Hawk in the Library of Congress

Posted on January 26, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 Thanks to Rodney Small for bringing our attention to this one!

We know that birds often act as messengers and have done a number of posts on various kinds of birds that performed that service. Now here’s an odd one. A hawk – believed to be a Cooper’s Hawk – has taken refuge in the main reading room at the Library of Congress. It was first noticed on Wednesday, January 19, and is believed to have flown in through a broken window at the top of the 160-foot high dome and hasn’t found its way out. The article and the actual photo of the hawk.

So what can this hawk’s characteristics tell us about its message?

Well, they’re predators, skillful flyers, and can often be seen around backyard feeders, looking for an easy meal. According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, they catch their prey with their feet and squeeze it to death. They hold their prey away from their bodies until it’s dead. They’ve also been known to hold their prey underwater until they die. These hawks are now seen in urban and suburban areas; some studies indicate they are more common in these areas than in their natural habitats of forests.

Life is difficult for the male hawks. They tend to be smaller physically than the females and are also somewhat submissive to them (well, maybe the size difference has something to do with that!), The male hawks build the nests and provide all the food for the female and young for 90 days, until the young can survive on their own.

Hawk, of course, is a term used for people who are pro-war. But since this hawk is in the library of congress, the place where all books published in the U.S. are housed, then perhaps its message suggests that we should look to the history books when making decisions about war. It also might address the predatory nature of politics – both domestic and international – and the divisiveness generally in congress. The fact that the hawk hasn’t found a way out of the library, that you’ve got librarians with binoculars watching it, trying to identify definitively what sort of hawk it is, is also intriguing. Might it suggest that if you ignore history, you’re doomed to repeat it?

Perhaps the hawk is telling us that the old paradigm –  the U.S. as the world’s cop, corporate takeover of democracy, hidden and predatory agendas – is trapped within itself, caught in a loop of its own making. Honestly, if you look at someone like Michelle Bachman, who is positioning herself as a supposedly viable presidential candidate in 2012, then we may be on an irreversible course toward the sort of destruction 2012 doomsayers have been talking about. Bachman is worse than Palin. She isn’t just a balloon head, as one commentator remarked this evening, she’s the kind of person who would promote laws based on her revisionist history.  Just this week she said the founding fathers abolished slavery. Wrong. They were slave owners.

As for Obama’s state of the union speech tonight, Iraq and Afghanistan merited a sentence or so each. No talk about how these two wars are sucking our economy dry.

But hey, maybe it’s also true that I’m making too big a deal out of this. Maybe the hawk just took a wrong turn.

Posted in animals as messengers, hawks, library of congress | 19 Comments

A Telepathy Experiment with Rupert Sheldrake

Posted on January 25, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Telepathy: mind to mind communication. In the larger Jungian picture, telepathy falls under the umbrella of synchronicity.  We’ve written about this phenomenon before, as in Jung and the Sympathy for All Things,  and have also written about British biologist Rupert Sheldrake.

Now this visionary biologist is conducting a telepathy experiment open to anyone who lives in the U.S. Basically, it goes like this: you need a cell or land line, people to whom you’re close who also have a land line or cell and live in the U.S. Further instructions are provided after you register and log in. Rob and I are game. Here’s the you tube video that explains telephone telepathy according to Sheldrake. Here’s the link for joining up.

Posted in experiment, Sheldrake, telepathy | 22 Comments

2 Dark Trickster Tales

Posted on January 24, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Kind of an imposing-looking guy, isn’t he? This is Robert Todd Lincoln, oldest son of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln. About a year before his father was assassinated, Robert was nearly killed on a railroad platform in Jersey City, New Jersey.

An impatient crowd on the platform shoved Robert toward the path of a departing train. An alert bystander saw what was happening, dropped his luggage  and, with his ticket clenched between his teeth, grabbed Robert by the collar of his overcoat and yanked him to safety.

When Robert turned around to thank the man who had rescued him, he recognized him. He was one of the era’s most famous actors – Edwin Booth, the brother of John Wilkes Booth, who would assassinate Abraham Lincoln, Robert’s dad, on April 14, 1865.

