 in a mountainous, rural area of Sri Lanka known as Thundeniya. When he was three years old, he began to talk about his past life. He claimed:

• he had been a monk at Asgiriya temple, just 16 miles from where he currently lived
• he had owned a red car
• he felt a pain in his chest, then died. He used the word “apawathwuna,” which is only used for the death of a monk.
• he taught apprentice monks
• had an elephant
• he had friends in the Malvatta Temple he used to visit
• he had a money bag and a radio in Asgiriya he wanted back.

His mother was embarrassed to report this, because these items aren’t considered appropriate for a monk to possess.

Ratnayake exhibited no interest in playing with other kids; he just wanted to be a monk. He recited Buddhist stanzas in the ancient language of Sinhalese Buddhism, only used and learned by monks. He lived his life like a monk, carrying his clothes the way a monk does, attending the temple and placing flowers there in the Buddhist fashion, and displaying similar behaviors.

These behaviors permeated his life. He was calm, serene, detached. He told his mother she shouldn’t touch his hands – women aren’t supposed to touch a monk’s hands.

Haraldsson interviewed a local monk who had observed his behaviors and felt his parents could not have taught him these behaviors. So Haroldsson began to search for the monk the boy may have been.

His research led him to Ven. Mahanayaka Gunnepana, a deceased monk who closely fit the boy’s descriptions. According to the memories of other monks who knew Ven. Gunnepana, he: owned a red or reddish brown car, died of a heart attack,was interested in an elephant that one of his disciples brought to Gunnepana’s village. He didn’t own a radio but had something similar – a gramophone. He was fond of music and was apparently  a virtuous monk who strictly observed the rules

Haraldsson thought it was unlikely that the boy learned any of this from his family or others with whom he came into contact.

You can read about the research and some of their other cases here.

from Deviant Art

Whenever there’s a disaster, natural or man-made, there are always stories about people who missed the doomed flight, left town the day before the quake hit, didn’t board the ship that sank, people who avoided the disaster because of a hunch, dream, or vision. Records indicate that 899 people who had booked passage on the Titanic didn’t show up. Why not? Was it purely random blind luck?

In 1960, Dr. Ian Stevenson, now deceased but then a professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia Medical School, researched the paranormal experiences connected to the sinking of the Titanic. Writing about it in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, he found 19 documented cases of passengers who had premonitions about the voyage. Some heeded the premonition and survived and others didn’t heed it and drowned.

“When people dream of accidents correctly and do not take the plane or ship, it is not the actual future they were seeing,” wrote David Bohm to author Michael Talbot in a private communication in 1988. “It was merely something in the present which is implicate and moving toward making that future. In fact, the future they saw differed from the actual future because they altered it. Therefore I think it’s more plausible to say that, if these phenomena exist, there’s an anticipation of the future in the implicate order in the present.”

We’ve written before about Bohm’s implicate order. He theorized the existence of a deeper order in reality called the implicate or enfolded order, a kind of primal soup that births everything in the universe. He believed that in the implicate order all time exists simultaneously. The explicate—the external reality we experience—unfolds from the inner order and then time is perceived in a linear way. Could precognition be the phenomenon that occurs when the implicate and the explicate, the inner and the outer, briefly coincide?

As Talbot noted in his book, The Holographic Universe, “Bohm’s assertion that every human consciousness has its source in the implicate implies that we all possess the ability to see the future.”

This idea is echoed by researchers who conduct various types of experiments to prove —or disprove—the existence of psychic phenomena. Lynn McTaggart, writing in The Intention Experiment, said it may be that our future “already exists in some nebulous state that we actualize in the present. This makes sense, since subatomic particles exist in a state of potential until observed or thought about.” If, as Bohm suggested, consciousness rises from the implicate order, if it operates at what McTaggart calls the “quantum frequency level,” then we can impact moments other than the present.

What’s fascinating is that many of these scientific experiments concerning precognition, what author Dean Radin refers to as presentiment experiments, have parallels in New Age beliefs. From Louise Hay to Esther Hicks, Pam Grout, Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra and others, the core belief is that you get what you concentrate on. The sheer power of your thoughts, emotions and intentions collapse the quantum wave of potential—the possible future—and it enters physical reality as a particle, the future you desire.

People who avoid a disaster because they heed a premonition have created a new future for themselves. So yes, if we pay attention, the future appears to be malleable. But if we’re dealing with issues other than life or death, how malleable is that future?

I’ve often thought about the Many Worlds Theory of quantum physics – the idea that our world and everything in it is constantly splitting into alternative timelines. Or, put in a more personal sense, it’s like Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

But suppose you DO travel both – and then some? The Many Worlds Theory suggests that for every decision and choice you make – to live here and not there, to marry this person and not that person, to try this and not that, to be a mathematician instead of an artist – there’s an alternate timeline where what you didn’t choose is lived out. A mind, blower, right?

