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Ever since we saw the trailer for Captain Philips, it’s been on our must see list of movies. But we somehow missed it in the theaters and didn’t get to see it until our daughter came home and rented it through ATT’s U-Verse – at three in the morning. At six bucks, it’s a bargain, particularly if more than one person is watching it. The irony is that we didn’t watch it until after Megan returned to Orlando.

In a nutshell, the story – based on true events – is about the first American cargo ship to be hijacked in 200 years.   The Somalian actors were selected from an audition of 700 Somalians in Minneapolis, which has a large Somalian population, and wow, are these guys ever cast perfectly. Tom Hanks plays Captain Philips and yes, he is absolutely stellar in this role, as he is in every role he has ever played.

Whether Hanks is playing Forest Gump or the AIDS victim in Philadelphia or the captain of this American cargo ship that is hijacked, he’s believable in every role. Hanks is one of those rare actors who is able to crawl inside the skin of the character he’s portraying and lose himself in it. We still know he is  Tom Hanks, but for the duration of the movie he is Gump or Philips and we are transported into his world – of magic, terror, loneliness, desperation, despair, triumph, whatever the emotion.  And that’s the key, I think, to his success. Hanks find the essential emotional theme  of the character and moves into it completely.

The screenwriter for this movie – Billy Ray –  also wrote the screenplay for The Hunger Games,  an adaptation from a novel, just like Captain Philips.  He certainly has a great sense for pacing, conflict, characterization. Since the movie runs two and a half hours, we had decided to watch it over the course of two nights. That plan bombed as soon as we started watching the movie. This story moves. There’s no place for a tidy intermission. If you take a break for munchies or the restroom, you had better pause the movie. It’s riveting from start to finish.

It was nominated for 6 Oscars- and didn’t win in any category, but should have.  There’s a larger social theme to this film that is sad, tragic, catastrophic. The Somalian pirates in the movie are driven by desperation, hunger, need. Their lives in Somalia are so terrible that they would be better off in American prisons where they would at least have three meals a day and a bed to sleep in.

In the final scenes of the movie, as the SEALS move in to save Philips, I was left with a terrible bitterness in the pit of my stomach that any people, anywhere on the planet, should be driven to such extremes of violence. When you’re hungry, does anything else matter?

Captain Philips isn’t just a riveting thriller; it’s a statement about how far we have yet to go as a species, as a collective, to create a more inclusive world in which no one goes hungry or despairs and is driven to desperate measures because of a lack of fundamentals.

Disc golf is said to be one of the fastest growing sports. It basically involves playing golf with modified Frisbees. Instead of a hole in the ground, the discs are tossed into a metal basket with hanging chains to stop the disc.

A couple of years ago, an 18-hole disc golf course sprouted a few miles from our house in a county park. I’ve always been an avid Frisbee player and after the course opened I bought my first set of discs – a driver, a mid-range, and a putter.

My regular partner is a big guy named Bill, who’s about three decades younger than me. He’s got long arms and a big throw, but he lacks my Frisbee-playing background and so I used to beat him regularly. Not so anymore. Now our games are always close.

The most treacherous part of our course is the 14th hole, which requires tossing the disk over a pond. It’s covered with lily pads and looks like a great place for gators to hang out. This is South Florida, after all. I heard a gator croaking one day, but so far, Bill and I have only seen an otter in the pond. Maybe the gators are on vacation. Maybe that’s a good thing, considering my last two games.

Both times on the 14th hole my driver shot fell short, dropping into the water close to the far shore. Both times I threw yellow discs.

The first time, my throw struck a wall of reeds that rise several feet above the opposite shore and the disc bounced back into the lily pads and sank. We walked around the pond, worked our way through the reeds, and spotted a yellow disc about five feet from shore. The problem was the disc was in about 5 feet of water, but fortunately I had worn board shorts. So I dove in, felt around the bottom for about ten seconds, and finally latched onto the disc. I popped up, held up the disc and Bill said, “That’s not your disc.” And he was right. I’d recovered  someone else’s. Same color, different disc.

