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We posted this synchro about Bruce Springsteen when our blog was about a year old. And because it was fun, we’re posting it again!

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On Saturday, March 27, 2010, we posted a synchronicity involving Bruce Springsteen, where Rob was hoping to materialize The Boss in the gym while a Springsteen song was playing. (He does belong to the gym). However, as the song ended, Rob materialized his boss for his yoga classes, the owner of the gym – a bit of a trickster.

Today (three days later) we were at the gym and I noticed a bunch of kids and women congregating in one area. Then a man in workout clothes gathered a couple of kids in front of him while the women whipped out their cell phones and snapped pictures.

It’s The Boss, I thought. Now how do I take a picture without being really tacky?

I paused on the rowing machine and snapped a photo of him working on a bicep machine. I was too far away and the photo just looked like a bunch of machines in a gym.

At the time, Rob had run home to get his pay sheet for his yoga classes for the week and I kept hoping Springsteen wouldn’t leave before he returned. I moved to a different area in the gym, hoping to snap a better photo. But people kept walking between us and I was still too far away.

Rob returned and I said, “You just walked right past Springsteen.”

“What? Where?”

I tilted my head toward him. “I’m going over to ask him if I can take his photo. For the blog.”

“Naw, don’t do that. He’s working out.”

I thought about it for about five seconds, then went over. “Excuse me. May I intrude on your workout for a moment?”

“Sure.”

Soulful eyes, I’m thinking. “You’re the topic of a synchronicity,” I said.

“Synchronicity,” he repeats, looking amused.

“You know, meaningful coincidence?” And then I tell him about Rob’s experience and mention our book, 7 Secrets of Synchronicity. “May I take your photo for our blog?”

“Let me put on my shirt.”

I’m thinking, No, don’t do that. A friend of mine wants pictures of your biceps!And he got up from his machine, shrugged on his shirt, and I snapped the photo with my BlackBerry.

“So now I’m going to be on a synchronicity blog?” he asks.

“You are. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.”

So, three days after Rob’s post on whether he could materialize the boss, The Boss appeared.

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We no longer belong to that gym. Too bad. It was fun seeing him and feeling the energy whenever The Boss stopped by to work out.

What’s the science behind precognition?

In Larry Dossey’s book, The Power of Premontions, he points out that recent research shows that the hippocampus in the brain may be involved in premonitions. It makes sense. The hippocampus is the center of emotion, the autonomic nervous system, and memory.

Researchers at a neuroimaging center at University College London studied five patients with amnesia who had suffered brain infections that had damaged the hippocampus. They could recall the names of relatives, but not past events. When they and a control group were asked to visualize future scenarios, common events like visiting a beach or pub or meeting up with a friend and to describe what it would feel like, they couldn’t do it.

“The hippocampus-damaged subjects could not describe spatial relationships between objects that were part of the future scenario, and they said little about what they felt like, Dossey writes. “The discovery that the hippocampus is involved in visualizing the future may be important in understanding premonitions.”

This element may be key in understanding the science of precognition because people who experience them visualize possible future events. Dossey points out that a major difference is that the individual experiencing the premonition often experiences a certainty that the event will occur while the person who visualizes a future event considers it imaginary. “The brain may not respect this difference. It has a way of responding as if the imagined event is real.”

If, for instance, you’re lying in the dark and you’re the only person in the house and hear a noise that sounds like a door opening, like footsteps, it’s possible that you’re imagining it, but your brain doesn’t know that. It reacts as though the event is real and releases stress hormones that prepare you for the real thing.

Is the hippocampus in precognitives more active and ramped than the hippocampus in people who never feel premonitons?

Eleanor MacGuire, the same researcher who conducted the experiment with the amnesic patients, performed MRIs on sixteen London cab drivers and found that the rear region of their hoppocampuses were uniformly larger than that of the fifty individuals in the control group.

As Dossey explains, becoming a licensed cabbie in London isn’t easy. “Drivers have to learn ‘the knowledge,’ as it’s called, which includes up to twenty-five thousand street names and the locations of all the major tourist attractions. Cabbies must know not only how to get somewhere, but they must know the most direct route possible.” This “knowledge” usually takes three years of training. The longer a cabbie is on the job, the larger that region of the hippocampus became.

When the BBC News featured MacGuire’s discoveries, some cab drivers came forth and said their experiences as cab drivers made them better at everything from business decisions to mathematics. MacGuire is asgainst GPS devices in London cabs. “We believe this area of the brain increased…because of the huge amount of data they have to memorise. If they all start using GPS, that knowledge base will be less and possibly affect the brain changes we’re seeing.”

