After

Posted on March 7, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 Picasso

 When we lived in Venezuela, most of the people in the American community who were Catholic attended one particular church. It was a Venezuelan Catholic church, but the bulk of its congregation consisted of Americans who worked for the oil companies. The kids were remanded to catechism classes, which pretty much amounted to brainwashing sessions about the nature of god, the universe, and all that. God is everywhere, God is good, God’s word is gospel.And when you die, you’re going to be judged as hopeless, maybe salvageable, or yes, you made the grade.

I remember siting there in this class and thinking that it was all wrong, that what happened when we died was what we believed would happen. I remember thinking that I didn’t want to go to church anymore and confess sins that I made up and do penances for things I hadn’t done, and I mean, please, Eve tempted Adam with a silly apple?  Are you kidding me?

In all fairness to the Catholic church, I agreed with the previous pope about the immorality of the Iraq war. But that’s about the only area where I agree with the church. Most religions seems to have a vested interest in encouraging us to believe we’ve got one life to get it right, that some archangel or god will be sitting in judgment of what we have have done – or not done; what we have achieved – or not achieved; that some angry god may decide to sideline us somewhere till we tow the line.

Sounds like politicians, right? But if you look at the literature about near death experiences, you find something quite different from what most Christian  religions preach.Tonight, rewriting  the ultimate journey section in our book, here’s what I found – and mined:

Science discounts anecdotal evidence. If it’s not replicable in a laboratory, under controlled conditions, then sorry, folks, it doesn’t count. Physician and author Dean Radin mentions this  in The Conscious Universe, where he lumps apparitions, hauntings, OBEs, and NDEs under the same iffy category. “Because almost all the evidence for these phenomena comes from uncontrolled, spontaneous cases – and thus was necessarily collected as after-the-fact anecdotes rather than as controlled laboratory results – scientific confidence that what they appear to be is very poor.”
Really? And exactly how would a near-death journey be replicated under laboratory conditions? In the 1990 movie Flatliners, a group of medical students explore the world of NDEs by stopping their hearts – and then being revived. Many things go wrong, of course, it’s Hollywood. But each of them relive experience nightmarish episodes from childhood, relive the injustices and cruelties they’ve inflicted on others, but ultimately discover that something survives.

The irony of dismissing anecdotes as valid, as proof, is that anecdotes are the only things we have at this point in scientific explorations of NDEs. Ask Raymond Moody, whose 1975 book Life After Life  is a compilation of more than 100 stories from people who were declared clinically dead and were subsequently resuscitated. Moody’s book stamped the word near-death experience on the collective consciousness.

Two of the personal experiences that follow were left as comments on our blog. The last story was told to us by a friend. Each experiences is different, but there are certainly common factors.

In 1966, Connie gave  birth to her first baby, a son. She carried him for ten months before her “quack OB” decided to induce labor. The baby was fine, but large. Three days after he was born, she began to hemorrhage, to bleed out. “As the code team frantically tried to give me more blood and shoot epinephrine directly into my heart, blood came out of me faster than they could get it in. My body was dead. My heart ceased to beat. I flatlined. I don’t recall how I moved out of my body, but I vividly recall hovering near the ceiling and watching the doctors and nurses in their panic.”

Yet, she felt no awareness of her physical distress. “It was pure bliss. I  stopped looking at what was happening below me and felt myself gliding away from that room, farther and farther. I didn’t pass through a tunnel, exactly. It was more as if I stepped through a door or a gate onto a kind of brightly-lit path or beam that seemed to be tugging me towards the most brilliant spectrum of colors, indescribable. I was so eager to reach those colors. But a voice, coming from someone I didn’t see, very clearly said to me, Connie, you can’t stay here. You have a new little boy to raise, and two more little boys coming. You have to go back.” 

But Connie had no desire to go back.She was infused with such comfort and peace and joy that she felt angry that something seemed to be relentlessly pulling her back. She looked down and was in the room again, then very suddenly, with a severe jolt that seemed like an electrical shock, she  was back in that ravaged body.

