The Tailor’s Tale

Posted on October 19, 2009 by Trish and Rob



This story comes from a man residing in the Albany, N.Y. area. Because of the intimate nature of the story, he asked us not to use his name. He calls himself Marlow’s ghost. We’re assuming he’s referring to Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), the Elizabethan playwright and poet who is sometimes referred to as Shakespeare’s ghostwriter.
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“For over a decade my wife and I have been growing apart. Actually, she has been withdrawing from me without explanation leaving me quite depressed and mystified. She exhibits unexplained and hateful rages, controlling behavior, isolation from our friends and almost a complete (uncalled for) lack of trust. This has been very painful as we have two young children as a captive audience. She has also refused my pleas for marital counseling.

“Well, over a year ago I had stopped at a quaint little tailor shop to have a few suits taken in as I had lost quite a bit of weight due to the fact that I had stopped drinking after her rant that I was drinking too much. I really wasn’t but that’s another story.

“I had recently taken a new job involving law enforcement and would pass a little shop on my way to work. As I would pass by, I began to feel increasingly compelled to stop. It was not the tailor I had previously used and to whom I planned to bring my suits, but I decided to stop anyway.”

Inside the shop, Marlowe found a “gaggle of women talking.” One of them was wearing a turban, had a Caribbean complexion, and was holding a small dog on a leash. Everything about the dog suggested it needed to get outside “to the nearest fire hydrant.” Since the other women were ahead of him, Marlowe volunteered to walk the dog. When he was back inside, the turbaned shop owner asked him to wait with his suits until she could get to him.

“Finally alone I told her what I needed and then she did a curious shuddering double-take and in non-sequitur fashion asked me in what month I was born. Now mind you, this shop advertises nothing but tailoring and mending services. I told her my birth month and this complete stranger says to me: ‘Your wife has been pushing you away. She was abused as a child and she has been holding this inside for some time. She feels you are getting too close and wants to hurt you before you get a chance to hurt her.'”

“Well, for the next 90 minutes she gives me details about my situation and myself that no other person in the world would know. She also told me that my two brothers-in-law, whom I consider my brothers, both good people, were also hurt when they were young.

“I left the shop dumbfounded, in a daze. I did not confront my wife, but I have sadly confirmed that her mother was highly abusive from the day my wife was born. This broke my heart and I haven’t been the same person since. I started therapy eight months ago to try and get my head around this whole life-altering saga.

“Now the synchronicity does not end there. At about the same time I took my new job as a local prosecutor, my wife entered the workforce as a child counselor at a local crisis center. Neither of us ever had such experience before nor did we ever consider these job sectors. It was out of economic need and these were the only jobs available after a two-month search. As it unfolded, one of my first cases was prosecuting a defendant who allegedly abused his young daughter. Now who do you think was assigned to this poor child as a counselor? Yup. My wife.

“I will leave this story here and offer something I have learned and then leave everyone with some questions. Many believe that emotional and psychological abuse is the most insidious and damaging form of childhood abuse.

“Now my questions. What would you do in my place? Would you act on this knowledge? Intervene constructively and try and help your loved ones in pain? Or just sit on the information believing it was just for your understanding. Last, as indicated in my subject line, was my visit to the seamstress a fantastical synchronistic event, God in the Machine, or was it both?”

In a followup e-mail, Marlowe told us that his wife has changed jobs and is now a counselor at an elementary school one block from the tailor’s shop. He has returned to see the tailor, who wants to help his wife.

“She has filled me in on much more very sad information, all of which I have confirmed independently. This woman is truly spiritual and an angel on earth as I have witnessed her personally healing and transforming strangers who enter her shop with an item or two of clothing. She also has a parade of regulars who come in always with a look of awe and expectant serenity on their faces. She tells me that my wife needs to come see her so that she can “flush” this evil thing that has been tormenting her whole life.”

Unfortunately, his wife refuses to visit the tailor.

“She derides me for believing a ‘witch doctor’ yet is scared to death to visit her with me. You have to remember intense guilt, shame, self-loathing and absolute secrecy have been instilled in abused children their whole lives.”

– Marlowe’s Ghost

A sad story…but Trish and I want to meet the tailor!

