Intuition and the Military

Posted on March 13, 2012 by Trish and Rob

 

 

 

 

 

 

Apparently the U.S. military has discovered that intuition may be a valuable tool in combat.  According to Live Science,  soldiers sometimes show a “battlefield sixth sense” that has saved lives in Afghanistan and Iraq. So now the military, of course, hopes to better understand this sixth sense and to train troops to tap into it.

The military has been doing its homework on this topic. The Office of Naval Research  (ONR) points to sixth-sense research about how “humans can detect and act on unique patters without consciously and intentionally analyzing them. The military also pointed to studies suggesting a sixth sense can arise from ‘implicit learning’ – absorbing information without being aware of the learning process – rather than building up expertise through years of practice.”

The ONR plans to measure how both intuition and implicit learning work, then they would create a model of this type of thinking. This model would reflect individual differences among soldiers, how they adapt to new situations, and would take into account the influence of battle fatigue.

It’s terrific that the military recognizes that intuition can save lives. But can intuition be broken down into components that comprise a “working model” of intuitive thinking?  Can intuition be taught? Or is it more a matter of awareness? Most of us have hunches from time to time, gut feelings,  that sense of certainty that we should do or not do something.  And we either act on the hunches or ignore them.

The dictionary defines intuition as: direct perception of truth, fact, etc independent  of any reasoning process; immediate apprehension. In the Western world, we are taught to distrust such perceptions. The emphasis is on left-brain thinking, reason, facts,  proof. And yet, in a time when everything is in flux, when institutions we took for granted are crumbling, when we are surrounded by uncertainty and have almost instantaneous access to news and information, our intuition may be our strongest ally. It enables us to make immediate decisions based on nothing more than a feeling.

We do seem to be in the midst of an emerging paradigm that is much more heart-centered and right brain than the existing worldview. And in this new paradigm, intuition and synchronicity are like conjoined twins.  It’s impossible to get to know one without the other.

So it’s very likely that as the military creates its intuitive thinking model, they will come face to face with synchronicity. Perhaps   Bernard Beitman’s Coincidence Studies would be of great interest to them!

 

Posted in intuition, synchronicity | 25 Comments

Paradigms and Neptune

Posted on March 12, 2012 by Trish and Rob

A woman believes that people are stealing her clothes, her jewelry, her money. She holds conversations with her mother, dead now for 30 years, and sometimes thinks that her son is a distant cousin and that  her husband is her father. She hears voices and sees things and people that aren’t there.

Another woman holds conversations with the dead, hears voices, sees things that aren’t there, and knows that her son was her husband in a previous life. People seek her out for precisely these reasons and pay her handsomely for the messages she brings from the dead.

The first woman is an Alzheimer’s patient; the second woman is a psychic medium. Both illustrate the elusive nature of Neptune, its ethereal veil, the way it dissolves barriers between realities. Think of Neptune as a tuning fork. Tap it. It hums. But no two people hear the hum in exactly the same way. Neptune transported Edgar Cayce into other realms and swept Einstein into the heart of scientific truth. It gave diarist Anais Nin penetrating insight into other people. But it can also lead into the basest escapism through alcohol, drugs, sex, addictions of all kinds, the darker side of the occult. It can lead to religious fervor, religious wars, extreme religious views and beliefs.

Neptune also rules compassion, the higher self, inspired art, escapism, addiction,  everything psychic, spirit communication, imagination, connection to something larger than ourselves. It dissolves the boundary between ego and others, so there’s often an element of confusion involved in any Neptune transit, but particularly with this one.

Neptune dipped into Pisces briefly in 2011, then retrograded back into Aquarius. On February 3, 2012, it entered Pisces again and will be there for the  next 14 years.  We can already see its influence being played out on the global stage.

In American politics, particularly in the Republican party, the religious fervor has reached frenzied proportions. For example, Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker  write of the e-mails she receives, including one “about why women have been saddled with the monthly inconvenience and painful childbirth – for tempting men to do evil and failing to recognize their roles as ‘helpmeets’ for men.”

