Ecstatic Postures

Posted on December 10, 2009 by Trish and Rob

About ten years ago, I came across a book called Ecstatic Body Postures, by Belinda Gore. It’s about a method for achieving ecstatic trance and visionary experiences, and is based on the research of anthropologist Dr. Felecitas D. Goodman.

Since I’m a yoga teacher who attaches energy related to astrological signs to 12 series of yoga postures, the book caught my attention. It features illustrations of figurines and rock paintings  from antiquity in which the subject is holding a particular posture. Writes Goodman: “If a specific posture represented in one of these artifacts is combined with rhythmic stimulation, be that by drum or rattle, the body temporarily undergoes dramatic neurophysiological changes, and visionary experiences arise that are specific to the particular posture in question.”

That’s the backdrop for what happened when our friend Nancy Pickard, a mystery writer, came to stay with us this week. Nancy arrived with a new book by Belinda Gore, called The Ecstatic Experience. Essentially, it is an updated and revised version of the older book, and this one includes a CD which contains drumming and rattling. The idea is to play the CD while holding one of the postures. After Nancy showed me the book,  I dug out my older edition,  opened it at random to  a page that featured the Olmec Diviner Posture, a seated position with one knee up and hands on the legs.

I stared at the illustration and suddenly wondered what had become of an antique figure that I’d purchased years ago in Cartagena, Colombia. I was attracted to that figurine because it looked like a man in a space suit wearing a helmet. I looked up on a bookshelf near my desk for the figurine, didn’t see it, but spotted another one from my collection, a modern copy of an antique, and I was surprised that it looked very similar to the illustration I had been studying. Synchronicity. The statue is the colored photo at the top.

So the next morning, again paging through the book, I came across a brochure for the Cuyamungue Institute of  New Mexico, which is where workshops are held on these ecstatic postures. I showed it to Nancy and she immediately pointed to the illustration on the front. I hadn’t even noticed that the figure was very similar to the two others. They’re not identical, but as you can see from the illustrations they are very close to one another. 

We decided to work with the diviner posture, play the CD, and see what happened. Since I often like to improvise, rather than follow precise directions, I suggested we try the version of the posture in my figurine. We worked our way into the posture, burned some sage, blew some tobacco, took several deep, cleansing breaths, then turned on the CD.

We held the posture for about 15 minutes while rhythmic rattling, one of four selections, played. When we emerged from it, we took turns describing our experiences. Amazingly, the three of us all found ourselves traveling downward through a tunnel. Nancy and I both saw it as a ribbed tunnel. Trish saw brilliant violet light and smooth gold burnished stone surfaces. As we exited the tunnel, we all saw trees. I found myself surrounded by hummingbirds. Nancy encountered tribal men, who were dancing and making the rattling. Trish experienced more colors.  Trish and I both heard the number 10, in my case, 10 days. I also heard the month of May, and I heard the words, “Brazil, two.”

As the rhythm changed, we all saw ourselves moving back up the tunnel from the underworld. It was a very interesting experience and we decided to try it again, maybe every day while Nancy is here, working with different postures.
Rob


Posted in trance states, yoga | 11 Comments

Love, Mira

Posted on December 9, 2009 by Trish and Rob


We’ve posted a number of stories involving synchronicity and creativity. The MO usually goes something like this: the individual is usually deeply immersed in a creative process of some kind and really plugs in to whatever he/she is doing. For a writer, this means you plunge into the depths of your own unconscious and seem to tap into something – Jung’s collective unconscious, your own intuitive wisdom, your characters. You may even be tapping into the future.

Robert Louis Stevenson struggled for days to find the plot for a new story, then  discovered it in a dream, as if it had been handed to him. The result was The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Elias Howe dreamed that he’d been taken captive by savages who were attacking him with spears that had eye-shaped holes  at the end. When he awakened from the nightmare, he realized the dream had given him the final piece of a puzzle for his sewing machine: the eye of the needle belonged near the end of it.

It’s one thing to read about something like this happening to another writer. It’s a whole different ballgame when it happens to you. Some years ago, I (Trish) was conducting a workshop at a writers’ retreat. As I spoke, I started feeling a level of discomfort that usually portends big trouble with whatever I’m working on. Sure enough, by the end of the day, I knew the novel I was writing had collapsed.

