That Pesky Trickster

Posted on August 19, 2010 by Trish and Rob

                         That Trickster, Smeagol

The trickster has his own chapter in our book. Anyone who has ever experienced a trickster synchro knows why this Jungian archetype deserves his own chapter. He plays with us, this archetype, laughs at us, pokes fun at us. Think Smeagol in Lord of the Rings, the Magician in the tarot, Jim Carey in The Mask, the Joker in Batman…You get the idea.

One of our first posts on the trickster was called Tony and the Trickster, when we had maybe 3 readers. Tony was Trish’s dad. It’s such a classic trickster tale that we decided to post again, rewritten.
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Tony was a retired accountant, who absolutely loved numbers. Born in Quincy, Illinois in 1913, he left there some time after high school and accompanied his older brother to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where one of their sisters lived. He didn’t have the money to attend college. The irony here is that when he was in his late 70s, he applied for membership in MENSA, the high I.Q. society, and got in. I think he attended a technical school of some kind in Tulsa. Then the Great Depression hit and whipped away the American economy. He applied for a job as an accountant with Creole (Exxon) and in 1937 landed in some obscure town on the shores of Lake Maracaibo.

Now skip ahead more than 60 years. Tony is in his late 80s. His wife of 56 years died several years earlier. He has Parkinson’s and pretty much lives in a wheelchair, in an assisted living facility in Georgia where my sister is director of nursing. In assisted living facilities, your neighbors change frequently. As my dad remarked on more than one occasion, “We all know that assisted living is the end of the line, the equivalent of mile marker zero.” That’s Key West. “I never know who lives across the hall from me.”

So a couple months after he moved in, the man who had been living across the hall from him passed on and a woman moved in. A few days later, he met her. To his utter and total shock, the woman was a former high school classmate from Quincy,Illinois – from more than 65 or 70 years earlier. When I commented about the incredible  synchronicity, my dad’s reply was: “The universe has a twisted sense of humor. I don’t like her any more now than I did back then.”

Looks like the trickster had brought his life full circle and taught me a thing or two about the nature of its lesson.

Posted in tony, trickster | 10 Comments

Four-Leaf Clovers and Luck

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Trish and Rob

Just a note: we’re moving Megan back to college during the next 2 days, so we won’t be online as much!
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We all know the tales. Find a four-leaf clover and it means luck is headed your way. But where did this idea originate?

Well, supposedly Eve carried a four-leaf clover with her from Eden. Druids allegedly considered the four-leaf clover to be lucky. The Celts considered the four-leaf clover to be a charm against evil spirits. But for a young man in the UK, the four-leaf clover really was a symbol of good luck. Jim Banzholder alerted us to this story.
It’s a rather odd synchro.

Raymond Curry, 20, was in a bad car accident – his car overturned and rolled through a fence near his home. The hatchback was impaled by two pieces of wood and a third piece impaled Curry, but missed his vital organs. He went through surgery to have the stake and part of his bowel removed. (This surgery in the U.S., by the way, probably would have bankrupted him!) His physicians later found a four-leaf clover stuck to his back under his clothes.

Curry, who had never seen a four-leaf clover before, said, “I know how lucky I am to be alive.”

The four-leaf clover is now mounted on a wall in his bedroom. The original story is here.
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Rob: “How’s he lucky? He was impaled by part of the fence. He lost part of his bowel.”

Me: “Hey, he’s alive.”

Posted in four leaf clovers, luck | 10 Comments

Fixing Freddie

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Trish and Rob

Move over, Marley! Here’a dog story about a boy, a mom, and a very bad beagle!

Paula Munier, the author, was our editor for 7 Secrets. This is her first memoir, just published today,  and it’s a winner.  The last paragraph in the book reveals how very good Freddie the beagle is:

“The moral of my dog story is this: You can fix your life. All it takes is a dogged determination, a nose for trouble and – when when all else fails – the courage to howl at the moon. Freddie taught me that.”

Posted in Freddie, paula | 14 Comments

Out of the Blue

Posted on August 17, 2010 by Trish and Rob

We write about our synchronicities here and share those that are sent to us, but Ray Schmitt has managed to film synchronicities as they were happening. To do so, he reached into his heart and in his search for answers reveals that synchronicities are deeply intertwined with our emotions – the second secret of synchronicity.