Yet, I’m sure that some of you have uncovered skills and talents you didn’t know you had, stuff that came so easily to you it’s as if the information was downloaded directly into your brain and soul. Are you tapping into one of your alternative timelines where you possess that talent?

Can you die on one timeline at a particular minute, date, place, but not on an alternative timeline?

When authors write Dystopian novels, are they tapping into one of those alternative timelines? What was the source of DaVinci’s inventions? In live science check out 5 of his inventions that are relevant today.

The tricky thing with precognition – and synchronicity – is that when you experience it, you may be tapping into a multidimensional self, a you that exists in numerous dimensions and alternative timelines. So, which road do you take?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7CIHFwM3Uo

On two different occasions in the last few weeks, an orb-shaped object has been caught on security cams at the U.S Space Walk Hall of Fame Museum on Pine Street in Titusville, Florida. Charlie Mars, the president of the museum, says he and his staff can’t explain it. “Nor can the fellas who put in the system for us.”

Mars says that both times the security cams caught the orb, the lights and air conditioning were turned off, which is why he dismisses the possibility that the orb is the result of glare or a dust ball.

“There are many items in here that were brought in by people who are no longer with us,” said Mars. “They could be coming back to check on it.”

The museum recently moved into a century-old building that used to be the original county records facility, and some people speculate that the structure might be haunted.

“We have had a number of things like that have occurred in the past 10 or 12 years that we didn’t have an explanation for,” said Mars. “We love having something come in unexplainable. It gives us a chance to interchange with each other and talk about what it could possibly be.”

Check here for the original broadcast on an Orlando TV station, and take a look at some of the comments. They’re nearly as interesting as the video!

Whenever we spend time with our daughter, we find out about new TV shows. Most recently, Megan told us about Wayward Pines. We’ve now watched three episodes and are hooked. The premise, from IMDB, sounds fairly simple and straightforward: 

An FBI agent, played by Matt Dillon, is searching for two missing FBI agents. As the result of a car accident, he ends up in Wayward Pines, Idaho, and quickly discovers he may not ever get alive.

By episode three, it’s obvious that Wayward Pines is not your usual reality. But is it the land of the dead, as in Lost? Is it some bizarre sociological experiment perpetrated by one the government spook agencies? Is it the result of some weird time twist? Right now, any of these or something else entirely, seems plausible.

So, here’s the real world weirdness. After watching episode three, Rob went back to his computer to continue researching the prices for our new auto insurance policies. He noticed on the policy that Progressive emailed a note that included an at fault accident on June 2, 2014.

The only time we have filed a claim on either of our cars is after tropical storm Isaac, in 21012 when our neighborhood was so inundated that on my way home from the gym, my Mazda simply died. I finally managed to get the engine to turn over and coasted into our driveway. The engine was shot and was eventually replaced with a much newer engine that had only 4,000 miles on it. I had to pay the $1,000 deductible and the insurance company paid the rest.

So Rob went online with an employee from the insurance company and asked for details about this alleged June 2, 2014 accident that neither of us could recall, where we were at fault. The accident had supposedly been reported through LexisNexis, a company we’d never heard of.

I poked around on that website for awhile and began to feel really creeped out – like Wayward Pines had followed us out of TV land and into the real world. In Wayward Pines, no one can speak freely, your every word is monitored; this LexisNexis outfit feels like that, a Big Brother company.  While I was thinking this, Rob called out from his office: “It feels like we’re in Wayward Pines. In an alternate reality.”

This was occurring right before and right after Mercury went direct at 6:33 p.m. this evening.  The culprit? Well, there were several. The first was a typo. The insurance report should have read: not at fault. The second was just plain weird. The insurance company employee reported that the accident had happened to our daughter’s car, but no driver was present. No driver? How does that work? As he drilled down deeper, he uncovered the truth: the accident involved a dog. No, the dog was not driving.

On June 2, 2014, our daughter’s dog, Nika, was hit by a driver in Orlando, who then turned around and took her to small claims court for the damage to his car.

The only “claim” Megan had made was to call Progressive to find out if her car insurance would cover the damage to the driver’s car. It got recorded as an accident with no driver in the car, for which we were at fault. In the end, it cost $1200 in vet’s bills and an additional small claims court price of $900 to the guy who hit Nika.

But by the time Mercury had gone direct and the typo and actual facts had been uncovered, we saved nearly $700 in car insurance – and realized we weren’t living in Wayward Pines, but were just experiencing the tail end of a Mercury retrograde that began on May 19 this year, and ended tonight, June 11.

Then we went out to dinner to celebrate the end of the retrograde!

