An Indiana Jones Synchro

Posted on April 27, 2019 by Trish and Rob

 

It’s been many years since I wrote seven Indiana Jones novels – actually eight including an unpublished one. But I still receive e-mails from hard-core Indy fans, who haven’t abandoned the legendary archaeologist and his adventures. 

These fans often send me books to sign or try to get a copy of Indiana Jones and The Staff of Kings, the unpublished one. I can send them the digital cover—created by a fan/artist—but not the book.

Probably the most avid fan of my Indy novels is Dale Dassel who visits the blog here regularly and knows all about synchronicity. Like many of the Indy fans, he collects stuff related to the movies. Ie. not only the hat, the whip, the jacket, but the Grail Cup and the Grail Diary, and more. And these folks don’t go for cheap knock-offs, they seek out the crafts people who made the originals, and who will for a price make reproductions using the same material and the same craftsmanship.

They talk about these collectibles in a fan forum called IndyGear. The reason I mention this is that Dale recently spotted a synchronicity in one of the IndyGear posts in a thread devoted to ‘Who makes the best Grail replicas?’

Here it is.

Nitz146 wrote: I just received RestauraJones Grail cup in the mail a few moments ago and it is truly an amazing piece of work. I highly recommend. It’s funny because I was watching the Last Crusade, and it was the part where Indy was in the Grail Temple, about to start looking for the Grail. At that same time, my doorbell rang and it was the mailman with RestauraJones’ delivery. Couldn’t have timed it better.

Dale quickly enlightened Nitz146 with this:

“That’s called synchronicity, which is the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that is meaningful to the observer and which can’t be explained by cause and effect. Or: meaningful coincidence. The term was coined by Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, who first wrote about it in 1949, in his introduction to Richard Wilhelm’s edition of the I Ching. It’s a fascinating phenomenon that can provide guidance, confirmation, warning, and infuses life with a sense of wonder and mystery. 

“Rob MacGregor and his wife Trish maintain a blog devoted to the subject: https://themysticalunderground.com/.”

Well done, Dale. I couldn’t have said it better! And how cool that the guy watching Indy hunt for the Grail Cup gets a knock on his door and the mailman is delivering the Grail Cup. Wow! Especially interesting when you consider that the Grail Cup is associated with unusual powers, especially the regeneration of life. Indy lives!

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The 3 Aliens

Posted on April 25, 2019 by Trish and Rob

 

In 2002, my friend Nancy Pickard and I attended a workshop that author Eric Pearl offered in Alabama. His book, The Reconnection, had intrigued both of us. Pearl, a chiropractor, had written the book after he noticed that some of his patients were being cured of ailments that he hadn’t treated.

He realized he had developed a healing method that involved certain hand movements over a patient’s body but never touched the person. It’s more complex than that, but you get the idea. This healing came through Pearl from some other source and it involved opening the chakras, then reconnecting them. At the point where Nancy and I attended a workshop, Pearl had just started teaching his healings methods. If I recall correctly, there were about 200 people at the workshop, many of them chiropractors or massage therapists.

One of the activities was to select a partner – a stranger – and work on each other using a particular hand motion. I think there were chiropractic tables set up that we used. I didn’t know the woman with whom I paired up. But when she began doing these hand motions over my body, I felt…well, something. Even as it was happening, it was difficult to describe. My body felt thicker, then thinner, then it seemed to vibrate.

Suddenly, a beam of light shot out of my forehead – the third eye chakra – and went straight through the ceiling of the auditorium where we were – and out into the sky. At the top of this beam of light, three aliens huddled around the top of the beam, watching me, watching everything. They looked like Grays, but not as menacing or frightening as the Grays that have become archetypal over the years. Their reminded me of curious puppies seeing a lizard or a squirrel for the first time.

My only thought was, WTF? What’s going on? The aliens sort of smiled and whispered among themselves, then that was it. The beam of light and the three aliens vanished.
Afterward, Pearl asked us to describe what we’d seen or experienced. My hand shot into the air. “Three aliens,” I said when he called on me, and I described what they had been doing.

He didn’t seem surprised. “Anyone else see those three?”

I think one other person in the group had seen something similar.

