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The Artist’s Way, published in 1992, proposed a rather unusual idea at that time – that there’s a link between creativity and a spiritual connection to a higher source. If you look in the index, though, there’s only a single mention of synchronicity, which I found odd even when I first read the book.

Creativity is usually defined by four words that begin with “i:” imagination, inventiveness, inspiration, ingenuity.  Synchronicity is rarely mentioned. And yet, creativity and synchronicity are like twins conjoined at the hip. They share organs, skin, blood, the life force. They complement and nurture each other. In fact, without meaningful coincidence, our creative endeavors often fall flat. We’re able to take an idea, a concept, just so far and can’t make that final leap into something larger than ourselves that speaks to the human collective. And I now wonder if that quantum leap is the spiritual missing link.

 In an interview, author and philosopher Ken Wilber, said: “Synchronicity has been an important part of my own spiritual path ever since I can remember. It is something that I’ve come to relate to as a sort of ‘experiential faith,’ an actual tested faith that has shaped the architecture of my own life story in dramatic ways. My experiences with synchronicity have been varied, seeming to come and go in waves, often accompanying times of great creativity, inspiration, and transformation. Sometimes they are flirtatious, like hearing an unlikely word just as I am typing it on my screen.”

 The Dalai Lama went ever farther: “I am open to the guidance of synchronicity, and do not let expectations hinder my path.”

In terms of spirituality, synchronicity seems to address the ways in which each of us is linked to something larger than ourselves, to Indra’s net, to Jung’s collective unconscious, and yes, perhaps to some higher source. Regardless of the term we use for this higher source – God, Buddha, All That Is, Source Energy,  Mohammed, Christ – the bottom line is that we can connect to it through synchronicity.

I mean, let’s face it. We’re born. We die. Those are the facts. In between, we explore, we delve, we experience, and we feel everything in the spectrum from despair to joy, from paralyzing fear to liberating certainty that we are more than our physical bodies, as Robert Monroe was fond of saying. 

But the bottom line is that regardless of what traditional religions tell us about heaven and hell and the afterlife and all the depressingly weird worlds between (limbo?!)  we really don’t know.  Maybe in our three-dimensional existence, we can’t know. Maybe we can’t quite stretch ourselves that far. And yet, some of us do. Some of us trust our own experiences to the point where we become the outlier, the outcast, the weirdo down the block who sees ghosts or talks to the dead or looks for signs at every twist in the path.  

But my sense is that outliers are growing exponentially every second of every day and that, perhaps sooner than we can imagine, there will be so many of us that a tipping point will  be reached and a new, more evolved paradigm will be born.

This afternoon, a book arrived from Amazon – Dean Radin’s Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Abilities.   Rob had ordered the book for my birthday back in June, only to realize it hadn’t been published yet. But it arrived at exactly the right moment.

I’ve been working on a chapter in our new book on psychokinesis and needed some new sources. It turns out that Radin’s book has two chapters on psychokinesis – Psychokinesis in Living Systems and Psychokinesis in Inanimate Systems.

By a living system, Radin is talking about people. This chapter covers phenomena like levitation – particularly among yogis and physical mediums;  consciousness field effect- whether Transcendental Meditation (TM) Sidhi practitioners meditating on peace and nonviolence actually lowers  crime and  violence; intentional influence at a distance; and the love study.  By inanimate systems, Radin is talking about humans interacting with and affecting machines and objects and veers into the movement of objects through nothing more than the power of the mind, the teleportation of objects, random number generators, the hemi-synch experiment (associated with the Monroe Institute).

There’s a lot of great information in these two chapters, but the main drawback comes from what Radin says early on in the book – that anecdotal evidence doesn’t constitute scientific evidence. The only evidence that matters in science is what can be proven in a laboratory. Rob’s response to that?  “Life is the laboratory.”

Many of us have experienced telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, and some of us have even experienced psychokinesis – mind-matter interaction.

