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During one of our recent radio shows, the person interviewing us asked about clusters of synchros and we got into a discussion about number clusters. One of the most interesting, which we wrote about in 2009, involves the number 23.

In Tangiers in the early 1960s, William Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, knew a certain Captain Clark who ran a ferry from Tangiers to Spain. Clark boasted that he’d been running the ferry for twenty-three years without incident. That same day, the ferry sank, killing Clark and everyone on board. That very evening, Burroughs was thinking about this gruesome event and turned on the radio and heard about the crash of a New York-Miami airplane. The plane was piloted by a Captain Clark. It was flight 23.

The synchronicity apparently shocked Burroughs enough so that he started compiling a list of synchros involving the number 23. In 1965, his friend and fellow author Robert Anton Wilson also began putting together a list of oddities about that number. One of the personal synchros he noted concerned his daughters. They were born on August 23 and February 23. Wilson wrote about the number for the Fortean Times in 1977. His article appeared in issue – yes, you guessed it! – number 23.

Here are some other synchros involving the number 23. In science and math:

During conception, each parent contributes 23 chromosome apiece to the fetus.

Euclid’s geometry has 23 axioms.

23 is the first prime number in which both digits are prime numbers and add up to another prime number.

It takes 23 seconds for blood to circulate through the human body.

Every 23rd wave that slams into a shore is twice as large as the average wave.

The first lunar landing was in the Sea of Tranquility, 23.63 degrees East. The second lunar landing was in the Ocean of Storms, 23.42 degrees West. The first two landings were Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 – 11+12=23.

The earth rotates completely every 23 hours, 56 minutes.

The axis of the plane Earth is 23.5 degrees.

The human biorhythm cycle is 23 days.
The pattern of DNA shows irregular connections at every 23rd section.

Humans have 23 vertebra running down the main part of their spines.

The Harmonic Convergence occurs every 23,000 years.

Geosynchronous orbit occurs at 23,000 miles above Earth’s surface.

September 23rd is the Fall equinox.

23+23+23=WWW, the World Wide Web (W being the 23rd letter of the alphabet)

In Hollywood and with movies and TV, the number also plays a role. Take X-Files. The production company, Ten-Thirteen -10+13 – adds up to 23. 10-13 is the birth date of creator Chris Carter. For fans of X-Files, remember that abandoned nuclear silo where a UFO is being held? 1013 is the number on the silo. In another episode, Mulder goes to the apartment of a recently deceased man and the number 23 is on the door.

In the popular TV series Lost, which builds on layers of synchronicity, there are a number of oddities involving 23:
Oceanic Flight 815 – 8+15=23
The gate number from which the flight departed
Jack’s seat on the flight was 23A
Rose and Bernard were sitting in row 23
Hurley stayed in a Sydney hotel on floor 23
The reward for turning Kate in: $23,000
One of the numbers in the sequence of 6 that won Hurley the lottery and opened the hatch: 4 8 15 16 23 42.
Even if the repetition of 23s in the series is intentional, it’s nonetheless the sort of weirdness that would have interested both Burroughs and Wilson.

In 2007, a Jim Carey movie, The Number 23, met with lukewarm reviews, but the premise is intriguing. Walter Sparrow, an amiable dogcatcher, becomes obsessed with a murder mystery novel that continually circles the number 23. The characters in the novel who become obsessed with the number invariably end up dead. Carey’s character believes the number parallels his own life and that the author is writing about him.

And all this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg with this number.

Here are a couple of quotes on synchronicity. The first is by Carl Jung and is something I (Rob) might say to skeptics on certain group sites, and then get called for ‘passive aggressive’ behavior by the web police. But sometimes you just have to say it.

This one speaks for itself!

