Orbs, like crop circles, are a mysterious phenomenon that so far have defied explanations – except for the usual argument – dust or moisture on the lens! The video below is striking. It is followed by a couple of orb photos that are on Threads of the Spiderwoman, which are some of the best orb photos I’ve ever seen.
The photos:
A violet orb!
And a blue orb!
Photo/illustration copyright by Jean Lavergne
This is part 2 of the Quebec encounter. We received comments, e-mails and Facebook messages telling us not to wait with the story, so we decided to put it up today. Now we get right into the encounter. Here’s what happened, as Charles describes it.
(The photo above of the backyard where the encounter occurred is combined with a drawing of what he saw. The drawing was made by More about photos at the end of the post.)
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Sunday evening March 27, 2011. It was still very cold outside and I decided to stay down in the basement where I added logs to the wood-burning stove. I laid on the couch and watched TV while my wife Helene and our daughter Bridgette remained on the first floor watching television. My dog, Spot, a fox terrier, was laying in front of the stove on his pet bed, a favorite resting place. I expected him to remain there the whole night. Later my daughter came downstairs to her bedroom. That’s when I turned off the lights, put some more logs into the stove, and fell asleep on the couch.
At 3 a.m., I was awakened by the sounds of Helene yelling and making noises. I stood up to see what was going on, and noticed that Spot was no longer on his bed. I went upstairs and headed to the master bedroom. The lights were on and my wife was standing beside the bed asking the dog to get down. Spot was acting very aggressive, showing his teeth, and refused to obey. We’d never seen him acting this way before. It was clear that something was going wrong with him… but what? Finally, with the help of a dog treat I was able to get his attention. As he came out of the bedroom for the treat, my wife asked me to take him down the basement and close the door. I did as she asked and laid back down on the couch.
I was awakened again at 4:50 a.m. by cries from my dog. He was standing in front of the wood stove trembling and shaking as he looked toward a window on the southeast side of the house. I usually wake up at 5 a.m. and let the dog outside, then feed him. By 5:30, I wake up my daughter and we drive together to the city where I work and she goes to college.
This morning, though, March 28, was different. Spot didn’t want to go outside. Instead, he was trying to alert me to something unusual going on outside the house. I opened the door to the stairs. Usually, he races ahead of me, anxious to get outside. This morning, though, he wouldn’t follow me, even after I called him. He continued to tremble and look toward the same window. I walked toward him and touched his right side gently to comfort him. That’s when a strange feeling came to mind that he was going to die soon. After awhile, he calmed down and followed me up the stairs. I walked to the patio door, which faces east, and reached down for his leash.
That’s when I noticed beams of light, very low in intensity, in the expansive field behind the house. I opened the patio door but the dog refused to come out. I grabbed him, forced him out and closed the door. As Spot passed our motion detector sensor, the patio spotlights came on automatically, illuminating the backyard. I couldn’t see the light rays any longer so I hit the switch, turning off the lights. After a few seconds, my eyes adjusted and I saw the beams of light again. Now they were closer and much more intense. They seemed to get brighter and brighter, closer and closer, so close to my backyard. I counted nine of them, their beams reaching the ground.
The shapes of the beams were like ice cream cones, but inverted. They were brighter near the ground and lost intensity toward the top. If there was anything above the cone, I couldn’t see it. I didn’t have any idea what I was looking at. At first, I thought they might be solid acrylic tubes of light. They were all displayed asymmetrically in the large field. I could even see energy rising inside the beams. But the energy was not the same in each one, and they were not glowing identically. I had no idea what I was looking at, but it was beautiful. I actually felt paralyzed by the spectacle. I watched for a couple minutes then went back inside the house and called out to Helene. “Are you awake?”
When she answered that she was, I asked her to come out to the patio. I said, “Spot is outside and acting kind of strange. I think he could die, and I want to know if you see the same thing that I do.”
We walked out to the patio door and looked out the window. “Wow, what is it, pyrotechnics?” Helene asked. “This is exactly what I told you about the other day. This is what I saw!”
My attention shifted to a vertical tube hanging just above our weeping willow tree to the right side of the yard. It glowed as brightly as lightning for a few seconds, then vanished, and reappeared again. Over and over. “Do you see that one to the right?” I asked. But Helene didn’t respond.
I was amazed, almost paralyzed by the sight, but not fearful. Gradually, I was able to barely perceive a grey, steel-like structure on one side of the tube. I kept staring and on the last two illuminations of the tube, I saw something that seemed out of this world. I clearly saw beads of very bright white lights, shaped like O-rings or Cheerios that floated in the tube, but didn’t touch each other. The tube itself now appeared a blue hue, but the O rings were bright white.
I opened the patio door, called out for the dog. Then I blacked out. That’s the only way I can describe it. The next thing I knew, I was in the shower shampooing my hair. I was confused, acting like a zombie. I felt like I had a hang over. The pressure in my head was painful, a headache like never before. I wasn’t scared, just confused. As I showered, I remembered what I’d seen in the backyard, but I wondered what I was doing in the shower and why I wasn’t standing by the patio door.