She quotes one e-mail: “Pagan women like yourself have no regard for the natural order of God’s plan and shamelessly promulgate the ‘we are goddesses’ bile that has infected the entire country and pretty much stopped it in its tracks from incurring God’s blessings.” And Parker is a moderate Republican, who is anti-abortion, not a leftist feminist.

But beneath this frenzy is another current – a burgeoning interest in the nature of reality and of consciousness, in how we are all connected, and in how we can live more compassionately. In other words, we are witnessing the war between paradigms – the old and the new.

This struggle between the old paradigm and the one that is evolving, emerging, is sometimes so glaringly evident that it’s shocking. Here’s the old paradigm:

  • Mostly male white politicians talk about legislation to ban contraception and to require transvaginal ultrasound – medical rape – before a woman can have an abortion.
  • Scrap social safety net  programs – Medicaid, Medicare – and privatize Social Security.
  • The real extremists in the old paradigm consider college “elitist” and advocate doing away with public education and having every kid in America home schooled.
  • Never allow gay and lesbian couples to get married.
  • Stoke the war machine; it’s great for the economy.
  • If you’re poor, elderly, you’re on your own. If you’re sick and don’t have health insurance, well, too bad.
  • No tax hikes on the wealthy, keep the burden on the poor and the middle class.
  • We live in a mechanistic universe, where everything is cause and effect.
  • Holistic health and medicine, ie. the mind-body-spirit connections, is  just New Age silliness.
  • UFOs/ETs are nonexistent. We humans reign supreme in the universe.
  • We have the best medical system in the world and we’re working on drugs that can cure anything.
  •  Climate change/global warming is a myth.

This list is long and depressing, so I’ll stop here. Just tune in the evening news for more.

Here’s what is so far apparent in the new paradigm:

  • What affects you affects me. We are connected.  We are all a part of Indra’s net.
  • If you can imagine it, it’s possible.
  • We create our realities from the inside out, based on our beliefs, emotions,  and thoughts.
  • Compassion, forgiveness, love, and diplomacy are more powerful than war.
  • Regardless of differences in ethnicity, culture, religious beliefs, gender, belief systems, we are equal.
  • Intuition and synchronicity are recognized as essential tools.
  • The universe – or Source, God, the higher self, whatever you want to call it – communicates with us constantly.
  • We are the change we can believe in.
  • Now, this instant, is the only moment that counts.
  • Each of us has a purpose on the planet and every purpose is equally important.
  • Keep an open mind even when the idea seems preposterous. After all, it was once widely believed that the world was flat, that electricity wasn’t feasible,  that travel to other planets was possible only in science fiction.
  • We share the planet with wildlife that is probably as intelligent or more intelligent  than we are.
  • We live many lives.
  • Confront your fears and move on.
  • Be forever curious, honor your own wisdom, never lose sight of your dreams.
  • Indulge your innate creativity.
  • And okay, I don’t know if this is really part of the new paradigm, but I hope it is: if ET knocks at your door, cautiously invite him/her in with the understanding that you will not be manipulated or controlled in any way, that contact will be only beneficial.

I’m sure I’ve left stuff off this list. But you get the idea. The new paradigm is Neptune’s domain. And we’ve got the next 14 years to perfect it.

Posted in astrology, Neptune, paradigms, synchronicity | 25 Comments

Karma and the law of attraction

Posted on March 11, 2012 by Trish and Rob

We typically think of the law of attraction as a focused effort to attract whatever we desire – a job, money, a car, improved health, a romantic partner. Whatever.

But it doesn’t always happen that way. Sometimes the law of attraction spins into someone’s life as a result of a good deed.  That is, by acting in a selfless manner and being of service, you just might be rewarded by the Universe with a surprising endowment.

That’s what happened recently to U.S. Marine Corporal Alexander Degenhardt who months ago decided to become a bone marrow donor. On leave and en route to Las Vegas for a quick overnight stay, he was contacted by a military health official and told that a matching recipient has been found. He was asked if he was still willing to serve as a donor.