Since I was already in the water, I continued searching for mine, but didn’t find it. Maybe the alligator ate it before I got there!

The next week, literally the same thing happened. The disc fell short. Again we spotted a yellow disc resting on the bottom. This time I figured it was the one I lost the previous week, because the location wasn’t right for the one I’d just tossed into the pond. I dove in, recovered it, and again, Bill said, “That’s not your disc.” He was right.

So I was two for two. I’d lost two yellow discs, recovered two yellow discs. But neither were mine. What were the chances of that?

Not my pond, but about the right size.

The disappearance of the Malaysian Boeing  777, flight 370,  on March 7-8 has triggered investigations and searches by several countries. Even now, no one knows for sure what happened.

No debris has been found. The oil slicks that were mentioned initially weren’t from airplane fuel. What was thought to be a cargo door or life raft turned out to be debris. The weather was good, the plane was at cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. So what happened?

The flight took off from Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, at 12:41 a.m. on Saturday, March 8 (afternoon of March 7, ET). It was scheduled to arrive in Bejing, China at 6:30 a.m. the same day, a journey of 2,300 miles – a distance  comparable to a flight between Miami and L.A. But around 1:30 a.m., as the plane was crossing the sea between Malaysia and Vietnam, air traffic controllers in Subang, outside of Kaula Lumpur, lost contact with it.

The pilots didn’t indicate that any problem existed, no distress signal was issued, but Malaysia officials say there’s radar evidence that the plane may have changed course and turned back toward Kuala Lumpur. The plane had 239 people on board – 227 passengers and 12 crew members.  Five of the passengers were children under the age of five. More than a dozen nationalities were represented among the passengers.

Speculation abounds and the picture became murkier when it was learned that two passengers were flying on stolen passports. An Italian and an Austrian man reported their passports stolen in 2012 and 2013, in Thailand. The tickets related to these stolen passports were bought together, by an Iranian man who said his two friends wanted to return to Europe- from Kuala Lumpur to Bejing and Amsterdam and to Copenhagen.

Similarities have been drawn between the disappearance of this flight and Air France flight 447 from Rio to Paris that vanished in 2009. The similarities:

–     –   Three days into the search, the plane is still missing. The Air France plane was found almost two years after its disappearance. A week after its crash, a few pieces of the tail were recovered.

–       – Both planes were at cruising altitude, above the sea

–       – 12 crew members for both flights.  With crew, the Malaysia flight had 239 passengers, the Air France flight had 228.

–       – Safety records. The Boeing 777 and the Air France Airbus 330 have terrific safety records.

–       – No Mayday signal

–       – Both jets had sustained minor damage on the ground and were repaired. In the Air France flight, no correlation was established with the earlier damage.

Theories range from bombs to hijacking to pilot suicide to a catastrophic technical failure.   Conspiracy websites are having a field day with this one.

But, you have to wonder. No debris, no Mayday signal, nothing from emergency transponders, which start signaling on impact with water or land.

I’ve been searching for a synchronicity in this story – and there probably are several – that might point the way to the truth. Other than the parallels to the crash of the Air France flight in 2009, which also had some major differences, like with weather, I haven’t found any. Has anyone else spotted synchros in any of this?

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UPDATE

IS HERE.

During the first five or six years of our marriage, Rob and I got to know a number of South Florida psychics and people involved in the UFO field. Two of these psychics were extraordinary – Renie Wiley and Tony Grosso, both of whom have since passed on.

Renie was my astrology mentor and an empath. She worked with cops in Cooper City, Florida on the various cases, including the disappearance of Christie Luna and Adam Walsh.

Several days after our daughter was born, Renie interpreted Megan’s astrological chart for us – and just about everything she said 24 years ago has unfolded.

She was a large-boned redhead, a Sagittarian with a heart and talent as huge as the Pacific who never minced word. When she entered a room people felt it. If you messed with Renie or someone she loved, she never fought back; she simply got even.

