Whatever Happened to Empathy?

Posted on September 14, 2011 by Trish and Rob

One thing about election season in the U.S. is that it provides an inside look at what’s brewing in the darker pockets of America’s collective unconscious. And those dark pockets are profoundly troubling.

During the Republican debate on September 7, NBC host Brian Williams was addressing Governor Rick Perry about the number of executions in Texas: “Your state has executed 234 death row inmates, more than any other governor in modern times. Have you struggled to sleep at night with the idea that any one of those might have been innocent?”

The audience exploded with applause at the mention of the number of executions and again following Perry’s unabashed support for executing people.

“No, sir, I’ve never struggled with that at all. In the state of Texas, if you come into our state and you kill one of our children, you kill a police officer, you’re involved with another crime and you kill one of our citizens, you will face the ultimate justice in the state of Texas, and that is you will be executed.”

That phrase, ultimate justice, got the loudest ovation of the evening. Rob and I just looked at each other in disbelief. Gov.Perry, you might recall, preceded his campaign by sponsoring and leading a Christian prayer vigil in Houston’s Reliant Stadium. Hypocrisy anyone?

On September 12, during the CNN-hosted tea party debate, Wolf Blitzer posed a hypothetical situation to Ron Paul. You have a 30-year-old man who has a good job, but doesn’t have health insurance. He doesn’t want to pay the $200-$300 a month for major medical insurance. He gets sick, goes into coma, and needs extensive care. Who pays for his coverage?  “Are you saying society should just let him die?” Blitzer asked.

People in the audience shouted, “Yeah!”

Whatever happened to empathy and compassion? When did the hearts of Americans turn to stone?  How did a faction of this society become so cold-hearted that these questions  drew cheers?

Right now, fifty million Americans lacks health insurance and  1 in 6 Americans  – or 46 million – live in poverty.  And that lasts figure is undoubtedly much higher since the figures are based on the same standards used in the 1960s. According to the Census Bureau, the government safety-net programs – that the Republicans and tea party candidates hope to dismantle –  lifted nearly 25 million Americans out of poverty. Unemployment compensation put food on the table for 3.2 million Americans and Social Security kept 20.3 million out of poverty. Then there are Medicare and Medicaid, the medical insurance programs for the elderly and the poor that the Republicans hope to rip apart.

The real tragedy is that Perry, who is considered the GOP front runner, is actually too liberal for many of the tea party hard core believers. Can you just imagine this country if that group selects the Republican candidate and that person goes on to become president? Costa Rica, the country which has more American in residence than another other – except the U.S. of course – might get a new surge of ex-patriots.

And, hey Wolf Blitzer, where can you get major medical insurance for $200-$300 a month?

 

 

Posted in synchronicity | 21 Comments

A Spirit’s Ultimatum?

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Trish and Rob

This story initially appeared as a comment by Debra Page under another post. It’s such an unusual story that we brought it forward.

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Two summers ago, I was resting in the afternoon. Suddenly a man appeared in my room dressed in late 18th century clothes. He had shoulder length dark brown hair. He was very tanned. He said to me “Do something about the boys playing with the trees. Or I will.”

I was a bit shocked at being issued an ultimatum from a “spirit”. I said, “I will, but you have no right to harm them in anyway.” He disappeared. He was talking about the two teenaged boys who were living in our complex. They had been tearing off branches of 200 year old trees, climbing on fragile willows, and generally ripping up the landscape. The next day , our biggest, oldest willow  collapsed, split in two. We never saw the two boys again.

Historical research revealed that two men founded the area where our condos are built. They  named it “The Garden of Eden”. They loved the land here.  I don’t know if it was one of the two men who spoke to me, or a “spirit of the plants”. My husband and I refer to him as “The Caretaker.” He takes the proper care of the plants on the grounds here very seriously.

Posted in spirt communication, synchronicity | 24 Comments

What If…

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Trish and Rob

The other day, Rob, Megan and I were in the car, on our way home beneath a vast blue Florida sky.  So I asked one of those what if questions.

