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This weird synchro is the sort that happens when you least expect it. I suspect it has its own category, but I’m not sure what to call it yet. It’s a mix of trickster, cluster, confirmation.

A couple of weeks ago, Carol Bowman and I were catching up by phone. Carol is an author, past-life researcher and regressionist. In the early 1990s, after an appearance on Oprah where she discussed her research, her book Children’s Past Lives was published. It was triggered by her young son’s sudden fear of loud noises – specifically, fire crackers at a 4^th of July party. This book was followed later by Return to Heaven, where Carol talks about how in some past life cases, the present body bears physical evidence of the previous life in terms of scars or birth marks. We met because one day in a browse through Borders, her first book literally fell at my feet.

So in this conversation, Carol  asked if I knew about the Travis Walton abduction case in 1975. It’s probably one of the best abduction cases on record, so yes I’d heard of it. I explained that not long after our Aliens in the Backyard had been published, we received an email from one of the men in the logging group with Walton when he was abducted.

“Which guy?” Carol asked.

“Ken Peterson.” His email, in fact,   had begun with an explanation that he was sitting next to Walton in the truck at the time of his abduction.

“Great. I’m mailing you a documentary called Travis that my friend, Jennifer Stein, produced.”

The DVD arrived last week and reminded me that I hadn’t heard from Ken for a long time and that I should probably email him. I got caught up in work and never got around to it.

Today, Rob and I were on our way to Whole Foods. We had planned to see Star Wars tonight with some friends, but it got pushed to the next day, so we agreed we should watch Travis. A few minutes later, I received an email from Ken. Synchro, I thought.

We watched the documentary that night. It’s well done and includes interviews with Ken and a couple of the other men who were part of that logging crew all those years ago. It includes scenes where Travel and Ken return to the site of the UFO experience all those decades ago. When I wrote back to Ken after we’d watched the movie, I explained the details of the synchronicity.

Trish, Thank you. That is fantastic. I figured something would happen if I got back to you. The 1st interview I did with Travis was 27 years after the encounter, and the ABC special was in connection with Shymalan’s movie Signs. It took 38 years for Travis and me to return to the UFO site together. We were with 2 people. Jennifer Stein was one of them!

– Ken

Ken is searching for answers, just like Travis and the other men who were with him that night. Because of the connection to Carol Bowman, I suggested that perhaps the message of this synchro was that he should find a qualified regressionist in his area who could take him back to that night. I noted that I had asked Carol in the past if she could regress an abductee or someone who’d had a UFO experience, but she felt she wasn’t qualified to do it. “I know how to deal with a client who has a deeply emotional reaction to past life memories,” she said. “But with something like this, I would be in unchartered territory.”

I told him I’d like to write a post on this sequence of synchros and asked if it was okay with him.

Trish, Yes, please do a post, and we will see where it leads. The other posts you did led to some incredible things.

So, we’ll see!

Last month, I wrote a post about Sixto Castillo, an inmate in a New Mexico prison who read The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity and wrote us about his interest in metaphysics and synchronicity. He’d said his spirit guide told him about an eighth secret of synchronicity. So, of course when I wrote him back, I asked what it was.

His response: “So what is the 8th Secret of Synchroncity? It’s the linking of 7 very important parts of our being – the 7 chakras.” He went on to say the link was related to kundalini energy, electromagnetism and DNA. I didn’t understand how that fit into synchronicity, and he seems to have figured that.

“How is this even relevant, you may say. Okay, let’s look only at the root and the crown. These two chakras are the most important vortexes, why? Because one keeps us anchored to the ground or sister Earth and the other hooks us to the outer most region of the atmosphere into and beyond the gravitational field. These two connect us to two different consciousnesses – the Earth where we live, and the higher place where…we connect with   synchronicity, and the Universe or Orchestrator of all the vast events and all that seem unexplainable.”

He also wrote again about his spirit guide he calls ‘Connie.’ He explained that she lived in the 11th century and was enlightened at the age of 11. She was praying to know things that others wouldn’t know because she was tired of being treated like a dummy and boom, she ‘knew.’ She seemed to outwit and out teach a lot of the philosophers of the day, but had trouble controlling or grasping the knowledge until she was taken in by an aging Chinese man who guided her.

