Mercury, the planet of communication, turns retrograde today at 9:42 PM Eastern time, in Sagittarius. It doesn’t turn direct until December 15 at 3:35 pm Eastern. During these weeks, communicate as clearly as possible, take nothing for granted. To navigate this period more smoothly, follow the rule of the 3 Rs: review, revise, reconsider. Don’t sign contracts or make any decisions that you may regret later!
To find out how this retro may impact your sign, check here.
Join Trish and Rob for a conversation with…
Marcus Anthony is an associate professor who teaches Futures Studies at the College for Global Talents, part of the Beijing Institute of Technology. He is a futurist, a life coach, and a writer. He investigates deep futures – profound, meaningful, and sustainable visions of tomorrow. Some specific futures Dr. Anthony focuses on include human and artificial intelligence, mindfulness, technology and the future, and consciousness studies. He is the author of Power & Presence: Reclaiming Your Authentic Self in a Digitized World and Discover Your Soul Template: 14 Steps for Awakening Integrated Intelligence. He lives in the city of Zhuhai in southern China.
We met Marcus 11 or 12 years ago online when he came to our synchronicity blog, and we interviewed him for one of his first books.
The law of attraction, popularized by the Esther Hicks books and workshops, says that like attracts like. This certainly seems to be the case with trump’s cabinet picks.
The man convicted of sexually assaulting E. Jean Carrol, seems to be comfortable picking Matt Gaetz for attorney general, even though he was investigated for having sex with an underage woman who was 17 at the time. Gaetz denied all allegations, of course, and withdrew his nomination before the ethics committee’s second meeting to determine if their report should be released publicly. DeSantis will undoubtedly reinstate him to his congressional seat.
Trump’s defense nominee, Pete Hegseth, has been accused of sexually assaulting a woman in a hotel room. You can read the sordid story at the link above.
Linda McMahon, trump’s pick to lead the Department of Education, has been accused in a recent lawsuit that she knowingly enabled the sexual exploitation of children by a World Wrestling Entertainment employee in the 1980s. She also denies the allegations. That sordid story is at the link above.
RFK Jr, the anti-vaxxer whom trump has nominated to head Health and Human Services, is alleged to have groped one of the family’s nannies.
So, who’s next? Trump’s choices certainly reflect his own depravity, but supporters will dismiss all this with, “It’s the deep state’s fake news.”
The next 4 years are going to be chaotic, ugly, tumultuous.
This post is from June 6, 2023, and in early June when I scheduled it, I had no idea, of course, that it would be the day my sister, Mary, died suddenly and unexpectedly. There’s something of a synchronicity in this. Jung died on a June 6 – of 1961, age 85. My sister’s death on this date felt like a message at the time, as if she were saying, Ok, I get it now, Trish.
+++
I periodically pick up Deirdre Bair’s biography of Jung and page through it, reading a chapter here, more chapters there I’ve never been able to sit down and read it from cover to cover. With the index, it’s nearly 900 pages long.
But tonight I happened to turn to a section from Jung’s The Red Book, a massive journal that started because of, as Bair describes it, “his first psychotic vision” during a journey by train to Schaffhausen. “The vision occurred after he decided it would be dishonest to continue treating patients using ‘Freudian theoretical assumptions.’” This happened around the time of his break with Freud, war was imminent, and Jung was “beset by so many other dreams and fantasies…that he was led to formulate the theory of active imagination, the process of concentrating on a single image or event long enough to allow it to develop its own volition.”
This sounds a lot like what happens in lucid dreaming, where you wake up inside a dream and seize on a particular image that will enable you to move more fully into the dream. The idea with lucid dreaming, though, is that by seizing on an image, you eventually are able to control and manipulate the dream.
On another train trip in 1914, Bair writes, Jung realized that that the only way he could define a system separate from Freud’s would be to treat himself as though he were his own patient. So he decided to confine his new journal to “language metaphors,” and allow the unguided flow to pour out of him. The first time he sat down to write, “he remembered hearing a distinctly female voice speaking quietly but with authority. “This is art,” she said.
According to Bair, this made Jung angry because he thought he was constructing “an empirical science.” Eventually, this female voice morphed into a male voice, Elias, who didn’t stick around long, and then into a second male voice, Philemon. “Jung described Philemon as the pagan voice of an old man of ‘simply superior knowledge.’
To me, this sounds like channeling. Or like the muse of a deeply creative person whose voice and personality are distinctly different from that of the individual. Jung believe that Philemon was teaching him “psychological objectivity, the reality of the soul.
