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In the last 24 hours, I have encountered the word SOMA three times. It’s not an ordinary word. It sort of sounds like it might want to become SOMNAMBULIST. Or SOMNAMBULENT.  Except for that pesky N in both words.

Before you run off to Google it, here’s how this cluster unfolded.  The first instance was in an email from the retired veterinarian, Sandy, with whom we shared synchros over lunch. She was writing about her early life, when she was in vet school, and the people and events that led to her encounters:

He was a visiting researcher from the Swedish Herbal Institute and I was working in the lab as a technician in the neurobiology department of North Carolina State University when he arrived. As we worked together on projects, we would share deep conversations about the nature of thought.

He said he had two friends whose work I would appreciate; one was a man named J Krishnamurti (JK) and the other man was a physicist named David Bohm. He told me to buy a book called Freedom From the Known that was transcripts of one of JK’s talks. Again I was shocked…I had this very book at home but never read it. I received it when I was 17 and went into a small bookstore while at the ocean with my friends. A man in a Buddhist robe behind the counter came up to me and handed me a small orange book and told me I am suppose to read it. I didn’t have any money, so he gave it to me as a gift. I never got around to reading it, and it sat forgotten on my bookshelf for the next 10 years. It was JK’s book Freedom From the Known. This man  also knew the physicist David Bohm and he happened to have a first draft of one of his papers that he was editing for Bohm titled Soma-significance, so he gave me a copy. This was a real turning point in my life.

The second SOMA in this cluster occurred while I was reading Stanislav Grof’s terrific book, When the Impossible Happens. I first read about this book on Daz’s blog,  when he reviewed the book. I read Amazon’s free portion of the book, and was hooked and downloaded it.

Grof, a psychiatrist, is talking about his encounter with an Indian guru, Swami Muktananda: “In the course of our discussion, I asked Baba about soma, the sacred portion of ancient India that is mentioned more than a thousand times in the Rig Veda and that clearly played a critical role in the Vedic religion. This sacrament was prepared from a plant of the same name, the identity of which got lost over the centuries. I found the reports about soma fascinating and hoped that Swami Muktananda might know something that would lead to its botanical identification and, ultimately, to the isolation of its active principle. Discovering the secret of soma was at the time the dream of many of us who were involved in psychedelic research.”

The third instance involved Brave New World, the dystopian novel by Aldous Huxley, where everyone takes the drug soma.  It’s a drug that induces bliss, interconnectedness, a feeling that all is well even if it isn’t.

I Googled it.

According to medical sites, soma is a muscle relaxer and may be habit forming. t’s also a song, a fabled psychotropic, a weird mushroom induced story.

So from these various definitions of soma, there sees to be something looming on the horizon that promises a blissful state of interconnectedness that sounds a lot like some big synchro.

We’ll see.

Soma.  A simple word but weird, and not a word I’m likely to forget. SO-MA. Almost like a mantra.

Music-related coincidences are one of the most common ways people experience synchronicity. Because it’s music, maybe it’s easier to find meaning in these experiences. In The Synchronicity Highway, we referred to Daz’s music synchro that was first posted here in the introduction. He was burying his cat in the woods, his car nearby, the radio on when Peter Gabriel’s song, Digging in the Dirt, came on, expressing exactly what he was doing.

I experienced two such music synchros today on a trail ride through the woods on my  mountain bike. I usually ride early on Tuesdays with my friend Don, but I’d skipped our ride for a dentist appointment and went out alone the next day. Interestingly, Don had told me that on his most recent solo spin through this trail, which is considered moderate to expert level in difficulty, he had fallen twice. He blamed his lapse in concentration on the fact that he’d taken his iPod along and the music distracted him.

In my case, the music seemed to serve as a warning. I was moving along on the trail approaching a new branch that is more challenging – lots of roots, steep uphill mounds and sharp drops, twists and turns. At one point, there’s a series of protruding roots that are challenging, especially since if you fall to the left you roll down an embankment and into a canal. That would be no fun.  I was wondering whether to go for it or skip it when the lyrics to an old Grateful Dead song, Ripple, caught my ear: “If you fall, you are alone.”

Yikes, I thought. It sounded like a direct message. I continued on, bypassing the new cut. The trail was somewhat wet after a rainfall the night before and a few minutes later, as I made a turn and went over an angled log, my back tire slid out and I barely caught myself with my foot as the bike went down. Just as all of that was happening, Cosmic Love, by Florence & the Machine, was playing and she was singing “falling star…”

That one was more of a joke than a warning, a trickster synchro that sent on my way to the end of the trail…and home in one piece.

