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Some things in life manage to come full circle. Author and past-life researcher and regression therapist Carol Bowman sent us this story that seems to illustrate that adage “one good turn deserves another.” It’s also a good synchro!

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On Valentine’s Day, Carol and her husband, Steve, went out to dinner. They had hoped their daughter would be able to join them, but the northeast has gotten so much snow this winter that she wasn’t able to get out of Manhattan, where she lives. Carol and Steve had been cooped up in their house for several days because of snow storms, so it was nice to get out and do something.

“We were in the middle of dinner and the owner stopped by our table and asked

where we had parked.  Apparently, someone had hit our car-Steve’s beloved cream puffy ’93 Camry – and we confirmed that that’s where we had parked.  

“The couple who hit the car had come in trying to find the owner. How often does that happen???  Steve went out with them to look at the damage and thanked them for telling us.  They wanted to pay for the damage and not go through the insurance company.  

“The woman told Steve she was a therapist, and Steve told her I was too. (I was still in the restaurant and missed this exchange.)  It turns out that she had come  to me some years ago, asking for help for her daughter!

“Is that karma?  Or CARMA?”

In 1959, Mike Wallace interviewed Rod Serling (Twilight Zone) about censorship. What he says is eerily relevant today:

 Most of us have experienced what I call the mystery of the  lost sock in the dryer. It’s not always a sock, of course, and it’s not always in the dryer.  Over the years, a number of objects have vanished in our house: a $100 bill, shoes, keys, flash drives. Sometimes the objects have reappeared in a place where we’ve already looked for it.

 But the experience Anne of Tennessee had  is a new twist!

 I had a leak in my bathroom sink 10 days ago and had to call the plumbers.  Twice, in fact.  This left water running across my bathroom floor.  I had my mop in the bathroom, mopping up water as needed.  After the plumbers left the second time, I left the mop in my bathroom in case there was still another leak. 

 My daughter called me at work, yesterday, looking for the mop, and I told her it was in my bathroom.  She couldn’t find it.  When I got home from work, we both looked for the mop.  In closets. Under beds.  In the garage.  It’s gone.  Disappeared. I am on my way to Walmart to buy another one. Strange.

 Two days later, I received an update from Anne on the missing mop:

 I am almost totally unnerved.  That mop that totally disappeared a few days ago?  It showed up sometime yesterday.  When I got home from work around 7:30, I found it leaning against my bathroom door.  My daughter didn’t believe me until I showed it to her.  And my granddaughter is now spooked as she says something is really off here.

 Yep, my old mop is back and for how long, I don’t know.  And I am really rattled about this.  Just makes me wish some of the other things I have lost/misplaced would return.

 Don’t know what to think of this.

 I asked Anne if she thought there might be a poltergeist or some other phenomenon at work in her house or some other trickster:

 I have wondered if i have something around that would do a stunt like that mop thing.  Laura and I searched the house completely twice for that mop, each time starting in my bathroom.  It was not in the house.  

Since it has reappeared, that leaves a lot of options open…like tricksters.  Just what we might have, I don’t know. I don’t even have an idea about how to figure out what is doing what.

 A mop is larger than a sock, keys, a bill. Is it possible that a person could disappear like the mop did?

Perhaps. In November 1878, 16-year-old Charles Ashmore of Quincy, Illinois went out into the night with a water bucket. When he didn’t return after several minutes, his father and sister went out to look for him. They found his footprints clear in fresh snow, leading hallway to the well, where the footprints suddenly stopped.

 In July 1854, Orion Williamson, a farmer near Selma, Alabama, supposedly got up from his porch chair and stated out across a field to bring in his horses from the pasture. His wife and child watched from the porch and on the far side of the field a couple of neighbors on horseback waved at him. Right then, Williamson vanished.

 Witnesses searched the field but found no trace of Williamson. Journalists flocked to the property to investigate. One of them, Ambrose Bierce, wrote about the incident in a story called, The Difficulty of Crossing a Field.

 Author Paul Begg, in his anthology of strange disappearance Into Thin Air, concluded that all these stories about disappearance are probably duplicates of the same story.  But when you experience one of these mysterious disappearance, it’s not as easy to dismiss.

 I’ve often wondered if these missing objects somehow slip into another dimension or something. Do our homes have vortices that act as portals between dimensions? If so, what activates them?  

And, totally off topic,  Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone!

 About a week ago, we posted a story about asteroids and stunning name synchros.  Well, there’s an update.