Posted in abuse, B2, intuition, marriage, relationships | 24 Comments

The Trickster At Work

Posted on October 18, 2009 by Trish and Rob

The trickster is one of the classic Jungian archetypes. Smeagol in Lord of the Rings qualifies. So did Jim Carey in The Mask. We’ve posted a couple of trickster synchronicities in the past, but this one, which comes from Mike Clelland, is a laugh out loud story.

Mike lives in Idaho…well, let him explain it.

“I spend a lot of time outside and get this irritated red face thing, and certain sun-blocks make it worse. Yes, life can be cruel. Alas, I am always on the search for a sun-block that does NOT effect my sensitive skin. During a recent outing with some folks I work with at an outdoor school, more than one of my comrades praised Neutrogena SPF-45. Hmmmm, maybe this would be the stuff that would finally end my search?

“So, when I returned to my little home town, I went to the locally owned Health Food Store in the hopes of finding a bottle of Neutrogena-45. Alas, nothing. And not at the locally owned little drug store either. I left the main street, and began my drive home. I planned to see if the giant grocery store built on the edge of town (Broulims) had this stuff. I slowed down as I approached the turn, but I found that I couldn’t quite turn the steering wheel, I simply couldn’t. The grim strip-mall of creepiness just seemed to repel me. So I continued home.

“When I was driving, I saw big bulging bags of trash set along the roadside. This was the annual spring road side trash clean up. Each year an organized group of volunteers will pick up trash along the high way after the snow melts. I live right on the highway, and I always try and help out on these days. So, when I got home, I grabbed a few big plastic trash bag and went out along the road side. It’s actually pretty distressing to really see (and touch) a winters worth of trash along the road. Lots of cheap beer cans and cigarette butts. I had some time, so I figured I would just walk along the road collecting trash all the way to the stop sign on the next corner North, about a half a mile away.

“There was a stop sign on this corner, this would be my target.

“This way, I would scour all the trash on this side, cross the road, and do the half mile back to my cabin. That’s a full mile of trash pick up, and that seemed pretty decent.

“As soon as I began, it started raining. And then the rain turned to snow. It was that crappy April kind of snow too, wet and cold. But I persevered, mostly because I was already soaked, and it felt like I was doing a nice thing. I thought about turning back but I just kept heading towards the stop sign.

“There was something nice about this moment, I could feel the results in the weight of the big plastic bag and it seemed easy enough to keep walking.

“And, when I got to my turn around point, that stop sign – literally at the base of the pole – I found a full bottle of Neutrogena SPF-45.

“I was, at the time, 44 years old. The product was noted 45. It was waiting for me – quite literally – at a sign post. It was a STOP sign.I can’t help to marvel at the altruistic angle in this story. It felt like the universe was rewarding me for a simple little good deed.”

Here’s the trickster part.

“The story isn’t perfect. That bottle had been there for a while, potentially all winter. The contents had separated into this runny yellow oil, and gummy white glop. It was kinda gross, and completely useless as sun-block. A mystical lesson in cosmic duality?”

Mike notes that he later got a new bottle and it doesn’t irritate his skin.

Posted in neutrogena, sunblock, trickster | 20 Comments

Another Sign

Posted on October 17, 2009 by Trish and Rob


Johnny Drogo wrote this synchronicity recently for Evolver.com. When I saw it, I was surprised how similar it was to my post called, ‘It’s a Sign.’ In both cases, the reading of passages from two books were involved in synchronicities. Here’s Johnny’s version.
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So on Sunday night I awaken early in the A.M. and I don’t feel like going back to sleep. So I turn on the radio and randomly select a book from the shelf that’s within arm’s reach of my bed. It’s “God’s Dust,” an Asian travelogue. I read the chapter on Taiwan, and about all the anti-Red propaganda and war preparations there.

Next, I read the first chapter of “Nature’s End: The Consequences of the Twentieth Century,” a novel of a totally polluted future Earth and how mankind confronts it. It’s co-written by famous “alien abductee” Whitley Streiber. The first chapter is about the main characters’ visit to Denver, Colorado, and how the air is black from smog and how you’ll croak without a gas mask.