I decided to sign up for a reconnection with Vicki High, Pearl’s assistant. She and I met in her room, I stretched out on a chiropractic table, and she explained what was going to happen. She was going to open all my chakras, then the next morning she would reconnect them in some particular way so that I would be better than before. I can’t remember all the details – hey, it was 18 years ago – but I think the idea here was to reconnect the six chakras on my body to the seventh and eighth above the top of my skull.

The experience was visceral. As my chakras were opened, I felt a lot of conflicting emotions. Suddenly, in the middle of all this, Vicki got a phone call that she answered. During the call, she started crying. I remember thinking, Uh-oh, this can’t be good. My chakras are wide open.

She apologized for the interruption, finished up, and asked me to return in the morning to close my chakras. That night, I developed a really bad case of iritis – inflammation of the iris. It’s painful, your eye aches and burns and “cries.” I’d experienced this periodically over the years, but never this bad. It didn’t disappear when she reconnected me the next morning. By the time I returned to Florida, my eye was really bad. The symbolism of Vicki crying and my “crying” eye didn’t escape me.

I went to my ophthalmologist when I got home. I didn’t tell him about any of this – Hey, Doc, I saw three aliens! He prescribed prednisone drops and since then, I’ve never been without them. I always wondered, though, about those three aliens. I didn’t see them again until three years later.

In 2004, Hurricane Francis battered South Florida for 15 hours. At one point late into the night, I lay awake in the house, everyone around me sound asleep – Rob, Megan, our dusky conure, the cats, the dog – and listened to the rain pounding the roof, the shutters, and heard the skylights vibrating violently in the wind. And suddenly, that beam of light shot out of my forehead again, pierced the roof, and there at the top, were those curious three aliens.

I started laughing. A kind of peace washed through me and I knew the house would be okay, it would make it through this storm, and I promptly fell asleep. When I woke a few hours later, Francis had moved on, the house still stood, the skylights hadn’t leaked.
That was 15 years ago and I haven’t seen them since. But I’d like to. I want to know what they are, what they mean, how that beam of light enables them to peer into this dimension, into my world.

P.S. There’s a double synchro associated with this story that came up today. Nancy Pickard, whom I haven’t heard from in a while, emailed me a link to a Washington Post piece about how the Navy has decided to take pilot sightings of UFOs seriously. Here’s the link:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2019/04/24/how-angry-pilots-got-navy-stop-dismissing-ufo-sightings/?utm_term=.4b1cb9f4f1ac&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1

 

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The Source of Synchronicity

Posted on April 22, 2019 by Trish and Rob

Whenever we’re on Coast to Coast, host George Noory seems to find an overall theme that defines the show. For our latest appearance on February 7, the theme came in the form of a question: what’s the source of synchronicity?

It’s one of those questions that has different answers, depending on your cultural, spiritual, and ethnic background as well as your beliefs about the way life works. Some of us believe synchronicity has a divine source. The book God Winks explores this in depth. Richard Tarnas, in his brilliant book Cosmos and Psyche, seems to lean toward the power of the unconscious to mold reality. Deirdre Bair, in her biography, Jung, doesn’t conclude; she reports. In the law of attraction, synchronicity is what you attract according to your beliefs thoughts, emotions.

Quantum physics might provide one possible answer through the work of David Bohm. He theorized that our external reality – the explicate order – is the result of an unfolding from the implicate or enfolded order, that births everything in the universe, even space and time. In this construct, then, synchronicity exists at the border between the two, so it’s our most accessible path to knowledge and insight.

But Noory always came back to his central question: where does it come from? Who or what orchestrates events that often involve incredible odds?

Over the years, Rob and I have debated this question, argued about it, come up with various explanations, none of which really suffice. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe the source of synchronicity is ultimately unknowable. If you’re a religious type, then it’s God, winking at you, signaling all systems go. If you’re not religious, maybe the quantum idea fits. Or the power of the psyche, emotions, beliefs.

But perhaps the truth is that reality is much different than what we’ve been taught. Maybe we really do live in a kind of matrix of illusion, where consensus reality stifles self-expression, so we become the deniers, the skeptics, the naysayers. That route is easier, less encumbered, we don’t have to think about stuff. No dots to connect.

But this approach falls short, too.

