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I’d never heard that phrase – spiritual socialism. But that was what came to mind after I finished a meditation one recent morning. I’d been concerned about finances and focusing on abundance. So what was that term telling me?

Did it mean there’ll be pie in the sky when I die? That’s a line from an old socialist folk song from the 1930s called The Ballad of Joe Hill. The idea of the song was that religion is a tool of the rich, another way of oppressing workers.

But maybe  you don’t have to wait until you die to get the benefits of spiritual socialism.

But is there really any such thing? How does it work? Is it like a government program on the other side? How do I sign up?

Are some beings on the other side against it? Do they see it as another big heavenly program that will cost them in the long run? And why should we help those physical beings, anyhow? They’re not like us. I suppose if there’s spiritual socialism, there’s also probably a spiritual Tea Party carrying on their routine. But if heaven has many dimensions, I suspect those spirits are on one of the lower planes.

But let’s get back to the question, how do we sign up for this program if we need it? And really, what evidence is there that it even exists?

I look to the lives that Trish and I have led over the past three decades when we decided to quit our jobs as teacher and journalist for a freelance life.

Over the years, we’ve always been provided for. One way or another we’d always paid the mortgage, and lived a good life. We still do. But things have gotten tougher and we attributed it to changes in the publishing industry that were making it more difficult for people like us. Publishers were baffled by the emergence of the digital world in their industry and found the old ways weren’t making it any more and they better clean house.

Part of the housecleaning involved dumping writers they’d supported, especially ones with high ‘returns.’ Returns in the publishing industry doesn’t mean profits. It means the opposite…returned books from the bookstores. Fifty percent returns is not a good omen for writers who want to keep getting published by mainstream publishers. Of course, the failure of giant bookstores, like Borders, comes into play as well.

With all that happening, we began scrambling for new options in the digital world, e-books. But without advances the game changes. That led to my meditation on abundance.

And the answer…spiritual socialism. Here’s how I think it works. It’s more like social security than a giveaway program. You need to work for your benefits.

Here’s how:  1) Consider all that you have in your life. Be grateful. Be grateful every day, every hour. 2) Don’t focus on lack. Stay positive. 3) Don’t feel sorry for yourself. 4) Don’t get angry at others who have what you want. 5) Instead, imagine over and over that you already have your dream. 6) Create that new reality firmly in your mind in the present. Don’t think of it as coming, but as already here. 7) Wish others well. Send them light and happiness. 8) Expect help from higher sources, count on it. 9) Nurture your dream with appropriate actions that might appear as unexpected opportunities. 10) And, of course, watch for synchronicities showing you the way.

Okay, you might say these ideas are not new. They’re not. But there they are, the tenets of spiritualism socialism. Well being for all.

Coming next: Spiritual Capitalism

Derren Brown is the new Uri Geller. He’s amazing…but is this synchronicity? How does he do it? He claims it’s all logical perception, but it certainly seems that there’s definitely a psychic element here.

Several months ago when we were visiting our daughter in Orlando, we picked up some bumper stickers at a bookstore that read: If anything can go well, it will! In other words, the opposite of Murphy’s law. Rob wrote up a post about an experience he had with one of our cars and this bumper sticker, now here’s another story about this bumper sticker on our other car.

We were on our way out of the neighborhood the other evening to go to dinner. The road outside the neighborhood is usually fairly empty of cars, except during the winter season, when the tourists and horse people are here. There’s no stop light, just a stop sign, and you really have to lean forward and check both lanes of traffic before pulling out.

This evening, there was quite a bit of traffic on the road and Rob started to pull out, then saw a car coming in the opposite direction and stopped. Suddenly, we were struck from behind, a loud crash, and I heard the crunch and thought, Aw, c’mon. Rob and I got out of our car and the driver of the truck exited his vehicle and came right over.

“Oh, wow, man, I’m so sorry. I thought you were going to turn and then I got distracted and wasn’t watching.” He handed Rob his insurance card.

We debated about whether to call the police, but the driver – Phil – said he was clearly at fault. And in Florida, if you rear end a car, the law says you’re at fault. So Rob jotted down his insurance info, we talked some more, and it turned out he lives in our neighborhood. In the end, we didn’t call the police or the insurance company. We agreed to get two estimates on the damage and Phil said he would pay cash for the repairs. That way, his insurance rates won’t go up.

