The Dream, the Dolphins, the Exhibit

Posted on May 13, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 

Dolphins at Dolphins Plus, Key Largo

As part of our daughter’s senior year thesis as an art major, she was required to do a series of paintings based on a particular theme, with a written paper that backed up the thesis. She knew she wanted her theme to involve dolphins, but floundered for months for a theme that spoke to her.

In January, she interned for a month at a dolphin research facility in Key Largo. Dolphins’ Plus has 13 captive dolphins and Megan came to know each of them well. During this month, she had a vivid dream about the fragmented ways in which people see each other and when she woke, realized she could use this fragmentation theme with dolphins.

Throughout the year, we had seen bits and pieces of Megan’s paintings. Back in February or March, we walked into her studio – a chaotic display of photos that had been sliced into precise strips, which she was using for her watercolors. I never understood how she kept these strips in any order and couldn’t imagine what the end result might be.  But I delighted in watching her paint.

Earlier in the year, she showed us two of the paintings, which we posted here. We had a better grasp then of where she was headed with these paintings, but were still puzzled by what she was doing.

Megan, like the other art majors, had to create a statement for her thesis. Hers evolved over the months into its final form, a direct result of her dream:

“The art for my thesis represents dolphins in a manner that challenges the joyous, free image of dolphins in order to show the flaws in stereotypes. The dolphins are presented in a large scale format, with an anthropomorphic eye that inverts the gaze of the viewer. The negative space delineated from the fragmentation of the images creates the illusion of a grid system of bars or windows which persuades viewers to wonder: who is in captivity, the dolphin or the human? Through the use of these stylistic techniques, viewers are influenced to redefine their perspective of dolphins by looking past the stereotype to the real thing.”

The public opening of the exhibit is on May 19, in a gallery downtown. But on May 12, we were treated to the private exhibit, where her paintings were displayed on the walls of the art department and the exhibit was open to everyone on campus. It was astonishing to witness the evolution of that dream Megan had months ago to the final paintings, and to see them displayed in a place that begs for art work. We’ve posted just a selection of them here:

This one has been sold!


Seen close up, you’re fooled into thinking you’re seeing water, a mountain, an island, or something else. Then you step back, and you see it, the dolphin…

This one is  surreal. I think of it as the atavistic dolphin, something that evolved in the early eons of this mammal’s existence.

The process of creativity always astonishes me. Whether we’re trying to figure out the theme for an art thesis or the plot of a novel or how to live our lives in  ways that are more emotionally and spiritually fulfilling, our creativity enables us to tap into the deeper reservoirs of our beings. If we can dream it, imagine it, feel it, believe in it, then we can manifest it.

Way to go, Megger!

Posted in dolphins | 26 Comments

Gotta Share!

Posted on May 12, 2011 by Trish and Rob

This one is sure to make you laugh out loud.

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments

The Shift is about to Hit the Fan

Posted on May 11, 2011 by Trish and Rob

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in movies, quantum physics, Uncategorized | 30 Comments

The $3,000,000,000 War

Posted on May 10, 2011 by Trish and Rob

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?

  • Universal health care for all Americans. This would be real health care,  not the truncated bill that passed last year, which hands the insurance industry 40 million uninsured Americans who are now mandated to buy insurance. Think Medicare for all, but a vastly improved Medicare. In other words, remove profit from health care.
  • Jobs.  With unemployment still above 10% in some states, hovering at a national average close to 9 %, this is a no brainer.
  • Improve infrastructure – you know, bridges, roads, the stuff over which we travel daily
  • Alternative fuels. It has always puzzled me that Florida, particularly South Florida, where the sun shines most of the year, doesn’t have a more robust solar panel program. Oh, you see panels here, but they are outrageously expensive, and Florida Power and Light, the primary supplier of power in this area, has a powerful lobbying voice.
  • A more robust Medicaid program for the poor and disadvantaged.
  • More educational funding. In the Republican alternative universe, public schools should be private. Everyone should have to pay to educate their kids from kindergarten through 12th grade.
  • College and graduate school grants. Many of our daughter’s friends are going to be graduating in debt to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. The job market sucks for these kids. So let’s say you’re at the low end of the debt scale – twenty or thirty grand in debt. How long is it going to take you to pay off that debt if you’re making forty grand a year?
  • Help for the homeless. Most homeless shelters are run by churches and other private organizations.  Why? Because the government doesn’t seem to care. Behind the gas station whee we buy our Cuban coffee a couple of times a week, there’s a homeless community of tents, chairs, pots and pans. While I’m inside buying the coffee, Rob walks our dog back there and the despair that permeates the air causes Noah to take off in the opposite direction. What will happen to these people during the hurricane season, when temps soar into the humid 90s, the mosquitoes move in, and the rain floods their little campsite?

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?

 

 

 

Posted in political, politicians, war | 27 Comments

The Tiger Synchro

Posted on May 9, 2011 by Trish and Rob

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?!

 

 

Posted in I Ching | 14 Comments

Like attracts Like

Posted on May 8, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 

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.

Posted in discrimination, law of attraction | 7 Comments

Happy Mother’s Day

Posted on May 8, 2011 by Trish and Rob

May your day be filled with beauty and joy!

Posted in mother's day, Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Vibration and Brian Greene’s The Hidden Reality

Posted on May 6, 2011 by Trish and Rob

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.

Posted in hidden reality, Seth | 23 Comments

Cluster Synchro

Posted on May 5, 2011 by Trish and Rob

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.

 

Posted in bush, global, Hitler, obama | 10 Comments

A Synchro Pun

Posted on May 4, 2011 by Trish and Rob

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.”

Posted in puns | 12 Comments