 We heard from Alex Miller today, thanking us for steering him toward David Wilson and Crossroads, the publishing company that has released our last two synchronicity books, and many of our back list titles. Crossroad is going to bring out Alex’s backlist title and perhaps his original titles as well.

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I’ve been nosing around your blog, good stuff there!  I thought you might like to know, after your post on Christie, that his sun is T-square to asteroids Washingtonia and Bridges!  (and he has an exact opposition from asteroid Kelly to Nemesis – Bridget Kelly being the aide who sent the infamous email.)  ’nuff said, right?  Also, sun was conjunct Hoffman and squared Greenwich when Philip Seymour Hoffman was found dead in his Greenwich village apartment. As you can see, this stuff is constant!

 So I asked Alex how these names can be so literal. His response:

 I’ve been working with this for 8 years now and I still can’t wrap my head around it.  On the one hand, it seems to put paid to the theory of ‘free will’, but on the other, it’s not like every Hoffman on the planet died in Greenwich village that day, so we’re still missing some component that narrows it down to specific individuals.  I have a full length piece worked up for daykeeper (where he writes articles about astrology)  for March on Hoffman. The story goes much deeper when you look at his chart and points representing death, addiction, drugs, etc.

By the way, the Olympics just opened with sun conjunct both Olympia and Olympiada, sun squared Russia and an exact Saturn/Apophis conjunction, which is troubling vis-à-vis terrorism concerns; the upcoming academy awards have sun conjunct Oskar (Oskar squared Hoffman when PSH won best actor for ‘capote’ in 2006).

Explanation: a conjunction is when 2 or more planets are in the same sign and degree. It’s a beneficial aspect. A square is when two or more planets form angles of 90 degrees to each other, considered a challenging aspect. But the bottom line is the astonishing name synchros associated with events. As Alex mentioned in one of his email, what does any of this mean about free will? Does it negate free will? Support it in a way we don’t yet understand?

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Alex publishes articles at  daykeeper. His newest piece is on the Mars retrograde that begins on March 1. He delves into myth and, like Joseph Campbell, like Jung, talks about how these myths apply to ordinary life. It’s an insightful read.

It was 8:20 a.m. on a recent Sunday and I was driving north from the West Palm Beach area to Jupiter, Florida to meet a friend for a bike ride.  It’s not a time that I’m often on the road, except for these occasional bike rides. I turned on the radio to NPR and was surprised to hear that the next interview would be about the meaning of coincidences.

Trish and I had often wondered why National Public Radio never seemed to take on metaphysical topics, such as synchronicity, and we often made jokes about appearing on NPR and talking about the subject. So, it finally happened. Not to us, but someone else, another writer, and I was curious to hear what he/she would say. Was NPR actually opening its radio doors to the paranormal? If so, then maybe the paradigm shift was really happening, the mystical/spiritual and science were starting to merge.

But as soon as the author and his book were introduced, I knew it was going to be another skeptical take on the subject. The author was a British statistician from the Imperial College of London with a lot of impressive credentials in the world of statistics and mainstream science. The book is called: The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day.

The sub-title, I suppose, is an intentional head scratcher. After all, these events are either rare or they happen everyday. Which is it? I’ll go with the latter, because that’s what I experience. But the author incredibly tried to argue both sides. Astonishing coincidences rarely happen, he told listeners, and gave a well known example involving Anthony Hopkins. (We wrote about it in The 7Secrets of Synchronicity.) Yet, he quickly added they happen every day because humans look for patterns. The underlying idea was that it was all just random, as any statistician will tell you.

I was waiting for him to talk about apophenia, but the interview was too short. Statisticians generally believe the so-called pattern-seeking behavior becomes a disorder – apophenia or paternicity – if you find meaning in the pattern. Maybe Professor Hand’s book will shed more light on his take of the ‘disorder,’ aka synchronicity.

Just encountering his brief interview early Sunday morning was a minor synchronicity, since Trish and I have co-authored four books on the subject. I suppose the professor would say that I was looking for meaning in a random event that I see as a pattern, and not a very impressive one at that.

But less than an hour earlier, while sipping a cup of tea and looking at the front page of the local newspaper, I spotted a story about the Bermuda Triangle. This story detailed a report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) that said there is no such thing as the Bermuda Triangle. In other words, there are no more disappearances of ships and planes in that area of the world than any other, and no unusual conditions present in that area of the North Atlantic.

It took a couple of hours, but my pattern-seeking behavior detected a minor cluster of synchronicity. Not only had I written books about synchronicity and heard a radio interview dismissing anything meaningful about coincidence, but within the same hour I had read an article that debunked the B.T., another subject that I’d written a book about.