So I eventually go back to sleep and get up and go to work. I check the news on the Internet. Two of the first items I see on Yahoo! News are “Denver choking on near record smog levels“ and “Taiwan stages live military drills to deter China.” WTF??

Posted in nature's end, streiber, word synchros | 3 Comments

911 Premonitions

Posted on October 16, 2009 by Trish and Rob

Vicki DeLaurentis sent us the following synchronicity, a story that illustrates how premonitions can occur years before the actual event.

“I read one of your posts about child reincarnation (something I have personal experience with both of my daughters) and noticed that you mentioned Carol Bowman and her site. I just found it fascinating that you would know her. Back in the early 1990’s I lived in the suburbs of Philadelphia and went to a day long spiritual retreat where it was promised we would do a guided meditation exploring past lives. The person giving the retreat was someone working on a book, her name was Carol Bowman!

“At this retreat I really opened up. I not only saw a very vivid past life which would prove to be monumental to me in this lifetime, but Carol also brought us to the future. There, I saw the Twin Towers in NYC on fire and crumbling to the ground.”

Vicki had no idea when this would happen, but her spirit guide assured her she wouldn’t be there when it did. For years, she tried to figure out when it would happen and asked every psychic she knew. But none of them had any inkling of anything like this.

In 1997, she and her husband moved to Long Island. She really began to worry about what she’d seen in Carol’s workshop, but once again, her guide continued to reassure her she would be fine.

One of her sisters lived in Manhattan then and worked in the area of the WTC. She loved working there and always had told Vicki she would never leave Manhattan. But on September 8, Vicki’s sister moved out of Manhattan, shocking everyone.

“A week prior to 9/11, my husband told me that a meeting he was supposed to have on September 11th had been moved up to the following day. So would it be okay if he changed the dinner plans we had with a business associate to September 12th?

“He then phoned back and said his friend thought it would be fun to have it in the Windows on the World Restaurant atop the World Trade Center. I immediately got a cold chill and said OK, but remarked that I didn’t know if I could go through with it because I have a fear of heights.

“My husband is in the oil business and everyone who worked in the office where his traders worked were all killed on that day. If the original meeting hadn’t been changed my husband would have been there. Needless to say, we never had dinner there.”

And Vicki finally had her answer about when her vision would occur.

Posted in 911, B2, Carol Bowman, premonitions, reincarnation | 16 Comments

Synchronicity in Wonderland

Posted on October 15, 2009 by Trish and Rob


I had just returned from a trip to Minneapolis, where I visited an old friend, nicknamed Rabbit, when this e-mail arrived. The day it arrived, a John Mayer tune, Your Body is a Wonderland, was rattling around in my head. So I was intrigued with the e-mail about rabbit symbols and Wonderland. – Rob
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My name is Eugene Beaty I was born the Year Of The Rabbit 1951, the same year Alice and Wonderland was made by Walt Disney, also the year synchronicity was defined by Carl Jung. It was also the year that the movie, Harvey, starring Jimmy Stewart, was released. It’s of course about a man who had an invisible Rabbit as a friend.

My rabbit synchronicities began in 1963, again The Year Of The Rabbit, also the same year John Kennedy died and all the coincidences between him and Abraham Lincoln became widely known.

My synchronicities illustrate how Father Time has written me into the Rabbit Passion Play of life! It’s all on my web site called SynchronicityInWonderland.

Jethro Tull wrote an appropriate song called Skating Away On A Thin Ice To a New Day. As he sang these lyrics at concerts in the ’70s, a human dressed rabbit ran around on stage.

Looking for a sign
That the universal mind (!) has written you into the passion play.

Skating away on the thin ice of the new day.

And as you cross the circle line, the ice-wall creaks behind —
You’re a Rabbit on the run.
And the silver splinters fly in the corner of your eye —
Shining in the setting sun.

Well, do you ever get the feeling that the story’s
Too damn real and in the present tense?
Or that everybody’s on the stage, and it seems like
Youre the only person sitting in the audience?

Skating away on the thin ice of the new day.