Me: “What if the sky suddenly filled with UFOs?”

Megan: “I’d lock myself in my room and seal up the house.”

Me: “But they might be friendly.”

Megan: “Yeah, they might be. But suppose they shot down beams of light and blew up the car in front of us?”

Me:  “Then we’d race home. So does it come down to the ET scenario – benevolent aliens – or the V scenario – the bad aliens?”

Rob, who hadn’t said anything to this point, jumped in. “There are so many possibilities. They might be from another planet, they might be us from the future, or they could be inter-dimensional beings. Or something else altogether. Whatever they are, that kind of event would change everything. It would be a global paradigm shift.”

Megan and I agreed.  Disclosure – by governments, by national security agencies, by whoever or whatever has maintained such a tight lid on the entire ET issue – would become irrelevant. If the leaders of countries announced that ETs were here, among us,  the impact wouldn’t be as powerful as millions of people seeing a sky filled with UFOs. That would be something that even skeptics couldn’t dispute.

I’ve often thought that popular culture is the collective unconscious of any society. The fastest way that ideas are spread, that they reach a tipping point, is through visual and social mediums – movies, TV, books, Facebook, Twitter. Was the black president in 24 the voice of the collective saying we were ready for a black president? Or was it a shade of precognition? Or both?

Take a look at the TVs and movies coming up during the rest of 2011:

Falling Skies, a Stephen Spielberg alien invasion for TV

Super 8: a Spielberg/JJ Abrams (Lost) alien invasion for movies

Battle: Los Angeles -pro–U.S.military invasion alien invasion

I Am Number Four – from James Frey’s YA novel, alien invasion

Cowboys and Aliens – a period piece, old West alien invasion movie

Monsters – romance/alien invasion

Skyline -human-tornado alien invasion

Men in Black III – the 3rd in the franchise

The Thing -prequel alien invasion

Battleship – childhood-toy alien invasion

Iron Sky – Nazis alien invasion

Then there are the classics like The X-Files, 4400, V,  Battlestar Galactica, all the Star Trek movies, Brother from Another Planet, Independence Day,  Paul, K-Pax, and, of course, ET. And there are  remakes of The Day the Earth Stood Still and War of the Worlds. I’ve probably left off a number of others.

The bottom line, though, is that in today’s world, the Internet provides us with more than just a cursory glimpse into Carl Jung’s collective unconscious. It IS the collective unconscious made conscious and visible. It’s as if TV, movies, books, and numerous websites are preparing us for something.

As we approached our neighborhood, Rob told Megan that when she was very small, she was afraid of aliens. Megan says she remembers coming into our room one night because she was scared about the aliens.

“Not your normal childhood fear,” I remarked.

“Uh, well, maybe that’s because you guys are weird. I mean, how many of my friends’ parents would be driving home and speculating about what we would do if the sky filled with UFOs?”

Properly humbled, Rob and I laughed and Megan leaped out of the car as though she couldn’t get away from us fast enough, but I could hear her chuckling.

 

 

Posted in synchronicity | 26 Comments

Book Review is spot on!

Posted on September 11, 2011 by Trish and Rob


Here’s an interesting British review of Synchronicity and the Other Side. We spotted it in a Google Alert.

 

 

Posted in synchronicity | 4 Comments

Did a little dog warn us about 9-11?

Posted on September 11, 2011 by Trish and Rob

In the summer of 2001, a woman holding a  small white dog stepped into an elevator at the Delray Racquet Club in Delray Beach, Florida. A man inside the elevator held it open for her. They were both headed to the same floor and she knew he lived down the hall.

As the elevator door closed, the man extended a hand toward the dog. A mistake. The little guy snatched the hand in its jaws and wouldn’t let go. The woman was terribly embarrassed. The dog never bit anyone before, she told the man as they reached their floor. He stormed down the hall holding his bleeding hand.