When testing psychokinesis with inanimate objects, two types of experiments are conducted – micro-PK, where the targets are microscopic (photons, radioactive particles) and macro-PK, where the target is large enough to see with the naked eye.  Spoon-bending is considered a macro-PK. “This phenomenon has  been studied a few times under quasi-controlled circumstances, and in my opinion it seems that something interesting may be going on,” Radin writes.   However, Radin says, since there are many ways  of bending metal with conjuring techniques, the scientific evidence is insufficient. 

 “That said,” he continues,  “if I were forced to decide whether it was possible to bend metal for real, without using blunt force or conjuring methods, then I would say yes, it is possible.” And he says this because not only has he seen it done by ordinary  people, but he himself did it at a spoon-bending party.  He apparently attended this party to observe a woman who claimed to have previously bent the bowl of a soup spoon. He was holding a large, heavy soup spoon and was mimicking this woman’s hand movements so he could get a sense of what she might be doing.

 While watching  the woman, he heard someone shout, “Look what you’ve done!”

 Radin glanced up to see what the commotion was about and it turned out that he was the source of the commotion. “I had somehow bent the bowl of the spoon I was holding about 90 degrees. I immediately checked my fingers to see if I had unconsciously used force, because it would have taken an enormous effort to create that bend and the effect would have left clear indentations on my fingers. There were no signs of force.”

 Someone shouted at him to bend it all the way, so he pinched it with a thumb and forefinger. “After the bowl folded over, it stiffened, and within a few seconds it became as hard as steel.”

 Radin hasn’t been able to repeat what he did. “So I can’t explain how this happened, nor do I present it as evidence for macro-PK. But it did happen.”

 And this is where I have an issue with “scientific evidence.” Radin, a scientist himself, bent a spoon.  But he states he doesn’t present this as evidence for macro-PK. Why not? Why should his personal experience, his personal “evidence,” take a backseat to some lab experiment? “The bottom line about macro –PK is that the jury is still out, We don’t have enough data under sufficiently strict controls to gain much confidence about mind-matter interactions large enough to be seen with the naked eye.”

Toward the end of the book are four or five pages on UFOs and encounters where I felt more hopeful for science generally. A little background.

 In 1957, Carl Jung published Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky and made a convincing  case for UFOs as the unfolding of a modern myth. As Barbara Hannah explained in her biographical memoir, Jung: His Life and Work, Jung wasn’t interested in whether UFOs were real. The fact that people all over the world were seeing round objects in the sky was what intrigued him. “Roundness is the symbol par excellence for the Self, the totality,” Hannah wrote. In other words, these round saucers were symbolic of a merging collective need for wholeness.

In the nearly 60 years since Jung wrote his book on UFOs, crafts of numerous shapes and sizes have been reported, physical evidence has been left behind, and thousands of abductees have come forward with their stories. How is that a myth?

But as Dean Radin pointed out in Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities, “Jung’s use of the term ‘myth’ does not imply that UFO sightings or for that matter encounters with angels, aliens, fairies, spirits, elves or demons are just fantasies. Rather, it suggests that some of these experiences may literally be psychophysical, a blurring of conventional boundaries between objective and subjective realities.”  Or, “mind literally shapes matter, that the imaginal and the real are not as separate as they seem.”

In 2005, I co-authored THE FOG, a book about the Bermuda Triangle with Bruce Gernon. We told Bruce’s story in Aliens in the Backyard, and now as we’re writing the sequel The Synchronicity Highway, I recalled a story Bruce told me that we didn’t use in Aliens. I couldn’t remember all the details, but quickly jotted down the story as best I could, then send Bruce an e-mail with a copy of it and asked him to clarify anything I got wrong.

So here’s what I had written.

On another occasion, Gernon went boating on the ocean with a group of friends near sunset. As the boarded the party boat, Gernon told the owner of the boat that they would see a UFO that evening. The man laughed, thinking that Gernon was joking. But after dark, a bright light appeared in the distance, hovered, then shot off and disappeared. The boat owner told everyone that Gernon had predicted the UFO. “I didn’t believe him and I didn’t believe in UFOs. But thanks to Bruce, I’ve seen the light!”