“The code team was ecstatic, but I wasn’t. I spent thirty-one days in what was then an ICU unit. It was written in my chart that for six minutes I had flatlined, with no cerebral activity and no pulse. I was dead, not “nearly dead”, as the so-called experts call it. There are no words in any language that can adequately describe the experience of being dead.“

What’s especially interesting about her NDE is that the voice was right. She went on to have two more boys. Her sons are now grown, Connie spent years working as a hospice nurse and a medium. You can’t convince her that what she experienced was a blip in her synapases or some hallucinogenic tale her brain spun as it was deprived of oxygen.Even Jung, who had an NDE, described it as: “Everything that happened in time had been brought together into a concrete whole. Nothing was disturbed over time, nothing could be measured by temporal concepts.”

Vicki D drowned at the age of sixteen. “I drifted up and saw myself lying on the beach as they administered CPR. Someone was behind me and kept asking me different questions. I remember feeling so peaceful and warm until the voice behind me told me to look closer at the girl on the beach and I slowly realized she looked like me, and then BAM!

“I was on the beach looking up at the sky, water was coming out of everywhere including my eyes and ears and they were clamping an oxygen mask on me and I was in so much pain and gasping for breath.  One reason why I personally feel it was real and not a hallucination is that I still remember it like it just happened and this was 36 years ago.”

During the birth of her first child, Renie Wiley died. She remembers drifting up toward the ceiling and watching the doctors as they tried to resuscitate her. Certain information was available to her in that state and she realized that her primary doctor was going to be shipped off to Vietnam and that he wouldn’t return.

When he brought her back into the world of the living, she described what she had experienced. She told him what she’d seen for him and begged him not to volunteer. He was shocked. No one knew that he had applied as a medic in Vietnam. And she was also right. He was killed in Vietnam.

Posted in NDEs | 27 Comments

The Trickster and Foreclosures

Posted on March 6, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Several years back, at the tail end of the Bush era, before the economy collapsed, we suspected things were screwed up because of what was happening in our neighborhood.

The house directly across the street from us had been turned over to the previous owners’ so the place became a revolving door for – well, we weren’t sure who these people were. One week, a family would be living in the house, kids and dogs and volleyball nets. The next week, the family would be gone and two guys would be sitting in the open garage with their computers, and new tenants would show up.

We had them all, every skin color, every type of family unit, every family pet. We discovered the guys in the garage were using the neighbors’ internet, that the house was being rented out to the homeless, the disenfranchised, that it was sold in a deal where no one could prove ownership, not even the bank. Then, of course, came the big collapse, 2008 and the foreclosure mess. We all know how that shook out.

So the other day we found this wonderful trickster story that turns the tables on banks:

Patrick Rodgers bought his home for $186,000. But when he started receiving notices that he owed a home insurance premium for a $1 million dollar house, he wrote his bank three times about it. The bank didn’t answers. A Philadelphia homeowner started foreclosure proceedings on a Wells Fargo mortgage office after winning a rather strange legal judgement against the bank. So he decided to force his mortgage company to pay attention, ABC News reported.

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Rodgers discovered the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act, which requires mortgage companies to acknowledge written requests within 20 business days or face penalties. He took Wells Fargo to court and won a default judgment of $1,173 because the bank didn’t show up in court.  When the bank still failed to reply to his letters, he started foreclosure proceedings.

The Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act, passed in 1974 to protect borrowers, stipulates a standard complaint letter that can be sent to lenders. (For more information on RESPA, check out the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s website here.)

The contents of Wells Fargo Home Mortgage’s offices at 1341 North Delaware Avenue were scheduled for a March 4 sheriff’s sale. We’ll have to check for an update!

 

Posted in trickster, Uncategorized | 13 Comments

Dakota, the Malamute

Posted on March 5, 2011 by Trish and Rob

We’ve posted quite a few synchros about animals as messengers and a number of stories about how our pets often stick around after they have passed on. The spirits of animals used a variety of methods to communicate with us. We might hear the tap of claws against a floor, feel the weight of the pet at the foot of our bed, catch a certain scent in the air that we identify with that animal. They also come to us in dreams.

But the experience Jennifer L had with her dog is the first we’ve heard of with animal spirit communication.

