Linda Moulton Howe warns of undetected nuclear contamination in decommissioned Russian subs sold to Spain and questions Chernobyl’s latest leak, while Phil Cousineau explores synchronicity—meaningful coincidences like Hugh Williams’ three shipwrecks on the same date—as life-altering signals. NASA’s Dr. Edward Taliaferro cautions Hollywood’s asteroid hype underestimates real threats, like untracked near-Earth objects, and urges transponder monitoring. Cousineau links synchronicities to intuition and cosmic patterns, arguing they reveal deeper purpose when recognized, from Ted Turner’s hollow success to James Van Harper’s eerie premonition. Callers share uncanny signs—deer sightings, matching strangers, shared dreams—suggesting reality may bend at pivotal moments, leaving science and skepticism struggling to explain life’s wondrous, often unsettling connections. [Automatically generated summary]
Welcome to Dreamland, a program dedicated to an examination of areas in the human experience not easily nor neatly put in a box.
Things seen at the edge of vision, awakening a part of the mind as yet not matched, and yet things every bit as real as the air we breathe that don't see.
This is Dreamland.
Indeed, it is.
Another Sunday evening, another Dreamland underway.
I'm Art Bell.
Lynn Molten Howe will be here in a moment with her report.
And then it's Phil Coseno and his book, Soul Moments, which really is about synchronicity.
So that's all ahead tonight on Dreamland from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, investigator into crop circles, animal mutilations, and all kinds of strange things.
High strangeness, actually.
As well as a science reporter for this program and coast occasion.
Environmental documentary producer and award winner for the very same.
Well, last week I reported about the cesium-137 radioactive contamination in Europe, apparently from hazardous waste burned at a steel smelting plant in Spain.
And since then, I received the following facts from one of our listeners, Ed Barth of Port Orchard, Washington, and I'm reading this with his permission.
Quote, I used to work at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, Washington.
There, we were recycling nuclear submarines and selling the steel to America's steel industry.
The controls on hazardous materials such as PCBs, abestus, and a host of other chemicals is very stringent, but the control and containment of nuclear contamination is of the highest priority.
While I was involved in cutting up our submarines, I heard that we might also get some Russian subs to cut up, but when they sent a survey team over there to inspect them, it was found that the Russian subs were so hot, meaning radioactive, throughout the entire boat, that we declined to take any.
So, yeah, so while I was listening to your report, I happened to think of all the old Russian boats that were sold to other countries.
And now it is possible that some of those old radioactive boats are getting scrapped by countries that have not the slightest idea about radioactive contamination and its control.
I know the Spanish said that the material was scanned, but how accurate is their equipment?
And were they only looking for surface contamination?
Unquote.
And we also know that one of the Spanish security people said that there was a screening, but that the CZM-137 containing material was inside of some kind of a case that shielded the detection.
And this is a story that I'm going to try to keep following because I think that this kind of mishandling of radioactive materials is a bigger problem worldwide than we think.
And I know you're also aware that the final reactor in Chernobyl is shut down after a leak, which, of course, authorities suggested produced no dangerous radiation.
But as that radionuclide expert said, no amount of radiation getting into the environment should be considered quote-unquote safe.
Now, in astronomical news, back in March, Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory announced that an asteroid called 1997 XF-11 was on a possible collision course with Earth in October 2028.
Then, the Jet Propulsion Lab in California did a recalculation and said that XF-11 probably would miss Earth by 600,000 miles.
Following that confusion have been two major movies, Deep Impact and Armageddon, featuring asteroids and comets that threaten Earth.
So recently, the National Research Council's Committee on Planetary and Lunar Exploration brought together scientists to discuss how not to incite public panic over asteroid activity.
And NASA has weighed into this with a recommendation that scientists consult with each other for at least 48 hours before any public announcements about incoming asteroids or comets.
But one asteroid tracking scientist is so concerned about possible impacts that he wants to see beeping transponders literally placed on what are called dangerous asteroids that are in orbits that might be deflected and could be hit by other asteroids so that they could go onto an Earth collision course something like cushion shots on a pool table.
Yeah, that they would like at least to put a 48-hour cushion now between when something's discovered and scientists saying that something may be headed this way.
I understand your point, and I think that's one of the problems, is lead time.
Yeah.
Well, the scientist who is also very concerned about both that issue and the whole general asteroid issue is Dr. Edward Taliaferry, a nuclear physicist who chairs the Subcommittee on Planetary Defense for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and consults To the Air Force's Aerospace Corporation in California.
That research and development supports the U.S. Air Force and National Reconnaissance Office in the design, construction, launch, and operations of military spy satellites and other spacecraft.
Here is Dr. Talia Ferry.
unidentified
Should be interesting by XS Hollywood.
You know, they've been hired to do promos for the movies, and Armageddon was the one that they talked to me about.
And they said, tell me, is this fact or fiction?
Could this really happen?
The answer is fact.
Not only it could happen, it has happened, and it will happen again.
Well, and the thing is, is that do people realize that the fine line between fiction that's entertainment and fact that could destroy large portions of coastlines is not anything we should be taking lightly?
And how do we prepare for dealing with incoming asteroids that might be on an impact course?
unidentified
Yeah, and this is the whole point of the thing.
You know, people, a lot of people didn't like the fact that President Reagan came up with what was called Star Wars in those days.
But it turns out that in order to detect and track an asteroid, to intercept it, home on it, and deflect it from its course is exactly the same technologies you need to detect, track, intercept, and destroy an incoming ballistic missile.
It's the same problem.
It's just bigger.
The spaces are bigger, the velocities are higher, and the objects are bigger.
Instead of having something that's three feet across, you've got something that's a mile across that you've got to deal with.
But all of those technologies in the U.S. and to some extent in the Soviet Union have been worked on and refined over the past 10 or 15 years.
So if you had come to me 20 years ago and said, Ed, what do we do about that?
The answer would have been not much.
But today, we really do have the technology to cope with something like that.
What could we do with something that was a mile wide?
Well, it turns out that a study was done.
I chair the subcommittee on planetary defense for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
And we actually spent a year working on that problem, that exact problem.
And it turns out that if you catch these things at the right time, you need time.
It doesn't really matter so much how big it is or what it's made of.
You need time.
You need warning time.
But if you can catch it three or four years before it's going to hit, there is a part of its orbit where the object itself is, let me say, most vulnerable.
You come up behind it with a nuclear device, a bomb, and you detonate the thing before it touches the object, and you nudge it in its trajectory.
And it really only takes a nudge if you've got three or four years of warning.
That nudge will be enough to take an object that was going to hit the Earth and move it enough so that it will now miss the Earth.
Now, in Impact and Armageddon and what have you, they keep trying to blow the things apart.
And that is exactly what you don't want to do.
And we spent a lot of time looking at all the different ways you could transfer energy to an object without breaking it into pieces.
Because you don't want a million pieces coming at the Earth.
That's right.
Most people don't have a good sense of geometry.