Several years ago, we wrote a post about a fascinating synchronicity involving a teapot hidden in the bowels of an old house in Minneapolis. The man who lived in the house had purchased, on a whim,  a teapot in a second-hand store, even though he didn’t drink tea very often. The man, Gabe Carlson, was also a member of a group of people who had an odd hobby. They liked to explore old shuttered buildings—department stores, banks, whatever—places that were condemned and boarded up. Kind of a spooky past time. They weren’t ghost hunters, they were urban explorers of the past, of the old and abandoned.

So shortly after Gabe had purchased that teapot, he realized that he had never explored a hidden passage beneath the house where he lived. He lifted the hatch and with a flashlight crawled underneath the floor. He came across an old rotting blanket with a lump beneath it. He peeled away the blanket and found a teapot. He carried it out, cleaned it up, and was astonished to discover that the teapot was identical to the one he’d purchased in the second-hand store.

The event was a game-changer for him. He began studying synchronicity and altering his views about reality. We used his story in The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity. It’s a good one. But, amazingly, it’s continuing, and now Gabe is actually on the sidelines as a new player in the ‘teapot’ synchros is coming forward.

But before we talk about Jacqueline’s teapot synchronicity, we have to introduce a psychiatrist into the story. That’s Gibbs Williams, who has written a book on his view on synchronicity. Unlike many mainstream scientists, Gibbs accepts the reality of meaningful coincidences. He rejects the idea that these experiences are random and meaningless. However, his perspective is quite a bit different than mine and Trish’s, as I’ll explain.

Recently, on a synchronicity Facebook page, Gibbs analyzed Gabe’s teapot synchro. He asked Gabe a number of questions, then made his analysis of the experience. It’s lengthy and you can read it here. The bottom line is that, not surprisingly, Gabe’s experience conformed to Gibb’s take on synchronicity, which is a reductionist point of view.

Gibbs rejects the concept of a collective unconscious or an underlying reality where everything is connected, a realm that exists outside of the everyday world of cause and effect, what we refer to as the birthplace of synchronicity. He calls that a fantasy. From his perspective, it’s all about the personal subconscious.

Okay, fine. He can believe whatever he wants. His perspective is not the point here. That’s where Jacqueline come in. She responded to Gibbs’ assessment of the teapot syncho in this way:

“The point of synchs is that the inner and outer worlds become ‘as one’. Not really to be interpreted either as ‘you creating your reality’ or as an ‘external god’ throwing signs at you. The point of synchs as I experience them is that the inner/outer dichotomy is healed as well as inner conflicts being resolved.”

She no sooner started typing her comment when up came an ad for a business called The Magic Teapot. Was that a Facebook bot following her trail on the Internet and providing advertising links? Or was it a ‘random’ ad, in that case a clear synchro? She noted that she didn’t use the word teapot in her comment. And, when she followed up with another comment, using teapot several times, no such ad appeared. (See that post at the end. It’s kind of funny.) Furthermore, she says she has never seen a local ad on Facebook.

But, it didn’t stop there. It was as if the universe said to her, “Okay, you’re not sure about that synchro, then how about this one?” She went to the Magic Teapot site and the first thing she read was about a market in Jedburgh. Just prior to going on Facebook, she had looked up a website that was seeking volunteers to help out on a reforestation project, something she was interested in. To her surprise, a friend of hers was the director of the project…and the project is based in Jedburgh.

Skeptics, of course, can dismiss all of these incidents as mere coincidences or Facebook technology. But clearly they were meaningful to Jacqueline. As someone else noted, “Maybe the universe is using Facebook to teach us all a lesson here on how our thoughts create our reality. We are attracted to things that we think about, consciously and subconsciously. Intuition is the glue that gets birds of a feather to flock together. When something resonates with our heart, I think our souls send out flares or rockets and connects ourselves to common universal consciousness.” Well said, Michael Collett.

I can’t leave this out…Jacqueline’s attempt to produce a local ad about teapots.