I shaved, dried my hair, brushed my teeth, all as if on automatic pilot. Then I went back to the patio. It was still dark out, but the tubes of light were gone. I didn’t even bother to look in the bedroom for Helene. I left with my daughter on time and drove to the city and got to work by 7 AM, right on time.
I sat in my office all alone, the door closed. I was looking at the floor, still feeling this huge pressure in my head. My eyes hurt. And then I started realizing what happened to us. No words could explain just how I felt.
These things were not supposed to exist. They were only supposed to be a product of Hollywood, American fiction. I was 49 years old and I started to cry and would do so repeatedly for month to come. I was stuck with a reality that does not exist for the majority of people.
I was now in mourning for my life and I started to become very frightened. As I sat in my office, I actually wished I had never been born. During the day, I even thought seriously about committing suicide. I felt as if I had been used, abused and controlled against my will.
They made the rules…they let me wake up my wife and then they controlled the game. Deep inside of me, I wanted to scream to let people know they exist. But I was scared that no one would believe me.
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The question skeptics often ask is why didn’t you take photos of the lights. So I asked Charles that question.
“As I’ve told other people who have asked that question, I did not think at all about my camera, which was in the basement. I was 49 years old and I was not born with a cellphone in my hand, either, like the new generation. Also, it was 5 a.m. Plus, if you you see the Airbus A380 passing over your house at very low altitude, you do not run for the camera because it might not be there no more as you get back. Besides, after a point, I was no longer in control of my actions.”
This is the first of several posts related to a dramatic UFO encounter that occurred one year ago. It was experienced by a French-Canadian couple who live in a rural area of Quebec. The incident has had psychic reverberations, including astonishing synchronicities as well as disturbing events.
The story is deeply emotional and came to us directly from the man, who we will call Charles. He and his wife do not want their names used. Neither had any interest or belief in aliens or UFOs before this experience. Charles approached us with his story after finding the French edition of our book, The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity, in a Montreal bookstore.
The story is long and quite involved, but fascinating. At times it reads like a modern-day gothic horror tale. We’ll post the entries intermittently over the next two or three weeks. English is a second language for Charles, so we have edited the writing, but hopefully maintained the essence of the story as well as Charles’ voice in the telling.
It begins in a graveyard nine days before the UFO encounter. We usually think of hauntings and aliens as two separate scenarios. But Charles is convinced that what happened in the graveyard was related to what followed.
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I guess it all started on Saturday afternoon March 19, 2011. The day was sunny, cold with very strong wind and still had a bit of snow covering the ground. A couple of days before, I started a project to create a family tree. I decided to call my father and ask him for help identifying family tombstones in our hometown cemetery.
When we arrived, I took out three sheets of paper with a list of family names. While my father located specific tombstones, I made note of the dates of birth and death. But a strong wind came up making it difficult to write. So I went back to my car for my digital camera and began taking photos of gravestones.
One of my father’s brothers was buried in the cemetery Feb. 19, 2011, exactly a month earlier. My father and I did not attend my uncle’s funeral because of a long-standing family dispute dating back to 1984. It involved a family business and was serious enough that it had to be settled in court. It was very difficult for my father not to go, but it would’ve been uncomfortable with other unfriendly family members there.
Something happened that day in the cemetery. My father started feeling very strange and frightened. Something frightened him, but he didn’t know what. Later, he asked me if I heard him screaming into the wind, calling for me. He said he heard a voice in his head that seemed to be coming from outside of him. It said: Tell your son not to stay there. Get him away quickly. I did remember hearing my father calling to me. At the time I was taking pictures of the family tombstone where my recently deceased uncle was buried. I walked away from the grave, and looked for my father. Oddly, even though I’d heard his voice, I had trouble finding him.
That evening, I took my 17-year-old daughter to a nearby city for her part-time job working at a restaurant. On the way there, I started feeling a pain in my stomach and began sweating profusely. I felt wetness in my pants and pulled into a gas station. I hurried to the restroom, embarrassed, thinking that I peed on myself. It was worse. My pants were filled with blood.
My first thought was that I was going to die. My father had colon cancer 20 years earlier, but was saved by surgery. Now it was my turn. I went to a clinic and was examined by an emergency physician. At his recommendation, I made an appointment with a doctor who specialized in colon surgery. I would see him at 8:30 a.m. March 28.
Little did I know how important that date would become for me. Not because of the appointment, but because of the astonishing and frightening event that would take place in the early morning hours of that day.
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The next entry describes the event that has changed Charles’ life.
(The complete story can be found in liens in the Backyard: UFO Encounters, Abductions & Synchronicity, by Rob & Trish MacGregor (Crossroad Press, 2013).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=RvqvXhXwMbw
As you see in the You Tube video, this is the chaotic scene on March 27, 2012, on Jet Blue’s Flight 191, New York to Las Vegas, when the captain who was co-piloting the flight tried to storm the cockpit. He was wrestled to the floor by men en route to the 2012 International Security Conference. An off duty pilot helped to land the plane in Amarillo at 10 AM central time, 11 am Eastern time, and passengers were safely deplaned.
But here’s where the story slides into that strange area of synchronicity clusters involving numbers. Flight 191, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal, “is one of the most tragic of all flight numbers.” Here’s why:
1985: Delta Air Lines Flight 191, an L-1011 wide-body, crashed shortly before landing at Dallas-Fort Worth, apparently due to wind shear, and killed 137 people.