Bruce called me a few minutes later and reminded me that actually we’d used the story in THE FOG. I’d recalled the gist of it, but left out a lot of details. The UFO had beamed a light down to the ocean, which moved in a slow circle several times as the craft descended lower and lower toward the ocean, then simply disappeared into the sea.

When Bruce called, he was somewhat baffled that I’d written him about this story. In fact, it was fresh in his mind because he had just had lunch with Timothy Bogle, the boat captain, that night, a couple of days earlier and they’d talked about it.

Hey, synchronicity and maybe telepathy as well. Bruce hadn’t seen Bogle for years and I hadn’t talked to Bruce for a few months. Yet it all came together.

The reason he’d gotten together with Bogle was that a History Channel program was considering doing yet another show that would feature his Bermuda Triangle experience and they were looking for a new angle. They wanted to interview the first people he talked to about what happened to him in his now infamous flight from Andros Island to West Palm Beach.

Considering the incident occurred in December 1970, many of those people–including Manson Valentine, then director of the Miami Museum of Science and an avid researcher of mysteries of the unknown–are now dead. But Bogle was still among the living and Bruce remembered telling him about his strange experience the same day he predicted that they would see a UFO when they went out for the planned party at sea.

Bruce told him the production company would also probably ask about the UFO they saw. But 40 years has passed and Bogle, who was a skeptic before he ‘saw the light,’ had slipped back into skeptical mode. He told Bruce it was probably an airplane and besides he was high at the time. Bruce reminded him that the craft had made no sound and they’d remarked that the engine sound of airplanes travels over water for miles. But Bogle just shook his head. He couldn’t go on television and say that he’d seen a UFO.

He no longer saw the light. Too bad. But Bruce sees the light now more than ever. For years, he tried to explain the Bermuda Triangle as an unknown weather condition he refers to as electronic fog. But now in retrospect he’s convinced that the B.T. phenomenon is directly related to UFOs and that the enormous cloud that chased him and surrounded his plane, then literally teleported him 100 miles in an instant, was harboring a UFO. After all, in the aftermath, he had no less than 20 UFO sightings, including one close encounter, and on several occasions he predicted they would appear. Something definitely happened to Bruce that day.

I told him years ago that I felt a UFO was at the heart of his experience, and  he finally agrees.

This video of Chinese dancers – or gymnasts, yoga students, who knows what they are? – is astounding.

In 1984, we accompanied an empath and friend, Renie Wiley, to a police station to observe her working on a missing child case, that of Christie Luna. We wrote about it in 7 Secrets of Synchronicity and updated  the story nearly 25 years later, when the mystery seemed to come full circle.

 Recently, in California, there was a case of a missing boy that reminded me of the Christie Luna case. Pam Ragland, 50, was watching a TV show about the search for an 11-year-old California boy, Terry Dewayne Smith Jr. who was missing in a nearby rural town.

As Ragland watched the show, she started crying and then had a vision of a young boy lying  on his side, his eyes closed. At first, Ragland didn’t want to get involved, but the images kept coming to her: the boy, a dirt road, a distinctive building that looked like a hay barn, and a single tree standing alone. Ragland saw a dark night with city lights in the distance.

 She finally called the tip line and a sergeant directed he call to the sheriff’s command center in Menifee, more than an hour’s drive from where she lived. She hustled her young children into her car and made the drive.

 The town lay 80 miles southeast of LA and by the time Ragland arrived, it was dark and the search for Terry was winding down its third day. As Ragland pulled into the gravel parking lot of the market that served as the headquarters for the search, she felt something powerful. According to the AP, she said: “I literally physically turned my body all the way around like a compass and I looked at the store…and I said, He’s back there.”

 An off duty firefighter drove her to the back of the store and when Ragland saw the hay barn she’d seen in her vision, she felt she should keep going. But the property was private. Some people were sitting in the driveway and when they were asked if Ragland’s group could proceed, they gave their permission.  The people were members of Terry’s family.

