The Painter and the Monk

Posted on June 1, 2009 by Trish and Rob

I came across this peculiar synchronicity on a site called System Glitch

***
Joseph Aigner was a fairly well-known portrait painter in 19th century Austria, but he was also a very complex and unhappy fellow, who made repeated attempts to kill himself.

His first attempt was at the age of 18 when he tried to hang himself, but was interrupted by the mysterious appearance of a Capuchin monk. At age 22, he again tried to hang himself, but amazingly was saved by the very same monk.

Eight years later, he was sentenced to the gallows for his political activities. Once again, his life was saved by the intervention of the same monk. Finally, at age 68, Aigner succeeded in suicide, shooting himself with a pistol. His funeral ceremony was conducted by the same Capuchin monk – a man whose name Aigner never even knew.
***
Since this one is pretty strange, I decided to dig a little. Who was that monk? Did he really repeatedly appear at crucial times in Aigner’s life and finally at his funeral? I Googled ‘Joseph Aigner painter,’ and that’s when things got, well, even stranger. Read on.
***

Joseph Aigner – The Sheboygan Press – September 23, 1929

Well Know Painter Suffers Fatal Stroke on Eighth St.

Joseph Aigner, well-known painter was suddenly stricken with paralysis shortly after 5 p.m. Monday while going home from work. He fell in front of the Ehrlich and Kindel Vulcanizing Company on North Eighth street and died at 5:20 p.m. at the entrance to St. Nicholas hospital where he was rushed in the city ambulance. A large number of people were present when the ambulance arrived.

Mr. Aigner was born in Frankenburg, Germany on December 24, 1870 and came to America with his parents when he was 14 years old. The family located in Kiel. In 1891 Mr. Aigner was united in marriage with Miss Ottilia Mais and moved to this city, where he lived since.
***
So, it’s a different Joseph Aigner, also a ‘well-known’ painter, and also a report of his death. The first Aigner died in 1886, two years after the second Aigner left Germany for America.

Upon further perusal, I found the story about the first Aigner appears on several web sites, and eventually traced it back to Robert Ripley’s Giant Book of Believe it or Not, Warner Books, 1983. But this post might be the first time that the two Joseph Aigners have been connected.

It was as if the universe was saying to me: ‘Oh, you’re skeptical about the monk synchronicities, are you? Okay, take a look at this!’

Posted in c6, death, trickster | 12 Comments

The Friendship Book

Posted on May 31, 2009 by Trish and Rob

This cover for the book is from 2005. I couldn’t find any from the 1960s. – Trish
***
We initially ran across Keith Fraser’s story while trolling the strange coincidence archive – – a real treasure trove of synchronicities. We liked his story and wrote him, asking if we could use it.

In many ways, it’s reminiscent of that final scene in What Dreams May Come, when the husband and wife whose lives went terribly wrong have reincarnated and meet up on a pier as a young boy and girl, playing with toy boats. There’s a moment in that final scene when their toy boats collide and they look at each other and we know that on some level, they recognize each other.
***

As a small boy in the early 1960s, I used to visit my Grandma’s house with my mum and read copies of DC Thompson’s, Friendship Book, to pass the time. The book (as it does today) contained a number of submitted photographs. One of these caught my attention – of a young girl painting a picture, and I asked my mum who she might be.

Years later, I was visiting my girlfriend’s home for the first time and noticed a copy of the Friendship Book on a book case. I mentioned that I used to read copies of this when I visited my grandparents, and started to flick through the book. It was then that I saw a photograph I recognized. It was that of a small girl painting a picture. I pointed this out to my future in laws and imagine my surprise when I was told that the photo was that of my future wife, which they had submitted to DC Thompson in the early 1960s. Bizarre, indeed!”
+++
Fraser doesn’t say what it was about the picture that seized him. But we can easily imagine him at his grandmother’s house, paging idly through the Friendship Book and suddenly stopping, staring, feeling something inexplicable. This story is reminiscent of one that Ray Getzinger set us, about a red headed girl.