1979: American Airlines Flight 191, a DC-10, had an engine ripped off from under a wing, which severed hydraulic lines. The jumbo jet plowed into a field near the end of the runway, killed the 271 people on board, and grounded all DC-10s until the technicalities of what went wrong had been solved.
These tragedies and the near tragedy with Jet Blue all involved 1 or 11 in the flight number, the type of plane, the time the Jet Blue flight landed safely, and of course, the death of 137 people in the Delta tragedy.
This story first came to my attention through a link on the Daily Grail to author Loren Coleman’s fascinating blog, Twilight Language. As he points out, 191 can be rearranged as 911. But as I started Googling and ran across the Wall Street Journal article and another on Huffington Post, I was struck by the clusters of 1s and 11s and, of course, by that other number, 137, which we’ve written a number of posts about. How is it that in all three of these flight 191s, everything reduces to 1 or 11?
Then of course, there’s the famous Flight 19, (another 1). It consisted of five TBM Avenger torpedo bombers that disappeared on December 5, 1945, during a U.S. Navy training flight from a Fort Lauderdale, Florida and birthed the modern lore about planes and boats that vanish in the Bermuda Triangle.
The higher ups at Delta and American are either superstitious – or understand synchronicity; after their respective crashes, they retired the number 191 for flights. When Jet Blue was contacted by The Huffington Post about whether it would also retire the number, they said they had no intention of doing so.
So, in the future, I won’t be taking any flight 191 anywhere, and I’ll definitely avoid a Jet Blue Flight 191.
U.S. Supreme Court justices are now in day 2 (March 27) of arguments in the landmark Affordable Health Care Act case, which mandates that by 2014, every American must have health insurance or pay a penalty. The constitutionality of the mandate is what’s being challenged: how can the government force you to buy a product?
The lawsuit was filed two years ago by the National Federal of Independent Businesses and 26 states – led by Florida – in an attempt to overturn the law. The core of the legal question is whether the U.S. Constitution’s interstate commerce clause allows the federal government to force people to purchase a product they don’t want. The government attorneys argue that since everyone will enter the health care market at some point, it makes sense for people to obtain insurance while they’re still healthy and costs can be controlled.
Two years ago, Mary Brown was one of the original plaintiffs in the lawsuit, didn’t have health insurance, and owned a small auto repair shop in Panama City, in the Florida Panhandle. Today, Brown’s auto repair shop is closed, she has declared bankruptcy and is unemployed, partly because of unpaid medical bills. According to the Palm Beach Post, of the $63,000 Brown owes, $4,500 of it is for unpaid bills for her husband’s medical care. More than half of it is owed to a medical center in Panama City and the rest is owed to doctors in Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi.
Jane Perkins, legal director of the National Health Law Program said, “Had she been eligible or had this law been in effect, she would have had access to affordable health insurance policies that would have covered these health care costs and in all likelihood avoided bankruptcy. It’s ironic that this plaintiff against the law is someone who makes the case for the rationality of what Congress did.”
Ironic? We have a better term for it. Dark trickster.
More than 62 percent of Americans who file for bankruptcy do so partly because of medical costs. Perkins notes that Brown and people like her are one reason health insurance and medical care are so expensive. When people don’t pay their medical bills, those costs are passed on to consumers.
But another factor of this dark trickster is that both sides of the arguments are specious. When President Obama signed the Affordable Health Care Act into law, with the mandate, he essentially handed the insurance companies nearly 50 million new customers – the number of people in this country who don’t have/can’t afford health insurance. You could hear the insurance companies’ collective cheers all the way to the moon. In return, insurance companies can’t deny coverage for pre-existing conditions and must remove all caps for coverage. Until profit is removed from health care – i.e., take insurance companies out of the picture and extend Medicare to all – then health care in the U.S. continues to be just another business run by corporate interests.
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We were going to post this tomorrow, but it appears the individual mandate is in trouble and if it’s overturned, then the entire law unravels. Robert Reich, labor secretary under President Clinton, believes that overturning the mandate could result in Medicare for all, IF the administration plays their cards right. You can follow this at Huffington Post.
Here’s a synchronicity from Australian futurist Marcus Anthony. The same evening that he alerted us to the story below, I had downloaded the Inner Tradition edition of his book, Discover Your Soul Template. In the foreword, Ervin Laszlo’s mentions a book by David Loye, “Darwin’s Lost Theory of Love.” I had never heard of it and paused to Google it to read more.
A few minutes later, the e-mail from Marcus arrived in which he suggested looking at his current blog post about a synchronicity. To my surprise, the synchro dealt with Charles Darwin and was about something else that he lost.
With that introduction, here’s Marcus’s story.
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Synchronicity is a fascinating subject. Firstly, we can dismiss it as pure coincidence, as mere projections from minds that are, by their nature, pattern recognisers. This is the standard way of looking at all coincidences, from the perspective of modern science. The second way to look at synchronicity is to assume that the coincidences emerge from an intelligent cosmos, or intelligent agents of the cosmos. In this sense synchronicity implies that the universe is playful, and has an inbuilt directionality. It suggests that there is an intelligence(s) which “wants” us to move in a certain direction.
