Wink in the Cosmos

Posted on September 7, 2009 by Trish and Rob

Here are a couple of humorous trickster-type synchronicities that appeared in an article called, “A Wink from the Cosmos,” that was published in the May 1996 edition of Intuition Magazine.

Earl was trying to track down an out-of-print book called The Adventures of Marco Polo. He scoured two used book stores in New York City, had no success, and caught a taxi to a third. The cab driver was unusually chatty, and during their conversation, Earl glanced at his license on the dashboard. His name? Marco Polo!

Art was sitting at his computer typing an e-mail missive when his cat Coal jumped from his lap onto the keyboard. Before Art’s startled eyes, as the cat shifted from key to key, its paws tapped out the word emerson on the screen. “To make it even weirder, I’ve been studying Ralph Waldo Emerson intently for the past year, and the study has taken on a very symbolic meaning to me,” he says, still in shock. “My wife was sitting next to me at the computer, and if I’m sent away for being crazy, she has to go, too!”

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UPDATE: Here’s another little wink. Apparently, when this post came up this morning, the type was black, so a black screen appeared – a black out. We didn’t know that because before we were able to go on-line and check the blog, well, we had a black out. The electricity went out for an hour or so.

Posted in animals, cats, Emerson | 18 Comments

Babalu

Posted on September 6, 2009 by Trish and Rob


Here’s a synchronicity story from Dave Malcolm, the former AUTEC engineer who has previously contributed. He notes that sometimes he’s disturbed by synchronicities because they tend to occur whenever he’s worried about a loved one. But fortunately his worst fears have never manifested after the synchronicity. “I’ve always been wrong I am happy to say.”

In any case here’s his story.
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As a network engineer I am frequently on global conference calls as I was at 4AM on a recent Saturday. While we talk on the conference many of us send instant text messages making comments about participants and have nicknames for lots of our colleagues.

Our man from Cuba got on and while I recognized him, some didn’t. So I texted that it’s Babalu, a reference to Ricky Ricardo from the “I Love Lucy show”.

Later that night, my grandchildren and I watched The Cable Guy, a movie we have all seen. No one really wanted to see it again, but there was nothing else on. At the end of the movie when an injured Jim Carey was asked his name, he replied, Babalu.

Now if I could just see those Mega Million numbers the morning of the next drawing.
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Ricky Ricardo sang a song called Babalu, a name that refers to the Afro-Cuban orisha (or god) Babalu Aye, also known in Brazil as Obalu Aye. He is known as the deity associated with illness, disease, insanity, aging and death, but is also the deity that cures same. He is appeased on the earth, and cool water is one of the mainstays of his appeasement.
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Although I don’t know the circumstances of Dave’s concerns, his worries about a family member could be reflected not only in the synchronicity itself, but also in the particular deity within the synchronicity.

Posted in babalu Aye, orishas, santeria | 14 Comments

Robert Rabbit

Posted on September 5, 2009 by Trish and Rob

When Trish attended a writer’s conference in Kentucky, she gave a talk one evening to the writers on synchronicity. In doing so, she told the story of the three Roberts. Briefly, last winter we stayed for awhile at a house in the Florida keys and were visited by two friends, both named Robert. That made three Roberts. One morning I opened the refrigerator and noticed a jar of grape jelly labeled: Robert is Here. That’s the name of a large fruit and vegetable standing in Homestead, and Robert apparently makes jelly.

So Trish mentioned that to keep everyone’s name straight, we referred to one of the Roberts as Tacayo (Spanish for brethren), and we called the other Robert Rabbit. As soon as she made the comment, a hand shot up in the audience and a woman said: “Sorry for interrupting, but one of the characters in my novel is named Robert Rabbit.”

Interestingly, of the 25 people in the audience, all but one easily grasped the idea of synchronicity.

On Saturday, September 12, Trish and I will give our first joint talk on synchronicity at the Heritage Book Festival in St. Augustine, Florida. You’re all invited!
Rob
P.S. I’m also going to be talking to a group of high school seniors in St. Augustine about writing and synchronicity. We’ll report back.

Posted in names, rabbit | 12 Comments

Merlin’s Magic

Posted on September 5, 2009 by Trish and Rob


This story comes from Judi Hertling of British Colombia. It’s a zinger!


For the past few months, Judi and her best friend, Chris, have been watching a British TV series entitled Merlin. The 13-part drama tells the story of the sorcerer of Arthurian legend. Both women are avid readers. In a phone call a few days after the series aired, Chris mentioned she would be interested in reading a few books about Camelot, King Arthur and Merlin. “This is not her usual genre, so when I was browsing our bookstore aisles recently, I thought I’d check out the science fiction and fantasy section to see if I could find titles that might interest her.”


Only a few titles caught Judi’s eye. One was The Sorcerer, another was UTHER, two books in a series about Camelot and the early years of Merlin, written by Jack Whyte. Judi had never heard of the author, but he had so many titles on the shelf, she figured he must be a successful historical fiction novelist.She passed the information on to Chris in their next telephone conversation and forgot about it until yesterday afternoon, when she was reorganizing her bookshelves.