Fearful that the man was going to call animal control and that she would lose her dog, the woman decided to act quickly. She called the Delray police to report the incident herself.

Police officer Tom Quinlan answered the service call. “She was nervous and didn’t want to get her dog in trouble.” So Officer Quinlan went looking  for the man. “He answered the door,” Quinlin recalls. “He had his right hand wrapped up. But he said it was fine. He didn’t want to do anything about it.”

The woman was relieved. Her dog was safe. As the Palm Beach Post reported: “It seemed like one of those meaningless incident until weeks later, after a band of 19 suicide hijackers conducted a coordinated attack agains America on Sept. 11, 2001.”

In the aftermath, Quinlan found out the man bitten by the dog was none other than Mohamed Atta, the operational leader of the Al-Qaeda attack and the one who piloted the jetliner into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

In an interview with the Post, Quinlan said: “When I was there that day, I could see into the kitchen. There were four or five guys sitting around the kitchen table and they were looking at a blueprint. I thought they must have been engineers.”

We can only guess why the little dog bit Atta, but we like to think that she sensed the man was up to no good, that she should do something to warn her master. The dog couldn’t talk so she did what came natural. She chomped on Mohamed Atta’s hand. His action got the police involved, but that’s as far as it went.

Some days dogs more aware than people.

 

Posted in synchronicity | 38 Comments

Magic

Posted on September 10, 2011 by Trish and Rob

from Jung’s Red Book

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While Rob and Megan were in Minneapolis visiting his family, Nancy Pickard flew in for a visit from Kansas. Yes, it’s like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz dropping by, except that the lions and scarecrows and tin men on this visit aren’t separate beings. They are us.

I met Nancy in 1985, I think it was, at the first book signing I ever did, for my first novel. She was two novels ahead of me. She and her former husband used to spend part of their winters in Fort Lauderdale, where we lived at the time, so we saw each other frequently. Over the years, we moved, Megan was born, she got divorced, and we both kept on writing. When we got together, our discussions were always bottom line – metaphysics, the hows and whys of writing, and usually, a bunch of synchronicities.  This visit was no different.

The synchros started when we went to the dog park. The only other human of our usual dog group at the park today was Colleen, who lived in Kansas for two years. Nancy knew the town, questioned Colleen about it, and Colleen talked at great length about how much fun she’d had there, how great this town was after where she had lived in Michigan. As we were leaving the park, Nancy murmured, “Synchronicity!”

“Really? How?”

“That town? It’s where my next novel is located.  It’s a nothing little  town in southern Kansas and the way she described it explained exactly what I need to know for this book.”

What are the odds?

Later that evening, we went up to a favorite coffee spot that was celebrating its first anniversary with free food. Nancy was telling me about the week she spent at Antioch College, teaching at a writers’ workshop. Her focus was first paragraphs and first pages in novels and she used classics as her examples. Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Dickens. In each instance, the first paragraph or first page encompassed absolutes or contrasts that used words like first, last, best, worst, alive, dead…well, you get the idea.

And I suddenly realized that I although I had set up the absolutes/contrasts in the novel I’m working on, the third in the Esperanza series, I didn’t address it in the first graph or first page. And with that realization, I suddenly knew who my protagonist should be. I suddenly knew whose story this is. This point of view thing in a novel is so critical to how the story unfolds that unless you have it right from the get go, the book won’t work.

Think of Harry Potter. It has one perspective through all the books – Harry. We get to know the other characters, but it’s his story.

The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins’ brilliant trilogy, sticks to one perspective – that of Katniss, the female protagonist, and the stakes in this story are life or death.

In The Great Gatsby, probably F. Scott Fitzgerald’s best novel,  all the decadence and strangeness of the jazz age of the 1920s is captured through the eyes of Gatsby himself in the opening paragraphs.