“They asked me if I was sure I wanted to go through with it, because it’s kind of painful. But what’s a little pain if it will save someone’s life?”  Cpl. Degenhardt said he was ready whenever they needed him.

The next day, (Feb. 19) about twelve hours after arriving in the gambling capital, he sat down at a ‘penny slot’ – the Money Vault Millionaires Seven slot at the Bellagio-  and a short time later he was $80 ahead. He was feeling good and it was getting close to time to leave for the airport to catch his plane back to Washington D.C., where he is stationed, at Nellis Air Force Base. He decided to play again, and that’s when $$$$ filled the screen. He’d hit the jackpot: $2.9 million.

Appearing on CNN on Sunday evening (2-26), he was asked if he thought the two experiences – his willingness to be a donor and winning the jackpot – were related. He nodded. “Yes, I think everything is connected.” It’s a kind of good karma, he said.

“Actually, though, I’m more excited about helping someone with the marrow donation than I am about winning the money.” He added that he planned to remain in the military and live on his pay while saving the jackpot.

He said that when he saw all the $s come up on the screen, he didn’t know what it meant. “Dude, what just happened?” he remembers asking a friend. “It’s something you always want to happen, but when it does happen you don’t believe it.”

Read more here.

Posted in synchronicity | 13 Comments

Update on Women’s Health Stuff

Posted on March 10, 2012 by Trish and Rob

I used Stephanie, the macaw from Costa Rica, for this post because in some weird way, I think this bird understands what it means to climb that volcano in the distance. And that’s what is happening to women now.  We’re having to move up ridiculously high mountains once again.

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Many decades after women won the right to vote, to use contraception, to have abortions, many decades after Roe v Wade legalized abortion, U.S. politics is once again embroiled in legislation that attempts to control women’s bodies. The updates on this story smack of the trickster, I think, and are attributable to the fact that we have a lot of women in politics now.
On  March 2, 2012, State Senator Nina Turner (D-Cleveland) announced legislation “that would protect men in Ohio from the risks of PDE-5 inhibitors, drugs commonly used to treat symptoms of impotence. Turner’s legislation would include provisions to document that the symptoms are not psychological in nature, and would guide men to make the right decision for their bodies. Physicians would be required to obtain a second opinion from a psychological professional to verify that a patient has a true medical malady before the medication could be prescribed.”

Interesting to see the tables turned, particularly in light of the fact that some years ago, Limbaugh was stopped at Palm Beach International Airport because he had a bottle of Viagra with him, except that it wasn’t in his name.

How would Rush feel about a rectal exam before obtaining Viagra?

Probably not so good. But Virginia State Senator Janet Howell proposed on Monday an amendment that would require men to take rectal exams and cardiac stress tests prior to receiving prescriptions for erectile dysfunction medication.

Ouch. Howell proposed the amendment in response to Virginia’s recently passed legislation that necessitated an ultrasound for women who are seeking abortions. After all, if women should have to adhere to certain legislation concerning their bodies and choices, why  shouldn’t men  be required to undergo similarly inconvenient rectal exams and cardiac stress tests at their expense? As Howell told the Huffington Post:

“If we’re going to do that to women, why not do that to men?”

Her amendment was rejected, which Howell expected. The vote – 21-19 – indicates that she isn’t alone. “This is more of a message type of amendment, so I was pleased to get 19 votes,” Howell said.

As I followed this story on the news this evening, I started laughing and realized that’s a much healthier  response than anger. Nothing bad can survive in the presence of laughter. So now when I watch these Republican candidates, when I hear about their attempts to legislate women’s bodies, I laugh until my ribs ache. These guys are bozos. They belong in a circus.

Even the women who are married to these men must be having second thoughts. One representative already admitted on the floor of Congress that his wife refused to have sex with him because he supported Virginia’s proposed legislation to require a transvaginal ultrasound if she sought an abortion. It may be the cheapest trick the book, but it apparently worked in this instance.

We suspect this issue will only proliferate in the days leading up to the November 2012 presidential election.

Meanwhile, Stephanie the macaw gazes out at that volcanic mountain with a measured perspective. Really? We’re back at square one?