“Having recently moved into our new house, I had taken hundreds of books out of packing boxes and shoved them onto shelves in a haphazard fashion. Being an organized Virgo, this went completely against my book sensibilities. So I set to pulling books off shelves and began rearranging them. As I was doing this, I started flipping through pages of books that I hadn’t gotten around to reading yet.One of the books was a novel that I remembered having picked up a few years earlier in a used bookstore in Kelowna, British Columbia. It was an advanced reading copy of a novel by Frank M. Robinson, Waiting. Curious as to why I hadn’t read it yet, since I enjoy suspense with a paranormal twist, I began flipping through the pages.


“In the middle of the book was a small piece of lightweight card, which I assumed was the previous owner’s bookmark – until I looked closer. It was, in fact, the torn off half of an airline boarding pass issued by Alaska Airlines departing from Seattle going to Kelowna. The name on the ticket?”


You guessed it. Jack Whyte.



Posted in authors, books, Jack Whyte, Merlin | 8 Comments

Written in the Wind

Posted on September 4, 2009 by Trish and Rob


Camille Flammarion (1842-1925) was a renown 19th century astronomer who also had a deep interest in psychic phenomenon. In his book The Unknown, published in 1900, he recorded a personal experience with synchronicity – although he didn’t call it that.

While writing the chapter on the wind in his major scientific work on the atmosphere, a gale blew open his window, lifted the loose pages he’d just written, and whisked them away. Several days later, he was bewildered when he received proofs of the vanished chapter from his publisher. It turns out that the wind had carried the pages into the street, where the publisher’s porter often walked. The porter found them and picked them up and took them to the publisher’s office.
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Here’s a link about Flammarion’s psychic/Spiritualist interests. It seems he had a great interest in the survival of the soul, ghosts, and “coincidences” surrounding death.

Posted in astronomer, Flammarion, writers | 13 Comments

Puzzling Dean Koontz Quote

Posted on September 3, 2009 by Trish and Rob

Every so often, friends who know about our interest in synchronicity send quotes or stories from other sources about the topic. Chip Carson, a reverend in Atlanta, Georgia, sent us this quote referencing synchronicity from a novel by Dean Koontz:

“The more rational the culture, the more likely that synchronicity would arise as a means of correcting what few errors the culture committed.” Dean Koontz from Frankenstein: Dead and Alive page 328. Isbn 975-0-553-58790-6
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Koontz is one of the storytelling masters, the writer that other writers read to hone their craft. We’re fans. Since we used to have a Golden Retriever and Koontz wrote one of the best books ever that revolved around that breed – Watchers – we love the fact that he works with an organization that trains Golden Retrievers as guides for the handicapped. Like Stephen King, he delves into the weird and the strange, into the worlds that exist in the spaces between our external realities and those hidden places we sense but can’t touch – i.e., the stuff that interests us.

But this quote is puzzling. Anyone have insights?

Posted in Dean Koontz, quotes, writers | 20 Comments

Snow Leopard

Posted on September 2, 2009 by Trish and Rob

Some companies go to great length to hype their new products, but the following must be synchronicity. Even Apple couldn’t arrange this scheme of events.

August 28 was the official publication of Apple’s latest operating system, OS10.6, known better by its nickname, Snow Leopard. Meanwhile, Dot Earth, a NYTimes environmental blog, showed a photo of a rare snow leopard, taken in Afghanistan. The story’s publication date is, yes, August 28.

Thanks to John Ehrenfeld for noting the synchronicity on his blog that otherwise sticks with rational thinking about future trends.

Snow leopards are designated as an endangered species by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. We’ll see which snow leopard survives longer.

Outdated computer operating systems, along with their accompanying hardware, disappear from use quickly, and are filling our landfills. It’s estimated that 160,000 computers are discarded every day in the U.S. Many end up in the Third World creating serious environmental hazards.

Posted in animals, computers, snow leopard | 10 Comments

What a gas!

Posted on September 1, 2009 by Trish and Rob


Max Action brought this story to our attention. It’s another case of simultaneous and independent discoveries, in other words, scientific synchronicities. In 1868, French astronomer Pierre Jules Janssen spotted an unknown element in the spectrum of the sun during a total eclipse.

A few weeks later, an English scientist Joseph Norman Lockyer succeeded in seeing the same element in regular daylight. Both wrote papers on this unknown element, and in a stunning synchronicity, both papers arrived at the French Academy of Sciences on the same day. Both men were attributed with first sighting of what became known as helium.