Two weeks ago, I gave a talk at the Hong Kong TEDx gathering at the HK Polytechnic University. My talk was called “Cosmos, Psyche and Our Brilliant Futures”. In my allotted eighteen minutes I made an argument for an intelligent cosmos, and predicted that soon the mechanistic paradigm that still dominates much of modern science will be replaced by the metaphor of an organic universe. Machines are unconscious, while organisms have intelligence and intention.
Part of my talk was about synchronicity and how it indicates just such an organic universe – where consciousness is a central component, not just an accidental bi-product. Fascinatingly, there was an intriguing synchronicity which occurred in regard to my talk. The Polytechnic Uni offered me the services of a student assistant, and her job was to make my slides as attractive and readable as possible. Part of my presentation was looking at the way that modern education and learning destroy certain natural abilities, and I used Charles Darwin as an example. Here’s the slide I put up for this particular part of the speech.
To go with this slide, the preceding slide was an image of Darwin. Below is my original slide, which I gave to my assistant.
However, when my assistant returned my PP file to me with the adjusted slides, my Darwin slide looked like the one below.
Darwin really had lost half his head! Later I was speaking to my assistant, and I said it was a clever idea. However she then confesed that it was all a mistake, and she hadn’t realised the slide had come out this way! I ended up leaving the slide exactly this way for my presentation, and using it as a great example of synchronicity.
Here’s an interview with futurist Marcus Anthony, Phd, author of Discover Your Soul Template. An Australian who lives in Hong Kong, Marcus talks about his life and how he came to write his spiritual self-help tome. He notes that his new book diverges substantially from what he publishes in his formal research, which he has also pursued with more than a thirty articles published in academic journals. His doctorate is in Futures Studies. Besides his writing and speaking as a futurist, he also works as a teacher and spiritual counselor. He does not presently hold a formal academic position.
1) What motivated you to write your book and what are the primary sources of your ideas? Where do the terms Integrated Intelligence and soul template come from?
Firstly, I love writing. I have always written, even as a child. For the decade or so leading up to the Writing of Discover your Soul Template (originally Sage of Synchronicity) I was mostly writing academic stuff related to the discipline of Futures Studies. Academia is incredibly restrictive, and there are numerous taboos in relation to writing about consciousness and psycho-spiritual development. I wanted to write a book which incorporated some of my academic ideas, but allowed me to tell the truth about life as I experienced it. However, in the end the book turned out to have virtually no academic content, and is full of personal stories and spiritual adventures I have experienced over the years.
2) Where do the ideas come from?
The truth is that they are mostly from my personal spiritual experience, and the simple experience of living in the modern world. I learned a lot from spiritual teachers like Leonard Jacobson, and a group of spiritual seekers in New Zealand, when I lived there in the late 90s.
I am very clairvoyant. Every time I stop to be present, sleep, meditate, or just get drowsy, images, songs and intuitive feelings come to me automatically. A great deal of my insight has come from that spiritual guidance. Of course I have done years of formal research too, and use it when talking about human intelligence, consciousness and so on. But to be honest, the direct experience of mind and spirit (and learning to apply them in my life) have been my greatest teachers, not books.
3) In the beginning of your book, you tell a story of a series of synchronicities related to New Zealand that culminated in a teaching job in New Zealand. The synchros seemed to guide you to the job. But it turned out to be a hellish experience. Did you think that you misinterpreted the meaning of those synchronicities? Was the abuse you took a test of sorts?
No, I don’t think I misinterpreted them. I just didn’t realise where they were leading me! As I mention in the book, sometimes we have to go through painful experiences in order to address the deepest needs of our souls. Naturally we all want to experience joy and pleasure, and avoid pain. So if the universe suddenly announced that part of your healing journey would require you to acknowledge that you are a complete psychological basket case and needed to feel the hurt that is inside you, of course most of us would run in the other direction! So Spirit has to be a bit sneaks sometimes!
It is important to acknowledge that while the end point is the same, every person’s journey is different. In my case I came from a background of harsh personal abuse in my childhood. This left me with incredibly deep personal scars. Several of my family members completely disintegrated under the weight of the darkness, descending into insanity, alcoholism, drug abuse, sexual abuse. One of my brothers committed suicide. Given this scenario, I have been called upon to address my own pain and suffering, bring it into the light, and to allow grace and healing to occur. We all have soul issues we need to address. Not everyone needs to do it the way I did it, however.
When I got to NZ I was immediately set upon by a psychopathic female boss at the international school where I worked. But at a deeper level, she merely played out some lingering pain from my childhood related to certain female figures. Because of her personal and psychic attacks, I was able to admit that I still carried a lot of pain in that area. By addressing that pain through inner child work, I was able to stand more fully in my power as a man. Till that age (30) I was walking man-child. That is, I was still a boy inside. There are a lot of big people walking around like that!
4) What role does synchronicity play in your life and how do you differentiate a synchronicity that is telling you that you are on the right path with one that is a warning that you might be taking a wrong turn?