 “We started to drive up this hill and it was steep, so we stopped the car and walked,” Ragland said. “All of a sudden there was a single tree and then I smelled something.”

 Ragland found Terry’s body.

 John Powers, a Riverside County sheriff’s detective, was impressed. He told KFI-AM Radio: “She actually went right up to the driveway of the hosue, onto the property, and right of to the body of his boy. Not in 23 years have I ever seen anything like this.”

 Apparently authorities have charged Terry’s 16-year-old half-brother with murder.

 I find this case compelling for many reasons. In five of my Tango Key novels –the main character is Mira Morales, a psychic and bookstore owner, a single mother, whose FBI lover, Wayne Sheppard,  gets her involved in his cases. Mira’s daughter, Annie, and her grandmother, Nadine, are also psychic. Sheppard is a diehard skeptic, a prove it to me kinda guy, and time and again, Mira proves  that she – all of us, really – receive information from what the quantum physicists call “the nonlocal,” that collective soup we can all tap into.

 This quantum soup is what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious, what David Bohm called the implicate order, what author Michael Talbott  believed was evidence that we live in a holographic universe. It’s the place that psychics go to tap in and tune in on you when you have a psychic reading. It’s where we travel in dreams, meditation, in any altered state. It’s the state of mind we drift into when we engage an oracle – the I Ching, the tarot, astrology, runes or synchronicity.

 I have recently been entertaining the possibility that synchronicity itself is a kind of oracle. It’s  the voice that we must be aware enough to hear, the manifestation we should recognize. Sometimes it’s an ally, other times it’s a pain in the neck. Sometimes it provides the proof that we should take one path and not another. Other times it teases us, tricks us into believing that something will work out just because the synchros seem to point in that direction.

In 7 Secrets of Synchronicity, one of the stories we mention involved writer and past-life researcher Carol Bowman.

Carol was visiting her mother in New York’s Hudson Valley, a small town, not much there. She had gone to the grocery store for basics. While waiting in line, she noticed the Asian woman behind her had a toddler in her cart, a cute little girl. Carol asked the woman how old her daughter was.

Asian woman: “She’ll be two next month. She’s an Aries.”

Carol: “My Aries daughter will be thirty next month. Aries kids are a handful, aren’;t they?”

Asian woman, laughing: “That’s for sure. And I’m married to an Aries.”

Carol’s antenna twitched. “Me, too!”

So we can imagine these two women in line at this dinky store, suddenly aware of some sort of connection, both with Aries daughters, both married to Aries men.

Asian woman: “I’m a Libra.”

Carol understood that something odd and fascinating was happening. “I’m a Libra, too. What’s your birthdate?”

Asian woman: “October 14.”

“That’s, uh, my birthdate, too.”

Yes, it sounds like an episode out of the Twilight Zone, weird music and all. But the upshot was that Carol handed the woman her business card and said she would be conducting a past-life workshop in the area in June. The Asian woman said she wold definitely attend.

Now: fast-forward about four years. Today,  July 3, 2013, Carol received a call from a Philadelphia woman whose therapist has recommended that she get a past-life regression. The woman looked for past-life therapists in the area and ran across Carol’s name – and suddenly remembered reading about her in 7 Secrets. A friend had given her the book a few weeks earlier and she remembered the story about Carol’s conversation with the Asian woman.

So Carol had called to thank us for the mention – which had brought her a new client.

This kind of connection is gratifying to writers. It means you’re creating ripples in this huge pond of life that positively impact other people. This woman will now experience a past-life regression with one of the pioneers in reincarnational research because a friend gave her a book with a story in it that she remembered. Technically, it may not be a synchro because there’s a causative factor – the book, 7 Secrets – but in a wider, broader picture – what are the odds?

UPDATE: Rob and I and Connie Cannon were interviewed on Whitley Strieber’s Dreamland about the unusual sighting her son had. We did a post on it here. The next link gives you the first 34 minutes of the interview. The rest of the hour is through subscription at Dreamland. The link to listen to it is here.