TEAPOT ADVERTS IN MY LOCAL AREA PLEASE : > >>> HERE , SEND ME TEAPOT ADVERTS HERE .. MAGIC SUPER TEAPOT ADVERTS PLEASE JUST HERE >>>>>>>>>>> i AM WAITING MR FACEBOOK ROBOT SPIES .. SEND ME LINKS ON THIS PAGE TO TEAPOTS NOW!!!! PLEEEEEEEEEEEEASE ..

Several years back, Rob’s co-author for The Fog,  invited us to lunch to meet Kathy Doore.  I can’t remember where this lunch took place, but I do remember Kathy’s passion for Markawasi, Peru.

This mysterious place has been on my bucket list since that first lunch, when she gave us her book about Markawasi. Bruce and his wife, Lynn, signed up for a tour with Kathy to Peru. Unfortunately, health issues prevented her from leading that trip and it was postponed to the following year.

Kathy and I got to be friends. We would meet for lunch periodically at the Macaroni Grill, and she would invariably have coupons that would entitle us to a three-course meal for ten bucks apiece. These lunches usually lasted a couple of hours and were never trivial or superficial. She wasn’t the sort of person who talked about her manicure or her love life or even much about her personal life. For her, it was always about ideas concerning consciousness, the nature of reality, synchronicity, UFOs, the paranormal in all of its strange and often bewildering manifestations.

For me, a Gemini writer, Kathy was a treasure trove of speculations. She was right up my alley, a woman with whom I could talk about the weird and the strange and who sat there nodding, understanding, Yes, yes, I get it.

During one of our lunches, she told me about her experience in a fog on Lake Michigan, in which she talked to her dead father and experienced a time displacement that paralleled Gernon’s in the Bermuda Triangle years before. I had my iPad with me at that lunch and did her astrological chart. The transits looked great, with Jupiter expanding her work opportunities and Saturn bring in solidity, a foundation.

But as I was telling Kathy about these aspects in her chart, I remembered what my mentor, Renie Wiley, had told me years before about Jupiter transits. Yeah, this planet is about luck and expansion and all the good stuff. But often when it forms a positive angle to a particular planet, it offers the soul a way out.

“Wow, Trish, I hope all this stuff unfolds,” she said. “Because I’ve been feeling that I may be passing over, that what I came here to accomplish is done.”

One evening, we had Kathy over for dinner and she sailed in with the makings of a killer salad and Rob made some delectable dish and we drank wine and coffee and talked for hours. The only reason she left was because she had an aging cat to tend to.

The last time we saw her, it was at the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach, where she, Bruce and Lyn, Rob and I went ghost hunting.

This morning, March 5, we heard from Bruce Gernon that Kathy, who’d had emergency intestinal surgery late last fall, was in hospice. Lynn, Bruce’s wife, called us this evening to tell us that Kathy had died. She was 61. She was estranged from her brother, had a couple of distant cousins, a few close friends. She died alone in hospice, died as she had lived, a mystery, a riddle, a private woman, an enigma.

Her legacy is that she brought the mystery of Markawasi into western consciousness. She was proof that each of us has something unique to contribute to the larger collective of humanity.

I won’t say RIP to you, Kathy. You were, after all, a Do-er, and that won’t change in the afterlife. You’ll be galvanizing souls on the other side and your passion will forever prevail!

 Today, we received an email through the contact form on our blog from Graeme Heddle of Scotland about a remarkable synchro he had connected to Aliens in the Backyard and The Synchronicity Highway. I think his story illustrates how awareness of synchronicity often triggers the experience. Here’s Graeme’s synchro:

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Greetings from Scotland. Just thought I’d share this with you. I discovered your book Aliens In the Backyard on the ebook subscription service Scribd. I really enjoyed it so decided to have a look and see what other books of yours were available and started reading The Synchronicity Highway last night. It’s also very interesting, but I couldn’t really relate to the whole synchronicity thing as I can’t recall anything like that ever happening to me. That all changed today as I’m just back from a local crystal shop after enquiring about a crystal I was looking for that I’d forgotten the name of.