Dossey points out that GPS devices may not be the only premonition inhibitors in technology. Practically instantaneous information on everything from the weather to stocks to who will win the Super Bowl may inhibit our natural precog ability as well.

So what’s the solution? I, for one, don’t intend to unplug my iPhone, iPad or computer. But perhaps unplugging for brief periods every day and then spending a few minutes envisioning and visualizing the future on my own will help in the development of whatever precognitive ability I have.

HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY TO OUR AMERICAN FRIENDS!

Sometimes, synchronicities occur in pairs or in clusters of more than two and those synchros seem to be addressing some inner thing, at least for me. These pairings or clusters can happen with anything, but for me, perhaps because I’m a writer, they often happen with words.

The other day, I was driving to the hair salon I frequent. I was listening to an Abraham-Hicks CD that was talking about allowing whatever we desired into our lives, about yielding to it. At the exact moment that the word yielding was spoken on the CD, I saw a sign that said yield. And I knew that was the message.

According to dictionary.com,  yield means:

verb (used with object)

to give forth or produce by a natural process or in return for cultivation:

This farm yields enough fruit to meet all our needs.

to produce or furnish (payment, profit, or interest):

a trust fund that yields ten percent interest annually; That investment will yield a handsome return.

to give up, as to superior power or authority:

They yielded the fort to the enemy.

to give up or surrender (oneself):

He yielded himself to temptation.

to give up or over; relinquish or resign:

to yield the floor to the senator from Ohio.

to give as due or required:

to yield obedience to one’s teachers.

to cause; give rise to:

The play yielded only one good la

Notice that in each definition, you yield to something outside the self – your teachers, the senator from Ohio, the farm – or to something lesser than what you are – temptation, obedience.

But with synchros, it seems that we often don’t understand the meaning until the event happens. And sometimes, even when the event happens, we miss it. But a few hours after the synchro happened,  we were hired for a ghostwriting project. We object to some elements of the contract – like how many words have to be written before you see your first payment. But contracts aside, writing is what you do in solitude, unless you work in TV, where you are a cog in the collective wheel called team. Writing is really about yielding what you think you know about the craft and the business to what you don’t know about either one.

It’s about faith that you make the intuitive leap to wherever you need to be to wherever you want to be.

Sounds simple, right?

Yield: to allow.

Okay, universe. Message received!

When Bill Nye, ‘the science guy,’ debated a creationist at a public event, a reporter for the Internet site, Buzzfeed, asked 25 people in the crowd, who considered themselves creationists, to write a question that they would like to ask Bill Nye. Then the reporter took pics of them holding up their questions.

More than 5 million people have viewed that clever report, and the comments of readers mostly take the creationists to task as unscientific-minded individuals in need of re-education. Granted, most of the comments are not ones that would stump Nye. Here’s a short selection:

“Is it completely illogical that the earth was created mature? Ie. trees created with rings, Adam created as an adult.”

“How do you explain a sunset if there is no God?”

“Why have we found only 1 Lucy when we’ve found more than 1 of everything else.”

I love that one, but then there’s this one: “If we came from monkey, then why are there still monkeys?”

My own contribution might be a takeoff of that one: “If we came from monkey, then why are we still monkeys?”

So it’s easy to make fun. Some commenters even got into the grammar, ie. ‘their’ instead of ‘there,’ etc.

Recently, those same pics were reposted on Facebook and the science-oriented commenters took no hostages, so to speak. Several were so adamant in maintaining the factual reality of Darwinian evolution that they sounded, well, sort of like  fundamentalists. And anyone who didn’t agree was stupid or uneducated.

I entered the fray and commented that, hey, Darwinism is 200 years old and represents hardcore scientific materialism. I suggested that physical existence was derived from consciousness, not the other way around. Well, that didn’t go over well.

That made me a ‘creationist’ in the view of the pro-evolution commenters, who of course knew they are right. It seemed that any doubts about Darwin’s natural selection theory as the key mechanism for evolution meant the writer must be a Bible-thumpers.

Science is always evolving, making changes when old theories prove false. For example, medical students don’t spend much time studying the history of mainstream medicine, basically because much of it—like bleeding people with leeches—was just wrong. Nobel Prize winner Kary Mullis put it this way: “The history of science is that we are always wrong.” That’s a humorous way of saying that science—unlike fundamentalist beliefs about creation and evolution—is always evolving.

But wait, it seems there is one area of science that seems less than open to evolving. Yes, ironically, it’s the science of evolution.

Of course, the bottom line here is that the debate is really all about God. There is no God in Darwinism or mainstream science. Atheism rules; God is a myth.

