DJan posted about this movie the other day on our blog – and on her own. The trailer is breathtaking. It’s not available yet as a DVD, but it’s on our Netflix list. Thanks for the tip, DJan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeqB8JwpdE4&feature=player_embedded
Fair warning: this is not about synchros.
OK, Bin Laden is dead. The alleged mastermind of 9-11, the reason we invaded Afghanistan, is now history, his body buried at sea. So why should we stay in Afghanistan?
Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, about three weeks after 9-11. Now we’re in May 2011. Let’s call it ten years. On this website, the cost of war.com, it’s shocking to watch the numbers move so fast that if you blink, you miss a couple of million. So at 10:01 PM on May 4, 2011, the total cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was $1, 187, 686, 509, 309. The war in Iraq has cost: $788, 411,187,998, and the war in Afghanistan has cost $401,275,469,599. I imagine these figures have altered drastically by the time you click that link.
But as Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz explains in his 2008 book, The Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, the figures don’t include the staggering price tag for caring for present and future health care costs for wounded veterans. Also, since the war has been funded mostly with borrowed money, the figures don’t include the exorbitant interest. In 2008, these figures upped the cost to $4.5 trillion and, if you toss in the cost of Afghanistan, it hit $7 trillion in 2008 estimates. On www.the costofwar.com, you find out what that’s costing in 2011.
And what about Libya? We’re supposedly there for humanitarian purposes, but we wouldn’t be there is Libya wasn’t supplier of oil – specifically, sweet crude.
So if that $3-7 trillion was used in other ways, what might it pay for?
And these items are just starting points.Opponents calls these programs socialist agendas. I don’t know how the word socialist ever entered the lexicon of helping out those in a given society who are too poor, sick, disenfranchised, or elderly to help themselves. But somewhere along the way, capitalism became a philosophy with a frozen heart, a fragmented soul.
Take a look at this site for a running tally on our national debt – much of which was accrued during the 8 years of the Bush administration.
The bottom line issue in all this is best expressed in a story. The day after the announcement of Bin Laden’s death, I was at the gym and ran into my neighbor. “Hey,” she said. “You didn’t come over to celebrate with us last night.”
“Megan broke her foot. I was on the other coast. What were you celebrating?”
“The death of Bin Laden.”
“He was assassinated,” I said. “That’s not something to celebrate.”
“He was responsible for the deaths of nearly three thousand Americans. He’s like Hitler, he should’ve been tortured.”
“No one should be tortured,” I reply.
“He should’ve been tortured,” she repeated.
This woman calls herself a Christian.
Frankly, I don’t get it. Yes, Bin Laden was a very bad guy. Yes, he was a terrorist. Yes, he changed the face of the American landscape for the worse and was responsible for the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans. Because of him, torture became ok, labeled as something else, something more sanitized – enhanced interrogation. Because of him, we invaded two sovereign countries, sacrificed thousands of American soldiers, and thousands of Iraquis were killed. Because of him, we continue to glorify war, and the Pentagon budget is basically untouched in the Republican budget plan.
But there’s a fundamental perversion here of American ideals. It seems that we always need an enemy – the Japanese and the Germans in World War II, Russian during the cold war, now Al Qaeda. Who’s next? Aliens from the Pleiades? The despicable aliens from V?
Why can’t we function as a country, a nation, a people, without an enemy? Why are we the world cop? Why must we always be at war with someone? Well, yes, it’s profitable. War is big business. War wins contracts for American companies that develop stealth bombers, drones, exoskeletons. But we’ve got big problems at home. Let’s get out of the business of war and tend to our own people.
We call ourselves a Christian nation and seem to take tremendous pride in that term. But when did Christianity become synonymous with war and torture and assassination?
I’ve been using the I Ching for a great many years. But even so, all too often I seem to get answers that are so obscure I end up putting the book away. But recently, our friend, Nancy Pickard, who has used the I Ching for years, sent us an astonishing synchro involving this divination system. She used an online I Ching source for this question:
From Nancy:
I had a cool dream about tigers and asked the I Ching what it meant. You will not believe what I got. It not only gives me a direct tiger answer, but even a picture of one!
