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Signs & symbols surround us and many of them hold messages that we should heed. Guidelines. Insights. Hints about the future that may transpire.

In October when we were in Asheville, we went into a shop where Megan decorated a ceramic plate that was a tribute to and a gift for her roommate, Erin. I don’t recall what it said, but do remember that it was a nice tribute to their friendship. The plate was to be delivered once it was fired.

A few weeks later Rob and I were visiting Megan and noticed the ceramic plate from Asheville on the counter. It was broken and chipped. A tube of super glue sat beside it. “What happened?” Rob asked.

“Oh, Erin put it in the dishwasher and it broke when we took it out,” Megan replied. “I’m going to fix it with super glue.”

Later that evening, Rob remarked, “That’s not a good sign, Trish, about her continuing to live here.”

“Oh, c’mon,” I said, “They’ve already agreed that she’ll sign a new contract on December 2. It’s fine. The broken plate is a fluke.”

Erin, after all, is a woman Megan has known for a decade, since she was 16 and she and Erin were interning at Dolphins Plus in Key Largo. They maintained a friendship over the years and when Megan moved to Orlando, she and Megan reconnected. In late 2014, Erin’s parents bought a great little house on an acre of land that backed up a lake, and Erin asked Megan to live with her. Nika, Megan’s dog, had a great yard to run around in and chase squirrels and Megan had her art room filled with paintings. An ideal setup. The house was close to Megan’s dog walking clients and her Paint Nite venues. She has been really happy in this house.

But Rob kept referring back to the broken plate, how it was like a symbol from a dream that you’re supposed to pay attention to. We had both been reading Robert Moss’s book, The Boy Who Died and Came Back, and I felt we were unduly influenced by it. I mean, c’mon, sometimes events are just stuff that happens, right?

Shortly before Thanksgiving, Megan and I returned from a trip to Asheville, North Carolina, where we attended an Abraham-Hicks two-day conference. The conference was wonderful, the trip was great, but as soon as we walked into Megan’s place in Orlando, there was that plate still on the counter chipped and broken, still not repaired. That night when Erin got home from work, she seemed strangely preoccupied, uneasy, and I felt that maybe she resented my presence there as Megan’s mom. She said she was just stressed from work. I felt otherwise.

I kept obsessing about the broken plate, that broken tribute to a friendship.Fast forward to November 30. Megan had arrived back in Orlando after the Thanksgiving holidays and had gone out and bought a Christmas tree for the house. Our neighbor had given us some Christmas ornaments that I passed on to Megan and I’d found some Christmas lights on sale that I passed on to her.

But when she walked in the house that evening, Erin informed Megan that her brother had gotten a job in Orlando and wanted to live in the house and Megan would have to move out. All this, despite the fact that they had discussed the renewed contract and living together for another four or five years. She had known this since before Thanksgiving- when I’d felt her unease.

Erin’s argument? He’s my brother, what can I say? Well, the only thing to say here is that Erin’s parents own the house.

My dad bought me my first property, a one bedroom condo in Vero Beach, back in the day when 15 grand was a lot of money. He never tried to control what I did with that place, who I invited there, who I lived with, nothing. It was mine. My rent went to him. When I sold the place, I kept the profit and used it for a down payment on another condo, in Fort Lauderdale. In other words there were never strings attached.

Rob recognized the sign and Megan and I refused to acknowledge.

I don’t know if the friendship is as broken as the plate.But the living arrangement is broken. The big question now is: what’s next? We’ve found a one bedroom-place that may work, in the same general area in Orlando. We’ll see what signs and symbols have to say and proceed from there. Never again will I dismiss a sign as some random event. As Robert Hopcke said in his book by the same name, There Are No Accidents. We do not live in a random universe. The only question is simple: Are we paying attention?

If there’s no trickery involved in this video – and it doesn’t look like there is – then this 9-year-old girl is astonishing!