But an object that's 10 miles across, you could break that up into 2,000, one mile across objects.
It's the same volume.
And the net result will be, instead of having just one thing to deal with, you now have 2,000 things to deal with.
And that is a disaster.
And incidentally, and I've not seen Almageddon, but in Deep Impact, the characteristics of what happens when one of these things impact is very well done.
Now, how many times in, let's say, the past 20 years have we seen asteroids in that mile to 10 mile diameter in which we would have three or four year warning?
unidentified
We haven't.
And that's the whole point.
And the problem is the following.
We know on the basis of studies done on various sizes of what we have detected already, that there are probably 2,000 objects with diameters of half a mile or greater, and which have orbits around the Sun, which cross the Earth's orbit.
Now, we only know where about 100 of them are, and that's the issue.
If you don't know where they are, you can't predict when they're going to hit.
It turns out that there's less than a dozen people who are tracking these things.
I mean, we're detecting like 10 a year or 15 a year, and if there are really 2,000 of them, you know, that's going to take a couple hundred years to find them all.
And that, to me, that's too long.
The dinosaurs didn't have a chance.
The dinosaurs were wiped out when an asteroid about six or seven miles across hit the Earth, as well as up to 70% of everything else on the planet died.
But we have the technology to find these things and predict when they're going to impact.
And we also have the technology now that if we find one with our name on it, we can do something about it.
We do have the technology.
It has to be focused.
You know, we have to look directly at some specific object, but we could do it.
You do what we call in the military, the shoot, look, shoot.
You shoot, you check the orbit to see how it changed.
If it still looks like it might hit, you shoot again until you've changed the orbit enough that it will now miss.
That's why warning time is so important.
It's important that we find these things very quickly.
I'd like to see them all determined within the next 10 years.
And incidentally, we should do this with the asteroid was called 1997XF-11.
We should send a rendezvous satellite, spacecraft, to 1997XF-11.
we should take a look at it, we should find out what its composition is, we should put what's called a transponder on it so that we can track it very accurately over the next 20 to 30 years and make sure that it isn't going to hit the Earth.
My feeling is that we need to do that with any object that we identify that is potentially a threat.
And this requires a little bit of background.
If you take most of the asteroids that we know about, the debris that's left over from the early formation of the solar system, and most of those things are in orbits between Mars and Jupiter, very benign orbits, no threat at all.
But something perturbs them out of that orbit and sends them in towards the Earth.
Those are the near-Earth objects, the things I'm talking about that are dangerous, the 2,000 objects that are dangerous.
And whatever it was that perturbed them once could perturb them again.
So the fact that you now have determined that 1997 SF isn't going to hit the Earth is no guarantee that something might still perturb it and change that.
In addition to his concern about tracking potentially dangerous asteroids, Dr. Talia Ferry says the Defense Department is working around the clock to change hardware and software in its many computer systems before the years switch to 2000 and those zeros turn off the computers.
But this 2KY problem, as it's known, isn't the only shutdown problem.
So is the number 99.
According to Dr. Talia Ferry, six months from now as we celebrate New Year's Eve to New Year's Day, other software and hardware could shut down as well.
unidentified
When banks started discovering software and computers, you know, most of their stuff was programmed in COBOL.
That was 30 years ago.
And whoever thought, well, surely in 30 years we're going to replace this software with something better, newer, faster?
But the software worked and it kept working, so why not keep it?
A lot of programmers in COBOL, for example, use the numbers 99 to signify the end of a file, meaning work is done, shut down.
So it isn't just 2,000.
There are problems with getting over the 1999.
Banking, I think, is going to be a real problem.
You're going to find accounts disappearing and all kinds of peculiar things happening.
And I've heard from ex-military and ex-intelligence that the military voices section of the book, they have first-hand knowledge themselves of how accurate those military voices are.
And prior to your coming on tonight, we were talking with Linda Molten Howe, who is an investigator for us, a science advisor investigator.
And she was talking with somebody who was telling us how very little planning we have done here on Earth for objects that are liable to plow into Earth, possibly doing to us what occurred to the dinosaurs.
And the only reason I mentioned that is because there is a great deal of synchronicity involved in what Hollywood does and then what seems to occur in real life.
Now, am I on the right track with regard to synchronicity when I talk about that?
That's an unusual way to get into a subject I thought I knew pretty thoroughly.
That's great.
I have worked, as you mentioned, in the film industry the last 15 years or so, and it's pretty common knowledge that there's something called the zeitgeist.
Remember that old German word for the spirit of the time.
So that every time a very popular movie comes out, we see that there is a rash of lawsuits from young screenwriters around the world saying, wait a minute, wait a minute, I was writing a script about a young boy who's a victim of divorced parents who meets an extraterrestrial.
And then, lo and behold, I look up and a movie comes up from Steven Spielberg.
Obviously, he overheard one of my conversations in a cafe in Los Angeles, right?
Well, your listeners will probably have many examples of this from their own life, but a French writer named André Gide wrote years ago that what is most personal is universal.
So that's a way to say if you go deep enough into your own experience, if you go deep enough, you hit what Jung called the unconscious, and suddenly you discover that you are fascinated with things that, lo and behold, again, suddenly become part of the cultural spirit.
That's happened to me throughout my own writing career.
I was writing on the famous mythologist Joe Campbell several years ago, and by the time my film and book came out on him, the whole culture seemed to be ready to talk about mythology.
So, well, last week, I interviewed, for example, the man who wrote the screenplay for The China Syndrome.
And three weeks after that movie came out, of course, Three Mile Island blew its cork.
Now, with regard to these things that might hit Earth, let me even suggest one other.
There are so many that I could barely even cover them all.
Another good one would be Wag the Dog about a president who has an affair and then tries to cover it up.
And then we have a president who has an affair, allegedly, and tries to cover it up, allegedly.
That seems just too coincidental.
But if all of this is true and there is some sort of mass consciousness of collective unconscious that is producing this, then I'm very worried about deep impact in Armageddon.
I grew up in a house in Detroit in the 1950s, and we were a family of readers.
My father would turn the television off on Friday night and say, Philip, someday you're going to thank me for this, but we're going to read Homer tonight.
And years later, sure, I credit him and I thank him for doing that.
But besides reading the classics, I think my dad, with his love of jazz and so on, wanted to bring a little syncopation into it.
So we would read from the old Ripley's, believe it or not, books too.
And I still remember as a boy my father reading this one unbelievable, in the real sense of the word, story that I end up using in my book, Soul Moments, my collection of synchronicity stories, that your readers might be interested in.
And it's a great way to help begin to distinguish between sheer coincidence and synchronicity.
Ripley tells the story that on December 5th in 1664, there was a terrible shipwreck off the coast of Wales.
81 passengers on board died.
And there was only one survivor, a man named Hugh Williams.
Well, a little more than 100 years later, the same day, December 5th, another ship sank off the coast of Britain with 60 passengers on board, and there was only one survivor, a guy named Hugh Williams.
