All Episodes
Previous Next
June 21, 1998 - Art Bell
01:53:34
Dreamland with Art Bell - Nuclear Contamination - Synchronicity - Linda Moulton Howe - Phil Cousineau
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
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 met.
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 Mark Bell.
Linda Moulton Howe will be here in a moment with her report.
And then it's Phil Cosentino and his book, Soul Moments.
Which really is about synchronicity.
I think you'll find it very, very interesting.
We've talked a lot about synchronicity.
Now we'll talk to somebody who's an expert in it.
So that's all I have 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 on occasion.
Environmental documentary producer and award winner for the very same here from Philadelphia is Linda Moulton Howland.
Good evening.
Hi Art.
Hi.
Well last week I reported about the cesium-137 radioactive contamination in Europe.
Yes.
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, asbestos, 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.
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 cesium-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.
I wonder how the sailors who were in those subs fared.
Good question, and I'm going to try to see if I can find out something more about this through the radionuclide contact that I had on that previous story, and I'll keep you up to date on what I find out.
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.
Ah, yes.
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 on to an Earth collision course, something like cushion shots on a pool table.
Linda, one question.
That 48 hour lead time?
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.
Would that include something headed this way only 47 hours out?
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 Taliaferri, 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 Ferri.
By Access Hollywood.
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.
They loved that.
They thought that was great.
They put that on the air.
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?
Yeah, and this is the whole point of the thing.
You know, 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 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, you know, 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, like, 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 Armageddon, but in Deep Impact, The characteristics of what happens when one of these things impact is very well done.
And that includes the gigantic tsunamis coming in on the coast.
Yeah, they got that a little wrong, but not a lot wrong.
They said it was a tsunami 3,000 or 4,000 feet high moving at 1,100 miles an hour.
It really can't move at 1,100 miles an hour, but you will have a tidal wave a mile high moving 600 miles an hour.
And not much will stop it.
How far inland would something like that go?
It would go all the way to the Appalachians.
The entire east coast would be wiped out.
And a good part of Europe.
The thing goes both directions.
Now, how many times in, let's say, the past twenty years have we seen asteroids in that mile to ten mile diameter in which we would have three or four year warning?
We haven't.
And that's the whole point.
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.
And who's tracking?
That's the other issue.
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, 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 1997XF11.
We should send a rendezvous satellite spacecraft to 1997XF11.
We should send a rendezvous satellite spacecraft to 1997 XF-11.
We should take a look at it, 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.
Most of the asteroids that we know about, the debris that swept 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.
Whatever it was that perturbed them once could perturb them again.
So the fact that you now have determined that 1997 XF isn't going to hit the Earth is no guarantee that something might still perturb it.
change that. Just like playing barriers and something else hits it. That's right.
And so my position is, first of all you got to find them.
We've got to find the other 1900 of these things, determine their orbits, and if
there are any which are potentially threatening, candidate threatening, then
you go to them. You look at them, see how big they are, see what they're made of,
and you put a transponder on them so that you can track them. I mean it
just makes sense. In addition to his concern about tracking potentially
dangerous asteroids, Dr. Taliaferri 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. Taliaferri, 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.
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 2000.
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 so, what could people do to protect their own financial arraignments about these sort of things?
I would keep hard copy records of everything.
In other words, if I have a bank account, I would keep a hard copy record of The number and how much is in it.
The next day, you can go back to the bank and say, look, this is how much I had in the bank as of the 30th of December.
And that should occur before we switch to 1999.
I would start keeping those records.
So, Art, he said the Defense Department's working 24 hours a day around the clock on this problem as well as... Oh, I've got one for you, Linda.
I've got one for you.
With regard to the Y2K problem, the Russian Defense Ministry just announced that it will not go to work on the Y2K problem until the year 2000.
And that includes all of their nuclear reactors as well.
Something to think about.
Oh, and he said, Dr. Taliaferri said he wouldn't even get in a plane between December and January of 1999 to 2000.
Yeah, but is that an attitude or what?