 This is always a depressing moment. Your mind scrambles to patch holes in the plot, to fix the characters. You feel like hurling your laptop against the nearest wall. Months of work, all that paper you wasted, all those printer cartridges, all that creative flow that went…south. You get the idea.

I fell asleep in turmoil and dreamed that my character, psychic and bookstore owner Mira Morales, was writing me a letter. Upon awakening, the only lines I could recall were: Don’t worry. It’ll work out.  Much love, Mira.

At some level, I apparently remembered the advice Mira had provided and was able to rewrite Black Water.
– Trish


Posted in creativity, Mira Morales, Poe, Tango Key, titanic, writers | 19 Comments

Rita and the Car

Posted on December 8, 2009 by Trish and Rob

This painting, by Odilon Redon, is called Pandora’s Box. It fits this synchronicity. I discovered this artist through Gypsy’s blog, which is a visual feast. So one night I clicked on the artist’s name under one of her entries – and a whole new world of color opened up.
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Sometimes our inner reaction to circumstances manifests in a physical way involving an object. That’s what happened to a friend, Rita, after she got a call informing her that her long-time business partner had died suddenly of a massive coronary at home. She not only grieved the loss of a friend, but immediately worried about finding a new partner. They had shared the workload and the expenses, and now she was faced with finding someone who could invest as well as work in the jewelry sales business.

Rita was still mulling over this development when she drove to an elementary school a few minutes later to pick up her daughter. While waiting in the pickup line, her car’s engine suddenly died and refused to start – a perfect synchronistic expression of her fears about her partner’s death.
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 This synchronicity is similar in tone and texture to one we posted earlier called End of the Road. Death is certainly an attractor of synchronicity.

Posted in cars, death, objects | 11 Comments

Joseph Campbell and the Praying Mantis

Posted on December 7, 2009 by Trish and Rob

Synchronicities often involve archetypes or archetypal situations that we all share – being picked on by the schoolyard bully in elementary school, loss of childhood innocence, the birth of a child, a wedding or divorce, the death of a parent. These types of synchronicities can startle us so deeply that we are forced to recognize them as something more than random coincidences.

Mythologist Joseph Campbell experienced a startling synchronicity that was reminiscent of Jung’s scarab while he was reading about the praying mantis, a hero symbol in the Bushman mythology. He was at home on the fourteenth floor of a building in New York City, and had an urge to open a window, which he rarely did.

Off to the right, a praying mantis stood on the rim of his window. Campbell, whose career focused on Jung’s collective unconscious and mythology, said the mantis was huge and looked  right at him. “… its face looked like the face of a Bushman’s face. It gave me the creeps!
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This synchronicity is similar to the classic plum pudding tale, where incredible odds defy imagination. Think about it. How many praying mantises hang out on the 14th floor windowsills of Manhattan apartments?

Posted in bushmen, Joseph Campbell, mythology, writers | 14 Comments

A Quantum Leap

Posted on December 6, 2009 by Trish and Rob

Can the present affect the past? If so, would that be cause and effect in reverse, or synchronicity? 


That’s the question that we are wondering as we post this quite extraordinary tidbit of information that involves President Obama and the birthers.  In case you’ve been missing in action, the birthers are a crazed contingent of far right and far from right fanatics who believe Barack Obama was born in a foreign country, not Hawaii. In spite of his birth certificate showing that he was born in a hospital in Hawaii, the birthers persist, saying it’s all a conspiracy.

 
The new twist on this story comes from ace conspiracy investigator Peter Levenda (author of Sinister Forces). But first, to put things in perspective, Peter makes it clear that he considers the birthers’ contention bogus. Notes Peter:

“I believe that the arguments set forth by the “birther” movement are without foundation because one would have to believe that a conspiracy existed as long ago as the day of Obama’s birth (or even earlier) to defraud the presidential election process.  I study conspiracy theories, as you know, and this one is beyond the pale.  Efforts to prove that Obama was born in Kenya (for instance) have been demonstrated to be false and the result of forged documents, etc.  I feel that there is a tangible element of racism and paranoid hysteria in these allegations that devalue honest journalistic investigation.”