Posted in books, c2, precognition, relationships, romance | 2 Comments

Indiana Jones and the Last Synchronicity

Posted on May 30, 2009 by Trish and Rob


Some of you might know that back in the early ’90s I wrote seven Indiana Jones novels, starting with The Last Crusade, then backtracking to the 1920s when Indy was just starting his career as an archaeologist. A few years ago, I was asked by LucasArts and Del Rey Books to write another Indy novel. I thought it was going to relate to the new movie, but instead it turned out to be connected to the sketchy story of a new Indiana Jones video game. I took the project and developed the story into a novel, much of which naturally diverged from the game scenario. It was a novel, after all.

The game and the novel, Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings, were supposed to come out in June ’08 simultaneously with the new movie. But that didn’t happen. As my editor at Del Rey said, no video game has ever been finished ahead of the deadline, and many are delayed. And so it was with the Staff of Kings. Consequently, the novel was also delayed, first to the fall of ’08, then the spring of ’09. Then, I was told of a shake up within LucasFilm and the game was pushed back to June of 2010.

(There is actually synchronicity coming here. It just takes some explaining to get to it.)

Then another twist. In March, I heard rumblings that the game was coming out this June. I figured it was a false rumor, or wishful thinking by fan-aticals. 😉 Then last week I was told by my editor that yes, the game indeed was being released in June using the old game platform, rather than the long-planned new version. At the same time, LucasArts cancelled my novel because it wasn’t scheduled for publication for another year and would miss out on the publicity related to the game release. Ironic, since I’d completed the novel ahead of my deadline.

Since I’ve gotten numerous inquiries from Indy fans about this novel, I told the web master of an Indy fan site about the turn of events. He wrote back Wednesday evening saying that he and others wanted to start a letter-writing campaign and petition drive to get LucasArts to release the novel.

So here comes the synchronicity. I was thinking about that idea Wednesday evening when another e-mail arrives with a request that I write a letter and sign a petition to keep UFO Hunters on the air for another season. Of course that caught my attention, not only because of the matter of a petition, but also because of my recent involvement (or lack of it) with an episode filmed on Andros Island. So it was synchronicity of dual (or dueling) petitions.

Here are the links: UFO Hunter campaign
 and the online petition.

I requested that no petition for the Indy novel be made public until June 1. That’s an astrological thing, and also puts it closer to the release of the game.
Rob

UPDATE 6/1/09: Here’s the Indy petition. Feel free to sign!

Wow! Seventy-one signers on the petition after one day! Thanks all.

Posted in books, Indiana Jones, writers | 39 Comments

The Winner from Winner

Posted on May 29, 2009 by Trish and Rob

Sometimes synchronicity is so obvious that even the Associated Press recognizes it.
***

Powerball ticket worth $232.1M sold in Winner, SD

By CHET BROKAW Associated Press Writer , The Associated Press – WINNER, S.D.

Friends and neighbors greeted each other in this south-central South Dakota farm and ranch town with one question Thursday: Who won?

Word spread quickly that a winning Powerball ticket worth $232.1 million had been sold in town.

In businesses scattered along U.S. Highway 18 and in the brick buildings on Main Street, speculation about the big winner dominated conversations.

At the Ampride gas station and convenience store, one man walked in to pay for gasoline and asked, “Is this the store that sold the ticket?”

The only winning ticket for Wednesday night’s jackpot was sold in Winner, population 2,800.

“How often does something like this happen _ a winner in Winner, S.D.?” said Norm Lingle, executive director of the South Dakota Lottery.

“We’re a small state. We don’t expect to have a lot of winners but when we do have that and it falls in Winner, what more can you ask for?”

Late Thursday afternoon, Lingle said the Lottery had been contacted by the apparent winner.

It’s the ninth-largest Powerball jackpot ever and the biggest ever paid out in South Dakota, he said.
***
The article listed the winning numbers as: 5,6,7,12,16,21.