I mean, you're not even going to go to work on it until it arrives.
I don't know.
We could really be in for some really strange... Yeah, they're going to wait and see what happens.
Linda, give out your contact info.
My fax is area code 215.
Give that one again.
one nine eight four two that's two one five four nine one nine eight four two and my new book glimpses
of other realities volume two high strangeness it's out in bookstores
amazon.com barnes and noble.com and the publisher has some autographed copies
at eight hundred six five eight nine nine five nine give that one again people
like autographed copies 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 that's where the story of Arts and Parts is too, by the way.
That's right.
Alright, Linda, as always, thank you so very much.
It will be a couple of weeks until we meet again.
Um, because I'm off on vacation.
Linda, thank you very much.
Yep, enjoy France.
Thank you.
Take care.
God bless.
And so, uh, there you have it, folks.
We'll be right back.
From the Kingdom of Nigh, This is Dreamland with Art Bell.
Indeed it is, and Phil Cousineau, who has written a book called Soul Moments, marvelous stories of synchronicity, something we've talked about so many times on this program, synchronicity, will be my guest coming up in a moment.
Well, Phil, welcome to the program.
Thank you much.
It's a real pleasure to be on.
I take it you're in the Bay Area?
In San Francisco, on a beautiful twilight afternoon here.
Indeed.
Well, glad to have you, and prior to your coming on tonight, we were talking with Linda Moulton 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 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 that 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?
Every time a very popular movie comes out, we see that there's 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 the movie comes up
from Steven Spielberg.
Obviously he overheard one of my conversations in a cafe in Los Angeles.
He took it all from me without paying me a cent.
But instead it's minds thinking of the same thing at the same time roughly, the winner
being the one who really does think of it first I guess or puts it in practical use.
Right.
Well, your listeners will probably have many examples of this in 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.
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 or collective unconscious that is producing this, then I'm very worried about deep impact in Armageddon.
Armageddon is just about to be released, and Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, is the director of Profile Investment Services and the host of the Goldstein on Gelt radio show.
He is a licensed financial professional both in the U.S.
and Israel.
Securities offered through Portfolio Resources Group, Inc., Member FINRA, SIPC, MSRB, NFA, SIFMA.
Accounts carried by National Financial Services LLC.
Member NYSE®, a Fidelity Investments company.
His book Building Wealth in Israel is available in bookstores, on the web, or can be ordered at www.profile-financial.com.
Well, let me give an interesting contrast here.
I grew up in a house in Detroit in the 1950s and we were a family of readers.
Can you give me some examples if you could?
Let me give an interesting contrast here. 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,
ìPhilip, someday youíre going to thank me for this but weíre going to read Homer tonight.î
And 50 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.
We would read from the old Ripley's, believe it or not, books.
Oh yes, of course.
Well, somebody must out there because I think it ranks right behind the Bible as the biggest selling book or book series of books in all of history.
Something like 80 million copies.
Really?
Of the Ripley's books have been sold.
So people have been fascinated with the unusual, right?
With the strange.
Yes.
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 a story that on December 5th in 1664, there was a terrible shipwreck off the coast of Wales.
Eighty-one passengers on board died, and there was only one survivor, a man named Hugh Williams.
A little more than a hundred 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.
Oh no!
Well, there's more!
Oh no!
In 1860, so again nearly a hundred years later, off the coast of Britain, another ship sank with 25 passengers on board, only one survivor, a man named Hugh Williams.
No!
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?
What are the odds?
Actually, you could get a mathematician to probably give you the odds of that.
You probably could, and that is the realm of coincidence.
It seems to defy logic, but I suppose if you had a computer, you could work out the odds, and eventually, eventually, these things might happen.
Now, you're saying that the story you just told is coincidence?
It's a coinciding of dates, times, names.
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?
Incidentally, 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 was an interesting way to describe this phenomena.
It's the kind of coincidence that touches you, and as the French say, the shiver goes up your back.
You know those kinds?
Oh yes, of course I do.