“Maybe synchronicity is the umbrella for paranormal events that occur spontaneously.” Rob said at one point after the show. “In that scenario, remote-viewing wouldn’t fall under the synchronicity umbrella because it’s controlled, consciously directed.” But if that’s true, why does divination in the Jungian scheme of things, fall under synchronicity? Every divination system, from the tarot to tea leaves to astrology and the I Ching, is a consciously directed activity where you ask a question and the system you’re using provides an answer.

In the end, we’re back at ground zero. Where does synchronicity come from? We would love to hear your thoughts!

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The Burning of Notre Dame and Planetary Empaths

Posted on April 20, 2019 by Trish and Rob

 

Sheila Joshi is a blogging friend, and a former clinical psychologist. On the day that Notre Dame burned, I received an email from her about planetary empath symptoms she’d experienced concerning the fire.

“I don’t consider myself a planetary empath and have never wanted to be one.  I pick up way too much from other people as it is.  But I may have picked up on the burning of Notre Dame and you’re kind of a collection hub for this kind of thing.

“Notre Dame burned on Monday, 15 April 2019.  On Thursday, April 11, I felt tremendously anxious in the morning and cried.  All of Friday and the morning of Saturday was hard.  But on Saturday evening I went into extreme anxiety that lasted all through Sunday. Sunday night I could not sleep more than a few minutes at a time for a couple of hours.  I got up Monday morning, wrecked. All of this was surprising and baffling, since I had been doing much better than this, and there was no apparent cause.

Saturday night, I dreamed that a French woman told me that another French woman had told her that when I was a teenager, I had waited in the Louvre Museum in Paris for my mother to pick me up.  She never showed up and I spent the night in the Louvre alone, hiding, and it had been traumatic.  In the dream, I didn’t remember this happening, and of course it never really did.  But the only time I was in Paris was when I was a teenager.  I was lucky enough to have seen Notre Dame then, in 1977.

“A week before Monday, on Sunday, April 7, I got a bee in my bonnet to look at the painting by David of The Coronation of Napoleon, in which Napoleon is crowning Josephine.  I followed the impulse and looked at images of the painting online.  I can’t think of any reason I wanted to see that painting just then.  Today, I found out that the scene takes place in Notre Dame and the painting now lives in the Louvre.

“On Monday, once the pictures of the fire started coming in on the news, I cried off and on all evening — hard.  But I slept well Monday night, as if ‘the fever had broken,’ and I feel much, much better today, Tuesday.

“I have also always said that I did not want to psychically pick up on upcoming catastrophes unless I could do something about them.  And, so far, there has been no sign that I do that either.  I don’t think I started picking up on the catastrophe on Thursday only because this is the devastation of a beautiful, famous, historic building.  My sense and my hope is that this event will mark a turning point in the battle against the rise of authoritarianism and nationalism around the globe, that it awoke something in people around the world, and that *that* Collective Unconscious shift is what I was picking up on.

“Interestingly, Macron said this burning and resurrection is part of France’s destiny.

“This beloved building may soften people’s hearts.  It may shake people into coming together more actively.  Salma Hayek’s Gucci billionaire husband donated $113 million to the restoration before the fire was out.  Others are following suit quickly.  As of Tuesday morning, more than $675 million had already been pledged.  Countries around the world are already offering to send their restoration experts and technicians.

“As Lawrence O’Donnell (MSNBC) said so well on Monday night, this event is a reminder that civilization always has been and always must be re-built and re-built and re-built.  Clearly, he was also referring to the reality (which most of us forgot) that democracy, too, must be re-built and re-built and re-built.

“He also pointed out that this is the first time in history that people around the entire world could watch at the very same moment the destruction of an international symbol of civilization — of the highest of both secular and spiritual values.”

Sheila also added this:

As you know, Roger Nelson, Princeton, is head of the Global Consciousness Project that has connected random number generators around the world, and shown that they become less random, more coherent, when there is an event of global significance and more human minds on the planet are focused on the same thing at the same time.  I wrote to ask him if he saw a significant increase in coherence in the Global Consciousness Project in the half week before the fire, and especially the second half of yesterday, Monday, 15 April 2019.
 
He wrote back —
 
Hi Sheila,
 
I have set a GCP event for the Notre Dame tragedy. Our protocol requires specification of a limited, focused time, usually a few hours and most often 6 hours. We don’t look for unusual spikes and then try to relate them, and the system isn’t designed for long periods, so I won’t be able to address your question about the half week before. The formal event will begin at 7 pm Paris time. If that shows a strong deviation, we may do some contextual explorations.
 