“My Malamute, Dakota, was very wolfish but also very human and intuitive in amazing ways. I always felt she bridged the gap between the human world and the world of nature for me. She was my best friend for so many years and after she passed, I could feel her presence for a long time. Then I stopped feeling her around. That made me sad.

“About nine months after her death, I came home one day, and saw her paw print on the window! It was exactly what she loved to do: jump on the window to look out. Now whenever I miss her, I think of that and feel comforted.”

We’ve heard of initials on frosted or steamed windows, names and hand prints on mirrors and windows, but never a paw print!

Posted in animals as messengers | 7 Comments

Shape Shifters, Brujos, and the Djinn

Posted on March 4, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 

One a week, Rob and I head to the gym for the yoga class he teaches. I know that during yoga, your mind is supposed to be present, not wandering all over the place like mine does. But oh well, someday maybe I’ll master that part of it.
So tonight, while doing the warrior series of poses, I kept thinking that I really would really like to have a significant synchro in the next 24 hours. When we got home, I was poking around on some of my favorite websites and ran across the mention of a new book called The Vengeful Djinn.  I clicked on the site and started reading and knew I had found my synchro.
According to the website, the “djinn were the first inhabitants of this word, where they lived for thousands of years before humanity arrived.”  Uh-oh, I thought. This sounds a lot like the mythology of the shape shifters  in Esperanza and that I’m expanding in Ghost Key.  In the first novel, there is just one shape shifter, who first appears as a friendly black lab and later reveals himself as a man, Wayra (Quechua for wind). Born in 1162, he was changed at the age of 18 and has been alive ever since. He’s a force of good – in that sense, his history differs from the Djinn.
Wayra has long believed he is the last of his kind, that he was created in a laboratory on Lemuria, a legendary continent that predated Atlantis. In Ghost Key, he discovers the truth about shape shifters – that there were seven  tribes of shifters that originated in a place with twin suns, and who existed on the planet before humanity arrived. The shape shifters and a group of evolved souls called light chasers, have battled against brujos for millennia. Brujos have evolved in the afterlife to the point where they can seize the living and live out the mortal lives of their hosts (if they’re lucky) to experience all the pleasures of physical life. In Esperanza, they are led by Dominica, who was once Wayra’s lover.
Now, quoting from the djinn website: “Shape-shifting djinn may be responsible for many forms of paranormal phenomena and experience, such as UFOs, shadow people, ghosts, poltergeists, and demonic possession.  In such ways, they gain access to us that enables them to steal our life force and information about us, and to manipulate and use us without revealing their true form and purpose.”
This italicized section is eerily similar to what brujos like Dominica are about.
It fits into the fourth secret, The Creative,  in 7 Secrets of Synchronicity. It’s what happens when people tap into the collective pool of ideas at the same time. It happens in the arts, in science, with inventions. It’s  what physicist and writer F. David Peat referred to when he wrote: “The space between…is the space that lies between the observer and the observed; it is the space of the creative act that rings a poem or painting to life.”
So now I feel as if I’m on the right track, hooked into the momentum. And I not only got my synchro, but a new book for my list of must read.
Posted in 4th secret, brujos, creativity, djinn, shape shifters | 20 Comments

The Poughkeepsie Seer

Posted on March 3, 2011 by Trish and Rob
Andrew Jackson Davis

If you know much about American history, you’ve no doubt heard about Andrew Jackson, the fourteenth president. But you’ve probably never heard about American mystic named Andrew Jackson Davis. So here’s a history lesson from the mystical underground.

In  1844, at the age of 18, a shoemaker named Andrew Jackson Davis went into a state of semi-trance and wandered from his home in Poughkeepsie, New York. The next morning he found himself forty miles away in the mountains where he claimed he encountered the spirits of Swedish philosopher and mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg and the second-century Greek physician Claudius Gale.  He came away from the experience claiming he was mentally illuminated. Even though he never attended school, he began teaching and writing about supernatural powers, which he called human magnetism and electricity.

Davis, who became known as the Poughkeepsie Seer, also exhibited these powers. In 1845, he began to dictate, while in trance, a book entitled The Principles of Nature.  In the book, Davis made the following prediction regarding a new era of communication with the other side.

