Math’s son took this photo on a Civil War site about 35 miles south of Nashville, Tennessee. See the two orbs? He’s a professional photographer, so it’s unlikely that these orbs are smudges on the lens or light leakage. Are they spirits or something else?
The radio show scheduled for noon today has been re-scheduled for next Sunday, March 3. We’ll put up a link for the show next Sunday. (Mercury, by the way, went retrograde on February 23.) Or you can copy the link.
Here’s a little survey. See how many of these questions you answer positively, and we’ll tell you what that means…or might mean.
Here’s more from the report.
“The focus of attention on skin samples and reproductive organs seems to suggest an interest in human anatomy and reproduction. If the examinations are for the benefit of the human species, the methods of involuntary intrusion and the subsequent post-traumtic stress that many victims report, is suspicious. The effort to produce amnesia is largely successful, as this study has shown. This could support a theory that the abductors have a more comprehensive understanding of our minds than we have of ourselves. It could also indicate a genuine consideration for our well-being, similar to our use of tranquilizers when examining endangered animal species. It could well be that the abductors have a similar mission with our species.”
The survey was sponsored by Robert Bigelow, a billionaire space pioneer, who is fascinated by UFOs and other unexplained phenomenon. He submitted the survey findings to members of an organization for psychiatrists. Unfortunately, the survey probably did more to damper the belief in alien abductions than support it, solely by the enormous numbers of abductees generated by the survey.
For more on this survey, look here. Since this survey, the Roper Organization has divided into the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, a non-profit organization, and a the for-profit Roper Poll. Both organizations were created by Elmo Roper.
Just a note on radio shows. Last night, we were on caesar’s ghost with Charlotte Kosa on blogtalk radio. And what fun that was. She’ll have the show archived at the link above. For some reason, we thought the show was going to be an hour, but it was two hours – and no breaks! Charlotte has a missing time experience that we hope she’ll write up and send us so we can post it.
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We took a break from work the other day and went to see Silver Linings Playbook.
We knew the movie had been nominated for an Oscar, that our daughter loved it, and that Jennifer Lawrence (The Hunger Games) starred with Bradley Cooper, the guy from Limitless. Other than that, we didn’t know much – no story line or the context. During the credits we discovered it was based on a novel by Matthew Quick.
From the opening to ending scenes, I was captivated. Cooper plays a guy who is bipolar and his illness is the world into which you, the movie viewer, travel. It‘s a bumpy ride. Cooper is such a terrific actor that you really understand what it means to be bipolar, that it’s about the anxiety we may feel at some point in our lives but magnified five million times. He’s obsessed with his wife – Nikki – whom he hasn’t seen for eight months because he has been in a mental institution. He ended up there by court order after finding Nikki in the shower with a teacher with whom she worked and beating the teacher to a bloody pulp.
Robert DeNiro, now 70, plays the perfect father of a blue collar bipolar son. The woman who plays his wife, Jacki Weaver, is so realistic she looks and acts as though she was recruited from some blue-collar neighborhood in Philadelphia. Then there’s Jennifer Lawrence – Katniss from The Hunger Games – and wow, you can see where this incredible actress is headed. She’s been nominated as best actress in this movie (and Cooper for best actor) and was also nominated for her role in Winter’s Bone. She’s just 22. She’s the real deal.
Lawrence takes edgy, rebellious roles that illustrate the changing paradigm for women – and for society as a whole. Her characters are flawed because of circumstances, because of what they must do to stay alive, to flourish. In Silver Linings Playbook, she’s the 25-year-old widow of a cop, and she steals the show. Ultimately, the story centers around a dance contest, a gambling venture, and how love can transform us.
I hope this movie wins big time.
After all, as the title suggests, we all have silver linings in our lives. We just have to recognize them.
We’ve done several radio shows for Aliens in the Backyard, and have more shows scheduled. It’s an often overlooked publicity for books, with its own peculiar pace and texture, and you can do the show in your pajamas and who’s going to know? Radio even lends itself to synchros. But before we go there, a bit of background is in order.
Over the years, Rob and I have done our share of radio shows. We loved doing Coast to Coast with Art Bell back in the late 90s. He was an engaging host, with a genuine passion for the topics he discussed. Whitley Strieber’s Dreamland has also been fun and enjoyable. We’ve done that show twice, for our first two synchronicity books. Whitley and his wife, Anne, are knowledgeable about the topics they take on, and understand the art of conversation. With them, you’re free to speculate, theorize, and you don’t have to hold back. We enjoyed the interview we did with Mike Clelland on one of the synchro books. Mike engages, drills, asks unexpected questions.
