11s Everywhere

Posted on April 5, 2013 by Trish and Rob

Today, I had an appointment (randomly assigned by computer) at the motor vehicle department to renew my driver’s license. Because of changes in Homeland Security laws, you now have to present a passport, two pieces of evidence that you live where you say you live, your social security card, and of course, your license. I dislike dealing with bureaucracies, so en route to the department, I stated, aloud, that I would like to experience some sort of synchro.  I mean, if I have to deal with a government agency, I deserved to at least have a synchro, right?

My appointment was for 11:10.  I walked in two minutes early, saw all these people sitting around, waiting, and thought, No, please, I don’t want to waste time waiting.  I glanced at the receipt the woman in the lobby had given me, looked at the computerized board, then heard my number called. Report to window 11.

 Really? An appointment at 11:10 at window 11? I figured this would go well.  The woman at window 11 spoke with a slight accent. Hispanic, I thought, but probably not Cuban. She was cheerful and pleasant and we joked about all the paperwork. Then she opened my passport and smiled.

“How long has it been since you were last in Caracas?” she asked in Spanish.

“1988. I went back with my husband and parents.” And right then I knew she was Venezuelan. “Where in Venezuela are you from?”

“Maracay.”

A map of Venezuela unfolded immediately in my head. Maracay lies south of Caracas, where I was born and grew up. One of our family vacations when I was a kid was to Maracay.  “I went there as a kid. It’s such a gorgeous country, isn’t it?”

“Precioso,” she said, as she typed away, entering all my info into the computer.

“But Chavez messed it up.”

She nodded. In Spanish, she explained how she had left Venezuela fourteen years ago, had married an American, and they always talked about how they would travel there when it was safe. “But it was never safe.  We never got there. He died last year.”

It was incredible to me that she could be sitting there at her computer, in her government booth, telling me – a total stranger – about the death of her husband. In her shoes, I would be in a mental ward. Rob gone, me raising Megan by myself,  a divergent path, no thank you. I expressed my  sympathy and asked if she had children. She pulled out her iPhone and navigated to a photo of the cutest 11-year-old girl in a bathing suit and sunglasses, playing to the camera.

“Enjoy it. They grow up too fast,” I said.  “My daughter is twenty-three. Are you ever homesick?”

She thought a moment. “My parents are here. But I am homesick for the country. What about you?”

“Always.” A moment passed. “Do you get a lot of Venezuelans through here?”

“Rarely. Mostly Cubans. And immigrants.” She handed me my passport and other papers. Our eyes locked, a connection happened. Then she said,  “Go stand by the blue curtain so I can get your photo.”

When I left  the building, I marveled at how the universe had manifested my desire rather quickly, all things considered. It’s about seven miles from our house to the closest motor vehicle department. The chances that my clerk would be a Venezuelan were slim.

And from that point forward, my day unfolded with shocking smoothness, ending this evening with a thunderstorm, unusual for April. It kept the cats and Noah inside and drew Rob and I out onto the porch. “This is great for April,” he said.  “April and May are usually our drought months.”

And if it continues, it bodes well for Florida’s hurricane season.

Now it’s 1:01 a.m. and the rain is still falling. I glance out my window, where a light shines down on the most magnificent plant with lavender flowers, and a waterfall from the roof.

In my mind, I am suddenly flying over Venezuela’s Angel Falls with my dad and Rob, the three of us marveling at the tepuis – cliffs, high plateaus  – and the tallest waterfall in the world cascading into utter beauty and majesty.

And it all started at the driver’s license office, with an 11:10  a.m. appointment, at window 11. Now, as I am about to press the publish button, the post time reads 1:11. REALLY?  By the time I’ve over that adrenaline shock, the clock has moved on. All these 11s leave me hopeful, buoyant, in the flow.

 

Posted in 11, 111, 11:11, synchronicity | 16 Comments

Game Change

Posted on April 4, 2013 by Trish and Rob

Note: Good ole Mercury retro played havoc with our radio interview on March 10. Dia finally recorded it – rather than doing it live – and posted it on You Tube. (This post was written before Merc went direct on March 17).

