A 6.3 quake struck New Zealand’s South Island today. It’s depth was 5 kilometers, deaths and damage have been reported. The planetary empaths who frequent this blog have been reporting symptoms for at least a week. Take a look at the comments under this post, where they talk about their symptoms.
Here’s one from Dale Dassel, who is writing a novel based on the Indiana Jones game, Fate of Atlantis.
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After buying my new VW last year, I wanted to get a vanity tag for it. What better word than ‘Atlantis’ to commemorate my novel and love of my all-time favorite Indy game? The state of Georgia has a 7-letter limit on custom plates. So, I went to the DMV last summer, after I got tht car, and tried ATLNTIS and ATLNTS. Both were taken, and they politely recommended that I hold off until January, when my tag actually needs to be renewed, otherwise I would have to pay the $90 custom tag fee all over again. So I returned on Jan. 19th with a sure-fire spelling which I was guaranteed to get: ATLANTS. Taken. Luckily, I’d prepared a list of Volkswagen-related ideas, and my first choice was available: V DUBBN (yes, I really love my car that much!).
Skip to this morning. It’s a rainy, dreary, overcast day, the kind of day where I want to just stay home and sleep all day. I get up, shower, and drive 8 miles to work. I get out of my car and go inside, where my supervisor says: “What are you doing here? Aren’t you off today?” Confused, I replied, “Um, I don’t think so, unless somebody changed the schedule and didn’t tell me.” See, I always work 8am-5pm, Monday thru Friday, and very seldom work on weekends. Thus, I hardly ever look at the printed schedule. I take a look, and sure enough: off Thursday, work Saturday 8-5. I say bye and gratefully head back to my car, eager to get home and crawl back into bed again. As I am driving down the street, there is a burgundy minivan about 20 feet in front of me. Approaching the traffic light ahead, I get closer to the van. I see that it has a vanity plate, and I am absolutely *astonished*. The tag reads: ATLNTIS
What are the odds that, in the ENTIRE state of Georgia, I see the exact vanity tag message that I tried in vain to secure last year? The odds that the person driving that vehicle lives in my exact city? Positively astronomical. Maybe I should go buy a lottery ticket if my luck is *this* good! 🙂 However, I think that it’s a sign telling me to take advantage of my unexpected free day and finish up the U-boat dive scene in chapter 17 that I’ve been neglecting for the past week or so.
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Dale’s story reminds me of my ZEN666 synchro.
This story appeared as a comment by Daz under a post a few weeks ago. It’s a good one, a trickster synchro that will make you smile , if not laugh. It worth reading again…or for the first time, if you missed it.
M.C. Escher
I’ve recently wondered what Jung would think of the Internet, You Tube, Google, the instant access to information. And, specifically, what would he think of all the UFO activity that’s reported daily, somewhere on the internet?
He seemed to regard UFOs as archetypes of the collective unconscious, a search for wholeness. Granted, I haven’t memorized his autobiography, but I seem to recall that there were many UFO sightings before the outbreak of World War II, which is part of what precipitated his interest in the topic.
First, look @ this photo Nancy Atkinson took at noon, 7,000 feet. That white speck is the moon. Then look at the video.
This video from the Netherland intrigues me. You can just imagine this guy out for a drive with his girlfriend, he sees these weird lights…and, well, let him tell you. I’m sure some skeptics somewhere will jump on this one, just as they did with the various videos of a UFO over Jerusalem, the UFOs that reportedly shut down an airport in China, the Phoenix Lights, and all the rest. Whatever. This video resonates.
We recenltly came across a long, but interesting article on the Internet by UFO author Budd Hopkins. It’s called Deconstructing the Debunkers: A Response. It appeared on a web site called The Alien Jigsaw: True Experiences of Alien Abductions. The article reminded us of the time we spent with Hopkins many years ago.
It was the early 1980s when we were writing for OMNI Magazine’s red pages about UFOs, hauntings and other paranormal activities. We were assigned to a UFO conference in Hollywood, Florida where Hopkins, was one of the speakers. We’d read his book, Intruders, so when we had an opportunity to go along with him on a UFO investigation involving hypnotic regression, we jumped at the chance.
Budd hadn’t rented a car so we drove him up the coast to meet a family with a dramatic story of repeated abductions, involving a woman and her young son. Hopkins hypnotized the mother, Carrie, and she told of being floated out of her bed down the hall and right through the wall to an illuminated ‘tube’ that lifted her and her abductees up to a waiting vessel.