We LOVED David Schrader’s show, Darkness Radio, that we did on February 14. He has a great sense of humor and that Midwestern affability that invites you to have a beer with him at the local watering hole after the show. He also knows his field – the paranormal – and the questions he asks, the points he raises, are valid and insightful.
At one point in the show, we were talking about Charles Fontaine’s experience after he’d left the graveyard – and nine days before his encounter – when he found his pants filled with blood. His first thought was that he was going to die. His father had been diagnosed with colon cancer twenty years earlier and Charles believed it was now his turn. Before we could finish telling the story, the show went to break.
One of the first subsequent commercials to air was a public service announcement about the importance of colon/rectal cancer screenings. Rob hurries into my office the phone at his ear, and says, “A synchro. Let’s pick up there!”
Wow, I thought, okay. A colon/rectal synchro. Not exactly elevated stuff, but okay, it’s a synchro, all right. Rob pointed it out to David when we went back on air and none of us really knew what it might mean… rectal alien probes?
Rachel Maddow and MSNBC have produced a documentary that is probably the best we’ve seen about the lies of the Bush administration that led up to the Iraq war. It’s based on the book by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War.
In those days right after 9-11, I remember being glued to TV news, watching as the Bush administration manipulated and took advantage of the national fervor that had seized the country. Everywhere Rob and I drove, we saw American flags flapping on cars. We were surrounded by people who were gung-ho for war against – well, whoever these guys with paper cutters were.
As the official picture became clearer – Afghanistan, then Iraq – I remember how Rob and I talked about how the hijackers were Saudis and that a couple of them worked out in a gym where he used to teach yoga. We wondered why Saudi Arabia wasn’t on the administration hit list.
As the fervor mlounted and moved in 2002 and then early 2003, we were horrified that Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Feith, and Rice were getting people to believed the lies they told about why we had to invade Iraq. The laundry list: Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (no, he didn’t); Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger (a lie, as Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame proved), and how we were going to be greeted as liberators by the Iraqui people (Cheney said so, therefore it must be true). We knew – as many others did – that we were being snookered.
This documentary illustrates just how slick these lies and their perpetrators were. Tony Blair believed them and when he got up there and talked about it in his beautiful, dignified British voice, it fueled the Bush administration’s resolve. Some of the Democratic senators who voted for the war undoubtedly now regret that vote. Among them: John Kerry, our new secretary of state, and Hillary Clinton, who may have lost the 2009 election because of that very vote. The documentary also shows how Colin Powell, probably the most respected member of the administration, became their fall guy.
The documentary is just an hour long, in six short parts. It’s well worth your time. It’s kind of sad that those of us who knew it was a lie were powerless to do anything about it, that we were essentially railroaded by hawks and extremist in the Bush administration. Take a look at the statistics on the dead and wounded for this war and try to convince yourself it was worth it. Then watch the documentary and think of what George Santayana so famously said,”Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Think about Bush’s infamous axis of evil speech so that when the revisionists of history try to convince you the Iraq war was necessary, you can just turn your back on them, the way elephants do when one of their own is dying.
The documentary is here.
the brain’s waves
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Rob has been teaching two meditation courses since last month – 6 weeks, once a week. The morning class is at a yoga studio and happens way too early for me. I’ve been going to the evening class at our gym.
Tonight was the fourth class and it may be one of my favorites. It consists of three meditations – two short, one long. The longer is a chakra meditation. By the time we reached the point tonight for the last meditation, I was primed for it, drifting along in alpha, when the brain’s frequency oscillates at 7-14 cycles per second, and dipping now and then into theta – 4-7 cycles per second.
Theta is an intriguing state. It occurs when we dream or daydream, during paranormal experiences, heightened creativity, OBEs, shamanic journeys, when you relax in sunlight on a cold day, when you take a hot bath…you get the idea. You may or may not be aware of your body. But your consciousness is busy. Freed from the constraints of daily waking life (Beta waves, which oscillate at 12-30 cycles per second) your consciousness bursts forth like some race horse chafing at the bit to escape its stall. And off it goes in every direction, opening itself to this or that possibility, to this experience, perhaps drawn to whatever matches your vibration.
Rob usually starts this meditation at the first charka and works his way up to the 7th. I was so immersed in theta I never heard the meditation began. I remember standing in front of a door – sort of a pale, powder blue, pretty color – and asking myself if going through that door was what I should do. No negative feelings around it, just a question: should I or shouldn’t I?