Hexagram 49/Line 5 changing
Nine in the fifth place means: The great man changes like a tiger.
Even before he questions the oracle, he is believed.
A tigerskin, with its highly visible black stripes on a yellow ground, shows its distinct pattern from afar. It is the same with a revolution brought about by a great man: large, clear guiding lines become visible, understandable to everyone. Therefore he need not first consult the oracle, for he wins the spontaneous support of the people.
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Direct, isn’t it?!
Yes, like attracts like, even when you don’t like it.
Case in point, two Muslim religious leaders en route to a conference in Charlotte, N.C. on Islamophobia are removed from the airplane by the pilot. No doubt the religious leaders were focused on anti-Muslim sentiments in the U.S. when they experienced the growing phenomenon first-hand.
Since the pilot probably didn’t know the nature of the event they were planning to attend, it’s also a case of synchronicity – two related events coming together outside of cause and effect.
Here’s the story as reported by the Charlotte Observer.
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Two Muslim religious leaders on their way to a Charlotte conference on “Islamophobia” said they were removed from a commercial flight Friday because the pilot refused to fly with them on board.
Imams Masudur Rahman, an adjunct professor of Arabic at the University of Memphis, and Mohamed Zaghloul said they and their bags were checked twice by security agents at the Memphis airport before boarding the 8:40 a.m. Delta Connection Flight 5452 to Charlotte.
Rahman said the plane left the gate and was taxiing to the runway when the pilot came over the intercom. “The pilot said: ‘There is an issue. We need to return to the gate,'” Rahman said.
A Transportation Security Administration spokesman confirmed the incident Friday and said it was not that agency’s decision to deny boarding.
“They were screened and cleared to fly,” said TSA spokesman Jon Allen in Atlanta. “The decision to deny boarding was made by the airline, not TSA.”
A Delta Air Lines spokeswoman said the flight was operated by Atlantic Southeast Airlines, based in Atlanta.
Jarek Beem, spokesman for Atlantic Southeast Airlines, the Delta Connection carrier that was operating the flight, told The Commercial Appeal newspaper in Memphis that the incident was under investigation.
He said the airline regretted any inconvenience to passengers, and that the airline takes passenger security very seriously. He would not comment on specifics of the case.
The imams were flying to Charlotte to attend the North American Imams Federation 2011 Conference this weekend. Organizers said more than 150 religious leaders from across the country will meet through Sunday to discuss prejudice and fear of Islam or Muslims.
“The conference is about ‘Islamophobia,’ so it’s ironic that these guys were stopped on their way here because of this same issue,” said Jibril Hough of the Islamic Center of Charlotte. “These guys definitely have something to talk about.”
After catching another flight and arriving at Charlotte/Douglas International Airport Friday night, Rahman recounted the incident to reporters.
Dressed in traditional Muslim clothing, Rahman said a Delta official apologized to them after they were removed from the plane Friday morning. He said the official told them that the pilot said some passengers were concerned about them on the flight.
Their attorney, Mo Idlibi, said there was no reason not to allow his clients to fly on the plane after several different security checks.
“I’d really like to know what the pilot based it on.”
Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the men called the council after the incident. Hooper said his group would review the incident to see if further action is warranted.
Calling it a “Juan Williams thing,” a reference to the fired PBS correspondent who said he was leery of flying with people in Muslim garb, Hooper added, “I think it’s possible the whole bin Laden situation factored into this with heightened sensitivity all around.”
Rahman said the experience reminded him of Rosa Parks and her famous 1955 stand against riding in the back of an Alabama bus because she was black.
“That racism, I felt today in the plane,” he said. “And that should not happen to anyone.”
Staff writer Meghan Cooke and The (Memphis) Commercial Appeal contributed. Editor’s note: Comments have been disabled due multiple abuse reports. Please refrain from profanity, obscenity, spam, name-calling or attacking others for their views.
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The last paragraph from the Charlotte Observer’s web editor suggests that Islamophobia is also rampant on the Internet.
May your day be filled with beauty and joy!