In 1860, so again, nearly 100 years later, off the coast of Britain, another ship sank with 25 passengers on board, only one survivor, a man named Hugh Williams.
So you'd think that the Parliament in London would have passed a law about people named Hugh Williams going on board ships.
As my dad said, and Houston Smith, do you know the religious historian out here in Berkeley who was on Bill Moyers recently said, okay, what are the odds?
You know, you might be thinking of a song one afternoon, and the song comes on the radio.
So it's a coincidence.
Something's happening in you, in your mind, in your memory, and then, what?
Coincidentally, it comes on the radio.
Now, I'm fascinated with this other realm called synchronicity.
And it's a word that the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung coined in the 1940s to describe a coincidence that doesn't have any known cause whatsoever, but it's deeply meaningful to you.
It seems to have something to do with your fate and destiny.
And these kind of stories are the ones that set your hair on end.
So I've been collecting these for the last few years, and I've come up with this book called Soul Moments because I thought that it was an interesting way to describe this phenomenon.
It's the kind of coincidence that touches you, and as the French say, the shiver goes up your back.
Let me give one that actually helped trigger the book project itself.
It came from my own life.
I'm out here in the late 1970s painting houses.
I'm not quite sure what to do with my college degree in journalism.
I'm not quite sure where to go in my life.
You know, it's a crisis in a young man's life.
And I find myself in the San Francisco bookstore, one of the great ones here, Green Apple Bookstore, late one night.
And I pick up a book called Two Years Before the Mast.
It's one of the great whaling books in American literature.
And I begin to read it there.
I buy it.
I take it home.
I read it all night because it's a story about what my area right here, San Francisco, was like before it became a city.
This guy, the author, Richard Dana, came around the coast, came into the bay, looked at the empty hills other than seeing a mission and a fort and said, oh, this could be a city as beautiful as Rome.
So it really caught my attention.
I go to the painting site the next day and I tell my friends at the construction site about this book.
And I'm a proselytizer for books, right?
So I say, you have to go out and read this book, or you can't call yourself a died in the wolf San Franciscan.
So I regale them with three of my favorite stories from the book.
I go home that night and there's a package from my father waiting.
I open it up and already the shiver is starting.
It's that sense of apprehension you might get when you pick up a phone or you open the door, something strange is about to happen.
It's the same book in this envelope, two years before the mass.
I open the book, and inside there's an index card from my father in which he says, Philip, I know you're having problems writing out there.
I always heard that when a writer is having trouble, he should read.
He should read the great books.
And if you read enough, you eventually become inspired to write yourself.
This was pretty amazing because my father and I had had a terrible falling out.
We hadn't talked for a couple years.
And then he says, here are my favorite three episodes in the book.
And they were the exact same three stories out of a 500-page book that I had told to my friends on the painting scaffolding that day.
So what do you have here?
You have an interesting coincidence.
You read a book, and then the same copy arrives in the mail at that same day.
But when a coincidence goes in and touches you in a place that is so deep you realize that the lights and bells are going off, then it becomes something that Jung called synchronicity because I knew at that moment that I was, as they used to say, I was my father's son.
Of course.
In other words, I felt incredibly connected.
See, that's the phenomena that I'm really, really, really dazzled with here.
You must get this with your audience and your different speakers on your show throughout the years.
We are in a time in which people feel phenomenally disconnected, right?
People don't feel connected to their families, their city, the religion possibly that they grew up in.
And so the things that connect you, the wonders of science, family, whatever it might be, then begin to shine a bit.
These are life's amazing moments.
So what I've discovered in collecting these stories again and again and again, people kept saying, Mr. Cousineau in their mail to me when they sent the stories for this book, Mr. Cousineau, the weirdest thing happened to me.
The weirdest thing, the strangest thing happened.
So you know, I went out and I looked up the origin of the word weird, and you know what it means?
In other words, that you can't explain, and the scientist next door can't explain it, and the newspaper columnist in tomorrow's paper can't explain it to you, and you shiver deep in your bones.
The ancients have told us, since the Greeks, since the Old English, that there is what they call a sly wink of fate, that dream that you can't explain, that encounter outside the radio station that you can't explain.
Maybe, it may be what they used to call a wink of fate.
I'm sure you've thought a million times about the source of this, the source of this synchronicity.
Is it something within, in other words, many scientists study all Kinds of things about our brain, and we still know very, very, very little about our brains.
So, where does synchronicity come from?
Is it a force external to or something generated from within?
Beautiful question, and I'm still wrestling with it even after a few years in this book.
And I've come up with a couple of things.
You've probably heard the notion of the Gaia principle.
Yes.
And this is the idea that the entire earth is alive.
It's not just human beings and dogs and cats.
The entire world is alive.
And you know, this was commonly believed by all cultures up until right around the European, so-called Enlightenment.
And there are moments when you feel that the world is alive and you feel connected.
Sometimes it's called the web of life.
Fritjof Capra, the great physicist, has just written a beautiful book about this, called the Web of Life.
In moments when you're truly awake and you're not a sleeping robot in life, you're truly awake.
You feel connected to the past and maybe even to the future if you're uncannily sensitive.
And so there's an argument to be made that synchronicities are happening around us all the time.
And it's in those moments when we wake up.
You may have a dream that shivers you so much that you are very much awake for the next few days.
Now, this is a good segue for me to go to my friendship with Joseph Campbell, who your listeners may remember was the famous mythologist.
He was in the power of myth years ago with Bill Moyers.
His writing, his books on mythology have inspired, according to people I know in Hollywood, six or seven of the top ten films of all time.
Because so many screenwriters, when they're going to write, like we talked about with E.T., a story that is attempted to be universal, it really helps to go back and know the myths, the legends, the fairy tales.
As they say, there are only two stories in the world.
A stranger comes to town and a man goes on a quest.
So once you begin to know the treasure trove's stories, it helps you in life.
Anyway, ten years ago I'm working on a film about his life called The Hero's Journey.
And we were filming at his house out in Honolulu, Hawaii.
And my partner's on the film finally got to the question that's become a bumper sticker in certain parts of America.
I asked him the famous Follow Your Bliss story.
Do you know his phrase about Follow Your Bliss?
I do not.
Well, Campbell was often asked as a writer, a teacher, a scholar, someone who has had an enormous influence on artists, scientists, scholars, screenwriters, and so on.
But he was also a very popular teacher at Sarah Lawrence for 38 years.
Again, hundreds of times he was asked, all right, Mr. Campbell, it's interesting to know about the hero's journey in the old stories, the hero's journey as it's around today.
But how do you know when you're on the right path in life?
So Campbell, his favorite answer I got on film out in Honolulu was that you should follow your bliss.
And by bliss, that means not your fun, not just your immediate gratification, which the whole culture is famous for right now, but the deepest, deepest fascination of your life.
Not the one your father said you should be following.
Or good morning, depending on the time zone when you're hearing this.
It's Dreamland from an area near what pilots call Dreamland.
