Spiritual but not religious

Posted on March 29, 2019 by Trish and Rob

I was wondering the other day whether or not there are any religions that recognize synchronicity. Maybe they all do, but don’t talk about it. I was trying to think of  a biblical story that exhibits meaningful coincidences. Maybe it could encompass the miracles ie. wine from water, walking on water, but those examples go far beyond what we normally think of a meaningful coincidences. Not being very knowledgeable in biblical lore I can’t think of any clear examples of synchronicity. Maybe someone can help.

Certainly there is a mystical element in all religions—or they wouldn’t be religions—but it seems that the supernormal side is buried. Maybe it was something that happened in the past, but it doesn’t happen now…and it certainly doesn’t happen to you. That’s my biased assessment of modern religion, which seems on a personal level more about social interactions, and on a priesthood level,  more bout structure and safeguarding the religion’s integrity against the questioning and doubts of  disbelieving outsiders.

We see this doubting and questioning religious authorities and their established churches and temples especially strong among the younger generation. Certainly there are still many who follow the religion of their parents or take up a new religion, but there is also something else going on.

There can be little doubt that traditional religious frameworks are no longer speaking to new generations as they have in the past, especially in the West.

In an article in the LA Times,  Philip Clayton, former dean of faculty at Claremont School of Theology, writes that the fastest growing religious group in the United States is “spiritual but not religious,” embracing a shocking 75 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29.”  Clayton argues that young people are not necessarily rejecting a sense of God, rather they feel that religious organizations are too concerned with money and power, too focused on rules and too involved in the structures of the political status quo.

That’s an interesting conclusion and one that must leave religious leaders puzzled. Clayton wrote the article in 2012, and if anything the trend has continued and expanded. My guess is that younger people, especially those with mystical leanings see that religion has largely abandoned its mystical roots. When that happens, it’s like toothpaste. Once out of the tube, its out. Rather than trying to put the mystical back in religion, young people see that we are all spiritual beings, that it’s our essence, and we don’t need a priest or preacher to tell us how to act when so many of them have acted so poorly themselves.

My guess is that synchronicities resonate with this group of young people more than established religion does. They are finding their spiritual roots right at home inside themselves, the very essence of their beings.

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Precognition and Shared Dreaming

Posted on March 27, 2019 by Trish and Rob

 

Here’s a third synchronicity that Christine shared with us. Once again, it involves precognition.

It was the last few months of grad school and most of us were excited to be nearing the end of our coursework. I had concerns about a dear friend and classmate of mine who was in her early 60s. She had powered through the program while working full-time as a special ed teacher, working as an intern at a homeless shelter, keeping up with coursework, and also trying to complete her thesis. She finally accepted that she would not be able to graduate on time with us.

Over the four months prior to graduation, I had a reoccurring dream where I would be standing in front of my friend talking to her and then would see her age 20 years to about age 80 or 90 right in front of my eyes. I kept encouraging her to go to the doctor and she would, but they just couldn’t find anything wrong with her.

I had also been working closely with two Native American elders that had been running sweat lodges and vision quest ceremonies. I had chosen to do a vision quest ceremony and had the strangest feeling that something very bad was going to happen to a close friend or family member while I was in my ceremony. I told several people about this strange feeling, but everyone reassured me that all would be fine.

As I completed the beautiful ceremony and began to return back go my normal life, I started checking my messages and realized that she was in the hospital. She had been diagnosed with stage 4 uterine cancer. When I went to visit her daily for the next two weeks, I saw the image of my friend that I had in the dream appear before my eyes. She had aged so much over just several weeks. I was further devastated, because I was moving back to Colorado and could no longer visit her daily. I would call her and tried my best to support her from a distance.

One night, I began to lucid dream. In the dream, I found my friend in the hospital, and I told her she could leave here if she didn’t want to stay. We left together and went driving up State Street in Santa Barbara. I took her to her favorite spot by the ocean. In a moment of spontaneous emotion and love, I fell to my knees and told her how much I loved her as a friend, mentor, and teacher. I told her that none of the love and wisdom she gave me would ever be wasted. I urged her to go be free, leave her physical body, and not worry about any of us and she drifted away.