I stared at the trunk of my car, where the bumper sticker has ridden for so many months. The beginning of it was squashed in and it occurred to me that the trickster was laughing. I snapped a photo of it. (See where the bumper sticker appears to lift up?) Phil apparently thought I was taking the photo as evidence and asked if I wanted to take a picture of his insurance card, too. I laughed and pointed at the bumper sticker.

“Just photographing the irony,” I said.

And actually, it could have been much worse. We could have rear-ended someone. Or the driver of the truck could have been moving at fifty miles an hour and the trunk and back seat could have been shoved into our laps. So, trickster, chuckle away. We drove on to dinner and had a wonderful evening!

PS Today, we got a call from the garage that had done the work on the car. The total was around $2,200 and change. Rob called Phil, and he drove over to the garage and paid for it, just as he’d said he would. A decent guy, a man of his word. I like that, and am grateful for it. If we were going to be rear-ended by anyone, Phil was the guy to do it!

So in the end, the bumper sticker proved true: If anything can go well, it will!

Net Neutrality is a phrase that is being tossed around quite a bit these days. The FCC is supposedly going to rule on  this soon.President Obama recently came out with a forceful statement that the Internet should be considered a public utility – equal playing field for all. However, the man he appointed to head the FCC – Tom Wheeler – is a former lobbyist for cable companies. Scratching your head over that one?

In a nutshell, should Internet providers be able to create a two-tier system for Internet traffic? Those who pay – big corporations like Netflix, for instance – would be in a hyper-fast download lane. Smaller companies – and websites and blogs that are run by ordinary people like us – would be in the, well, VERY SLOW download lane.

Here are two incredibly different takes on the issue – the first by the head of a Tea Party organization that says all websites should NOT be handled equally, and the second by HBO’s very funny John Oliver, who actually explains the issue well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeCj4y36UKM#t=33

And now, the other side of the issue, with John Oliver of HBO:

Recently, someone on Facebook, I think it was, mentioned that the current issue of Scientific American had a cover story on the neuroscience of meditation. I figured this would be a great resource for Rob, who teaches meditation, so I looked for the issue at Walgreens, then at our local Barnes & Noble, but couldn’t find it. This afternoon, I had to be in a town south of us for a hair  appointment and stopped by the B&N there. And found the issue.

The article on meditation is terrific and delves into the actual brain changes that come about as a result of meditation. It makes the case for why everyone should meditate daily- an altered volume of tissue in some areas of the brain, beneficial psychological effects, a faster reaction to stimuli and becoming less prone to various forms of stress. And that’s just for starters.

I was delighted to find several other articles that were informative. The first was on rooftop solar panels, which are proliferating in Arizona and California, and should be abundant in Florida. But the power companies are balking because they stand to lose a lot of customers – and, therefore, revenue – if these panels become the norm.

Then there was an article called Pluto and Beyond. This one caught my attention because I’m working on a book now for Page Street Publishing  called Unlocking the Secret to Scorpio. Pluto is the planet that rules Scorpio. While I didn’t expect Scientific American to delve into the astrological aspects of Pluto, I thought there might be something in the article I could use in the book. Sure enough, there is.

A little background first.

Every astrological sign is ruled by a planet and some signs, like Scorpio, also have a co-ruler. These rulers are associated with mythological gods and goddesses whose lives and personalities match the tone and texture of a particular sign. Before the discovery of Pluto in 1930, Mars was assigned as Scorpio’s planetary ruler.

To the ancient Greeks, he was Ares, a savage god who was little more than a thirsty SOB. In the Illiad, Zeus says it as he sees it, that he finds Ares, his son, completely odious because his primary enjoyments are nothing but “strife, war, and battle.” On Olympus, Ares was disliked for his blind violence and brutality. He was all about aggression, physicality, survival.

The ancient Romans looked upon Mars more kindly. They called him by the name we know him and he was first and foremost the god of agriculture, the protector of cattle and the preserver of corn. As the husband of Rhea Silvia, a vestal virgin, he fathered Romulus and Remus, who were suckled by a wolf.

