On a more serious note,conscious or unconscious precognitions could’ve also played a role in why so many passengers cancelled or didn’t show up to take the airplanes that crashed into the World Trade Center.
According to American Airlines records, one hundred and sixty-four reservations were made for flight 11 departing from Boston on September 11, 2001. Sixty-five people canceled their reservations prior to departure, and an additional seventeen persons were no shows. Similarly, one hundred and sixteen reservations were made on flight 77 that left from Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C. that same day. Fifty-four people cancelled their reservations, and three more were no shows. In other words, people were not scrambling board those planes that day.
When we lived in Venezuela, the school most of the American kids attended was called Campo Alegre and it was known as the American School. That’s how it looked back in the day. It had been created by the oil companies that hired and brought in American employees and their families. Most of our teachers were imported from the U.S.
But the school only went up to ninth grade and after that, the choices were somewhat limited. So my dad’s company, Creole, a subsidiary of Exxon, offered an attractive option – they would pay for your kids to attend boarding school. So for 10th and 11th grade, I attended a girls’ boarding school in Massachusetts. This was real culture shock. I met very wealthy kids – heiresses, and kids whose parents were in the diplomatic corps in places like Pakistan, and then just your plain ole’ variety of rich kids whose fathers were the CEOs of major New York corporations. This is how Northampton looks today:
I lived in one of the houses on campus, with a girl from Darien, Connecticut whose mother had been a former model, and an exotic looking girl, an American whose father was a diplomat in Pakistan. Phyllis and Randall. Next door lived a rebel and rogue, a rich girl named Portia. She was from New Rochelle, New York and became my closest friend. From her, I learned that rules could and should be broken.
If lights out was at 9, then at 9:02 p.m. you should sneak down to Holly’s room on the second floor and have a party. If and when the housemother heard the ruckus and came to investigate, you should hide under beds and inside of closets. She called me Swartz, a takeoff from my maiden name, and I called her Porsh.
On the weekends, when we were allowed to sign out of the campus and explore the town, Porsh and I often jotted down some bogus destination in town – a dress shop, for instance, or Friendly’s Ice Cream store. Then we headed wherever we wanted, which was usually to the Smith College campus. I don’t remember what we did on the campus other than walk around and study people. But to me, these excursions were delicious precisely because they were forbidden.
When my parents move to the U.S. in my junior year, I knew that would be my final year at boarding school. Sure enough, I spent my senior year in high school in South Florida, and hated most of it. At one point in that year, I received a call from Pinkerton Detective Agency and then from the FBI, asking if I knew Portia______. She apparently had run away from boarding school and someone had told the feds I might know where she was. I didn’t. But I was sure that wherever she’d gone, it was an adventure and I was sorry I’d missed it.
Turned out that Porsh had run away and gotten married.
We reconnected several times some years back, when she was living in northern California, happily married to her third husband, the proud mother of a son from her first marriage. Porsh and I and our husbands sat on a wide balcony of a restaurant that overlooked the Pacific coast and talked and talked.
We’re friends on Facebook, a fact I’d forgotten until just tonight when she popped into my mind. If our lives from birth to death are a moving, breathing depiction of who we are in this second, then Porsh is one of those not so subtle influences in my life, the rebellious blond who was smarter and more daring and adventurous than the rest of us. She’s what Carl Jung would call an archetype, wild and unpredictable and always living according to her own rules, her own code.
And time and again, those traits have worked their way into the women in my novels. Thanks, Porsh! Everyone should know a rogue, a rebel!
We’ve written many posts about synchronicities that occur during transitional periods in our lives – birth and death, marriage and divorce, a move, career change, financial ups and downs. This synchro was connected to a death and was sent to us by a friend whom we’ll call Tom because he wishes to remain anonymous.
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Yesterday I came across what I thought would be classified as a synchronicity, with its basis in an unfortunate situation. My mother-in-law passed away yesterday, but it was expected as she’d been diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer in May (never smoked a day in her life, but was around some secondhand smoke).