But nevertheless, so we might know, give me a good example of what you consider to be synchronicity so we can delineate between that.
Sure.
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.
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 dyed-in-the-wool 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.
Richard Dana.
My father had sent me.
So there's a strange coincidence, right?
It's unusual, but it's possible.
That's mathematically possible, right?
But here is the synchronicity for me.
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 a terrible falling out.
We hadn't talked for a couple of 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 that same day.
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.
In other words, I felt incredibly connected.
That's the phenomenon that I'm 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.
People don't feel connected to their families, their city, the religion possibly that they grew up in.
All of that's true.
Disconnected constantly.
Disconnected from the government.
Disconnected with nature and so on.
Absolutely.
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 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?
What?
The origin.
Our word weird is fate.
Fate.
When something deeply weird happens to you.
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, a dream that you can't explain, an encounter outside the radio station that you can't explain.
Maybe, it may be what they used to call a wink of fate.
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, 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.
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.
Preachoff 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.
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 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.
Once you begin to know the treasure trove of stories, it helps you in life.
Anyway, ten years ago, I'm working on a film about his life called The Hero's Journey.
We're filming at his house out in Honolulu, Hawaii, and my partners 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?
Yes.
So Campbell, his favorite answer I got on film on Honolulu was that you should follow your bliss.
And by bliss, that means not your fun, not just your immediate gratification, which you know, the whole culture is famous for right now.
But the deepest Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, is the director of Profile Investment Services and the host of the Goldstein on Gelt radio show.
He is a licensed financial professional both in the U.S.
and Israel.
Securities offered through Portfolio Resources Group, Inc., Member FINRA, SIPC, MSRB, NFA, SIFMA.
Accounts carried by National Financial Services LLC.
Member NYSE®, a Fidelity Investments company.
His book Building Wealth in Israel is available in bookstores, on the web, or can be ordered at www.profile-financial.com.
I got Joe on camera about this.
It was a beautiful, very passionate answer that he gave me.
And then it occurred to me to ask him about synchronicity.
And just as I'm about to ask him, we run out of film.
This is one of those moments.
I knew I wasn't going to get it again.
So I'm feverishly gesturing towards the film crew, put more film, more film, but it takes time.
I had to ask him anyway.
Joe Campbell, this synchronicity, this realm of wonderful coincidences, has anything to
do with the hero's journey or following your bliss.
He gave me one of those looks, Art, that a filmmaker is always longing for.
It was a question he had never heard before.
He said, ìSynchronicity is the confirmation that you are on your right lifeís path.î
That's a great place to hold it.
Stand by, Phil, we'll be right back.
This, of course, is Dreamland.
I'm going to be playing this game for the first time.
The number is area code 702-727-8499.
Please limit faxes to one or two pages.
Now, here again is Art Bell.
Well, good evening everybody, 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 Cousineau 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.
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-fifties, 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.
Then one day, but I was bored.
I hated it.
Hated it.
Then one day, a radio station came to me and said, hey, we've heard you, you know, you did some talk radio.
And they said, Come on, do a little part-time talk radio for us.
And I was sucked back in, that was the end of it.
I took many thousands of dollars of a pay cut, my wife at the time thought I had lost my mind, to go back into my passion, radio.
And when I did, kaboom, here I am.
Now, is that following one's bliss?
Absolutely.
Yes, I do.
I happen to be in a store.
You had a job, right?
That is absolutely correct.
I had money but not happiness, not bliss.
Not the bliss, not the deep, deep fascination.
Do you recall the sequence of events that led to these people asking you to come and
do the first radio show?
Yes, I do.
I happened to be in a store.
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 I was gone.
I was a goner.
I was back in radio again, that which I had sworn not to do simply because I loved radio.
My soul, I loved 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, and here we are now on 400 radio stations.
Well, that's a brilliant story.
First, you were following your bliss, and it's obvious with the enthusiasm in your voice and the passion you have for this work, this is the life you should be leading.
Oh, absolutely.