In Copley, Ohio, where I live, there’s a restaurant called the Bunny, which has a big tall rabbit sign out front. That was built in 1959, the year I moved to Copley. The place is now called Charlies which is the same name of the place where Elwood P Dowd went to have a drink and hang out with Harvey, the rabbit.
***
Eugene had much, much more to say, but that is a piece of the Rabbit puzzle from
www.synchronicityinwonderland. Hop over for a look, if you wish, and take along a carrot or two!

Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments

33 again

Posted on October 14, 2009 by Trish and Rob

We’ve written a couple of times about synchronicities with the number 33. It’s time for another, this one courtesy of Dan Brown and The Lost Symbol.

The novel deals with the Masonic philosophy, and for the Masons, the #33 is the highest degree in the order. Brown notes that 33 is also the highest master number in numerology, and symbolized Divine Truth. That meaning dates back to at least the time of Pythagoras, 600 B.C.

He goes on to note that Jesus was crucified at age 33 – even tho there is no historical evidence that that was his age. “Nor was it coincidence that Joseph was said to have been thirty-three when he married the Virgin Mary or that Jesus accomplished thirty-three miracles, or that God’s name was mentioned thirty-three times in Genesis, or that, in Islam, all the dwellers of heaven were permanently thirty-three years old.”

Brown says none of that was coincidence, but maybe it was synchronicity. In any case, here’s one that is clearly a synchronicity: Brown wrote this stuff about 33 on page 333 of his book. In all likelihood, he would not know what page of his manuscript would turn up as page 333 in the book format.

Oh, and here’s another. While I was writing the above, Trish asked the I Ching a question. What was the answer: Retreat, Hexagram 33.
Rob

Posted in #33, masons, Numbers | 30 Comments

Out of Africa-2

Posted on October 13, 2009 by Trish and Rob


Augustine Togonu-Bickersteth, the Nigerian writer who recently published a book on coincidences that compares the lives of African and European leaders, offers up another one here.
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Saint Ignatius of Loyola was born in northern Spain in 1491. He was a soldier.

Ibrahim Babangida was born in northern Nigeria in 1941. He also was a soldier.

Ignatius took up arms for the Duke of Najera. He broke his leg, was known to limp. He had surgery and spent a long time recovering after being taken home by French soldiers.

Babangida fought in the Nigerian Civil War, where he sustained a leg injury, and was known to limp. He also had surgery and spent a long time recovering in a hospital in France.

Najera sounds like Nigeria. Najera is associated with the River Najerila.
Nigeria is associated with the river Niger.

Ignatius lived in the Castle of Loyola in Spain, and Babangda lives in a 50 bedroom mansion in Minna, Niger State, Nigeria.
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Again, these synchronicities could be tell-tale signs of reincarnational links. When we first introduced Augustine here, we mentioned that his e-mail was a pleasant change from the typical Nigerian scam. Augustine notes that the notorius 419 scam, as it’s known, had its roots in Spain in the Spanish prisoner scam. Wikipedia confirms that contention.

Posted in africa, names | 4 Comments

Further notes on Miguel Serrano

Posted on October 12, 2009 by Trish and Rob

Serrano at Nazi shrine in Chile

On October 7, we posted “The End of the Road” which, in part, told of the relationship of Chilean writer Miguel Serrano with Carl Jung and Herman Hesse. Their mutual interests in mystical realms was their point of connection. Years ago, Trish and I thoroughly enjoyed reading Serrano’s Jung & Hesse, Record of a Friendship.

Peter Levenda, author of Unholy Alliance and other books dealing with the occult and politics, read our post with particular interest. An expert on the mystical pursuits of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, Levenda knows quite a bit about Serrano. He didn’t post a comment, because he knew he would be seeing us shortly. So Sunday, we met Peter for lunch in Delray Beach, Florida, a coastal community about halfway between our respective homes.

The restaurant we chose was closed so we ended up at Boston’s, on A1A. It wasn’t my first choice because it’s usually crowded and noisy on weekends. However, when we arrived, we were directed to the second floor where we found a table on the deserted balcony with a view overlooking the Atlantic. Trish and I had eaten there several times and never even knew there was second floor restaurant.