Don’t take my word for it. Do what Nancy and I did. Start pulling your favorite novels off the shelves. Read the first paragraph or the first page. What are the stakes? The contrasts? The absolutes? Which words are used?

A novel, of course, is more than just an opening paragraph or first page. The author has to carry the idea and the characters through to the end. And the ending is just as important as the beginning.  It’s probably why author Jerzy Kosinski (The Painted Bird) used to write his endings first.

When Nancy finished her teaching at Antioch, she got a standing ovation, the first time that had ever happened in the history of this particular writers’ workshop. “One of those magical moments,” she said.

Ha, I thought.  It’s because she left-brained something that all novelists should keep in mind: give the browser who picks up your book a reason to buy it. Give them magic.

 

Posted in n pickard, synchronicity | 14 Comments

Before You Hit the Road

Posted on September 9, 2011 by Trish and Rob

This story comes from our friend, Melissa. She used to live down the street from us and babysat Megan on a few occasions. She now lives in NY with her husband, Jon, and has been jotting down her synchros. This one is related to travel – not the actual journey, but the preparations you make before you leave.

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On Wednesday, August 24…we were getting ready to fly out to LA that afternoon for our vacation.  I needed to print a couple of things for work before I left, so I proceeded.

My printer was giving me difficulty and then ended up needing an ink cartridge replacement — it was really out.  Usually I can tell it to print just black and keep going, this day the machine was just not having it.  When I reached into the box on the shelf that holds all the ink, I found the tickets to the Serge Gainsbourg tribute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serge_Gainsbourg concert at the Hollywood Bowl we were planning on attending in the very box.  We would have left without them otherwise.

I think that was a synchro, even if I had no idea! The universe really wanted us to go to that show — we saw lots of people (famous) just hanging out and my new favorite actor, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, actually performed.

Posted in synchronicity, travel | 9 Comments

Darth Vader and Dick Cheney

Posted on September 8, 2011 by Trish and Rob

One recent morning, Rob asked if I had read Maureen Dawd’s column abut Dick Cheney’s new book. When I said I hadn’t, he said, “Read it. The only believable part is at the end.”

I hadn’t had my coffee yet or even a bite of breakfast and frankly didn’t know if I could muster the courage to wade through any column about Cheney and his new memoir, In My Times.

In my mind, Cheney remains a Darth Vader, a man who actually ran the country for eight years and nearly drove the U.S. into oblivion. He was the guy who backed torture  (enhanced interrogation, Cheney called it) the invasion of Iraq, and the outing of  CIA agent Valerie Plame. And that’s just for starters. For all we know, he may have written George Bush’s speeches, in particular the ones about mushroom clouds and Armageddon and be afraid, be very afraid. About midway through the Bush years, I couldn’t even look at Cheney without feeling the urge to vomit.

Darth Vader, if you recall, wore that weird black helmet so that he could breathe. When stripped of that helmet, he looked like the pathetic, dying man he was, who could merely gasp for breath. Cheney, it turns out, is a man without a pulse.

In July of this year, he had heart surgery to implant a mechanical pump known as a ventricular assist device. It’s used in a small, but growing number of people whose heart failure is so severe that they would die in a few months without it. In other words, Cheney was at the heart failure stage where he was severely short of breath, could only walk a few steps, or was confined to a chair or bed for most of a given day. The pump doesn’t mimic the heart’s beat. There’s no beat at all.

I found a curious synchronicity in Cheney’s end of life surgery. A man who claims he would order torture again, who takes no responsibility for anything he did during his eight years as VP, who is responsible for the destruction of thousands of lives in Iraq, who lied to Colin Powell about WMDs in Iraq, who outed a CIA agent, has no pulse. No heart.  Interesting symbolism, right?

The second synchro is this: during the weeks that Cheney, apparently in a coma,  recuperated from his heart pump surgery, he claims he had a “prolonged dream” that he was in a villa in Italy. “It was in the countryside, a little north of Rome, and it really seemed I was there,” he wrote. “I can still describe the villa where I passed the time, the little stone paths I walked to get coffee or a batch of papers.”