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 happened to us.
You know the old, you know the BB King line, 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.
That's right.
If you had eaten the wrong thing, you would have been in a different mood and so on and so forth.
Let me give you a couple of examples from my book along those lines.
Do you remember Keith Thompson?
Yes.
You had Keith on your show a few years back.
He's a dear friend of mine out here in the Bay Area.
He wrote Angels and Aliens, one of the great books on the UFO phenomenon.
Well, he tells a story about the trauma he felt when he turned 30 years ago.
You know those big years with the zeros all tend to throw us, right?
I know.
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, 2-26-54.
It was 2-26 in the morning, almost 2-27, but that was also his birthday.
2-26-54.
This happened 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.
Yes.
And so there's a beautiful coincidence there, but it turns into synchronicity because Keith realized, wait a minute, wait a minute, if there's something in me that I didn't know about this power to wake up at precisely 2.26.54, then there is something happening in me.
Do you know what I mean with this?
Yes.
Something unfolding that isn't pure ego and will.
And Keith decided, you should read the story in the book, it's just poetic and beautiful.
He decided to begin to trust that power.
And sometimes you can call it Douglas Goldstein, CFPÆ, is the director of Profile Investment Services and the host of the Goldstein on Gelt radio show.
He is a licensed financial professional both in the U.S.
and Israel.
Securities offered through Portfolio Resources Group, Inc., Member FINRA, SIPC, MSRB, NFA, SIFMA.
Accounts carried by National Financial Services LLC.
Member NYSE®, a Fidelity Investments company.
His book Building Wealth in Israel is available in bookstores, on the web, or can be ordered I had all these people working for me.
I had benefits you couldnít believe.
I mean it was the job for Times Mirror Corporation as a matter of fact and I threw it all away
on a synchronistic moment.
Douglas Goldstein, CFPÆ, is the director of Profile Investment Services and the host
of the Goldstein on Gelt radio show.
He is a licensed financial professional both in the U.S.
and Israel.
Securities offered through Portfolio Resources Group, Inc., Member FINRA, SIPC, MSRB, NFA,
SIFMA.
Accounts carried by National Financial Services LLC.
Member NYSE & SIPC, a Fidelity Investments company.
His book Building Wealth in Israel is available in bookstores, on the web, or can be ordered
at www.profile-financial.com, or can be ordered at www.profile-financial.com.
All information on this website is purely information and should not be used as the
sole basis for making financial decisions.
The opinions rendered herein are those of the guests, and not necessarily those of Douglas
Goldstein, Profile Investment Services, Ltd., or Israel National News.
Readers should consult with a professional financial advisor before making any financial
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 a thousand 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 deep economic problems and a 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? Salk. Dr. Salk. 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 can help you.
I want to build my hospital and went to the exact same spot that the man, my friend, writes about in my book.
Now Salk followed that impulse and he built this hospital.
It's one of the most famous neurological hospitals in the world, 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, 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 the 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.
Beautiful, beautiful.
I love that phrase, life is nothing but one fork in the road after another.
Well, that's what it is.
Dr. Jung, who coined this word that we keep mentioning, synchronicity, felt that they tend to occur right at crossroad moments.
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 She was a novelist several years ago but she reached a
crisis where she just couldnít write.
She was completely stuck.
Itís a horrible place to be.
Itís a terrible writerís block.
So she went to a writerís 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.
You canít get anything right.
No wonder you canít even finish a book.
Right then, right at that moment and as Young says, this is the moment when the synchronicities
tend to happen when youíre really vulnerable.
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, Kate Bullard, has a stick stuck in her head.
What?
Now just imagine being somewhere a thousand miles from home and hearing Art Bell.
Art Bell has a stick stuck in his head.
That would get your attention, right?
Yes, it would.
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.
So, they call the ambulances, and the ambulances come and take her away, and it turns out that the teenage girl is okay.
But, there you are now with... We're right back at that moment.
What do you do with it, right?
What are the odds now?
What do you do with it?