So was I encountering a conspiracy by the universe against my ideas about how the universe works? That would actually be a contradiction. If the universe was acting with intelligence, why was it promoting these debunkers? Hmm.

The answer, to my way of thinking, was that the universe has a great sense of humor. I had encountered the trickster, one common form of synchronicity. The trickster nudges you along. A paradigm change is underway you say? Well, don’t expect to hear about it on NPR or read about it in your daily newspaper. Look deeper. 

 In life, there are several big challenges: happiness, however you define it; health; the freedom to pursue what you love, to verbalize what you think and believe; and the financial means to pursue all of the above.

Yet, over 800 million people – one in eight – go hungry. If you’re hungry, then nothing else matters.  If you’re sick and don’t have health insurance or the means to pay for the treatment you need, then you are basically screwed. If you live in a repressive country where the Internet is censored, where women must be accompanied by a male relative before they can leave their homes, then you are probably held captive by religious beliefs that say you, a woman, must be controlled, subjugated. But let’s say, for the moment, that you win  500K in the Lotto. Or it’s what you inherit or earn. How does half a million change the dynamics?

Well, if you’re Bill Gates or the Vanderbilts or the Campbell soup heirs, half a mil is  pocket change. This percentage  probably spends that in a week on employees, horses, and other diversions. But if you’re middle class or working class or are among the ranks of the unemployed or underemployed, then 500K is a game changer.

All of us have markers that are game changers: when my book is published used to be one of mine.  But when my first novel was published, I was already into the next book and thought, Okay, when this book is published I will… And when that book got published and I had contracts for more novels, my game changers morphed again, my goals shifted.  At this point in my life, my game changers entail larger stakes, bigger dreams. When the script sells, when the option is exercised… But the older I get, the clearer it becomes that what I’m really talking about here is: how do I want to spend the rest of the time I have on the planet?

Perhaps, in a way, these game changing goals are like new year’s resolutions. Well, in 2014 I will… what? Discover the secret of the universe? Unlikely. But perhaps I will stumble across a story that will shed light on some essential mystery I have puzzled over for most of my life. Perhaps I’ll finally have an OBE that will blow my socks off.  Or maybe I’ll converse with my dead parents or my dead editors and or end up on a space ship. Or maybe I will learn something I didn’t know about life after death. Or about life.

I do know this: the game changers and goals I recognized in my twenties are worlds apart from the game changers in my sixties. The forty some odd years in between tend to change your priorities. When you realize that more than half your life is behind you,  you become even more aware of how every moment counts, of how NOW is the only thing you have for certain and even that NOW is elusive, fluid, ever changing.

So, really, regardless of your age or place in life, the bottom line question seems to be: how can I make a difference, with the time I have on planet Earth?

Rob and I were out running errands today and stopped at Barnes and Noble to look for an issue of Time Magazine that has an article about the benefits of meditation. Rob had hoped to make copies of it to give to the students in his meditation classes. But we couldn’t find a copy of Time. There were dozens of magazines that covered everything from self-help to generals to atheists and astrology and travel. But no Time.

What we did find, though, was a bookazine – magazine size, no ads, the cost of a trade paperback- called Conspiracies, Mysteries, Secrets, & Lies. This sucker probably covers every conspiracy known to man – and then some – but one of the most interesting concerns the Titanic.

Most of us know the specifics about the ill-fated voyage of the supposedly unsinkable Titanic – that on the night of April 15, 1912, it crashed into an iceberg that ripped a hole in its hull and the liner sank. More than 1,500 people died. But the writer of the article in the bookazine, J. Lee Marks, points out that conspiracists believe that the Titanic never sank, that its sister ship, the Olympic, was sunk in its place for the insurance money.

In 1911, the Olympic was the largest passenger ship in the world and on September 20, 1911, it crashed into a British warship. The Olympic was found to be at fault, so the insurance company refused to pay for the damages, which posed a major threat to the cruise line. At the time of the Olympic’s crash, construction on the Titanic was still underway and conspiracists believe that the damaged Olympic was renamed the Titanic and billed as the company’s newest ship.

According to Marks, conspiracists says that the Titanic was repaired, refurbished, but that on the inside still had mechanical and structural flaws as a result of crashing into the British warship. Meanwhile, Marks writes, “production on the Titanic was sped up and completed, and the boat was rechristened the Olympic. It immediately set sail and continued making trans-Atlantic voyages and money for the White Star Line until 1935, when it was retired.”