If I were going to have my dreams analyzed by a psychiatrist, I would choose Bernard Beitman, a visiting professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia. Never mind that he claims he is no expert in dreams. He’s a Jungian, who also happens to be the first psychiatrist since Jung to embark on a serious study of synchronicity. His book, Connecting with Coincidence, will be published in March 2016, by the same folks who published Chicken Soup of the Soul.

Dr. Beitman also blogs for Psychology Today, where this particular article appeared.

Beitman believes that coincidences can be useful to psychotherapists in their treatment of patients. As he develops his coincidence studies, he looks to the usefulness of coincidences. “I analyze the role people play in creating their own coincidences. While shaping this previously abstract, philosophical topic into a more solid science, magic is not lost on me. In fact, it is that transcendental feeling created by coincidences that started my quest. I suppose this is the case to a certain degree in all scientific exploration,” he writes.

When Beitman was in his late twenties, he felt like a kid who had found his way into a “strange new land that it seemed few people had visited.” Sound familiar? You bet. Many of us who experience synchronicity have felt this very thing. Bernard writes that he felt like he’d wandered into the “Coincidence Forest,” where magic resonated. “I ran back through the tunnel to tell other people what I saw. Most of them did not know what I was talking about.”

Years ago, I recall saying this very thing to my former college roommate. “Don’t you ever wonder how it all fits together?” I asked.

She was a family court judge at the time, a woman who determined whether you would get custody of your children, how your joint assets would be split in the divorce, that kind of meaty, fundamental stuff. And she replied, “Sure. I wonder. But I don’t obsess about it, Trish.”

And yes, maybe there is some obsession in here about synchronicity. It’s such a strange but familiar phenomenon that when it happens repeatedly in your life, aren’t you compelled to figure it out? Or, at the least, to figure out what it means for you?

When Beitman was younger, he woke up choking one night. He later found out that it happened at the exact time that his father was choking to death in his home thousands of miles away.  His name for this type of synchroncity is simulpathity – feeling another’s distress at a distance. It’s synchronicity and empathy slamming together at the same moment. Mothers often experience this kind of thing with their children. Identical twins experience it, as we wrote about here. But any of us can experience it with people we love.

For Jung, this journey started with the scarab beetle that appeared on the window of his office just as a patient was relating a dream about such a beetle. He opened the window, a beautiful symbolic gesture that enabled his patient to make the connection between her dreams and the real world.

As Beitman says: “Jung saw a need for ‘human understanding’ to break through his patient’s resistance to his treatment. Though it isn’t clear what ‘human understanding’ meant to Jung in this case, we can infer that it contrasts with the excessive rationality that Jung says characterized the patient.   It is clear that he sees the coincidence as a way of achieving his therapeutic goal.”

In his study of coincidence, Beitman has found that its creation “favors the prepared mind.” In other words are you open and receptive to meaningful coincidence?

Jung, says Beitman, was a conduit for the scarab coincidence. “Had he not opened the window and let the beetle in, the connection might never have been made between the woman’s inner and outer worlds. The scarab beetle also had significance for Jung. It had appeared previously as a symbol in his own visions. Perhaps this added to his instrumental role in creating the coincidence.”

What Beitman hopes to do with his book and with Coincidence Studies is to illustrate how meaningful coincidence is an actual force that enables us to live more creative, happy, and loving lives.

Sounds good to me. I cant wait to read his book!

HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL OUR FRIENDS IN THE U.S. !!

History has a version of Thanksgiving about pilgrims and the new world. But for me, it’s always been a time to be thankful for what exists in my life now.

Rob and Megan: hub and daughter on the dog beach in Jupiter, Florida. That thing in the sky is a kite; kite boarders were everywhere today.

Our dogs, Nika and Noah:  at the dog beach.  I think Noah is whispering in her ear and trying to get her to do something she doesn’t want to do.

The beach: This is the dog beach. No leashes. See all those prints in the sand? Dog prints! The wind was really blowing and the surf was rough, but it wasn’t hot!

Nika, pooped after excursion at the dog beach, resting her head on Noah’s butt.

Books: we’re surrounded by them. Here are two of our messy bookshelves.