Okay, so what are the odds on THAT one? It’s almost as if the the hand of destiny tapped the two families on the shoulders that day, linking them together forever.

Here’s another bizarro tale.

Recognize this young man? He’s British blue rock star Keith Relf, the lead signer and harmonica player for the Yardbirds, a group famous in the sixties.His fellow Yardbirds were more famous than he was – Jeff Beck, for instance, was voted by Rolling Stone  as the 14th most influential guitarists of all time out of a list of one hundred;  Jimmy Page went on to found Led Zeppelin and was ranked as the ninth most influential guitarist of all time; and Eric Clapton came in fourth in Rolling Stone’s  list.

In 1976, long after the Yardbirds broke up, Relf and his sister planned to tour together during the summer. Relf spent the spring practicing. But on May 14, his eight-year-old son found him motionless in his London home, guitar still in his hand. His cause of death? Electrocution by his own guitar.
Dark trickster tales, for sure. 
Posted in death and the trickster | 25 Comments

Ecuador releases its UFO files

Posted on January 24, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Ecuador has released all of its UFO files. There’s some amazing footage on this video, clear shots of UFOs over the cities of Quito and Guayaquil, as well as UFOs over erupting volcanoes in Ecuador. Disclosure seems to be happening more rapidly in other countries. When is the U.S. going to follow?

Posted in disclosure, ecuador, UFOs | 21 Comments

Synchros, Olbermann, and Comcast

Posted on January 23, 2011 by Trish and Rob

At some point in the nightmare of the Bush years, we tuned in one night to MSNBC and listened to Countdown and Keith Olbermann, and knew this show spoke to us.

Here was a man talking about the very things that Rob and I discussed over breakfast. He railed against Bush’s invasion of Iraq and told us why he was against it. He exposed the hypocrisy in Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina, dissed John Yoo’s validation for waterboarding and torture at Gitmo, poked fun at Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck and the other brain-dead humans at Fox News. He was Keith, this guy whom we invited into our home every night, night after night, and his show became the point in our evenings when we broke away from our own work to find out what was going on in the world.

We used to watch the evening news with Brian Williams. He fell by the wayside. Within a few months,  Countdown was it, the voice of what we intuited about where things were headed in the U.S., in the world.  Keith was  the voice of integrity, the only voice in cable or network news that told it like it was, laid it out, A to Z. Yes, sometimes he was vitriolic, he was brutal. But so what? The other side plays that way 24/7. In some strange sense, Keith Olbermann became the voice for a segment of the American public that still believes in the Bill of Rights and in conducting political business in a humane and genuine way.

During the health care spectacle in Congress, Keith talked about the free clinics coming to various American cities, and asked for donations. His request raised millions for that clinics. When Governor Brewer of Arizona denied insurance coverage to 99 individuals in her state who need transplants, Keith invited some of these patients onto his show and asked for donations to a transplant organization. That raised money, too. When his parents were dying, he shared these details with us as well and always managed to tie in the personal stuff with the larger global issues. This guy, Keith, became a man who wasn’t just talking to us, but was sitting in our living rooms with us,  part of the family nightly ritual.

Keith never mentioned the word  synchronicity, but he highlighted coincidences,  he recognized them, and sometimes they were related to sports.

Tonight (January 22, 2011), after Rob and I got home from an Otmar Lieber concert, I went onto Huffington Post and discovered Olbermann had just done his last show. I felt sickened, depressed, until I remembered that just a few days ago, the FCC had approved  Comcast’s buyout of MSNBC. When I’d heard about the merger, my first thought was that Keith would be the first on the chopping block. I hoped I was just being pessimistic. The irony here is that Keith’s show was MSNBC’s top show, with 1.1 million viewers. What kind of business model is that, Comcast? Well, it isn’t a business model. It’s politics.