In order to recoup the insurance payments they didn’t get from the Olympic’s crash, the White Star investors supposedly plotted to sink their damaged boat (the Titanic). They arranged to have the steamship Californian and another ship on hand to rescue the doomed passengers and crew. And supposedly the captain of the Titanic – Edward Smith- was in on the scheme. But things, of course, went horribly wrong, the Titanic sank earlier than it was intended – either because it collided with one of the rescue vessels or because it actually hit an iceberg.

Another theory about the Titanic is that millionaire and White Star investor J.P. Morgan was a last-minute no show for the Titanic’s maiden voyage. At the time, Morgan was trying to form the central banking system we now know as the Federal Reserve – which isn’t part of the government, but is a private company. Interestingly, three men who were opposed to the formation of the Federal Reserve died when the Titanic sank: John Jacob Astor, Benjamin Guggenheim, and Isadore Strauss.

Given the banking debacle that led to the economic meltdown of 2008, this last part of the conspiracy is the part I find the most believable. But, if it’s true, then Morgan went to great lengths to kill off his foes. Wouldn’t it have been easier to just have them knocked off?

This bookazine runs about 130 pages and probably 30,000 -35,000 words; the bookazines Rob and I were working on in 2013 ran from 12,000 to about 15,000 words. The author  is listed as J. Lee Marks. So I Googled him and not much showed up. I kept clicking links and eventually came across a blog post  about this bookazine.

The author of this blog article, Bernie Suarez, took issue with Marks’ conclusion that NSA spying is really okay since we have to be protected against terrorists, yada, yada. It ticked him off enough that he contacted the president and creative director of The Media Source, who published the bookazine, and asked to interview J. Lee Marks.

Suarez was told that Marks was reclusive and didn’t give interviews. Suarez rips apart the author’s take on a lot of these conspiracies- namely that they are perpetrated and spread by idiots – and yet glorifies professional skeptic James Randi.

I’m no fan of Randi. Rob and I met him years ago when we were freelancing. Back then, he was offering $10,000 to anyone who could prove to him, a magician, that psychic phenomena was real. Now the ante has been raised to $1,000,000. Thing is, if Randi were presented with legitimate evidence that psi exists, he would not only be a million bucks poorer, but would be out of a job, his identity robbed, stripped away. He would be just a senior citizen with a white beard.

But the article and this strange little mystery about J. Lee Marks, got me thinking. I love conspiracies, I love the intrigue and mystery. Since I don’t believe much of what the government tells me, I’m ripe for conspiracies. Do I believe there have been coverups? You bet. Do I believe that the moonwalks were a hoax? No. I think we went there. I heard Edgar Mitchell speak at a public function some years ago and came away believing that he experienced something extraordinary on his re-entry to Earth that turned his worldview inside out.

Elvis? Is he dead? Well, yes, he probably is.

Is the 27 Club real? Seems to be – and it falls under the umbrella of synchronicity.

What about the JFK assassination? And the assassinations of MLK and RFK? What about Roswell? Did it happen?

What about climate change? Is it all a scam just to levy a carbon tax?

If nothing else, this bookazine provides some fodder for blog posts and is a trigger for discussions. But it also prompted me to examine my own beliefs. Where do I fall in the conspiracy scheme of things? Where do you fall?

 The planet goes through cycles of cold and warmth. This is science, not wishful thinking or illusion.  The earth has shifted on its axis in the past. This is science, not speculation. Long before the planet had 7 billion people, dinosaurs were wiped out by climate change. That was part of a cycle.

But climate change deniers will tell you it’s all cyclic, that 7 billion people on the third rock from the sun aren’t having much of an impact on the climate or anything else They will tell you they have lived through worse winters, worse summers, worse weather in years past. And all of that is undoubtedly true. But it doesn’t change the fact that we humans are accelerating climate change.

Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About People Looking At People Looking At Animals in America is one of those books you pick up and buy because you sense there’s something in it that speaks to you. This was a Christmas present I bought for myself and wow, the author, Jon Mooallem, has made the planet – and the effects of climate change – come alive for me.

He wrote the book because of his young daughter, because her world was inhabited by polar bears on her pajamas, by butterflies on her sippy cups, by birds in the cartoons and TV shows she watched. Yet, in the actual world she inhabits and is inheriting, half of all species could disappear by the end of the century.

Think about that for a moment. Half of all species? By some estimates, there are 8.7 million species on the planet now. “Scientists now concede that most of America’s endangered species will survive only if conservationists keep rigging the world around them in their favor.”