All that said, the part of this letter that really caught my attention was near the end when he asked me about the word ‘glint.’ “Glint…man, I’ve been trying hard to find this place or whatever it is. I know that it means flash, beam, sparkle. But so far I don’t know what it means, but maybe you can help me with this mystery.”

I have to say I was a bit stunned, because in fact I had been thinking about ‘glint’ that morning. I wrote back saying…

“Sixto, I’m going to help you with the mystery of ‘glint.’ Well, at least I will tell you about glint. The day I received your letter I was reading a novel called, THE QUEST, by Nelson DeMille, one of my favorite authors. On page 324, I read this line, in which the ‘love interest’ character addresses the protagonist: “You were going to tell us what a glint is.” When I read that (before your letter arrived) I thought that’s a strange thing to focus on. Doesn’t she know what a glint is?

“The protagonist, Frank Purcell goes on to explain that “It’s what it sounds like—a quick reflection of light on a shiny surface. Pilots in combat look for the glint of an enemy aircraft, or the glint of a metal target on the ground.” Purcell is in Ethiopia with two others in search of a black stone monastery hidden in the jungle where supposedly – legend has it – the Holy Grail is kept. A deep secret. They fly over the area taking photos and looking for a glint that might reveal the location of the monastery. The story carries on for a couple of chapters about the search for the glint, and there are more references later. So it’s really strange that you send me that off-the-wall comment about a glint…”

I think Sixto has developed some interesting psychic abilities while behind bars. It seems that he can ‘see’ from a distance – clairvoyance or remote viewing. A handy ability when you’re a prisoner. In spite of it, he seems to have a certain ‘glint’ in his eye.

Fair warning: there’s no synchro here.

I first became aware of Rachel Maddow when she used to be a guest on the Keith Olberman show on MSNBC. Then one night she substituted for Keith when he was out of town and I was impressed by her grasp of issues, her clarity, her humor, and her admitted nervousness about hosting the show.

By the time she anchored her own show on MSNBC, I knew she was a Rhodes scholar who held a PhD from Oxford, that she is the first openly gay woman with her own news show, and that she is a true Aries. This woman is outrageously intelligent, a consummate communicator, and totally fearless. She was also one of the first news people to bring national attention to the disaster in Flint, Michigan, a city of 100,000, where drinking water has been poisoned by lead. Tonight, she held a town hall in Flint that was so powerful it wouldn’t surprise me if Governor Rick Snyder comes under federal investigation, as he should.

The situation in Flint has been like this since 2014, when the Republican governor cut a billion bucks in taxes for the rich and decided to save millions by switching Flint’s drinking water from Lake Huron – a glacial lake, with pure water – to the Flint River. This river is so polluted that it corroded the lead in the water pipes. For nearly two years, the residents have been drinking and bathing in this lead poisoned water. This means that children, the elderly, pets, and everyone else has lead in their brains. In young children with developing brains and nervous systems, this can be catastrophic.

In October 2015, Snyder finally acknowledged that the water wasn’t safe to drink. He apologized. Really? An apology is all he has to offer? And yet to date, not a single lead pipe has been removed in this city. Donated bottled water has been pouring into Flint, but how many bottles of water does it take to bathe? As of today – January 27 – the governor has no plan to remove the lead pipes and replace them.

Rachel interviewed a local pediatrician who has been tending to these young kids, a master plumber who gave estimates on what it would cost to replace all these lead pipes, a professor, an engineer, an activist, and residents of the city.

The master plumber said that he could galvanize a thousand plumbers to Flint to get to work on this problem and they could have the job done in a lot less time than the 15 years Snyder said. More, like, well, months. The pediatrician tried to remain upbeat, but you could tell she’s deeply concerned about the developmental issues these children face. The activist said straight out that Snyder needs to resign and be imprisoned. The mayor has met several times with Snyder and come away profoundly disappointed – and angry.

It’s clear that the problem began when Snyder fired all the elected officials in Flint and appointed an emergency manager for the city who would make all the decisions. In otherords, he suspended democracy. He silenced the people, of whom more than 40 percent live below the poverty threshold and sixty percent are black. They aren’t part of his voting constituency. They don’t count.