Ray began a two-year spiritual journey with his camera in September 2007 after suddenly losing his wife and film partner Judy Lee. He couldn’t imagine her ‘not being.’ Where did she go? She had to exist in some spiritual or energy form otherwise he would have been more devastated by the loss. He set out to re-examine, or affirm, his belief system.

That’s the premise of his new documentary, Out of the Blue. Using Ken Burn’s film, “The Brooklyn Bridge,” as a metaphor, Ray builds a bridge to the metaphysical world. He travels to Mexico and has numerous synchronistic encounters, including meeting the widows who share their own personal stories.Ray explores whether things can exist in different forms or dimensions, how the universe connects with us and us with the universe, and how inspirational thoughts or messages can seemingly come out of the blue.

Here’s a trailer. And it’s available here.

Posted in documentary, Ray Schmitt | 14 Comments

Clouds and Computing

Posted on August 16, 2010 by Trish and Rob

I’ve run across the phrase cloud computing several times recently. I Googled the phrase, read the various entries, but still didn’t understand what it actually was – until our trip a couple of weeks ago to the Florida Keys.

In addition to the lovely location, our agent’s house is a book lover’s dream. So one afternoon when I realized I was nearly finished with the book I’d brought with me, I started roaming through the books around the house, starting with the stack on the table pictured above.I picked up one called You Are Not a Gadget, by Jaron Lanier, known as the father of virtual reality. I’d never heard of the book, but the first page I turned to discussed cloud computing. Synchro, I thought, and read on.

“Cloud is a term for a vast computing service available over the internet. You never know where a cloud resides physically,” writes Lanier. “Google, Microsoft, IBM, and various government agencies are some of the proprietors of computing clouds.”

So it might be said that one possible cloud is composed of the millions of individuals who contribute to the internet through blogs, websites, forums, a kind of global brain, as Lanier calls it. “According to a new creed, we technologists are turning ourselves, the planet, our species, everything, into computer peripherals attached to great computing clouds. The news is no longer about us but about the big new computational object that is greater than us.”

As I was reading this, it suddenly dawned on me that one of the best examples of a computing cloud is a web bot that claims to use the internet as a giant oracle that can predict future events. The two men who own the technology, Clif High and George Ure, call themselves Time Monks. The technology and algorithms, which are kept secret,  supposedly tap into the collective unconscious through spiders that search the Internet for  300,000 words. The predictions can allegedly predict catastrophes 60-90 days in advance.

I’ve been following George Ure’s site for a couple of years now. Occasionally, he posts free predictions from the web bots, but mostly he’s an economist who rarely sees anything good about the economy and is a diehard urban survivalist. Just before the financial meltdown in 2008, he and Clif were on Coast to Coast, I think it was, and were talking about the web bot predictions for a dire downturn in the economy. It was definitely a hit. They claim to have other hits, but I can’t vouch for them.

So the web bot project uses millions of blogs and websites to make predictions. Quantity, in other words. In his book, Lenair talks about quality versus quantity. “The fragments of human effort that have flooded the internet are perceived by some to form a hive mind or noosphere.” Some of his tech friends – like Larry Page, one of Google’s founders – expects “the internet to come alive at some point.” Other people – like science historian George Dyson – believes it has happened already.

Lenair has some interesting stuff to say about blogs and blogging and how the internet is changing the book and music industries. That alone is worth the read. But his particular take on the “hive mentality” of the web and what it may mean for individual creativity is what really captured me. And thanks to this book, I finally have a clearer understanding of computer clouds and was able to identify the web bot project as one such cloud. I also realized that the government routinely uses their computing clouds to scan blogs and websites. We wrote about our experience with that here. There have been other such incidents, but that’s a post for another day!

Posted in books, computers, Internet | 20 Comments

The Universe Delivers

Posted on August 15, 2010 by Trish and Rob

We’ve posted several of Judi Hertling’s synchronicities. They usually involve her request to the universe for something specific. Her most recent story is here. What’s particularly intriguing about this story is that it shows how Judi harnesses synchronicity and is similar to an activity in 7 Secrets (p226) called Harnessing Synchronicity. 
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In early 2007, my husband and I completed construction of our potential dream home. As anyone who has ever built a house with a spouse and a contractor knows, it doesn’t get much more stressful than that. So when I began journaling about stress, illness, and healing, I was only slightly surprised.

I am a positive person for the most part so this is not a topic I usually write about, however as I hadn’t been feeling up to par for a few weeks, it seemed a natural way for me to release a few negative energies that may have accumulated during the whole construction experience, while at the same time allowing me to explore on paper which areas of my life were out of balance.
 