Dogs, like people, sometime meet one of their own kind who trigger the wild side of their personalities. That other dog – or person – brings out something strange and vastly different in your personality that urges you to take risks, to move against the status quo, to do what you are not programmed to do. You are suddenly and wonderfully liberated from taboos, feel pumped up with self-confidence, you’re in the flow, the moment.  

This is the space that Noah, our golden retriever, and Nika, our daughter’s dog, inhabit when they are together. It’s actually an incredible thing to watch.

Rob and I lead fairly quiet lives. When Noah is alone with us, he adapts to that quietude, meditating with Rob on the porch in the mornings, thumping his tail against the floor when I come out into the kitchen long after that meditation is over, often nosing through the fallen leaves in our yard, looking for the omniscient squirrel.   

But when Nika is here, all that energy changes. Noah is suddenly eager to be doing whatever Nika is doing – on the hunt for avocado seeds and squirrels, lizards and squirrels, toys and squirrels. Always, it comes back to these squirrels.

Since our time change the first Sunday in November, where we supposedly gained an hour of time, Noah and Nika started getting restless between 3 and 4 PM, which used to be 4-5 PM, when we would take them to the dog park.  So now, shortly after three PM, we leash them and pile in the car. As soon as we pull into the park, both dogs are hanging their heads out the window, scanning the area for squirrels.

The moment the doors open, the dogs leap out. Sometimes, we can hold them back until we reach the gate. Other times we do so at our own peril and just release the leashes. And off they go, tearing through the front part of the park, the unfenced part, and race from tree to tree, leaping, barking, on the hunt for squirrels. It’s then they are running on the wild side, the wind at their backs, their snouts in the air, pursuing scents we can’t even imagine.

If Nika isn’t visiting, Noah can’t be bothered to race through the park. She brings out this wildness in him.

When the four of us manage to reach the gate with the dogs still leashed, they whimper and bark to get inside the park. We take off their leashes, unlatch the gate, and off they go, moving at the speed of light to the farthest corners of the park, happy to simply run together beneath the vast blue sky, and ever hopeful to spot a squirrel scampering along the top of the fence or up the trunk of a tree. Watching them, my heart soars.

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Interestingly, while I was writing this, the Rachel Maddow show was on in the background. She was talking about how Republicans continue to pursue distractions rather than real issues. The dogs were curled up on the floor between our offices.

And Maddow  said, “Distractions – squirrel- distractions – squirrel.” And the dogs suddenly came fully awake and ran to the door just as Maddow uttered a third squirrel.

I think that would qualify as a squirrel cluster!

Here’s an interesting financial-related double synchronicity. It starts with Jane Clifford in her cottage in Wales burning banking statements in her log stove. The reason she was doing that was that she had opted to go on-line with banking where the statements are accessible for up to 12 years.

However, not long after that she needed to produce some banking statements, including one from April 2012 that she needed as evidence in a matter that could bring her at least £10, 000.

But now that the statements were on-line, she had a problem. She didn’t have a printer that was compatible with her laptop or one that would work with her iPad.  So she drove to a friend’s house with the laptop, downloaded and printed out the statements. However, it was only afterwards that she discovered she still needed the April 2012 statement.

So she went to the local post office, anxious to finish this time-consuming bureaucratic mess. But the computer there wouldn’t let her access her bank account. Now she was getting angry and frustrated that she had to produce the statements at all, and the feeling persisted.

That night she asked ‘upstairs’ for help in sorting out the matter in such a way that wouldn’t require her to drive to her friend’s place again…and she needed the sorting quickly.

She was still feeling grumpy over the matter the next morning and even grumpier that she had allowed the matter to irritate her. So she sat and meditated and asked her ego to take a back seat. After that she went to light her log stove and in the drawer where she kept old papers to light the fire was the exact bank statement she needed!

“I call that a Miracle!,” Jane wrote. “How come it wasn’t burned with the rest? I was dancing about the house saying, ‘Thank you, thank you, afterwards.’”

That was a good financial synchro, but as I read Jane’s e-mail I could hardly believe what I was reading. I had just finished editing a parallel financial synchro story that I’d written the night before as part of a proposal I’m putting together for a meditation book.

The story involved a woman who had discovered that someone had stolen money from two checking accounts over a two-week period. I wrote that she was ‘frustrated and angry,’ the very phrase that Jane had used in her story. Like Jane, the woman meditated about the matter, asking why this was happening to her.

That’s when she realized that she needed to change the way she dealt with her finances. She often paid credit cards late so they had high interest rates and as a result she had a low credit rating and couldn’t get a car loan. As soon as she reorganized her finances, combining credit card accounts and cutting up extra cards, she got calls from both banks saying that they were reimbursing her lost money! It was covered by insurance.