Tony was a short, plump gay man and one of the few people I’ve met whose sign I don’t remember! He lived in a trailer in Pembroke Pines, Florida, and also worked with cops, sometimes in tandem with Renie. He and Rob co-authored The Rainbow Oracle, a divination system Tony developed with color.

Around this same time, we also got to know psychic Linda Georgian, who eventually hosted the Psychic Information Network with singer Dionne Warwick, one of the first infomercial TV shows.

So when I wrote my second novel, Hidden Lake, published by Ballantine, I wondered what would happen if you had a community of psychics in which a murder occurred. Would there be too much information to solve the murder? Would the info be faulty, filtered through a psychic’s subjective lens? How would the investigation differ from, well, an ordinary murder?

Ballantine gave the book an awful cover – some dude in a brown suit lying on the ground. First off, in the novel, the victim was a woman, not a man. Second, what man in his right mind wears a suit like this in the middle of a South Florida summer?  

I was paid less for this book than I was for my first and later learned why. Bob Wyatt, who was then editor-in-chief, had told my editor, Chris Cox, to advise me to ditch the paranormal. And for a long time, I did. For a long time, I wrote linear novels that hinted at the psychic unity of life, but never spelled it out.

When Chris died in the early 90s, Rob and I flew to New York for the memorial service. Megan was a year or so old and wailed throughout most of the service. I remember that Rob stood at the back of the auditorium with her in a stroller and I sat up near the front because Chris, in his will, had requested that I speak at his memorial service.

The lead speaker was actress Susan Sarandon, whom Chris had known for years. She spoke movingly of their friendship and I later learned that when he was dying of AIDS, she had paid for a private nurse to tend to him.  I have admired  this woman ever since.

When I went through the formatted version of this book, which I hadn’t re-read since I  submitted it in 1986, I felt Renie and Tony around, I felt my younger self struggling to evaluate what she was learning, I loved writing Hidden Lake because most of the players were based on real people.

And if I were to meet editor Bob Wyatt today, I would tell him just how wrong he was. We need to know that we are connected to one another, that what impacts you, impacts me, that what you learn eventually filters down to me. We are that closely aligned with one another.

Now Hidden Lake has a second life as an e-book and Crossroad gave it a cool cover, depicted above. Here’s an excerpt.

Synchronicities can be complex or simple. They can unfold over time or be done within seconds or minutes.  

Our friend Melissa sent us a synchro that involves concert tickets and seating. It’s short and puzzling and no telling what it means. Is it a light-hearted trickster?

“Today I bought two sets of tickets for a Tori Amos concert, one in Miamiand one in New York City. Take a look at my seats:

Miami: Row DD, Seats 101,102

NYC: Row D, Seats 101,102

“Not sure what this could mean, but I’m into it!”

 In 2012,  authors and radio personalities Jeffrey Pritchett and Andrew B. Colvin invited a number of Bigfoot researchers onto their radio show, The Church of Mabus and began an investigation into the Bigfoot phenomenon. The result is a fascinating book, Praise for the Hairy Man: The Secret Life of Bigfoot.

The authors, both of whom have had Bigfoot sightings and experiences, used a simple “10 questions” interview format and delved into a diversity of areas about this elusive creature. The areas include: the Bigfoot/alien connection, the possible role of ancient aliens in the genetic history of the Yeti, the sex habits of Sasquatch, reports of telepathy, shapeshifting and flight with Bigfoot, Native American beliefs in Sasquatch.

One of the chapters that intrigued me was an interview with Stacy Brown Jr., whose team is called the Sasquatch Hunters of Florida.  There are 12 members on his team who come from a variety of backgrounds but are united in their passion to find out the truth about Sasquatch. The team has various hair samples and a pair of handprints and are now working with a forensic scientist who will study the DNA of the samples.