My take is different. God is consciousness. We are all about consciousness. That’s our true essence, our heritage, our true selves. Hence, we are all God.

No doubt such ideas don’t win favor with either side of the controversy, but they do present an alternate view. But enough monkeying around.

Did they have it right all along?

This was their reaction to the Supreme Court’s June 26 ruling on gay marriage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=31&v=qLTdRqYwzXQ

When I first started studying astrology, I was still in my teens and had never heard the term synchronicity. I was simply curious about the deeper underpinnings of who I was and where I might be headed in my life. In those days, astrology software didn’t exist and I, who am math-challenged, spent hours struggling with the complicated algorithms just to draw up a single chart. Today, the astrology software I have on my phone and iPad do the calculations in seconds.

During my freshman year in college, I ran across Richard Wilhelm’s edition of The I Ching, a Chinese divination system that dates back thousands of years. It uses 64 hexagrams that are derived from the toss of coins. Carl Jung wrote the introduction and used the term synchronicity to explain why the system worked. I suddenly understood that synchronicity was the basis for astrology and every other divination system.

As Jung wrote in the introduction, whoever invented the I Ching believed the hexagram “was the exponent of the moment in which it was cast.” In other words, when you ask your question and toss the coins, the hexagram you receive is like a snapshot in time, making manifest the internal. In much the same way, in the moment when you drew your first breath, the stars and planets were at certain positions in the heavens and that pattern, your birth chart, is a snapshot in time – the blueprint of your potential.

“…synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance,” wrote Jung.

I was recently reminded of the connection between astrology and synchronicity when I looked at the calendar for this September. My latest astrology book, Unlocking the Secrets to  Scorpios is due to be published that month, but on September 17, Mercury – the planet that rules communication, writing, books – turns retrograde. Over the years, I’ve learned that a Mercury retro period isn’t a good time to make submissions, sign contracts – or release a book into the world. So I wrote the editor and asked for the exact pub date and explained about the Mercury retro.

He said the pub date is September 8, so we miss the retro by nine days. I erected a chart – essentially a natal chart for the book – for that date, at noon, in Salem, Mass, where the publisher is located. I chose noon because it’s the middle of the day. It’s likely the book will be shipped before then and shelved in bookstores on the 8^th. Now here’s the synchro. The ascendant or rising in a natal chart – the symbol to the left of that horizontal line that cuts the circle in half- is the point where you enter life. That symbol is for Scorpio. So, an astrology book about Scorpio will be entering its “life” when Scorpio is rising!

A skeptic might point out that Scorpio had a one in 12 chance of being on the horizon, so essentially this is simply a random coincidence. But if I had chosen, say, 1:00 p.m. as the time, the rising would be Sagittarius. If I’d chosen 7:00 a.m, the rising would be Virgo. But that isn’t what happened. Like I said, I selected noon because it’s the halfway point in the 24-hour day.

As Richard Tarnas noted in his phenomenal book, Cosmos & Psyche, Jung  didn’t regard the outer world as “merely a neutral background against which the human psyche pursued its isolated intrasubjective quest for meaning and purpose. Rather, all events, inner and outer, whether emanating from the human unconscious or from the larger matrix of the world, were recognized as sources of potential psychological and spiritual significance.” From this perspective, Tarnas said, “…all of nature supported and moved the human psyche towards a larger consciousness of purpose and meaning. Each moment in time possessed a certain tangible characters or quality which pervaded the various events taking place at that moment.”

So, whether you believe in astrology or not, there’s a curious synchronicity about the time I “randomly” chose for the birth time of the book’s release into the world. Scorpio is rising for a book all about Scorpios.

Here’s kind of an eerie synchro from Jane Clifford about a short journey she took through rural Wales, where she resides.

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I visited my dear friend and soul sister Liz, who is in the final stages of cancer and before leaving had a conversation with her son about hospice care. I usually visit Liz for two hours, but found myself leaving after an hour without knowing why.

On the way home through remote mountain country I stopped at the only shop there is on the journey home to buy a lighter. There I bumped into a friend I had not seen for many months, who told me she is turning her mountain property into a hospice!

I told her my friend was dying of cancer and I had just visited her. Bizarrely, she asked if I knew of the “Death cafe” in my local town, a place where those losing someone they love or in grief can meet and share experiences. I then realized if I had not cut short my visit  after an hour I would not have bumped into her and had the conversation.

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Apparently, there is a worldwide network of these death cafes. The one in the image at the top is in Chicago. It makes sense, I guess, since death is a worldwide phenom. They even have a web site.

