Spirit Speaks, part 1

Posted on January 14, 2012 by Trish and Rob

 

In times of momentous transitions in our lives, synchronicities tend to occur with greater frequency. A marriage or divorce, the birth of a child, a drastic change in income, career, job, a move, the loss of loved ones: these large, transitional moments in our lives seem to attract synchronicity, perhaps as confirmation, affirmation, as a venue of hope and resurrection. Who knows? What we do know is that these kinds of synchros are invariably powerful and often life-changing.

In recent discussions on Facebook in a synchronicity topic, there has been speculation that the phenomenon is a naturalistic event, something that unfolds from the personal unconscious, like a predilection for certain types of experiences, foods, relationships, addictions. In this particular belief system, synchronicity has nothing to do with the collective unconscious, Carl Jung’s term for events and emotions and situations that are common to all people. In fact, in this worldview, the collective unconscious doesn’t exist, and is simply a result of magical thinking – Jung’s and yours!

So let’s go back to the basics, to the definition of synchronicity, according to Jung: the coming together of similar inner and outer events in a way that is meaningful to the observer, but can’t be explained by cause and effect.  For example, I think about someone I haven’t talked to for months, my phone rings and it’s him.

Jung first defined synchronicity in 1949, when he was writing the introduction to Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the I Ching, and asked the oracle’s “judgment  about its present situation – i.e., my intention to present it to the Western mind.” (For Jung’s full explanation about this, read the intro to the Wilhelm edition of the I Ching.)

In researching synchronicity for  our first book, 7 Secrets of Synchronicity,  we found a particular M.O. for the phenomenon, a pattern that extends well beyond just the personal and slides into the collective. The collective unconscious unnerves some people. It’s the place of myths and fairy tales and urban legends; it’s the territory that Joseph Campbell explored, the magic that Lucas and Spielberg have spun into films, that Stephen King and Dean Koontz bring to their novels. It’s the place where we all meet and speculate about ….well, what if. It’s the place where all the b.s. is stripped away and only story exists. Your story. My story. Our story.  These areas where yours and mine  merge is the domain of synchronicity.

Within that domain, I think that synchronicity speaks to us in a variety of ways and one of them is through spirit contact. When we lose someone we love, we’re experiencing a major life transition. This sequence of synchros come from Gypsy,    who lost her older sister  in early December. We’ve used her stories in both of our books. Now, from Gypsy’s notes:

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For some time I had been considering doing a weekly Friday post on an ancestor of ours – “voices from the past” giving some interesting little tidbit from their life. It was going to be a different one each week, one who had died on a particular date.

The first post in the series was supposed to be for December 2 , the day I thought about this series.  During lunch time that day, I spoke by phone to my older sister, Jerelyn, for over an hour. Later, when I got home from running errands, I went to my ancestry site and searched for family members having died on December 2. It was then that I got a call and learned that Jerelyn had died.

She passed away on “opening night” of her theater production – literally within hours of the house opening.  The numbers themselves and the clusters involved in the date of her death  were: 12022011 – [3] 2s and [3] 1s [= 9]

On 12/09 en route home, from Delaware to Louisiana, I thought about Jerelyn, her life and death, and asked mentally for a sign of some kind – any kind. Within moments, there was the large exit sign – exit 111.

That same  day, within feet of crossing the Louisiana state line, the mileage on my car hit the 100,000 mark – literally.

On 12/12 [again the 2s and 1s], at 4:14pm [time #s = 9], I picked up Synchronicity and the Other Side [the copy which I had gotten for her xmas gift] and asked the question, “What about Jerelyn?”

Then I opened the book randomly – page 36 [again = 9] –  and, eyes closed, my finger landed on the 4th paragraph. This passage sets out my story of the girl in the yellow dress at my house while Jerelyn was living with me and how she asked the construction workers if I had told them the story. Also on 12/12, several hours after the incident above, my daughter, Lisa, sent me a text message.

When the message came in, ” I was sitting with the book still open, this time on page 117 [again double 1s plus the total is 9] at this point: “the medium and the message/entertainment world of tv.”