The connection between Mars and sex probably came because of Ares’s affair with the goddess Aphrodite. At the time, she was married to a cripple, Hephaestus, and compared to him, Ares was a dashing suitor, handsome, utterly fearless, all the things the Olympians looked for in a mate. Ares, naturally, too advantage of the situation. Their lustful encounters were eventually discovered by all the other gods when Hephaestus ensnared the adulterous couple in an invisible net.

These ancient mythological gods had strange and dramatic lives, fraught with all the sexual and emotional tension of soap operas, and Mars/Ares certainly had his share. He was assigned as the ruler of Scorpio until the discovery of Pluto in 1930 by a young astronomer named Clyde Tombaugh.

Tombaugh and his fellow astronomers were certain he had discovered the long suspected ninth planet in the solar system, the mysterious Planet X. In classical mythology, Pluto governed the underworld – or Hades as it was known when referring to an actual place. For the Greeks, Pluto was seen as more benefic than the ruler of hell; he was the god who reigned over the afterlife. Like all these mythological gods, his life was tumultuous and he is probably best known as the dude who abducted Persephone and took her to the underworld. Hardly a stunning endorsement of his character. That said, though, he apparently turned into a loving husband for Persephone.

Pluto’s underworld and afterlife connections fit well with Scorpio’s ability to delve into the unseen, the unknown, the mysterious, and also fits Scorpio’s natural home, the eighth house in a horoscope, which governs death, the afterlife, reincarnation, and the occult. So, eventually, Pluto became the modern ruler of Scorpio.

Then, in 2006, Pluto was demoted as a planet and astrologers were thrown into something of a quandary. Did that mean Pluto no longer counted in astrological configurations?

The Scientific American article explained why Pluto had been demoted. It isn’t as dense as originally calculated and by 1992, astronomers began discovering objects that rivaled Pluto in size – around 1500 to date – but which add up to only a tenth of the mass of Earth. All of these objects are in the Kuiper belt – a band of billions of icy asteroids beyond Neptune described as “nearly pristine examples of the solar system’s ingredients.” Astronomers have been studying this belt ever since.

In 2005, Michael E. Brown, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, discovered a Pluto-size Kuiper belt object – Erin – and this discovery led to Pluto’s demotion the following year from planet to “dwarf planet.” Pluto is the largest object in the belt and in July 2015, NASA’s New Horizon probe will end its nine-year journey with a close flyby of Pluto and its five known moons.

Ironically, when New Horizon was launched, Pluto was still a planet.

One goal of the flyby, says SA, will be to “seek signs of a subsurface ocean… The idea that life could exist inside Pluto it utterly speculative – but because liquid water is considered a necessary ingredient for biology as we know it, its discovery would at least make such speculation legitimate.”

So, I’m not sure if this is a synchronicity since someone had told me about the meditation article that prompted me to buy the magazine. But the fact that I found information relevant to the book I’m writing, info I could actually use, may be serendipity or a form of the library angel. I’ll have to ask psychiatrist Bernard Beitman what he thinks, from a medical/scientific standpoint.

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Bernard  said it was a form of the library angel synchro. But because of the information available on the internet, he is now calling it an information angel.

Interstellar is one of those rare movies that will stick with me years from now. Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968, is still vivid in memory. So is the 1997 movie Contact.

Interstellar combines elements of both of those movies, but may surpass both.

Writer and director Christopher Nolan (Memento, Dark Knight Rises, Inception) is a master of non-linear storytelling. He does this, in part, by keeping the story tightly focused on the characters, who come across as completely genuine, the kind of people you or I might know. But it’s the relationship between single parent Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and his daughter, Murph (MacKenzie Murph at age 10; Jessica Chastain in her 30s) and Ellen Burstyn (old age) that seizes the emotional center of this film and pivots the plot again and again.

Here’s a plot summary from IMDB:

In the near future Earth has been devastated by drought and famine, causing a scarcity in food and extreme changes in climate. When humanity is facing extinction, a mysterious rip in the space-time continuum is discovered, giving mankind the opportunity to widen their lifespan. A group of explorers must travel beyond our solar system in search of a planet that can sustain life. The crew of the Endurance are required to think bigger and go further than any human in history as they embark on an interstellar voyage, into the unknown. Coop, the pilot of the Endurance, must decide between seeing his children again and the future of the human race.