This is Dreamland.
Phil Kusino has the subject synchronicity, really, really, really fascinating.
And I've got a story.
If that's what synchronicity is, I've sure got a story.
We're talking about synchronicity and how it differs from simple or even not so simple coincidence.
Here once again is Phil.
Phil, welcome back.
Thanks very much.
Let me give you a brief story and see if this qualifies.
You know, that was a wonderful story regarding the line, follow your bliss.
When I was in high school, I was only an average student.
My parents had both been to college.
It was in the mid-50s, and these were the days when every parent who had been to college was of the opinion that if their son or daughter didn't go to college, then on to law school or medical school or whatever, why you were going to end up starving to death and being reduced to menial work all your life.
And I didn't want anything to do with it.
I did take some college, but I didn't enjoy it.
Dropped out, went into the Air Force, got out, and then my bliss, my passion has all my life been radio.
And so for 20 years, I was in radio, moving around, starving to death, got out of radio finally, fed up with it, said I can't do it anymore.
I've got a wonderful job with a large corporation, had a whole department of people under me.
I was in a store, and I was talking to the clerk in that store, and a fellow named Jack Daniels, who worked for the radio station that sucked me back in, overheard the conversation I was having with the clerk and walked up to me and said, you did talk radio.
And that's how it happened.
It went from there to management, and then came the offer, and then came the job, and then I was gone.
I was a goner.
I was back in radio again, that which I had sworn not to do simply because, you know, I loved radio.
God, my soul, I love radio.
But I got out of it because I wanted a life.
I wanted not to have to move around anymore.
I wanted not to suffer the slings and arrows of a new job every year or less.
And that's what a lot of radio people have.
And so then all of a sudden, kaboom, there I was back in it, taking thousands of dollars of a pay cut.
But all of a sudden, back in love again, back in my passion again.
Now, the synchronicity of it then is the sequence of events that led you to the people that asked you to change your life.
Because that's how we can begin to look at our lives as stories, not things that happen to us.
You know, the old blame it on you, you know, the B.B. King lying, nobody loves me but my mama, she could be jiving too.
We can blame, we can get caught in that blame game.
We blame, we blame, we blame, we blame.
But if you pull back, if you get some enormous perspective, you can begin to see that there is a small thread that is connecting us from one person to the next, even from one walk or one building to the next.
Now, if you look back on that sequence, you know, if you had slept late that day, you would never have met these people who asked you to go back to radio.
And so the night before, he went out and he partied with some friends, and he went to bed not really knowing which direction his life was going to go, but he was feeling deeply anxious about it.
Well, he woke up with a start in the middle of the night and just happened to look over at his clock, and the digital readout was 2.2654.
It was 2.26 in the morning, almost 2.27, but that was also his birthday.
2.2654.
This happening in 1984.
And he had one of those great smiles that we get once in a while when you have a truth is stranger than fiction moment.
And so, you see, I call my book Soul Moments precisely for that, because that's what we have to trust in life.
The encounter, the hunch, the intuition, the dream that moves us from the inauthentic to the authentic life.
Let me give you another story in the book that is scary because of its implications.
A friend of mine that I worked with on a documentary film many years ago is a doctor in San Diego.
And he tells me that at one time he remembered that he had delivered 1,000 babies.
It was a very, very successful career in medicine before he went into film.
But he had an encounter with a young child in which he almost lost the child on the operating table.
And then he felt some tremendous sense of force that came into him and gave him a sense of clarity as a doctor, a surgeon, a healer that he had never felt before.
And he saved the boy's life on the operating table.
Well, there's an uncanny moment like we've been talking about.
Now the question is, what do you do with that moment, right?
You just throw it away and say, well, that was strange.
I can't explain it, but these things happen.
Well, this doctor, a friend of mine, he felt that this power actually came from a certain place.
So he got in his car outside of this hospital and he drove to a point near the famous Scripps Institute in San Diego, went up to the headlands overlooking the Pacific Ocean there, and he had some intuition that the power that he had, just felt, to save this boy came from this exact spot.
Well, he made a vow at that moment to dedicate the rest of his life to helping save children, especially children that had the deep economic problems, in the family with deep problems economically.
And yet, and yet, and yet, one thing led to another, and he was never able to do that.
He had vowed to actually build a hospital up there on that hill.
He couldn't do it.
He led to one thing, to another, to another.
Well, years later, who's the man who discovered the polio vaccine?
The doctor in San Diego became friends with him, and Dr. Salk at one point sought him out and said, I want to take you to a spot that I think I want to build my hospital.
And went to the exact same spot that the man, my friend, writes about in my book.
Now, Sock followed that impulse, and he built this hospital.
It's one of the most famous neurological hospitals in the world, now, the famous Salk Institute.
Whereas my friend in the story writes this because he really wants to help other people who get to that crossroad moment, like you did with radio, and for one reason or another was not able to follow through.
So you've got a kind of shadow synchronicity as well, right?
Where the coincidences begin to pile up, and you follow these amazing intuitions.
But as always, because life is sometimes like a movie, right?
It's like the hero at the climax moment of the story.
What do you do when the chips are down?
What do you do in that crisis moment?
If you follow through, I think you get this sense that the ancients always talked about of destiny unfolding.
And if you don't, it's like living in someone else's life.
Well, when you look around you, Phil, perhaps we can discuss this.
If you look at the world of successful people and the world of people who are almost inevitably failures and whatever they endeavor to do turns out wrong, life is nothing but one fork in the road after the other, one decision after the other.
And if you listen to yourself very carefully, you make the right decisions and things turn out well.
If you don't listen to yourself, inevitably you make the wrong decisions and everything goes wrong.
And for some people, they listen.
For some people, they don't.
And that seems to be the dividing line between those who are successful and those who have failure and tragedy.
Dr. Young, who coined this word that we keep mentioning, synchronicity, felt that they tend to occur right at crossroad moments.
And so you were really humming here with this.
Another story from the book is just uncanny, like this.
A woman writes to me that she was a novelist several years ago, but she reached a crisis where she just couldn't write.
She was completely stuck.
It's a horrible place to be.
Block.
It's a terrible, terrible writer's block.
So she went to a writers' conference in North Carolina, and after getting the babysitter and taking time off and so on, she arrived a day early and immediately began to berate herself.
Well, you can't get anything right.
No wonder you can't even finish a book.
And right then, right at that moment, and as Jung says, this is the moment when the synchronicities tend to happen, when you're really vulnerable, right?
She hears her name called out.
Now, her maiden name was Kate Bullard Adams.
So here's Kate Bullard Adams at this conference hall, and she hears her maiden name shouted out, Kate Bullard.
So she jumped up from the couch that she was sitting in, and she looks over and she sees that two young boys, two young teenagers, have carried in a teenage girl who's had an accident on the conference grounds.
And she fell and she had a stick poked through her head.
There is another category that I don't understand.
And this would be people who are eminently successful, but extremely unhappy.