Many of his Philemon writings are in The Red Book, which the Jung family kept under wraps for years because it smacked of madness. It includes not only Jung’s writings during this period, but his sketches, paintings, doodle, the inner self made manifest in art and words.
Years after Jung started The Red Book, he allowed his translator and friend, R.F.C. Hull to read The Red Book. Hull is best known for his translation of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. His take on The Red Book is fascinating for its insight into the connection between madness and genius, between creativity and the unconscious, and into Jung himself.
“Talk of Freud self-analysis – Jung was a walking asylum in himself, as well as its head physician.” Hull thought The Red Book provided “the most convincing proof that Jung’s whole system is based on psychotic fantasies – which of course it is – and therefore the work of a lunatic.” But he compared Jung to a medicine man, a shaman “who understood madness and can heal it, because at periods they are half-mad themselves.”
Jung’s achievement, Hull concluded, “…lay in hammering that material into a system of psychotherapy that worked.”
I think Hull missed the mark in many respects. But in all fairness to Hull, he was Jung’s contemporary and was seeing the material from that perspective. To me, it seems that Jung’s legacy went well beyond his system of psychotherapy.
His work hurled open doors about the nature of human consciousness and how it impacts the nature of our personal realities, what we experience day to day in our own lives. It coincides with fairly recent discoveries in quantum physics that tell us an event doesn’t happen until it is observed, which is another way of saying that consciousness is the sum total. Everything. Without it, a thousand trees can fall in a forest but if there’s no one around to see it, to hear it, has it actually happened?
Thanks to Jung, the idea that we create our lives from the inside out, through our thoughts, beliefs, desires, intentions- through everything that makes up our consciousness – is not quite the outlier notion it once was. Debate the idea with yourself, with family and friends. Argue for or against it. Think about it, mull it over, seriously consider it. And then ask yourself: Suppose Jung was right?
And suppose synchronicity is the place where it all bleeds out, coalescing in seemingly miraculous and stunning ways? Suppose synchronicity, the term that Jung coined, is the voice of that quantum theory?
The book was written before the election. But this post about trump as the dark trickster is about to become even more relevant and obvious in his second term.
Personification of the Dark Trickster
The trickster archetype that sneaks up on us in the dark is a deceiver, liar, cheat, and thief who figures he can get away with something while we’re distracted. He flips the status quo on its head and sometimes does so with a wry twist of irony. When he reveals some dark undercurrent about ourselves and the culture in which we live that we would rather ignore, synchronicity is usually involved.
Donald Trump may be its ultimate trickster among us. He’s admired by some, despised by many. He’s reckless and ruthless. One moment he’s savvy and cunning. The next he’s dumb and dumber rolled into one.
His name may be the simplest example of a synchronicity associated with him. The dictionary meaning of trump means to “outrank or defeat someone of something, often in a highly public way.” Like in a presidential election. “In the card game bridge, the trump card is the most powerful card in a particular round and defeats all the others — sort of like when your needs or wishes trump someone else’s. Originally trump implied a deceptive form of victory involving cheating, but that sense has been largely lost, though it’s still around in the term trumped up, meaning something that’s been falsely made up.”
During Trump’s four years as president, Twitter – renamed X – was his favorite weapon for retaliation against anyone who slighted him, which was often. He used it to humiliate and berate women, figures in the media, people of color, members of his own party, and anyone else who criticized him. And as he geared up for a second run in 2024, he used his failing Truth Social for the same purpose.
The dark trickster serves what Jung called the Shadow, those unexpressed parts of our personalities. In fact, the dark trickster is a favorite figure in American movies – Joker in the Batman franchise, particularly as played by Heath Ledger in Dark Knight Rising– and may be the paragon of this archetype. Jung saw this kind of trickster as an expression of an “earlier, rudimentary type of consciousness.”
In The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, he wrote: “He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness…”
His unconsciousness is an intriguing term when applied to Trump. During his presidency he tended to tweet in the early morning hours when his handlers – like chief of staff General Kelly –were asleep. These freewheeling tweets often unraveled the very thing he attempted to implement, like the travel ban on some Muslim-majority countries. On October 18, 2017 the ban on travelers from six countries was supposed to go into effect. But two federal district courts – in Hawaii and Maryland – shot down the ban. Judge Theodore Chuang in the district of Maryland included a detailed history of Trump’s tweets to back up his opinion on the ban. In fact, his tweets had been used twice before by federal judges to block the ban.
In 1938, Carl Jung told an American reporter that Hitler was “the loudspeaker which magnified the inaudible whispers of the German soul.”
