Probability vs. luck

Back when I was kid in middle school, called junior high in those days, two or three friends and I would hang out in the boy’s locker room after gym class for a few minutes and flip coins, calling heads or tails. If you guessed it, you got it. If not, you paid the nickel, dime or quarter.

At first, I just watched, probably because I didn’t have any change in my pocket. But one day I took my turn and correctly guessed nine of ten flips, and cleaned up. The next day, my luck continued. I just knew whether it was going to be heads or tails, and that baffled the other guys. After that we didn’t play the game anymore, and that was the end of it. I’ve tried to repeat the phenomena a number of times, but never seem to get much better than the average – 50-50. Maybe it was because money was involved that my focus was stronger and I was somehow able to ‘see’ whether it would be heads or tails.

The memory of that experience came back to me recently when I was reading about a 17th century French gambler named Antoine Gombaud chevalier de Mere. Until 1654, de Mere did quite well at the gambling tables. Then his luck changed so he decided to invoke probability theory to help his cause.

One of de Mere’s favorite wagers involved four rolls of a single die. To win, he had to roll a six at least once. Because of his success, no one would wager against him. So he changed the game to include a pair of dice. He wagered that he would roll a double six within 24 tosses.  De Mere believed that he would win two out of three times. But instead, he lost regularly.

Unable to find the flaw in his own logic, de Mere wrote to his friend Blaise Pascal, one of France’s most famous mathematicians. Even though Pascal wasn’t a gambler, he was fascinated by the question. He recruited fellow philosopher Pierre de Fermat and they corresponded over a four-month period. The result was Traite du Triangle Arithmetique, a landmark book of probability theory.

Pascal and Fermat found that de Mere was a long way from the two thirds odds he had imagined. Actually, his chances of winning were less than even–49 in 100. However, by adding one roll, the odds improved to 51 out of 100. To reach his favored two out of three wins, he would have to allow for 39 rolls.

While gamblers who win consistently are probably using probability theory to their advantage, I think there’s another factor at play – the power of the mind to affect or detect the roll of the dice, the flip of a coin, or the turn of a card. However, as soon as the process turns repetitive and monotonous, the average goes down. It seems that over time even the lure of large piles of chips ultimately loses its appeal and the psychic advantage fades.

I’d like to hear how others with psi abilities perform in games of chance.

 

 

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The Source Code

Parallel universes seem to be the rage these days. One of the best and most recent books on the topic is Brain Greene’s The Hidden Reality, which we wrote about in an earlier post, or in just about anything written by astrophysicist Michio Kaku. Hollywood has tackled this topic before – notably in Sliding Doors, one of our favorites. Now there’s a new Hollywood twist on the theme. Source Code.

Jake Gyllenhall  is an Iraq war vet who, according to wired.com, “uses time reassignment technology to crack open alternate realities in an effort to stop a terrorist from blowing up Chicago.”

Every movie or novel that plays around with ideas like this has to establish the rules. And the rules in this particular story are that you can visit this past, alternate reality, but can’t change anything in it. In the movie, Gyllenhall’s assignment has his “revisiting an eight-minute time loop animated by the brain activity of victims killed during an earlier train attack. While on his Groundhog Day–style mission, Colter searches for clues that might lead to the identity of the terrorist behind the bombings,” says wired.

Astrophysicist Michio Kaku – one of our gurus – says, “What you see in Source Code is highly improbable, but it’s possible.”

Here’s the trailer.

The Source Code

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Message from the Church Billboard

Picasso, certainly a trickster artist!

This uplifting synchro comes from Thomas Nash, who contacted us because of the Dreamland interview. It smacks of a mischievous trickster story, but is also a result of Thomas’ search for a synchro. Intention? It sure looks like that.

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I honed up to the fact that I’m a pawn a long time ago, although it’s my Chess game! ha ha!

This means that if you pay attention, the world will show you what to do and it will sometimes use you in various ways, depending on what’s needed.

The message on my answering machine is a way to describe what happened…..

“Hi, we’ve gone fishing for possibilities, there’s no limit”

So…sometime when you’re bored, or need to get out of the house, try something like this…

It was the weekend and I had no plans. Headed out of my driveway, I decided it felt best to turn right. Reaching the beautiful river road, it shows me the road to Cazadero. Magic abounds! An old friend could just show up or a beautiful hitchhiker could invite you home. You could get a flt tire and a band of hippies might adopt you!