Okay, that being said …

“There is a synchronistic element hidden within the “birther” allegations that no one has noticed so far.  It is truly bizarre, and its existence suggests to me that the fury of the birthers has its origin in the “sinister forces” of which I write.  I even hesitate to bring this up, knowing full well what the reaction will be among the birthers and how they will use this synchronistic piece of “evidence” to add more fuel to their fires, full as they are of heat and no light.  But, here it goes:
“In the two birth announcements from the Hawaii newspapers mentioning that a son was born to Mr and Mrs Barack Obama on August 4, 1961 we notice that the next announcement in the series, directly below that of Barack Obama, is for a son born to a Mr and Mrs Norman Asing on the same day.”
Seems innocuous, unless you have a sharp eye and familiarity with the language of Indonesia.We’ll let Peter explain.
“Asing is a word in the Indonesian national language, Bahasa Indonesia, and means … “foreign“!  
 You will recall that Barack Obama spent four years in Indonesia growing up and still has a good command of that language.
“Now the birthers will say that this is evidence that there was a conspiracy back in 1961 when Barack Obama was a week old, and that the birth announcement for Mr Asing was a coded message to their followers that “the eagle has landed” or something (much, I assume, to the real Mr Asing’s dismay). 
“My interpretation, of course, is somewhat different.  I believe that the birther movement was so intense that it created a ripple in space-time. (I write about this in Sinister Forces in connection with the Kennedy assassinations, the Texas Tower Sniper, etc. all of which were predicted in novels and plays long before the events took place).
“I believe that this announcement is a clue, but not of a conspiracy.  It is a prediction of what would occur, a prediction created by the intensity of the debate and the passions of the individuals involved whose quantum effects were felt not only in the present and presumably in the future but… also in the past.

“I would never have noticed this had I not spent many years living in Malaysia which uses a national language quite similar to Indonesia’s, and in which the word “asing” has the same meaning, so it was only serendipity that brought my attention to the birth announcement where the word “Asing” jumped out at me because, you see, in Malaysia and Indonesia I was also “asing”:  a foreigner.”

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So, to sum up,  Peter is suggesting that the emotional intensity of the birther movement and their contention–no matter how wrong–affected the past, synchronicistically resulting in the appearance of the name Asing directly below Obama.

This explanation is interesting–present circumstances exerting influence on the past–and could relate to previous synchronicities we’ve posted about authors writing about future events…namely, Edgar Allan Poe penning a tale about a dramatic case of cannibalism on the high seas 47 years before it occurred, and Morgan Robertson ‘novelizing’ the sinking of the Titanic (he called it the Titan) in Futility 14 years before the tragedy.

Posted in obama, politics, quantumn physics, time | 11 Comments

Apollo 13

Posted on December 5, 2009 by Trish and Rob

 

Butternut Squash was doing homework with her son and ran across this amazing synchronicity  concerning Apollo 13. She says she must be the last person on the planet to hear about it, but we’d never heard it, either! It’s another one of those repeating number synchros. In this case, the #13.
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On April 11, 1970, at 1:13 PM Houston time, Apollo 13 was launched. On the military time clock, it was 13:13. Two days later, on April 13, a fuel tank explosion took out all the power and oxygen. It appeared that fuel cells 1 and 3 were dead. The lunar module served as their life vessel and got them back to Earth.

When astronaut Lovell began the first post press conference, his first words were, “I am not a superstitous person…”
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A bit of trivia about #13:
Among the Greeks, the bad luck day is Tuesday the thirteenth. I’ve yet to enter a building where the #13 is listed in the elevator. On most planes, you don’t find a thirteenth seat or a thirteenth row, at least not in planes where the  first twelve rows are first class. In some cultures, there’s a superstition that if thirteen people sit at a table for a meal, one of them will die in the next year. The fear of the number thirteen is
 called triskaidekaphobia.”


Posted in #13, apollo 13, global, spacecraft | 16 Comments

Millie and the 2 of Clubs

Posted on December 4, 2009 by Trish and Rob

 This image is from a deck called soul cards, found here.
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If psychic phenomena falls under the umbrella of synchronicity, as Jung  believed, then every time you get a psychic reading, you’re experiencing synchronicity.

We first met heard about Millie Gemondo of West Virginia the night before Hurricane Andrew struck South Florida. Two days later, we had a reading with her. We were impressed. Eventually, we met Millie. And were really impressed. So many psychics have agendas – personal agendas. Not Millie. If she doesn’t see or feel it, she tells you. No BS.