I do believe that the universe and our psyches are in intimate relationship. It is a mysterious process. I cannot say I understand exactly how it works, but it just does. I allow synchronicity to guide me. I generally don’t go searching for it, however. When we habitually search for signs it is generally evidence that the ego has set up an agenda for power and control, and is refusing to trust life.
Generally, when a synchronicity occurs, the ‘energy’ of the event lets you know if it is a moving you toward something, or warning you of possible ‘negative’ consequences. The feeling you experience within is key. If it feels light and joyous, it is evidence that you are being drawn towards something that is ‘right’. If there is fear and a sense of foreboding, it probably means that it is a warning of an undesirable future.
5) Could you summarize what you mean by Integrated Intelligence and how it relates to the Law of Attraction?
Integrated Intelligence is merely the term I give to spiritual intelligence. It is a little more specific than the way people typically use the phrase ‘spiritual intelligence’. I identity specific ways of knowing such as unity experiences, intuitive synthesis of information, sensing the future, sensing the cause of problems, and identifying a person, place or book as being important. When I researched the literature I went about listing the kinds of things that people claim they can do with spiritual intuition, then I melded them with my own experience to come up with a core set of cognitive abilities.
6) You have questioned the wisdom of books like The Secret. Why is that and what kind of inner work does it take for a person to achieve his or her desires?
I like Wayne Dyer’s upgraded take on the law of attraction: “You attract what you are, not what you want.” I can’t say I’m an expert on the law, whatever the truth about it may be. I personally believe it is better to allow life to speak to you, rather than trying too hard to command it to follow your instructions. I suggest people follow their excitement, set general goals related to this higher sense, and then move lightly and joyfully towards the goals.
Work hard if it is required; and most of all follow through with committed action! Far too many people in the New Age and spiritual communities expect that they can manifest their desires by merely imagining them! The modern world is competitive, and it may take years of deliberate practice to develop the skills to become a master in some fields of expertise. For example, I have spent countless thousands of hours developing my intuitive abilities through meditation, recording dreams and visions, paying attention to intuitions and taking specific actions based on them, and also working on my emotional body.
My concern with some philosophies in this area is that they tend to be overly materialistic and cater towards our inner narcissist! You might be aware that James Arthur Ray, one of the presenters on the Secret, got into an awful lot of trouble on one of his spiritual rebirthing retreats, where three people ended up dying in an Indian sweat lodge in Sedona. Ray apparently set himself the goal of being the first New Age billionaire. He was charged with negligent homicide. Now that was some ego fall!
6) What can the reader hope to gain from reading your book and making use of the tools of Integrated Intelligence that you present?
Discover your Soul Template is a very practical book which teaches you how to develop Integrated Intelligence and then apply it in creating a life aligned with the deepest needs of your spirit, and the greater good of humanity. The book goes beyond law-of-attraction-type books by encouraging the reader to explore their own spirit as they go about living their bliss. Although it covers some serious topics, it is written with a light heart, and most people who have read it have told me that it made them laugh a lot. I enjoy self-derogatory humour. After all, why wait for others to beat you up when you can do it yourself! In the end we are only human. Let’s stop being so serious and have a good laugh about ourselves.
7) You call the inner voice that connects with Integrated Intelligence as the sage, but how do you distinguish the voice of the sage from the voice of the ego?
This is an important question for all of us. The best time to listen to inner feelings and voices is when we are in a state of peaceful presence. The worst times are when we are in states of fear, stress, expectation, and dare I say, lust! The ego is a trickster. It sets up agendas, and then gets excited when it thinks it is about to hit pay dirt (or throws tantrums when it thinks it about to be denied). The feelings associated with this are not genuine ‘intuitions’, but ego projections. For example, after I got my PhD I set up an agenda to become an academic in the discipline of Futures Studies. There were jobs I applied for, and there were interviews I attended where I got really excited and believed the job was ‘meant to be’. Then, when I got rejected there was the pain of having the ego’s agenda deflated. The payoff for my ego, in terms of gaining academic success, is ‘prestige’. Status, face, honour, prestige: these are all the same ‘energy’: the mind attempting to validate itself through manipulating the external world of people and experience so that it can feel ‘OK’.
In my spiritual counseling work, I once had a woman come to me saying she had issues of trust with God and the universe. She had a history of disappointment, of feeling denied. But the truth was that she had set up the mother of all ego agendas for herself. She believed that she was to be elevated into some higher spiritual realm where she would become ‘enlightened’. She was told by a clairvoyant that she was ‘star seeded’ and that she was going to ‘ascend’ sometime soon. In other words, she had created a delusion, and built a false idea of who she was around it. Of course God is not going to entertain such pompous nonsense! It is not God who was letting her down. It was just that her delusion required masses of emotional and life energy to be channeled into something that was never going to happen, and the impending realisation that it was all about to come crumbling down threatened her entire ‘story’. Naturally, her life was one of constant denial. Yet fall down she had to!. I call these ‘ego-falls’. The bigger the delusion, the more painful they tend to be. Yet they are ultimately blessings in disguise. Until the mind releases its delusion, we cannot know who we are, and we cannot heal.