 

Posted in politics, synchronicity | 7 Comments

Grasshopper

Posted on March 9, 2012 by Trish and Rob

 

Animals as messengers, there have been a number of posts on this blog about that phenomenon. Here’s another one:

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We’ve lived in our  house for nearly 12 years and until recently, have never seen a grasshopper. In fact, now that I think about it, I don’t recall ever seeing a grasshopper in all the years I’ve lived in South Florida.  And I’ve lived here off and on since 1963. We’ve had a lot of other critters as messengers, but never a grasshopper.

So imagine my surprise when I opened the door to Rob’s office the other night to let the dogs out into the yard and discovered a large grasshopper just sitting on the inside frame of the door. I was about to take a picture of it with my cell phone, but it jumped away. I Googled spiritual meaning of grasshoppers. From answers.com:

Grasshopper Symbology — The grasshopper is associated with astral travel. They have the ability to leap through time and into space where the true mysteries of life exist. People with this medicine have the wisdom necessary to overcome obstacles efficiently and are able to jump into successful ventures without preparation or planning. When the grasshopper appears to us we are being asked to take a leap of faith and jump forward into a specific area of life without fear. Usually that specific area is one that we have avoided and is often connected to change on a larger scale. This can represent a change in location, relationships, career or just in the way we perceive ourselves.

Grasshoppers can only jump forward….not backward, or sideways. So, when grasshopper shows up he could be reaffirming to you that you are taking the right steps to move forward in your current situation. Or it could be that he is telling you to go ahead and move forward, getting past what is hindering you. This is why grasshopper is the symbol of good luck all over the world. Grasshopper’s ability to connect and understand sound vibrations is why he is also a symbol of your inner voice. He could be telling you to trust yours.
When he appeared, we were working on the proposal for the law of attraction oracle, so I interpreted the grasshopper’s appearance as connected to that. Go on, keep moving with it, take a leap of faith.  The day after we sent out the proposal, I was getting ready to go to the gym, reached for the phone – and saw another grasshopper on the kitchen counter. I snapped a picture of him with my cell. It’s a bit fuzzy, but you can see how big this guy is.  I called Rob into the kitchen so he could see it. Rob picked him up and put him outside in a plant.

So that’s two grasshopper sightings in three days.  I’m taking the luck part of this definition and running with it!

 

Posted in animals as messengers, grasshopper, synchronicity | 9 Comments

More synchros from Toronto

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Eaton Centre, Toronto’s enormous downtown underground commercial complex

It seems that when we travel, we always experience an increase in synchronicities. But our Toronto trip in mid-February produced a flurry of them. That was probably because the unusual nature of the trip and that synchronicity was on our mind. So the meaningful coincidences just kept coming our way.

We’ve already written about several of these experiences, but there were more. Not all of them were sensational, but they were a constant reminder of the ‘Weird or What?’ connection we were embracing by pursuing this trip.

En route, via Canada Airlines I was reading Stephen King’s 11/22/63, and came to a passage where King described a woman wearing a long tartan coat. I paused and thought briefly that I’d never seen a tartan coat. A few hours later, sitting in the bar adjacent to our hotel, where we ate a light dinner, I had a view of people coming and going into our hotel, Pantages. Our drinks had just arrived when I spotted a woman wearing a long tartan coat enter the hotel. I pointed it out Trish, who said she’d never seen such a coat, either. But then, we live in Florida.

The next afternoon we took a Beck’s taxi to the loft studio where Trish would make her debut before the camera. After the interview, we gave a copy The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity to Stephen Grant, the director and interviewer.

He immediately launched into his own recent multi-layered synchronicity involving a Canadian singer named Andy Kim, who was famous long-ago for a song called Sugar Sugar when he was in a group called the Archies.  Stephen had just told an off-color story involving the singer when he spotted Kim walking their way in the airport. The story was synchronistically linked to the name of that song, and there was more, but I lost track after getting distracted by the memory of that bubble-gum tune from so long ago.