So let’s look at Comcast. From a CBS news site, we learn that “taking over NBC will transform the company into a media powerhouse. NBC Universal owns the NBC and Telemundo broadcast networks; 26 local TV stations; popular cable channels including CNBC, Bravo and Oxygen; the Universal Pictures movie studio and theme parks; and a roughly 30 stake in Hulu.com, which distributes NBC and other broadcast programming online.” The merger, according to this article, is one of the largest in a generation. Comcast worked hard for this merger. It spent nearly $100 million, hired a hundred lobbyists who were former government employees, and made campaign contributions to three-fourths of all members of the 111th congress.
What did all this money achieve?  According to Joe Torres, Free press senior advisor, government and external affairs, it achieved a great deal for them. “The new Comcast-NBC will have the market power and every incentive to favor its own content over its competitors’, destroying the emerging online video market and stifling cable competition. This new behemoth will control one out of every five TV viewing hours. While the FCC placed several conditions on the merger that are beneficial to the public, there’s no way to sugarcoat the harmful impact this deal will cause the public by giving Comcast unprecedented power over our media landscape.”

 In practical terms, what’s this merger mean? Well, in addition to banishing Olbermann, one of the true progressive voices in the media, Josh Silver, writing in the Huffington Post, noted, “Culmination of the deal, combined with the FCC’s recent, loophole-ridden “Net Neutrality” rules, sets the table for Comcast to turn the Internet into cable television, where it has the ability to speed up its content, slow down or block its competitors such as Netflix, and hike the rates for its programming and services. We’ll all end up paying more — whether you’re a Comcast subscriber or not.”  Even worse, as Silver noted, “The merger further squeezes what’s left of independent, diverse voices from the television dial, laying waste to President Barack Obama’s promise to reign in runaway media consolidation.”

So that’s where it all stands right now. We can certainly expect the other internet providers to follow Comcast’s lead.

Keith Olbermann  will undoubtedly land on his feet and it would be great to see him on HBO, where his 1.1 million viewers would follow him any day of the week.

Posted in comcast, keith olbermann, nbc | 14 Comments

Synchro project allows public access

Posted on January 22, 2011 by Trish and Rob

We welcome the Synchro Project to the real world with their new blog. The project is an academic adventure exploring synchronicity as a science.That’s a challenging proposition since mainstream science considers meaningful coincidence an oxymoron. They have their work cut out for them. Their efforts, of course, will be lumped with parapsychology, where thousands of successful experiments over decades of research have not made a dent in the current scientific paradigm, which rejects telepathy, precognition, remote viewing or clairvoyance, and other aspects of psychic abilities.

The project has held two symposiums, the latest at the Yale Divinity School. Unfortunately,  until now, the project has appeared somewhat elitist. The public was not allowed to attend the fall 2010 gathering of minds, according to their pre-symposium information. As professional writers, we’re well aware of the difficulties in getting attention to newly published books in a extremely competitive field. (Fifteen hundred books are published every day, including self-published ones.) So when we were invited to the symposium, we found it more than slightly odd that the public was banned.

Possibly, the thought was that a public forum would make the subject appear untenable for true academic research. Maybe they will explain their reasoning on their blog. Combining that lack of public access with the cost involved, and the fact that we are not members of the academic world – elite or otherwise – led us to decide not to attend.

We’re pleased that the Syncho Project’s blog will allow anyone to see what they’re doing and possibly contribute.  Let them know that synchronicity happens to everyone.

Posted in Uncategorized | 11 Comments

A synchro or a lie

Posted on January 22, 2011 by Trish and Rob

If a politician or his staff tells a story that sounds like a synchronicity, it might be one. Of course, considering the source, it might be a lie. It’s not too far fetched to say that telling falsehoods is a mainstay in the world of politics. If you don’t have the facts on your side, make them up.

With that in mind, here’s a ‘synchronicity’ from the Tweets of Rick Scott, the new super conservative governor of Florida. A former health care executive who spent $50 million of his estimated $218 million fortune on his campaign, Scott had never Tweeted on Twitter until his younger staff member set up an event on Jan. 20.

Scott answered 19 questions in 140 characters or less. No space to ramble to avoid answering a question. Most of them were softball queries, such as ‘How do you like Tallahassee (Florida’s state capital)?’

Then along came question 19: ‘So what are you gunna fire everyone and hire Walmart employees? Yeah, thats great…you jackass.’

Scott never answered. The governor’s office said his computer froze before he could reply. Ah, a synchronicity. The session with the word jackass. Too bad about that.