Brown recounts one of his own experiences. In November 2011, he and another man, Matt Roberts, pitched a tent on a property and were in “for one scary night. The creatures walked around our camp all night. We had hickory nuts thrown at us.  At one point, we woke up to our tent shaking. We got a  thermal image that night and some really good audio. Needless to say, I was ‘sold.’ I quit the band I was in, and went into Bigfoot full-throttle.”

When Brown was asked if Sasquatch might be a paranormal or multidimensional creature, he replies that anything is possible. “Any time you go that route, though, people think you are nuts. It’s just too much for their minds to grasp.” During his experiences that night in November, he thought the creatures might be ghosts because they got around so effortlessly.

Brown’s team offers Sasquatch trips, where you camp out in areas where the creature has been sighted, are trained in their high tech gear, and includes three meals.

I particularly enjoyed the chapters that draw connections between Bigfoot and UFOs. In Chapter 5, the authors interview Stan Gordon, a former Pennsylvania state director for MUFON. He’s also an author and has appeared on numerous TV shows talking about his research. According to Gordon: “There are a small percentage of cases… where observers have seen both a UFO and Bigfoot at the same time and location. From the reports I have received from across the country and around the world, such cases may be much more common than first thought.” The biggest problem, Gordon notes, is that many researchers are reluctant to publish such accounts for fear of ridicule.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Whether it’s Bigfoot, UFOs, aliens, or anything else that goes bump in the night,  fear of ridicule seems to be a huge impediment to finding the truth.

Praise for the Hairy Man: The Secret Life of Bigfoot is a terrific compilation of research, stories, and theories about what this creature might actually be.

Tonight, from 7-9 p.m. eastern time, we’ll be live on The Church of Mabus, talking about The Synchronicity Highway.

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Trish wrote the above, but didn’t realize that I’d had a synchronicity yesterday related to the same subject. I was reading one of the interviews in Pritchett’s book when I felt a nudge to go to the Unexplained Mysteries, a website that I hadn’t visited for months. Surprisingly, the first thing I saw was an article about a Sasquash sighting on Vancouver Island.

That reminded of my own sighting many years ago in the North Woods of Minnesota, a large region in the northeastern part of the state known as Arrowhead Country or the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA). No motorized vehicles are allowed and transportation is by canoe and portages…trails connecting the numerous lakes. I still recall portaging my canoe, which had pads for my shoulders and carrying a Duluth pack with my camping gear on the trips I used to take, usually one around Memorial Day weekend, the Fourth of July or Labor Day.

On one particular trip, a friend and I paddled across a lake to a campsite at sunset. It was the only campsite on that lake. We had the place to ourselves. After pulling the canoe up to shore, I followed a trail leading from the campsite to a big wooden box, the outdoor toilet supplied by the park service. No outhouse, just a box above a hole in the ground, in the forest.

As I approached it, I stopped as I saw a figure moving through the woods about fifty feet away. I glanced down for just a moment, feeling a bit disappointed that someone else was here. As I looked up, the figure raced through the thick woods at an incredible speed on two feet. It wasn’t human, wasn’t a bear. Within moments, it was gone.

When I told my friend what I saw, he was intrigued at first. But then he thought otherwise when I told him what exactly I saw. The creature appeared to be wearing something white on its head that I described as a sailor hat with the brim pulled down. My friend, Laurel, just shook his head. He believed there might be Yeti in the forest, but not one wearing a sailor hat.

A few years later, I read a description of a Bigfoot sighting that included an illustration. The creature had a conical head, and the top half of it was white. That was what I saw!

Only a tiny percentage of people who come to our blog ever leave a message. In fact, far more people who never come to our blog attempt to leave messages – ie. SPAM, but we block those off-subject sales pitches.

Occasionally, someone will e-mail us rather than comment on the blog. That was the case recently with an Australian woman of aboriginal descent, who we will call Emily. She wrote us about the post on shamanic meditation that included a story by a woman who had an encounter with her deceased father.