So part way through the lunch, Peter mentioned the post and asked us if we knew that Serrano was a life-long Nazi. He went on to detail his research into Serrano’s life and the books Serrano had written in Chile on Hitler as an avatar – an ascended master. We were stunned. And of course we thought: what about Jung?

Peter believes that Jung wasn’t an avowed Nazi or a supporter of Hitler. However, he was interested in a goverment that actively pursued mystical realms and occult forces, and that might’ve played a role in his relationship with Serrano. He also noted that Jung wrote very little about Jews, and never about the Kabala, the heart of Jewish mysticism. Peter pointed out that a group of Jungian scholars, in years past, actively attempted to distance Jung from the Nazis, and maintained that he was not a sympathizer.

After lunch we walked several blocks along A1A to the parking lot, arriving about five minutes after our meters had expired. We spotted a police car idling behind our respective vehicles and $30 tickets posted on the windshield. I tried briefly to talk the cop out of the tickets, but she would have none of that. As we drove off, I thought: like attracting like. We’d talked about Nazis at lunch and afterwards found a gestapo cop waiting for us.

Meanwhile, Peter is heading to Las Vegas this week to attend a conference of retired intelligence agents, where no one is allowed to enter the conference hall with a cell phone or even a notebook and pen. He plans to rush back to his room between sessions and write down everything he can remember. And maybe he’ll report back…if there any synchronicities among the ex-spies.
Rob

***
Peter sent us these photos of Serrano from a power point presentation he gave at a lecture.
***
As if to punctuate the theme of the day, Sunday night we watched the third episode of FlashForward, which we’d recorded, and it featured the story of an 86-year-old Nazi being held in a German prison. He revealed some information about the 137-second flash to the future everyone experienced.

Deirdre Bair in her biography about Jung, has some intriguing insights into Jung’s beliefs about the Nazis. One of the most baffling anecdotes came from the writer Philip Wylie, which remains undocumented and unverified to this day, says Bair.

Wylie contends that during a weekend in NY, Jung told him “in strictest confidence,” that Josef Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, had “commanded” Jung to travel to Berlin to attend public and private meetings with Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels to “discern whether all four of them, as Goebbels feared, evidently were mad.” Wylie claims that Jung made the trip and “sat through enough of their show to know they were madmen.”

But apparently no one in Jung’s family or among his closest associates ever heard him tell this story. As Bair concludes, “As no evidence exists to corroborate Wylie’s tale of this secret trip to Germany, it must remain just one among many unsolved puzzles of Jung’s political behavior.”

Posted in Carl Jung, Miguel Serrano, nazis, Peter | 14 Comments

Jessie, The Golden

Posted on October 11, 2009 by Trish and Rob


Jessie after Hurricane Wilma, wondering why the mailbox looks so, well, weird.

When Megan was in third grade, her class invited parents to a Thanksgiving presentation about gratitude. Each student made something that expressed their gratitude for something in their lives. Megan had sculpted a dog from clay and when it was her turn to speak, she got up and presented her little sculpture.

“I’m grateful for the golden retriever I’m going to get,” she announced.

Rob and I looked at each other: Huh? We had three cats and no intention of getting a golden retriever, or any dog. And her little sculpture certainly looked like a Golden Retriever – right down to the ears, the tail, the body stance.

“And this is the dog,” she finished.

“We’re getting a dog?” we asked her later.

“I think so,” she replied.

A couple of weeks later, a friend of Megan’s asked if we would like a dog. The friend’s father was a school cop who trained dogs to sniff out drugs in lockers and one of their dogs, a golden retriever, had washed out of the program. No dog, nope, nope, we said.

And then we saw her, a beautiful reddish gold retriever about two years old, who had been given up by her original family when the son developed asthma. Now she had washed out of the drug-sniffing program, and was going to end up at the pound unless someone adopted her.

“We’ll try her for a few days,” we said. “See how she and the cats get along.”

Well, Jessie came into the house, the three cats came over, sniffing, checking her out, and Jessie’s tail wagged and wagged, and then she plopped down in front of Rob’s desk and that was that. She stayed for eleven wonderful years.