Upon awaking from this dream, I was tearful and my heart grieving for her, I called the hospital. I asked a mutual friend who had been there with her if she had passed away, because I just had a dream. My friend replied astonishingly, “She took her last breath peacefully in her sleep just moments ago.” Was there some level of reality to the dream I had? I would like to think so.

 

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Global Synchronicities

Posted on March 25, 2019 by Trish and Rob

On March 23, 2019, Special Counsel Robert Mueller turned in his report on his 22-month investigation to Attorney General William Barr.

This AG was appointed by trump after he wrote the prez an unsolicited memo about obstruction of justice and how he felt about indicting a sitting president.

In our book 7 Secrets of Synchronicity, one of the secrets is about synchros associated with global events that often connect to the past. In this case, Mueller released his report 46 years to the date – March 23, 1973 -when Watergate burglar James McCord’s letter confessing the existence of a wider conspiracy was read in open court by Judge Sirica. That was when the Watergate cover-up started to unravel.

It’s interesting that all this happened during a Mercury retrograde, which doesn’t end until March 28. The 2000 election also occurred during a Mercury retrograde and look what happened there – it went all the way to the supreme court. This suggests we certainly haven’t heard the last of this, particularly in light of the fact that Mueller’s report didn’t exonerate trump from obstruction of justice even though trump is already crowing otherwise.

Once Mercury turns direct, there will be more news. Stay tuned. This saga is far from over.

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Yuck! Cigarette!

Posted on March 23, 2019 by Trish and Rob

We recently saw Ester Hicks in Orlando. It was me, Trish and Megan and at least 1,000 others, who came to see Ester channel the non-physical entity Abraham.

Trish and Megan have gone to many of the Hicks-Abraham seminars over the years. It was my first, but I’ve seen DVDs and CDs and wasn’t surprised by anything I heard or saw happen as Abraham talked to people who were selected for the ‘hot seat’ on stage. A woman sitting nearby who has gone to many of the seminars mentioned that in the aftermath she often has psychic experiences.

I found that interesting and wondered if something of the kind would manifest for me. As it turned out a synchronicity unfolded that evening that unfolded for me, Trish and Megan as we watched the Netflix movie Roma at Megan’s house. Trish, a semi-closet smoker, asked Megan to pause the movie so she could go out of the back step for a cigarette break.

As Megan hit the pause button, I looked up the TV and pointed. The movie is in Spanish with English sub-titles and there  frozen on the screen was a sub-title that left us laughing. You can see it above: Yuck! Cigarette!

Synchronicity…and what were the chances of that happening? Even if you knew about that line, and none of us did, it would be literally impossible to capture it at that appropriate moment.

 

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Synchros and Noah’s Passing

Posted on March 21, 2019 by Trish and Rob

Noah and Nala

 

Synchronicities tend to flourish during pivotal points in our lives. The recent death of our Golden Retriever, Noah, had its share. We wrote about the particulars here.

In early March, shortly after he got sick, Rob dreamed that he and I were traveling somewhere. Noah was with us, but behind us, thinner than his usual 105 pounds, and he was with my dad, whom we called Buddy, who had died in 2005. When Rob told me his dream the next morning, I went into complete denial. Just a dream.

But deep down, I think we both knew the dream was precognitive and this illness of Noah’s wasn’t going to end well.

My dad had lived with us for several years after we put my mother in an Alzheimer’s facility, and loved the Golden Retriever we had back then, Jessie. Here she is after Hurricane Wilma, wondering what happened to the mailbox.

We used to take Jessie with us to the Alzheimer’s unit, where most of the patients remembered her by name. She often engaged with my mother and the other patients, accompanying them on imaginary trips to Broadway, Disney, L.A. Jessie, like Noah, was a rescue, a reddish Golden. She wasn’t as large as Noah, who weighed 105 pounds and was considerably larger than most of the dogs in our local dog park. But what she lacked in size was compensated by her compassion for and love of humans.