And Kate Bullard writes that for years, she couldn't get this incident out of her head, because she knew it was more than a coincidence.
But, she didn't know that it had a name.
She found out these things are called synchronicities, so she kept playing with it.
Stuck in the head.
Stuck in the head.
Why does this bother me so much?
Then she got it.
It was as if she was stuck in her head.
That the teenage girl had a literal stick from the ground, probably a tree in her head, but it's as if Kate had a pen stuck in her head.
You know what happens when you're stuck in your head?
You can't reach your heart.
Absolutely.
And you can't create.
You can't be truthful with your friends, your wives, your husband.
You know, there's a great scene in the movie The Adventures of Baron von Munkhausen with Robin Williams, who plays the King of the Moon.
Every time he has an argument with his wife, the Queen of the Moon, he literally spins off his shoulders and he flies around the moon like a UFO.
And after she goes to bed, he slips back inside the castle and back into bed.
It's an incredible image for the mind-body split.
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.
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?
It doesn't mean anything to me.
It doesn't make me happy.
Well, you clicked on the word right there.
That's why I call the synchronicities meaningful coincidences.
If it's clever, if it's hip, if it's cosmic, so what?
It doesn't mean too much.
But meaning is the thing that transfigures our lives.
And if you are worth a billion dollars, but you're miserable and you can't sleep at night, then it means less than zero, like the book title says.
So the question is, where do you go for your meaning?
You follow your bliss.
But apparently some who don't still achieve, as Ted Turner, great material success, great material success, and that would seem to be the exception, because those who don't follow their bliss rarely do, and yet here are a few who achieve it, and even though they get to it, somehow, I guess, in their heart, their soul, really wasn't what they wanted.
And so they're not having any fun with it.
I subscribe to Albert Schweitzer's maxim.
Remember Schweitzer, the humanitarian doctor in Africa?
Of course.
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.
All right.
Hold it.
In service, you can find happiness.
Hold it right there.
From an area near Greenland, this is Greenland.
Now to Phil Kusnow.
Phil, here's an interesting fax sent by Dusty.
Let me read the whole thing to you and see how you react.
In the Midwest, one person hit the state lotto not once, but three times over the years.
The experts said the odds of this are one, followed by a string of zeros that would stretch to the moon.
This case was investigated and cleared by officials, yet Another winner dreamed she planted six carrots.
On each carrot, she saw a number.
She promptly played the numbers and won that state's lotto.
This was the first and only time she had ever played the lotto.
Are these things synchronicity or coincidence?
Wonderful synchronicities.
I love it.
One way to distinguish between the two is that 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, My 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 Prieta 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 play 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 of 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 Esalen Institute out here in Big Sur on the coast and this was a workshop with David Darling from a wonderful cello player and a couple of friends and we're talking about modern myths.
And so I start talking about the X-Files because you may know that a few years ago I wrote a book on UFOs called UFOs Manual for the Millennium.
No, I did not know you did that.
Yes, 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.
Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, is the director of Profile Investment Services and the host of the Goldstein on Gelt radio show.
He is a licensed financial professional both in the U.S.
and Israel.
Securities offered through Portfolio Resources Group, Inc., Member FINRA, SIPC, MSRB, NFA, SIFMA.
Accounts carried by National Financial Services LLC.
Member NYSE®, a Fidelity Investments company.
I want a couple of copies of your book on Joseph Campbell, your man of myth.
I look up and I say, ìWho should I make this out to?î She starts to lean over and she
says, ìDonít you recognize me?î Itís Mulderís mother from the X-File.
He is a licensed financial professional both in the U.S.
and Israel.
Securities offered through Portfolio Resources Group, Inc., Member FINRA, SIPC, MSRB, NFA, SIFMA.
Accounts carried by National Financial Services LLC.
Member NYSE®, a Fidelity Investments company.
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 sign copies for all the people on the X-Files show.
Since you did author a book on UFOs from the angle of mythology,
maybe a couple of words from you about that.
What were the basic conclusions of the book?