She passed away yesterday exactly at noon. However, the nurse had to call the doctor to report the passing, then he would give the official time based on when he received the call. She passed away in her home as they felt it best she stay there. The nurse was heading to her car at the time, so it took her a few minutes to go back inside, then call the doctor. He declared it official at 12:10:43, ten minutes and forty-three seconds after noon.
Her birth date was December 10, 1943.
Would that be considered a synchro?
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Definitely! We’ve heard stories about clocks stopping at the moment that the loved one dies, a photo of the person falling off the wall at the moment of death, loud, booming sounds without any apparent cause that resound when the person dies. Bernard Beitman, a psychiatrist and visiting professor at the University of Virginia, started choking one night just as his father was choking to death on the other side of the country. It seems there are infinite ways that synchronicity manifests itself at these pivotal transitional points.
Our daughter is presently house-hunting in Orlando for a new place to live. Last week, she found what she thought was the perfect place, ideal neighborhood, three bedrooms, two bathrooms, pet friendly, with a fenced backyard where her dog can run and play.
The woman told Megan she selects renters based on who has the highest creditrating. Since Megan hasn’t found a roommate yet, we agreed to co-sign on the lease and submitted our applications for a credit and background check. We felt she had a good shot at this and she was supposed to find out around the time we were going to Orlando help her out with her second Wine Walk.
This event happens ever second Thursday in Orlando. Artists come from all over Central Florida and exhibit their wares. People who attend – anywhere from 300-700- buy a $10 ticket to the wine walk. It entitles them to free drinks along the wine walk route, where all these artists have their exhibits. This time, Megan was invited to set up on the front porch of a dog bakery, where she has painted pet portraits for the owners. It’s an ideal spot with a built in audience.
The day before, though, we’d found out that Megan had come in second in the credit rating so she hadn’t gotten the house. It struck us as odd that an owner would judge a tenant worthy based only on a credit rating. What about how you feel about the prospective tenant? What kind of impression did the person make on you? Megan and the owner had gotten along so well that she ended up commissioning two pet Christmas ornaments from her. At any rate, during the day leading up to the wine walk that evening, we spent most of our time house-hunting on Zillow and other sites.
The wine walk went great and we were hopeful:
This morning before we left, Megan said she’d gotten an email from the owner of another house that interested her and was going to see the place that afternoon. The location was better, the rent – with a roommate – would be what she’s paying now, and even though it had only one bathroom, there were three bedrooms and a large yard
Now, here’s the synchro. This house had become available just today. Back in November, the woman rented the place to a fireman and a paramedic. Even though she really liked the two young women who had seen the place before the two men, the guys had the highest credit scores of the prospective tenants. They were supposed to move into the house in January, but the paramedic changed his mind and the deal fell through the very day she emailed Megan.
The woman laughed when Megan told her what had happened with the first house. “I should’ve selected the two women, but instead I went with the highest credit rating. Then the deal falls through. I’ll never again go strictly on credit rating.
As Megan was leaving, someone pulled up in front of the house to inquire about it. The owner told them she was pretty sure she’d just found the right tenant. I take this as a confirmation synchro that the house is the right one for her. Now we’ll wait and see what unfolds.
These are great anagrams. I noticed this list on a FB synchronicity site a few hours after I’d stumbled on what I call a counter-anagram. That would be when the re-arranged word reflects opposite characteristics, rather than similar ones.
I was working on a chapter of Sensing the Future, our upcoming book, when I noticed that two names of paranormal researchers were anagrams. However, one of them is a strong advocate and defender of the reality of psi phenomenon and the other is a skeptic-debunker. They are Dean Radin and James Randi: Radin/Randi. I’m not sure they would accept that one in the Anagram Society, but I have to chuckle over the magician Randi realizing that his name, with a minor shuffle, becomes Radin and visa versa.
On the night after Thanksgiving, Megan had some of her friends over, all twentysomethings. They love card and board games, and this evening they were playing something called Word Whimsy,2the game of outrageous answers.