The night we brought Noah home from the clinic where he’d had his ultrasound, I contacted  Heather Bristol, an animal communicator Megan had gone to after her cat, Piper, died unexpectedly.

I explained the situation about Noah and said I would like to know whether this recommended surgery was what Noah wanted. Since Noah was still alive at the time, Heather requested a photo and said she would call me at 10 a.m. on March 14. Shortly after 8 a.m. that morning, I texted her that Noah had passed.

She replied that we could still talk, but that he night not be fully accessible to her for several days. After death, the souls of some animals enter into what Heather calls soul healing, where the soul is essentially reborn into the spirit world, just as it was reborn into the physical world. When we talked, though, she had some preliminary information. Pressure in the abdomen. A stoppage of blood flow to certain parts of the body. He had been an independent dog who lived – and died – by his own agenda.

He had wanted to die at home. Megan’s cat, Piper, was with him, and so was “another dog that had been associated with you and Rob.” Heather hadn’t seen that dog’s breed or color, but my sense was that the dog was Jessie. As soon as Noah saw the dog, he decided he was “outta here.”As Heather put it, he had “fulfilled his soul’s purpose for this life and was ready to move on. He lived in love and he moved into love after he passed.”

We talked for more than an hour about her work, the state of the world, climate change, and animals. She didn’t charge me for her time because she couldn’t full connect to Noah’s spirit. That will come at a later date. But Heather, like our friends Millie Gemondo, Kathy Adams, and Helen Burley, is the real deal.

Each of these women excels in a particular area. They’re like pieces of some huge jigsaw in the matrix of reality. Heather’s specialty is animals. Millie is great with emotional connections, the bigger picture. Kathy is a psychometrist who can read you through any object, even a cell phone. And Helen is a Spiritualist medium who speaks to your loved ones who have passed. There are men who also do this work, but women seem to outnumber them.

So what is this weird matrix in which we live? I get glimpses, have certain experiences, look for answers. But in the end, I don’t know. None of us know. We have ideas and theories, and some are more popular than others, but the bottom line is that we’re clueless. We grope through the dark and sometimes synchronicity offers a glimmer of understanding, clues, hints, intuitive hunches, and we have to figure out the symbolism. Rob could have ignored the dream about Noah with Buddy. But he knew what it meant.

So did I.

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Full moon in Libra

Posted on March 19, 2019 by Trish and Rob

There a lot to enjoy about this full moon on March 20. Libra is a social sign, geared toward relationships, harmony, peace, and represents the arts. But notice that Uranus in the 6th house is also at 00 degrees, in Taurus, so adjustments of some kind will have to be made on or several days before or after this full moon. Usually, the adjustments involve our own emotions.

In the 2nd house, we have Jupiter in Sagittarius at 23 degrees forming a perfect and beneficial angle to Venus at 23 degrees of Aquarius. Whenever they two planets are meeting up like this, they’re happy. We feel more optimistic, upbeat, positive. But there are two detractors- Mercury is retrograde until March 28 and  Mars in the 7th house is at 23 degrees Taurus. It forms a perfect and challenging angle to Venus. This suggests disagreements or tension of some kind with the opposite sex.

Full moons usually feature some lunacy down here on earth, so be careful when you’re driving. There may be some aggressive drivers on the road. And don’t speed. Full moons are about culmination, harvest, completion, so if you’ve been working on a project, you may be tying it up, adding the finished touches.

To find out how this full moon impacts you, check the masthead for the March predictions for your sign.

 

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NOAH

Posted on March 17, 2019 by Trish and Rob

Noah – the red; Nigel the blondie; Nika the black and white

 

There are times when your heart breaks so completely that the best you can do is not cry for 30 seconds.

Our Golden Retriever, Noah, came to us 10 years ago at the age of 9 months, a rescue. He had been crated for most of his life by his owners, who hoped to breed him. They also had his parents. When the couple went bankrupt, they gave the dogs to a Golden Retriever rescue organization. We adopted him.

From the start, he was shy, afraid of kids and newspapers. We started taking him to the dog park and he became socialized, less timid, and within a year, had begun trusting humans. When he was two, Megan rescued a pup, Nika, and she lived with us for the first 7 months of her life and Noah became her big brother, teaching her the ropes around here. When Megan moved, Nika went with her and every time she and Noah got to see each other, it was a joyous reunion.