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.
He was just a famous soldier five years ago and look at this cult that's forming around him.
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 theories of phenomena through history.
For example, the abduction phenomena has absolute parallels with the seizure of people by ferries 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.
Did you see he just died?
Yes, he just died.
It was kind of strange that they announced his death about three months after the occurrence.
Very, very curious.
Yes.
Anyway, the conclusion of the book is one that I'm still very fond of.
This is my book, UFO's Manual for the Millennium.
It's still available through HarperCollins.
In which I suggest this.
Very playfully, I say I remember seeing my first flying saucer.
I was eight years old and I was at the drive-in in my hometown.
Well, that's to say I was there to watch a triple feature of science fiction films.
And I remember that first moment, I will remember it to the day I died, watching the War of the Worlds and the Angry Red Planet.
Oh yes, of course.
And in one level, UFOs are absolutely real to me.
They have been real since I was eight years old.
I remember seeing these movies.
I remember the sky crackling in Michigan.
I was watching these as if we were being invaded that moment.
But what I try to reach in this book is actually similar to the point I'm trying to reach with the synchronicity book, and that's this.
Phenomena are happening all around us constantly.
The question is, What does it do to your heart and soul?
Does it have any meaning to you now?
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.
Our brains are capable of incredible things, and I'm 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.
Yes, I play with that idea in the book, actually.
Carl Jung, who coined synchronicity, a few people know this, but his last book was On Flying Saucers.
It was.
It stuns people in the whole UFO movement, 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 were 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.
Fifty million people.
That's a wound that the planet has not healed yet.
And Jung's notion was quite amazing.
He 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.
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, isn't it one of the most miraculous things in life?
It is, of course, yes.
I have one more little thing to drop upon you.
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?
I suspect so, with the vast majority of sightings.
In my book on UFOs, I actually reproduce 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.
Dragons.
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.
Oh yes.
And saving figures.
Yes.
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 make up your own conclusion.
But again, the glory of this, and part of it began with the sightings in 1947, and then I think really accelerated with science fiction films, Speaking with movie like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, right, is that we, you know, the old phrase, nature abhors a vacuum?
Yes.
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.
Well, and here's something to ponder.
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 what 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, 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.
That's very poetic.
That's beautiful.
Well, maybe.
It's a fascinating topic.
How many other people write about this?
How many other people are investigating synchronicity, as are you?
Coincidentally enough.
I actually expected this to happen.
When my book finally came out, there were another three or so that came out in the market at about the same time.
Nobody really, from my specific point of view, where I concentrate on the stories.
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.
Some friends of mine actually asked the physicist Stephen Hawking a question for me recently.
They had dinner with him and they asked him, or 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.
Isn't that a beautiful phrase?
Yes, of course.
Scientists, psychologists, artists, filmmakers are all dealing with this, but I try to keep it to the story.
I'm encouraging people to tell their stories to each other.
When that happens, you begin to notice, I think much more clearly, what's really unfolding in your own life.
Then you're hip and you're aware if you're at a moment like you were when someone offers you a job to go back to radio.
If you fall asleep, then you don't make the right decision.
What then do you consider the nature of time to be?
Have any conjecture?
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 on.
Forever.
Forever.
That's right.
So, time is relative.
It's almost a cliché, but I found out recently that the Greeks, you know the idea that the Eskimos have a hundred words for snow, And in Yiddish, there are 100 words for genius.
The Aztecs had 400 words for potato and so on.
The Greeks had nine gods, or nine words for time.
Nine words?
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?
Yes.
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 experience the same thing when the synchronicity happens time And that's an extraordinary thing in life when it happens And yet, you're absolutely correct.
All right, Phil.
Hold on.
When we come back, I think we'll open the lines.
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.
This is Phil Cousineau.
And his book is Soul Moments.
Either you get it or you don't get it.
And I have a feeling it'll be about a 50-50 split.
A lot of people will listen to this program this evening and they'll say, I don't know what they're talking about.