She’s not only a terrific psychic, but an empath -someone capable of tuning into the emotions and physical body of whoever  he or she is reading.

Some empaths use photos of or objects that belong to the person for whom they are reading, but they generally don’t use the typical divination tools – no cards, I Ching coins, astrological charts.  Millie uses a regular playing deck of cards when she reads for people, but the cards are simply her way of focusing her enormous ability. One night she was reading for Trish and said something that really resonated and Trish exclaimed, “What? Where are you getting that?”

Millie laughed and touched her temple. “The two of clubs.”

Now the two of clubs is the standing joke. But it’s the card that resonates emotionally for her, that opens her to the “vast, tumultuous ocean of desires, conflicts and pains, triumphs and joys that are specific to the person I’m reading.” She doesn’t consider herself an empath, but sometimes the emotional connections to the person she’s reading shoves its way into her awareness.

While reading for a friend on Florida’s west coast some years ago, she suddenly felt a pain in her breast and blurted, “You’ve  got a small tumor in your left breast. Get yourself to a doctor immediately.”

The friend went to the doctor the next day and, sure enough, a small tumor was found and subsequently removed. Millie’s warning saved her friend’s life.

Posted in breast cancer, cards, health care, Millie, psychics | 10 Comments

Synchronicity books

Posted on December 3, 2009 by Trish and Rob


We recently read an interesting article on synchronicity on the Internet in which the author takes a scientific approach and makes some worthwhile observations. Here’s one:

“If causality does not govern everything, then there could theoretically exist an ACAUSAL connecting principle. Two events which are somehow connected, but neither of them caused the other one to happen. This is synchronicity. If synchronicity does not exist, then the world is just full of strange coincidences.

“Telepathy, divination, astrology and such are potentially possible under the theory of synchronicity. But they don’t occur for the traditionally believed reasons. Telepathy, meaning that one could ‘read’ another person’s mind, suggests some sort of thought waves, and this is not in accordance with physics. But it’s possible that two people can think of something at the same time.

“Under the theory of synchronicity, all such events would be synchronistic. If a person is more inclined toward certain synchronistic phenomena than others, she/he could be perceived as a telepath. Similarly, an event in the future or in the past could be connected with an event in the present; and the constellations and the stars and planets could be connected with elements in human lives.”

However, for a smart guy who wrote a lengthy and thoughtful article, Nicolas Knutsen makes one very baffling comment:

“The only book which is all about synchronicity that I know of, is of course the original by C.G. Jung, “Synchronicity – An Acausal Connecting Principle.”

Unfortunately, that comment tends to put Mr. Knutsen in the Dick Cavett league of writers on synchronicity. So let’s set the record straight. There have been many books exclusively on synchronicity and they are not difficult to find. Here are some:

Chopra, Deepak. The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire: Harnessing the Infinite Power of Coincidence. Harmony Books, 2003.

Combs, Allan, and Holland, Mark. Synchronicity, Science, Myth and the Trickster. New York: Marlow & Co., 1989.

Grasse, Ray. The Waking Dream: Unlocking the Symbolic Language of Our Lives. Quest Books, 1996.

Hopcke, Robert. H. There are No Accidents. Riverhead Books, 1997.

Joseph, Frank. Synchronicity & You: Understanding the Role of Meaningful Coincidence in Your Life. Element Books, 1999.

Jung, C.G. Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. Princeton University Press, 1969.

Koestler, Arthur. The Roots of Coincidence: An excursion Into Parapsychology. Vintage, 1972.

Mansfield, Victor. Synchronicity, Science, and Soul-Making, Open Court. 1995.

Peat, F. David. SYNCHRONICITY: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind. Bantam Books, 1987.

Storm, Lance (editor). Synchronicity: Multiple Perspective on Meaningful Coincidence. Pari Publishing, 2008.

Tarnas, Richard. Cosmos and Psyche. Plume, 2007.

 Vaughn, Allan. Patterns of Prophecy. Dell, 1973.

Vaughn, Allan. Incredible Coincidence. Signet, 1980.

Wilson, Colin. C.G. Jung: Lord of the Underworld. Aeon, 2005.

And, of course, we can’t overlook:

MacGregor, Trish & Rob. Seven Secrets of Synchronicity: Your Guide to Finding Meaning in Coincidences Big and Small. Adams, August, 2010.