Carrie remembered nothing about what happened to her when she was taken into the vessel, but she did recall details about the trip up the tube. Their house was located less than a mile away from the headquarters of the grocery store tabloid, National Enquirer, which during those years published UFO stories. Each Christmas season the Enquirer would put up a huge Christmas tree, a dazzling display of lights and kiddie rides. It was a popular attraction. The tree was fully lit and visible during the abduction and Carrie recalled looking down, and pointing it out to the aliens. Hopkins matter-of-factly asked how they reacted, and Carrie, speaking in a hypnotic monotone in the present tense, said, “They aren’t impressed.”
Carrie’s husband, D, was also present, and he was a presence – to say the least. While Carrie and her son were gentle and sweet, her husband was imposing. He was a big man, older than Carrie, with a mane of silver-gray hair. D wore black clothes, and a gold necklace bearing a thumb-sized gold devil pendant. He said he was a former Baptist minister, who told us that he had ‘changed sides.’
Yeah, that was weird. Trish and I were exchanging glances, wondering what was up with that dude, but Budd seemed to ignore him, as if he didn’t figure into the scenario, and just focused on the wife’s experiences. Budd was staying overnight with the family and when we left, we were glad we weren’t staying there.
In the aftermath, we asked for a follow-up interview and invited the couple to our Fort Lauderdale townhouse. We should have guessed that doing so would attract more high strangeness. Since we didn’t particularly want to be alone with them, we invited a few friends, ones we knew from other stories we’d done for OMNI and other magazines. So it was an eclectic group and among them were a few talented psychics. Carrie and her husband arrived early and again D wore black with his satanist logo visible. Everyone stayed late and seemed to be enjoying themselves, except for D. The ex-minister/satanist seemed out of his element, wary of everyone, and remained stoically silent for the most part. He never moved from one place the entire night.
It was around 1 a.m. and we were talking about MIBs – men in black – when the unexpected happened.
I glanced over at the sliding glass doors, which led from the living room to a small porch and the parking lot. Someone was standing on the porch staring in at us. By the time I alerted the others, the man had moved away. I hurried to the doors, threw them open, and could hardly believe what I saw. Instead of simply disappearing into the darkness beyond the parking lot, the man was making a scene of his escape. He crouched low, and moved from car to car, and kept looking back at us. He was hiding in full view.
Trish called the police, and the response was astonishing. Within a few minutes, eight or nine patrol cars arrived, some with dogs. The police spread out and searched the complex. We were baffled…until we found out that a man had been murdered an hour earlier, less than a mile away. As far as we know, they never found the man we reported, and we don’t know if he had anything to do with the murder. But it was a strange ending for an unusual evening, and hey, we never saw that couple again!
If this paradigm shift comes to the U.S. and Europe, perhaps part of what it will include is free internet for everyone, a project undertaken by a charity group, A Human Right, to buy a satellite that will beam free internet to developing countries around the world. Nearly 5 billion people out of the world’s 6.9 billion don’t have access to the internet, which we now know was a vital tool in Egypt’s liberation.
Recently, I wandered into the skeptic’s dictionary out of curiosity to see what they had to say about synchronicity. Basically, folks, they’re telling those of us who accept and pursue meaningful coincidences in our lives that we’re deluded or crazy. Let me quote from the dictionary.
“What reasons are there for accepting synchronicity as an explanation for anything in the real world? What it explains is more simply and elegantly explained by the ability of the human mind to find meaning and significance where there is none (apophenia).
“Jung’s defense of acausal connections is so inane I hesitate to repeat it. He argues that “acausal phenomena must exist…since statistics are only possible anyway if there are also exceptions” (1973, Letters, 2:426).
“He asserts that “…improbable facts exist–otherwise there would be no statistical mean…” (ibid.: 2:374). Finally, he claims that “the premise of probability simultaneously postulates the existence of the improbable” (ibid. : 2:540). However, if you think of all the pairs of things that can happen in a person’s lifetime, and add to that our very versatile ability of finding meaningful connections between things, it then seems likely that most of us will experience many meaningful coincidences. The coincidences are predictable but we are the ones who give them meaning.”