Sorry, but I don’t care for the name. I find it more ghoulish, than comforting. A place you might visit on Halloween. How about something more transitional and upbeat, like “The Sa Ta Na Ma Cafe”—birth, life, death, rebirth. It’s one of my favorite chants. Of course, they might have to serve Indian food!

When my sister was pregnant with her oldest son, I awakened very early one morning with severe abdominal pain. (And I’m NOT an early riser!) At first, I thought I might have food poisoning or that I’d contracted some sort of virus. Other than the pain, though, I didn’t have any of the usual side effects of intestinal problems. I didn’t leap out of bed and rush into the bathroom! The pain eventually subsided and I fell back asleep.

Later that day, I received a call from my sister in Atlanta. Her son, Ardon, had come into the world early that morning, at around the same time I was experiencing the abdominal pain.

Coincidence? Hardly.

Neurologist Berthold Schwartz called this type of experience a telesomatic event, from words that mean “distant body.” It’s the sort of psychic experience in which emotions and feelings and intimate connections play an integral role.

In Larry Dossey’s 2009 book, The Power of Premonitions: How Knowing the Future Can Save Our Lives, he wrote, “The term is appropriate because the involved individuals behave as if they share a single body, even though separated by great distances and, in some cases, by time.”

This kind of experience is often reported by identical twins.

Dossey’s book includes several intriguing stories about telesomatic events. In one example, a mother was writing a letter to her daughter, who had recently left for college. For no apparent reason, her right hand suddenly started burning so badly she had to put down her pen. Less than an hour later, she received a call informing her that her daughter’s right hand had been severely burned by acid in a laboratory accident – and it had happened at about the same time that her own right had started burning.

Dossey believes these examples aren’t precognitive, but illustrate how emotions and empathy are often interwoven into precognition. He cites a letter he received from Larry Kincheloe, an obstetrician-gynecologist in Oklahoma. He’d been practicing for about four years when, one Saturday afternoon, he got a call from the hospital that one of his patients was in early labor. Since this was her first baby, he figured she wouldn’t deliver for many hours. Yet, while he was sweeping leaves, “he experienced an overwhelming feeling that he had to go to the hospital. He immediately called labor and delivery and was told by the nurse that everything was fine; his patient was only five centimeters dilated and delivery was not expected for several more hours.”

But Kincheloe couldn’t shake the feeling and started feeling an aching pain in the center of his chest. The more he tried to ignore it, the worse the sensation became. He finally leaped into his car and rushed to the hospital. The nurse was just walking out of the patient’s room when he arrived and gave him an odd look, curious about what he was doing there. He admitted he didn’t know. Just then, a cry came from the labor room.

“Anyone who has ever worked in labor and delivery knows there’s a certain tone in a woman’s voice when the baby’s head is on the perineum, nearing delivery. He rushed into the room in time to deliver a healthy infant.”

After this experience, Kincheloe began paying attention to his feelings and these days, he’s usually en route to the hospital before anyone calls. “This is now such a common occurrence among the labor and delivery staff that they tell the new nurses, ‘If you want Dr. Kincheloe, just think it and he will show up.’”

As Dossey points out, Kincheloe’s experiences illustrates “how physical sensations can alert us to something important about to happen – an early warning premonition system. Physical symptoms are like psychic cell phones uniting distant individuals.”

So I started thinking about this in relation to planetary enpaths,  individuals who experience physical symptoms  hours or sometimes days before a natural or man-made disaster.  My hope is that more research can be done on this phenomenon so that perhaps in a not so distant future they are able to fine tune their abilities. They won’t be able to stop quakes or man-made disasters, but perhaps they’ll be able to offer ample warning about the specific area and type of event so that injuries and deaths are prevented.

According to the BBC, the attendance at the summer solstice at Stonehenge this year may  number 40,000 or more. Even though I’m not crazy about crowds, I would love to be there!

According to efestivals in the UK, here’s the scoop:

Access

Access to the stones themselves is expected to be from around 7pm on Saturday 20th June until 8am on Sunday 21st June, with it being a Sunday these hours may be extended. The Stonehenge visitor centre closes at 3pm on Saturday for Summer Solstice. Last admissions will be at 1pm, and will be closed all day Sunday, reopening at 9am on Monday 22 June.

There’s likely to be casual entertainment from samba bands & drummers but no amplified music is allowed. When you visit Stonehenge for the Solstice, please remember it is a Sacred Place to many and should be respected.

Van loads of police have been present in the area in case of any trouble, but generally a jovial mood prevails. Few arrests have been made in previous years, mostly in relation to minor drug offences.