Mooallem focuses on three species – bears (polar bears primarily) butterflies, and birds. The section on polar bears is fascinating, heartbreaking, and ultimately so infuriating that I had to set the book aside for a few days to calm down. Great chunks of ice floes on which polar bears live are melting.  We’ve all seen the photos – these white bears clinging to bits of ice so they won’t drown. Mooallem even tells us where these photos come from, and how Martha Stewart’s team were there to photograph them for a TV special.

This book is so beautiful, so troubling, and so humanly written that as I read it I kept thinking of the esoteric meaning of the animals he writes about – and I’m not even halfway through it yet. The polar bears: power, predator, vulnerability. Butterflies: transformation, metamorphosis, life after death. Birds: messengers who often act as messengers between the living and the dead.

“It’s hard to square our nostalgia for certain rare species with our resentment of species…that we’ve helped to thrive, intentionally or unintentionally. It’s a thin and erratic line we draw between the wildness that awes us and the wildness that only annoys us,” he writes. “It’s a reminder that we remake the animal landscape on timescales longer than our imaginations are calibrated to perceive or predict, and that we can’t predict how we’ll feel about those changes, either.”

Can you imagine your life without a dog, a cat, a bird, a hamster, a gerbil that brings a smile to your child’s face?

“In the end,” Mooallem writes, “I can’t say I’m terribly optimistic about the future of wildlife. The stories of the polar bear, the butterfly, and the whooping crane had, at times, even lowered my confidence in our ability to see the problem clearly.

 There’s a fluidity to nature that’s not easy to recognize or accept, and climate change will only accelerate and distort such changes.”

The bottom line here is that we humans may not be causing climate change, but the presence of 7 billion souls and all they bring with them are certainly accelerating climate change. I see it in my backyard, in the erratic production of fruits and vegetables. I see it in Florida’s weird winters – 88 degrees in February, with afternoon thunderstorms endemic to summer, not winter. And I am reminded of a dream I had back in the seventies.

In the dream, I’m in a rowboat in tumultuous seas, headed toward the Bahamas because Florida has been inundated and there’s no dry land left. Only years later did I realize it was Water World or The Day After Tomorrow, based on the 1999 book by Whitley Strieber and Art Bell, The Coming Global Superstorm.

 The dream has stuck with me all these years because I had lost everything – family, friends, pets, my home, my base. It was just me in this silly boat, rowing toward another Armageddon because, in the dream, I knew that most of the Bahamian islands are about where South Florida is – three feet or less above sea level. I knew I wouldn’t find a haven, a sanctuary. But I kept rowing. Hope is powerful.

Wild Ones is worth every penny you spend, whether it’s in hardback, paper, or ebook. But to open this book is to open a door you may not want to walk through. Sometimes, denial is the easier path.

People who don’t believe in synchronicity do so because they believe coincidences are random, meaningless events. You could say they believe in the ‘god of randomness—a condition one psychologist calls ‘randomania.’ When they refer to people who find meaning in coincidence, they often say these folks – ie. many of us here – are suffering from ‘apophenia’—the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.

Sure, it’s a handy term for dismissing synchronicity, but synchro debunkers ought to take a closer look at that term, its origins and its actual meaning. Apophenia was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, a German neurologist and psychiatrist, and member of the Nazi Party. He was referring to a serious mental disorder, not synchronicity or epiphanies.

According to a 2010 research paper about Conrad’s work, the term reflects the fact that schizophrenics initially experience delusion as revelation. “In contrast to epiphany, however, apophenia does not provide insight into the true nature of reality or its interconnectedness, but is a process of repetitively and monotonously experiencing abnormal meanings in the entire surrounding experiential field.” For example, a sense of “being observed, spoken about, the object of eavesdropping, followed by strangers.”

I can’t help wondering that some of these people experiencing Conrad’s apophenia in Nazi Germany  weren’t crazy at all. It seems there was plenty of reasons at that time and place for people to think they were being observed, spoken about, the object of eavesdropping, and followed by strangers.

Besides that point, Aaron Mishara, writing in The Schizophrenia Bulletin, says that “‘apophenia’ is a misnomer that has taken on a bastardized meaning never intended by Conrad.” In other words, Conrad wasn’t talking about people who experience meaningful coincidence.