Over the years, we took Noah everywhere with us – to the Keys, Orlando, Atlanta, North Carolina. He was a good traveler, never complained, and was always happy to just be with us. Rob was his human; I was the backup. On cool nights, he loved sleeping out on the porch with Rob. He enjoyed going to the beach. He loved chasing his Frisbee, balls, and barking at squirrels. There was a fierce intelligence in his topaz eyes and a kind of instinctive humanity. He was an old soul.

He accepted our cats – old and new.

But there was always a kind of sadness about him after he’d spent time with Nika and had gone their separate ways. After one such separation, he refused to eat for 3 days. We realized he was lonely. So when a dog park friend asked if we wanted a Golden puppy, we said of course, and Nigel joined the family.

In the past two years, they became good friends, companions, bros in the adventure of it all. Noah taught Nigel how to behave at restaurants, how to live comfortably with humans. When we visited Megan or she came home, Nika joined the pack and the three of them bonded.

About 10 days ago, Noah stopped eating. We took him to our long-time vet, blood work and X rays were done. The blood work didn’t look good, but the vet wasn’t able to make a determination about what was ailing him. He gave Noah an appetite stimulant, prednisone, antibiotics for fever and asked us to come back in a few days for more blood work.

For a few days, he rallied. Ate. Dog park. Frisbees. Playing with Nigel. We returned on March 13 for blood work. It was worse. He was anemic. Still had a low fever. The vet thought he might have cancer and recommended an ultrasound that would reveal more detail than X rays.

We got into a specialty clinic around 4 p.m. on March 13. The ultrasound didn’t reveal any masses or tumors, but it did show a diseased spleen. The vet, a young woman, explained everything in detail. Noah’s spleen was throwing off blood clots. With the anemia, she thought it was likely that he had cancer. She recommended that we leave him at the clinic, they would spend the next day giving him transfusions and IVs to get him ready for surgery. Then there would be more of the same after surgery.

Our concern was that if we put Noah through this – he was 10 – what would happen if the spleen turned out to be cancerous and the cancer had spread? “Chemo,” the vet said.
In other words, no guarantees. And they weren’t even certain he would make it through the surgery. We asked them to send the ultrasound and all the info to our vet and we would talk to them the next day and and then decide.

That evening, all 4 of our pets joined us in the family room. The black lump in the red is Nala. Nigel is the dog to the left. Simba is the orange cat on the coffee table. And that’s Noah at the end of his favorite couch.

Noah ate some rotisseries chicken, a couple of treats. At 7 this morning, Rob woke me and said that Noah was dying. He was under the dining room table, breathing hard. We got ready to take him to the vet to be put down. At one point, he weaved through the kitchen and got up on his favorite couch next to Nigel, put his head on Nigel’s back, and shut his eyes. We tried to coax him out to the car, but he stretched out in the doorway between the family room and kitchen and within minutes, he died.

It’s difficult to explain all the emotions that ran through me in those final moments. Horror, grief, and profound gratitude that he had come into our lives. As the cats weaved around him and Nigel kept sniffing at him, I felt the instant when Noah’s soul left.

There’s more to this story, with synchronicity and precognitive dreams and a conversation with animal communicator Heather Bristol. But those posts are for another day.

RIP, Noah.

A card from our friends Dwane and Rose:

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Precognition of Major Illness

Posted on March 15, 2019 by Trish and Rob

 

 

Here’s another powerful synchronicity that Christine experienced. I wish we’d had this one for our book, Sensing the Future.

In analyzing my near-death experience and the flood of lucid and precognitive dreams that have followed since then, I have found that my experience parallels that of Moss (1996), which fit the typical pattern of shamanic initiation involving illness and immersion in the dreamworld.