All I could remember was that it was from a meteorite that crashed into the earth somewhere in central Europe. The shopkeeper didn’t know what I was talking about, but said if I could remember the name he would be happy to source it for me. Of course when I got home I completely forgot to search for it on Google as intended. But I did pick up my iPad and continued reading the book.

Imagine my astonishment when I continued reading from where I’d left off, the section entitled Telepathy with Strangers, only to discover the story of Trish and the woman in the New Age book store both looking for MOLDAVITE, the very stone I was enquiring about today! (original post https://themysticalunderground.com/?p=15632

I’m gobsmacked, totally gobsmacked! I’d like to thank you both for tuning me into to synchronicity and I’m looking forward to reading many more of your books! Kindest regards, Graeme, Burntisland, Scotland

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I emailed Graeme and asked if we could use his story on our blog. He replied that he would be delighted if we did and added, “It gets weirder still.”

Just after I sent the email to you, my fiancée Ben emailed me to ask how I would feel about us getting these rings for our wedding. (According to the website, the ring is crafted from solid billet of Gibeon meteorite)

I couldn’t believe it! I’ve tried to explain to him what I’m so excited about,  but he’s not convinced, bring a die hard skeptic. He has promised to give your book a go though!

The Sanskrit term for psychic abilities is siddhi, and these extraordinary abilities were described more than two thousand years ago by a yogi scholar named Patanjali in a four-volume book called, The Yoga Sutras. The third book, called Vibhuti Pada, describes the siddhis in 56 sutras.

Patanjali attested that these abilitities, which he divided into primary, secondary and inferior siddhis, were best achieved through deep meditation. Mainstream science hasn’t done much to explore the validity of the connection between meditation and psychic ability. But a few researchers have taken up the challenge.

I write about that research in my new book, The Jewel in the Lotus: Meditation for Busy Minds. Here’s a brief excerpt about research related to the siddhis.

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Parapsychologist Dean Radin in his book, SUPERNORMAL: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities, writes: “From a scientific perspective, the mere existence of these phenomena, regardless of how weak or unreliable they may be, is astonishing. It tells us that the modern understanding of the human mind, which is based on the neurosciences and its approach to studying brain functions, has completely overlooked a fundamental aspect of our capacity and potentials.”

More recently, British psychologist Serena Roney-Dougal studied Tibetan Buddhist meditators in northeastern India with the intent to find out if increased levels of meditation result in increased psychic abilities. The participants relaxed for five minutes, then meditated for 15 minutes. Then they were asked to describe a photograph on Roney-Dougal’s laptop computer, and sketch it. Afterwards, they were shown four photos on the computer and asked to select the photo that was closest to the image they saw in their vision.

A variation of the procedure tested meditators’ abilities to see the future. They were asked to describe and draw a picture that would be randomly selected on the computer from a collection of twenty-five photos.

The result of the study revealed evidence that more experienced meditators performed at a higher level when it came to exhibiting psi abilities. When all the tests were compiled, the odds against chance were 8,500 to 1. While scientific studies of meditation have become popular and the results positive, mainstream researchers continue to shy away from studying the siddhis. It’s almost as if they are saying, If the siddhis exist, we don’t want to know about them.

Radin puts it this way: “The siddhis are a core component of most meditative traditions, so one would think that any serious research on this topic would have to include a discussion of the siddhis. But most haven’t, and the abyss is especially conspicuous in the neurosciences, where merely this topic in a positive tone is strictly forbidden.”

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Some of my meditation students have told me about their paranormal experiences during meditation, and usually they’ve been about contact with deceased loved ones.

Recently, I had a curious experience myself while meditating at the end of a yoga class at the studio where I teach. As I relaxed and moved into a meditative state, an image came to mind. I saw two people standing at the counter in the lobby of the yoga studio. One of them was massaging the shoulders and back of the other one. It seemed an odd thing to pick up. So as I left the class, I asked the instructor behind the counter, who was checking in students for the next class, if anyone had been giving another person a massage while standing at the counter. I told her I’d seen it during the final relaxation.