Listening to Rachel’s show, I was reminded of Frank Herbert’s classic book, Dune, where water is the most precious commodity. But that was fiction. What’s happening in Flint is real life. You turn on the faucet in your kitchen and brown, smelly water pours out. Your kids break out in rashes. Their hair falls out. Pregnant women may give birth to deformed children. The elderly with compromised immune systems can‘t fight off the toxicity. Here’s what the Mayo clinic has to say about lead poisoning.

Snyder knowingly poisoned the water supply of a city of 100,000 so he could save money. If he were a foreign leader, the U.S. military would invade his country, topple his dictatorship, and probably send in Navy SEALS to take him out. But so far, Snyder hasn’t been investigated, impeached, or indicted. My hope is that as a result of Rachel’s town hall show in Flint, that will quickly change.

It’s unconscionable that in the supposedly richest country on the planet, a city of 100,000 is without clean water. Here’s the Rachel Maddow website where you can read the latest news about Flint. While you read it, imagine how you would feel if this fiasco had happened whee you live. Imagine turning on a faucet and only filthy, toxic water pours out. You can’t drink the stuff or bathe in it. Now what?

Poets are a special breed, able to capture an emotion, thought, or situation in a few words or with a particular phrase that resonates so deeply within us that everything else melts away. Poetry requires the writer to enter an altered state of consciousness that is often so extreme the artist is swept up in the creation, lost inside of it, and merges with whatever he or she has created.

Anne Sexton was that kind of poet, a paradox, a woman who came of age in the fifties and sixties and tackled taboos in a way that few other female writers had at the time. Abortion, menstruation, incest, adultery, sexuality, masturbation, drug addiction, depression, suicide and death. These days, such topics are the stuff of TV talk shows, but in Sexton’s era, propriety didn’t look kindly on open discussions of this kind of stuff.

After the birth of her first daughter, she suffered from post partum depression and in 1954, suffered her first breakdown. The second breakdown occurred a year later and after a suicide attempt, she was hospitalized. At Glenside Hospital, she met Dr. Martin Orne, the psychiatrist who became her long-time therapist and encouraged her to write poetry as a kind of therapy. Orne would later become well known for his work as an expert witness for Patricia Hearst and for his pivotal testimony that led to the Hillside Strangler pleading guilty.

Sexton’s first published book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, brought confession poetry to a whole new level. She continued writing while she battled what was later diagnosed as bipolar disorder. Her work was tremendously popular during her lifetime and even though critics often attacked her poetry for its confessional and taboo themes, she won numerous awards, received a Guggenheim Fellowship, grants from the Ford Foundation, honorary degrees, and became the first woman to receive Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa award. She also held professorships at Colgate University and Boston University and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967 for her third books of poems, Live or Die.

Just in these lines of Sexton’s poetry, you can see the themes:

But suicides have a special language.

Like carpenters they want to know which tools.

They never ask why build.

Twice I have so simply declared myself,

have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,

have taken on his craft, his magic.

In 1974, Houghton Mifflin published The Death Notebooks, the last book of her poetry published while she was alive. On October 4 of that year, a month before her forty-sixth birthday, Sexton had lunch with poet Maxine Kumin to revise galleys for Sexton’s manuscript of The Awful Rowing Toward God, scheduled for publication in March 1975. When she returned home, she put on her mother’s old fur coat, removed all her rings, poured herself a glass of vodka, and locked herself in the garage. Then she started the engine of her car and killed herself by carbon monoxide poisoning.

You might say that because of her mental history, previous attempted suicides, and the themes of her poetry, Anne Sexton was destined to become a suicide. The fact that her last published work was The Death Notebooks certainly qualifies as a tragic synchronicity; she initially wanted the volume published posthumously. But was The Death Notebooks precognitive? Perhaps. It was in this volume she wrote:

For God was as large as a sunlamp and laughed his heat at us and therefore we did not cringe at the death hole.

In the October 27, 1974 edition of the New York Times, author Erica Jong wrote that for Anne Sexton the writing of poetry wasn’t just some literary exercise. “It was a kind of essential, life-giving stay against confusion—and the silence that ‘is death.’”

The epigraph for The Death Notebooks is a quote from Hemingway: “Look, you con man, make a living out of your death.” And as Erica Jong wrote, “ Anne Sexton could not die until she put the whole story of her death into poetry. This was her ‘living,’ and she made it last as long as she could.”

