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Synchronicity, telepathy, or precognition?

Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between the three. Recently, I had two experiences that brought home that question.

The first one was simply a thought that came to mind. I suddenly remembered that a reporter for the Tallahassee Democrat was supposed to call me or e-mail me about an interview. I’d forgotten about it, but there was a deadline involved. The article was supposed to appear before a writer’s conference opened in Tallahassee in a few days. Since I was giving the keynote address, the reporter had decided to interview me for his article about the conference.

As I walked back to my office and mentioned it to Trish, she replied that he’d just now sent me an e-mail. So my immediate thought was that it was telepathy. I’d picked up on his e-mail. But he hadn’t sent it yet, so maybe it was precognition. Then again, maybe it was neither. After all, I hadn’t predicted that he would write me at that moment or knew he was writing me. It was simply something that I’d remembered was supposed to happen. So maybe it was just synchronicity. Or, all of the above.

Here’s another example that occurred the next day. It was the same type of situation. I was remembering something from the past when, bingo, I got an update. I’m an avid disc golf player, I play in a league once a week. When I take Noah, my Golden Retriever, to the dog park, I often bring a couple discs and practice a few throws, making sure I don’t clobber any people or dogs with my tosses. As I retrieved my discs, I thought about a particular type of disc that I wanted to replace one that I’d lost in a lake a few months earlier. I’d really liked that disc and had put my name and cell phone number on it.

Not two minutes later, I received a text message from a guy who’d just found it several feet from shore. I was amazed, but didn’t tell him that I was just thinking about that long lost piece of plastic. He didn’t give me his name, but said he might show up at the league game the next day. In fact, he did and handed me the disc. It turned out we have same first name, Rob. A common name, but still it fit with the synchro. Like attracts like. But, again, was it telepathy when I thought about that long lost disc, precognition? Maybe it doesn’t matter.

I recently met Philip Merry on a Facebook group synchronicity page where he very niftily countered a skeptic who had repeatedly contended that synchronicity belonged wholly in the everyday world of cause and effect. In our on-line conversations, I found out that Philip is a Brit who has lived in Singapore for 26 years and is in the midst of completing a Phd on synchronicity. He also told me that our book, The Seven Secrets of Synchronicity, was instrumental for him in starting his thesis on the topic. Philip also said that he has conducted leadership workshops for 35 years in 57 countries.

Philip is including some of his own synchronicities in his thesis and he sent me one of them. It’s a meaningful coincidence that occurred at a pivotal point in his life, when synchronicities often manifest. This is directly from his thesis, which accounts for the academic style of writing in which he refers to himself in the third person.

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“The first example concerns meeting the American singer John Denver at a time when the author was making a decision about marriage. The author had attended a workshop where John Denver’s songs helped clarify his decision to marry. On Friday he actively thought about how he could contact John Denver, but dismissed it as a crazy idea.  

“He was surprised to find from the next day’s newspaper that John Denver would be in Singapore the following week. He shared the story with his friend Carol, who called who her friend Shirley, who worked at the hotel where John Denver would be staying. Shirley called the author asked him to send a fax for her to pass to John Denver.

“Shirley reported later that she was standing with fax in hand and John Denver appeared from the lift. She passed the letter to him and he called the author on Sunday evening saying how pleased he was that the author enjoyed his songs.

“This is synchronicity in action. At a significant moment in the author’s life (deciding to get married) he wanted to thank John Denver and two days later talked to him.  There had been no planning, no knowing and no logic, just a synchronistic event that seemed to confirm that getting married was the right thing to do.” 

Philip also sent the image at the top of the post. Here is what he said about it.

“On the picture – my take on synchronicity is that there is an energy field (or morphic field or zero point etc) that exists just outside awareness of our everyday world. This is a field we can tap into if we know how (or if we believe that it exists). Hence the pic captures this sense of looking beyond the world of everyday into the magic world of synchronicity. Trust that makes sense.”

Over the weekend of April 24-25, Rob and I attended the Tallahassee Writers’ Conference. Rob was one of the keynote speakers and talked about the importance of synchronicity, dreams, and meditation in the creative process. We also presented workshops – Rob did one on creating archetypal characters and I did one on storyboarding and we did a joint workshop on writing partnerships. It was one of the most enjoyable and best organized conferences we’ve ever attended.

At various points during the weekend, people shared their synchronicities with us. One of the best we heard came from Donna Jennings, whose synchronicity came at a critical juncture in her life and definitely acted as guidance.

In March 1985, Donna was interviewing at four different colleges for a doctorate program in marriage and family therapy. She had just left her third choice – Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, where it was cold, freezing, still winter. Then she arrived in Tallahassee, where her fourth choice was Florida State University.