The road started to narrow as I drove past the small, rural town. I didn’t want to drive the windy road to the coast, so I turned around, a bit deflated since nothing magical seemed to have happened.  Then, something caught my eye! It was a miraculous message written on a church billboard and seemed to be just for me:

Try eating your ego sometime, it’s non-fattening.

I chuckled all the way home.

 

 

 

Posted in travel, Uncategorized | 12 Comments

Joey and His Grandfather

This multi-layered synchronicity comes from Janice Cutbush. We’ve posted a couple of her synchros –  The Loon of Fourth Lake and Sky Bars, Joy and Mom and Dad, which actually has a synchronous connection to this some story. There are synchronicities with birthdays, names, dates…well, you’ll see.

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In 2007, my nephew Joey, a 29 year old construction worker, sustained a traumatic brain injury when he fell off a 35′ high flat roof he was working on in Albany, NY.

He life hung in the limbo of a coma for 5 weeks. Doctors were predicting the worst. He had only a 10% chance of surviving and if he did, he most likely would be a vegetable.  After 4 weeks he began to show signs of recovering- blinking, squeezing hands, opening his eyes. Week five he began to revive and in fact did survive.

However, he was left with a crippling cognitive impairment that would make it difficult for him to work-visual agnosia. He is face blind and does not recognize much of what he sees. When he was doing physical rehab, his therapist took him to the hospital store, to get him familiar with the store and items in it. She started with chocolate candy. She held up a Sky Bar and Joe started singing the advertising jingle from the 1950s-“One two three four Sky Bar; it’s a four in one bar.” The therapist was amazed and asked him how he knew that old song. He said, “My grandpa used to sing old jingles to me when I was little.”

We all thought it was incredible that he remembered this since it was so long ago.  Joey was my father’s namesake and in a weird coincidence, my father (Joey’s grandfather) died on March 10, 2000, which was Joey’s birthday. We all remember thinking at the time how awful it was that my dad died on Joey’s  birthday. Joey was in the Marine’s in California when his grandfather died and did not come home for the funeral, but had been very close to my father growing up as my parents took care of Joey when his mom went back to work.

After the accident, a lawsuit was initiated by Joey’s parents against the numerous contractors that were involved in the building he was working on when he fell. The lawsuit dragged on for 3 years and finally in late 2010 it was settled.  Joey’s lawyers won a substantial settlement that will provide him with an income for life, since his disabiliity will prevent him from working. There was synchronicity again connecting my Dad and Joey even in the settlement. The case was settled out of court by the lawyers on a holiday, Veteran’s Day, which happens to be my father’s birthday.  Again, a final synchronicity after the lawsuit.  It was necessary for Joey’s parents to hire a trust lawyer. As it turns out, the trust lawyer’s father was the obstetrician who delivered Joey in 1979.

In a final connection, Joey and his grandmother have become very close since his accident. She is 92 and lives alone. Joey visits her almost every day and sometimes spends evenings watching TV with her.  It is touching and poignant to see him doting on her.  We all wonder what messages from beyond Joey received when he was hovering between life and death. Maybe this was my dad’s way of saving Joey and ensuring that his wife would be cared for in her old age.

 

Posted in spirt communication, Uncategorized | 9 Comments

They Come in Threes

On March 10, I was interviewed for an hour by Anne Strieber for her and Whitley’s Dreamland radio show and for their subscriber section. During the first half hour, we talked about 7 Secrets of Synchronicity – what the secrets are, with stories that illustrate them.  We probably spent the longest period of time on the trickster – especially the dark trickster, the archetype that can be the most puzzling. The dark trickster is often a warning. Here’s an example of a dark trickster.

During the second half hour, Anne began with a question: do we have free will? She says that after she emerged from her coma six years ago, synchronicities proliferated in her life. They seemed to be part of some greater complex puzzle that prompted her to question whether someone or something else is actually pulling the strings. Think: The Matrix. Or, a movie I haven’t seen yet but which she has – The Adjustment Bureau. I feel that synchronicity is the language of the unconscious and supports the premise of free will.

This led into a discussion about the grays. They may be a kind of dark trickster, who awaken us to a greater reality beneath our daily lives, just as synchros do. Anne has read the 250,000 letters that her husband received from contactees and abductees and is in a unique position to recognize patterns consistent with these events. She says that contactees and abductees always experience grays in threes. “Two short, one taller.” If someone tells her they experienced contact or an abduction with four or five grays, then she knows the experience wasn’t genuine.

I realized that she had identified an archetype associated with these experiences – threes. She added that many of these experiences occur at 3:33, and we talked a bit about the significance of the number. Then I thought back to an experience I had in 2001, when I attended a workshop taught by Eric Pearl, author of The Reconnection.