Moss interviewed an Aboriginal shaman who stated, “No one becomes a sangoma [shaman] without first getting sick. . . . Everyone who is called by the spirits gets the sickness, a bad sickness” (as cited in Moss, 1996, p. 138). The shaman further revealed that “her time of illness was dominated by dreams” (p. 138). I relate this to my experience several years ago, when I contracted the necrotizing fasciitis bacteria, which began in my throat and spread all the way down to my abdomen.

According to the surgeons and doctors, I had a 1% chance of surviving, given the severity and location of the infection, and I was incredibly fortunate to have narrowly escaped death. I learned many lessons from this illness. While I did not know, moment to moment, if I would live or die, I became aware of the real value of each breath. Each moment became immeasurably significant, precious, and beautiful and contained more meaning than imaginable—each moment contained an eternity.

Paradoxically, the two months I was in the hospital fighting this disease were some of the most precious moments in my life. The experience taught me how to surrender and let go and, ultimately, how to live. As Krishnamurti (1969) explained, “death is a renewal, a mutation, in which thought does not function at all because thought is old. When there is death there is something totally new. Freedom from the known is death and then you are living” (p. 77).

Months prior to contracting the infection, I had several lucid dreams wherein I attempted to remove a cyst from my throat, which, in hindsight, was an accurate presaging, considering there was actually a cyst in my throat, which triggered the entire infection. My story is consistent with many other studies on precognition. According to Talbot (1991), psychologists Jean Achterberg and Bernie Siegel, who conducted research on the effects of imagery on cancer patients, reported that they were “already ‘imaging’ their illnesses many months before the illness manifests in their body” (p. 188).

I also had extremely vivid, reoccurring nightmares in which a Native American woman visited me night after night in a violent fit of rage and proceeded to strangle me. Every time, I woke up from the dream, I felt her energy and hands still around my neck. These reoccurring dreams, not only reflected the ways in which I was suppressing my own authentic voice but also foreshadowed my illness and attempted to communicate the spiritual message of the importance of honoring my soul’s desire.

Paul Rageneau, a Jesuit priest who lived among the Hurons in the mid-17th century, reported that they believe that our souls’ desires become known to us through the language of dreams and that when these desires are fulfilled, the soul is satisfied; however, if the soul “is not granted what it desires, it becomes angry; not only does it fail to bring the body the health and well-being it might have wished to bring, but often it even revolts against the body, causing various diseases even death.” (As cited in Moss, 2005, p. 37)

Looking through my dream journal from the period before my illness, in an undated entry, I described the following dream:

I saw the girl again last night. She is a part of me—this Native American girl, who haunts my dreams. She seems so real. . . . It feels as though she is warning me. And then I see the red shirt and I hate it, I don’t want to wear it. (Author’s dream journal, December 2007)

Over the years, I had recalled the girl in my repetitive nightmares with great vividness, but I had forgotten about the detail regarding the red shirt until writing this chapter. This detail is significant, for I had never understood the connection. In hindsight, I can see that this red shirt offered to me could have represented the massive quantity of blood that was lost and drawn out of my chest by the wound vacuum for an entire month while in a medically induced coma.

As horrific as these dreams were along with the physical suffering associated with major illness, I can look back with a sense of gratitude for the experience, which gave me a glimpse into deeper realities and set me on a new path within the world. While in a medically induced coma, I lived suspended in an inescapable dream world, and my dreams reflected what was happening to my body in my waking life.

Among these were dreams of dismemberment. I was unable to wake myself up from these horrific dreams, which were so real to me that it seemed I lived out entire lifetimes. My experience of time was greatly altered, and upon waking, a more intuitive, sensitive, and emotional part of my personality that I had resisted and attempted to hide had become more pronounced. I had undergone so many operations that I was left with few emotional defenses and was unable to repress my thoughts and emotions in the way in which I had previously.

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A Mercury Retro Tale – and the Trickster!

Posted on March 13, 2019 by Trish and Rob

 

Mercury retrograde began on March 5, in Pisces, and ends on March 28. I keep tabs on the big Merc retro snafus – like an appliance breaking down, a contract getting lost in the mail, something unexpected with one of our cars. Today is March 10, our first Mercury retro thing.