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We’ve divided Gypsy’s journey into two parts. Stay tuned!

 

Posted in spirit communication, synchronicity | 22 Comments

Colors, WordPress, Rights Reversions, and ebooks!

Posted on January 13, 2012 by Trish and Rob

One of my frustrations with WordPress has been what I thought was a lack of versatility in terms of colors and fonts. In fact, when we first migrated our blog from blogger to WordPress a year or so ago, I tried to alter the template so we could have a black background, different fonts of various colors, but couldn’t figure out how to do it. Blogger simply had made things so easy I didn’t have to think about what I was doing to make changes. Click here and there and the magic happened.

At the time, learning how to use WordPress felt like learning Greek. Every time I went to one of the support forums, my brain became hopelessly entangled in html code that I didn’t understand. I lacked the patience and the time to do the research. Some months back, Gypsy suggested I should highlight our page headings so they stood out. Her blog is a visual feast; ours looked tired. Again the html stuff threw me.

I thought about taking a course in html, but knew it would eat up time in the evenings when I’m able to get some of my best writing done.I kept going through the new plug-ins, looking for one that would facilitate what I wanted to do, but couldn’t find anything suitable. I was astonished by all these hundreds, maybe thousands, of plug-ins created by programmers for the WordPress platform, offered for free, and wondered how these people make a living.

Then late last year, Rob and I decided to bring some of our out-of-print books back into print through digital media. I suddenly had a pressing motive for figuring things out. We wanted to set up a storefront of some kind for these digital books, but where to start? How to do it? Our first step was requesting rights reversions for our books that had gone out print.

This arduous task is complicated by the fact that many publishers drag their heels on rights reversions even though they have no intention of bringing the books back into print. Last fall, I requested rights  reversions from Ballantine for 15 titles that have gone out of print. I also requested three titles from Kensington, and three from Hyperion. So far, not a single title has been reverted. So I started with a book to which I did have the rights – Your Intuitive Moon, an astrology book about using lunar signs and cycles to enhance intuition. Rob started with Romancing the Raven, a time travel novel involving Edgar Alan Poe.

We still have  computer files for these books, we had the rights, so the next step was finding a digital publisher. We chose smashwords, which converts the book for free, and takes a small percentage from sales. Their guidelines are stringent, detailed, so we each hired formatters recommended by smashwords. I used Katrina Joyner, who formats and designs covers for smashwords and is also a writer. For a reasonable price, she formatted and designed a terrific cover. Once I had the formatted book, I uploaded it to smashwords, then to Amazon Kindle. Amazon immediately contacted me concerning the rights. Fortunately, I had my rights reversion letter, scanned it, and sent it off.

All of this led to my discovery of a wonderful plug-in, theme tweaker lite, which takes the colors in your word press themes and enables you to change them. It’s free. However, the developer offers a pro version for three bucks and change that I’m going to buy now that I know how well this plug-in works.

There’s no synchro in any of this, but there’s a process I appreciate. Publishing is no longer a game centered in NY, with agents and editors deciding what’s good and what’s not, what’s publishable and what isn’t. Thanks to Steve Jobs and Amazon and a handful of visionaries, the middle men in publishing may eventually go the way of the dodo bird.

Yes, it’s wonderful to be paid an advance for a book that someone deems to be commercial and  that paradigm has enabled us to make our living for nearly 30 years, doing what we love. But the paradigm is shifting and if we, as writers, don’t shift with it, we can kiss our careers adios. This shift probably doesn’t apply to the big name writers who essentially carry the publishing industry – Rowling, King, Patterson, Roberts, Dwyer, Hicks, Hay, Weiss…we all knows their names. They’ve made it many times over and will undoubtedly continue to do so.

But in both the old and the new paradigm, as least as it relates to writers, the same cosmic truths remain:  you must believe in your skill as a writer, believe in what you’re writing and have written, believe that it will make a difference in someone else’s life and  will sell. If you don’t believe it, no one else will, either. You must continue to write from your heart, from the depth of your passions for certain ideas, relationships, from whatever moves you. In whatever venue you publish, these truths are impervious.