One element of great storytelling is to have a small subplot of some sort that threads throughout the story, often some odd human quality or experience. Then, by the end of the story, you suddenly realize it was never small, that it’s the very thing on which the story hinges. Nolan does this with Murph, the daughter, and Cooper.

Murph is convinced that a ghost is communicating with her, sending her a message of some sort. She keeps a journal filled with lot of weird lines that she’s convinced contain the message. Sometimes in their library, books fall off shelves for no apparent reason. Her dad tells her there’s no such things as ghosts and it’s not a poltergeist or anything else that’s supernatural. It’s science – gravity.

I don’t want to spoil the film for anyone who hasn’t seen it, so you’ll have to see it to find out how pivotal this is to the story, the nature of space/time, wormholes, the quest Cooper undertakes, and how it figures into the final moments of the film. I hope McConaughey is nominated for an Oscar for Interstellar. His emotions spill into the theater. When he’s choked up, so are you. When he cries, so do you. You don’t just feel what he feels, you experience it.

Anne Hathaway plays Brand, a scientist who works with her father, Michael Caine, Professor Brand, in a secret NASA facility. Like McConaughey, she’s a Scorpio and her emotions are nearly as intense as his.

The archetypal themes in the movie are classic. The father/daughter relationship is especially powerful and propels the film. The other theme that is so prevalent is that of self-preservation versus personal sacrifice to save humanity. And then there’s the supernatural element, which turns out not to be supernatural in the way we think of it but a product of messing around with space/time.

Rob and I had had two minor irritatants about the film. Food and nearly everything else is scarce in this near-future world. But people are driving trucks and cars. Where does the gas come from? We never see anyone filling up.

The other point is more subtle. Throughout the film, there are references to Murph’s “ghost” and also to “they,” the people or entities who are responsible for the wormhole that has appeared just when humanity is desperate for options. One of the characters refers to they as humanity’s protectors.

Who are they? In the universes on the other side of this wormhole, are there other species? Other beings? Other inhabited planets?

It’s one of two central questions in this intelligent, spectacular movie. And, yes, there’s synchronicity! And a line straight out of one of our recent blog posts about how a parent should never outlive his/her child.

– fro deviantart.com

from deviantart.com

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Nancy Atkinson sent the following story.  She and her husband, Rob, Megan, and I met in 2009 in Oregon when Rob and I were working on our first synchro book. At that time, we’d been blogging for four or five months. Nancy and I had gotten to know each other through e-mails and the lunch was like a continuation of where we’d left off with our last written communication. It was great to actually meet a fellow blogger with whom I felt an immediate kinship.

In the five years since that lunch, we have continued to correspond. Nancy divides her time between Lake Tahoe, Portland, and Hawaii. She has two daughters who certainly understand what synchronicity is and, as you’ll see in this story, that understanding may have saved a young boy’s life.

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My daughter, Jill, is a special education teacher and has children with a variety of needs. One cute little guy needs a small, close, place to “hide” during the day to decompress. He had been showing up to the nurse’s office on a regular basis during a class that was especially hard for him.

The nurse, office staff, and my daughter were trying to figure our where he could go for some quiet time when it was suggested that the file room would be a good place. It’s quiet and they thought maybe they could put a box or something in the room for him to curl up in for the needed “time out.” His father had offered to build a box.

As soon as Jill saw the room filled with fling cabinets she freaked out. Her best friend when she was eight was a tiny little girl, who after a fight with her mother, crawled into a file cabinet at their place of business to hide. The file cabinet was fireproof. By the time they found her several hours later, she was gone. It was horrible. The mother and I were Girl Scout leaders together and she lost her little girl. It was beyond devastating.

Jill believes that had she not had that experience the file room would have been the obvious choice for this little guy to go- a small child that likes to hide from the world in small, tight places. Even Jill realized it was a synchro and, needless, to say, they found another place for the boy.

While the girl was missing, her mother had called me and asked me to watch for her to come home. Police were combing the woods and the river area behind their business. They thought she had fled into the woods and that somehow she may have made her way home. She was a really smart little girl.

So even though it was a long shot, I was watching for her in the neighborhood.   Their business was far away from our neighborhood. She was only eight, after all. Then the next call was that they had found her, and she was dead.