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the present moment. The idea that we are going to achieve ‘enlightenment’ is a spiritual trap. You are either here being human, or you are tripping off into the flighty word of imagination and super-selves; that is, trying to become something that you are not in order to compensate for your sense of inadequacy. We are human beings. Let’s celebrate that. The state of presence naturally brings two feelings: gratitude for existence and love for life and all things. That is where our light shines. It cannot shine in some imagined future where we are ‘enlightened’ or elevated into some super-human form. That is the ego’s subtle agenda for escape. It is a rejection of what God has given us: this moment, this life, this self. How can your light possibly shine when you are rejecting who you are, and the life you have been given!?
8) As a futurist, what is your perception of life one hundred years from now, and how does that differ from the views of mainstream science?
I usually avoid making predictions with a timeline, as they are inevitably going to be wrong. It appears inevitable that there will be suffering, as the world is in the grip of the mind and its projections. Just as individuals suffer ego falls when they go into delusion, collectives of people do too: families, cities, nations, cultures, races, and ultimately the human race. In the 1950s in China, Mao ze Dong talked up a huge ego agenda for the Chinese people. He decided that China, then a nation six hundred million peasants, would overtake western countries in the production of steel (and other areas) within a short period of time. He worked everyone into a frenzy, getting everyone to melt down their pots and pans in backyard furnaces to increase steel production levels. The people bought the lie. Unfortunately Mao’s plan forgot the simple fact that when you take everyone off the fields to make useless pig iron, then there is nobody to plant or harvest crops. The result was the biggest manmade disaster in human history. Probably about 45 million Chinese people starved to death in the ensuing famine. In the history of stupid ideas this gets my vote as the most stupid. Yet hundreds of millions of Chinese people bought the lie!
Yet there are equally absurd ego agendas on sale in modern education, media and life today, and masses of people still buy them. For example the idea that human beings are discrete, isolated entities, and that consciousness is contained only in our heads is just dumb. Anyone who has done any inner work at all and allows their experience of life to inform them of what is real knows that mind and environment are entangled. The claim that the purpose of ‘life’ is to make genes replicate themselves (the selfish gene) deserves a special mention too. This is about as bright as saying the purpose of a car is to make the wheels go round. But because these things are written in science text books by people with PhDs, we assume they must be true.
9) What role do spirit guides play in your life and how do you distinguish them from your inner sage or higher self?
I have had many experiences where I have found myself in the presence of spiritual guides. These occur during sleep or meditation. When the busy mind is quiet it is easier for guides to communicate with you. In Discover Your Soul Template I mention my first major experience in this regard. It occurred just a few months after I began my spiritual journey, when I began to meditate. A female guide came to me as I slept. She had a very soft, feminine and beautiful energy. She was using her hands, moving them above my body in what seemed to be a healing process. She told me that I was rather more damaged than I realised, and that I was only using three per cent of my intelligence. That experience is what really confirmed that my exploration of the mind and spirituality was the correct life path.
I get daily spiritual guidance, mostly through words and song lyrics that some to me spontaneously. At least some of these must be placed there by spirit guides. For example, the night my brother committed suicide I was hearing the song “suicide is painless”, the theme from the TV series MASH. Only hours later the police knocked on the door to deliver the terrible news. It was a truly painful time for me and my family. However I was comforted by some of the songs that came to me over the next two nights. The first was from Oasis: “Someday you will find me in a champagne supernova in the sky.” I knew that I was being told I would meet my brother’s spirit again in the next life. The other song was “Don’t cry for me Argentina”. I felt this was telling me not to assume responsibility for my brother’s emotional energy, and to let him move on. We can unconsciously channel other people’s pain if we feel guilt or sympathy (as opposed to compassion) for them. I was being told to let him go. This was very, very difficult.
10) You write about the importance of following your soul template. Do you think that an astrological birth chart is a viable reflection of a soul template?
To be honest my knowledge of astrology is limited. I do sense that astrology is relevant to human consciousness. The connections are probably more archetypal than anything to do with physical forces. For example, the gravitational effect of Pluto on a human being is so tiny it is effectively zero. Yet waves, cycles and pulses are primary features of the universe. The movements of the heavens about us can be seen as being part of these kinds of processes. So yes, I do sense that astrology has some effect on our lives, although I am not sure of the extent of it.
11) Does the ego survive death?
There are many mystics, such as Krishnamurti and modern mystic Garry Webber, who consider there is no life after death at all, and I respect their knowledge, amd I am open to the possibility that they may be correct. However I have had an awful lot of psychic interactions with people’s ego-based projections after they have passed on. So either I am interacting with some aspect of their consciousness which still resonates even though ‘they’ don’t, or the human psyche goes on. By the ‘psyche’, I mean the reservoir of emotional and psychic energy which lies within all human beings on this earth. And if the psyche survives death, it is reasonable to assume some part of the personality does too. For example, not long ago I had a very graphic vision of a relative of mine who passed on more than a decade ago. In this vision I saw him on his knees with his hands over his face, absolutely distraught. He kept repeating that he had sexually molested two female relatives of mine, who are about the same age as me. So when I recently went back to Australia for the first time in five years, I rather subtly brought up the subject with one of the sisters of one of these relatives (not actually one of the two ‘alleged’ victims’, who I did not meet on the trip). She came right out and said one of the ‘victims’ (her sister) had indeed alleged that she had been sexually molested by the now dead relative. It is my many visionary experiences like this which have led to to conclude that at least some aspects of the personality survive death.