And this is the process that led to our blog having a different look!

 

 

 

 

Posted in beliefs, blogging, ebooks, publishing, synchronicity | 16 Comments

Can I Hitch a Ride?

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Rob and Megan assembling bookcase as Noah snoozes

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During times  of major transitions in our lives, synchronicities tend to flourish, our energy is more intense and focused, things manifest more quickly. We wrote about this phenomenon in 7 Secrets of Synchronicity, and experienced it when we moved our daughter to Orlando over January 8-9.

Megan graduated from college last May, moved back home, took a part-time job, and started applying for jobs in her preferred field, animal behavior/training. She landed an internship at Disney, training dolphins and manatees, and it starts January 12. This is her first experience of living on her own in an apartment.  She chose downtown Orlando, where everything is within walking distance and there’s a real sense of neighborhood, albeit a vertical one with neighbors greeting each other in elevators rather than across backyard fences.

Through an online service, she found a roommate, V,  an auditor who already lives in Orlando and is a few years older than Megan. V hunted for apartments in the price range they had agreed upon and found an unfurnished two bedroom/two bath place. V already has living room furniture, so Megan only needed bedroom furniture – i.e, she didn’t have to furnish an entire apartment.  They couldn’t move in until January 9 and Rob had to be back home by the 10th for the beginning of a new meditation class. That gave us a day to get the job done. Crunch time.

Here’s how it went:

On the 8th, we drive up to Cassadaga to stay for a night (that’s for another post) and figure we’ll head out early on the 9th (day of the full moon!) to get Megan moved in. And moving in means this: unloading everything that’s in a car, a van, and a top carrier into a ninth floor apartment; buying a queen size bed; a chest of drawers, a desk, a bookcase, and some household items.

The bed is a must. We must find one and somehow transport it ourselves or she’ll be sleeping on the floor in a sleeping bag for a week, maybe two. Beds, we found out, are not delivered overnight. Plus, the condo association would charge an additional $100 to use the loading dock! That’s  a surprise.

We have both dogs with us. Noah, the retriever has been sick and is on meds and we don’t want to ask our neighbors to take care of  him or Nika, the pup, for two nights. They are already watching the cats.

When we arrive at the apartment building at 11:30 AM on the 9th, (so much for an early start), we’re told that a move in is supposed to be reserved, usually happened between 1 and 5 PM, and costs $100. We balk. A hundred for what?  A padded elevator for our exclusive use.  But the guy at the desk says we can move in immediately, 90 minutes early, so we pay the hundred and drive our cars into the unloading garage of the building.  The extra 90 minutes is our first lucky break.

Lots of irritating security in this building. All tenants carry something called a FOB  that gets you in and out of the labyrinthine garages, elevators, hallways.  So we trek back and forth between the garage and the elevators, FOBBING  every time we need to get through another door, the dogs hurrying along with us. The MacGregor carnival act.  Rob frets about our limited time to move in. How are we going to get a mattress and box springs and  a chest of drawers and transport them in our van and unload them before five?  And with two dogs along, how are we going to fit all this stuff in the van?

Every time we make a trek, we pass a mattress just standing upright against the wall. Beautiful mattress, a queen, looks brand new. The first couple of times, we ignore it, figuring it belongs to someone who is moving in. Then we begin to take in the details. It’s deliciously soft. Lean against it, test it, sink your fist into it,  press your cheek against it. Wow. Really nice. Rob notices that it’s resting against a wall next to a pile of old carpet that was obviously being disposed. So he asks one of the maintenance guys if it belongs to someone. He replies that it’s being tossed out and its ours, if we want it.

Not only is the mattress new and free, it’s the manifestation that makes everything else possible logistically. We’re able to obtain all the other stuff  we need in one trip; finish before our 5 PM deadline, when our loading dock closes; save at least $400-$500 on a mattress, another hundred bucks for a delivery.