UPDATE:
The winner was a 23-year-old dirt poor rancher named Neal Wanless. He’s single, and lives with his parents. They don’t have a phone and their mobile home was repossessed last year, and they’re $3,500 behind on taxes. Neal’s father collects scrap metal an re-sells it, but the prices have dropped in recent years. Neal will collect $88 million after taxes.

Posted in lottery, names, Numbers, power ball | 8 Comments

Dualities

Posted on May 28, 2009 by Trish and Rob

I’m still reading through Pinchbeck’s 2012 book. I’m savoring it, reading bits and pieces on the treadmill at the gym. So this morning, 5/25, Memorial Day, I’m reading about alien abductions, where Pinchbeck talks about Whitley Strieber’s experiences, detailed in Communion. Pinchbeck asks, “Are the visitors (the Grays Strieber writes about) ‘real’ or ‘imaginary?’ They are both and they are neither.” Pinchbeck likens them to quantum phenomena, a kind of duality that is both wave and particle. “…they do not exist or not exist, nor do they both not exist and not not exist.”

From this,he veers into Tibetan Buddhism, and cites from Dzogchen: The Self-Perfected State, “Duality is the real root of our suffering and of all our conflicts. All our concepts and beliefs, no matter how profound they may seem, are like nets which traps us in dualism.”

So later in the day, I pick up my current issue of Mountain Astrologer and turn to an excerpt from a new book about the meanings of the seven traditional planets – the sun through Saturn. “According to some esoteric theories, at the moment of creation the invisible One broke into a visible two, appearing as opposites that characterize our world: light and dark, up and down, good and bad, masculine and feminine…Each astrological symbol also reflects this duality by containing within itself both an up side and a down side…”

So now this duality thing has my attention. I’m a Gemini. It’s one of two signs in the zodiac represented by two of something – Pisces, a pair of fish swimming in opposite directions and Gemini, the twins. I live with duality daily. Some days I’m yin, some days I’m yang, some days I am both.

I walk outside and am greeted by the two stray cats we feed – a female and male, Smoky and Big Head, yin and yang. I return to the article in the astrology magazine and read about how Mercury, the planet that rules Gemini, is the alchemical hermaphrodite, who may “also represent not just the unredeemed matter of the alchemist’s early experiments but the final outcomes of his efforts- the marriage of the sun and moon, the restoration of all dualities into one.”

And then I run across the story about the king and his double, another story about dualities, posted yesterday, 5/27. The message? I don’t know. This isn’t like Max’s synchronicity about two magical teapots, not that definitive. Maybe these loops are simply addressing the duality of my own reality, the extraordinary and the mundane, the vivid and the muted, the good and the bad, the black and the white, the sacred and the profane.
Trish

Posted in astrology, duality, theory, twins | 6 Comments

The King and His Double

Posted on May 27, 2009 by Trish and Rob

This story from 1900 reminds me of some of the synchronistic parallels involving identical twins. Even though the two men – King Umberto I of Italy and the owner of a small restaurant in Monza – weren’t related, they looked like twins and their lives held numerous astonishing parallels. This story was originally published in Ripley’s Ghost Stories and Plays. So back in time we go…

Trish
***
July 28, 1900

King Umberto I of Italy and his aide-de-camp, a general, arrived in the town of Monza, where the king was supposed to present prizes at an athletic competition the next day. Since even kings get hungry,he and his general went to dinner at a small restaurant in town that evening.

As the owner of the restaurant took their order, the king noticed that he and the man looked like twins – their faces, their physiques. When he mentioned it, he and the owner started talking and discovered some intriguing parallels in their lives. Both men were born on March 14, 1844, in the same town, and had the same first name – Umberto. Both had been married on April 22, 1868, to a woman named Margherita. Both had a son named Vittorio. On the day of the king’s coronation, the other Umberto had opened his restaurant.

It gets even stranger. The king, astonished by these parallels, asked the restaurant owner how it was that their paths had never crossed before. But Umberto the restaurant guy told the king that their paths had crossed twice, when they were both decorated for bravery – in 1866 and again in 1870.