Cuban artist Abel Matos
The movie Limitless is about a writer who stumbles upon a drug that enables him to use something like 97 percent of his brain. He has been blocked for months on a novel, but when he takes the drug, he’s able to write the novel in several days. One young woman in the film who had used the drug, delivered a memorable line that describes it: “I read Brian Greene’s The Hidden Reality in forty-five minutes.”
Rob and I laughed about that afterward. Wow, 45 minutes? And he wrote a novel in a matter of days? Maybe we need that drug.
I’ve been working my way through Greene’s book for weeks, reading a little here, a little there, and trying to digest and understand the material in between. This evening, I read something about string theory that really resonated for me.
Prior to string theory, Greene explains, the standard view envisioned “nature’s fundamental ingredients as point particles – dots with no internal structure – governed by the equations of quantum field theory. With each distinct species of particle is associated a distinct species of field. String theory challenges this picture by suggesting that the particles are not dots. Instead, the theory proposes that they’re “tiny, stringlike vibrating filaments.” Whether you’re looking inside any elementary particle or inside an electron or a quark, Greene contends you’ll find a string.
The theory argues that even though the strings within different kinds of particles are identical, the patterns of their vibration differ. “Much as different vibrational patterns of strings on a guitar produce different musical notes, different vibrational patterns of filaments in string theory produce different particle properties. In fact, the theory encourages us to think of a vibrating string not merely as dictating the properties of its host particle but rather as being the particle.”
As soon as I read this, I was struck by how similar this sounds to the Seth material and to a lot of what is written in the Abraham/Hicks books. In The Nature of Personal Reality, Seth talks about feeling tones, which he defines as “your emotional attitudes toward yourself and life in general. They give the overall emotional coloration that characterizes what happens to you. You are what happens to you. “ Even though our emotions fluctuate constantly, Seth says that beneath these transitory feelings are feelings that are unique to each of us, “that are like deep musical chords.”
Sometimes, these unique feeling tones surface, “but in great, long rhythms. You cannot call them negative or positive. They are instead tones of your being…they represent the core from which you form your experience.”
In the Abraham/Hicks material, a lot is written about the importance of emotions as a gauge of whether we’re in the vortex – a swirl of vibrating frequencies that represent the best of who we were – or outside of the vortex. When you’re feeling low or depressed, for instance, you’re outside of the vortex. That’s when the Abraham material suggests that you reach for “better feeling thoughts,” which raise your vibration/frequency.
String theory’s argument that particles are strings echoes Michael Talbot’s brilliant book, The Holographic Universe, where he makes an impressive case for the idea that we are all connected or, to paraphrase John Lennon, that we are all one. Greene addresses the holographic idea in a later chapter, where he talks about theoretical physics and the holographic multiverse.
During a conversation in 1998 with the legendary physicist John Wheeler, Greene asked what he thought the dominant theme in physics would be in future decades. Wheeler summed it up in one word: Information. As Greene explains, physics traditionally focuses on things – planets, atoms, rocks, particles – and then investigates “the forces that affect their behavior and govern their interactions.” Yet, Wheeler “believed that information…forms an irreductible kernel at the heart of reality.”
Information, then, possesses its own vibration, its own frequency. “…the universe can be thought of as an information processor,” Greene writes. “It takes information regarding how things are now and produces information delineating how things will be at the next now, and then now after that. Our senses become aware of such processing by detecting how the physical environment changes over time.”
Perhaps this explains why synchronicity is more frequent during times of major transitions in our lives: we have new information, a new frequency enters the picture. And at some profound level, that information transforms a root belief that we hold. It might explain a spontaneous remission of cancer, an abrupt rags to riches scenario, a pregnancy that occurs just before an adoption is finalized. It may also explain why some ideas reach tipping points and a new paradigm is ushered in.
I don’t know that Brian Greene would agree with these speculations from a non-scientist, but this book certainly stimulates a lot of what if possibilities.
What’s with May 1st, anyway? This sure looks like a global cluster synchro to us!
On May 1, 1945, Hitler’s death was announced.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyZICBPh0wc
On May 1, 2003, Bush announced that the mission was accomplished. Here he is in his flight suit on the U.S.S. Lincoln.