Finally, after we left the studio with Stephen’s synchros fresh in mind, our Beck’s taxi pulled up. As we climbed in, I noticed the license plate on the car in front of us. It read BEXT. When pronounced, it sounds just like the taxi company’s name. Cheryl Welch, whose story brought us here, might call that an example of government mind control if it happened to her. But to us it was just another synchro on the journey.

Finally, one more taxi, and one more synchro. En route to the airport, our taxi driver asked us why we were visiting Toronto and we talked the entire trip about synchronicity. How strange it was to be picked up by a driver who was not only familiar with synchronicity, but fascinated with it. She not only drove the taxi, but held her own on the subject and told us about the meaningful coincidences that led her to getting a freelance art gig with Disney World. Of course we had to tell her that was where our daughter worked.

Meanwhile, en route Trish got an e-mail for a mystery writer friend who said she will be in Orlando for the next few days and why don’t we visit. Any day except Tuesday when she would be visiting the Epcot Center – right where Megan works.

Posted in synchronicity | 9 Comments

PayPal as Grand Inquisitor of Censorship?

Posted on March 7, 2012 by Trish and Rob

 

 

 

Every so often, a corporation appoints itself as Big Brother Censor of certain types of books. The newest player in this game is PayPal, which currently has a monopoly over Internet cash transactions.

If you recall, they also cut off donations last year to Wikileaks Julian Assange. In fact, there’s an organization called PayPalSucks.com that details why you shouldn’t use Pay Pal for any of your Internet transactions – and part of the problem is their credit card policy. But that’s another story.

According to The Independent: “Last week, without warning, PayPal wrote to every major self-publishing website, announcing that henceforth it will refuse to process payments for clients that sell books which contain certain types of what it regards as obscene content.”

So PayPal has essentially appointed itself as Grand Inquisitor about what is obscene.  Even the U.S. Supreme Court has struggled for fifty years to do that. In 1964, Justice Potter Stewart tried to define hardcore porn this way: “I’ll know it when I see it.” Apparently, PayPal is using that same baseline.

According to this website about obscenity and the Supreme Court’s history in trying to define it, the edicts handed down in 1973 by Justice Burger in Miller v California, are still in effect today:

“(a) whether the ‘average person, applying contemporary community standards’ would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,

(b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law, and

(c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”

Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords, one of the largest epublishing sites in the world, says PayPal’s decision has resulted in the withdrawal of about a thousand novels of the 100,000 he stocks. As he told The Independent, “Regardless of whether you or I want to read these books, this is perfectly legal fiction and people have a right to publish it. It surely isn’t for some financial services company to control what is written by an author.”

Take at look at the list of banned books maintained by the American Library Association

Here’s their list of top 10 books banned in 2010:

And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson;

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley;

Crank, by Ellen Hopkins

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

Lush, by Natasha Friend

What My Mother Doesn’t Know, by Sonya Sones

Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich

Revolutionary Voices, edited by Amy Sonnie

Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer

Amazing, isn’t it?  Here we are in 2012 and a book like Brave New World makes this list. Or The Hunger Games. Or Twilight.

So what’s next for PayPal? Banning cash transactions for movies they think are obscene? For art? Jewelry? In an official statement, PayPal issued a statement that “the decision does not represent an effort to impose a morality on the reading public.”

Really?

PayPal will no longer get any business from me.

 

 

Posted in censorship and paypal, synchronicity | 29 Comments

Music synchros

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Trish and Rob

 

 

 

A friend of ours who lives in NYC  sent us a couple of music synchros. The first relates to the death of Whitney Houston on Feb. 11. Her husband is a filmmaker, who creates music videos, among other projects. So possibly the music link came into play.

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“Immediately thought of you when I was watching a moment of “Glee” last night.  Whitney Houston died on Saturday, as I’m sure you know.  On “Glee” last night (Tuesday), they had a segment of the show where one of the kids on the show sang her hit, “I Will Always Love You.”  Not a big synchro, but definitely one since she just passed and that show aired last night.  Those episodes are shot and scheduled weeks, sometimes months, in advance, so they would have had no way of knowing that they would air so close together.