Yesterday afternoon, shortly before 5 p.m., Evan – a friend of Megan’s with whom I exchange political texts- wrote: BIG political news today. Supreme Court justice Scalia reportedly found dead at his hotel. I immediately checked Huffington Post and CNN, but didn’t find anything. I wrote Evan: Murder would be my suspicion!

But Scalia, 79, died of natural causes in his sleep, at an exclusive lodge in west Texas where he’d gone to hunt. Here’s the synchro. In a post the other day, we’d written about the New Hampshire primary that Bernie Sanders had won and about how Sanders, 74, was not only the guy we would vote for, but was winning the youth vote all over the country. His idealism appeals to voters between the ages of 18-27.

One commenter, CJ, brought up the age factor:

My problem with having Sanders as President, and the ONLY problem, is his AGE.
That can’t be changed. His body is 74 years old, regardless of the great state of his mind. This means after his first term, he would be 78 years old, just two years short of 80. The statistics for a person of his age…remaining in sufficiently good health to run the complications of this country are dire. Then who would we have? Who would he choose as his VP? These are things we need to seriously consider, not just his platform. His age bothers me a lot.

Another commenter, Laurence, remarked: Funny, how folks are talking age here while we have an entrenched supreme court full of geriatrics. These folks can dictate federal policies for decades to come. Let’s not worry about age but getting involved and bringing everyone to the voting booth this November.

That evening after Laurence made his comment, I researched the ages of the supremes:

Scalia – nearly 80

Kennedy – 79 ½

Thomas – 67 ½

Ginsberg – nearly 83

Breyer – 77 ½

Roberts – 61

Alito – nearly 66

Sotomayor- nearly 62

Kagan – nearly 56

Then today after I received Evan’s text, it occurred to me it might be a synchro. Here we’d been talking about the relevance of age in politics – Bernie versus the supremes – and then the second oldest member of the court, Scalia, is found dead. His death may hurl this country into a constitutional crisis  because the Republicans have already announced they will block any of Obama’s nominees.

The longest that Congress has delayed in voting on a supreme court justice is 125 days; Obama still has 340 days left in office. This evening, Obama commented on Scalia’s passing and said he would nominate a justice “in due time,” whatever that means.

So we’ve got two instances here about age and politicians and I suspect we’re going to see more that will eventually become a global cluster synchro.

Stay tuned…

And happy valentine’s day to everyone…

Rob and I watched the New Hampshire primary this evening, the first after the Iowa caucus. Bernie Sanders was predicted to win this primary because – as the pundits kept repeating over and over again – his state of Vermont borders New Hampshire.

These same pundits were surprised that the Iowa caucus last week was essentially a tie between Sanders and Clinton. He won 49.6 percent of the vote and 21 delegates and Clinton won 49.9 percent of the vote and 23 delegates. Clinton, however, came out before any of the networks had announced the projected winner and declared herself the winner.

Early on during the New Hampshire primary, MSNBC announced that Sanders was the projected winner. As of 11:22 p.m., Sanders has won 110,953 votes or 59.6 percent of the votes and Clinton has won 72, 231 votes or 38.8 percent. As one pundit put it, this is the largest margin in history. For the first time, we heard moderators and commentators saying for the first time that Sanders was a force to be reckoned with. This was the guy who, nine months ago, was written off by everyone because he’s a Democratic socialist, because Clinton was the presumed candidate.

It’ll never happen: we heard that time and again. But, as some wise person somewhere once said, Never say never. Bernie kept drawing the largest crowds of any candidate wherever he spoke. Young crowds, college kids, the youth vote. His grassroots fundraising – no super PACS, just donations from more than 3 million people who donate an average of 27 bucks – is unprecedented. When he and Clinton essentially tied in Iowa, the pundits really sat up and took notice. Now that he has won New Hampshire by such a huge margin, even Clinton supporters like MSNBC’s Chris Matthews are blown away.