Thanks for your interest.
 
Best,
Roger

 

 

 

The latest donation figures are now close to a billion.

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Trump and Full Moon in Libra

Posted on April 18, 2019 by Trish and Rob

This full moon in Libra on April 19 has some problems.Thanks to a challenging angle from disciplinarian Saturn, and powerful Pluto, there’s a lot of tension in the air. People can’t seem to agree on much of anything. And the stakes here, in a global sense, are big.
Today, April 18, the attorney general, William Barr, is scheduled for a press conference BEFORE he releases the redacted Muller report. Rod Rosenstein will supposedly be there, too, but Mueller – whose team spent 22 months investigating trump – will be conspicuously absent.

During the Iran Contra coverups in the Reagan administration, Barr was also AG. He suppressed a DOJ opinion on Iran Contra and gave an inaccurate summary in its place. Years later, it was finally disclosed that he falsely represented the opinions conclusions. Now here he is again, after publishing a 19-page, unsolicited memo before his nomination about why a sitting president can’t be indicted. That was his job pitch and trump grabbed it.

Right now, Pluto and Saturn are closely conjunct – within 3 degrees of each other. Saturn represents structures within our physical reality and Pluto represents power. Capricorn represents government, our existing paradigm. Pluto possesses the power to knock those structures flat.

When we put trump’s natal chart up against the full moon chart, two things leap out. The Saturn/Pluto conjunction is happening in his 5th house — creativity, romance and love, children, fun and pleasure – so he and his team are finding creative ways to shape the narrative about the report. Here’s what you, the public, should think about this report. Trump is exonerated – no collusion, no obstruction to justice. But if that’s true why not release a fully unredacted report to Congress and the American public?

 

Given the 5th house, trump’s kids (5th house) may be part of the obstruction. With transiting Mars hitting his natal Uranus, trump will be combative. Watch for his twitter feeds. Transiting Jupiter is three degrees past a conjunction with trump’s Sagittarius moon, so his lies are swelling, expanding, becoming grandiose schematics of the reality in which he lives.

In his 9th house – world view, spirituality, law and courts- he’s got the transiting Sun in Aries and transiting Uranus in Taurus at 2 degrees. Unexpected events and situations are triggering a kind of subdued panic in him.

He and his team may battle for control of the narrative for a couple of days, but because full moons tend to illuminate what’s hidden, the unredacted report will reach the media and the public at some point.Then we’ll see if the dems have the guts to start impeachment proceedings.

I’m not sure what house indicates impeachment, but suspect it’s 9, which rules government generally. And with Uranus in Taurus transiting that area of trump’s chart, there are going to be sudden and unforeseen events coming at him. Will any of it be enough to topple him?

We’ll see.

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Our Alternate History

Posted on April 16, 2019 by Trish and Rob

One of the sub-genres of fiction is called alternate history. Novels in which the South wins the Civil War, or JFK survives the attack in Dallas, Nazi Germany wins WWII, the British defeat the rebel colonialists in America, or Al Gore beats George W Bush.

I was laying in bed thinking about such novels when for a moment, in my half-sleep state, I wondered if anyone had ever written an alternate history novel in which Donald Trump wins the presidency. Then, I thought, wait, I am actually living in that alternate history. If you’re reading this, then you too no doubt are also caught in the alternate world.

Rick Wilson, a conservative who worked for George H. Bush’s administration, is one of us trapped here and he’s pissed off about it. I’ll let him describe the general situation.

“Who could have imagined that a man of Donald Trump’s spectacular vulgarity, vanity, and gimcrack gold-leaf aesthetic would turn out to be a president without a shred of dignity. Who would have thought a man with a grasp of history derived solely from movies and television would be unable to channel the wonder and power of this nation in times of crisis?

“Who could imagine that a serial adulterer with a desperate need to have his manhood validated and who engaged in a string of risible, sleazy affairs would become an international laughingstock?

“Who could have foreseen that the faux billionaire up to his ample ass in debt to God knows who would look at the White House as a way to nickel-and-dime the taxpayers and the GOP into bumping up his revenue stream at his hotels and golf courses?”