Suddenly, there was an explosion of soft gold light in my head and I heard Rob say, “With the third eye chakra (6th)….”
And I immediately remembered that in one of his classes three years ago, I experienced this same light. It exploded through the side of my face, into my jaw, where I had been having trouble with a tooth. I understood then that my tooth had just been healed. It hasn’t bothered me since. I’m not sure what this explosion of light tonight was about. I’m not sick, no problems with teeth, nothing obvious. Since Rob said third chakra right after the light exploded and because the explosion occurred across my forehead (but inside my skull), I’m wondering if that chakra has been blown open. Or healed. Or it could be connected to the novel I’m writing, Fastwalkers.
The third eye is usually associated with psychic abilities. From Wikipedia: The third eye (also known as the inner eye) is a mystical and esoteric concept referring to a speculative invisible eye which provides perception beyond ordinary sight. In certain dharmic spiritual traditions such as Hinduism, the third eye refers to the aina or brow, chakra. In Theosophy, it is related to the pineal gland. The third eye refers to the gate that leads to inner realms and spaces of higher consciousness…
The third eye is often associated with religious visions, clairvoyance, the ability to observe chakras and auras, precognition and out-of-body experiences.
My novel takes place two centuries after a series of global catastrophes killed millions and drastically altered the planet. Anyone with psychic ability is not only persecuted by the government, but is rendered mute so his or her “contagion” can’t spread. The law is implemented by Enforcers, who take all offenders to Key 13 (it takes place in the Florida keys, which are now a hundred feet above sea level – hey, it’s fiction!) It started out as a young adult novel, but there are certain rules about YA novels that you’re supposed to abide by – no overt sex scenes, you can’t use the F word, and so on. There is rarely an adult viewpoint. I dislike rules about what you can and can‘t write. I think it’s why I never took a creative writing course.
So this explosion of light could be connected to Fastwalkers.
Or not.
I may never know. Or I may know five years from now. Or maybe I’ll know tonight.
Our daughter, Megan, is writing a novel. She has outlined it, written 30 pages that she sent us, and today experienced a synchronicity that perfectly illustrates one of the secrets in our book 7 Secrets of Synchronicity. The fourth secret, The Creative, is that creativity lies at the heart of synchronicity. At the beginning of that chapter, we use a quote by physicists and author F David Peat: “The space between…is the space that lies between the observer and the observed; it is the space of the creative act that brings a poem or a painting to life.”
Or a novel.
In her novel, the protagonist, Riley Phoenix, 22, lives in a second story one-bedroom flat with lousy plumbing, in a neighborhood that isn’t very safe, and there’s no security whatsoever in the building – no cameras, no concierge, no security people. But she’s perfectly happy living by herself in this place. Okay, that’s the setup for the synchro.
This weekend Megan drove over to Florida’s west coast to see a friend with whom she went to high school. Renie had recently moved and Megan hadn’t ever been to her place. So she got there, they went out on the town, and this morning, Megan bolted awake and realized she was in her character’s apartment. Renie lives in a one-bedroom flat, on the second story of a building, in a not very safe area of town, and the building has no security whatsoever. And oh, Renie’s flat has terrible plumbing.
“It wasn’t like I walked into Renie’ place last night and thought, Wow, this is where Riley lives. It just hit me out of the blue this morning. So I walked around, taking pictures of the place so I can now fill in the details of Riley’s flat.”
When she called to tell us the synchro, we told her it was a positive sign for her book and her creative process. She agreed, but added, “It’s because I have absolutely no resistance to writing this novel. I know I can do it.”
Pretty cool, huh?
Remember Bo Derek in the movie 10?
She played the quintessential woman that every man desires. That face, that body, that presence. But it turns out that Bo is much more than her PR. She was featured in the Palm Beach Post at the beginning of polo season, 56 years old and still a 10, a horse breeder and activist, the natural to toss the first ball at the 10th anniversary opening game at the International Polo Club.
The synchro for us in this story was horses. We were putting together a proposal for a bookazine on famous horses through history. Our town has quite a prolific history on horses, specifically those used in polo. Thanks in large part to John Goodman, the multimillionaire founder of the International Polo Club, Wellington is what, back in the sixties, we would call a Ta-ta community.
Ta-Ta is another name for lah-de-dah, as in, Huh? Seriously?