I was the first person the mother called with that news. It was horrible. Jill still calls the mother every year to reach out on that day. The mother and I had months of long walks as I tried to keep her from going over the edge and committing suicide. Years later, she told a mutual acquaintance that I had kept her sane during that time.

All I know is that it took everything I had to help hold her up. Long talks on the nature of life and death. My belief was and is that we never really die – that we just move on, go “home.” I related all the near death experiences I knew about at that time and I think that really helped her. She did make it – a divorce – but she is doing okay now.

Could another synchro have been that I was in the picture? I mean, it was 1995 and not many people believed in life after death. She was not someone who had any interest in that kind of stuff. My beliefs were really different from my friends (still are) at that time. Maybe she needed me to tell her everything I knew about life after death to keep her going. I guess we’ll never know.

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This story may actually have elements of spirit communication to it. Is it possible that Jill’s friend from so many years before reached out across time and space and death to remind her of the devastating results of that filing cabinet?

One of the things I’ve learned from more than five years of blogging is that parents who have experienced the deaths of their children are made of much stronger stuff than I am. No parent is supposed to outlive a child. Our friend Mike Perry and his wife, Karin, of the UK  lost a daughter. Debra Page whose story we included in at least one of our synchronicity books, lost her daughter to a rare genetic mutation.  DJan Stewart, who hosts two blogs, lost two sons.  How does any parent continue after that kind of devastating loss?

I suggested to Nancy Atkinson that her friend might benefit from a past life regression with Carol Bowman.  Carol has done a number of regressions for parents who have lost children. Her books, Children’s Past Lives and Return from Heaven are classics, and her philosophy is that past life regressions are healing. Nancy said that the next time she sees her friend, she’s going to suggest a regression with Carol.

David Peat, author of The Bridge Between Matter and Mind, will hold a four day seminar on synchronicity, June 12-16, 2015 at the Pari Center for New Learning in Pari, Italy, where Peat resides. The name of the seminar appropriately is The Bridge Between Matter and Mind.

We’ve corresponded in years past with David Peat, and when The Seven Secrets of Synchronicity came out, he invited us to speak at the Pari Center. We haven’t made it there yet. But maybe some of our readers will journey there next June…and, who knows, maybe we’ll see you there.

Here is how David describes synchronicity:

Synchronicities are those mysterious and inexplicable coincidences that occasionally erupt in one’s life. At times we may feel that those around us are confined to a narrow world of logic and physical law, a world that admits no hint of mystery. This can give rise to a feeling of isolation within an indifferent universe and in an increasing complex society whose members are reduced to ciphers. Synchronicities, by contrast, open a doorway into a very different world: a world that also has resonances with the deep insights that have been revealed by the new sciences.

True synchronicities are more than mere chance occurrences. They are characterized by a sense of meaning and numinousness. They provide a bridge between inner and outer worlds, between our private thoughts and external, objective realities. Within a synchronicity, patterns of external events mirror an inner experience; likewise dreams and fantasies may seem to flood over into the external world. To distinguish synchronicities from mere chance occurrences Carl Jung stressed that they must always involve “meaningful coincidence” that lie beyond any explanation involving causal links and connections. They reveal to us an underlying world of patterns, forms and connections that transcend any division between the mental and the material.

Of course, attending this seminar is also about a trip to Italy, unless that’s where you live. Pari sounds like a very interesting place to visit.

Here’s from the Pari Center website:

The medieval village of Pari, located some 25 km south of Siena is a particularly appropriate center from which to consider the future. The village is located on a hill top and surrounded by magnificent views of the heavily wooded Tuscan countryside. The surrounding area is given over to olive groves and grape vines and small-scale farming. In winter wild boar are hunted in these woods.

The surrounding area has been occupied for well over 2000 years. The Etruscans certainly made use of the curative properties of the sulfur hot spring located below the village. In addition to burial areas close to Pari the remains of a major Etruscan town can be visited at Roselle some 40 km away.

One thousand years ago Pari had become a walled town of several hundred persons grouped around the central castle, the residence of the Counts of Ardengheschi. By the 14th century the region had come under the government of the Sienese.

