The Lost Manuscript and the Herring

Posted on February 5, 2011 by Trish and Rob
Synchronicity and luck often seem to go hand-in-hand. That was certainly the case for Hermann Sudermann (1857-1928) , a German dramatist and novelist whose plays were the basis for more than 35 films in the twentieth century. 
In the early days of his career, Sudermann earned his living by submitting weekly installments of his novels to a newspaper in Berlin. But the newspaper editor was apparently worried that if something happened to Sudermann before he finished a novel, his readers would be left hanging in midair. So one day he informed Sudermann that their arrangement was changing. From here on in, the young novelist would have to turn in the entire book before the chapters were published.
Sudermann wasn’t happy about the change  – too long between paychecks! But there wasn’t much he could do about it except start writing.  He sequestered himself on the family farm and wrote Frau Sorg, about a young man torn between his love for a woman and his devotion to his father. When the novel was finished, Sudermann set out to deliver the manuscript to the newspaper.
He supposedly put the manuscript in his overcoat pocket. This part strikes me as somewhat odd, but perhaps manuscripts back then were written on paper of a smaller size than today’s standard of 8.5X11 inches. He boarded a train for Berlin and in Insterburg, where he was due to change trains, he encountered some old friends. Instead of changing trains, they hit the local watering holes.
The next morning, Sudermann woke in Berlin, but couldn’t remember anything that had happened. Worse than the hangover he probably had was that the manuscript was no longer in his overcoat pocket, which meant he wasn’t going to be paid. Depressed, he headed back to the farm and, that evening, again found himself at Insterburg, waiting for the train to Berlin, which wasn’t due to arrive until morning. He found a place to stay for the night, then hit the local bars again.
At some point, he stopped at a delicatessen and ordered a herring. As was customary in those days, the herring was wrapped in scrap paper and Sudermann was already eating when he recognized the handwriting on the paper as his own. It was a page from his lost manuscript. Elated, he got the rest of the deli’s wrapping paper and recovered most of his novel.
The odds in this story are significant. If Sudermann hadn’t gotten lodging for the night, if  he hadn’t stopped at the deli for that herring, if he’d been too drunk  to recognize his own handwriting, things would have turned out much differently.
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Then there is something darkly symbolic and trickster-like about finding your novel pages put to use wrapping fish. Back when I was a newspaper reporter, we used to be proud of getting our stories on the front page stories, but we conceded that the next day they would under someone’s kitty litter. – R
Posted in luck, novelists, sudermann | 11 Comments

Phantom Kangaroos

Posted on February 4, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Speaking of ghosts, this story has been kicking around our dashboard for weeks. It seems an appropriate time to hop to it, and get it posted.

Kangaroos, as every kid knows, are unique to Australia. But are they?
This next story is another one of those Fortean oddities that don’t seem to have any explanation and underscore the incredible mysteries of the world and reality we inhabit.
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In Mayama, a mountainous region about 220 miles north of Tokyo, there have been more than 30 sightings in the last seven years of kangaroos. Obviously, this area doesn’t have any indigenous kangaroos.Now journalists are supposedly flocking to the region, hoping to capture photos of these elusive creatures.

Interestingly, phantom kangaroos are fairly common in Fortean literature. Colonies of kangaroos have shown up in England, France, Germany, Scotland, and yes, in the U.S. In the U.S., they seem to appear in certain areas for a short period of time – usually in the Midwest – then vanished just as mysteriously as they appeared.
Jerome Clarke, in his book, Unexplained! says that sightings date back to 1899, when a woman in Virginia saw a kangaroo in her backyard.

Throughout the 20th century, there were sightings in Ohio, Utah, Illinois, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Colorado and California. Canada has also reported sightings.

So how do these creatures get to these areas? If you’ve seen any in your area (other than in Australia!) we’d love to hear about it.

The original article is here. 

How many of you saw the lunar eclipse??