So, like Jane, she’d taken time to meditate and in both cases synchronicities had resulted. Meanwhile, I’m writing a book on meditation and two stories about meditation and finances came my way within two days.

 George Zimmerman. Remember him? George, who shot Trevon Martin and was acquitted in July.

We did several posts on George and Florida’s stand your ground gun law.  At  the time of his acquittal, we felt fairy certain that Zimmerman would screw up somewhere up the line, just as O.J. Simpson did after his acquittal, and would end up in the news again. And he has – 5 times since his acquittal.

The most recent event occurred today, November 18, 2013, when Zimmerman apparently came to his girlfriend’s home, smashed a glass table, threatened her with a gun, then pushed her out of her own home and locked her out. He barricaded himself inside and called 911, just as she had done moments earlier, and gave his version of events.

On MSNBC this evening, Lawrence O’Donnell played the full tape of the 911 calls. The tape is chilling. Zimmerman sounds strangely calm as he spells out his version of the events. It’s the voice of a man who knows how to play the system, who knows that his version of reality must be recorded somewhere, for his own defense. It’s the voice of a man who knows that the best defense is an effective offense.

What’s really interesting to me about the Zimmerman case is the girlfriend – not his wife, who is divorcing him – but his new girlfriend. What woman in her right mind would get involved with this guy?

When I worked as a librarian and Spanish teacher in the Florida prison system, I discovered a rather strange and perverted phenomenon that I called The Inmate Groupie Weirdness. You take a high profile case involving a young man and, invariably, female groupies converged. They sent letters (in the days before e-mail), dropped by for visits on weekends, and sometimes the inmate actually married the most faithful groupie while still in prison or as soon as he got out.

I don’t know what it’s like in Florida prisons since I left in 1979, but many of the prisons are now privatized (more profitable!) and it’s likely that conjugal visits can be arranged, for the right price. Even back in the days when the state had fairly stringent oversight on prisons, almost anything could be had for the right price – cigarettes, drugs, sex. And if you were a high profile inmate, someone whose case got a lot of media attention, you could get even more privileges. Unless you molested kids. Then you usually died in prison, killed by other inmates.

If George Zimmerman ever does time, there will be some woman in the wings who declares her undying love for him. And when he’s released, she’ll be outside the gates, waiting for him, eager to draw him fully into her life.  And it’s likely that she, too, will end up calling 911 because sociopaths like Zimmerman just can’t help themselves. And women who are drawn to men like this can’t help themselves, either. Something essential is missing from their psyches. It’s why Charles Manson had such a faithful female following.

I don’t know if the missing ingredient was breast milk or a loving parent, or even something simpler. Maybe all the players involved agreed to these roles before they were born in this life. But Zimmerman, regardless of what happens to him, won’t ever lack for female support and adoration.

Go figure.

 When we were on Open Minds radio last spring, the host, Alejandro Rojas, asked if aliens can control synchronicity. The question is a good one and came up again today, when we had lunch with a woman who has had encounters for the last twenty years.

Sandy and her second husband, George, live on Florida’s West coast, we live on the East coast, so today we met them for lunch halfway across the state in the town of Clewiston. We’ve been corresponding with Sandy ever since she got in touch with us in late September,  after having read  Aliens in the Backyard. During the years of her encounters, she has kept meticulous notes and journals about what transpires and had sent us some of her journal entries.

We planned to meet at the Clewiston Inn but it turned out the inn doesn’t serve lunch until the tourist season begins in a few weeks. So we ended up at the Tiki Bar, an open air place on the shores of Lake Okeechobee. On Sundays, it’s  also a biker bar. Dozens of Harleys roared in just as we arrived, but we got a waterside table and talked for the next three hours.

Sandy is a retired veterinarian whose specialty was animal neuroscience. Her encounters have never involved the classical abduction scenario, medical experimentation, or being taken into a craft. Some of her experiences of these beings – whom she refers to as energies – sound utterly terrifying to me, but over the years she has learned to control her fear and now works consciously with these entities.  She has names for them – Watcher, Marshal, John –  which makes it easier for her to distinguish them in her journals.

During the course of our conversation, we also talked about synchronicity. She feels that ever since these encounters started, the entities “arrange” major events through synchronicities, that they actually generate the synchros. Her move from Maryland to Florida and her meeting George 17 years ago are two such events. This part of the conversation led into a discussion about free will. She says that even when these synchros were occurring, she had the free will to make different decisions, to go in another direction.