That was the part Rob found believable. Me, too. His description has all the hallmarks of a near-death experience.

“So it must mean the universe forgave Cheney,” Rob remarked after I had read Dawd’s column and burst out laughing. “The guy was in an Italian villa, sipping cappuccinos every day.”

“Either it’s forgiveness or it’s all bullshit,” I replied.

“You think Cheney’s lying about that villa stuff?”

“No.  I mean, maybe what we believe is all wrong, that it’s all  BS, there’s no afterlife, no karma, no accountability, that Cheney and Bush and Wolfowitz and all the rest of them will be joining Cheney in the afterlife, in his Italian villa to drink cappuccinos and plan their next assault on freedom and truth.”

I run into this wall from time to time and promptly call Carol Bowman, for a reality check. Carol is the author of two books on reincarnation and a past-life therapist who has regressed thousands of people.  She’s convinced we live many lives, that we bring issues for one life into another, that we’re here to resolve and move forward.

But really, the bottom line is that we don’t know. Yes, there are signs, and it may be that synchronicity is the language of  this particular terrain. It may be the best language we have at this time and place, at this juncture between what is and what is to come. But is it incontrovertible scientific proof? Well, maybe.

In the meantime, as Maureen Dawd says, think about “Caesar and his cappuccino.”

Or, as Carol Bowman says, Believe.

 

Posted in cheney, past lives, synchronicity | 42 Comments

The Nature of Consciousness

Posted on September 7, 2011 by Trish and Rob

This documentary is part 1 of a planned 3 part film on the nature of consciousness. This segment is just under 16 minutes long and well worth a look! Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrKVQVr3p04&feature=player_embedded

 

Posted in synchronicity | 22 Comments

Synchros as Confirmations

Posted on September 6, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Old Town in Esperanza, Ecuador

This post is about the synchronicity of dates – as confirmation.

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In Esperanza, there’s a character named Wayra – Quechua for wind – who’s a shape shifter, the last of his kind. We meet him first as a black lab.  He has a long and convoluted history with Dominica, the ghost whose tribe terrorizes Esperanza.

In Ghost Key, the sequel, he’s pursuing Dominica, who has seized a young woman and the niece of the protagonist in the first book, and has fled Ecuador. In this book, Wayra learns he isn’t the last of his kind,  that there were seven tribes of shifters that originated in the “land of the twin suns.”  A man and a teenager are badly injured in the story and the only way Wayra can save them is to turn them into shifters so that the properties of shifter blood will heal them. He then turns the teenager’s mother so that the boy will never be alone, as Wayra was for so many centuries.

In the third book, The Twin Suns, the story opens with Wayra training his three new shifters in the particular skills and talents that shifters have – the healing properties of shifter blood, the shifter longevity, the skill to track anything, anywhere, and the ability to move through time. Everything he knows about being a shifter he had to learn on his own because the man who turned him took off and Wayra never saw him again.

Of these skills, time travel is the most problematic – and the most difficult to master. It took Wayra centuries.  He hopes his protégés can master it in decades. So he’s explaining how the time travel thing works and the teenager, Rocky, says he’s chosen a spot in time – Woodstock. He wants to see Jimi Hendrix performing at Woodstock.  Wayra asked Rocky for the date.

At that point, I had to Google it to make sure about the dates. I was writing this scene late  on the night of August 18. So I end up at Wikipedia and discover that Hendrix was scheduled to perform at Woodstock on August 18, 1969.  Wow, I thought, 42 years ago today. Synchro! I figured it meant I was on track with this story. Then I read on and discovered that due to weather and technical difficulties, Hendrix actually played on the morning of August 19.  I felt sort of deflated until I glanced at the time on my computer: 1:22, August 19. It turned out to be a synchronicity, after all.

 

 

Posted in creativity, esperanza, synchronicity | 12 Comments