I would add that…Who could have foreseen a president, previously known as a huckster, would regularly tell more lies before lunch than normal people would tell in a decade. All of that, and that’s not even going into the fact that he admires dictators and strongmen more than leaders of democracies, and believes an adversary named Putin over the FBI and his own intelligence agencies.

Thank you, Rick. His comments come from his book, Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real about the Worst President Ever. 

Many of us are surprised to find ourselves in this alternate reality, one in which anywhere from 30-40+% of the population actually look favorably on what they’re seeing to continue supporting Trump. Trump himself says he could shoot a random person on 5th Avenue in New York and his base would stick with him. Some even boast that he’ss the best president ever.

That’s how strange this alternate history we’re living has become. Then there’s another alternate reality coming in 2020, one in which Trump wins a second term. I hope that somehow I can figure out a way of leaping off that alternate history and landing into the version where someone else who is running for president – almost anyone else, except for Mike Pence in the event that he somehow gets into the race – is our president.

 

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Part 1: Are There Astrological Signatures for Encounters?

Posted on April 14, 2019 by Trish and Rob

 

I’ve often wondered about the signatures in birth charts that suggest a propensity for experiencing anomalous phenomena. Anomalies include all the things that Charles Fort investigated and wrote about: teleportation, rains of frogs, fish, and inorganic material, spontaneous human combustion, ball lightning, UFOs, poltergeist events, unexplained disappearances. And, according to Wikipedia, “He was also perhaps the first person to explain strange human appearances and disappearances by the hypothesis of alien abduction and was an early proponent of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, specifically suggesting that strange lights or objects sighted in the skies might be alien spacecraft.”

Fort’s books sold well while he was alive and are still in print. You can find them here.
So I began with Fort’s natal chart. He was born on August 6, 1874 in Albany, New York. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the time he was born, so I used noon. This chart doesn’t provide the correct sign of his moon and ascendant, so the houses where planets fall are also incorrect. But it gives us the signs of the other planets and of the North and South Nodes, and the angles these planets/points make to each other. You can refer to the illustration below the chart to identify the planetary symbols.

I used The Rulership Book by Rex. E. Bills to find the rulers of synchronicity, aliens, abductions, spaceships, and psychic experiences. The book was published in 1971 and probably needs an update! I suspected that most of what Fort wrote about fell under the rulership of Uranus. The symbol is in this illustration.

The rulership book doesn’t have an entry for synchronicity, but there’s one for coincidences, ruled by Uranus. This planet also rules everything psychic as well as spaceships. Aliens are ruled by Uranus, the 9th house, Neptune, and the sign of Sagittarius. It’s not clear, though, what type of aliens Bills was referring to – those who enter a country or the ET variety. Abductions are ruled by Pluto (as in the tale of Persephone, abducted to the underworld.) Jupiter rules foreign countries, people, and travel.

So in Fort’s chart, the first thing that hit me is the cluster at the top of his chart – his sun at 13 degrees Leo conjunct  his Uranus at 11 degrees Leo. In his 6th house, he has the planet Neptune in Taurus at 0 degrees exactly conjunct his North Node in Taurus. The rulership book lists one of the rulers of aliens as Neptune. The North Node is a point in a chart that addresses the direction you should move in this life to evolve at every level.

Is  there are correlation between possible signatures – or combinations with the North Node, Pluto (abductions) and those of people who have experienced alien encounters?

Betty Hill

The chart of Betty Hill, abducted in 1961 with her husband, Barney, is correct in terms of her moon, ascendant, and house placements because I had her birth time. There are 3 notable clusters in her chart: the conjunction of Pluto and her sun at 6 and 5 degrees Cancer, in the 9th house, mentioned in the rulership book; the conjunction of Jupiter and Mercury at 24 and 22 degrees Cancer, in her 10th house; and Venus and Saturn conjunct at 21 and 24 degrees Leo in her 11th house. Her North Node in the 2nd house at 3 degrees Sagittarius forms a beneficial angle – a trine – to her Neptune at 7 degrees Leo in her 10th house. This Neptune/ NN connection is also in Fort’s chart, but in his the two are conjunct. .