I was searching for a person name Briggs, and came across an interesting article by a David Briggs in the Huffington Post. (Not the same person. Never did find the other Briggs.)

Here’s the gist of the article addresses this question:

Is the paranormal becoming the normal?

The answer, according to three researchers, is yes, at least in the U.S.. More than two-thirds of Americans have paranormal beliefs, according to sociologists Christopher Bader and F. Carson Mencken of Baylor University and Joseph Baker of East Tennessee State University. They report their findings in a recent book, Paranormal America. .

These spiritual seekers are accepting practices and experiences that are not recognized by science and not associated with mainstream religion, say the researchers. However, not everyone is a believer. Interestingly, the more deeply religious you are, the less likely you’ll be curious about UFOs, psychics or Bigfoot. Meanwhile, those with no religious or spiritual beliefs are  likely to be dismissive as well as disinterested.

Statistically, those who report a paranormal belief are not the oddballs anymore. The average American holds slightly more than two paranormal beliefs, report Bader, Mencken and Baker. “What we can say with certainty is that we live in a paranormal America.”

The 2005 Baylor Religion Survey found that women are twice as likely as men to believe in astrology, that people can communicate with the dead (a big reason Medium lasted for seven TV seasons) and that at least some psychics can foresee the future. Men, on the other hand, are more likely to believe in UFOs and Bigfoot.

“Women tend to want to improve themselves, to become better people,” said Bader, who is also a director of the Association for Religion Data Archives. “Men tend to want to go out and capture something, to prove it’s real.” Gatherers and hunters!

Here are some more of their sociological findings:

• Belief in Bigfoot, ghosts, psychic abilities and other paranormal phenomena declines noticeably with increases in age and income.
  • Unmarried and cohabiting individuals are far more likely to embrace the paranormal. Asked whether they have had any of five paranormal experiences from witnessing a UFO to contacting spirits, the typical unmarried respondent claimed close to two experience, while the average married respondent had no paranormal experiences.
  • Republicans are “significantly less interested” in the paranormal than Democrats or independents.

Overall, the researchers said, conventional lifestyles and stakes in conformity are strong predictors of paranormal beliefs, with highly unconventional people the most likely to turn to otherworldly possibilities beyond the realm of traditional religion.

Going out on their own limb, the researchers predict that by 2050 nearly three-quarters of Americans will report at least one paranormal belief.

You can find more on the book in the Huffington Post article here.

What seems apparent, though I’m not sure the researchers say so, is that more people are looking for direct spiritual experiences, not just the word of religious leaders. The sheep are starting to stampede!

We’ve written about the spiritualist community of Cassadaga, Florida on a number of occasions and have mentioned in passing a related community in Upstate New York.  In an article simply called Angels, Anne Streiber recently talked about a visit she and Whitley took to the Lily Dale Assembly, the summer spiritualist community near Cassadaga, New York. They both had readings with medium Gregory Kehn, who told  Whitley something that Kehn could not possibly have known. It resulted in an astonishing synchronicity.

Kehn asked, “Do you remember the time your car died on the highway?” Whitley was  astonished because the comment was both specific and accurate. Indeed he remembered the incident.

Anne describes it this way: “In the early nineties, we were driving toward our cabin when our fancy Volvo suddenly died. Whitley manhandled it over to the side of the road and after a couple of minutes, it started up again. Relieved, we continued on to the tollbooth, which was about a mile away, and went on to the New York State Thruway and then along back roads to the cabin.”

Kehn proceeded to explain that Whitley’s guardian angel had stopped the car because there was a carload of people on the Thruway who would have recognized Whitley. They would’ve followed them home and killed them.

Whitley was telling the story to their son a few days later, while driving the same car. He concluded by saying,”If I’m going to believe a thing like that, I’d need some sort of a sign.” Suddenly, the Volvo’s engine died! Once again, it started up a few moments later. Those two incidents were the only times that car died in the years that they owned it.

Quite a synchronicity. You can read Anne’s entire story here.

…aliens landed in the backyard?

That’s a question that the Statesman Journal of Salem, Oregon asked a group of fourth and fifth graders recently. Since we wrote a book on that very subject: Aliens in the Backyard, we of course were interested in what the kids had to say.

Their answers are hilarious. Here’s a sampling.

Dana Smith, Grade 5, Four Corners

I would teach them math, how to dance and how to eat like a normal person like using plates, spoons, and other things.

Arlet Lopez, Grade 5, Four Corners

I would teach them how to ride a bull, play soccer, and how to get dirty in the mud with pigs.

Kevin Ramos, Grade 5, Four Corners

Three things I would teach friendly aliens about Earth would be sarcasm, music, and animals.

If you want to read more of their responses, look here.

Obviously, these kids need to grow up and read our book!