Writing:  that’s my dad’s ancient typewriter. I wrote my first 5 unpublished novels on a similar machine. This artifact reminds me of where I started.

That redhead in the background is Esther Hicks. Megan and I attended a two-day Abraham-Hicks workshop in Asheville, North Carolina, at the Grove Park Inn.   It was strange, surreal, and powerful. But that’s a separate post.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL OUR FRIENDS IN THE U.S. But honestly, if the day is about gratitude, isn’t it international? Universal?

We’ve written about travel-related synchronicities  here a number of times, even wrote a related book called The Syncronicity Highway. When traveling it seems more opportunities arise for meaningful coincidence. Here’s a good one we noticed on Facebook that was taken from a London newspaper—a doppelganger synchro.

These two men are not brothers. On the flight in late October from London to Galway, 32-year-old Neil Douglas was surprised to find a man that looked exactly like him sitting in his seat. The doppelganger, 35-year-old Robert Stirling, had changed seats so that a couple could sit together.

“I asked him to move and when the guy looked up, I thought: “Holy s***, he looks like me” Douglas told Daily Mail. “I later checked into my hotel in Galway to find my doppelganger checking into the same hotel ahead of me…We ended up socializing and quite a few people pointed out that we looked very similar.”

Cheers!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvqtO6lgFyI

The title of the post doesn’t do this guy justice. This man may be the paragon of synchronicity thru passion, creativity, art.

This photo was taken inside a bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina, one of the dog friendliest cities I’ve ever visited. Noah isn’t quite sure what he’s doing inside a place like this, which is expressly forbidden in bookstores in South Florida, but he eventually relaxes into it.

The Arcade Bookstore has a coffee and wine bar inside, and zillions of amazing books – mostly used. Here, I found autographed first editions by Carl Sandburg and a number of other authors. I realized these books were part of people’s passion for rare first editions. They were pricey, but fascinating to see. I have recently been re-reading William Goldman’s Control, and  in the store found a signed edition of Marathon Man, which I bought for ten bucks.

This is the kind of bookstore where book people love to wander, browse, sample, and sit awhile. There are tables, chairs, and couches everywhere. Here, book people walk around in a kind of stupor, touching, marveling, opening books at random. I could live in here. I often wonder if places like this are found in the afterlife.

Everything in the store is labeled, well-organized, by genres, authors, topics. This is the kind of bookstore where you and your dog arrive, find a book, buy a coffee, and settle in for the day.

The Arcade Bookstore is vastly different from some of the other bookstores in town, more traditional stores that don’t allow dogs. Inside, these stores have a lack of couches and chairs that invite you to sit down and stick around for awhile. Although these stores are independent, they followed the same type of bureaucracy that chain bookstores do.

I checked out the astrology section in this other bookstore, for instance, to see if Unloocking the Secrets to Scorpio was included. It wasn’t, so I approached the clerk at the front desk and handed him a postcard for the book. He gave me the name of the head buyer and suggested that I email her. I did. I never got a reply. In my mind, her silence became synonymous with the fact that they don’t allow dogs in their store- i.e., not too friendly.

When this connection first occurred to me, my  left brain dismissed it as silly, irrelevant. But my right brain knows better. Part of that is because not too long after we left the bookstore, we headed toward the general store, where Rob and I took turns waiting outside with the dogs. While I was out there, an employee came up to me and said the dogs were welcome inside. This general store is larger than the bookstore, has more delicate things that can be broken by unruly dogs. But the dogs behaved just fine.

And that’s how it is with dogs. They’re curious but not naturally destructive. They listen, they understood, they go with the flow regardless of how strange it is to them. They would be more inclined to carry off merchandise from the general store than from the bookstore that won’t allow them inside.

Overall, I was truly impressed by the welcome mat that Asheville has set out for dogs, bowls of water outside most places, treats for the dogs, lots of pats. They ate it up. And so did we.

Here’s a Jungian description of terrorism. Worth reading.

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“Terrorism is a manifestation of the psyche. It is time we recognized the psyche as an autonomous factor in world affairs.