The Hunger Games, a trilogy by Suzanne Collins, takes place in an unspecified future, when the disparity between rich and poor is vast and profound. The U.S. is divided into 12 districts where life is brutally difficult and every day is a struggle to survive. The rest of society lives in the Capitol, an opulent place where life revolves around the annual Hunger Games. Each year a male and female from ages 12 to 18 are selected from each of the twelve districts to fight to the death in the games, which are televised. This is reality TV at its most chilling.
When the book opens, it’s the day of the reaping – the selection of the tributes – for the 74th year of the games, which were started so that no one would ever forget the uprising that changed the face of the country. In district 12, Katniss Evergreen, 16, and the other teenagers wait tensely in the crowd as the names are drawn. That very morning, Katniss’s sister, who just turned 12, dreamed that she was selected. And when she is, the Peacekeepers bring her forward to the stage. But Katniss screams that she will volunteer, that she will take her sister’s place.
From this point forward, The Hunger Games – the book – races forward at a breakneck speed that keeps you turning pages.
And now, The Hunger Games has hit the big screen. We saw it this afternoon and it’s one of the best adaptations of a book I’ve ever seen. Jennifer Lawrence, who plays Katniss, is superb. She captures all of the complexities of this weird futuristic society in which children killing children is the biggest social event of the year.
I last saw this woman in Winter’s Bones, which Nancy Pickard suggested we watch when she last visited. Nancy felt that movie had exquisite pacing and characterization and that we might learn something from it. Nancy was right. Rob, Megan and I later watched it and as Megan said then, “That actress is going places.”
Wow, was she right. This young woman carries the film. And given the success of The Hunger Games – you can bet Lawrence will be a familiar face from here on in.
Keep in mind that the trilogy is YA – young adult. In YA novels, writers can do things that simply aren’t accepted in adult novels. Children can be hybrids who fly (James Patterson); they can be magicians who play games on flying broomsticks (Harry Potter); or they can become reality TV stars who fight to the death (Hunger Games). They can be as violent as they want, but they can’t have sex. That’s the big no-no.
In one of The Hunger Games books, Katniss and Peeta, the young man chosen from district 12 on the same day she’s chosen – sleep in the same bed. Chastely. Without sex. And yet, in the first book, they survive (spoiler alert!) precisely because they act as though they have fallen in love.
The movie was cleverly marketed.People were being primed to go see the movie on the opening weekend. Megan saw it first in Orlando, at a sold out theater. In our town, the movie was showing every thirty minutes throughout the day, so in our 3:00 PM showing, the theater was maybe half full, we got great seats, and settled in.
In Variety, I read that the book had “only sold 200,000 copies” before the female producer approached Collins about a movie adaptation. That made me laugh out loud. Only 200,000 copies? Really? Most authors would be delighted to sell a few hundred thousand copies of their book. Of course, since the movie hype started, the sales have escalated into the millions. Even before that happened, Collins made the Fortune 500 list for one of the richest writers in the world.
Why? Well, part of it is luck. The books were obviously promoted from their inception. Also, Collins had had a bestselling series before this and worked in the movie industry as a writer for various TV shows. But more than any of that, the trilogy, especially The Hunger Games, are terrific reading. Collins created a complex female character willing to sacrifice herself for her sister and mother, and created a world that is an extreme vision of our own. She’s a fantastic storyteller. And all great books – and movies – start with the story and the characters.
Who loves these characters? Who do they love? What are the stakes? Emotions. Connections. The Hunger Games is sheer entertainment, but there’s much more going on beneath the surface.
On March 21, we posted a story about the shooting of Treyvon Martin, who by now needs no itroduction. Events concerning the this incident are escalating. One of the questions we asked was what this tragic shooting might mean on a soul level. A friend sent us her response:
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Getting back to the Treyvon Martin case and your question what do I think about this on a soul level? I think Universal Consciousness is expanding itself at an increased rate through experience, as are we, as is the planet. I think current events of unrest, re-ignited racism, turmoil, etc are external events which are the outward reflection of our mass internal thoughts and current beliefs. What we think and believe we manifest.
Racism from my perspective always comes from a place of fear; the “us vs them” response based on outdated belief systems, experiences and indoctrinations that have remained stagnant and which have been passed down from generation to generation. With that kind of limited experience and awareness how could George Zimmerman have acted any differently from his human experience. He acted as his belief system allowed.
On a soul level – when you take away that outdated belief system, the race, the history, the physical body, the culture and environment you are simply left with a level of pure awareness comprised of Source Energy – all of us are the same facet of the whole. So with this belief Treyvon on a soul level would have complete understanding of his physical death because he would be pure awareness, love and compassion – consciousness expanded through experience. And, since we also comprise the same Source Energy then our consciousness has also been expanded.