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“I was on your website this morning reading about synchronicity and meditation. I don’t want my identity exposed, but decided to take the chance after reading your article about meditation and the lady who wrote about her meditation experiences with you and seeing her father during meditation. I noted you didn’t use her name, which gave me the courage to contact you.

“Back in 1995, after going home to see my family, my older sister shared some experiences with me. She was into the ‘New Age’ stuff and gave me some Dawn Hill books to read. I won’t go into everything she told me, but after reading Dawn’s books I decided to try meditation, sharing my attempts with my sister.

“Life was hard for me during that time and I found the meditation sessions calming, and became able to get to that state quite easily. I am a First Person of Australia woman and we believe that the old people, the ancestors visit us. I could never see or hear them, but felt their presence. My father told me it was like seeing a live person, and not to be afraid, that it’s the living you should be wary of! I see them now, but that’s another story.”

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Emily later told us a story about her contact, not with an ancestor, but with a mysterious other-worldly being.

“I think meditating opened me up to a bigger universe and someone from ‘out there’ tried to contact me. I was living by myself at the time and the  experience scared me.

“I was contacted one night whilst reading. It was gentle and deliberate, but when I saw it, I freaked out. It tried for many years, but I was too scared! He was beautiful… I called him the Lionman.

“He had hair like a lion’s mane and his face was like a man and a lion, with a body like a man. He was beautiful. He wore a shirt and a vest. The vest looked like dark brown suede, fawn shirt and pants, with boots that came up to his knees. He held his hands in front of his body with his head bowed for a while allowing me to watch him. Then he came closer and he looked up at me and smiled. That’s when I freaked.”

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Emily said that she could not only see the Lionman, but also his otherworldly surroundings. “He was in a dead-end, surrounded with high red rocks and red earth. Maybe he was on Mars!”

Towards the end the Lionman would knock three times at her door, but Emily was too afraid to answer. “He stopped trying in 2002. I now regret my fears.”

She asked us to let her know if we ever hear about the Lionman from anyone else. She wants to know more about him. “It’s been good to share this with you and Trish. I feel like a weight has been lifted off me.”

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Later, she told us one other story, one that possibly offers a clue to the identity of the Lionman.

“With my meditating I became very good at it, but could only stay there for 20 minutes. I also had some wonderful experiences. I could slip in and out of meditation whenever I was stressed. One time I was on a plane going through rough weather and was very stressed so I meditated. I used to go to a special place by the river whilst meditating and believe I met ‘God’ there that day.

“He appeared to me like they depict him in the bible. I was amused and asked him if he really looked like that. He told me, “I have many images,” and swirled around me in beautiful colours. There was a baby crying on the plane so I asked him if he could help the baby, and the baby stopped crying immediately. I believe he was a beautiful spirit, perhaps even god.”

After reading that story, it occurred to me that perhaps Emily’s religious upbringing might be influencing her visions. What came to mind was C.S. Lewis’s novel (and movie), The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe. The Lion, of course, was Lewis’s mythical figure for a deity.

So, Emily, I think the Lionman was a guide, a spirit, an alien, an avatar, an advanced being. One of those or maybe all of those.

If anyone else has had an experience like this, please let us know.

Meditation is basically about relaxing and focusing. There are generally three types of focusing: mindfulness, imagery (or visualization), and inquiry, where you pose a question and look for answers to appear through the senses – a voice, a vision, a smell, however it comes. Sometimes, those answers come in strange ways.

The last form of focusing comes into play during the second half of my 6-week meditation course, and sometimes interesting things happen. That seems to be especially true for the last class, which focuses on shamanic meditation, in which students are guided to the Upper World, Middle World, or Lower World of shamanism where they meet a power animal or guide.

Recently, as I finished the shamanic meditation at Moksha Yoga Studio, I walked out leaving my meditation cushion behind. So the next day I decided to retrieve it, and take a yoga class. As I arrived, I recognized a student from an earlier course and we talked a bit about her son taking some private classes. Later, she wrote me with more details, and then told me about her experience during the shamanic meditation class.