We also somehow get the box spring for $90 instead of $150, savings enough to pay for a metal frame with wheels. We find a chest of drawers, a discounted floor display that we can take with us. We strap the box spring on the roof rack. Everything else fits, even with the two dogs.  We have extra time now and take the dogs for a walk along the lake and see flocks of swans so accustomed to people that they come up close to shore, hoping for snacks. A pair of black swans follow us as we walk along the shore. I take them as a good sign for this new chapter in Megan’s life.

The next morning, we hit Target and Office Max and buy the other stuff Megan needs, including a combo computer desk and bookshelf and chair, and all of it has to be assembled. While Rob and Megan do that, I make some sandwiches and then unpack  boxes and suitcases and get things in the bathroom put away, shower curtain up, and clothes hung or in  drawers.

By 12:30, we say our emotional good-byes out on the street where the van is parked. Hard, this is hard, different than when she left for college. Feels permanent.

In just 25 hours, we were able to get Megan settled in, with a full fridge, a workable kitchen, personal belongings arranged, a computer desk and even a chair to sit on, and a divine bed. It was that mattress that made the difference, just standing against the wall in the unloading garage, a kind of  Jack Kerouac with his thumb stuck out. Can I hitch a ride?

You bet, Jack. Any time.

 

Posted in synchronicity | 16 Comments

Fortune Cookie Synchro

Posted on January 11, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Today we offer a fortune cookie post. It’s appropriately brief.

Fortune cookies are a form of divination, which makes those little messages inside the sweet cookies all potential synchroncities. Here’s a good one from Rob Lessman, who posted it recently in one of the synchronicity sites on Facebook.

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“At the Chinese restaurant, my wife told me about this thing she and her friends used to do: Adding the words ‘in bed’ to each fortune being read off. Right after she told me, I opened MY fortune cookie…

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We like to pose questions before opening the fortune cookie to see if we get an answer. We’ll have to try adding ‘in bed’ and see what happens.

Posted in synchronicity | 11 Comments

Strange Object

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Trish and Rob

This video comes from Turkey. It’s a strange object, for sure. Whitley Strieber’s video experts believe it’s an “authentic unknown.”

 

Posted in synchronicity, UFO | 9 Comments

Cancer Full Moon Jan 9, 2012

Posted on January 8, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Full moons are often a time of madness on the planet. The crazies come out of the woodwork, people are more accident prone, impatient, reckless.  At the heart of it, though, the hidden is illuminated – on both a personal and a collective level- and that can drive many of us to emotional extremes.

On January 9, the full moon in Cancer falls at 18 degrees, 26 minutes. Go here to find out where this moon falls in your chart.

Cancer is a nurturing, subjective, and family-oriented sign. It is highly intuitive, its feelings are easily hurt, and its energies are focused, directed. It dislikes emotional confrontations and, like the crab that represents this sign, it retreats at the first sign of conflict, withdrawing tightly into its shell.

What’s interesting about this full moon is that Mars forms a close and beneficial angle to it. Mars represents our physical and sexual energy. It’s our booster rocket in life, that part of us that explodes forward to pursue what we desire. It’s our heat sensor, our personal GPS. While it’s in Virgo, it’s able to get us from point A to B without any problem. We might even get from B to G. But too many steps beyond that, and we’re lost. We become Hansel and Gretel stealing off into the forest at night, tossing bread crumbs behind us in the hopes that we find our way back.

If we rely on our left brains, our ego-centered selves to get to where we want to go, we can pretty much figure we’ll be wandering for along time. If we allow our intuition to guide us, our emotions, our hunches, then we’ll do just fine during this full moon.

On the night of this full moon, Mercury and Pluto are widely  conjunct in earth sign Capricorn. This means that any type of visualization and meditation you do clarifies whatever confusion you have about something, and puts you in the power seat because you suddenly get it. Venus and Neptune are closely conjunct in air sign Aquarius, a wonderful indicator for creativity and the beauty of romance in any intimate relationship.