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I remember that when I read Brian Weiss’s Many Lives, Many Masters, I was struck by what he’d learned about the death of his infant son many years earlier, that the baby’s death “burned off karma,” for both Weiss and the boy, that it was a soul choice. So did Treyvon Martin, at a soul level, choose his death to underscore racism and gun laws, to bring about a profound change in the discourse in this country about both of these topics?
The prosecutor and chief of police have stepped aside. The people pressure mounts with a march of more than 30,000. Even Obama has issued a statement, that if he had a son, he would look like Treyvon.
One of the things we like about blogging on synchronicity is that our posts sometimes remind readers of some of their best synchros, and they relate them to us, either through e-mail or as a comment. One recent day we posted a collection of meaningful coincidences that occurred in Toronto. We noted that travel moves you out of your everyday world, hence opening you to synchronicity – if you’re paying attention.
Sometimes you can’t help but notice. That was the case of the following three synchronicities that all came to us that as comments on our post – More Toronto Synchros. In each case, the person experiencing the synchronicity was out of his or her everyday world. We thought they were so good that we wanted to post them again together.
The first comes from Scotland – from Vicky at acoustic wave. It’s one of those stories that could easily fall into the category of instant manifestation.
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Your story about the Sugar Sugar singer has just reminded me of one of the biggest synchros ever, for me. To outline, my friend works for a tourism company. I am a voice over artist. The tourism company was running an ad campaign on TV, featuring the voice of a very well known Scottish TV presenter. Once or twice, my friend and I joked that I’d like that particular voice gig.
Anyway, my friend came to visit last summer and we walked to the pub in a neighbouring village. We began talking again about that ideal voice job with her company. She mentioned that the famous TV presenter still had the monopoly on it. She then told me that she had never actually seen him presenting, so she wouldn’t know him if he passed her by. I was surprised, so I began doing an impression of his distinctive style. We both had a laugh about it. Literally, two minutes later, that well know TV presenter walked into the very pub we were in.
After I lifted my jaw off the ground, I was able to point him out to my friend. Scotland isn’t the biggest country in the world but it’s still very big and it seemed implausible that he would be in my little corner of the country, at the exact time I was doing a send up of him. It was one of the funniest, most unlikely experiences of my life. It really is a small world!
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That one reminded us of the famous plum pudding synchronicity. The next one comes from Darren down under. Darren tells us he has nothing against short people. It just happens that a dwarf plays a role in the following tale.
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This reminds me of a very similar experience I had when I took my two boys to see Nancy Cartwright (voice of Bart Simpson) at the Brisbane Concert Hall at Southbank.
We were waiting outside in the foyer for the doors to open, our backs to the glass wall. There were about twenty bar tables scattered throughout the foyer where your could rest your beer/wine glass and snacks. The tables featured a round top attached to a pole and underneath was a smaller round table about half way down where you could put your bag, I guess.
My youngest son, who was about 11 at the time, asked me what the smaller table was for. I thought I would be funny and told him that it was for dwarfs to rest their beer glasses on, as they were too short to reach the real table top.This seemed to satisfy his curiosity and we just continued to wait for the doors to open.
About five minutes later (and I swear my sons lives on this), a dwarf came along and placed a beer glass on a nearby table, not on the little table underneath, but on top of the real tabletop. I looked at my boys with pleading eyes not to say a word.
I know people reading this comment will think that the little fellow must have been around before I made the remark, but I can assure you that wasn’t the case. The odds of this happening must be trillions to one, as I hadn’t seen a dwarf in real life for about ten years and I haven’t seen one since. Out of all the “coincidences” in my life this one is my favourite.
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Darren, might’ve ended his story just like Vicky did…’It really is a small world!’
Darren seems to be one of those people that coincidence researcher Dr. Bernard Beitman calls ‘coincidence prone.’ One of our favorites involves the time Darren picked up a deck of 500 cards, each one offering a suggestion of something you might do at least once in your life. His first selection read: ‘Drive a forklift.’ That, ironically, is exactly what Darren has done for a living for 24 years. Clearly, a trickster synchro there.
The last story belongs to Becky, who found our Toronto stories very fitting and reminiscent of her own favorite.
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Weird or what! It’s so funny how synchronicity works, and it was an event that took place in Toronto in 1997 that has led me here today. Everthing about this post makes me chuckle. A couple of synchros jumped out at me. Toronto ( I love the city, been there many times), February ( my birth month) , Steven King’s 11/22/63 11 is daughters b-day, 63 is my birth yr, Beck’s taxi, my name is Becky and sometimes people call me Beck’s.
Also the biggest syncho of my life happened in Toronto. It’s similar to Vicky’s experience in the pub, except I was in a bar in Toronto after a U2 concert. I was with my husband and sister-in-law and said to them that we were going to meet Bono. They scoffed at me and not two minutes later he walked into the bar!
It was a life changing moment, a knock on the head. I had chills because two weeks prior to the trip not only had I dreamt the event was going to happen but I also had a flash of it happening while I was driving and awake! I even told friends I was meeting for dinner that night about my flash.
Chills ran up and down my spine when it actually happened. I knew in that moment that my life would never be the same! It woke me up to the synchronicity of life. I sure see the world differently now and pay attention to the universe that is always here to guide us.
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Great story, Becky, reminded us of Springsteen in the gym, fodder for several synchros here.