Here’s the Sanders’s message, which has remained basically unchanged for his decades in Congress:

That the system is rigged for the super wealthy – the upper one percent

That corporations should pay their fair share in taxes

That no one should have to go 50 or 60 grand into debt to get a college education- i.e., free tuition at state universities and colleges

That health care should be a right not a privilege – i.e., single payer system, Medicare for all

That Citizens United – the supreme court decision that corporations are people – must be overturned so that corporations can’t buy elections

That the minimum wage must be raised to at least 15 bucks an hour

That the U.S. can’t continue to be the world’s cop – i.e., he voted against the war in Iraq; Clinton voted for it

Combating climate change

Racial justice

And that’s just the tip. Read more about his issues at his site.

But the thing with Sanders is his passion, the consistency of his message, and that fact that his voice comes across as genuine. Clinton, on the other hand, comes across as just another politician who talks about incremental change (sorry, that hasn’t worked) and how she can get things done and take on Wall Street and the banking system and all the rest of it. Never mind that in 2013, she earned more than 9 million bucks for speaking engagements on Wall Street.

One afternoon recently at the dog park, a bunch of us were sitting around on a large pipe that the dogs like to run through. Jamie and I were talking about Clinton and Sanders and she said that either one of them would be fine with her. “But they aren‘t equal,” I said, and enumerated the reasons why I think Sanders is the better candidate.

Jamie said, “Okay, let’s do a little dog park focus group,” and turned to a couple of young guys in their twenties. “Why is Sanders so popular with your age group?”

The bearded guy, a teacher, just laughed. “Well, that’s easy. He’s for the people. For us. When he talks, you know he believes what he’s saying. He’s genuine. When Clinton talks, it’s all about her.”

“She’s the establishment,” the other guy said. “Sanders is the rogue, the rebel, the revolution.”

It’s interesting that a 74-year-old Socialist Democrat has 85 percent support among 18-27 year-olds. When I mentioned this, the teacher nodded. “Yeah, it’s his message. We get it. Clinton’s message is about the perpetuation of the status quo.”

When we left the dog park, Rob and I got a kick out of the fact that the only two cars in the lot with Bernie Sanders stickers were ours and a truck, parked right next to each other. That’s the picture above.

After watching the primary tonight, I realized that one of the reasons I love national politics is because you get a sense of the collective pulse, the collective consciousness. And this pulse has Sanders at the very liberal end of the spectrum and Cruz and Trump at the very conservative end of the spectrum. The headlines at the Huffington Post tonight  

WTF GOP 

A RACIST, SEXIST, XENOPHOBIC DEMAGOGUE JUST WON THE NEW HAMPSHIRE PRIMARY…

But a Democratic Socialist also won the primary.

There’s something extraordinary happening in this country that I haven’t seen since the political scene of the late 1960s. What began with the huge crowds that Sanders drew early in his campaign, in the tens of thousands- dismissed by pundits as flukes – may now be a revolution that will usher in a vastly changed world if he wins the nomination and the election.

Yes, I would love to see a woman as president. But give me Senator Elizabeth Warren, not Clinton. She’s the old guard.

Sanders is the agent of change. And who knows? Wouldn’t it be something if he tapped Elizabeth Warren as his VP?

A starling murmuration

Today, February 8,  I was driving to my favorite salon to get my hair trimmed. When I drive, particularly on this pleasant route, my mind hums along. I was thinking that it was a new moon day in Aquarius, a fellow air sign, and new moons always mean new opportunities. Suddenly, I found myself stuck in a weird, negative train of thought, and when that happens, I try to find something else to think about.

I glanced up at the sky and saw a flock of birds – hundreds of small birds, I’m not sure what kind – flying west. Then they suddenly changed directions. And it hit me as a synchro, a message that I should do an immediate 180 in my thinking. And that’s what I did.

When I got home, I did some research on this curious phenomenon. In 1984, zoologist Wayne Potts published an article in Nature on his research on how flocking birds move. And his work illustrated that birds in flocks don’t just follow a leader. Instead, they anticipate sudden changes in the flock’s direction.

Sounds like precognition, right?

Once a change in direction begins in the flock, Potts said, it “spreads through the flock in a wave.” Potts called it a manoeuvre wave and said that it begins slowly but can reach speeds three times faster than would be possible if birds were simply reacting to their immediate neighbors. Potts called this ability among flocking birds the chorus line hypothesis. That is, he said, birds are like dancers who see an approaching leg kick when it’s still down the line, and anticipate what to do.