Facilities

Toilets and drinking water are available and welfare is provided by festival welfare services. There are normally one or two food and drink vans with reasonable prices but huge queues, all well away from the stones themselves.

Sunrise is at around 4:45am.

Conditions

Rules include no camping, no dogs, no fires or fireworks, no glass bottles, no large bags or rucksacks, and no climbing onto the stones. Please use the bags given free on arrival and take them out, filled with your litter, to the skips provided. Please respect the rules so that we’re all able to enjoy the solstice morning at Stonehenge for years to come.

Getting there

Where possible, please travel to Stonehenge using public transport. The local bus company, Wilts & Dorset, will be running a service from Salisbury railway and bus stations to Stonehenge over the Solstice period. Access to Stonehenge from the bus drop off point is through the National Trust farmland.

Global synchros are invariably intriguing, mystifying, and always prompt me to wonder about who is orchestrating this stuff. Religious types will say it’s evidence of the hand of God; skeptics says it’s random. I suspect the truth lies somewhere in between.

In 7 Secrets of Synchronicity, the seventh secret is about global synchros, when the universe seems to be addressing us as a collective. I was doing some research today and ran across some of my favorite global synchros. Some are dark tricksters that sneak up on you like monsters that hide in pockets of darkness in your bedroom.   Others are so obvious and in your face they feel offensive. And some, like the synchro that follows, address a societal issue that screams for repair:

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On July 20, 2012, a mass shooting during a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises left 12 dead and 58 injured in Aurora, Colorado. A gunman, dressed in tactical clothing, set off tear gas grenades and shot into the movie theater audience with several weapons. The sole suspect was James Eagan Holmes, who was arrested outside the cinema minutes later.

On December 14, 2012, another mass shooting occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School when 26-year-old Adam Lanza opened fire and killed 20 children and six adults in the village of Sandy Hook in Newtown, Connecticut. Before driving to the school, Lanza had killed his mother at their Newtown home. As first responders arrived, Lanza committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.

Two mass murders five months and 1,800 miles apart attracted widespread media attention and triggered emotional and heated debate about gun control. The synchronicities that link these two tragedies are documented on film. In The Dark Knight Rises, the name Sandy Hook is written on a map in the movie. As it to highlight the connection, the name Aurora also appears in the Batman movie. It can be seen on the top of a skyscraper in the backdrop of another scene.

Most recently, the shootings in Charleston, South Carolina have prompted a movement to remove the confederate flag from government buildings. This flag symbolizes the dark time of slavery in the U.S., when the south wasn’t just racist, but was blinded by hatred.

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The issue that begs repair is gun control. The second amendment to the Constitution dates back to 1791, when George Washington was prez and life in America was pretty much about trial and tribulation.

Google that year. The right to bear arms was undoubtedly necessary for survival. But it’s now more than two centuries later and life is not quite the same thing in the 21^st century as it was in the 18^th century. Yet, according to Pew Research, the number of Americans who own guns falls between 270 and 310 million. That’s a lot of weapons.

But as a gun owner said to me in the gym the other day, “I might give up my guns, but how can I be sure that the rest of the gun owners in this country will do the same?”

Is a fear-based society the best that we can be?

A few weeks back, a neighbor called the animal care and control and the local cops because our dog had barked at his dog. I mean, really? Dogs bark for the same reason that human beings speak. It communicates something. The animal care person was a short, intense woman who asked to see our dog’s rabies tag and said the complaint was that on Christmas Day, our Golden Retriever, Noah,  had run over to our neighbors’ yard and barked at his dog. All dogs must be leashed, even on the short trip from house to car.

“Hey,” Rob said. “That neighbor keeps his German Shepherd on a short leash in his garage, in conditions that are against the rules set by your agency.”

The woman rolled her eyes. “I know. He was just issued a warning. If he gets another complaint, there’s a fine.”

Later that day, Rob drove past the neighbor’s house and pointed at the poor dog, still tethered on a very short leash. An hour later, a cop showed up at our front door. He seemed really uncomfortable as he informed us that a neighbor had reported that Rob had driven by his place and shot him the finger.

At this point, I’m wondering if we’re living in The Matrix and just don’t know it yet. We explain the situation to the cop, about how Animal Care & Control had already stopped by earlier and how this neighbor is really the big crybaby in the neighborhood.

And then I say, “Do you think this guy (our neighbor) is armed?”

The cop looks at me with his big dark eyes. “Ma’am, I assume that everyone is armed.”

That statement, from a cop, pretty much sums up what’s wrong here. I understand that in some ways we are still a society tuned into the Wild West. But it seems to me that the second amendment has wreaked more havoc than it’s worth.