But maybe that’s not what happened. Maybe it was Scott who froze, then walked away. The question was later removed from  Scott’s Twitter stream by someone from the Harris Media PR firm that handled Scott’s social media during his campaign. A spokesman for Scott told the Palm Beach Post that deleting the comment was ‘inappropriate.’ Yeah, right.

C’mon. Why lie? Just say the question was inappropriate and removed. But no that would be too straightforward.

Posted in fl, politics, rick scott | 13 Comments

Twin Suns

Posted on January 21, 2011 by Trish and Rob

In the late 1980s, before Megan was born, my parents, Rob and I went over to my sister’s place for dinner. The house actually belonged to her husband – now ex-hubby – and during dinner, we talked about past-life hypnotic regression. My sister’s husband  thought it was all pretty silly, but my dad was intrigued and wanted to try it. I think my mother went along with it because of my dad. So after dinner, Rob, my parents, and I went into another room.
My parents and I stretched out on the rug and, with Rob as our hypnotist, went through a deep relaxation. Rob’s voice is pitch perfect for this, quiet yet firm, and he led us through ever deeper levels of relaxation. At some point – I’m not sure when – my mother left, but my dad and I didn’t move.
Rob took us up to a door  we were supposed to walk through, into a past life that held relevance to this life. I don’t recall walking through the door, but suddenly found myself  on a dusty road, walking alongside  wagons with heavy wooden wheels, beneath the glare of twin suns. I remember how the brilliant light practically washed out my shadow on the ground. I remember how dry the air smelled. I remembered thinking, OK, this is weird, where am I? And then I came out of it.
My dad was slowly sitting up. I looked at Rob. “How long?”
“Maybe thirty minutes,” he said.
“I saw myself walking along a road with wooden wagons,” my dad suddenly said. “And there were twin suns in the sky.”
I nearly swallowed my tongue. “I saw twin suns too!”
And just then, someone entered the room and we were interrupted and then joined the others. That scenario has always haunted me. How could my dad and I see the same images? And where was this place with the twin suns? I figured it was some other civilization in a parallel universe or on another planet and that maybe I had lived there.
I also thought it would make an interesting premise for a novel.  And that’s why I’m skeptical about images like this. It might be my muse, working overtime.
But this evening, I was writing a section in the sequel to Esperanza about twin suns. I took a break and clicked on huffington post  and saw an article entitled Two Suns? The photo you see when you click the link is exactly what I saw the night of the hypnosis. Even their positions in the sky are identical to what I saw.  Synchro, right? But then it gets stranger.
Those twins suns depicted in the article are how our sky would look to us if Betelgeuse, which is losing mass, went super-nova. This is when a star, you know, collapses. According to Dr. Brad Carter, Senior Lecturer of Physics at the University of Southern Queensland, the sky would look like this for several weeks. And during this time, there might not be any darkness. No night-time. 
“The Star Wars-esque scenario could happen by 2012,” Carter says. Or maybe a lot farther out in time than that. As the article points out, this explosion could cause a neutron star, which is what’s created when the core of a massive star is compressed during a supernova,  or “could also result in the formation of a black hole 1300 light years from Earth.”
So now I can’t help but wonder if this is the scenario my dad and I saw – not a past life, but a future event. But where in the future?
Carter says that if Betelgeuse went nova, earth would be deluged with particles that hold all but one percent of the nova’s released energy. These particles would pass through the earth and our bodies without any harm whatsoever. Here’s the original article.
Other than the synchronicity, which holds meaning for me, I’m not sure what to make of this. But this is the first time in the 20 plus years since that regression that I’ve seen an image that’s identical to what I remember. The fact that I find the article within minutes of working on a scene in which twin suns are mentioned, suggests there’s something to it. And clusters of 2s may be important. It’ll be interesting to see where this one leads or whether a synchro has simply come full circle.
Posted in betelgeuse, dad, twin suns | 24 Comments

Global Consciousness Project

Posted on January 20, 2011 by Trish and Rob

See that dot on the right hand side of the blog? We put it up a few days ago. It’s called the Global Consciousness Project dot. Through dozens of random number generators situated worldwide, as depicted in this map, the idea is that “as mind moves, so does matter.” (Dean Radin). It seems to be a kind of oracle and has a history that goes back to 1998, so there’s statistical evidence.