“Tally was at the peak of spring,” she said. “The azaleas were in full bloom.”

“I was driving around, considering my options, wondering which collect I should choose. And Ta Da, I turned around at Jennings Street. Message delivered and received.”

Donna began the program in August 1985 at FSU and graduated in 1990. “I’m now retired from teaching human sexuality at college. Writing is my new direction and I am on the front end.”

I suspect that Donna will continue to follow the synchros and will do just fine as a writer!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiPctjrei80

In Aliens in the Backyard, we have a chapter called “Earth Shakings,” which is about planetary empaths. This chapter grew out of pieces we posted on our blog about this phenomenon.

On March 11, 2010 and on March 11, 2011, we posted our first two pieces on planetary empaths. These individuals are so attuned to the planet that they experience physical, emotional and psychic symptoms days and sometimes weeks before a natural disaster.

Periodically, we receive emails from some of these planetary empaths about the symptoms they are experiencing. In late March/early April 2013, several empaths reported recurring and persistent symptoms. These symptoms apparently were related to the events at the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013, and possibly to the 7.8 quake in Iran the same day.

So we created a page where these individuals can report their symptoms. On April 25, 2015, Nepal suffered a massive 7.8 – 7.9 earthquake, depending on which source you read. On the day of the quake, a woman named Liz posted on the empath page:

Yesterday evening I became extremely nervous and sick at my stomach. This morning my friend sent me the link to this page about Planetary Empaths. After reading my email, I checked my Facebook and had a message that a FB friend was okay after the earthquake. That was the first I had heard about the quake. I am Buddhist and am sure that my unease was due to this quake. I still feel sick and keep wanting to cry.

Sharlie West, who periodically emails me her visions and dreams, some of which are precognitive, sent me this:

Three weeks ago I told husband Jim that there would be a huge explosion, possibly an earthquake, and thousands of people would suffer. This was before  I went to sleep, in that in-between state. I could see them running. 

Three weeks before 9/11 I dreamed about bodies floating upward near the buildings, all in black and white. Guess I was seeing the negative.

And it’s not over yet. There will be a series of them. There’s a heaviness knowing it can’t be stopped.

Did anyone else experience any symptoms before the quake on April 25? Connie? Debra?

Nicholas Carroll pointed this out on Facebook. It’s pretty cool – the bird lands on the book and looks at itself on the page.

Here’s another very old post we put up on 2009. It’s about a cluster of synchros. As you can see, clusters can involve virtually anything – even a sweatshirt!

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Ten years ago (in 2009) our neighbor, Annette, was on her way home from the hospital, where her father had just undergone an amputation of his leg. It was chilly and she stopped to buy a sweatshirt. As she got back onto the interstate, she suddenly witnessed a horrendous car accident – a truck slammed into the rear of a smaller car, which flipped over several times and finally came to rest on its side. Annette pulled to the shoulder, leaped out of her car, and ran over to the car to see if she could help.

The middle-aged man inside was terribly injured but still conscious. Annette shouted at the crowd of gawkers, asking someone to call 911. Then she stayed with the man, talking to him, urging him to remain conscious, assuring him help was on the way. Two days later, she stopped by the hospital to visit him and he told her he would never forget her, that her voice and encouragement forced him to cling to consciousness.

Now, fast forward to 2009. Annette was on the interstate again with a friend and her kids. It was another chilly night and she stopped to buy a sweatshirt. As she did so, she flashed back on the last time she had bought a new sweatshirt while headed somewhere on the interstate. She felt a sort of superstition about it, but shrugged it off. Ten minutes later, an SUV raced past her, weaving all over the road. Annette suspected the driver was drunk and slowed down to put some distance between them.

Then, suddenly, just ahead, she saw the SUV slam into a smaller car. “The moment of impact was like an explosion. That’s how hard the SUV hit the other car.”

She swerved to the shoulder, scrambled out, and ran toward the accident scene, as she had ten years ago. Just like before, gawkers were clustered around and Annette, who had left her cell phone in the car, shouted for someone to call 911. She leaned into the car to see if she could help the driver, but he was unconscious, his legs bent at an awkward angle, his torso slumped over the steering wheel. She didn’t feel a pulse when she touched his wrist, but detected a faint pulse at his carotid.

“Stay with us,” she said. “Help is on the way. Just stay with us.”

But when the paramedics started removing the man from the car, she saw that his face was split open from his skull to his chin and knew he wouldn’t make it. “I told my husband about this, about how in both instances I had just bought a new sweatshirt and what did he think about that? He told me I was looking for meaning where there isn’t any. But I can tell you this. I will never again buy a new sweatshirt if I’m driving on the interstate.”