On May 1, 2011, Obama announced that Bin Laden is dead.
In The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity, we suggested interpreting signs and symbols appearing in your waking life as if you were interpreting a dream. Sometimes dreams catch our attention through puns.
For example, if a girl dreams that her boyfriend has a lion in the back of his house, it could mean that he is ly-in’ to her about something. If you dream of a bear accompanying you to work, maybe it means that you need strength and power in the workplace. As a pun, it suggests that you can’t bear it. If you dream you’re on a train, but you never take trains in real life, it could mean that you’re in training. Aren’t we all?
These sort of puns can flow right into our waking lives, appearing as synchronicity. Here’s a dramatic synchro-pun that was related in Synchronicity: Science, Myth, and the Trickster, by Allan Combs and Mark Holland.
A Texas motorcycle patrolman, named Allen Falby, was severely injured when his motorcycle struck the back of a truck. Alfred Smith pulled over after seeing the accident and saw that Falby had a deep gash in his leg. So he used his tie as a tourniquet to stop the bleeding. His action probably saved the patrolman’s life.
Five years later, the two men met again. This time Smith was badly injured in a car accident. Falby was first on the scene and found Smith bleeding badly from one leg. He applied a tourniquet and after the bleeding stopped looked closely at Smith’s face and recognized the man who had saved his life. Later, Falby jokingly commented, “One good tourniquet deserves another.”
On the evening of Friday, April 29, we were leaving the dog park and saw a young man hobbling in on crutches, with a boot on his foot, his dog darting along ahead of him. He’s someone we see periodically at the park, so we stopped and asked if he had broken his foot.
“Yup. Playing basketball.”
Rob said, “It’s a bitch. I broke my foot last year.”
Once we were in the car, I remarked, “I think you broke your foot in 2009, in June.”
“What? Are you sure?”
“We’ll check the blog.” So when we got home, I did check and the post on Rob’s left foot went up on June 25, 2009.
The next day at Rob’s yoga class, I noticed that the woman next to me, Rose, had something wrapped around her left foot. After class, I asked her what had happened. She said it was related to a bunion and that her orthopedic guy wanted to remove it. “But years ago, I was married to an orthopedic surgeon and I learned that if at all possible, you should stay away from surgery on your back and your feet.”
“Are you a Pisces?” I asked her.
“No, a Virgo. Why?”
“Well, Pisces rules the feet, which means that part of the body is vulnerable for people of that sun sign or for individuals who have a Pisces moon or rising.”
Rose didn’t know anything about her natal chart, so the conversation ended there. But when we were in the car, I started thinking about Megan the Virgo with Pisces rising and remembered how she has always enjoyed having her feet rubbed. Then I realized that twice in the last fourteen hours, I had paid attention to feet, not something that usually registers for me. I had conversed with people I hardly know who have problems with their feet. Then I forgot about it until around one Saturday morning, when Megan called, sobbing.
“Mom, I’m on my way to ER. I think I broke my foot.”
Saturday afternoon, she had been sailing with some other kids. Her legs were dangling over the side of the sailboat when another sailboat came alongside and slammed into the sailboat she was on. Her left foot got caught between the two boats.
So Sunday morning, I drove across the state. Megan was on crutches, in a lot of pain, and couldn’t keep anything down because she was ill from the codeine they’d given her for pain at the ER. We checked into a hotel and she slept for a few hours, then finally had a bite to eat. Yesterday morning, we got in to see an orthopedic doc.
Yes, her foot was broken – a metatarsal bone near the fourth toe. Her foot is still so swollen, though, that he recommended a heavily padded splint for a week, then a cast for a few weeks, then a boot. This means Megan will be graduating from college on crutches.
So, the signs were there, but I couldn’t read them. Maybe that’s the trickster part of some synchronicities. Hey, here’re the clues, you piece them together and make the appropriate warnings. There were two references to foot problems in a period of fourteen hours, one of those references from a Virgo having problems with her left foot. Symbolically, the break seems to be related to Megan’s feelings about graduating. As she put it, the only thing she has known since she was five years old is school. Now she’s going to graduate – and what happens then?