With this revelation, Umberto the common man left to wait on his other patrons and the king told the general to be sure to invite his double to the games. He intended to make him a Cavaliere of the Crown of Italy. But the next day, when the king asked for his double, he was informed that the man had been killed in a shooting accident. Shocked, the king told the general to find out about funeral arrangements. At that very moment, an assassin fired three shots. The first shot missed the king, but the next two tore through his heart, killing him instantly.
***

The web site Abovetopsecret.com also includes this story with even more detail. The writer concludes that the two Umbertos were actually twins.

Rob
***

“Twins being a major problem in royal lineages, for obvious reasons, one of the boys was given away immediately after birth, but was also called Umberto, either by chance (by the family who adopted him) – or even on purpose, to secure a credible ‘spare.’ That would explain everything, even the subsequent ‘coincidences.’ (Many studies of the lives of identical twins show that their spouses are often very similar in appearance, share the same name etc. Twins often also die on the same day – although in this case even the death could be explained in a more sinister and less coincidental light…)”

Posted in death, historical, parallels, twins | 7 Comments

An Unwanted Synchronicity

Posted on May 26, 2009 by Trish and Rob

We were coming home Sunday from an overnight trip to Sarasota, Florida and we both thought that we hadn’t experienced any synchronicity. It wasn’t until this morning when I read a Facebook synchronicity page entry that I realized that we had indeed encountered synchronicity. We just didn’t want to recognize it.

In the blog entry I read, a woman from Ontario had gone to a conference, but her hotel room wasn’t available, and her camera broke en route beyond repair. However, she quickly found a room in a neighboring hotel for half the price. She took a bus ride, got off at her destination, and there was a camera shop across the street, where she replaced her old camera. Then, back at the room, she found that two movies she’d been wanting to see were on the schedule. Well, these are more like serendipity experiences, than synchronicity. Nevertheless, they reminded me that things had not gone so well on our trip.

We had gone to Sarasota to help our daughter move home from college…and nothing convenient happened, or so it seemed. There were delays, confusion and frustration. The kids were supposed to be packed up and ready to go home. They were hung over and the place was a wreck. Megan forgot her notebook computer in a common room and didn’t realize it until we were home, three hours away. She also forgot to turn in her room key. Her roommate’s bike was stolen and she had to buy it back from a pawn shop. That affected us because we were taking the bikes home.

All that I realized was a synchronicity, because astrologically we are in the last week of Mercury retrograde which means: possible delays, miscommunication, and confusion, especially related to travel. Also, you can experience computer problems!

Yikes! It was so obvious that we didn’t see it.

Posted in astrology, travel | 3 Comments

The Odds, Again

Posted on May 25, 2009 by Trish and Rob

We found this next story on another blog and wrote to Tim Wallender, who had posted it, asking if we could use it. He said sure. Tim now lives in Memphis, but says this story took place in Wisconsin, around 1995. It’s one of the most incredible instances of objects lost – and then found in a very mysterious way.
***

Both me and my brother worked for the same railroad. He was an engineer and I was a conductor at the time. One day we were both working but on different trains. It was the first day that the railroad issued cell phones to the engineers. The engineer I was working with asked me who I thought would be the first one to lose their phone. I said without a doubt my brother would.

A few miles further down the track we had to stop and set out some cars. Mind you, this is approximately 120 miles from where we both started our trip and only my train was to stop there. I set out the cars and engine, and as I looked down in the snow there was a cell phone. My engineer was there also to help with the hoses and we both looked at each other and said, “No way”. Sure enough I open up the case and there was a sticker with my brother’s name on it.

I called him at the hotel he was staying at in Chicago and asked him where his phone was. He said he didn’t know. Turns out his second engine was giving him trouble and it must have fallen out of his pocket when he walked back to check it out.