The abduction (Pluto) impacted her entire life/personality (sun) and it became her career (in speaking engagements) as books were published (Mercury and Jupiter) about her and Barney’s experience. The Saturn (structure) and Venus (women, $) conjunction in the 11th house may be addressing the long-lasting cultural impact of their experience.

I haven’t included Barney’s chart because I couldn’t find a birth time for him.

Diane Fine

The next chart is of Diane Fine, a lifelong abductee whom we wrote about in Aliens in the Backyard.

Diane’s chart lacks the Uranus connection, but has a North Node connection, like Fort’s chart. Her NN is conjunct Pluto and both form a trine – 120 degree angle – to Saturn at 16 degrees Capricorn and to Jupiter at 8 degrees Capricorn in her 6th house. The trine is usually beneficial, but in Diane’s case, it seems to have exacerbated the health issues she suffered as a result of the abductions. With Saturn’s involvement, the health issues became long-term.

In one abduction experience, several  grays were working on her knees and when she asked them to heal her immune disorder, they said they couldn’t, because the disorder was “karmic.”

Many of her experiences are like the anomalies that Fort wrote about it, but worse.  In one of the strangest experiences, she discovered she was pregnant – even though she’d been told she couldn’t get pregnant. Her OB said the pregnancy was high risk and sent her to a special clinic in Vermont. During the trip, heavy fog forced her and her friend off the road. They turned in to a barn that had been converted into a restaurant. She remembers nothing after sipping at a soda until they arrived at the ferry they would take them across Lake Champlain. They were missing several hours.

When she finally arrived at the clinic and was examined, she was told she wasn’t pregnant. She believes the fetus was taken from her during those missing hours. On the way back, they passed the turnoff for the restaurant – and nothing was there.

In part 2, we’ll take a look at the charts of several other people whose lives have been filled with encounters.

So far, it looks as if  there are several  possible signatures: Pluto conjunct the North Node,  Pluto conjunct the sun, Uranus conjunct the sun, Neptune conjunct or trine to the North Node.

 

 

 

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Who are you?

Posted on April 11, 2019 by Trish and Rob

 

I’ve been using Instagram since early 2017, when an editor told our agent that our “platform” was just mediocre. When I asked what that actually meant, Al said, “Your social media platform.” You know, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the number of followers you have on these platforms.

My initial reaction was, Huh? Do followers actually buy books? I’d already realized that Twitter was useless unless you were already a celebrity or famous for something. What was the point of posting anything when the news was swallowed up within seconds by someone else’s post? I stopped using it.

I like Facebook for its reach and versatility, enjoy the closed groups especially for teaching workshops, and still use it.

I started building followers on Instagram and what a strange journey it has been. In Instagram etiquette, at least the way I understand it now, you should be following far fewer people than the number that follow you. I violated that rule from the beginning. The second rule of the IG etiquette is that your IG account should have a brand focus – travel, dogs, astrology, cats, UFOs, aliens, art, novels, writers, movies, health, coaching, law of attraction, cooking, parenting, synchronicity, 11, something specific that other people of like minds can connect to. I’ve also violated that one. Right now, I’ve got followers and follow IG accounts in all of the above plus some.

At one point, when I posted the cover of our book, Aliens in the Backyard: UFOs, Abductions, and Synchronicity, some dude left me a comment: WTF? What’s your brand?

That comment triggered a whole thought process for me about where our culture is now. Why does a woman who professes to be a yoga teacher but basically has a huge butt, have more than 12 million followers? What has she achieved to garner that many followers? I can understand the millions who follow Stephen King and J.K. Rowling: they’ve produced stuff, books that have molded our cultural thought about the mysterious and magical. But a big butt??

On the day Uranus entered Taurus, I put up an astrology post about Trump and the Mueller investigation. That day, I got more than 100 followers on Instagram – not because of trump, but because I started following someone who had a lot of followers in, well, something. My followers rose to 685. By the next morning, I’d lost 50 followers. I have no idea why for the rise or the fall.

I’ve discovered that if private accounts or people who haven’t posted anything yet follow me, the account is usually porn – a naked woman or guy who direct messages me and says, Hey, click here for more! Quite often, I get follows from people selling IG followers for a nominal price. Why? Why would I bother buying followers? What does that even mean? What’s the purpose? Do I buy followers so that I, like the big butt woman, can have 12 million followers? And if I did reach that point, would it mean these 12 million buy books? Probably not. But what it does mean is that I’m now an INFLUENCER on Instagram and advertisers buy space on my IG account and that translates as bucks for me.