“The psychological root of terrorism is a fanatical resentment – a quasi-psychotic hatred originating in the depths of the archetypal psyche and therefore carried by religious (archetypal) energies. A classic literary example is Melville’s Moby Dick. Captain Ahab, with his fanatical hatred of the White Whale, is a paradigm of the modern terrorist.

“Articulate terrorists generally express themselves in religious (archetypal) terminology. The enemy is seen as the Principle of Objective Evil (Devil) and the terrorist perceives himself as the “heroic” agent of divine or Objective Justice (God). This is an archetypal inflation of demonic proportions which temporarily grants the individual almost superhuman energy and effectiveness. To deal with terrorism effectively we must understand it.

“We need a new category to understand this new phenomenon. These individuals are not criminals and are not madmen although they have some qualities of both. Let’s call them zealots. Zealots are possessed by transpersonal, archetypal dynamisms deriving from the collective unconscious. Their goal is a collective, not a personal one. The criminal seeks his own personal gain; not so the zealot. In the name of a transpersonal, collective value – a religion, an ethnic or national identity, a “patriotic” vision, etc. – they sacrifice their personal life in the service of their “god.” Although idiosyncratic and perverse, this is fundamentally a religious phenomenon that derives from the archetypal, collective unconscious. Sadly, the much-needed knowledge of this level of the psyche is not generally available. For those interested in seeking it, I recommend a serious study of the psychology of C.G. Jung.

– from the Archetype of the Apocalypse (1999), “Editor’s Preface,” p. xvii.

When Carl Jung met with Sigmund Freud in Vienna in 1909, the two men had met before and exchanged numerous letters about their respective views on psychology, the mind, and the unconscious. Even though they were still friends, there was an undercurrent of tension between them that Jung later attributed to the differences in their views about the human psyche. Jung’s research had begun to diverge from Freud’s and was leading him deeper into the world of parapsychology myth, religion, and symbolism.

At this particular meeting, Jung asked Freud about his views on precognition and parapsychology in general. Freud rejected it all as nonsense and did so, as Jung wrote in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, & Reflections, “in terms of so shallow a positivism that I had difficulty in checking the sharp retort on the tip of my tongue.”

Suddenly, Jung felt a curious sensation, as if his diaphragm was made of iron and was turning scorching hot. Then there was a loud cracking sound in a nearby bookcase and both men bolted to their feet, alarmed that the bookcase was about to topple over on them. Jung exclaimed, “There, that is an example of a so-called catalytic exteriorization phenomenon.”

“This is sheer bosh,” Freud retorted.

Jung said that it wasn’t and predicted that in a moment, it would happen again. “Sure enough, no sooner had I said the words than the same detonation went off in the bookcase. To this day, I do not know what gave me this certainty. But I knew beyond all doubt that the report would come again.”

Freud just stared at him and Jung didn’t have any idea what the look meant. “In any case, this incident aroused his mistrust of me.

What’s fascinating about this instance of precognition is that it happened so quickly after Jung had made the prediction and probably reinforced his belief that synchronicities peak during times when deep unconscious forces are activated.

But we don’t have to wait until life is locked in some sort of crisis before we hook into the future. In our daily lives, we’re surrounded by signs, symbols, and patterns that carry hints about our future. Sometimes the message is obvious, sometimes it requires interpretation.

In The Three Only Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence & Imagination, author and dream researcher Robert Moss recounts an incident that happened to him shortly before the stock market crash in 1987. He was in an airplane restroom when he accidentally dropped a wallet with his credit card and checks from a brokerage account into the toilet. He barely managed to snatch it out before it was flushed away.

“Had this been a dream, I might have written a one-liner like: ‘If you’re not very careful, your stock market investments will go down the toilet.’ Unfortunately, in 1987, I was not yet fully aware that incidents in waking life speak to us exactly like dream symbols. I failed to harvest the message, neglected to take the appropriate action to limit the risk to my brokerage account – and saw a large percentage of my net worth go down the toilet.”

The incident was clearly a hint about the future, a warning specifically about his assets, but Moss didn’t get the message.