This little gizmo is a free iPhone app developed under a NASA program by Russell Targ at Stanford Research Institute. Targ, a physicist and a pioneer in the development of the laser, was also cofounder of the Stanford Research Institute’s investigation into psychic abilities in the 1970s and 1980s. ESP trainer helps in the development of psychic ability. From Targ’s website:

We have found that people are able to improve their ESP scores by using a machine just like this and get in touch with the part of themselves that is psychic. The player is presented with four colored squares. For each trial, one has been selected at random by the ESP Trainer. Your task is to choose the correct square. If you succeed, you will hear a chime, feel a vibration, and see a large color picture. Otherwise, the system lights up the correct square, and you proceed with the next trial. The score indicator at the top counts the number of correct choices. Words of encouragement appear as you achieve the scoring levels of 6, 8. 10, 12 or 14 hits. After 24 trials you may begin a new game.

The game offers multi-sensory feedback, reinforcement, and an opportunity to Pass, meeting all the requirements needed for learning this skill. ESP Trainer improves your ability to recognize your intuitive impressions, and it can bring you to a level of intuitive awareness beyond anything you’ve experienced before.

The purpose of the trainer is to allow you to become aware of what it feels like when you psychically choose the correct square. When you don’t have that special feeling, we encourage you to press the Pass button. (So this is not a “forced choice” test.)

The website notes that in a year-long NASA program with 145 people, many were able to significantly improve their scores. “Four of the subjects improved their scores at the hundred-to-one level or better. This approach has been used with surprising success on Wall Street.” If you continually score 12 or higher, then Targ wants to hear from you!

I downloaded it to my iPhone and Rob and I both gave it a whirl. He got 7 out of 24, I got 4 out of 24 🙁 on the first try. On subsequent attempts, I took more time. I discovered that when I held my fingers up close to the iPhone screen, but without touching it, I could sometimes sense which color held a photo, and did better than I had when I just quickly tapped away.

It’s a neat little app, something you can whip out while you’re waiting in line somewhere or just need a break from whatever you’re doing. I plan to practice until I can get 12 out of 24 – or better!

Zimmerman, who killed Treyvon Martin, a 17-year-old black kid wearing a hoodie, has been acquitted. The special prosecutor, Angela Corey, is a Republican appointed by Florida’s corrupt Republican governor, and is on TV right now, defending the tactics that her team of prosecutors took in this case.

It’s pathetic. This verdict is pathetic. But in a state that the NRA rules, where i in 17 individuals carry a weapon,  where a neighborhood volunteer like Zimmerman was allowed to carry a concealed weapon, is a travesty. The idea that race had nothing to do with this is absurd. It has everything to do with it. Sanford is a good ole boy town, deep south, as deeply south as you can get.

But perhaps, as with OJ Simpson, Zimmerman will become embroiled in something similar 13 years up the road, to the day. Or not. One way or another, the universe will balance it all out.

UPDATE: Rob and I and Connie Cannon were interviewed on Whitley Strieber’s Dreamland about the unusual sighting her son had. The link to listen to it is here.

From The New Yorker

+++

Recently, someone asked me why I don’t go to church. It was something of a synchro for me since I had been thinking about how when I was really young, church was not only mandatory but included a catechism class taught by Catholic nuns.

In one of these catechism classes (I think I was 12) the nun was talking about heaven and death. “When you die,” she said, “you go to one of four places: heaven, purgatory, hell, or limbo. The last was the place you went if you hadn’t been baptized to clear your soul of original sin – you know, Adam’s fooling around with Eve in the garden and grabbing that apple off the tree.

I remember thinking, Huh? That’s wrong. What happens is what we believe happens. This is all a lie. After that realization, I found a reason to be sick or extremely fatigued on  Sundays, and my younger sister bore the brunt of church and catechism.  I still had to attend occasionally, but by the time I was 16 I mustered the courage to tell my dad that I just couldn’t do church anymore, that I didn’t believe a word of it.