Posted in disappearances, kangaroos | Leave a comment

SIGNS of our time

Posted on February 4, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Last year, Robert Perry came to our blog and offered an interesting synchronicity in which an idea manifested in a short period of time into a physical experience that mimicked the idea. Perry was working with an organization called Circle of Atonement, which was following the guidance in The Course of Miracles. They were holding a meeting to discus how to streamline the organization when one of the members came up with an image of people working together in a chain to improve efficiency. Perry remarked that she was describing a ‘bucket brigade,’ where a team fighting a fire forms a chain passing along buckets of water.

Astonishingly, minutes after making this remark, a plumbing accident flooded a nearby room, and the group formed a chain and passing buckets to clear the water from the room. A great synchronicity, that. Perry calls such incidents signs, as the title of his book above indicates. Here, we would be a bit more specific and call it a trickster synchro.

Robert Perry has written a book called, SIGNS: A New Approach to Coincidence, Synchronicity, Guidance, Life Purpose, and God’s Plan. Here’s another story of  a sign from Perry’s book, and again it sounds like the trickster to us.

 Feeling guilty at having neglected his family, Perry went out with his 13-year old son to play Frisbee. At one point the boy lay down on the ground to rest, and Perry amused himself by trying to get the Frisbee to land on him. That evening they watched a Simpsons episode in which Krusty the Clown discovers he has a daughter and takes her to play Frisbee. He  lies down and asks her to throw it on him.

The matching incidents drew attention to an underlying theme. Krusty is in despair at being a useless father, and for Perry this underlined his own feeling that he hadn’t  spent enough time with his kids. The fact that he was being likened to a degenerate clown, who first didn’t know he was a father and then discovers he is a terrible father, was not exactly inspirational. But it was a good example of how the trickster works. It’s the sense that It’s the absurd coincidences that make you think that someone is out there making a joke at your expense.

Perry offers three possibilities about three possibilities how synchronicity works. He suggests that similar events cluster in time and space according to some unknown law that one day might be explained by quantum physics. Another possibility: it’s a physical manifestation of some wise element in our unconscious. The third explanation is one that Perry has come to adhere to more than the others. The signs or synchros emanate from God.

He writes: “It is a feeling that grows in one through long and repeated contact, a feeling that doesn’t need the support of religious belief systems, a feeling that one may never even articulate to oneself, but that is simply an innate response to the presence of a greater mind.”

Our take: if God is behind these stories then She is a master trickster.
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Today is the 2nd anniversary of our blog and we just want to thank all of you who have contributed so much to our collective knowledge about synchros!

Posted in dark trickster, Robert Perry, signs | 32 Comments

UFO Over Jerusalem

Posted on February 3, 2011 by Trish and Rob

There’s a certain synchronicity about this event occurring now, given the turmoil in the Arab world. This video has been circulating since January 28, with various versions taken by different people from different areas. This one, the 4th, is the clearest.

Posted in UFO jerusalem | 41 Comments

Another Earth

Posted on February 3, 2011 by Trish and Rob

This movie, which just won at Sundance, sounds like it goes hand-in-hand with Brian Greene’s new book, The Hidden Reality. A second earth. Parallel lives. Take a look at the trailer, then check out the link for more extensive information about the film.

The other link.
Thanks to musing egret for letting us know about it!

Posted in another earth, movies, parallel lives, sundance | 5 Comments

Revolution #49

Posted on February 2, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Here’s an interesting I Ching reading from Adele Aldridge related to the Egyptian uprising. She sent this to us around noon today.


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I couldn’t resist sharing this with you.

While eating lunch and watching more news about this fascinating revolution going on in Egypt I decided to indulge in a quick question of the I Ching. I asked, “What will happen in Egypt now?”

The response I got was #49 Revolution with the two yin lines changing to Hexagram #1, The Creative. Of course just getting the hexagram named revolution is statistically improbable and what keeps me hooked.

Adele
***
Other name for Hexagram #49 are Radical Change and Throwing Off. The changing line leading to #1, the creative, is interesting. Let’s see what happens.

Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments

ESP

Posted on February 2, 2011 by Trish and Rob

We mentioned this study after the New York Times wrote about it last month–and the reaction–but now here’s more details.

ESP. Extrasensory perception. Despite all the studies done by J.B. Rhine, despite Carl Jung’s writings on the subject, despite the fact that most of us experience it from time to time, it remains an ugly stepchild in the psychological community.  But now, an article in a prestigious journal may change all that. Or not.

The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology has agreed to publish an article about nine unusual lab experiments conducted over the last ten years by Daryl J. Bem, a professor emeritus at Cornell. Hard to argue with an academic from Cornell, right? In a nutshell, Bem tested the ability of college students to “accurately sense random events, like whether a computer program will flash a photograph on the left or right side of the screen.”  The study included more than 1,000 students. For the nuances of the experiment, click here.  
What’s more intriguing than the experiment itself is the resistance from other mainstream psychologists that Bem’s experiment is pro ESP – i.e., that it exists, that it’s real. Quoting from the NY Times article: “It’s craziness, pure craziness. I can’t believe a major journal is allowing this work in,” Ray Hyman, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University Oregon and longtime critic of ESP research, said. “I think it’s just an embarrassment for the entire field.”
Really? An embarrassment? Bem’s article was subjected to peer review by four reviewers in the field. And all four decided that the paper met the journal’s editorial standards, says  Charles Judd, the editor of the journal, a psychologist at the University of Colorado. He added: “…there was no mechanism by which we could understand the results.”
We’re not sure what he means by “mechanism,” but this seems to be the bone of contention among those who object to the article. “The problem was that this paper was treated like any other,” said an editor at the journal, Laura King, a psychologist at the University of Missouri. “And it wasn’t.”
Because the paper concerns ESP, a “paranormal” phenomenon, it apparently should be subjected to more rigorous standards. In the end, it all boils down to this: “…if ESP exists, why aren’t people getting rich by reliably predicting the movement of the stock market or the outcome of football games?”
Why does ESP have to translate to wealth and riches? Why is that the bottom line validation for whether it’s real? What about the child who reaches out telepathically to a parent in the middle of a crisis and the contact averts a tragedy? What about  the feelings you experience with a partner, a friend, a sibling, those moments when your minds connect in an inexplicable and beautiful way? ESP is as common and ordinary as breakfast.  
 It’s tough to dismiss someone like Bem – Cornell, Harvard, Stanford, considered to be one of the imminent social psychologists. And maybe that’s why the rebuttals have been so vociferous.  The rebuttals seem to be the dying gasp of the old paradigm, no different than the dying beliefs in politics or religion. Change will come regardless of what the naysayers and skeptics say. It will sweep into our lives in such bold, dramatic ways that rebuttals will make us laugh. 
Posted in telepathy | 75 Comments

Cyclone Yasi

Posted on February 1, 2011 by Trish and Rob

While a 2000-mile stretch of the U.S. prepares for a massive snowstorm, Queensland, Australia is facing the monster in that image, Cyclone Yasi, now a category 5 cyclone. Weeks ago, this same area suffered tremendous floods. According to this article, North Queensland residents have been given just three hours to evacuate. It’s going to hit during high tide, which means a storm surge is expected across much of the North Queensland coast. Winds of 279 kilometers an hour – 173 miles an hour – are expected. That wind velocity matches Hurricane Katrina.

Send good thoughts to our friends down under. Brizdaz, let us know how you weather the storm!

Posted in Australia, cyclone yasi | 43 Comments

Lost Wallet Blues

Posted on February 1, 2011 by Trish and Rob

We’ve all done it – misplaced or lost something practical or valuable and then we tear through our homes and cars and lives, looking for whatever it is we’ve lost. Losing a wallet, for instance, can make you feel like you’re losing your identity. Or, as the illustration shows, it can make you feel naked. Your ID, your credit cards, your personal information, as well as cash, is kept there.  In fact, when we dream of such a loss, it usually symbolizes a concern about one’s identity.