Posted in books, Knutsen | 18 Comments

The Fitzcarraldo

Posted on December 2, 2009 by Trish and Rob

In the late 1980s, we led tours for travel writers to the Peruvian Amazon and took  several trips up the river from Leticia, Columbia to Iquitos, Peru. The Rio Amazona was no QEII. However, as a former rubber-hauling vessel that had been refurbished for passengers, it had a wonderful open deck that provided fantastic views of the jungle.  Its sister ship was the craft that was used in Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, that starred Klaus Kinski.

The boat stopped frequently for side trips on wooden skiffs with our bilingual guides, most of whom were the sons of Riverenos – Amazonian fishermen. These young men understood the river, the jungle, its moods, risks, and beauty.

So one afternoon when the boat hit a sandbar, we saw concern on the faces of the crew members. It was too early in the dry season for the river to drop so low. The owner of the boat, an American who had lived in Peru for years, tried to play down the problem, assuring us that the crew would find a way to free the vessel.  But we could see he was apprehensive.

Meanwhile, below the deck, passengers were watching a video of Fitzcarraldo, which had begun before the boat hit the sandbar. We joined the others and were astonished that the scene showed our sister vessel
 stuck fast on a sandbar and the crew finally deciding to drag the ship through jungle to another branch of the river.We looked at each other, shocked not only by the synchronicity, but by how none of the other passengers seemed to connect the parallel worlds of the movie and our situation.

Fitzcarraldo had been chosen from two boxes of videos, but even if it had been the only movie on board, what were the odds that the scene of the boat stuck on a sandbar would be playing just as the same thing was happening to us?

When you connect with synchronicity, it’s as if your world holds an added richness and dimension that others apparently miss.

A short time after the movie ended, the crew managed to maneuver the boat into deeper water and we continued our trip. We commented that it was fortunate that we didn’t have to drag the boat, like in the celluloid version of events. “That was just a movie,” one of our fellow passengers remarked. True. But for us, it was more than that.
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We scanned this very old photo of several of us on the open deck of the Rio Amazonas. From left to right: Diane Cleaver, our former agent, Rob, Trish, a woman whose name we don’t recall, and Chris Cox, our editor. What’s especially eerie about this photo is that the people on either end are no longer with us. Chris died in 1990, and Diane died about four years later.



Posted in amazon, fitzcarraldo, movies, travel | 14 Comments

The Monster of Florence

Posted on December 1, 2009 by Trish and Rob

 

Peter Levenda explores the dark side of mankind in his books, such as Sinister Forces, and so it’s not surprising that his reading list would include The Monster of Florence. But for Peter, that book opened synchronicities connecting him with the co-author Douglas Preston.

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I have just finished reading The Monster of Florence, by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi.  It is an account of Preston’s investigation of Italy’s most famous serial murder case. I read a lot of serial killer non-fiction, and this seemed like an interesting addition.  The Monster has been killing and mutilating victims in Tuscany and primarily around Florence — a city I know well — since the 1960s and has never been caught.  But Preston’s book — written with the help of the most-informed Italian journalist on the case, Mario Spezi ,who is referred to as the “Monstrologer” — is equally about the corruption of the Italian judicial system which has allowed the Monster to escape justice to this day.  Okay.
                                            

   Today I was writing an email to a friend of mine about the book.  It was only after I had finished the book that I realized that Preston is the co-author, with Lincoln Childs, of a series of books about an occult detective named Pendergast.  I had been reading those novels in Indonesia last year, during Ramadan, as they were one of the few books I could find in English.   Okay, that was interesting, but …

I had just finished writing the email when I felt compelled to do a search on the Internet for some background information.  I found a blurb by Preston for a book by Whitley Streiber, Critical Mass, on the International Thriller Writers website. Now, I know Whitley and have been interviewed by him on a number of occasions, so that was eerie.  I didn’t know that Preston and Whitley knew each other, or were aware of each other’s work.

 
But what I especially did not realize was that the blurb from Preston appears on the site directly below a blurb for the same book … from me!
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Interestingly, when Peter reviewed Streiber’s new novel, it was called Midnight…and that’s somehow appropriate.

Posted in authors, books, Peter Levenda | 12 Comments