I thought he was going to be angry, but instead he started laughing. “Fantastic. Now I don’t have to go to church anymore.”

Now, many decades later, I see organized religion as a real detriment to our evolution as spiritual and creative beings.

In North Carolina.

In Texas.

In North Dakota.

Other states have initiated  the same types of restrictions on women’s health. Why? What is it about women’s health that drives these aging white men nuts? Well, just a simple fact: these women can conceive, give birth, have children – their children –and oh my god, your child’s life begins at conception. But never mind that once this revered child is born, it’s on its own. The Repubs  don’t want to care for this child, have public education for this child, or even acknowledge this child if he or she isn’t white. In fact, they hope to restrict women’s access to birth control.

If, in today’s Republican party, you are not white and male, then, oh sorry, you don’t count. Never mind that most of American voters are female. Never mind that Hispanics are the fastest-growing minority in this country. The Repubs are playing to some extreme, shrinking base  and if they continue on this path, they won’t qualify as a national party.

But their base is powerful. I saw it today when I went to my usual beauty salon and overheard the woman who colors and cuts my hair talking about the George Zimmerman trial.

If Treyvon Martin had been white, you can bet we wouldn’t be having this trial or discussion,”  she said.

I wanted to call her on it, wanted desperately to say, Hey, hon, guess what? Racism is alive and well in South Florida, and you are its face, its reality, its heart. But I didn’t. I wasn’t up to it. But you know what? I think it’s time for me to find a new hair stylist, like a gay guy who gets it. Or a gay woman who is raising kids with her partner. Or even a straight man or woman who understands that we, as a human collective, are  at a cross road, and that what worked for us as a people and as a country in earlier decades is no longer relevant.

If we look at these events as dreams, as our blogging friend Adelita Chirino does,  what’s the message? Are we entering the realm of Margaret Atwood’s visonary novel The Handmaid’s Tale? Or  are these events necessary steps toward some greater and more humane paradigm? Right now, in the thick of it, the answer isn’t clear.

In Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, Nobel laureate Kerry Mullis writes movingly of how he received a letter in the mail that would determine his future. If memory serves, I believe it concerned whether or not he’d been admitted to the college/graduate school of his choice. He stood there, the letter in his hand, and realized that until he opened it, until he actually read it, the content was like Schrodinger’s cat, the classic quantum physics thought experiment. The cat is trapped in the box. Is it alive or dead? You don’t know until you open the box.

Until you open the box – or the letter – there is only a wave of probability. But once you open whatever it is, that wave crashes into physical reality as a particle, as the reality. I feel like that’s where we are now as a human collective: we’re Kerry Mullis, holding that letter in our hands. We’re Erwin Schrodinger, contemplating the box that holds the trapped cat. What’s it going to be? Business as usual? A new paradigm? Or something altogether new and different?

                                                                      Emerson

  The other day, I got a call from our friend Jeri Young, whose good year blimp synchro we posted here.  She had just experienced another synchro and was eager to tell me about it.

 Her husband, Steve, had called her and suggested they meet at Panera Bread for lunch. Panera is a fast-food chain that serves terrific fresh soups, salads and sandwiches, for a reasonable price.  So they put in their order, and grabbed a table. While they were eating, Jeri noticed a saying on the wall behind Steve. It was a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson that read: Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

 At about the same moment, Steve was reading the same quote on a wall behind Jeri and called her attention to it. She glanced around, laughed, and told him to look around. “I was just reading that!”

 After they got home, Jeri picked up the mail. There was a graduation announcement from Steve’s half-sister, who is just graduating from high school. When she opened it, she found a photo of the graduating class and behind them, on the wall, was the class motto. Yes, you guessed it: the same quote by Emerson.

 We’ve been running across these types of synchronicities more frequently – where a photo is involved, almost like evidence, the giant exclamation point at the end of the cluster! Rob has affectionately called them, photo-synchros.  They sort of make you feel like what our friend Cassie Hague captured in this photo. Like, OMG!