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Our daughter is a true movie aficionado. Mention a movie, an actor or actress, and she can recite verse and chapter and IMDB history. So whenever she comes home for a visit, we end up watching a lot of movies we have missed. One of these was Game Change, a 2012 film based on the book of the same name. It follows John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, from his selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate to their ultimate defeat in the general election.

Julianne Moore plays Palin in this film and she looks so much like Palin, has her voice and mannerisms so perfected, that for a moment when she first appeared on screen, I thought she was Palin. Steve Schmidt, who was McCain’s main advisor during the file, is played by Woody Harrelson, one of those actors whose face you recognize, even if you can’t exactly place him in movies.

Harrelson is  terrific in everything he does and as Schmidt, now an MSNBC contributor (on the moderate Republican side), you understand exactly what he went through trying to educate Palin so that she would be up to snuff on interviews, with speeches, in the public. Ed Harris, who needs no intro,  plays a bewildered McCain who wanted to “do something daring,” something that fit his image as a maverick.

So when his advisors suggested Palin as a running mate, an obscure governor from Alaska who was good-looking and went against party politics on her stance about oil companies and Alaska drilling, McCain followed their advice. The film is interspersed with actual news clips. There’s the famous  Palin/Couric interview, where it’s obvious that Palin’s foreign policy experience rests on her claim that she can see  Russia from her front porch. We also see clips of the VP debate between Biden and Palin.

I came away from this film feeling sort of sorry for Palin,  who apparently didn’t understand the kind of maelstrom into which she would be drawn. But what I felt most of all was gratitude that the McCain/Palin ticket didn’t win. To me, it seems like one of those alternate offshoots of history, that maybe there is a place where these two won and, well, no telling what sort of horrors might be occurring there now.

I mean, really. McCain as prez – we’d be at war with any country who didn’t agree with us on every talking point, and Palin would be urging all of us to retire in Alaska. I’m so deeply grateful that era is over. That’s what I brought away from this movie. That and an appreciation for superb acting and a respect for that adage about how if you don’t grasp your own history, you are doomed to repeat it.

Yuck.

Posted in synchronicity | 7 Comments

3 Questions About Synchronicity

Posted on April 3, 2013 by Trish and Rob

On March 31, we were interviewed by Alejandro Rojas of   Open Minds Radio/TV  and the link went up  on April 1. He was the first radio host we’ve spoken with who focused closely on synchronicity. He asked several intriguing questions that prompted this post.  Do aliens experience synchronicity? Do they generate synchronicities? And what, exactly, is the dark trickster as it relates to encounters and abductions?

 Do aliens experience synchronicity?

 To answer this question, we have to ask what synchronicity is for humans. A synchronicity can act as a confirmation, a warning, a wake-up call. It can bring emotional issues and decisions into greater clarity and can signal communication being the living and the dead. It can nudge us to take on a particular creative project, to move or stay put, to get married or divorced or to start a family. And yes, synchronicity can be a trickster, a Smeagol in disguise that blows open our consciousness in some way.

Synchronicity often makes us feel as though the universe is speaking to us. That’s how writer Deirdre Blair probably felt after she won the National Book Award for her biography of Samuel Beckett. “Suddenly, quite a lot of people who didn’t know each other and in several cases didn’t know me, either, were asking what my next book might be and had I thought of writing about Jung?”

In the author’s note at the beginning of Jung: A Biography, she wrote that she was uncomfortable with the way Jung’s name kept surfacing, but recognized the peculiar confluence of suggestions as a synchronicity. She started researching Jung’s life  and work. The irony of her synchronicity was that she was writing about the man who coined the term and wrote extensively about it.

Synchronicity, then, hints at a deeper order in the universe, what physicist David Bohm called the implicated or enfolded order, a sort of primal soup that births everything, even time. He referred to our external realities as the explicate or unfolded order.  So, if this deeper order exists,  then wouldn’t aliens experience synchronicity, too?

Well, it would seem so. But the challenge here is that we don’t know what “aliens” are, what type of reality they inhabit, or the nature of their consciousness. Are they ETs? Inter-dimensional beings?  Are they from a parallel universe? Are they us from the future? Are they somehow connected with the dead?