Interestingly, this is echoed by Bernard Beitman, a professor of psychiatry at University of Virginia, who just finished a book on meaningful coincidence.  “A synchronicity presents you with an option but it doesn’t mean you should make the choice that seems to be suggested.”

But Sandy chose to heed the synchronicities and not only moved to Florida, but ended her first marriage to Jay, a physician. Jay’s encounters included abductions that were sometimes so horrible  she had to throw herself over him to calm him down.   The entities “scolded” him for being coldly objective and subsequently taught him to meditate and to open his mind and heart. He and Sandy remain friends and although he no longer has encounters, his life has completely changed – for the better.

We asked her what she thought the beings’ agenda is. “Maybe it’s about helping humanity evolve.”

Sandy says that her intent is to work with these beings and record the experiences. She tries not to judge or dissect what happens, but because she’s such a left-brain person it can be challenging to simply remain open, without fear. “The beings are teaching me to manage the powerful energy that comes in when they’re present. I’m learning to work with matter and to move in and out of dimensions, even to strange worlds and different times. The space/time jumps are my favorites.”

Whitley Strieber has also written about these space/time jumps. I think he calls them time slips. For Sandy, they seem to happen suddenly, without warning, and she finds herself in some sort of parallel world/dimension with people whom she knows. In one experience, she found herself as a convention of scientists and asked the woman next to her what year it was. The woman whispered, “We’re not supposed to talk about dates.” But Sandy kept pressing her for the year and the woman finally said, “19…” And that was it.

Judith Orloff, an M.D. and author,  wrote about something similar in Second Sight. In between lives, she visits and lives with her soul family, people she knows only from the between state.

Sandy, like Strieber, believes there may be some connection between the entities and the dead. She also is convinced that since her encounters started in 1994, her intuitive abilities have deepened.

“I think paradigm shifts start as localized ripples like this that eventually spread and grow large enough to change how we think and function as a society,” she says.

 If so, then perhaps one day synchronicity will be understood as the unifying force that it certainly appears to be.

This video is inspiring!

I can’t get the video to show here, but copy, paste, and you won’t be sorry!

It seems that South Florida is a hotbed of psychic misadventures. Recently, we wrote here about a Fort Lauderdale-based Rom family and their methods of scamming unwitting clients, including a bestselling romance writer, who was duped out of millions.

Now comes a new story of a psychic taking advantage of a vulnerable woman, caught up in a series of negative events in her life, including the death of her mother and the breakup of a relationship. In her case, money was not an issue – at least not initially. She had inherited $100,000 from her mother, money that she would soon lose to a 23-year-old psychic, named Stephanie Thompson.

Probably the young psychic thought ‘easy come, easy go,’ regarding the inheritance. Once she knew about it, she told the unwitting woman, who remains unnamed, that the money was cursed and needed to be cleansed. Amazingly, the ‘victim’ got the cash out of the bank and turned it over to the psychic. I put victim in single-quotes because really there are no victims, only people playing roles.

In this case, the woman even admits that she knew better, that she was aware of fraudulent psychics operating in South Florida when she walked into the Psychic Boutique on U.S. 1 in Boca Raton. But she says she was so caught up in her travails that she thought maybe she was cursed.

Apparently, she initially thought she would pay $50 for a psychic reading, but was told she needed to pay $2,000 to determine the cause of the ‘negative energy’ around her. The price grew to more than $20,000 after the psychic said she meditated and discovered the woman was cursed. Thompson even told the woman that she might get cancer just like her mother if she didn’t get the inherited money cleansed. Supposedly, she would get it back after the ritual.

But that didn’t happen, as the woman should’ve known. Does the money ever get returned in these ‘money laundering’ schemes? The woman says: “In my logical mind, I probably would have said, ‘Get the heck out of here, you’re crazy. But I was distraught. I had gone through a string of very difficult things. And you think, maybe I am cursed. Maybe there is something going on here.”

Indeed there was. She was about to lose $100,000. Actually, when you think about it, it turns out that money was cursed and both women would pay the price. The so-called victim lost her inheritance and Stephanie Thompson lost all the money in a casino – so she says – and was arrested and is facing a prison sentence when it comes to trial. That would be a double-trickster synchronicity. You think that money is cursed…just watch what happens.

Another synchronicity occurred when the woman went to the police. She was reporting the misdeed to a detective when Thompson called her and said that she could get her about $75,000 back. So they agreed to meet outside a CVS in Boca and the cop came along. When questioned by the detective, Thompson admitted she had lost it all at a casino.