I really don't understand.
And those are the people who will never or have never experienced synchronicity.
I wonder if the telling of this will assist some in moving in that direction. If so, it
would be useful.
Once again, back to our guest, Phil Cousineau. Now his book, Soul Moments,
I take it Soul Moments, Phil, is available generally in bookstores from coast to coast and beyond?
Yes, it's available in all bookstores right now, but if a listener goes to a local store and can't find it
or is a long way from a bookstore.
I do have a phone number.
That would be 1-800-685-9595.
Got it.
1-800-685-9595.
How much is your book?
$14.95.
Okay.
Very good.
1-800-685-9595.
Got it. 1-800-685-9595.
How much is your book?
$14.95.
Okay. Very good.
We've got lots of people who would like to talk to you.
And we'll get to that in just one second.
I said at the beginning of this hour that I think there are going to be a lot of people that get exactly what we're discussing tonight, and a lot of people sitting out there scratching their heads saying, no, no, no, this is just a show about coincidental things, and they just are not going to understand the concept of synchronicity, are they?
Well, the world seems to be divided right down the middle that way.
I remember my father, Ches, Chastising me when I was a boy with a phrase like, oh, Philip, you make mountains out of molehills.
Remember that old phrase?
Yes, I do.
But as my old friend Joe Campbell said about myths and all of these fantastic stories, it depends on how much you want to think about it.
You know, if an encounter or a dream doesn't touch you this deep, that's OK.
You can let it go.
But what I'm so intrigued about are those moments that we can't get out of our mind.
Velcro.
Velcro experiences.
Velcro experiences.
To you, and you've got to do something with it.
You can't leave it behind.
That's great.
All right, here we go.
First time caller line, you're on air with Phil Kusno.
Hi.
Yeah, hi, Art.
This is Eric from Seattle, Washington.
Hi, Eric.
And I've got, I think I've got an example.
Years ago, when I was in high school, my mom passed away.
And after she had died, They're 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, excuse me, I was thinking that, 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 came around, there was a band of deer, about 12 deer, I do understand.
Phil, into what category would you put that?
Love synchronicity.
of the hill there and they all just kind of stopped and talk about your hair standing up on the
other side.
I do understand. Phil, into what category would you put that?
Love synchronicity. 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've 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 message of the animal appears.
It's a sly fox, a band of deer.
Deers are enormously important in mythology all around the world.
Just one important question, Caller.
Yeah?
Did you propose?
Nah.
Yeah, I didn't tell her about it for a while.
I kind of let it go, you know, and I think it was about eight months after that I actually made that decision and we've been married for a while.
I've got a four-year-old daughter and everything's fine.
All has gone well.
All right.
Remarkable story.
Thank you.
Congratulations.
That would cause one's hair to stand on end.
There's no question about it.
Telling yourself, well, if I should see some deer around the next corner, I'm going to propose.
And there they were.
It happens.
Apparently.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Phil Cousineau.
Hi.
Hi.
I'm Richard from Seneca, Missouri.
Hi, Richard.
About seven years ago, probably, I had an experience that was pretty unusual.
At that time, I was single.
I was living by myself.
Our local paper has RSVP ads where you can call.
At that time, I was living in Joplin.
It's a bigger town than this.
It's around 40-some thousand.
They had a pretty large amount of ads.
I had never attempted to call one before.
For some reason, I felt drawn to this one particular ad, and I called it, and the girl described herself and told her first name.
About 30 minutes later, I was supposed to go meet a friend of mine at a place there in Joplin.
Well, for another unknown reason, I stopped at another place, and I ran into a friend I hadn't seen for years.
He was with a girl that looked an awful lot like the one that was described in this ad.
Oh, no!
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 that, you know, we were kind of friends and we just Thank you very much.
That is a perfect example of synchronicity.
than the fact that it made me more aware of synchronicity because at the time I was reading
a book about synchronicity.
The odds against that happening was just really pretty bizarre.
That's wonderful.
That is.
Thank you very much.