Abductees tell us they can manipulate human consciousness, can apparently “float” people out windows, through doors, and up into crafts. We are told by abductees that these entities convey information through telepathy and also through images on TV-like screens.  If these abilities are genuine rather than screen memories, then it would seem they have surpassed any abilities that humans have. We can’t possibly know whether they experience synchronicity because we don’t have answers to the most basic questions about who or what they are.

As Whitley Strieber  has said, “these encounters may be our first true quantum discovery in the large-scale world: The very act of  observing it may be creating it as a concrete actuality, with sense, definition, and a consciousness of its own.”

Do aliens generate synchronicities?

We do know that synchronicities are often associated with encounters and abductions, both during and after the event. We wrote about a number of these synchronicities in Aliens in the Backyard. But we’ve found that just in writing about this material, synchronicities occur. For instance, when we were working on Connie J. Cannon’s story about her 1981 abduction to Warner Rob’s Air Force Base,  we happened to check the statistic counter for our blog and were astonished that moments earlier someone from Warner Robins, Georgia, had arrived at our blog by Googling: Warner Robins military secrets.  What are the odds?

It’s likely that the nature of the encounter and abduction material  creates an atmosphere in which synchronicity can flourish. For someone who has experienced an encounter or abduction, the search for answers, illumination and understanding seems to trigger synchronicity. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the entities are generating them.

Can humans generate them?  How would we even begin to do such a thing? It’s not as if you wave a Harry Potter wand and presto-chango, the synchro happens. The most humans can do is to create an inner receptivity, an emotional and intellectual receptivity, that is conducive to synchronicity. But just because it’s unlikely that we can generate synchros, does that mean these entities can’t either?

Not necessarily. Again, it comes back to the  fundamental questions: who or what are they? If they can manipulate our consciousness, our reality,  if they can shape shift and do the other things that abductees claim, then perhaps they can generate synchronicities. Perhaps their intervention in our lives acts as a launchpad for the synchronicities that swirl around encounters and abductions.

And what, exactly, is the dark trickster as it relates to encounters and abductions?

 Smeagol is the personification of the trickster archetype. He usually had a private agenda of one kind or another that prompted him to mislead the hobbits on numerous occasions and to trick them into believing he could be trusted.    

In Native American mythology, the coyote is often depicted as a trickster. He’s cunning, adaptable, a shape-shifter who uses his mischievousness to drive home a point and make people laugh.

The trickster is prevalent in mythology and legend. The Norwegian god, Loki, the son of two giants, possessed great ingenuity but was really a rascal and raconteur who enjoyed stirring up trouble. Loki was a shape shifter who could take various forms- horse, falcon, a fly – and could even change gender.

Diane Fine, one of the lifelong abductees in our book, recounted an encounter with a Loki-type trickster. After attending a rock concert with her husband, she awakened later that night to find herself on a craft with three Grays and a taller enetity. The rock star whom she had just seen was asleep at her feet.

“What’s he doing here?” she demanded.

Telepathically, one of the Grays replied: We thought you liked him,  and the rock star promptly shape-shifted into another Gray.

The dark trickster can also be an ally. In 1991, Diane worked at a marina in California and went up and down stairs frequently. Her left knee developed problems.  One night, she found herself on the familiar surgical table on a craft, with three Grays and a taller being operating on her knee.

“If you can fix my knee, then why not fix my auto-immune disorder?”

The answer, conveyed telepathically, was: We can’t. It’s karmic. The knee is mechanical.

Diane lost consciousness. When she awakened the next morning, she found a small incision in her knee. It healed within two days and her knee has never bothered her again.

The  trickster wears many guises. While we were writing Aliens in the Backyard, we were contacted by Rob’s former agent about a new project. e had recently He Tony had recently launched a new venture, bookazines, a cross between books and magazines, and asked if we would be interested in writing a couple of them. He told us that the editor for these bookazines was Bob Guccione Jr, the son of the man who started OMNI Magazine.

We were floored. Back in the mid-1980s, we wrote for OMNI’s anti-matter section, which covered UFOs, abductions, encounters and everything paranormal. It’s how we got our start as freelance writers. Because of OMNI, we met Betty Hill and Budd Hopkins and our interest in this field burgeoned. For us, things had come full circle.