Now, there's a program on CNN that runs.
It's called Pinnacle, that profiles people who are at the top of their game, whatever it is.
And they profiled the man who owns CNN.
And they talked to him for, oh, I don't know, a good half hour.
And then at the very end of the interview, they asked him what it's like to be so successful, to own baseball teams and news networks and so forth and so on.
And he said, you know, it was one of those moments you talked about.
And he just laid back and thought about the answer for a little bit.
And he said, you know, success really is kind of an empty bag.
In other words, he'd made all this money, married to a famous actress.
We all know who we're talking about here.
And yet he was unhappy.
Success, having all of this, he's asking himself, what does it mean?
He said something quite beautiful I've thought about many times through the years that if you are in doubt about where your happiness or your meaning lies, try being in service to the world.
One way to distinguish between the two is that a synchronicity is kind of an outside world echo of something that happens in a human being.
So for example, I'm walking down a street in one of my favorite neighborhoods in Paris talking about a friend I haven't seen in 25 years, and I look down and he's sitting right there at a cafe table.
So I'm thinking about him, wondering what happened to Steve.
I haven't seen Steve in a long time.
Mention this to my friend, and barely do I get the words out of my mouth when he's sitting there.
It's remarkable that something like that can happen.
But it also happens with dreams.
I have a story in my book about a woman named Catherine Van Horn out here in the Bay Area who dreams one night that she's driving with her child, with her children and two kids from their school in the carpool.
And suddenly it's as if she's driving on square wheels.
And she wakes up in the morning thinking, square wheels, what the heck could that mean?
But it was so visceral, she couldn't get it out of her mind all day.
That afternoon, she goes to pick up her children, gets the kids from the carpool, they're driving across a bridge, and suddenly the car is driving as if on square wheels.
Earthquake.
And it's not just her imagination.
The kids from the back even use that phrase.
One of her two children says, Mama, Mama, why do we have square wheels suddenly?
Well, she keeps driving.
She gets home, turns on the radio, and it's the 1989 Loma Pareta earthquake.
You bet.
Now, we have these capacities.
It's extraordinary, but we generally tend not to use them.
And you know the old axiom, if you played any sports at all, you don't use it, you lose it.
And I've found in my travels around the world, both as a writer and as a filmmaker, that many, many other cultures exercise these muscles.
You might say the inner muscles, the muscles of the soul and heart.
You can come up with a lot of images for this.
And you do it by talking about your dreams, for example.
If you talk about your dreams, it's much more likely that you're going to remember them.
If you pay attention to things like synchronicities, if you just begin to talk to your friends, your wife, your husband about them, you get it out in the open rather than hide it.
My experience, my own life, and those are the people I know who I'm in contact with about this in the book, they say it's something like serial synchronicity.
You begin to talk about it, and it happens in front of you.
Let me give you an example of this.
Recently, I was teaching at Etsy Institute out here in Big Sur on the coast.
And this was a workshop with David Darling from a wonderful cello player and another couple of friends.
And we're talking about modern myths.
And so I started talking about the X-Files because you may know that a few years ago I wrote a book on UFOs called UFOs a Manual for the Millennium.
And it's a book I wrote looking at it as modern myth-making and showing the comparisons with what we're seeing around us now through all of history.
It was a lot of fun to do the book.
And I had written about the X-Files in the book.
So I'm writing about this, the power that that show has had, seizing the cultural imagination.
And so during a break, I walk up and I'm signing some books for some people in the hall.
And a woman walks up and says, well, I want six copies of your UFO book, and I want a couple copies of your book on Joseph Campbell, your man of myths.
And I look up and I say, well, who should I make this out to?
And she starts to lean over and she says, don't you?
Don't you?
Don't you recognize me?
And it's Mulder's mother from the X-File.
It was one of those moments where I'm wondering, does this crowd even watch the X-File?
Should I talk about this or not?
Is this stretching my credibility too much to talk about ufology and the X-Files as modern myth-making?
But I went for it.
It's that moment again.
I went for it.
It's a hunch I really, really trust.
And it turns out she wanted me to send copies for all the people on the X-Files show.
Now, to dispel any misunderstanding, I use the word myth and mythology as my old mentor, Joseph Campbell, did, and other writers, scholars, poets, composers of every kind for millennia have used it.
A real mythology is a collection of stories that are sacred to the culture and help define it.
Sometimes it's a hidden story.
You can talk about the American myth of progress, for example, or the King Arthur myth that helped set the mood for English history for so long.
And so I describe the modern UFO phenomena in this sense that it is a modern mythology.
We're watching one unfold all around us as if someone, who knows, 1,500 years ago would have been really hip to this and looked around and say, wow, God, look what's happening with this Arthur business.
You know, he was just a famous soldier five years ago, and look at this cult that's forming around him.
You know, if you're really aware of these things, you can look around and you can see them unfolding all around you.
So that's what I see happening with this.
But that's also to say two things.
It's very probable something real is happening.
So I hold that out.
But I make comparisons with other series of phenomena through history.
For example, the abduction phenomena has absolute parallels with the seizure of people by fairies in Old Ireland.
Keith Thompson writes about this in his book, Angels and Aliens.
When people talk about being transported to other realms, other times, this is not the first time in human history that people have reported these stories.
There's such a thing as Siberian soul journeys that shamans take.
You see, Carlos Castaneda sold 10 million books talking about these kind of soul journeys.
Well, it brings me back to the same question I asked you earlier, the one that you're still working on.
With respect to UFOs, I wonder if they might not be from us.
From us.
Our brains are capable of incredible things, and I am not suggesting that people don't see these things, nor am I suggesting that they are not actually photographed, because they are.
But I just wonder if there is the possibility that these are creations from within.
But Jung was riveted by this as much as he was by alchemy and black magic and synchronicity and the ancient myths.
And his conclusion was very, very interesting to me.
He looked back through history and saw that in moments of crisis, Romans, Greeks, Africans, Brazilians, people at different moments throughout human history, in moments of crisis, tend to project in their mind and out into the world images of wholeness.
In other words, circles.
Round circles.
A round circle is a halo.
It's a mandala, like with the Tibetan Buddhist.
Images of circles have always been healing forces for people.
And so he looked back and he saw, as you must well know, and I write about in the book, the first rash of sightings was 1947, and it's right after the cataclysm of World War II, the Hiroshima bombings.
We're beginning to heat up the war with the Soviets.
And in many, many ways, the world's soul, to coin a phrase, is fractured.
It's split right down the middle.
We lost 50 million people in World War II.
50 million people.
That's a wound that the planet has not healed yet.
And Jung's notion was quite amazing.
It said that people have extraordinary powers when they are in a catastrophe.
And what they do is spontaneously project images out there, and they see gods.
And they see images from the heavens that come down to save them.
Now, that's a psychological way of looking at this.
And it doesn't debunk people's actual sightings.
People are seeing something.
There's no doubt about it.
But the point I try to wrap up with in the book, I call the re-enchantment of the night sky.