Rob had fallen asleep and I was working in my office when Megan suddenly rushed in, excited. “Mom, you’ve got to see this synchro.”
“See it where?”
“These cards that came up.”
Synchro is the magic word around this house, so of course I got up and hurried after her into the dining room. “Here was the question/issue.” Megan points at the top card, a red card with a message that reads: If we were all children, this would frighten us.
Megan’s friends are snickering and giggling as she gestures at the 4 cards beneath the main card. And yes, this is somewhat ribald, folks, so if you’re easily offended, don’t look any farther. But if you want a good laugh, here are the words:
Boner
Cock
Balls
Weiner
And here’s the pic to prove it:
This sure has the trickster’s handprints all over it!
That’s the name of a song by Elvis Costello. I hadn’t heard it in many years. In fact, I don’t think I’d heard any Elvis Costello songs for a very long time. But a couple of days after the Paris terrorist attacks, I heard ‘What’s so Funny…’ on the radio and realized it fit well as an answer to terrorism.
Later, as I headed to the gym, I decided to create ‘Elvis Costello Radio’ on Pandora on my iPhone. I did so and plugged in my earbuds. Oddly enough, in the hour I was at the gym, I only heard one Elvis C song before the Pandora program switched to other songs that supposedly fit well in style and ‘era’ to Elvis C. The song I did hear was ‘Allison – My Aim is True.’
But that wouldn’t be the end of Elvis Costello for the day. That evening, Trish and I decided to watch an episode of the television series, Minority Report, which is based on the Stephen Spielberg movie of the same name. We’d been looking forward to this new series this fall because we’re working on a book about precognition and that’s what Minority Report is about – specifically three ‘precogs’ who detect crimes before they happen. In the TV series, however, the program has been shut down. I guess solving murders before they happened raised some irritating civil rights issues. So ten years have passed and one of the male precogs starts working freelance with a female police detective.
Unfortunately, we haven’t found the series too interesting. I guess we’re not in the proper demographic since the detective and her female buddy are both in their 20s and seem – to us – way too young for the roles they’re playing. But maybe in 2065 the detectives are young and hot. We watched the third episode that night, hoping it would get better, but basically watching it because it deals with precognition.
So in this episode the suspected killer at the climax is about to kill a young woman named Allison and as he aims his gun at her forehead, we hear – yes – Elvis Costello singing ‘Allison – My Aim is True.’ Fortunately for Allison, the would-be killer is interrupted before he fires. You don’t need to know anything more about that episode…or any of the others, for that matter.
For me, the sequence of events were an Elvis Costello synchronicity and a precognition – an unconscious one. So I experienced a precognition that involved a television series about precognition, which we were watching because of our book in the works is on precognition.
I don’t think we’re going to use this story in the book, though, probably because it’s one of those stories that’s really only of interest to the person who experienced it. That’s what I realized after read what I wrote here. But now I’ve already written it…so here it is.
Before we start this post, there are several questions we would like you to answer. Please don’t Google anything yet. Just mark the appropriate response.
1) Have you heard of The Mandela Effect
Yes
No
2) Nelson Mandela died in Johannesburg in 2013.
Yes
No
3) Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s.
Yes
No
4) Do you know who Fiona Broome is?
Yes
No
Rob and I first heard about the Mandela Effect from Sharee Geo, who co-costs a radio show on Truth Frequency Radio, with her husband Chris. Rob and I were recently guests on their show and before our scheduled appearance, she emailed us suggestions about what we might discuss:
Synchronicity and Meditation are both hot topics on the show. However, we’ve gone even a little further lately with ideas about a holographic reality that uses synchronicity to reinforce reality, along with phenomena like the Mandela effect – The idea that something has happened to our “timeline” sometime in the past that is now changing small things in our present reality/timeline.
Rob and I have experienced things like she was suggesting, but weren’t aware that it actually had a name, so I started Googling it. Nelson Mandela is one of my uncontested heros, so yes, this interested me. This article, from a website called Odyssey, explains it as a conspiracy theory about how people often remember events that didn’t happen in the way they remember. Another website calls the Mandela Effect a theory about parallel universes. This theory makes more sense to me than any conspiracy.