We even experienced a rather amusing trickster synchro with Alejandro Reyes, the radio host who asked these three provocative questions. We thought that Open Minds would be a great venue for an article about synchronicity and encounters and intended to ask him about it once we received the link for the show. But he beat us to it. When he sent us the link, he invited us to send him a submission.

 

Posted in aliens, aliens in the backyard, radio, synchronicity | 14 Comments

Navajo Nation Rangers

Posted on April 2, 2013 by Trish and Rob

Here’s a video about a law enforcement agency that investigates the paranormal and UFO cases.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giv0zBPXmYg

Posted in synchronicity | 7 Comments

TED Doubles Down

Posted on April 1, 2013 by Trish and Rob

You may recall we wrote a post here about our surprise in learning that TED, an organization that lets brilliant people speak out about their ideas, removed talks by Rupert Sheldrake and Graham Hancock. Sheldrake questioned mainstream science’s approach to the paranormal and Hancock’s ideas are on the frontiers of science.

TED was heavily criticized for removing those talks from their archives. Their reaction to the controversy, astonishingly, was to double-down by cancelling an upcoming TEDx event in Hollywood entitled, “Brother Can You Spare a Paradigm.” It featured speakers like Russel Targ, Marianne Williamson, Marilyn Schlitz and Larry Dossey.

The Hollywood TEDx event was promoted this way: “(The event) will illuminate the urgent need to change our fundamental value system or worldview to one in which humanity pulls together rather than separately. This view would supersede the current worldview where whoever has the most toys wins. The new view is based on what science tells us about a quantum universe, with everything being interconnected and all of us being interdependent. A new science-based vision won’t take hold, though, until people know and understand that there are more humane alternatives available.”

That description apparently aroused the ire of  some powerful TED backers who ardently defend the validity of mainstream science. In cancelling the event, an email sent to the organizer by TED described the ideas it was presenting as “pseudoscience.”

Futurist Marcus Anthony has written extensively about the TED controversy, including three articles that were published in  Conscious Life News, in which he attempted to show how the controversy could be settled. He also brought this latest TED kurfuffle to our attention.

Marcus writes, “It is now clear that TED is controlled by a narrow and extremist skeptics collaboration which is trying to shut down knowledge and information which challenges scientific materialism. I am of the firm opinion that such ideas should be freely discussed. How else are they to be debated or examined rationally? Suppression will give these speakers and ideas more publicity.”

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More commentary on the TED controversy also appears at Weiler Psi.

Shortly after reading the above description of the cancelled TEDx event, which calls for a greater recognition of how everyone and everything is interconnected and interdependent, I happened upon a blog post in Sacred Spiral of Light, which included this synchronistic comment. Wouldn’t you know, synchronicity comes into play in multiples and ties it altogether!

“For me noticing synchronicity is akin to noticing that we are not separate beings but rather all connected…it is being in touch with the wonder, the magic and the power of the Universe. It is realising that the Universe is in constant communication with us all…if we can but slow down a tad and notice…”

Thank you for that, Elaine.

 

Posted in synchronicity | 21 Comments

Happy Easter

Posted on March 31, 2013 by Trish and Rob

In 1919, a WWI soldier, Louis Houghton, brought a suitcase full of hybrid lily bulbs to the southern coast of Oregon. He gave them to family and friends to plant. The climate was apparently ideal for growing the lily, which is native to the Ryukyu Islands of Japan. By 1945, more than a thousand growers were producing bulbs for the commercial market. They have a sales window of only two weeks a year, but Easter lilies are the fourth largest potted plant crop in the U.S.

The lily in the photo above is in our yard. One Easter five or six  years ago, we bought it and later planted in our yard. Even though Easter falls on a different day every year, this gorgeous lily blooms without failure every year during the Easter weekend.

In 2012, for instance, Easter fell a week later than it does this year, on April 8. In 2011, Easter fell three weeks later than this year, on April 24. But year after year, this  lily blooms right on time. How does it know to do that? Is it Nature or magic or both? Or something else altogether?

Happy Easter to all of you!