It could be that Trump rode to power as the loudspeaker for the inaudible whispers of that faction of the American soul that feels disenfranchised and marginalized by a rapidly changing world. He also might be the personification of the ultimate American Trickster, the archetypal con artist of the 21st century.
available at Amazon
We already are seeing evidence of this in his cabinet picks: Matt Gaetz, for instance, as attorney general, Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intellgence, vax denier RFK Jr.as secretary of Health & Human services, oil executive Chris Wright as energy secretary. All are gag worthy.
Buckle up, folks. The next four years are going to wild and dark.
Join Trish and Rob for a conversation with…
Maureen J. St. Germain founded the St. Germain Mystery School, the Ascension Institute Mystery School, and Akashic Records International. She is also the creator of more than 30 guided meditation CDs and is the author of 8 books, the latest one being Living Your Best 5D Life, published by Bear & Company. It’s the third in her 5D series and follows Mastering Your 5D Self and Waking Up in 5D. That book was voted bestselling book in 2017 by independent booksellers. Another of her books, Opening the Akashic Records, won Book of the Year from the Coalition of Visionary Resource Awards. Maureen lives near Sedona, Arizona, and offers workshops worldwide.
This gives me more hope than I’ve felt since election day.
My friend Alexa Blye is a whistleblower. About skilled nursing facilities in California. But what she describes may be true of other such facilities countrywide. She was recently on our podcast. Her whistleblowing began with her friend Helen.
After billions of federal Medicare dollars paid to Los Angeles Department of Public Health by the California Department of Public Health, for over 12 years of egregiously misleading, subpar and falsified investigation results, Los Angeles County Public Health Department’s contract is up for renewal next year. Enough is Enough! Do NOT Renew It! PROTECT OUR ELDERS FROM ABUSE AND NEGLECT – and falsified report findings that cover it up. Helen’s wish was that no one else would go through what she went through.
My dear friend Helen, at 100.5 years old, was transferred from her home in independent living, where she had resided for 22 years – the last 10 years as a widow, to the Skilled Nursing Facility (SNF) in her Life Plan [aka Continuing Care Retirement (CCRC)] Community.
So many things went wrong for Helen that almost overnight, she went from being vibrant, poised, confident, and self-controlled to terror-stricken, anxious, and distraught. She was treated terribly by the staff, as if she was nothing more than an annoying object. She felt humiliated.
She made me promise to take notes and write about her treatment so that no one else would go through the horror that she was experiencing. This blog-story includes the fulfillment of that promise.
Read the rest of Helen’s story here.
And here’s the link for the rest of Alexa’s powerful blog:
2025 is going to be a year of major transitions. Perhaps the biggest transition will be from a democracy with challenges to an autocracy under trump that aspires to become the rule of one: a king, a czar, a Putin, Pinochet, Maduro, Castro, Orbán…you know, all the dictators on the planet now.
If you voted for trump, then it’s best if you study the history of autocracies, how they come to be, what their playbook is, and how trump is using it already, before he even assumes office. If he initiates “the biggest deportation in history” it will undoubtedly be a heartbreaking shit show. Think of a Dystopian presence so huge and ugly and cruel that it defies The Hunger Games, 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale.
This is Pluto doing its thing – first, it destroys everything, then it rebuilds on the ashes. But we, the people who DID NOT vote for trump, scoop up handfuls of those ashes and build something better, stronger, more powerful than authoritarian rule. We do this as a community of rebels, of revolutionaries, who organize at the local levels and become a collective with a positive, upbeat message that speaks to the soul of all people who desire freedom.
Pluto represents death, rebirth, change. It darted in and out of Aquarius since January 2024, but finally enters it for good on Nov 20 and will be there for the next 20 years. Aquarius is the sign of the equalizer, the humanitarian, the visionary, the innovator. Every Aquarian I’ve known has represented these qualities.
Pluto is now transiting somewhere in your birth chart. That’s the place where you will experience the most transformative change in the next two decades.
Join Trish and Rob for a conversation with…
Alexa Blye is the author of The Good Sister and Her Flying Monkeys – inspired by a true story about a malignant narcissist. Alexa is also a retired compliance consultant for federally funded programs and a semi-retired mental health professional in private practice in Southern California. Alexa currently lives in a life-plan retirement community. When her 100-year-old friend, Helen, entered the facility nursing home, she stumbled across the underbelly of skilled nursing facilities. She believes everyone should know about it if considering or requiring skilled nursing for yourself or a loved one, no matter what state you live in.