Recently, while at a a local coffee shop, Trish was inside ordering and Rob sat outside with Noah, our golden retriever. His keys and wallet lay on the table in front of him. An odd thought occurred. What if I just walked off and left my wallet here.  What a strange thing to ponder, he thought, as Trish came out and handed him his coffee and they headed to the car. Rob held the dog leash, the coffee cup, the car keys and his wallet. In the process of putting the dog into the car and juggling the contents of his hands, the wallet must’ve slipped out. It fell to the pavement and wasn’t noticed.

A couple of hours later, the search began. It didn’t take Rob long to concede that he didn’t misplace the wallet in the car or house. He’d lost it. He decided to wait before taking any action, just in case it turned up. But he also took out an old wallet, as a replacement. The next morning he called the two banks which held his debit card and credit card. Sure enough, someone had tried to use the cards. So he had an answer to the intuitive question he asked himself just a couple of minutes before he actually left the wallet – not on the table, but the pavement.

This experience reminded Rob of another lost wallet experience, an extraordinary one, that unfortunately was cut from the text of Seven Secrets to make room for other stories. It’s a good one.

 This incident occurred about 12 years ago when we lived in another city about 15 south of our present home.
Rob lost his wallet, but didn’t get frantic about it. He was confident that the wallet somehow would return to him. He’d lost the wallet while windsurfing on a lake near the house and hoped it had fallen out before he went into the water. However, he couldn’t find it on the shore where he’d rigged his sail. He knew that if he’d accidentally taken it with him and lost it in the lake, chances of recovering it were slender, to say the least.

But Rob, in this instance, didn’t do any of the things people normally do when they lose wallets – no calls to credit card companies, no request for a duplicate driver’s license, no contact with his auto insurance company. For three or four days, he visualized the wallet returning to him, visualized it so intensely that he could feel its weight in his hand, in his back pocket. He believed the wallet had been found already.

That same week, a lawn man had stopped by our house, soliciting business. We already had someone doing the lawn, but Rob and the man chatted, then the guy left. A few days later, this same man was fishing with a net in the lake where Rob had been windsurfing and dredged up Rob’s wallet.  He returned it, complete with all the cards and water-soaked cash, and said he was relieved that Rob was alive and not on the bottom of that lake.

So not only did the wallet return, as he’d visualized, but he’d met the man who found it a few days before it was discovered.

Posted in lost objects, visualization, wallets | 23 Comments

Maria and #14

Posted on January 31, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 Paul Klee painting
 

This story is in 7 Secrets of Synchronicity and is about number clusters. It was a post we’d written in the early days of our blog, when we got about 5 hits week, mostly from family and friends.  We’re re-posting it  because we love number synchros!
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Clusters of synchronicities that occur with numbers range from the odd to the truly strange. They can coalesce around a single event or continue over the course of a lifetime. In Maria’s story, the number 14 recurred four times over a period of four months.

One night Maria, a college sophomore, drove into a DUI checkpoint on her way to MacDonald’s. Earlier that evening, she’d had two beers. After performing the field sobriety tests, the policeman determined that she was impaired, arrested her, and performed the breathalyzer. Even though she blew under the legal limit for impairment, she spent 14 hours in jail before she was bailed out.

Her parents hired an attorney, who felt she had a strong case for dismissal based on the video of her field sobriety tests and because she blew under the legal limit. A prosecutor was assigned to her case. After reviewing the evidence, he was ready to dismiss the charges, but was then removed from the case and another prosecutor was assigned who wanted to press charges. Her court date was set for December. Since it fell during her week of final exams, the attorney asked for a continuance and a new court date was set for February.

Before Christmas, 14 law firms filed a motion that the DUI checkpoints in this particular county were illegal because the police had too much discretion. The motion was heard on January 14 and the judged ruled in favor, which meant that all the evidence would be dismissed in 14 cases, including Maria’s.

The number 14 adds up to 5 – a number about freedom. Shortly before she was stopped, Maria had had an argument with her boyfriend about her freedom.

Posted in number clusters | 8 Comments