Yet, the term is still often used in academia for people who experience synchronicity and other psychic phenomena. From Wikipedia, “In statistics, apophenia is called a Type I error, seeing patterns where none, in fact, exist. It is highly probable that the apparent significance of many unusual experiences and phenomena are due to apophenia, e.g., ghosts, and hauntings, EVP, numerology, the Bible Code, anomalous cognition, ganzfeld ‘hits,’ most forms of divinations, the prophecies of Nostradamus, remote viewing, and a host of other paranormal and supernatural experiences and phenomena.”

Arch-skeptic Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptical Magazine, apparently has come to his senses enough to recognize that people who believe in synchronicity aren’t necessarily headed for the loony bin, though in his musings he would not doubt prefer it that way. (Sorry for reading your mind, Michael.) In fact, Shermer takes the position that most people see such patterns and attribute meaning to them where there is no meaning. Notice how Shermer has decided for all of us that coincidences are meaningless, random events. Instead of calling it apophenia, though, Shermer in 2008 coined the term ‘patternicity’ — “the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency.”

Psychologist David Luke takes umbrage with the likes of Shermer and the belief that everything is random and those who experience synchronicity are simply misguided – if not becoming psychotic. So in 2011, Luke coined a new term, ‘randomania,’ the tendency to attribute chance probability to apparently patterned data. In other words, the opposite of apophenia or Shermer’s patternicity.

In other words, Luke is taking the opposite point of view of Shermer. In an article in The Journal of Parapsychology, he writes that randomania is seen in people who dismiss psychic phenomena, such as precognition and telepathy, “even if scientific research suggests that the phenomena may be genuine.”

David Luke has a supporter in former Army-CIA remote viewer Joe McMoneagle.  When we told him that skeptics label remote viewing a Type I Error  apophenia – he had this to say:

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“That’s why there have been over 40,000 remote viewings in dozens of experiments replicated in more than a dozen research labs in seven countries over the past ten years; nineteen years of RV support to every major intelligence collection agency in America; and I personally have done more than 100 successful demonstrations of RV [double blind] on major television channels in seven countries – and have demonstrated it using children from two schools located more than six hundred miles apart on Channel Four in Japan; found 50% of the missing people I’ve looked for in Japan [out of 28] over a six year period [all double blind]; supported five physics research inquiries using RV to describe sub-quantum particles, to include the single largest high energy strike on the Earth in our written history by targeting the past; and demonstrated five out of five precognitive targets with unequivocal correct results [judged blind and filmed] . . . . . . I did it all because I suffer from apophenia Type I errors.

“Excuse me; but give me a f-ing break. These people are totally delusional.”

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Whoa, talk about turning the tables! I should mention that if you want to read more about Joe and his remote viewing, Trish and I have an article in the new issue of NEXUS Magazine. In it, we interview Joe about a remote viewing he did that found ancient aliens on Mars. It’s a fascinating story, especially because the target came from NASA.

This tree is in our backyard, a big, beautiful thing with an opening in the middle of its huge trunk where other branches shoot off in many directions. On various occasions, cats have taken refuge in that opening, as have other critters – possums, squirrels – that the dogs can smell.They are endlessly fascinated with this tree, leaping up to sniff and investigate.

But until today, no dog had leaped into that opening, a leap so graceful and beautiful it was as if she had wings. The dog who did what no other dog has done is Kilt, one of two border collies that belongs to our housemate, Cassie.

Kilt is two, incredibly smart, imbued with endless energy, and is affectionate and always eager to play. She’s a rescue. She originally belonged to a family in Alaska and apparently hated it so much that she misbehaved and bit her owner. She was subsequently flown to Florida by her owner to be trained. The trainer works specifically with border collies and other herding dogs and one of the things he does in this training is to teach the dogs how to herd sheep. He knows Cassie because she has been taking Willow to his ranch to sheep herd.

The dogs staring up at Kilt are Noah, our golden retriever, and Willow, Cassie’s male border collie. Noah is three times as tall as Kilt and when he leaps up at this tree, his massive paws against the trunk, he could just step into that opening – if he wanted to. But he seems to be somewhat claustrophobic. And willow, who is 10, has ailing hips.

So today, Rob was outside with the dogs, and as they clustered around the tree, Rob flung his arm into the air and said, “Kilt, go!” And she went. She leaped up and vanished into this tight opening, howling with pleasure, and managed to turn around and look down at Noah and Willow and howled again, as if to say, “Ha, ha, catch me if you can, suckers.”

When they didn’t rise to the challenge, she leaped down – and over both of them – and ran out into the yard, looking for squirrels.

I think there’s a lesson in this for humans. Leap while you physically can. Don’t be afraid to take risks. Life is an adventure. Explore it any way you can!