At 6:30 this evening, we were supposed to be on Dylan Stewart’s Paranormal Thoughts podcast. Dylan is in Brisbane, Australia, we were going to use Skype, and wondered if the mike Rob has for his iPad Pro would work okay. We’ve had trouble with Skype in the past.
We learned about Dylan’s podcast through our blogging friend, Darren, who also lives in Brisbane, and he sent a link to one of Dylan’s podcasts on synchronicity. I was impressed and and emailed him. He emailed back:

First off I just want to say I am a big fan of your work! Your husband’s and your research has captivated me for years. The fact you have come across my podcast and reached out has blown me away! Brisbane is a small place I probably know your friend!

He invited us to his podcast, we found a good date, now here we were, waiting for him to connect with us on Skype. He did and said he was having trouble with his recording equipment. He kept apologizing and I felt bad about it and finally said, Hey’s it’s Mercury retrograde. I forget it’s a term which may not mean anything to other people. We chatted while he fiddled with his equipment and we finally decided to try again on a different date.

Afterward, I dropped by a couple of blogs I visit that included Djan Stewart’s . A few days earlier, she had written a post about “Mercury retrograde” and astrology. The comments ranged from: “astrology isn’t a science,” to “never heard of it.” Her post on March 10 is about Mercury retrograde and how the TV she and her husband owned blew out and they had to buy a new one.

And only as I’m writing this did I realize DJan and Dylan have the same last name. Stewart.

It’s one of those weird name synchros that sometimes feel like the trickster is having a good belly laugh. Ha, ha, Trish. Gotcha on that one.

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Life-Saving Synchronicity

Posted on March 11, 2019 by Trish and Rob

 

Christine Crawley and her partner, Tony, visited us in January to do some filming for a movie on synchronicity that they’re working on. Not surprisingly, they’ve both experienced synchronicity and Christine was nice enough to send us a couple of hers. Here’s the first:

Throughout my life I have had many seemingly miraculous moments in my life, but by far one of the most life-changing synchronicities ended up saving the life of someone very important to me. I will always be grateful that the right information came to me at exactly the right moment in time.

I was visiting a friend out of state at the time and as we wandered into bookstore, where a particular book stood out for me, called Mind Programing, by Eldon Taylor. The book was about hypnosis and the subconscious mind and I had already read a great deal on the subject, but for some reason I had the feeling I needed to buy this book and I followed this intuition.

I began reading the book on my flight back home the next day and  nearly finished the book. When I got to one particular chapter near the end, I suddenly put the book down and knew that I had gotten all the information I needed from it.Something inside me told me to close the book. In fact, I felt it was important not to read  anymore, so I could just sit with and digest the information I’d read.

In the chapter I had just read, the author recounted a story about how his wife just happened to read on a cereal box one day that the particular sensation of “burning lungs” can be an indication of a heart attack, which is a symptom that the author had been experiencing off and on for a few weeks. This coincidence led the author to go to the doctor within days of find out that information, which ended up saving his life.

Whe  my father picked me up at the airport that same day, he immediately started complaining that his lungs were burning. He said it was probably the pollution in Denver and that he was fine, but asked me to drive. Having just read less than an hour ago that this symptom could mean he was having a heart attack, I argued with my father that we should go to the ER.

He resisted over and over, said that he was ok—he just needed some aspirin and said that we should just drive home to Colorado Springs. However, I drove to the nearest hospital and convinced him to see a doctor. The doctors ran tests and discovered that he was,  in fact, having a heart-attack and he had to undergo open-heart surgery immediately. He would probably not have survived the ride back home to Colorado Springs, because his right artery was 99% blocked. If I had not have followed a simple intuition to pick up that book, I may not have known my father was having a heart attack.

I do believe that the universe is constantly speaking to us, giving us direction and feedback, only if we are willing to listen. I have had more than one seemingly miraculous synchronicity, but this by far has been the most memorable and life-changing one. I may have forgotten that information if I had read it a week ago or a month ago, but I read that book at the exact moment necessary in order to help save my father’s life.

Burning lungs is not a well-known symptom of having a heart attack and I am grateful to have read this information only an hour before seeing my father so that this information was fresh in my mind and used to help him.

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