The phrase first appeared online in 2010, when blogger Fiona Bloom described an experience she’d had at a Dragon Con conference. She realized that other people had a memory completely different from hers about when Nelson Mandela had died. She believed – remembered – that he died in prison in the 1980s. She remembered the news clips of his funeral, the mourning in the country, rioting in the cities, even Winnie Mandela’s speech. Then she discovered he was actually alive
Fiona went on to discover other widely held alternative memories that include Star Trek episodes that never existed, and the death of Billy Graham. Then, in 2012, another blogger, Reece, who also happened to be a physicist, described a similar dichotomy about the spelling of the old cartoon The Barenstein Bears. That’s the spelling I remember. But these days, the spelling is The Barenstain Bears. And Reece the physicist provides a theory of the universe that would account for this.
I propose that the universe is a 4-dimensional complex manifold. If you don’t se habla math jargon, that means I propose the 3 space dimensions and the 1 time dimensions are actually in themselves complex, meaning they take values of the form a+ib, part “real” and part “imaginary”. Within this 4D manifold, there are sixteen hexadectants (like quadrants, but 16 of them), corresponding to whether we consider only the real or imaginary part of each of the four dimensions. In our particular hexadectant, the three space dimensions are real, and the time dimension is imaginary.
I honestly have no idea what any of that means except that he seems to be talking about a four-dimensional universe that sounds more like string theory- with multiples realities sandwiched alongside ours. But to keep things simple, let’s call them parallel universes, similar to the idea put forth in the 2011 independent movie Another Earth.
Just for the record, I remember this cartoon as The Berenstein Bears. Here’s the You Tube video about the Bears. In the course of this video, the narrator notes how he went back into cartoon archives and found that the spelling changed some tine between April and August 5, 2001. In other words, the spelling changed anywhere from three weeks to five months before 9-11, when the world did change.
Interestingly, Rob and I experienced something like this when we were house hunting in early 1999. My dad was living with us then, my mother was in an Alzheimer’s unit, and we were looking for a house large enough to accommodate the four of us. At the time, we lived in a 3-bedroom house in Boynton Beach. Megan was sleeping in the living room because she had turned her bedroom over to my dad, and Rob’s office was in the hallway.
One of the places we looked at was in Jupiter, Florida about 25 miles north of where we live now. The house and the property, about two acres, were terrific. We loved the place. It had two master bedrooms, one on each side of the pool, with a wide open kitchen that opened to a spacious family room with a great fireplace. We recalled that the owner was a pilot. But it was too expensive.
Six or eight months later, on another house-hunting Sunday, we ran across the house again and eagerly went by for a look. Same address, but the house and property were totally different. It wasn’t the same house. We asked the Realtor about it, if any changes had been made to the place in the last six months, if the zoning had changed, the addresses. Nope, nope. Nope.
In Robert Moss’s book, The Boy Who Died and Came Back, he describes a number of similar experiences he has had over the years. He’s aware of a number of parallel selves- the Robert Moss who continues to write thrillers, a Robert Moss who is living with Australian Aborgines, a Moss who is a shaman. The idea here is that’s if the Multiple Worlds theory of quantum physics is true, then for ever decision we make, the path we didn’t choose shoots off on its own and we live it out. And sometimes, the lives bleed into what we call our present reality.
Is it possible that the Mandela Effect is tangible evidence of these parallel lives? I find the idea tantalizing!
In writing Sensing the Future, our book on precognition, I’m confirming what I already suspected: that our concept of time and our approach to science are subject to revision.
In my research, I always go to a book’s index first and scan the listings under P, looking for precognition. Most of the time, if it’s there at all, it’s as a footnote on a particular page. It seems that many scientists are uncomfortable with the term precognition but not with the word premonition. Rupert Sheldrake is a notable exception.