Now, as someone who loves the constellations, who loves stars, who loves going camping, you know, lay on your back in the Grand Canyon, look at the stars.
And isn't it one of the most miraculous things in life?
I have been doing shows, of course, on this sort of thing now for years and years.
It was, oh, I don't know now, a couple of years ago that I decided I would try, with millions of listeners, people interested in ufology, I would try a grand experiment.
And so I suggested to the audience that we all concentrate, or as many as I could talk into it, concentrate at a specific time asking whoever it is up there to show themselves in our skies over a major city somewhere.
Within two weeks of that, actually less, we had the most remarkable mothership kind of sighting seen by hundreds or thousands of people in Phoenix, Arizona.
Now, maybe something, maybe nothing.
But again, it goes back to, I wonder if we are the creators of this phenomenon.
In my book on UFOs, I actually reproduced some lithographs, some old engravings from England in the 15th century, and I think it's Basel, Switzerland in the 17th century, showing sightings of dragons flying across the sky.
And this was recorded frequently throughout European history.
And that's nevertheless Chinese history, which I'm not as familiar with.
But there have been sightings in the sky of tremendous powers, colorful characters, and saving figures.
The gods coming down to save us.
That's the parallel.
So what I try to do with the book is be very playful.
Rather than say this is the first time in human history that anything like this has ever happened, which is extremely dubious, and it's just being pretty unaware of history.
Just find the parallels.
Look back.
Compare these things with other realms, with other periods of history, and then, and then make up your own conclusion.
But again, the glory of this, and part of it began with the sightings in 47, and then I think really accelerated with science fiction films, peaking with a movie like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, is that we, you know, the old phrase, nature abhors a vacuum?
With as much prodigious accomplishment as modern science has had, you know, it's been pretty exclusive.
And the whole business that the rest of us who aren't scientists should find some mystery in the night sky, meteors, and other planets and so on, you know, most average people feel very left out, Right?
And the world is dead.
The world has been dead.
The night sky has been dead.
People don't know stars anymore.
They don't know the constellations.
They don't know very much about the night sky.
And yet, it has to be one of the greatest sources of wonder in all of life.
Again, with the movies, for example, recently, Deep Impact, Armageddon on the Way, all of this talk, non-stop talk about something slamming into the planet.
There was, oh, a couple of months ago, XF-11, this mile-wide thing that they said is, well, it may hit Earth, they said.
And then about two days later, they did a recomputation.
They said, no, it's going to miss Earth by about 600,000 miles.
Thank goodness.
We're all saved.
It was going to hit in 2048 or something, or another, I can't recall.
Anyway, if what I think might be true is true and that we actually generate this, then right now, with all of the mass consciousness at work on this, the thing is probably changing its trajectory ever so slightly way out there beginning to come right toward us.
Well, coincidentally enough, and I actually expected this to happen.
When my book finally came out, there were another three or so that came out in the market about the same time.
And nobody really, from my specific point of view, I concentrate on the stories.
You know, there are physicists who are writing on this now, and they're talking about warps in time and space, which is one reason why this can happen, or space-time, foam.
Or some friends of mine actually asked the physicist Stephen Hawking a question for me recently.
They had dinner with him, and I asked him for me about synchronicity.
And he deliberated on it for a while, as you might imagine he would.
And he finally said, well, it may be an example of what I am believing now is a power for human beings, and that is remembering the future.
I spent some time in Southeast Asia years ago, and they have a wonderful phrase called rubber time.
That time expands and contracts, expands and contracts, folds back on itself.
Einstein was once asked to explain relativity, and he said, well, it's like two minutes with a very beautiful woman that seems to go like that, like a finger snap, compared to two minutes with an absolute bore at a cocktail party, which tends to feel like it's dragging forever, forever.
But I found out recently that the Greeks, you know the idea that the Eskimos have 100 words for snow, and in Yiddish there are 100 words for genius, and the Aztecs had 400 words for potato and so on.
Nine words because they really believed, well, there's mythic time, there's sacred time, there's ritual time, when you're in love, time seems suspended, right?
I suspect we are going to grow back more into that idea because time dilates so much in modern experience.
It's moving so quickly that we have to have other ways to talk about it.
And I think using a word like synchronicity can begin to help because in my experience, and apparently those people who wrote to me experienced the same thing, when the synchronicity happens, time seems to stand still.
And that's an extraordinary thing in life when it happens.
And by now, I think that the majority of you are in sync, if you'll excuse the word, in sync with us and understand what we're talking about, and no doubt have a few stories of your own.
So open lines straight ahead.
unidentified
This is Phil Cousineau, and his book is Soul Moments.
But if a listener goes to the local store and can't find it or is a long way from a bookstore, I do have a phone number, and that would be 1-800-1-800-685-9595.
And I think I've got an example is years ago when I was in high school, my mom passed away.
And after she had died, I kind of considered her my guardian angel.
And I met, who's my present wife now.
We were up camping in the woods.
We were driving down the road and stuff, and we had dated for a while.
And I kind of, you know, thought to myself that, oh, excuse me, I was thinking, you know, if I should marry my wife, mom, you know, let me see some deer around this next corner.
That very next corner, I come around, there was a band of deer, about 12 deer, and they still crossing the road.
And I had to stop, and they come up on the side of the hill there, and they all just kind of stopped.
And, you know, talk about your hair standing up on the end of the hill.
I was quite surprised at the proliferation of animal stories as they came to me by mail, through the fax machine, by email, and so on over the last few years.
Probably 20% of the stories that have come my way and are in my book have to do with animals.
So I thought about this for quite a while.
And then I remembered something.
Again, my old mentor, Joe Campbell, said that throughout human history, animals have been used as messengers in stories.
The animal appears, a sly fox, a band of deer.
Deers are enormously important in mythology all around the world.
And so as things went on, I was able to get with her by herself and ask her if she had placed an ad like that.
At first, she said no.
And so later she came to me and told me yes, that she had, and she just couldn't believe that I, you know, had known that.
And nothing, you know, we were kind of friends and we just vague acquaintances.
Nothing really ever came from that other than the fact that it made me more aware of synchronicity because at the time I was reading a book about synchronicity.
And it was just, I mean, the odds against that happening was just really pretty bizarre.
And the opening of the movie is a fabulous example of this deep desire in all of us for these two people to meet, like we just heard in the radio in this store.
If you recall in the beginning of the movie, Woody Allen is there with Diane Keaton in a movie theater.
Their relationship is disintegrating, so he wants to try to heal it by taking her to a movie.
unidentified
Well, he takes her to a movie about the Holocaust, Sorrow and the Pity.
A very strange choice, but they're sitting there, and they're standing in line, and a very pompous professor is talking to them about Marshall McLuhan, the famous sociologist.
And it's annoying Woody Allen no end.
And he tells Diane Keaton, this guy has no idea what he's talking about.
He's completely misrepresenting Marshall McLuhan and so on.