 

 

Posted in synchronicity | 15 Comments

A Saturday Chuckle

Posted on March 30, 2013 by Trish and Rob

This one was sent to us by Nancy McMoneagle. It pretty much sums it up!

 

 

Posted in synchronicity | 4 Comments

DOMA

Posted on March 29, 2013 by Trish and Rob

In the mid 20th century, it was illegal for blacks and whites to marry.  Illegal. Think about that for a moment.

If you loved someone whose skin color was different than yours, you were not allowed to marry that person. You were relegated to the same shadowed black alleys where women sought illegal abortions that sometimes resulted in their deaths, and were made to feel that the love you felt for a person who simply happened to be a different color was somehow soiled. This is what the gay rights issue now is all about – civil rights.

DOMA – the Defense of Marriage Act signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1996 – established that no American state, district or territory could be required to recognize a same-sex marriage that was performed in another state. The law also laid out that the federal government does not recognize gay marriage for any purpose, ranging from issues related to immigration and joint tax filings to the issuance of federal insurance benefits and more.  I’m still not clear on why Bill Clinton, hailed as a bastion of liberalism, signed this act into law.

This week the Supreme Court is hearing a day of oral argument each on the Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8, a California ballot measure that voters approved in November 2008. It amended the state’s constitution to define marriage as only between a man and a woman.

This whole issue strikes me as so specious that I am incensed whenever I hear something about it on the news. Why should the federal government or any state government deny gays the right to marry? To adopt children and raise families? To enjoy the same tax breaks and Social Security benefits that straight married couples enjoy? Once again, what’s really going on here is the last, dying gasps of an old paradigm that kept gays closeted for years.

My first editor, Chris Cox, who bought my first novel in 1984, was gay. He lived with Bill, who had a PhD in art history and ran one of Manhattan’s art museums. One day, Chris called and broke down sobbing:  Bill had been diagnosed with AIDS. But they were hopeful, there were new drugs, he would make it, Chris said.

Bill didn’t make it. His death was slow, painful, horrific. He deteriorated in bits and pieces – bodily functions, vision, gone. Bill’s parents brought him home to Minneapolis to die and flew Chris out there from New York every weekend to be with Bill. Chris and Bill were in their mid-thirties at the time. It was the late 80s.

Bill died and Chris’s life fell apart. Within a few months, he was diagnosed with AIDS.  He got to the point where he couldn’t make calls, work, do much of anything. His friend and fellow editor at Ballantine, Cheryl Woodruff, who was Rob’s editor at the time, helped with Chris’s daily life. Susan Sarandon, who Chris had known before she became SUSAN SARANDON, paid for a private nurse.  In 1990, he passed on. Cheryl arranged a memorial service in New York and called to ask me to speak at his service. That he had requested it.  So Rob, Megan and I flew to New York.

During this period that Chris was my editor, Rob and I had been leading  tours to Colombia and the Peruvian Amazon for Avianca Airlines. Chris accompanied us on some of these tours because he wrote travel pieces for Conde Nast and other magazines. In the top photo, he’s the guy on the far right. The photo is old and I couldn’t get it any larger.

On one of these trips, he led me to this beautifully carved nomadic figure in the photo. I bought it and spoke about it as his memorial service. In my mind, his figure symbolized Chris,  the intellectual nomad who took chances on unknown, unpublished writers.

Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins sat behind us at that service and she gave the opening memorial, a moving tribute to an unusual man – not a gay, white, black or Asian man, but a MAN, a HUMAN BEING whose life was cut short by a devastating disease.

So when I hear these arguments in the supreme court about a gay person’s right to marry the person they love, I go back to Chris and Bill. I go back to the late 1980s when the world lost many young and talented gay men and women to AIDS. It saddens me. Even though we’ve made strides as a nation, a people, a collective,  gay marriage remains a divisive issue.

I don’t understand it. Love is love. The gender of love shouldn’t even enter into the equation. Gay or straight, black or white or green, we all deserve the same rights, across the board, coast to coast, state to state, heart to heart.

 

Posted in DOMA, synchronicity | 17 Comments

A Writer’s Synchro

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Trish and Rob

One day, a synchronicity alert came up that led me to Sandra Champlain’s website.  The synchro is a good one and I asked if we could repost. She said sure and sent me a digital file of her book, We Don’t Die: A Skeptic’s Discovery of Life After Death. 