While there was nothing physical that I could put my finger on, I had a vague sense that something within me was not quite right. I could not shake the feeling that the house, while beautiful, felt wrong to me and that I also felt wrong in a way that I could not explain. As far back as I can remember I have been sensitive to my environment, to people, and to the subtle changes within my body.

I am also guilty of not always acting on those subtleties, or instincts. Not always trusting my intuition.
Winston Churchill said. ‘You create your own universe as you go along.” So this time I listened. And I trusted.

I made an appointment with my physician and went to see him a few days later. He ran the usual tests, found nothing too unusual, and told me to come back in a few weeks if I was still feeling – off.

Trusting that the Universe was trying to tell me something about myself, something important, I made a second appointment and after more tests and examinations he referred me to a specialist who was not usually available to take new patients. The appointment was scheduled for six days later. This in itself was unusual since appointments to see most specialists in Canada can take six weeks or longer so I was grateful that I wouldn’t have to wait that long, and also because it was scheduled for two days after my husband arrived home from working a five week rotation overseas.

On the allotted day we arrived a few minutes early, filled out the necessary paperwork and then I was hustled into the exam room. An hour later I returned to the waiting area, a little shaken. I told my husband that during the exam the specialist had found two ovarian masses, and I needed to have major surgery to determine if they were cancerous or not.  Given that my Mother had passed away of ovarian cancer, this was not good news.

The date for surgery was still to be scheduled, and we were warned that it would be at least a four to six weeks wait since operating rooms were in short supply. I was also informed that I would need someone to be home with me for at least four weeks following surgery. No lifting, no cooking, no cleaning, no driving. We have no family where we live, we were new in the neighborhood, and my husband was due to go back overseas in five weeks.

I needed a synchronicity so big that it would rearrange people and events once again to provide that which I needed. Surgery and recuperation time all before my husband went back overseas. Impossible? Maybe.
My mantra is always the same. “If it is for my highest good and for the highest good of all those concerned.”
The next day I received a telephone call from the surgeon’s office saying that she had received a surprising and very sudden surgical cancellation, and that she would be able to perform my surgery 48 hours later if we could be at the hospital the next day for pre-op tests.

Not only did the Universe provide a way for me to have the much needed surgery, but my husband would be there to take care of me and the household chores as I needed, and as I had asked for.

The surgery was successful and four weeks later, once the pathology report was back, we heard the magic words, “the tumors were benign. No cancer.”

Posted in health, law of attraction, visualization | 11 Comments

Doomsday or Folly?

Posted on August 14, 2010 by Trish and Rob

If you were alive in the 1960s, you undoubtedly recall air raid drills and the hoopla about underground shelters. In the movie The Road, which takes place in post-apocalyptic times, father and son find such an underground shelter, full stocked with food and supplies. The image above is an artist’s rendition of a lounge area in a proposed underground shelter by a company called Vivos.

I ran across this image and story the same day we posted Mass Dreams of the Future, a synchronicity that felt troubling because there’s apparently enough hype about 2012 so that developers are now capitalizing on it.

In a nushell,  the Vivos shelter network is proposing a network of 20 such shelters. According to the article in USA Today, these shelters “are intended to protect those inside for up to a year from catastrophes such as a nuclear attack, killer asteroids or tsunamis.” Another outfit, Radius Engineering in Terrell, Texas, has been building these shelters for more than 30 years and claimed that business “has never been better.” Their shelters are pricey – from $400,000 to a $41 million shelter that can accommodate up to 750 people. For a Vivos shelter – which sells something like time shares for these things (not sure how that would work during a disaster!) – developer Robert Vicino is looking for buyers willing to pay $50,000 for adults and half that for children.

Vicino says he’s not profiting from fear. “We’re not creating the fear; the fear is already out there. We’re creating the solution.”

So what happens after a year or five years, when the supplies run out and people are losing their minds from living underground and the catastrophe that drove them into a shelter is still poisoning the air?

Posted in 2012, domed city, underground shelters | 13 Comments

Friggatriskaidekaphobia

Posted on August 13, 2010 by Trish and Rob

Can you figure out that title? Hint ‘Frigga’ means Friday…and there’s a phobia at the end.

Yes, Friday the 13th. If there’s any superstition that the average Muggle abides by, it’s the fear of Friday falling on the 13th of the month and the supposed bad luck that goes with the day.