So at that moment, he walks up to the camera, which is a very unusual thing for a filmmaker to do.
It's very risky.
But he says something to the effect, wouldn't you like the following to happen?
And he goes stage left and he pulls the real Marshall McLuhan out of the wings of the theater.
And he says, would you tell this professor?
He doesn't know what he's talking about.
And McLuhan says, I don't know how you ever got a job teaching me.
You're completely misrepresenting my work.
And then Woody comes back to the camera and he looks right at you and he says, don't you wish life was like this more often?
And it's a famous, famous example in the movie of this kind of bond that you have when you're reading a book, when you're hearing a story, when you go to the movies, that there's a suspension of disbelief that the uncanny can happen.
I'd like him to tell me exactly what he thinks this is.
My daughter did so many instances of this type of thing I'm going to tell you.
The first time I ever noticed it, I called one Sunday afternoon and her husband answered the phone and as soon as he heard my voice, he began to laugh.
Now, what you have just described, what that lady has just described, is, or I would generally, before tonight, have called that precognition, which may be the same thing as synchronicity, or may be in the same ballpark.
This is a very controversial aspect of the synchronicity phenomena, but I'll take a stab at it.
I believe that precognition and dreams that foretell the future are part of the synchronicity phenomena for the simple reason that all synchronicity is, is, again, a connection between something that happens inside of a human being.
You have a hunch that the phone is going to ring, and bam, it does.
Or you wake up with a shot in the middle of the night and realize somebody somewhere that you're close to has died.
Now, this happens.
It happens all the time around the world.
It's happened throughout human history.
We have these capabilities.
Now, my suspicion is that in earlier times, before technology, when we were hunter-gatherers and so on, because life was far, far more dangerous living in the natural world, we had to develop powers or capacities to stay alive as a species.
And because I've documented some of this in my travels, I've filmed in the Amazon with very remote Indians.
I did a film on peyote religion among the Native Americans in Mexico and the American Southwest.
And I've come across people from the Southwest to Bali, the Amazon to Borneo, people who are not technologically advanced but are, let's say, spiritually advanced.
That they are as advanced in the interior world as we in the West or America are in the exterior world.
Those powers are there for people to understand what someone else is thinking.
I think lovers or spouses who've lived together for a long time have an inkling of this.
Do you know what your wife is going to say before she says it?
Well, we don't even have words for that anymore because it's considered like something expendable, like your little toe.
But those capacities to be in touch with the ancestors through dreams, to be able to anticipate the future, I think were part of the survival mechanism very early on.
And that, as I said earlier on in the program, crisis brings that back.
When you are in a crisis about your marriage, about the job situation, like you were, like you described it, in a sense, that's what the ancients called a soul crisis.
On the outside, very successful, right?
Very, very accomplished.
But something, as Jim Morrison, the doors are saying, something's wrong, something's not quite right.
And in those moments, in the moments of crisis, the crossroad moments, I suspect that these capacities come back to us.
Well, it must be, because at the moment that I left this cushy job I had, from the wife I had at the time, who thought I had lost my mind, to the people in the corporation who, and I guess there must have been 10 or 12, who sat down and counseled me and said, have you lost your mind?
And that's another synchronistic event for you that your next guest should speak French.
However, what I would like to say is that my call, you taking it at the time you are, brings just what Phil was talking about, is that about precognition and about synchronicity together in my story.
I don't know if I'll have time to tell you all of it, but I'll certainly attempt to do so in a rapid succession starting right now, okay?
I have no family, so my girlfriend Kim had in northern Alberta had her grandmother, and she invited me to spend Christmas with her and her grandmother and some relatives near Grand Prairie, Alberta, which is quite, you know, snowbound and cold.
And this is relevant, so let me tell you, Kim at the time had a big old Trans Am with brown exterior and interior because it's relevant to the story.
So I hardly ever dream, but when I do dream, I dream of events sometimes that scares me and they happen two or three days later.
But in this case, it was I dreamt that I was in Tim's passenger seat and there was all white around me.
And I had my feet belt on, but I couldn't feel anything.
And I was trying to call her name, but I couldn't speak.
So that kind of spooked me a little.
I didn't say anything, and then the next day I called Tim up, and I said, how's everything going for the trip, Tim?
Not cause, because remember, in the original definition, these are coincidences that have no known cause.
If you believe that God caused you to come together with the love of your life or brought about the new job change, or if you believe in literal angels, angels as messengers, then that's a cause, a cause for things that can be magical.
And that's all fine.
That's part of your worldview.
That's fine.
But this particular realm tends to defy explanation.
That's the point.
How can you possibly explain the following?
A friend of mine was a football player, James Van Harper, down in Georgia.
And playing sports, he wasn't very much open to these kind of ideas, the mystic, the uncanny, and so on.
But one year when they were playing football, all the players were forced to watch a movie called Red Asphalt.
So Jim, this friend of mine, Jim, who writes a story in my book, Soul Moments, is watching this.
And in the middle of one of the car wreck screeches, he hears the name Bob, shout it out, and he looks around.
At first, he thinks it's part of the soundtrack to the movie, but then he realizes nobody else heard it.
And then he hears it again.
Bob.
It's a shriek.
It's a horrible shriek.
And this business of the hair on the back of the neck standing up took place for him.
And he got that shiver.
And he knew in his heart of hearts something was wrong somewhere.
So he dashes home, and a few hours later he gets home and he goes up to the house and his mother opens the door.
She's ashen white.
And at first Jim thinks that someone in the family has been hurt.
And then she says, oh, Jim, I'm sorry to tell you, but your friend Jim.
Now, this is Pensacola, Florida.
She says, your friend Bob up in Minneapolis was just killed in a car wreck.
And Jim says, when, when, when?
And he figures out through a couple of phone calls, it was three hours previous, the exact moment he heard the word shouted out.
There was someone else in the car that was shouting out his friend's name when they were in the car wreck and he got killed.
So now the point is that that's an amazing coincidence, and it could be just a coincidence, right?
We have that phrase, we hear it every day.
Oh, that was just a coincidence.
Someone in the street was calling Bob.
But Jim knew in his heart of hearts that his friend had reached out through 1,000 miles difference, and he heard the voice.
Now, we're right back to that crossroad again.
It's possible.
Time and space are sometimes suspended.
What are you going to do with it?
We're right back there.
What are you going to do with it?
And it's had a profound influence on Jim because he figured if he had the capacity, now this is maybe the point of our whole interview art, if our friends have the capacity to hear a name shouted out 1,000 miles away, what else do we have the capacity to know?
You know what just occurred to me that the word in the idea of synchronicity is a little bit like that night vision binocular that you just advertised.
You know, you put these binoculars on and you have the capacity to see what is invisible to everyone else.
Now, if you have this idea of synchronicity, the coincidences that are possible, the connections that are absolutely time-defined, space-defying, it's like putting a new lens on and saying, wait a minute, if that could happen to Phil, to Art, to all these 80 people in this book, maybe it can happen to me.