Jupiter forms a tight and beneficial angle to Mercury on the night of this full moon (in earth signs, Taurus and Capricorn) so your conscious mind is primed and ready for expansion.

Between January 1-22, every planet is moving in direct motion – they’re all behaving! Then on the 22nd, Mars in Virgo turns retrograde until April 14. And that aspect is for another post.

The sign of Cancer refers to your native country.  Look for revelations about something that has been hidden. In the U.S., for instance, it might be this headline.

In your country, it might be something else. That headline may define the year ahead for your country.

I used to write monthly, individual predictions for each sign. Then I discovered Susan Miller’s site and she does this so well, so thoroughly, that I stopped. Check her out. If you know your rising sign, check that sign, too.

 

 

 

Posted in synchronicity | 15 Comments

Quantum Levitation – and Toys!

Posted on January 7, 2012 by Trish and Rob

From the Japanese Institute of Science and Technology comes this very cool application of quantum levitation. Here’s the institute’s explanation of this You Tube video made of their experiment:
“Here is a short footage on our recent work on quantum levitation. We were inspired by the game Wipe’out to do our work. With this new technology, we hope to revolutionize the world of motor transport; Maybe in a near future we could assist to a real Wipe’out race.”

Posted in quantum physics, synchronicity | 7 Comments

The Story of 8

Posted on January 6, 2012 by Trish and Rob

In numerology, eight is a number of power and money. It’s about thinking big and acting big. The caution is that playing with power can result in a steamroller effect, burying others in your wake, causing resentment.

So it’s interesting that Mitt Romney won the Iowa caucus by 8 votes. It doesn’t exactly cement him as the Republican’s candidate to take on Barack Obama in November, but provides him another slogging step in that direction.

Romney, of course, has big money and is using it to crush his opponents, but he’s not the most popular guy around. Three out of four Republicans don’t even favor him now.  But they will when he’s knocked all the others off the campaign trail.

No doubt the number 8 will haunt Mitt, especially in the general election. After all, favoring the top one percent at the cost of the middle class will surely come back to bite the Republicans and their candidate.

Then of course there’s that other meaning for 8 – as in being behind the 8-ball, and that’s where Romney probably will be with voters on Nov. 4.

 

 

Posted in synchronicity | 18 Comments

Inside the fence

Posted on January 5, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Several months ago, I wrote about an unusual building that was next to the yoga studio where I teach meditation. When I take Noah, our golden retriever with me, I usually let him out after class and he walks in front of the adjacent building. A high fence surrounds the property, which is about two acres. The white building is two stories and takes up nearly half of the property, which includes a swimming pool.

There is no name on the building or gate, which is what initially caught my attention. Eventually, through some digging into property records, I discovered the name. But it was just a series of letters that gave away nothing about the nature of the business. A little more digging by this former investigative reporter and I discovered the folks behind the gate sell weapons and teach police departments how to interrogate suspects, among other endeavors.

Some time later, an interesting synchronicity occurred when one of Megan’s best friends got a job there. That’s when I found out even more. The company, she told me, has a weapons armory. So apparently they were shipping weapons out of the building to foreign countries or whoever bought their stuff. Good reason they keep the place secret, I thought.

In recent months, I haven’t paid much attention to the place. But the other day, after taking a yoga class, I let Noah out of the car. He walked over to the fence surrounding the white building, sniffed around, then suddenly charged along the fence. I gave chase and was startled to see the gate open and Noah racing inside the property, probably in pursuit of a squirrel.

I ran after him, breaching the entrance, and suddenly an alarm went off. It sounded like civil defense drill, that annoying guttural honking. Great, I thought. Now these interrogation experts were going to catch me and practice their techniques on me.

I shouted for Noah, and something about my voice caught his attention. It was the same voice I use when I think he might dart out in front of a car. He stopped his pursuit, and trotted back to me. I tugged on his collar and we both ran for the gate. I never saw anyone. Fortunately, it was January 2, a holiday, and there was only one car in the lot. I suspect that someone inside either spotted me, or reviewed a video tape and watched a bald-headed guy with a goatee chasing a retriever.