However, among those who transit the mystical underground, I’ve noticed that some of us don’t abide by the bad luck scenario, and even consider it as a day of good luck. Maybe that’s because 13 is a lucky number in paganism– as in 13 lunar cycles in a year. There are lots of theories about the origin of the superstition, but I’m not going into that here.

Instead, here’s the story. Trish and I were supposed to do interviews today  about The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity for Whitley Streiber’s radio show, Dreamland, and Unknown Country’s subscriber Podcast. What happened? Mid-morning we received an e-mail from Anne Streiber saying that she was ill after returning from an 11-hour flight from London. So the show is being re-scheduled for a latter date.

So, it could be construed as bad luck–no interviews…or good luck in that we don’t have to do our interviews now on Friday the 13th! 😉

Sorry to bombard everyone with three posts today, but we couldn’t pass up Friggatriskaidekaphobia.

Posted in Uncategorized | 12 Comments

8-9-10-11-12

Posted on August 13, 2010 by Trish and Rob
soul cards
 

Thanks to Jim Banzholder for alerting us to this one. Talk about synchros with numbers! This infant seems to know a thing or two already! Poker, anyone?

Take a look. 

Posted in birth, Numbers | 6 Comments

Message from a One-Legged Burrowing Owl

Posted on August 13, 2010 by Trish and Rob

This evening (August 7), we’ve been preparing for our  interview with Whitley Strieber’s Dreamland Radio, which will be recorded on August 13. Since we’ll be interviewed separately, we’ve been trying to come up with different synchronicities for each of the 7 secrets.  I imagined myself being asked what my best personal synchronicity was – and drew a complete blank.

A kind of panic spread through me and suddenly I was 11 or 12 years old, living in Caracas, and in a piano recital that was being filmed for a local TV station. As I sat down at the piano to play the piece I had rehearsed for weeks, my fingers froze, my mind went numb, and I heard nothing but static. Stage fright. I think I started crying, the cameras stopped, and then I was finally able to play the piece. The memory seemed like a clear warning to have something prepared. And then I remembered the message of the one-legged burrowing owl. I thought we had already used it as a post, checked, and we haven’t. I did write about it in Animal Totems, a book I co-authored with our friend Millie Gemondo. So here’s the one that stands out in my mind.

For the first 11 years of Megan’s life, we lived on a lake – a man-made lake that was dug as an enticement to buy homes in our development. It had a few alligators, a lot of ducks, and drew other birds and wildlife. For several years, we had a family of burrowing owls living in our back yard. They’re an endangered species,  live in burrows they dig beneath trees and shrubs, and are slightly larger than a robin. They hunt between dusk and dawn and are rarely seen during the day.

One Sunday afternoon, Megan and her friend came racing into the kitchen, shouting about a burrowing owl perched on the atrium fence outside my dad’s bedroom. My dad had been living with us for about two years, ever since we had placed my mother in an Alzheimer’s unit.  I knew that in esoteric traditions, owls are considered to be messengers between the dead and the living and my first thought was that the owl portended that my dad, who had Parkinson’s, was going to pass away soon. The fact that the owl was perched on the fence in broad daylight concerned me, too.

The three of us stood at the sliding glass door, gawking at the owl. Then I noticed that the bird was perched on just one leg. I thought that the left leg might just be pulled up, so we hurried outside for a closer look. It wasn’t the least bit startled as the three of us approached for a closer look. We realized its left leg wasn’t just pulled up; part of its leg was missing.

Unsettled by the whole thing, I convinced myself it didn’t mean anything. But at nine the next morning, the phone rang. It was the Alzheimer’s facility. My mother was on the way to ER, presumably for a broken hip. I rushed over to the hospital. She was in excruciating pain. X-Rays were taken, doctors arrived and left. By the end of the day, the prognosis was worse than a broken hip. My mother’s left hipbone- the same leg that was actually missing on the owl – had disintegrated completely. He wasn’t a candidate for a hip replacement because she didn’t have the presence of mind necessary for the rehab.

“So what are the alternatives?” I asked the doctor who delivered the news.

“We do wonderful things with pain management nowadays.”

Easy for him to say. She wasn’t his mother.

My mother was transferred to a nursing home, where pain management consisted of regular doses of morphine. She died three weeks later of pneumonia. The owl had delivered its message that Sunday weeks earlier.

Posted in animals as messengers, death, mothers, owls | 11 Comments