I don’t know what the odds are of finding your brother’s cell phone 120 miles from where he got it, the same day he got it, and only minutes after telling someone that he would lose it. Or what are the odds of stopping on top of it and looking down in about a three-foot section of rail and finding it?
***

Posted in lost objects, the odds, trains, travel | 1 Comment

Order of Melchizedek

Posted on May 24, 2009 by Trish and Rob

If you’re not yet convinced that synchronicity is more than mere coincidence, this one might push you to rethink your reservations. The starting point is a comment from our entry on May 19- World on Fire from Gypsy Woman in which she referenced author Drunvalo Melchizedek. When I saw that last name, I was immediately reminded of a bizarre compound synchronicity experienced by two authors, Jacque Vallee and Colin Wilson. I wrote about the story in my book, PSYCHIC POWER: Discover and Develop Your Sixth Sense at any Age.

UFO researcher Vallee was interested in a Los Angeles cult known as the Order of Melchizedek, related to an obscure biblical prophet, Melchizedek. He searched for information about the prophet, but didn’t have much luck. (That was before Google. Now his name immediately elicits a site: https://ad2004.com/Biblecodes/Hebrewmatrix/melchizedek.html)

In the midst of his research, he took a taxi to the Los Angeles airport and asked the taxi driver for a receipt. To his surprise, the receipt was signed M. Melchizedek. He assumed the name must be more common than he thought, but when he checked the Los Angles telephone directory, the only one listed was his taxi driver.

Vallee offered a quirky explanation of how synchronicity works. He said it could be called “the angelic answer.” He suggested that it was as if he’d placed a message that read “Wanted: Melchizedeks: on a universal notice board. As a result, an earnest angel had asked, “How about this?” and handed Vallee the tax driver.

To clarify his point, Vallee noted two ways a librarian could file information. One is alphabetical. But an easier way of filing would allow the librarian to place each new book on the closest shelf. Each book would have a beeper attached to its spine and could be located with a transmitter. Vallee proposed that the universe works on a similar system, and that explains synchronicity. In more modern terms, that would be like saying that universe acted like a Google search, but with no computers involved.

The story doesn’t end there. When the prolific writer Colin Wilson wrote about Vallee’s theory for an article on synchronicity, he experienced a related synchronicity himself. After completing work on the passage about Vallee, Wilson took a break from writing to walk his dog. As he left his office, he noticed that a book had fallen from a shelf. He picked it up and looked at the title, You Are Sentenced to Life, by Dr. W.D. Chesney. He’d bought it years ago, but had never read it. He paged through it and near the end found a page headed “Order of Melchizedek.” It was a letter to the author by the founder of the order. Wilson noted that, of the more than 30,000 books in his house, it was that book which fell just after he had written about Melchizedek.

So both authors attracted their own Melchizedeks. Thank you, Gypsy Woman, for reminding me of the story!
Rob

Posted in colin wilson, names, valee | Leave a comment

The Empress

Posted on May 23, 2009 by Trish and Rob

Some years ago when we lived in Boynton Beach, Florida, a group of us were sitting around the kitchen table, pulling tarot cards at random. A neighbor, Jeri, stopped by with her five-year-old son, saw the cards, and immediately pulled a chair up to the table.

“Will the cards tell me if I’m pregnant?” she asked.

“Possibly,” I replied, and handed her the deck. “Shuffle with your question in mind, fan the deck out face down, and pull three cards.”

In the tarot, there are two cards that nearly always mean pregnancy if that’s what you’re asking about: the page of cups and The Empress. Jeri didn’t pull either one. She didn’t even pull one of the backups – the Ace of Cups. “There’s nothing about pregnancy here,” I told her.

“Let me pull a card,” her son piped up.

So we reshuffled the deck, fanned out the cards, and her son approached the table, his expression very focused. Then he picked his card: The Empress.

“You’re pregnant,” I blurted.

A week later, the pregnancy was verified by her doctor.

This is synchronicity in action. For that single moment when her son picked his card, the Empress was the one in 78 that could give her the definitive answer she asked for and her son chose it.

Posted in c7, divination, pregnancy, tarot | Leave a comment