Until the 1950s life in Pari had continued unchanged over the centuries. Moreover it was totally self-sufficient for its food, heat, furniture, shoes and clothing. Wool, for example, was made from the fleece of the local sheep and a form of very durable linen was made from the local ginestra plant. Mulberry trees surrounding the village attest to the use of silk. Very little money circulated in the village and its economy was based on a system of exchange and barter for goods and services. What little money did enter the village came from the sale of its wine and, later, though the contraband smuggling of tobacco and salt (for preserving meat).

Here is how David describes Pari today:

Amazingly, the Weather Channel is taking tips from the History Channel and now has a program on Sundays called American Supernatural, a blend of the paranormal and – what else? – weather. Of course, it’s the Weather Channel.

One of their first programs was about small Louisiana town along the banks of the Mississippi River, named Frenier. Don’t look for it on a map. It no longer exists and some folks say the reason the town vanished was that a voodoo priestess named Julia Brown said over and over that the town would die  when she died. Amazingly, she was right.

In the early evenings, Julia would sit on her front porch singing and playing her guitar. One song that she sang over and over again, day after day, had these strange lyrics:  “One day I’m gonna die, and I’m gonna take all of you with me.”

On Sept. 28, 1915, Julia died and the next day all the town folk were gathered at the wake for Julia. That was when a devastating hurricane struck, wiping out the town and killing all but two or three people, who lived to tell the eerie tale of Julia Brown.

Good going, Weather Channel. Who would’ve figured that mediums and meteorologists would mingle together on that channel.

Dear President Obama,

The election results of November 4 were undoubtedly depressing for you. With the Republicans now controlling the entire congress, it means you’ll be much grayer by 2016. It means you will be using executive veto more often. It means you’re being blamed for events and circumstances over which you had little or no control.

This is the first time that a sitting president’s hometown governor has lost since 1892.

In 2008, my husband and I waited three hours outside a Fort Lauderdale venue to hear you and Joe Biden speak. Your audience was hungry for change. We were blown away.

By 2012, when you were re-elected, when we voted for you again, we were disappointed that many of the changes you had promised had not panned out. You set the bar too low for health care coverage. Instead of setting the bar at Medicare for all, you included the insurance companies by making health care mandatory. The insurance companies salivated at the opportunity to sign up 50 million new clients. Gitmo remains open to this day. Yes, you got us out of Iraq – sort of – and are supposedly going to get us out of Afghanistan. But you were too conciliatory with the Republicans, too willing to engage them, and all they did was stonewall you and everything you stand for.

The media pundits are calling the Republican wins tonight “a wave,” as in a tsunami. It’s going to be a wave, all right, a wave of utter disaster for the middle class, for health care, for any hope of a raise in the minimum wage, for more tax loopholes for corporations, for more of the middle class descending into poverty, for more war, more of the U.S. as the world cop, for more stonewalling on climate change. It’s going to be a tsunami for the unborn, who will claim “personhood” even though they are no larger than a comma in a womb. Well, you know all of this.

So, while greedy capitalism is going to flourish, when trickle down economics will resurge, the planet will drown, the economy will shrink, the Republicans will cut Medicare and Social Security, the elderly and the poor and the young will stagger. As one of my writer friends emailed me tonight: “I will never understand this country. If I didn’t already feel half dead, I’d hang myself.”

I know what he means. In the next two years, we may find ourselves living in a Philip K. Dick novel like Blade Runner. It’s one of the grimmest Dystopian novels ever written, where corporations are the true kings and the rest of us are as disposable as Kleenex.

The media pundits are calling this a “rejection of the president and his policies.” But as a Republican strategist said, “The Republicans don’t really have an agenda except to reject everything that Obama wants.”

We are pretty much screwed for the next two years. The old paradigm, it seems, is not going out with a whimper. And unless the Democrats run a powerful candidate in 2016 – Elizabeth Warren instead of Hillary Clinton, for instance – we’ll have four more years of Republican policies that benefit the one percent. And in the end, the one percent will be the only ones who can afford bunkers they’ll run to when the oceans rise, when the planet rebels, when the poor and the disenfranchised take to the streets. It will be the opening paragraphs of The Road, a Dystopian novel by Cormac McCarthy that won the Pulitzer prize and that might be more depressing than Blade Runner.

 If I could afford to move to another country, I would.

Best,

Trish MacGregor

P.S. I apologize for the tone of this email. Tomorrow when the sun rises, when the perfect Florida weather dominates, I hope it will be easier to look at the bright side.