I haven’t read the book yet, but appreciate the synchro. Every author hopes the reading public will love his or her book. And when you receive a negative review, it hurts. It’s as if your child has been bullied and hit.  I’ve read books that I disliked but have never posted a negative review. I just don’t buy any more books by that author.  As my dad used to tell my sister and me, If you don’t have anything good to say, keep it to yourself.

Here’s the synchro:

My book, “We Don’t Die” is so new that not a lot of people had read it. So, I had a handful of good reviews and I was thrilled people enjoyed it.

However I woke up a few days ago to a new review. Not a 5 star or 3 star or even a 2 star…but a 1 star review. “Poor reading…” the guy or gal called it “…a joke to read.” When I read it my heart sank. I was quick to wonder if I have any enemies that don’t want me to succeed or that simply want to make me look bad. But then I thought of so many people I have experienced, you probably have too, that when having a bad day they really take it out on another. My book probably just touched the wrong nerve in the person and angered them.

If you have read it, you know I talk directly to the reader and have them look at their life, so they have a life that counts. I cannot even guess what the person read or why they said what they did, but I have to trust they felt better for doing it. I am a big girl, I can be strong. I trust that they got what they needed and so did I. A good friend told me  “If you try to make everybody happy, you’ll make no one happy.” Even Oprah has people that don’t like her, so I can be thick skinned and realize my book is not a fit for everyone.

Here’s the cool synchronicity that followed. The very next day there was a new review of my book on Amazon. Not just any review, but a review written from Amazon’s #1 top reviewer (out of the 14 million reviews people have written, this woman “Chandler” holds the #1 spot).

I had gotten a tip to contact some of these top reviewers and ask them to review my book, as they hold more weight with readers than some of people who have never written a review. Chandler was the only person I wrote to and she said “No, I don’t do book reviews.” I politely asked if I could send her a book as a gift anyway, because I knew that someone, somewhere in her life would deal with grief and she could have a good thing to give them.

It was this Chandler who read my book and gave a 5 star review the day after the bad review came in. That’s pretty miraculous, I’d say!

We never know why exactly people do what they do or say what they say. Often it can be very, very hurtful. However, if we believe in ourselves, keep taking the best action we know to do, have integrity and trust the process…amazing synchronicities are bound to happen. That one knocked my socks off.

 

Posted in synchronicity | 5 Comments

Memories of the future

Posted on March 26, 2013 by Trish and Rob

 

One of the ways Carl Jung thought of synchronicity was to compare it to ‘memories of the future.’ I’m not sure he ever used that particular phrase, but he did say that one of his favorite quotes on synchronicity was from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, in which the White Queen says to Alice: “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backward.”

Here’s the full reference from the story, as cited by Wikipedia.

‘The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday–but never jam to-day.’
‘It MUST come sometimes to “jam to-day,”‘ Alice objected.
‘No, it can’t,’ said the Queen. ‘It’s jam every OTHER day: to-day isn’t any OTHER day, you know.’
‘I don’t understand you,’ said Alice. ‘It’s dreadfully confusing!’
‘That’s the effect of living backwards,’ the Queen said kindly: ‘it always makes one a little giddy at first–‘
‘Living backwards!’ Alice repeated in great astonishment. ‘I never heard of such a thing!’
‘–but there’s one great advantage in it, that one’s memory works both ways.’
‘I’m sure MINE only works one way,’ Alice remarked. ‘I can’t remember things before they happen.’
‘It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,’ the Queen remarked.

You might ask, how can we remember the future when it hasn’t happened yet? Well, that’s true if we see life as linear. But what if linear time is an illusion, as the theory of relativity suggests, and all time is taking place simultaneously, or all points in time are equally real.

This concept, I suspect, dates back to the ancients, but in Western philosophy, it was formulated in the writings of John McTaggart, author of The Unreality of Time (1908). Essentially, the ideas is that time is just another dimension, that future events are already ‘there.’ In other words, there is no objective flow of time, only the subjective experience of the passage of time.

Posted in synchronicity | 16 Comments