Pearl teaches a form of healing that uses certain hand movements over the body to promote healing. No physical touch is involved. As we learned these hand movements, we practiced on each other. I paired up with a woman standing next to me – whom I didn’t know. As she performed these hand movements, a beam of light suddenly shot out of the top of my skull. I could see it. The beam extended upward through the ceiling, the roof, similar to these beams in the photo above, but there was just  single pillar of light, a perfect column. At the end of it, I saw entities peering down at me.

Anne immediately jumped in and asked me what the entities looked like.  The question threw me. I’d never wanted to think about this before. I blurted, “They looked like aliens and there were three of them.”

I explained that I never felt threatened, that my sense of these entities was that they were curious and, in some odd way, protective. They crowded around the top of the light column, sort of jostling each other like kids eager for a better view.

Skip ahead three years. In June 2004, Hurricane Frances hit our area. It was a large, sloppy storm that, at one point, covered most of the Florida peninsula. It dumped more than a  foot of rain on our area, water began seeping under our front door early on,  and during the long hours it pounded away at our neighborhood,  I worried about our skylights leaking. Everyone in Florida knows that if your roof is compromised in a hurricane, your house is pretty much history.

We were bunked in the bedroom with our daughter, a dog, three cats, and a bird, and around five that morning, I was the only one awake. The rain pounded relentlessly at the hurricane shutters. I could hear the skylights vibrating in the living room, the kitchen, the bathroom.  I considered getting up to check the skylights, but was so exhausted I lay there for another moment. And suddenly, the beam of light shot out of my head gain – my forehead this time – and there were those three entities at the very end of it, peering down at me.

I suddenly knew the house would come through the storm intact. I immediately fell asleep. When I woke hours later, the storm had moved on and the house was fine. “They weren’t hostile in any way,” I remarked to Anne.

“They never are,” she replied. “People who say otherwise are experiencing their own projections, not the grays.”

So now I’m waiting for these three to drop by again and offer some reassurance about the global situation.

 

 

Posted in aliens, Striebers, Uncategorized | 17 Comments

Planetary Empaths and Japan’s Quake, Tsunami and…

Exactly a year ago today, on March 11, 2010, we published our first post on planetary empaths. That in itself could be  a synchro, given  the devastation in Japan and that we’ve been hearing from these empaths for the last four or five days about the symptoms they’ve been experiencing.

These individuals we call planetary empaths are so attuned to the planet that they experience physical, emotional and psychic symptoms days and sometimes weeks before a natural disaster. These recent symptoms people were describing suggested that something huge was about to occur.

The symptoms varied from individual to individual:

–       ringing ears

–        heart palpitations

–       nausea

–       extreme vertigo

–       insomnia

–       tingling or vibrating that runs up and down the arms and legs

–       strange, vivid and powerful dreams about natural disasters. Some of these dreams are quite specific

–       migraine headaches

–       poltergeist phenomena – loud noises, for instance, with no apparent source

–       bleeding from the ears

–       abdominal pain or discomfort

–       extreme sadness for no apparent reason

Usually when we hear from these individuals, we take note  of it on the blog, as a post or comment. However, because of recent computer issues – being hacked – we put the comments into a folder  to refer to later. We took a few days off to visit our daughter and awakened this morning to the news about Japan’s 8.9 quake and the subsequent tsunami. We just looked at each other, spooked that the empaths were right again, and deeply saddened as we watched the heartbreaking videos of the devastation in Japan.

On March 3, SW wrote: “I dreamed about 9/11 a month before it happened. Interestingly, it was in reverse, i.e. the people and building were upside down. Also, it was in black and white. Now I am feeling that something else equally big is about to happen.”

We wrote SW and asked her what kind of “big” she thought it might be. She said she didn’t know. “It’s elusive. But I did dream last night that Washington, D.C. had lost all power and people, myself included, were wandering round in the dark in masses.” She added that she was experiencing numerous synchronicities.

This was followed by reports over the next two days that people were exhibiting some or all of the symptoms listed above. For some of these individuals, the symptoms began several months ago. Gypsy Woman, for instance,  wrote about a horrifying tsunami dream she had where rivers of sludge swept across entire towns.

A week ago, a woman who comments as mathaddict reported feeling “radiation sickness.” Given that five of Japan’s nuclear reactors are now under emergency, she seems to have picked up on a radiation leak. In fact, on MSNBC this evening, it was reported that radioactivity in the area of one reactor is 1,000 times normal levels.