Years ago, I used to be annoyed when newspapers, such as the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel where this story appeared, featured these psychic scams on their front page. It seemed an attempt to show that all psychics were frauds, that there was no such things as psychic abilities. I no longer think that way. The reason people get caught up in these scams is that there are indeed people who can foresee events, who can read you as if they’ve known you all their lives, some who can even heal. But there are the scammers, and some of these people no doubt also have talents. It usually takes at least one good psychic hit to hook a potential victim.

We’ve encountered such psychics over the years. For us, it has been people who attempted to psychically manipulate us into writing their books or who wanted some control or influence over a part of our lives. That was the case in one instance a few years ago when a psychic told Trish that she was in contact with Trish’s deceased mother. A good ploy, but Trish didn’t buy it. She knew her mother too well. Nothing the psychic said provided any proof that she was in contact with her mother.

There can be a fine line between a good psychic reading and one intent on manipulating and altering a person’s actions. Then there are the Stephenie Thompsons who step way over the line into the world of fortunetelling fraud and make front-page headlines for their criminal behavior.

Daughter Megan was home for a visit over the weekend and pulled us away from our computers for a couple of hours to watch a movie – one that we would never have picked out ourselves. She likes to do that, previously exposing us to strange, raunchy satires, such as Super Bad and Pineapple Express. And now This is the End. The latter involves several actors from the earlier two movies  –  Seth Rogan, James Franco, Jonah Hill, among others – playing themselves as they getting together for a party at Franco’s new house when an unexpected event occurs—the apocalypse. Hence, the title.

Turning the apocalypse into a comedy, including a reading from Revelations, might seem chancy. In fact, the studio that produced the movie was wary and cut the budget. So the actors agreed to take smaller pay than expected. We found the movie pretty hilarious, in a gross sort of way, and noted that it even maintained a moral about personal behavior – self-serving vs. self-sacrifice. The self-serving tended to fall into a sinkhole to hell in James Franco’s front yard, while those willing to sacrifice themselves were ‘rapturized’ in a blue beam of light accompanied by Whitney Houston’s, “I’ll Always Love You.” Ultimately, only two of the actors playing themselves made the trip up the beam, the others succumbed to the whims of a well-hung, red-eyed, horned beast.

After This is the End ended, I turned to Trish and smiled. “Now why don’t you write a post about that.” Little did I know that events the following day would lead me to writing the post.

When the snail-mail arrived, I found a small envelope with my name on it, written in a shaky scrawl. There was no return address, but it had been mailed from West Palm Beach, a few miles away. Inside was a photocopy of a newspaper or magazine clipping. It was a Q&A column and the question of the day was: What is the Rapture of the Church?

Of course, I immediately saw the synchronicity. Silly movie was soon followed by serious  column, which I also found silly. Maybe it was the way that the question was phrased that bothered me  – Rapture of the Church. I had the feeling that it wasn’t put that way to avoid confusion with say, rapture of the deep. No, the implication, of course, was that you best be a member of the Church if you’re going to make it out of this world alive.

The answer to the question was stated this way. “The Rapture of the Church is the time when Jesus Christ returns in the air to bring the Church home before the beginning of the Great Tribulation.”

The column went on to include a quote from scripture, which in part read: “For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven and with a shout, and the dead in Christ shall rise first, then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the cloud to meet the Lord in the air, and thus shall we ever be with the Lord.”

The author of the column, said to be Hal Lindsey, author of The Rapture and The Late Great Planet Earth, concluded: “I believe that the Rapture could occur any moment. The signs of the times indicate it will certainly come in the lifetime of those who are reading these words.”

According to Wikipedia, Lindsey earlier had predicted the Rapture would take place by 2000. Well, timing has always been a problem with prophecies about the end times. Although maybe the Great Tribulation is already underway – ahead of the Rapture – and it’s taking place in the U.S. Congress. Certainly, there are members of Congress who deserve to be rapturized out of Washington ASAP.

The third book in my Hungry Ghosts trilogy was published today! Before I knew the pub date, I was worried that it would be published during Mercury retrograde, which ended on 11/10. It turns out that astrologically, today is one of the luckiest this year, with the transiting sun and transiting Jupiter forming a perfect beneficial angle to each other.

An excerpt is here.

The cover is scary… I think it’s supposed to be Ricardo, one of the brujos – hungry ghosts – but he never looks like this in my descriptions of him. He doesn’t wear face paint. When we first see him, his host is a Q’ero Indian. By the end of the book, his host is a black man, whom I imagine as Denzel Washington!  I didn’t have any input on the cover!

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On another note: every disaster and mass event not only has synchros, but also has miracles. In the midst of utter devastation that may have killed more than 10,000 people, a baby was born. She was named after her grandmother, who is among the missing.