She smiled and said: “No, but I wish somebody would give me a massage.” I left it at that and headed home. I was still in the car when she texted me: “Hey, after you left a couple came in, and the guy rubbed his wife’s shoulders while she checked in. Does that count?”

“Sure,” I responded. “But who’s counting?”

Whether you call it a siddhi or a synchronicity, it was meaningful to me.

When I saw my first Star Trek years ago, somewhere in the late 1960s, I was totally captivated by Spock. Who was this guy, anyway? The pointy ears, the maddening logic, the mind meld thing he could do.

Spock, a human hybrid, was probably one of the most complex characters in the TV show and the subsequent movies, an individual uncomfortable with emotions, yet with a profound need to feel. I loved this guy. He was Kirk’s right hand guy, but often carried the show/movie. He was supposedly cold, distant, but there were times, especially in the Trek movies, where his humanity shone.

He died yesterday at the age of 83. Thank you, Spock. Thank you, Leonard, for who you portrayed and who you were. Live long and prosper! May the afterworld be enlivened and enriched by your presence.

This afternoon Rob and I turned into our neighborhood and saw the above car leaving our neighborhood. Google Earth. Wow, I thought. That would be a weird job to write about. I felt like telling Rob to stop so I could run over to the car and pound on the windows and ask the driver how she’d gotten the job and where could I apply?

The Google Earth history is here. Basically, it amounts to Google mapping every shadowy corner and surface on the planet through 3-D images taken from a street view, satellites, and any other means that are available. The last time I looked up our address on Google Earth, it showed a van in our driveway that we hadn’t owned for about five years, a van that actually had blown its engine on a trip to Atlanta when we were traveling with our teenage daughter, a bird, and a dog. Our front lawn in that photo was parched from months without rain.

I have mixed feelings about all this readily available information. On the one hand, I love the idea that no place on the planet is hidden, inaccessible, so remote that it exists in a time warp. On the other hand, I am appalled at just how much information is out there and that it’s not necessarily accurate. Anyone with a website, anyone who blogs, anyone with a Facebook or Twitter account or any kind of social media interaction is online, there, clickable.

And yet, don’t we all live a good portion of our lives in our own heads? Don’t we construct elaborate worlds inside our skulls, our consciousness? Aren’t we continually weaving the threads of our personal stories that even Google can’t fathom or document?

So, carry on car from Google Earth. Keep that camera humming. I’ll know the right version of my house when I see it. Our SUV sits alone in the driveway, the grass to the right is green and flourishing now because we’ve had rain and Rob has cut back on the bamboo and other trees and plants that blocked the sunlight. The Google camera may capture the tall avocado tree in our backyard – the one that produced so many avocados last year that we had to give them away. It might even capture one of our three mango trees, the branches blooming and promising a bumper crop this summer.

Ah, Google. In just 16 years, you have entered our lexicon in a way that few other words/concepts have. When someone asks me a question to which I don’t have an answer, my response is always the same: Google it. When I’m lost, creeped out, need a menu, a nearby restaurant, store, a particular book, product, the place with the cheapest gas, when I need anything at all, I Google it.

And I find something. It isn’t always the very thing I’m searching for, but if I click enough links, I eventually get to what I need.

So seeing that odd Google car leaving our neighborhood of perhaps thirty homes drove home the weird and sometimes uncomfortable reality of what we have become as a society, a planet, a collective people. Privacy is who you are inside your own head. Everything else is open to scrutiny, observation, judgment.

But in five years or ten, will Google or some other technology have found its way into your head? Your soul? Your essence? Is that technology already in development?

When I came across this metaphorical tale about life after death, I couldn’t pass it up. It also works as a window to open-mindedness and provides a glimpse of the holographic universe. As above, so below.

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In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other: “Do you believe in life after delivery?” The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.”

“Nonsense” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. What kind of life would that be?”