D page of mythic musing emailed us about five days ago about her symptoms, which were particularly severe. Spirit of Magenta, and several others reported feelings of deep sadness. Healing Mudras,  Jen at Fractal Times, mathaddict and others   work  with the signs and symbols in their dreams for deeper clarification. Some of these empaths are accomplished lucid dreamers, able to wake up within their dreams and changed them, manipulate them.

The challenge with this whole thing is that although some of these people are able to distinguish the type of disaster – quake versus volcanic eruption, for instance – they can’t pinpoint exact locations.

Yet, these empaths tune in to something big. Like most intuitive abilities, this one isn’t an exact science. It’s still evolving.

If you have experienced any of these symptoms, particularly before the Japan quake occurred, we’d love to hear from you. Leave us  a comment. We’re certain there are  many more planetary empaths out there who may be reluctant to speak up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in planetary emapths, Uncategorized | 54 Comments

The Bracelet and the Goddess Card

Here are a couple of intriguing synchros from the psychic healer Jane Clifford of Wales.

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“I am away in the amazing Candy Valley, my fav country retreat & whilst here I always go have acupuncture with the incredible Dr Wen. He’s the real deal; he can read one’s energy and see your essence and treat accordingly. This time I met his colleague and translator Isabelle for the first time.

“This morning, my intuition told me to take off my Tibetan bracelet that I have been wearing for months.  I have learned not to argue with my intuition anymore, so I removed the bracelet. I went for acupuncture and during the treatment Isabelle brought in a tiny box of treasures and gave me one of her two Tibetan bead bracelets. They were given to her and imbued with energy by her Tibetan Buddhist master.

“I put it on, wearing it where– until this morning– my other bracelet had been. I usually take flowers when I go there, but this morning I was rushing. So after acupuncture I went go straight into the thrift store opposite & bought a bright green vase. I filled it with  flowers and gave it to Isabelle. She told me she has been looking for a green vase of that shade for months & said:  ‘You know everything.’ I laughed and said I wish I did!

“The next day, I went back to the acupuncturist to collect my daughter. This time I took a card/picture of the Chinese goddess of mercy Quan Yin with me. I wanted to ask Dr. Wen if he knew of her. When I arrived he was in the consulting room with my daughter and came out to greet me in the reception. I held out the card depicting the goddess. He looked astonished, took the card and rushed over to the room where my daughter was waiting. He came back shortly and said:  ‘When you walked in with this card for me, I was talking to your daughter about this same goddess!’

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Jane always amazes us with her synchro tales. She’s got the power!

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The Badger from Wisconsin

 

For more than three weeks now, state workers in Wisconsin – known as the badger state –  have been protesting the governor’s intent to bust workers’ unions. Even though the union agreed to pay cuts, that wasn’t enough for Governor Walker and his Tea Party cronies. They wanted to kill workers’ rights to collective bargaining. And this evening, they were successful.

The Republicans used a nuclear option to ram legislation through the state senate by removing the collective bargaining facet from the budget bill – even though the whole issue was supposedly about the budget. Here’s the full story.

So as we were watching the news tonight, we kept thinking there had to be a global synchro here. After all, this protest has gotten extensive coverage in the media and seems to reflect a growing trend in a number of states.  Sure enough, on MSNBCs The Last Word, one of Lawrence O’Donnell’s guests was a Wisconsin union leader – Rick Badger, a Wisconsin native.

 

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A Few Days Off

We’re going to take a few days off from the blog so that we can straighten out everything that got messed up when we were hacked. We hope to resume on Saturday! See you then.

Trish and Rob

 

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The Nebraska Trip

This story comes from Lauren at Threads of the Spiderwoman. We read it on her blog and loved it. You’ll see!

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I ran across this story in my files, and felt like sharing it.

In 2005 I was driving across Nebraska from an east coast residency, and stopped in tiny Cozad to visit the Robert Henri Museum, and the 100th Meridian Museum, which I just couldn’t resist.   The founder of the “Ash Can” school of American realism, Robert Henri was born there, and apparently never went back,  preferring New York City and Paris to Nebraska.  Cozad forgives him.

I remember, afterwards, sitting in a diner and fretting as usual about what to do with my life.  I know I was doing this, because I have it on paper in my journal.  I also remember looking up at a flashing sign on the bank across the street.

That got my attention.

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Pretty cool, huh?? Talk about direct, literal messages from the universe.

 

 

 

 

Posted in travel, Uncategorized | Tagged | 16 Comments