This evening, Megan’s former college roommate, Jules, explained all this in a way I’d never heard before. She’s in a PhD program at Stanford, where the consensus thought is that we’re all locked into a mimetic theory that states that most of human behavior is based upon imitation.That would explain why there are so many IG accounts about “building a life that is the best version of you,”a phrase that first appeared on Oprah. Barnes & Noble caught that bug, and now has a special exhibit of books in that genre. And there’s no shortage of life coaches who will be delighted to teach you how to do this for a hefty fee.

In other words, in the mimetic theory, which PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel expounds, we’re all imitators. Life is built on imitation. This system of thought was first advocated by French philosopher Rene Girard, who died in 2015.

From Wikipedia:

Girard’s fundamental ideas, which he developed throughout his career and provided the foundation for his thinking, were that desire is mimetic (i.e., all of our desires are borrowed from other people); that all conflict originates in mimetic desire (mimetic rivalry); that the scapegoat mechanism is the origin of sacrifice and the foundation of human culture, and religion was necessary in human evolution to control the violence that can come from mimetic rivalry; and that the Bible reveals these ideas and denounces the scapegoat mechanism.

Reading this makes me want to vomit.

It implies that we humans are incapable of original thought and desires, that we covet and envy what others have, and these emotions are what propel us through life.
Is this really where we are as a culture?

Jules also said something else that struck me as strange about our individual identities. At Stanford, people introduce themselves as pronouns. “I’m Jules. I’m she and her.” A straight man might say, “I’m he and him.” Someone in an open marriage might say, “I’m they.”

A secret language, a secret code- or the underpinnings of a Dystopian future?

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Paranormal Thoughts

Posted on April 9, 2019 by Trish and Rob

We finally had the opportunity to talk with Dylan Stewart, an Australian with a terrific podcast called Paranormal Thoughts.  You can listen here.

We tried once before, during the last Mercury retrograde, to do the show, but Dylan had a glitch in his equipment. Mercury retrograde! An interesting synchronicity led to this contact with him, through a blogging friend, Darren, another Australian, who blogs about synchronicity. This time, after Mercury had gone direct, the interview went great and Dylan’s new equipment worked perfectly!

Here’s the Mercury retro story.

Mercury retrograde began on March 5, in Pisces, and ends on March 28. I keep tabs on the big Merc retro snafus – like an appliance breaking down, a contract getting lost in the mail, something unexpected with one of our cars. Today is March 10, our first Mercury retro thing.

At 6:30 this evening, we were supposed to be on Dylan Stewart’s Paranormal Thoughts podcast. Dylan is in Brisbane, Australia, we were going to use Skype, and wondered if the mike Rob has for his iPad Pro would work okay. We’ve had trouble with Skype in the past.
We learned about Dylan’s podcast through our blogging friend, Darren, who also lives in Brisbane, and he sent a link to one of Dylan’s podcasts on synchronicity. I was impressed and and emailed him. He emailed back:

First off I just want to say I am a big fan of your work! Your husband’s and your research has captivated me for years. The fact you have come across my podcast and reached out has blown me away! Brisbane is a small place I probably know your friend!

He invited us to his podcast, we found a good date, now here we were, waiting for him to connect with us on Skype. He did and said he was having trouble with his recording equipment. He kept apologizing and I felt bad about it and finally said, Hey’s it’s Mercury retrograde. I forget it’s a term which may not mean anything to other people. We chatted while he fiddled with his equipment and we finally decided to try again on a different date.

Afterward, I dropped by a couple of blogs I visit that included Djan Stewart’s . A few days earlier, she had written a post about “Mercury retrograde” and astrology. The comments ranged from: “astrology isn’t a science,” to “never heard of it.” Her post on March 10 is about Mercury retrograde and how the TV she and her husband owned blew out and they had to buy a new one.

And only as I’m writing this did I realize DJan and Dylan have the same last name. Stewart.

It’s one of those weird name synchros that sometimes feel like the trickster is having a good belly laugh. Ha, ha, Trish. Gotcha on that one.

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Trump Bonaparte

Posted on April 6, 2019 by Trish and Rob

Above: “I’ll be back.” Below: “I’ve been here before.”