When Trish’s mother went into an Alzheimer’s unit, Jessie accompanied us each night for a visit – Rob, Trish, Megan, and Trish’s dad, whom we called Buddy. The residents all knew her – by name – even though they didn’t have a clue who we were. There were three women who were always on their way into Manhattan for dinner and a play, two of them dressed to kill, the third in her pajamas and big Barney the Dinosaur slippers, who Jessie always accompanied to the locked front door, where they believed their taxi awaited them, the magical Cinderella coach that would take them into NY.

“Where’s the cab, Jess?” Lillian would ask.

Jessie’s tail wagged, she barked, the women waited at the locked door, in the locked ward. For Jessie, all humans were worthy of love and affection.

When Megan and her friends played music and sang for the residents of the unit, Jessie waited patiently, listening, her paws seeming to tap to the music, her tail swishing rhythmically, to and fro.

When we moved to the house where we live now, we had to put the cats at the vet for a night. The day we brought all three into the new house, Jessie was at the door, greeting each of them, nose to nose, her tail wagging, and we realized these cats were as much her family as we were. When our dusky conure joined the menagerie, she used to ride on Jessie’s back and engage in this complicated ritual with doggie treats. Rob would pluck out a treat, hand it to Kali, and the bird would drop it directly into Jessie’s mouth, a mouth that could just as easily have eaten the bird.

We took Jessie everywhere – to the gym, the grocery store, vacations. She captured the hearts of everyone with whom she came into contact. Her love was always unconditional. She taught us about love. Family. Community. Every afternoon, Rob took her down to the park in our neighborhood to play Frisbee. Kids would gather around, get into theFrisbee groove, and pretty soon, we’d have teams. Jessie had her own fan club. Everyone in the neighborhood knew her – and she knew them.

At the end of Megan’s freshman year at college, Jessie made the trip across the state with us, but she wasn’t feeling well. It was hideously hot that day, mid-90s, no breeze, and she was suffering. One of us remained in the car with her, air conditioning blasting, while Megan’s stuff was loaded into the car. On the way back across the state, we stopped to let Jessie out and she could barely stand. That night, one of our cats stood vigil next to her, and we knew the end was near.

We took her to the vet the next morning, early, fast, and discovered she had some sort of throat problem – she couldn’t swallow, the prognosis sucked. Surgery that might not work, drugs that would cripple her. We opted for euthanasia. At the moment the vet injected her, her eyes flicked to each of us. She was aware, cognizant, she knew. She had gone the extra mile to wait until Megan was home again before she left. She had arrived when Megan was 8. She departed when Megan was 19.

Eleven years. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not that long. I feel her around sometimes, hear her claws tapping against the floor, hear her soft exhalations as she dreams. Just a few days ago,I found her Frisbee in the garage. But it’s now 18 months later and we still haven’t gotten another dog. It”s impossible to replace a dog whose soul was human.

But back to Megan and that third grade presentation: it’s a great example of precognition, an aspect of synchronicity. Megan not only knew we were going to get a dog, she got the breed right!

But what Megan didn’t know, what none of us knew, was how a dog would change our lives in such profound ways.

Posted in dogs, Jessie, Megan, precognition | 11 Comments

SPLAT!

Posted on October 10, 2009 by Trish and Rob


This one comes from Jim Banholzer, a short, but funny story about a friend’s synchronicity.

***
At first, my friend seemed excited by the concept of synchronicity when I mentioned your blog to him, and he told me a story about the end of a relationship. It was after his first year of college, and he was saying goodbye to his girlfriend when – out of the blue – a bird crapped on his forehead. Soon after that, they broke up, and he felt somewhat shat upon, so to speak.
***
Talk about a sign! But there’s more. So when the man, now a professor, went to our blog, he cautioned Jim about getting involved here, pointing out that the definition at the top of the page was not grammatically correct. He probably is opposed to the colon after ‘or.’

We found that hilarious, at least the idea of warning a person away from a blog so as not to be associated with someone else’s grammatical error. Yikes! Yep, your career is toast, Jim!

He then wondered if the prof’s reaction to our blog related to his renewed annoyance of that trickster synchronicity from long ago. Maybe he will come back and straighten out our grammatical problems. We can only hope! Or: not.

Posted in birds as messengers, relationships | 8 Comments