 Hours before the first plane hit the World Trade Center, these random number generators went a bit nuts, the button turned red. If you read what it says on the website about the colors, you know that red indicates a variance in the statistical analysis of these generators: an event that mass consciousness registers, sometimes before the event occurs, it seems. The same thing happened during the original I.J. Simpson trial. And shortly before the Tucson shootings. In other words, these generators get it.

So yesterday, I go onto the blog and see that the dot is turning from green to orange and then to bright red. “Hey, Rob,” I call out. “Something’s happening somewhere. The dot’s turning red.” I’m really kind of joking about this, asking if he’s got any idea what the red is about.

“That’s interesting,” he says. “But what’s it mean?”

I don’t have a clue. A couple of hours later, we go to the gym. Rob is teaching a private yoga class for the owners, so I go to work out. As I step onto the treadmill, I glance at one of the TVs, this one tuned to Fox  News. Just on principal, I look away and check out the guy who is watching the channel so avidly. I feel like telling him he’s being brainwashed. I resist the urge, pat self on back, and then realize that the news tip is legit – there has been a shooting at an L.S. high school.

I immediately think of the red dot. No way, I think.

By the time I check the news again, a few hours later, there has been a 7.3 quake in Pakistan.

By that evening, Sergeant Shriver, the Kennedy brother-in-law who started the Peace Corps, is dead.

Right now, writing this, I’m leaning toward this GCP dot as a kind of oracle. And if it’s an oracle, then it qualifies as synchronicity. And it it’s synchronicity, then I intend to pay close attention to it. The drawbacks, however, seem pretty daunting. When the dot changes colors, I can see how the collective consciousness is changing. I can monitor the psyche of the planet! And yet… where are the specifics?

When that dot turns red, I don’t have specifics. There’s nothing here that screams, Hey, check shootings! Check Pakistan. Check the obituaries for the famous. Once this dot can at least give me hints about specifics, then I will start keeping a written record.  For now, I watch it and monitor the news and thank the researchers who have inadvertently proven Radin to be right: “As mind moves, so does matter.” Even without those specifics, this strange little dot  could be a valuable tool.

Posted in GCP | 57 Comments

Four Synchros from Shropshire

Posted on January 19, 2011 by Trish and Rob

I was thinking that we hadn’t heard from Jane Clifford of Wales for awhile, but the next time I looked at e-mail there she was. As usual, Jane had an interesting synchro, one involving a book. She was writing from Candy Valley in Shropshire where, for the past week, she has been exploring Bronze Age trails wending through a magical woods.
***

My daughter brought a Chinese girl home from London for Christmas, her family lives in Bejing. Meanwhile, a non-Chinese friend gave me a book for Christmas s about a Chinese girl living in London whose family resides in Bejing. I had asked our Chinese visitor if she knew of Quan Lin the Goddess of Mercy, who is worshipped and petitioned by the main character  in the novel. Yes, she knew of Quan Lin. Life imitates art.
***

I checked back to see when Jane had last written, and discovered three more synchros she’d sent. Here they are:

 That’s a good one, but brief. So I checked back and found three others that Jane had sent a couple of weeks earlier.

1) Talking to a friend on the phone I said the word grapes as she was reaching for one.

2) I was about to ring my son and his girlfriend, Sophie, to ask if they were going for a long walk sometime this week. I wanted to drop off Sophie’s red setter, who is staying temporarily. As I reached for the phone it rang. It  was Sophie saying they were going for a long beach walk and could they pick up the dog! It was a grey, foggy, misty day; so most unexpected!

3) This is a BIG one! My son, his girlfriend, Sophie, myself & a young male friend of mine all decided to throw the I Ching coins for a reading this afternnon. We each took turn, first throwing then reading the hexagram out loud. My son got the same hexagram as my friend, and I got the same hexagram as Sophie  with the same changing lines, too! What exactly are the mathamatical odds of that happening?

Posted in life imitates art, Shropshire | 5 Comments