“It is a truth that spirits commune with one another while one is in the body and the other in the higher spheres—and this, too, when the person in the body is unconscious of the influx, and hence cannot be convinced of the fact; and this truth will ere long present itself in the form of a living demonstration. And the world will hail with delight the ushering in of that era when the interiors of men will be opened, and the spiritual communion will be established…”

In Davis’ notes, dated March 31, 1848, are the following words: “About daylight this morning a warm breathing passed over my face and I heard a voice, tender and strong, saying: ‘Brother, the good work has begun—behold a living demonstration is born.’ I was left wondering what could be meant by such a message.”

It wasn’t long before he realized the meaning of the message. March 31, 1848 was the day that  Maggie Fox and her two sisters established a means of communicating with the others side, which gave birth to Spiritualism, a movement that flourished in the waning decades of the Victorian Era.  Davis had experienced a synchronicity through his contact with the other side.

While synchronicity doesn’t always involve spirit contact, it can serve as connective tissue between the everyday world and the other side, the world of spirit. The more contact we make, the more the so-called ‘dead’ appear to be quite alive and willing to communicate.

Posted in Fox sisters, Poughkeepsie Seer | 16 Comments

Amanda Hocking

Posted on March 2, 2011 by Trish and Rob

OK, for a change of pace here – from owls to self-published e-book millionaire at the ripe old age of 26! She was rejected by major NY book publishers, but that didn’t stop her.

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Posted in amanda hocking, ebooks, writers | 24 Comments

The Owl, the Yoga Studio, and Techie Tools

Posted on March 1, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 Type in anything in Google, a word or phrase, a question, a random thought, and somewhere in the virtual universe,  Google will come up with something relevant. Sometimes, Google leads searchers right to this blog. The terms that people use to find their way here  range from the common to the bizarre.
For the last month or so, we’ve been getting hundreds of hits from people who are searching for phoenix or Illuminati. The phoenix search term has been fairly consistent since last fall; the Illuminati search term is more recent. On days when we have more than a thousand hits, we check sitemeter and, sure enough, these two search terms are the most common.

In doing so recently, we stumbled across one very strange and specific search question:  “What does it mean spiritually if an owl dies in front of your yoga studio?”  

Generally, search terms aren’t this specific, so this one caught our attention. We’ve done several posts on owls:  as messengers between the dead and the living, as figures in UFO sightings/abductions; as harbingers of a  deepening spirituality and wisdom. So we broke down the components. We don’t know what kind of owl it was – that in itself might be meaningful. But we know the owl was dying, it was happening in front of this individual’s yoga studio, and the person recognized the event as significant. Our initial reaction was that the owl dying where it did certainly doesn’t bode well for the survival of the yoga studio. Even though yoga is now recognized as a beneficial physical activity unconnected to any particular spiritual practice, it has been and still is often associated with spiritual practices and beliefs. And the individual asked about the spiritual significance.
On a personal level, it could mean this person is about to experience some sort of profound spiritual transformation. It could mean that someone close to this individual may be preparing to pass on. It might mean that the yoga studio won’t last much longer, that the current chapter in this person’s life is closing and he or she will move on to find some new spiritual practice. Or it may mean something else altogether.
Anyone else have other interpretations? Insights?
Posted in google, owls, yoga | 28 Comments

Sightings

Posted on February 28, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 
On Christmas Eve, we were sitting around our fire pit, warming our feet, and started talking about UFOs. I suddenly remembered two instances when I had a sighting.

The first must have been around 1963. I was in boarding school in Massachusetts, there because the high schools in Venezuela weren’t that great and the company my dad worked for paid for it. Six or seven of us were in a room on the ground floor of an old Victorian house that comprised one of the dorms. The room belonged to Holly Smith, who had inherited a ton of money when her parents had passed away a few years before. Holly was a trust fund kid – there seemed to a be a lot of them at this boarding school – and had a prime room with fantastic floor to ceiling windows that offered a panoramic view of the campus, the sky, the world. She paid extra  for that room, where she lived alone.