In The Sense of Being Stared At, he has several chapters on precognition. He admits that precognition is the most puzzling of all psychic phenomena. “How could we possibly sense something that has not yet occurred?… It raises deep questions about freedom and determinism. If we know something is going to happen, does that mean the future is fixed? And if the future is fixed, does that mean free will is an illusion?”
It’s challenging to write about precognition without delving into this question. But Sheldrake does a masterful job of explaining that the old paradigm of a mechanistic universe has been turned on its head through recent discoveries in quantum physics. Through attention and intention, he says, “our minds stretch out into the world beyond our bodies…Even the relatively determined near future is predictable only in terms of probabilities.” Take weather forecasts, for instance. Or economic forecasts. Or the forecasts that insurers use. “Indeterminacy lies at the heart of quantum physics. Predictions are possible only in terms of probability. My intentions affect the future.”
Interestingly, his thoughts are echoed in the Seth material, more than 6,000 pages that were channeled by author Jane Roberts and resulted in more than 20 books on the nature of reality. Seth described himself as an “energy personality essence no longer focused in physical existence,” and the basis of his material is that we create our own realities through our intentions, expectations, beliefs – through our consciousness. He stated that every earthly event played out in all its probable states and that we are interconnected with these multidimensional/parallel universes. We just aren’t tuned in yet to that fact.
In this scenario, then, there would be a world in which the terrorists never crashed planes into the World Trade Center, where Al Gore had won the presidency, where the tragedies in Paris never happened. There would be a world where you married your childhood sweetheart and lived happily ever after. This idea, the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics, has been around since 1957, but has gained traction in recent years.
Every consciousness, according to Seth, “is dependent on upon every other. The strength of one adds to the strength of all. The weakness of one weakens the whole. The energy of one recreates the whole. The striving of one increases the potentiality of everything that is, and this creates responsibility upon every consciousness.” In other words, folks, we’re all in this together.
Seth also noted that precognition occurs in evolution so that a species can prepare itself now for changes that will be necessary in the future. Is that why so many people had precognitions about 9-11? About the Boston Marathon bombings? About other man-made and natural disasters?
“The fact is that each of you create your own physical reality: and en masse you create both the glories and the terrors that exist within your earthly experience.”
So, I’m discovering that Sensing the Future is a book in which quantum physics and metaphysics run for awhile on parallel tracks and then blend seamlessly together.
This synchronicity comes from Terry Crowley, a writer we met at the Tallahassee Writer’s Conference last spring. We’ve posted a couple of her synchros before. This one is about how some decisions/situations haunt us for years and then some synchro happens that clears it up! I’m not sure where this falls in the scheme of synchronicity – helpful synchro? Resolution synchro? I think it’s a meld of both.
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One morning, on the way home from running errands, Terry was pondering relationships and thought of an old friend she hadn’t heard from in years. “I didn’t magically hear from her; that’s not the synchro. What I was thinking about was a situation that happened between us.
“I had a meeting I was in charge of and had to attend, but my friend wanted me to be in her wedding. I decided to change the date of the meeting so I could attend the wedding, but then she changed the date of the wedding to the same date of the meeting again! I was now between a rock and a hard place. I decided I had to decline her invitation and attend the meeting instead.”
For years, Terry beat herself up about this decision. She finally decided to look at O Magazine, which she never had time to do these days. “One of my favorite columnists is Martha Beck, so I turned immediately to her article Right This Ways! (plural “s”), which talks about how some social decisions are just impossible to make, but she provides some ideas on how to make those decisions. Beck described the EXACT scenario I faced 43 years ago!! The exact decision that I have been periodically beating myself up about for all of those years. To make matters worse, I later found out that several of the attendees at the meeting were mad because they had to miss another wedding they wanted to attend, too!
“Thankfully, I can now let this no-win scenario go. I tried to do the my best for my friend. The circumstance was out of my control, even though I did my best to control it, and much to the chagrin of others. This was a happy synchro to have had because I can now stop second-guessing myself the next time this pops into my head. The article also made me realize how much I have been thinking about this decision from so long ago!”