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I love that last line. Should someone else apply meaning or no meaning to our coincidences? Are we not worthy of making decisions about our own experiences? The message is that we should not trust our own thoughts or perceptions if we find meaning in coincidental or mysterious happenings in our lives. In other words, the proper and scientific thing to do is to ignore and dismiss coincidences. The inverse, of course, is that it’s okay to apply no meaning.
The writer continues:
“Even if there were a synchronicity between the mind and the world such that certain coincidences resonate with transcendental truth, there would still be the problem of figuring out those truths. What guide could one possibly use to determine the correctness of an interpretation? There is none except intuition and insight, the same guides that led Jung’s teacher, Sigmund Freud, in his interpretation of dreams. The concept of synchronicity is but an expression of apophenia.”
The Skeptic’s Dictionary concludes with a comment that Jung went through a period of mental illness when he was exploring these concepts. The implication: he was crazy and so are we!
Here’s an interesting synchro tale about a symbol of spiritual ascension. It was written by Patricia Gibson, director of the Epilepsy Information Service at Wake Forest School of Medicine. It appeared as a guest column in the Winston-Salem Journal of North Carolina on January 13.
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Synchronicity has been described as the coincidence of a thought with an outside event. Many of us have had these moments that surprise us and make us wonder. Some of these moments we forget, while others keep resurfacing, causing us to ponder on the mysteries of life.
Last August, I was leaving a local restaurant with my sister when we decided to stop by a craft store next door to look around. We passed some beautiful molded art squares hanging on the wall; one depicted a heart with wings.
“I have always loved that symbol — a heart with wings,” my sister said, almost to herself. “Do you remember that pillow you made me one Christmas when I was 14?”
“Oh, yeah, the purple heart with the red wings,” I said, surprised that it was that same symbol. She had seen a picture of the pillow in a teen magazine and thought it was so cool. I later cut it out and went to a fabric shop looking for purple and red satin. Pretty tacky, I had thought, but then surprised myself by coming up with a fairly good replica of the pillow. I smiled, remembering how excited she had been when she opened the present.
“What does that symbol mean?” I asked.
“It means a spiritual ascension, evolving to a higher level,” she said, “To me it just means hope.” I made a mental note to return to the store later and buy that art square for her next birthday.
Two years ago, my sister was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, a deadly sneaky cancer with a high mortality rate. She has won that battle so far, but not without the price of severe nerve damage from the chemotherapy.
As I recently passed the craft store on my way to work, I again thought of the heart with wings and said to myself, “Don’t forget to go get that art piece,” trying to underline this in my brain, forgetful person that I am. I pulled up to the stoplight at Five Points and sat idling behind a truck, waiting for the light to change. As I sat staring absentmindedly ahead, it suddenly hit me that there in front of my eyes, hanging on the back of the truck, was a beautifully hand-carved heart with wings. I could not believe it.
The light changed and the truck turned right and so did I. The truck turned right into a lot and parked. A man got out and headed toward the building. I jumped out, running behind him.
“Sir, excuse me, sir,” I called. He turned and I explained that I had seen his sign and wondered where he bought it. “It is so beautiful, and I want one for my sister, that symbol means so much to her.”
He explained that he had carved it himself, but he was having some medical problems now and couldn’t do that work at this time. I gave him my card and asked, should he ever be interested in selling the heart with wings, to please let me know.
I never heard from him, though I would think of him from time to time and wonder if he might have lost my card, something I would likely do. I regretted that I had not gotten his name and number.
On Dec. 21, a particularly discouraging day, I unlocked my office door, tossed my coat on the nearby chair, looked at my overflowing desk with a sigh, and then did a double take. To my utter amazement, there amid the stacks of paper lay the beautiful hand-carved heart with wings. Attached was a note that said, “Happy Holidays — May your spirit soar and that of your loved ones always soar,” and just below that, “free.”
I ran to my coworkers, but they could offer no information. I went to the security guard at the front desk.
“Mary, tell me, there was something left in my office.” Her eyes told me she knew something.
“I can’t say,” she said, and looked away. “I promised not to tell anything.”
“You don’t understand,” I said, “this is just a miracle.” But she wasn’t budging.
The power of a simple act of kindness is impressive. I wanted so to thank that man for his generosity and kindness. And I so hoped and prayed that whatever medical problem he was having was better. So, sir, all I can do is write this to say thank you and to say that people like you give me hope for our world. May your spirit also soar.