Many nights, some of us would sneak down to Holly’s room after lights out – yes, 10 PM was the magic hour for the dorm to go dark, arcane, I know – and sit around talking and gossiping and smoking cigarettes.So one night six or seven of us were sitting around in Holly’s room, doing our usual forbidden things, and I happened to look out one of her fabulous windows and saw a very strange light. It hovered, it was soundless, it pulsed red, yellow, blue.

“Hey, look,” I whispered to one of the other girls. “What the hell is that?”

“A plane,” she said.

“It’s not making any noise,” I said.

“We’re just not hearing any noise because it’s too far away.”

Except that it wasn’t far away. The light was close and now it was moving strangely, swiftly, zigzagging across the sky, growing larger, brighter, and changing colors. “That’s a UFO,” I said.

“No way,” said Holly.

The light zoomed in closer – not flush to the window or anything like that – but close enough for all of us to see that it wasn’t a plane, wasn’t a chopper, wasn’t like anything any of us had ever seen before. It performed – racing from right to left, moving diagonally, spinning, slowing, hovering again.

By then, I was practically hanging outside the window. I knew what I was seeing, I knew what this was, and so did everyone else in that room.Then the light shot off into the stratosphere at the speed of light.

The second sighting occurred on November 9, 1965, during a blackout to the Northeast coast of the U.S. The Life Magazine cover story depicts it well. The lights went out. I was a freshman in college, in Utica, New York, wedged between Schenectady and Syracuse. I was in my double room on the ground floor, had just come in from a class or dinner or something, and hit the button on my desk lamp – which didn’t come on. No electricity. It was already dark outside, and I made my way over to my bed and sat down and tried to remember where I had put my flashlight.

My room had long windows that slid open and looked out over the back campus where everything was totally black. But suddenly, the sky lit up and dozens of bright, orange objects cascaded through my vision. At first, I thought it was a meteor shower that was visible because of the blackout. But after a few moments of watching these objects, I knew they were the same thing I had seen two years earlier in Holly’s room. These were UFOs.

When I Googled blackout 1965, a wikipedia entry was one of the first URLs that came up. Here’s what it says:

On the same night, many UFO sightings were made in the same area. One occurred at 4:30 PM over Tidioute, Pennsylvania, and another at 5:22 PM between Syracuse Airport and Rochester, New York. They were described as fast, bright objects. During the blackout, a private pilot and a flight instructor both witnessed a bright fireball 50–100 ft in diameter, which quickly vanished. The fireball was observed over the Clay Power Station, which was originally said to be the source of the blackout before authorities reported the source of the surge to be at Beck. In New York City, UFOs with a strange glow were reported, and one of the pictures of the object taken was printed in Time Magazine. Before the Federal Power Commission‘s explanation, the Indianapolis Star, the Syracuse Herald-Journal, and the Associated Press all picked up the UFO reports.
 +++
So now, all these many years later, I’m left to marvel that I twice witnessed something inexplicable, that I intuitively know were UFOs, and that I got as close to them as I can personally accept. Years ago when Rob and I met, I defined my boundaries with UFO experiences. I didn’t want little grays running around in my bedroom, I didn’t want implants, I didn’t want terror.Forget pain and malaise. Give me magic, give me mystery, give me proof. Back then, as now, I’d like to meet a friendly ET, you know, the funny looking guy in the Spielberg movie who will take me on a wild bike ride through the light of the full moon.

Posted in 1965 update ny, UFO | 17 Comments

FOK NEWS CHANNEL

Posted on February 27, 2011 by Trish and Rob

It’s not a typo, but a play on FOX, America’s favorite source for made-up conspiracies tying liberals with right wing Muslim Brotherhood in a grand conspiracy. Go figure.

It’s the new blog by Keith Olbermann, the ousted host of MSNBC’s Countdown.

Fortunately, for us, in one of his first comments, he mentions a synchronicity. Well, he doesn’t use the word, but…he pointed out that Tea Party idol Rand Paul appeared on The David Letterman Show the same night that Dave featured Stupid Pet Tricks.

‘Was that coincidence?’ Keith asks, then says he doesn’t think so.