You can read the details here: https://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/08/dayintech_0818/

Simultaneous scientific discoveries are more common that we might imagine. According to the technium:

Newton and Leibniz both discovered calculus

Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both discovered evolution

Three mathematicians “invented” decimal fractions

Oxygen was discovered by Joseph Priestley, in Wiltshire, in 1774, and by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, in Uppsala, a year earlier

Color photography was invented at the same time by Charles Cros and by Louis Ducos du Hauron, in France

Logarithms were invented by John Napier and Henry Briggs in Britain, and by Joost Bürgi in Switzerland.

“There were four independent discoveries of sunspots, all in 1611; namely, by Galileo in Italy, Scheiner in Germany, Fabricius in Holland and Harriott in England.

As fiction writers, we’ve experienced this same sort of phenomenon. In the mid 1990s, we started a novel about Amelia Earhart’s last flight, but never finished the book, which was probably a good thing. In 1996, Jane Mendelsohn’s I Was Amelia Earhart was published.

We suspect we all have the ability to tap into his primal soup of ideas – and it doesn’t matter if it’s logarithms or Amelia Earhart!

Posted in helium, science synchronicity, simultaneous scientific discoveries | 10 Comments

Swallows, Skydiving, and 2s

Posted on August 31, 2009 by Trish and Rob



UPDATE: Megan corrected us. She said there were only 2 tandem jumpers.

On August 19, we moved Megan back to college on the other side of Florida. There’s a stretch of highway where there’s nothing but sugar cane fields covering land that once was part of the Everglades. Along this stretch, hundreds of swallows sweep across the terrain, nabbing insects on the fly, swooping across the two-lane road. They’re especially thick around dusk and seem oblivious to cars.

So on the way back, around dusk, we entered this stretch. The swallows swooped and dived (literally ‘sky-dived’), often winging away from our car at the last second. Then two of them, one after another, hit our windshield. At some deep level, I sensed it might be an omen.

On August 30, 11 days after we moved her back to college, we met her halfways across the state for her second skydive, for her 20th birthday. Her appointment was for 12:30, but they didn’t get airborne until around 2 PM. She was jumping tandem, with an instructor.

Are we seeing a pattern here? 2nd dive, 20th birthday, 2 swallows, a tandemn jump at 2 PM. The tandem jumpers leave the plane last and there were three of them. We were standing outside, watching the jumpers with four of Megan’s friends. And suddenly, something happened to Megan’s parachute. It seemed to just… well, fly away.

An instructor standing next to me said, “Wow, look at that.”

“What just happened?” I asked.

“The first chute failed. Don’t worry. They’ll freefall for a few seconds, then the second chute will open.”

And that’s exactly what happened. They landed safely and afterward Megan said she didn’t realize anything unusual had happened.

Later, another skydiver said it’s an unusual occurrence. It didn’t happen for him until his 1,200th dive.

So an event 11 days ago (there’s another 2!) related to Megan’s skydive. An unnerving synchronicity.

Today, 8/31, is her actual birthday! So happy birthday, Megger!

Posted in 2s, birds, birds as messengers, Megan, Numbers, skydiving, sports | 21 Comments

A Murder of Crows

Posted on August 30, 2009 by Trish and Rob

On August 28 in West Palm Beach, an 18-year-old man awaited the verdict on the crimes with which he was charged – 14 felonies that included burglary, kidnapping, five counts of sexual battery with great force, and the savage act of forcing a mother and son into sexual acts together. He was one of ten youths involved in the ruthless assault and gang rape against the 37-year-old woman and her 12-year-old son, a crime that shocked the community for its brutality. Moments before the verdict was read, a murder of black crows hovered outside the windows of the courtroom, filling the gray sky.

The reckoning came with the crows. Nathan Walker and another defendant was convicted of 11 felonies and now faces life in prison. More trials in the case are coming.
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The phrase, “murder of crows,” may have originated from a fallacious folk tale that crows form tribunals to judge and punish the bad behavior of a member of the flock. If the verdict goes against the defendant, that bird is killed – murdered – by the flock. The basis in fact is probably that crows sometimes will kill a dying crow who doesn’t belong in their territory or much more commonly feed on carcasses of dead crows. Crows are associated with battlefields, medieval hospitals, execution sites and cemeteries.
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Throughout history, birds have served as synchronistic symbols that reflect events. So we weren’t surprised when we opened the newspaper one morning and read about how a flock of vultures are nesting on the roof of a home where the mayor of West Palm Beach resides. The city and county governments in recent years have wallowed in corruption and several city and county commissioners have gone to prison. The corruption has been so extensive that the FBI set up a permanent office in West Palm Beach investigating government corruption. While the mayor has not been implicated, the FBI says that more indictments are coming.

Clearly, from the mayor’s point of view, it appears that vultures are waiting to attack their next target. Vultures eat carrion, and interestingly, every indicted elected official has immediately pleaded guilty–knowing that the FBI has the goods on them, and they are dead meat, so to speak. Recently, one opponent of the mayor wrapped her home in toilet paper. But the perpetrator got the wrong house. The mayor’s luck continues…so far.

Posted in birds as messengers, crimes, crows, vultures | 18 Comments