Despite her husband’s skepticism, Annette recognized the pattern and found it meaningful. Buying the sweatshirt didn’t create the accident, but ultimately it enhanced her awareness.

In 2010, we posted a story called The Ghost & the Straight Pins. It was also in The Synchronicity Highway. As you’ll see, there was recently an oddball synchro associated with this story that happened to poet Sharlie West.

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During my (Trish) last year in college, I lived in a small apartment on the third floor of an old building in Utica, New York. My roommate, Linda, and I, shared our cramped living space with a tabby cat. Early in the school year, Linda’s grandmother passed away. One day not long afterward, Linda’s mother found a straight pin on the grandmother’s tombstone. A few days later, our tabby, Tigger, was about to jump into a chair where I was reading when she suddenly did a 180 in midair and tore into the bedroom. Linda and I just looked at each other, wondering what that was about.

The next morning, I found straight pins scattered around the living room – a pin stuck in a couch cushion, pins laying on the rug, a couple more straight pins on the kitchen table. This began to happen consistently. When Linda mentioned it to her mother, she sort of laughed and said it was Linda’s grandmother. “Nana G loved to sew. I’ve been finding straight pins all over the house, even underlining passages in the bible.”

I didn’t have any problem believing in ghosts  and was certain that Tigger had seen Nana G the night she did that 180, but straight pins? How did a ghost manipulate physical matter, even matter as small as a straight pin? But one weekend when we visited Linda’s parents, her mother showed up the straight pins underlining passages in the bible.

“How does Nana G do that?” I asked Linda’s mom.
“I have no idea,” she replied. “But isn’t it amazing?”

The straight pin phenomenon continued consistently for several months,  then gradually stopped. About ten years later, I was visiting St. Augustine with Linda and her mother. We were in that fort featured in the photo, Castillo de San Marcos. The Spanish began construction on this fort in 1672 to protect the city. It’s the only existing 17th century fort in North America.

There’s nothing in this place, just stones and empty hallways. Our footsteps echoed in the emptiness. The whisper of the past was everywhere. But everything was bare – the thick walls, the well-worn floors, not even a piece of trash in sight. So the three of us were moving through the interior, marveling at how cool it was despite the summer heat outside. I happened to look down and stopped, incredulous, staring at a single straight pin.

I picked it up and showed it to Linda’s mother. “What’re the odds of finding a straight pin in this place?” I asked.

Her mom smiled. “I’ve been feeling Nana G around.”

“Looks like she wanted to tour the place with us,” Linda said.

“So is this an apport?” I asked.

Neither of them had an answer. But to this day, an apport – the paranormal transference of an object from one place to another – seems to be the best explanation.

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Now jump ahead five years since we posted this. Poet Sharlie West emails me whenever she has had an intriguing vision or dream, as it was in her most recent note:

Last night I dreamed about straight pins that I was collecting, lining them in two rows

next to each other like railroad ties. In the dream I said to someone, this is a coincidence, I just saw a television movie that had straight pins in it. (I didn’t)

I woke up thinking, what was that about? Then as I was reading The Synchronicity Highway I came to the part about Straight Pins in Castillo San Marcos and had to share. So funny after last night’s dream. I have no idea if this is a meaningful sync. I don’t even sew.

We shall see. The parallel lines might mean something. Oh, and as I sat down at the computer to mention this, it was 11:11.

Whatever the dream means to Sharlie, it struck me as precognitive.

This post was adapted from a news item by Laurel Airica that appears on the Unknown Country website.

Most of us are fascinated by astonishing coincidences when inner experiences collide with outer events outside of cause and effect and against all odds. However, one aspect of meaningful coincidences that we often overlook is linguistic synchronicities, including anagrams, puns and homonyms.

For example, the word coincidence is a homonym for co-incidents. Although the meanings are something different, the words are linked through synchronicity.

Then there’s prescience. Opened up it becomes ‘pre-science.’ That’s something to think about.

An anagram of significance can be found in the two words, ‘earth’ and ‘heart.’ The synchronicity is that we need to treat the earth with heart. And ‘heart’ is about compassion.

The human heart has a two-way dialog with the brain—each influencing the other. The heart has the strongest electromagnetic field, which changes with our emotions. We actually evolve from the heart, not the brain. The heart has over 40,000 sensory neurons that have both short and long-term memory, and more information is sent from the heart to the brain than the other way around. So we need to bring heart-based thinking, the home of compassion, into the world, into our everyday lives.

One way to do so is through meditation, in other words not-doing, rather than doing.

An eight-week study conducted by Harvard neuroscientists supports that idea. The study involved 16 participants practicing mindfulness meditation for about 25 minutes a day for eight weeks.