I first read this story in 2007 shortly after the book was released, and my first thought was, OMG, how many messages like this have I missed? A lot. But I may have avoided some really critical oversights because I’m a book hound.

When I was a freshman in college, I bought a copy of the Richard Wilhelm edition of the I Ching, in which Jung wrote the introduction and first explained his theory of synchronicity. After reading it several dozen times, and then devouring everything I could find that Jung had written, I finally understood that the universe is alive. We are inundated with signs and symbols, portents and omens, messages both great and small. If you tune in and listen with your heart, this is the stuff that guides, directs, and comforts you. It confirms, warns, laughs at and with you. It offers wisdom, solace, and a real, tangible sense that everything and everyone is connected.

Philip Merry, who has a happy name, sent an e-mail to me and others that combines synchronicity and angels…and he wonders if synchronicity could be about angelic intervention. I’ll let him tell his story.

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“I am currently doing my PhD on ‘Synchronicity and Leadership’ as well as running a global leadership consulting business. I am doing the PhD because I have in my own life come across many examples of out of the blue experiences that lead to synchronistic events. Carl Jung who gave us the term synchronicity said that synchronicity is the coming together of two events which are meaningful to the observer and a-causal in nature, meaning that event A did not cause event B in the logical sense.

“What I am interested in as well as the big synchronistic events which you will read more of once my dissertation is published, are the small supportive events that happen day by day. Small things that support you on your journey and take care of you.

“I call them everyday miracles.

“I hear the skeptics guffaw: ‘What, are you saying that you have a personal guardian angel?’

“Maybe I am saying exactly that. Let me give you an example.

“Yesterday I was traveling home from Guangzhou to Singapore. It had been a demanding two days conducting four long in-depth coaching sessions. On top of this I have hurt my knee, which meant that every step on my right foot sent a shockwave up my leg. Walking was difficult hence I had booked a wheelchair when I arrived at the airport in Guangzhou.

“I was on the return leg to Singapore and at the airport dragging myself the long distance to the gate. I was feeling sorry for myself, feeling unsupported and basically in a victim, “poor me” mode.

“As I arrived at the gate the young Singapore Airlines steward looked at my ticket and said, ‘Mr. Merry I see that you booked a wheelchair yesterday, would you like us to do the same when you arrive in Singapore?’ My first thought was, ‘Wow, their system allows them to track passengers who need additional help. Not only that, but they had a system allowing them to allocate one person to be looking out for me on arrival at the gate, and then book a wheelchair for me at Changi Airport.

“Thankfulness began to flood my body. I felt warm kindness from the young steward, and my victim mentality began to fade away.

“I walked towards the plane comforted, but still feeling raw and weak. I looked to my left at the bag a passenger was carrying. On the side of the bag were these words:

Always remember you’re braver than you believe

Stronger than you seem

Smarter than you think

And twice as beautiful as you’d ever imagined

“I can’t tell you how good reading these words made me feel. I felt strengthened immediately. Imagine the look of surprise in the woman’s eyes as I stopped her and asked if I could take a picture of the words on the side of her bag. Incredulous doesn’t really do justice to the look on her face.

“Could it be that I DO have a guardian angel? Could it be that I have somebody watching the smallest detail in my life and waiting to support me? What I can tell you is that right at that moment it felt that my guardian angel was real and true and I gave a heartfelt prayer to whatever divine force was making me the centre of their attention.

“My synchronicity fieldwork continues and within two years I hope to be finished. But I tell you I am both surprised and heartened by the amazing miracles that seem to be showing up in my life. Miracles both big and small.

“And here’s the thing: I don’t think I am the only one that has things like this happening to them. Maybe there is a guardian angel for all of us. Maybe there is synchronicity supporting and protecting us wherever we are.

“Do you have a guardian angel and mistakenly call them co-incidence?”

Philip Merry, CEO Global Leadership Academy, Singapore. phil@PhilipMerry.com – www.PhilipMerry.com

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Maybe the guardian angels put the ‘meaning’ in coincidences…making them synchronicities.