Here’s what she wrote:

“By the way, during the last meditation class of fall last year, we did shamanic meditation and it blew my mind…..didn’t know what happened and was so confused that I didn’t say anything at the time. But you had us pick a guru (mine was an eagle) and we were to ask the guru a question and as I was asking my question, I could smell sawdust, then I realized it was my father (who died 12 years ago) and he was the guru and he answered my question. I felt he was actually in the room.

“The significance of the sawdust was that my dad used to work with wood. He loved making furniture and just experimenting with woodworking, and he always smelt like sawdust. So it was a comforting and familiar smell to me. It’s funny how I could smell the sawdust in the room before I ‘saw’ my father in my meditation.

“I didn’t actually see him, I just knew he was there. I could hear him and smell him, but not see him. The form of the eagle had disappeared and my father was ‘there.’ I don’t know how else to explain it.

I was so taken aback by his presence that I asked him why he was here and I had to go because you were calling us back to the room. It was the most bizarre thing that ever happened to me during meditation. I was crying. I miss my father a lot. We were very close. Didn’t know how to handle all of that. LOL. It’s all good. Just wanted to share that with you.”

* * *

I’ve heard similar stories from other students. I’m always interested in hearing about such experiences, but I don’t push people to tell everyone in class what happened during their meditation. That’s probably because of a memory I have of a meditation teacher who always went around the room asking each student to describe his or her experience. I found it invasive.

I’ve been re-reading sections of  Arthur I Miller’s terrific book, Deciphering the Cosmic Number: The Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung. In a section called Parallels and Coincidence, Miller talks about how Jung believed that in any discussion about dreams, physics and psychology, we should take a closer look at our notion of time and in particular, a close look at synchronicity.  By this time, Jung had been exploring the concept since his early days in medical school.

As Jung delved further into mythology and alchemy, he developed his idea about “one world,” the unus mundo, in which all people are connected. As Miller wrote, “If there was one world, he reasoned, surely there should also be one mind, which he identified as the collective unconscious of humankind.”

This idea seemed particularly obvious when he consulted the I Ching because the advice the hexagrams provided appeared to be relevant to the moment in which he asked his question. “If he asked the same question a second time – at a different moment – the advice might be quite different.”  So if the Ching’s answers held any significance at all, Jung wondered, how did the link between the psychic and physical sequence of events occur?

In the 1920s, Jung started to seriously explore parallels between out of body experiences – OBEs – and mental states. One day in 1928, Jung drew a mandala that looked to be very Chinese and that same day received Richard Wilhelm’s manuscript of his translation of the Secret of the Golden Flower. “To Jung, that was what synchronicity was all about,” wrote Miller.

“In the Western world, we usually assume that events develop sequentially, one after the other, by a process of cause and effect. But Jung was convinced that as well as a vertical connection, events might also have a horizontal connection – that all the events occurring all over the world at any one moment were linked as a kind of grand network. Thus, when one threw the coins to consult the I Ching, the throwing of the coins coincided with one’s feelings at that precise moment and the answer reflected the truth of that moment.”

Synchronicity is at work in all divination systems- the tarot, astrology, reading leaves in a teacup, even opening a book and pointing at a word on a page.  In the moment the coins are tossed, the cards are drawn, the chart is erected, the answer is intrinsic to that moment.

As a psychologist, Jung was convinced that science couldn’t explain “certain remarkable manifestations of the unconscious.”  He also knew that physicists wouldn’t touch acausality and hoped to find a way of developing his ideas with scientific rigor. And it was at that point that he met Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli.  It wasn’t until 1948, though, that Jung and Pauli started exploring the concept of synchronicity more deeply.

Interestingly, because of the time in which they lived, Pauli and Jung kept their collaboration on synchronicity and physics to themselves, out of fear that their colleagues would laugh at them.

In that sense, perhaps, things have changed a little bit – but not enough. With the technology and instant access to information available to us now, I wonder how these two men would fare in the 21st century.