Magnetic Resonance (MR) scans were taken of their brains two weeks before they began the program and two weeks after they completed it. Scans were also taken of a control group to make sure that any observed changes in the brains of the meditators could not be ascribed simply to the passage of time.

The researchers found an increase in ‘grey matter’ in the areas of the pre-frontal cortex related to empathy and compassion, memory and a sense of self. At the same time, there was a decrease in the density of the amygdala – the primitive area of the brain responsible for the fight-or-flight response.

Notes Laurel Airica, creator of WordMagic: An Enchanted Literary Entertainment, “Given that meditation increases the part of the brain related to compassion, and the effects of meditation show up throughout the day in more compassionate interactions – even with strangers – perhaps meditation should be widely encouraged as an important form of mental/emotional hygiene because it makes us more socially responsible. Meditation may even be an evolutionary strategy that could give our species the necessary impetus to make the ultimate, life-saving leap from Humankind to HumanKindness.”

You can find more details in Laurel’s article.

Have you ever wondered where that phrase comes from? DOG TIRED. Well, I’m still not sure of the origin of the phrase, but these photos definitely illustrate what it means. Thanks to Nancy McMoneagle for sending! No synchro here, but plenty of laughs.

And now, the cats in the dog tired act:

And my personal favorite:

In mid-April, we posted a story about an experiment I conducted based on Pam Grout’s new book, E-Cubed. One of the interesting comments about it was from Stephanie, who had read Grout’s E-Squared, saw the experiment post, and decided to do her own thing with it.

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I love the E-Squared book, fun experiments. Because of your post, I took seven $1 bills and had my 13 year old son help me craft the notes. I then drove around with my 15 year old daughter taping them to car windshields. What fun!

As I was taping a dollar to a windshield, my ex-husband called my daughter and she told him what I was doing. He laughed and asked, “Why in the world would she do that?”

My daughter “To spread happiness, I guess.” Indeed!

The best part is that he always hated when I donated or gave away money; he simply didn’t understand it. He said “If you’re going to give money away, give it to me!” I guess I’m still up to my old tricks.

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A few days after I’d done my $1 bill experiment, I decided to try it with $5 bills. I only had one, so I taped my note to the bill, dropped the tape dispenser in my bag, and headed to the gym.

I recently changed gyms. Now that I’m on Medicare, Humana offers free gym membership through a program called Silver Sneakers. I can’t say I’m crazy about the name, which I equate with silver/gray hair, but since it’s free, I can’t complain. The only thing this gym lacks is a rowing machine and aerobic classes, but that’s why the membership is inexpensive – or, in my case, free. The clientele are working class folks, the ones who work 8-5 for minimum wage and should be voting the Democratic ticket.

In our previous gym, much more upscale, I was paying about $31 a month and it draws the upper middle class folks – and the uber rich and famous, like Bruce Springsteen. If I had left a $1 or $5 bill on the inside of the restroom door here, with a note about the generosity of the universe, it probably would have been dumped in the trash can. But when I taped a $5 bill on the inside of the restroom door at the new gym, I felt that it might mean something to whoever found it.

Two days later, Rob and I received more than $500 in unexpected royalty checks. The thing with this experiment is that you can’t be thinking, Gee, what am I going to get back in return? You tape your bills to wherever, without any expectation of compensation, and simply hope that it helps someone, somewhere. I keep putting myself in the shoes of someone who finds a note and a bill. I hope their reaction is: WTF??? Is this for real?

In fact when I posted the first story I wrote on Facebook, I’d forgotten that my neighbor – who is a Facebook friend – was one of my recipients.

You did this? she wrote. Thank you!!

I plan on continuing this experiment. We’re going to a writers’ conference this weekend in Tallahassee, a college town. Unless college life has changed drastically, it means these kids are living hand to mouth. I figure I’ll have my printed notes about the abundant universe and my tape dispenser and my bills. And in between our home and Tallahassee, there will be many hundreds of miles of turnpike – and rest stops. What better place for this kind of thing than a turnpike restroom, where women from all over the country converge?

Maybe Grout has hit on something big here. It’s like that very old TV show The Millionnaire,  It ran from 1955-1960, and was actually about this kind of giving, but on a much larger scale:

According to IMDB: John Beresford Tipton is a multi millionaire and among the things he does with his money is to give away a million dollars to people he doesn’t know. So every week Tipton who is not seen, instructs his assistant, Michael Anthony to go bring the person he chose their check. And he asks them to sign an agreement not to tell anyone how they got the money. And we see how the recipients’ lives are changed.

It’s not as if a buck or five bucks is going to drastically change anyone’s life. But the thought behind it, that we live in an abundant universe that always has our backs, is powerful.