“These propagation speeds appear to be achieved in much the same way as they are in a human chorus line: individuals observe the approaching manoeuvre wave and time their own execution to coincide with its arrival.”

So not only did I experience a startling synchro, I apparently was observing precognition in action as well!

Astronaut Edgar Mitchell—one of 12 moonwalkers—died Friday. He lived just a few miles from us in suburban Lake Worth, Florida. We didn’t know Mitchell personally, but saw him speak some years ago in an appearance in Boca Raton.

When I read the Palm Beach Post’s story about his life, I noticed there was no mention of Mitchell’s controversial belief and comments about UFOs and aliens. They did, however, mention that he founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which explores paranormal phenomena. Mitchell also performed telepathy experiments on his return trip from the moon—a very cool thing to do, we think!

So to fill in the gap about Mitchell’s interest in UFOs, here’s a portion of an interview from 2013 that Mitchell gave to James M. Clash, author of The Right Stuff: Interviews with Icons of the 1960s.

Clash:  You’re also known for your views on UFOs. What’s your experience regarding the Roswell, New Mexico, incident of 1947?

Mitchell: After my space flight, I was contacted by descendants of the original Roswell observers, including the person who delivered the child-sized coffins to the Air Force to contain alien bodies. Another was one of the children of the deputy sheriff who was patrolling traffic around the site.

There was also a military officer who was a friend of the families not involved in that particular operation, but who did share office space there. They all seemed credible with their stories that the bodies found were alien.

Clash: If that’s the case, why has it been hushed up?

Mitchell: Initially I think there was justification in that leadership officials thought people weren’t ready to handle it. But we are well past that now. Frankly, and this is just personal opinion, remember what (President) Eisenhower said in his final speech: “Beware the military industrial complex.” I suspect that’s what we’re talking about.

But it’s not just military. It’s a cabal of organizations primarily for a profit motive. We invented aircraft at the beginning of the 20th century.

Twenty years later, we had an airline industry. Think of what that could mean in terms of space travel with control of UFO machinery, technology. There’s a lot of money involved.

Clash: Have you ever seen a UFO yourself?

Mitchell: I consider myself fairly well informed, although I have not seen one personally. I’m not out there looking — I’m pretty busy.

Clash: Have you been threatened by anyone about your outspokenness on the subject?

Mitchell: No, but they wouldn’t be very successful with me if they tried.

Clash: Are you disappointed that America last visited the moon back in 1972 and has only sent astronauts into low earth orbit since?

Mitchell: There is no question we have to continue with human space development to other planets. But we also need to get our economy running. Then we have to get the world organized to work on this because it is really too much for any one country.

We need a community of nations capable of space flight because we all have to be off this planet sometime in the future. Our sun is going to burn out eventually, and we are not in a sustainable situation.

P.S. Go find them, Edgar, whatever and whoever they are. And check in periodically  to let us know, okay?

I recently encountered a surprising, and unlikely, synchronicity  related to the chakras.

I was preparing for a meditation workshop that I lead at the yoga studio where I teach. I use a lot of guided meditations, and one of them focuses on the chakras—the invisible energy field that surrounds the body from the tailbone to the crown of the head. Chakras have been part of  yoga theory and Eastern philosophy for a couple of thousand years or more, and have become recognized and studied in the West in recent decades.

Each chakra is related to a bija, or seed sound, which we chant softly while focusing on the chakra in question. Here are a few examples of bijas: YAM, RAM, HAM, AUM. Each chakra is also related to a geometric shape. For example, a crescent shape is the focus of the throat chakra – or ajna chakra.

Finally, each chakra is also associated with a mudra or hand gesture…and that’s where my synchronicity manifested. I was focused on the mudra for the heart chakra because I had two versions of it in my notes. I was trying to remember which one I used in the previous course, and which one was the appropriate one. I finally realized both were correct, but one of them improved the description by providing more detail.

I’d been thoroughly focusing on the mudra for about five minutes when I was interrupted by a buzz from my phone. I’d been playing Words with Friends with David, our publisher at Crossroad Books. He’d just made a move and it was my turn. I clicked onto it and was startled to see that his word was ‘mudra.’

Wow! That really surprised me…and of course when I mentioned it to Trish, she said: “That’s a good one. Write it up for the blog.” And so I did.