In the first week after his boastful, self-congratulatory chatter about not getting charged for conspiring with a foreign adversary to win his election and avoiding charges of obstruction of justice, Donald Trump made a couple of stupid decisions that took the wind out of his bilious sails.

His pompous promotion of the idea that the Republicans were going to end Obamacare and create a great health care system that would be cheaper and cover everyone was made to disastrous effects. Dems said let’s see it. Republicans encouraged him to let it go and talk about something else. So he did by saying the new Republican plan would come out after the 2020 election. Right.

If that wasn’t bad enough, he immediately jumped into another mess by proclaiming loudly that he was fed up with Mexico and ready to close the border. He wasn’t kidding, he said. He was serious. Before the week was over – after Republicans urged him not to do something so stupid, something that would seriously hurt the economy – he backed off on that proclamation and said he would give Mexico another year to stop immigrants from coming to our southern border.

Interestingly, Trump’s behavior to promote aggressive acts, then back down is strikingly remindful of what the French historian and diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about Louis Napoleon in his Recollections of the Revolution of 1848 and the French Second Republic. Napoleon “changed course frequently, first advancing, then hesitating, then pulling back, to his great detriment.” His mind “was inconsistent and confused, filled with large but ill-assorted ideas which he borrowed (from)…very different and often contradictory sources.” He was “fond of flatterers” but nevertheless “trusted in his own star.”

Sound familiar?

The comparison and quotes from Tocqueville were adapted from an essay entitled, “Tocqueville’s Recollections in Trump’s America,” by Cheryl B. Welch, senior lecturer on government at Harvard.

Interestingly, Huffington Post published an article Aug. 2, 2016, Trump vs. Napoleon, comparing and contrasting the two leaders. The author William Dietrich, concluded that Trump matches up with Bonaparte on plenty of the bad, but not much on the positive side. For example:
 Both were pugnacious as children and combative as adults.
 Both prided or pride themselves on negotiation skills
 Both went to military school, Trump as as teenage disciplinary problem and Bonaparte as a Corsican immigrant who graduated as a French second lieutenant.

Dietrich writes:

“Both were opportunists, Napoleon seizing chance in the military realm and Trump in the business world. By the same token, their strategic planning was fluid, seeking power and success more than any philosophic plan. Neither has claimed much of a moral compass.

“Both were or are vague about religion and morality while not hesitating to appear before religious audiences in hopes of using faith to their advantage. Napoleon was a deist who could act ruthlessly without concern for the afterlife, and Trump does not seem affiliated with any particular denomination or creed.

“Both enthusiastically pursued women romantically and sexually but had a clumsy tendency to insult. Both expressed misogynistic disdain for female ability or achievement.

“Both have boasted of their womanizing. Both have divorced.

“Both were, or are, narcissistic, obsessed about themselves to the point of limited empathy for other people – be they battlefield dead on Napoleon’s part or immigrants and refugees on Trump’s part.

“Both were obsessed with “building their brand.” In Trump’s case the use of his name has been a lifelong business strategy. Napoleon stamped his initial ‘N’ and his symbol of the industrious bee across his empire, because he was acutely aware he was not of royal blood and needed acceptance of his family as a new dynasty.”

Dietrich also wrote: “Trump does mimic Napoleon’s ornate Empire style. His gilded Manhattan penthouse is very much as over-the-top as were some of Bonaparte’s palaces. But the general spent a lot of time on an iron campaign bed, dressed modestly, and led armies from horseback in bad weather. He shared his soldiers’ hardships.”

We don’t think Trump likes to go camping. Has he ever? And thanks to his vanishing bone spurs that allowed him several deferments from the draft, he hasn’t stepped on any active battlefields.

Finally, here’s a scary link that some pundits have suggested might happen if Trump is defeated in 2020. Napoleon III was the first elected President of France from 1848 to 1852. When he could not constitutionally be re-elected, he seized power in 1851 and became the Emperor of the French from 1852 to 1870.

Trump knows that he might face criminal charges after leaving the presidency, and for that reason some have suggested that he will do everything possible to stay in power and delegitimize anyone who  beat him at the polls. We will see.

P.S. The quotes with the pics at the top were, of course, written in jest.

 

 

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