Our feet carry us forward in life. The left foot is ruled by the right brain, that part of the brain associated with creativity. The break may be associated with a break from what she has known all these years – school – and a whole new chapter opening for her. Then again, that may be too simple. There are undoubtedly other underlying issues that she keeps to herself.
But on the drive across the state, one phrase kept repeating itself in my head: pay attention to what you pay attention to.
In both of our books on synchronicity, we’ve written about the connection between animals and synchronicity. In 7 Secrets, the focus was on animals as messengers that relay particular information about our personal lives or our global situation. In Synchronicity and the Afterlife, our focus is on animals as vehicles of communication with the spirits of our loved ones – animals and human – who have passed on. Now I’m wondering how animals may symbolize our particular creative motif – the way we integrate creativity into our daily lives, how animals spark our imaginations, stir up our intuitions, and lead us into unexplored depths within ourselves.
When I was a kid, we lived in an oil camp in Maracaibo, Venezuela. It lies on the shoes of Lake Maracaibo, the largest lake in South America. Its basin contains large reserves of crude oil, which is what brought Rockefeller there in the early 1930s, to drill. Our house backed up to a vast expanse of rock that eventually led to the hospital. On weekends, friends and I would climb the fence to the hospital property and look for tadpoles in the pools of rainwater that accumulated in the rocks.
There were hundreds of these strange pools, small, self contained worlds where tadpoles no larger than commas swam about, eating I don’t know what. We scooped the tadpoles into jars and took them home and within a few days or weeks, we would have frogs jumping around in our back yards. That’s when my fascination with frogs began.
Over the years since, frogs have appeared at significant times in our lives, as we’ve written about here. But on another level, I’ve since realized that frogs are my creative motif. I started out writing fiction, murder mysteries, then psychic investigations of murders, and finally, with Esperanza, wrote a story that takes place partially in the afterlife. Along the way, my nonfiction reflects the kind of transformation that embodies the frog’s life cycle – dreams, , divination systems, animal totems, synchronicity. The underlying theme remains constant, a way inside the mysteries to explore the mysteries themselves.
Other writers we know have different creative motifs –hummingbird, bumblebee, hawk, dolphin. But since all of us are inherently creative, the motif is as varied as we are as individuals. Sometimes, our motif is an animal that makes our hearts melt. For one friend, it’s the bat. She’s crazy about bats, and when I look into the life cycle and strangeness of bats, I see this woman’s life and decisions reflected there. For other friends, it’s the spider, the scorpion, or even a mythological creature, like the phoenix. And these people come from all walks of life and work in many different fields, not just the so-called “creative” fields.
Animals as creative motifs change over time, depending on where we are in our lives, what we’re doing and what we need. Sometimes the creature that speaks to us most strongly is one that terrifies us – snake, roach, rat, you name it, you own it. Fear is as strong an attractor as love. In this story, one of the earliest we posted, a woman who is afraid of scorpions dreamed of one after surgery on her ovaries. By working creatively with the dream and the scorpion motif, she accelerated her healing.
Other times, a seemingly random encounter with a creature holds particular significance, as in this story that involved ladybugs. To recap: during a long weekend in the Muir Woods, a young couple had repeated experiences with hundreds of ladybugs and then saw a lone ladybug on a rock on a beach, an unlikely spot for this insect. They researched ladybugs and discovered they are symbolic of luck, but can also indicate a time when we’re pushing too hard for a wish to come true. They also found out that the ladybug’s life cycle is nine months, the exact time they had been together. The night they returned home, they broke off their relationship. By using the synchronicity creatively, they realized their relationship had run its course.
Recently, I’ve been noticing dragonflies everywhere – in the yard, outside my window, or as emblems on jewelry, clothes, decorative pillows. After starting this paragraph on dragonflies, for instance, we went to the gym and Whole Foods and I encountered two more dragonflies. One graced the front of a candle holder I was admiring and another was on a wine label. Those two occurred within minutes of each other. Dragonflies symbolize luck, creativity, messages and news, and discovering the Zen of the moment. I bought the wine! Beyond that, I’ll have to see what develops.