But here’s the thing. We were writing about polo, about how it’s the game of kings, and this story about Bo Derek, the ’10 of 10s’ –royalty! – turns up in the fluff section of our local newspaper. You can tell that the interviewer was a bit overwhelmed at interviewing the perfect ’10.’ The questions were sort of silly, like, well, what does she admire about horses? Her response, though, was spot on: They have a sense of the game and they do learn and know what the goal is, the way they’ll fight off another horse and hold the line. It’s wonderful to see.”
So these types of stories are the oddball synchros happening in our corner of the world. Nothing earth-shattering here, nothing that shakes us up or weirds us out too much. These synchros are perhaps, most of all, a trickster sort of entertainment, especially when the horse bookazine didn’t pan out – despite the fluff and the synchro!
In my daily perusal of statcounter, I discovered something I had never heard of called URLpulse. The hit came from Ottawa, Canada, home of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who have shown an interest in our blog since we first wrote bout the Quebec encounters. So I clicked on this link and learned a whole bunch of statistics about blogs and websites.
URL pulse uses a particular algorhythm to arrive at the conclusions they present on their website – how many daily and monthly hits your website or blog receives, from which countries, some of the key words, all sorts of weird tidbits. We use one such site like this that tracks book sales on Amazon, using an algorhythm. The tally isn’t always exact – it’s sometimes way off. But it was accurate enough to tell me that when my publisher lowered the ebook price of Esperanza to $2.99, it made a substantial difference in my ebook sales – hundreds in a single month. When they jacked the price up again to $11.99, sales fell sharply.
On URLpulse.co, your website or blog’s net worth is calculated according to how many hits you receive. Guess who number 1 is in the US and worldwide? Google. Each month, more than 64 billion pages are viewed, it receives more than one billion monthly visits, it has more than 9 million external links, and it’s estimate worth is $1.39 billion.
Facebook is number 2 in the U.S and worldwide. Monthly pages views: over 61 billion, with monthly visits at nearly 2 billion, with more than 13 million external links. Estimated worth? $1.29 billion.
Yahoo comes in at number 4 in US and worldwide with more than 17 billion monthly pages views, more than 2 billion monthly visits, worth $1.86 billion.
At this point, I wondered about number 3. Amazon? Nope, they come in at number 5 in U.S., 111 worldwide, with more than 11 billion monthly page views and more than 400 million monthly visits.Estimated worth? $304.45 million.
The iTunes website? It ranks 22 in the U.S., 26 worldwide.
At this point, I got curious about our industry – writers, publishers, agents. Random House, one of the largest publishers with multiple imprints, is ranked at 5,829 in the U.S., 21,339 worldwide, with more than 2 million pages views a month, less than a million monthly visits, and its estimated worth is slightly more than half a million bucks.
Well, okay, how about JK Rowling and Stephen King? Rowling comes in at over 59,000 in the U.S., over 155,000 worldwide. Monthly page views number over 400,000 a month, with monthly visits at slightly over 165,000. The estimated worth of the site is $119,801.56.
This is where I began to think that maybe these algorhythms don’t work well. Rowling is the first billionaire author, her books have sold millions. Then I took a look at stephenking.com. It’s ranked at 17,177 in the U.S., 82,333 worldwide, with over a million pageviews a month, less than 200,000 monthly visits, with an estimated worth of $136,603.33. Really? That’s it for the great Stephen King?
I encourage you to check your own website or blog. Not every single one is listed, but we found ours – not the blog, but the website. Our website is fairly static; we add stuff when the occasion arises. The blog, on the other hand, is a nearly daily endeavor. So these statistics apparently include the website and the blog and, according to our statcounter, they aren’t very accurate:
| Monthly pages viewed | 27,216 | |
| Monthly visits | 4,570 | |
| Value per visitor | $0.24 | |
| Estimated worth | $4,040.56 * | |
| External links | 120 | |
| Number of pages | 60 |
Our monthly visits run between eight to ten thousand. These include unique and repeat visitors. I’m not sure about the page views; the above figure seems too high, but I’ll have to keep closer track in the future. What really made me laugh about all this is the value placed on each visitor – less than a quarter. C’mon, the knowledge, information and insight that visitors and commenters provide are incalculable. Where do those attributes enter into algorhythms?
Hours after Pope Benedict announced that he was retiring for health reasons, lightning struck St. Peter’s Basilica. You can see it in this video. It’s one of those odd synchros that often happens during mass events, but this one is pretty extraordinary. What’s the message?
Even though such a resignation hasn’t happened in almost 600 years, the church has a system in place to deal with it. Of course they do. If nothing else, the Vatican is well-organized. They’ve got their bases covered.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZL0Z2nV3cU