That means it was either planned, a matter of cause and effect. In other words, the producers and/or Dave said let’s put Rand up against Stupid Pet Tricks. Or it was a meaningful coincidence, a synchronicity. But I suppose if you’re a Tea Party supporter rather than a Dave or Keith fan, it’s meaningful in another way – not as a joke – but as evidence of a left-wing, socialist conspiracy.

When will the tea-baggers realize that, yes, it is socialism here – socialism for the rich– who are getting more and more wealthy thanks to government subsidies and tax cuts–not the middle class or poor. Abundance and prosperity consciousness is not about creating a society of haves and have-nots fighting over the pie, but spreading out the benefits for all to enjoy and prosper by. Enough spouting off.

We wish Keith well, and hope he soon starts using the term synchronicity when he encounters these meaningful coincidences.

Posted in Uncategorized | 19 Comments

The Singing Bowl and the Monk

Posted on February 27, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 In early December, I ordered a singing bowl for Rob from Butternut Squash– aka Jeri Gerard. We wrote about the bowl here. At the time, Jeri and I talked about what kind of bowl might be appropriate for Rob. She asked me some questions about him, then said she would try out some bowls for tones and pick one that she intuitively felt would fit him. She also told me that sometimes these ancient bowls are accompanied by the spirits of the monks who owned them. I thought that would be kind of cool, a Tibetan monk sharing our space.

So throughout late December and January, I’m waiting for this monk to show up. I don’t see anything. Rob uses the bowl at the end of the relaxation period in his yoga classes, a rich, sonorous sound that brings you gently out of a very relaxed space, back into the real world. When he starts his new meditation class next week, he’ll be using it then, too. But back at the homestead, I’m still waiting.
So one day we come home from the gym and Rob wants to know if, before we left,  I locked the French doors that open onto the back porch. Yup, sure did, I reply. “But they the doors were unlocked and open,” he says.
I’m thinking, Okay, maybe I didn’t lock the doors.  But I know I did. And on it goes like that for a couple of days – doors open that were locked, things missing that were in plain sight, a kind of trickster twist. For instance: The key that has been in the door of the cabana bathroom since we bought the house 11 years ago is now missing. We didn’t even known this key could be pulled out of the locks, that’s how permanent it seemed to us. But it’s gone.

It got me thinking. During the Christmas holidays, Rob and I were in the kitchen and I mentioned that I needed some cash and would head over to the bank the next day. Rob said I didn’t need to, he had cash, and held out a hundred dollar bill. My hands were full at that moment – opening cat food or dog food, or both – and I asked him to just set it down.

He put the bill on top of a container of raw almonds. I went about my business. When I turned around, the bill was gone. “Hey, Rob? Did you put that bill down?”
“On the almond container,” he calls from his office.
“It’s not there.”
“Of course it’s there.”
Uh, no, it isn’t. I search in the obvious places. I realize the almond container is close to the edge of the counter, that the trash can is right under it. I remove the bag and patiently proceed to remove every piece of gross garbage. No bill. I look in the silverware drawer, the cabinets, go through the garage again. Rob comes out and joins the search. We cast accusing looks at the cats, the dog.
The bill has yet to show up. That night I began to suspect the monk.
Rob thinks  I’m creating a colorful fiction with this monk, and maybe he’s right. I mean, think of the possibilities. But. The doors, the key, the bills, and something less obvious, a shift in energies. Our two female cats, who hate each other, don’t squabble much anymore.  The stray cat we feed strolls in and out of the house and none of the other cats care. I sleep better at night. Even when weird stuff happens – a spyware program taking over my computer, for example – I feel okay. I’m confident I’ll find a solution. Life feels good, exciting. I trust in a benevolent universe. It’s not that these things were untrue before, only that they are more true now. Something has changed.
So I wrote Jeri about the monk and she had a story about how, once upon a time,  a woman returned one of these singing bowls to her because it was inhabited by three spectral monks.  Well, we don’t have three monks. But I feel certain we have at least one and now I’m formally inviting him to step out of the shadows, to make himself known. 
Posted in jeri gerard, monks, singing bowls | 8 Comments