I had another music synchro up in Maine this weekend.  On Saturday, my mother, Jennifer, and I were driving down Academy Street in Presque Isle, Maine on the way to the nursing home where my great aunt is now living.  I had put on (I think) “Rhiannon” by Fleetwood Mac and looked up as we were crossing Fleetwood Street.

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To take it another level–or I should say, another musical note– that same day, Gypsy had sent a Fleetwood Mac song via Facebook.

Posted in synchronicity | 9 Comments

The Precognitive Chimes

Posted on March 5, 2012 by Trish and Rob

In Synchronicity and the Other Side,  we talked about clocks that stop or batteries that die when a loved one passes. This story about an oak pendulum clock came from Connie – aka fortune 500  and the events ultimately proved to be precognitive.

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We have an oak pendulum clock on the living room wall, like a standing grandfather clock with chimes, only a smaller wall type. A couple of years ago, we stopped putting batteries in the back so that it wouldn’t chime. But there are batteries in the timing mechanism and although the pendulum swings and the clock keeps perfect time, it no longer chimes.

On 2-16 I emailed you that our pendulum wall clock was trying to chime, with no batteries in it, and that at exactly 12 noon it chimed loudly and clearly, twice.  It chimed again at exactly 1:00pm, 4 times, loudly and clearly.  As this was happening, I was psychically smelling an unpleasant odor of something being burned or scorched. My son, Kenny, who was also in the house,  couldn’t smell it, and I am only able to smell psychic odors as Parkinson’s has destroyed my olfactory nerves.

After emailing you and learning you were en route to Toronto, I sent no further emails to you but did make notes in my journal, along with numbers I was feeling urged to do.  The number of ‘death” is 20/2. For some unknown reason at the time, my husband’s older brother, Buddy, came into my mind powerfully, and I did his numbers.  BUDDY is 20/2.

I thought about the fact that on Mother’s day twenty or so years ago, we had given my mother-in-law a replica of this clock, it’s exactly like ours, but hers chimes because Buddy kept the batteries fresh in it.

You may or may not remember, but years ago I told you that my mother in law refused to leave after she died, stating emphatically that she wasn’t going until Buddy passed, because she was afraid he would go to sleep smoking and burn the old homestead to the ground.

Mrs C always sat on the far end of an old ragged sofa in the living room there, even after she had passed.  The sofa was at least 60 years old, and last week Danny, my husband’s nephew, bought Buddy a new sofa to replace the old one. I don’t know how Mrs C, in spirit, felt about this change.

I couldn’t get her or Buddy out of my mind the day the clock chimed and the scorched smell inundated me.  This is in my journal for that day, the 16th, and I wrote, “Is Buddy going to transition? If so, why is the scorched/burned odor so strong it almost takes my breath?”

Late this evening, 2-19, Danny phoned. He found Buddy laying on the floor in front of the new sofa, dead, today.  Apparently he had lain down to nap or sleep, had tried to get up, had fallen, and died. The burning/scorched odor might have been Mrs. C reminding me of her post-death remarks that she wasn’t leaving due to her fear of Buddy burning down the house. So she haunted the place.

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On the 20th, Connie wrote that she had learned that Buddy’s will stipulated that he wanted to be cremated, another possible explanation for the burned smell.  The coroner’s office also informed the family that the body wouldn’t be fit for a viewing because Buddy had died at approximately noon on the 16th, when the clock first chimed, and his body had remained on the floor until the afternoon of the 19th, when Danny found him.

Another possibility about the scorched stench Connie had smelled is that a a small gas heater and a portable electric heater were both on high for the three days his body lay on the floor.

Connie sent us some photos taken in the house, which is over a century old, and in several there are mysterious, misty images of faces and forms, one a child. The photos were taken with a throwaway camera rather than a digital one. So the photos couldn’t be easily uploaded, and unfortunately, when scanned, the details blur.

 

 

 

 

Posted in precognition, spirit communication, synchronicity | 22 Comments

A dog and his bone

Posted on March 4, 2012 by Trish and Rob

A good belly laugh! Thanks to  Nancy for sending it.

Posted in synchronicity | 7 Comments