Now you say, well, I haven't seen it before, but that's like saying, well, Art couldn't see anything out in the desert because I can't see it.
So we're not selling snake oil to anybody anywhere, but I think it's a wondrous gift.
It's a wondrous gift to say, you have the capacity to see and hear and feel things in your dreams and in your encounters that maybe you just haven't tapped yet.
You said you buy, I don't care, a car, a dodge dart, doesn't matter.
And all of a sudden you see dodge darts everywhere.
So then why would it not be possible to consider that when one meditates on the whole concept of synchronicity, one in effect brings it on or allows it to enter?
An incredible book by Boris Pasternak, the Russian author.
Well, when that book first came out in 1961, the English and the American critics just crucified him.
There was one very mean critic in London who actually said, well, we know this is an important book.
It's full of all this amazing symbolism and so on.
But really, Boris, there are so many coincidences in this book.
Who can possibly believe it?
Just, for example, one, if anybody can remember, Dr. Shivago, played by Omar Sharif, exiles himself out into Siberia, and lo and behold, he comes across, what was it, Julie Christie?
But, you know, Pasternak wrote a letter back in English, not even in Russia.
And this may be a wonderful way to start wrapping things up with the whole subject, in that he says, you know, the Russian soul is a mystic soul.
There are things that happen to us in this ancient, ancient land that regular literature or ordinary storytelling just can't encompass.
And he says, you don't understand this because you come from a whole tradition.
It's very cause and effect, cause and effect, cause and effect.
It's as if the whole world is like a billiard table and one ball bounces the other ball.
Well, that explains a lot of our experience, but it can't explain some of it.
So Pasternak writes that he had to put in all these uncanny coincidences in the book just to incorporate that mysterious part of life that cannot be covered through sheer cause and effect.
And one of the analogies I always use when I talk about synchronicity is James Bond.
Now, if you take away all the special effects and things, what you have is a man with a mission, and he stays focused on the mission, and things just work out.
But that's not why I called, to tell you that.
The reason that I called was that I've been on my own synchronicity research line for some time.
And one of the things I do is collect watches.
I bought the astrology watch that you were selling years ago.
And one of the watches that I got was a fishing time watch.
And I use that watch.
Now what that watch does is it maps the diurnal cycle of the moon.
So every rotation of the moon around the Earth, if you will, it doesn't stop at it.
There are four quadrants.
Moon set, moon noon, moon rise, and I forget what the other one's called.
But they're spaced apart for four hours and 50 minutes or whatever it is.
Now I started setting that alarm just for the exercise of setting the alarm.
And I noticed things would happen like within 10 minutes, five to ten minutes of the alarm.
Interesting things like the tension of the day would break.
For example, I was in a conference room in a business meeting with a bunch of people in a very oppressive day and people snapping at each other and so forth.
And someone in that meeting said something funny.
And then just a split second later, everyone started laughing and the whole pressure of the day was lifted and my alarm watch goes off at the same time.
Now, I started doing that daily.
I did this for probably six months to a year.
And I noticed that right about when that alarm went off, interesting synchronetic things would happen.
Someone would just come up to me and say, I've been looking for you all day, and I could literally stand on the street corner and watch the alarm go off and have those kinds of things happening.
Now, to add to that, I think it also relates to the analogy you gave about a car.
As soon as you buy a new Mustang or whatever, you start seeing them everywhere.
I think the more you focus on synchronicity, the more you recognize it and are aware of it.
I certainly recognize that feeling when it happens.
I don't need the watch anymore, but I got attuned to it somehow.
And I just wanted to share those thoughts with you.
Well, you just kind of went down the same road I just went down.
Very interesting story.
I have a story, a brief story about watches that may have nothing at all to do about synchronicity.
I have been a time freak all my life.
I want exactly accurate time.
And I have gone out and I have bought and spent money on some of the best watches in the world, waiting for one that is accurate.
Every watch my wife puts on holds perfect time to the second.
Every watch I've put on all my entire life runs inevitably one to two minutes fast every week.
No explanation for it whatsoever.
But it's true, and I've spent great money trying to break that cycle.
Wildcard line, you're on the air with Phil Cousineau.
unidentified
Hi.
Yes, I'm Susan.
I just wanted to tell you that I had just read the story about the woman who arrived a day early to a writers' conference two days ago in a month-old newspaper.
And I've been worried because it didn't tell me the ending and the girl was okay.
Right, about the woman who was, I think it was Kate Bullock, who was a day early to a writers' conference in a college.
And I just read it two days ago, and as soon as he started, basically when he said, when the stick went through one side of her head and out the other, I definitely recognized it.
And I'd been fretting over whether she was okay or not.
And he said, and she was okay.
And I was just wondering if maybe he was finishing the story for me cosmically.
You know, I kept hearing you talking about, you know, we create these things, and I believe that we create reality.
And the question I really have is, isn't really synchronicity a form of cosmic consciousness, like a karmic information that comes through to help direct us through life?
And when you use it, it suggests that our life is unfolding with a purpose.
It's not just random.
See, that's the fear of a lot of people in modern life, that our lives don't mean anything the way that they're unfolding.
And so synchronicity gives a hint that the way your life is unfolding, the way you've just bumped into that person you were thinking about, the way that your dream unfolded truly, is because it's being pulled, as it were, by the future.
So one way to talk about this is, yes, it's cosmic consciousness that you either are awake and alert to or you shut yourself off to.
I agree completely.
Once you have the antenna up, you put the lenses on, you begin to believe that these things are possible, you do have a say in the way that your life is unfolding.
As a matter of fact, the Greeks, they had a God of synchronicity, and he was standing on a razor's edge.
This is an old image that suggests life is so tenuous, it can go either way.
It's very painful.
But the other aspect of this is that the God is reaching up, and his fingers are on the scale of fate.
It's really an amazing image.
And to me, it's suggesting that the Greeks, they said, when the God of synchronicity is coming by, grab him.
Grab him swiftly.
Grab him.
In other words, think about that dream that happened.
I'm glad to have a kindred spirit out there in the world.
unidentified
Well, I've read all of Carl Jung's work, and I've actually used synchronicity my entire life, and I found it to be very, very beneficial in business decisions and helped me with a great deal of Success in my life.
What I'd like to know is, do you think that the synchronicity existed on its own, or did it have any part in some kind of precognition on my part and on her part separately?
That seems unusual.
I mean, I would tend to believe this synchronicity, but what's your opinion on that?
It's a complicated question, obviously, but my reach for the subject at the moment is that synchronicity is what's created when the person becomes aware of the connections.
In other words, a lot of these things are just meaningless.
They come and go to people, and people are so busy they don't pay attention to what you just described.
They don't pay attention to their dreams or their encounters.
And so life is meaningless.
But at that moment, when you take your breath, you take the breath in, and you begin to think about the ramifications and the consequences and life's profound mystery, that's your creation of synchronicity.
You've begun to create the synchronicity moment yourself.