I dismissed the incident, didn’t think about it until that evening when I was on Facebook. I noticed a photo of Megan’s friend, R.L., the one who works at the facility, on the right side of the page. I hadn’t seen her in person for months and she looked a little different, her face thinner. So I clicked her picture, which led me into her Facebook page. At that moment, there was a knock on the door.

Abracadabra! It was her. Megan answered the door and I recognized R.L..’s voice. Perfect timing. Trish heard me laugh, and I explained the entire incident. Of course Trish wasn’t going to let that go. She walked across the house and brought R.L. back and asked me to repeat the story again.

R.L. thought it was a good synchro and wondered why the gate was open on the holiday. Then she gave me an update. “There aren’t any weapons there any more, just ammunition. They ship the weapons from a warehouse now.”

I wondered if that made me feel better. I was teaching meditation next to an ammunition dump, not a weapon’s armory.

 

Posted in synchronicity | 2 Comments

Saudi Women

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Our mornings are pretty loose, but ritualistic. Rob gets up before I do, brings in the newspaper, lets the dogs out, starts the coffee and his day. By the time I reach the kitchen, the coffee is hot, the cats are waiting to be fed, and my beautiful grapefruit is begging to be sectioned. I glance at the newspaper, go through the email, then get out the laptop and take a look at my favorite news sites.

But there are some headlines not fit for breakfast viewing. Not fit for any viewing at all. And these are the ones I feel compelled to read because they underscore the shocking contrast between democracy – even when it’s shrinking, even when the Bill of Rights is being rendered irrelevant – and theocracy. Here was the headline that made me read:

Saudi woman beheaded for “practicising witchcraft”.  Or here.

In a statement issued by the SPA state news agency, Amina bint Abdulhalim Nassar was executed in the northern province of Jawf for “practising witchcraft and sorcery.”

What does this mean, exactly? None of the articles I read explained the specifics of her “witchcraft.” Did she reveal her knees to a man who was not a relative or her husband and, thus, lure him into temptation through the sorcery of her flesh? Did she read cards for a friend? Did she concoct some sort of Harry Potter brew for her neighbors? Did she treat an ailment with herbs?

Years go, we had a friend who owned a mystery bookstore in Fort Lauderdale. He had spent years in Saudi Arabia teaching English to the locals. He went there because the pay was fantastic and he didn’t have to pay U.S. taxes. But his stories about the country and culture were chilling. I remember one in particular: that it was illegal to offer weather forecasts. Yes, you read that correctly. In the Saudi worldview, weather forecasts – at least back then – were considered to be prognostication, telling the future, so they were forbidden by the kingdom laws.

So was this woman, perhaps, offering her version of a weather forecast? Is that considered to be such dire sorcery that you’re beheaded for it?

It’s shocking that in a democracy that prides itself on freedom of expression, we do business with a country like Saudi Arabia. It’s even more shocking when you consider that the majority of the 9-11 hijackers were Saudis. In Saudi Arabia, women aren’t permitted to drive, to leave home unless accompanied by a male relative, have to cover themselves and on and on. We recently mentioned Saudi women in another post – Plan B.

I read stories like this one about the beheading and about a Saudi woman who was raped by a male cousin, then released from prison with the suggestion that she marry the guy, and I get angry. Can’t help it. Then I look at the Republican candidates for the 2012 presidential election and realize they aren’t so different from their Saudi brothers.

Keep women oppressed.

Maintain control over women’s reproductive systems.

Make them pay for their poverty, their single motherhoods, it’s all their fault, they didn’t please their guy.

In China, another one of our staunch business allies, hearsay contends that female babies are often killed because females babies  are less desirable than males.

And on it goes. These kinds of stories drive me nuts. And if the law of attraction works on a grand scale, then my focus on the repression of Saudi women suggests that I could end up as a  Saudi female in a future life. Oh shudder, please, no. Anything but.

Okay, now I’m turning the newspaper page to something fluffy, about a dog that found its way home.

Posted in synchronicity | 33 Comments