That is a perfect example of synchronicity, almost too much for me actually.
It just means you become far more alert.
Have you ever had the experience of buying a new car and then suddenly you see Mustangs everywhere because you now own a Mustang?
Absolutely.
There are ways that we wake up that tell us that we've been sleepwalking for a little while and reading a book is one way that can trigger these kinds of experiences.
Travel, I found out, is another way that triggers synchronicity.
Because you're a little more alert, you have to be just to be safe, right?
But you're also a little more vulnerable to things.
In a sense, you want the extraordinary to happen when you're traveling.
And that reminds me of a great example from the movies, by the way.
Do you remember Annie Hall with Woody Allen?
Oh, yes.
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 the 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.
Well, he takes her to a movie about the Holocaust, Sorrow and the Pity.
Very strange choice, but they're sitting there and they're standing in a line, and a very pompous professor is talking to them about Marshall McLuhan, the famous sociologist, and it's annoying Woody Allen at 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 a 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.
And it may happen more if you pay attention.
I believe that's absolutely correct, if you pay attention.
And about half the people are, maybe even less.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Phil Cousineau.
Hi.
Hi.
Hi there, where are you?
I'm in Virginia.
Virginia, alright.
Yes.
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.
And I said, why are you laughing?
He said, this crazy daughter of yours.
So she said, Charlie, answer the telephone.
He said, the phone is not ringing.
And he said, it wasn't.
And she said, yes it is.
Mama's calling.
And he said, about that time the phone rang.
All right, well, yes, okay.
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.
Are we talking about the same things here, Phil?
It's a brilliant question.
I thank your listener for bringing this up.
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, 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
but 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 you know what your wife is going to say before she says it
yes all the time Right.
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, to 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, a 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, very, very accomplished, but as Jim Morrison, the daughter, is saying, something's wrong, something's not quite right.
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?
Do you know what you're doing?
Do you know what you're giving up?
That sort of thing.
And in each case, I would say, yes, I understand.
This is something I've got to do.
Deep in my soul, I know I've got to do it.
That example, even the words you chose were just perfect because that's the state that
we're in, mostly in the West, in Europe and in America.
It's what they call the mind-body or the mind-soul split.
It's portrayed in the language.
People will always say, have you lost your mind?
What do you mean you want to take a year off of work and go live in Paris for a year?
Has something happened to your mind?
All right, that does it.
Now, that's the second time you've said Paris, and here's something that I haven't told anybody about, and certainly you didn't know about, but do you know that Wednesday, you know, like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, this coming, I'll be in Paris?
I haven't told my audience.
I haven't told anybody.
I'll be in Paris Wednesday.
It's the second time you've said Paris in this program.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Phil Cousineau.
Hi.
Well, hello, gentlemen.
I'm Julie, and I'm calling from Vancouver, BC, Canada, on CFUN.
Hi there, Julie.
Hi, and I'm a member of your chat club, Art.
All right.
I'm proud to say.
Bonjour, Monsieur Cousineau.
Bonjour.
And that's another synchronistic event for you, that your next guest should speak French.
It's too much.
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?
All right, go.
All right.
I lived in Alberta and I've been living in Vancouver two years, so this happened about five years ago.
I have no family, so my girlfriend Kim 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 snowbound and cold.
And this is relevant, so let me tell you, Kim at the time had a big old Trans Am with a 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 seatbelt 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 Kim up and I said, ìHow's everything going for the trip, Kim?î ìOh, everything's fine.
Call me tomorrow.î Yada yada.
Fine.
I called her the next day to fix a time for our departure.
Lo and behold, she was a little hesitant, and I said, ìWhat's the matter, Kim?î Well, she said, ìYou know, Julie, I had a really funny dream last night, and I was In my car, on my passenger side, and I knew you were on the other side, and I kept trying to call to you, but all I could see was white around me, and you weren't answering.
Well, needless to say, we both decided we weren't going.
She called her grandmother, who was very spiritual and still is, and she told us both not to come.
Alright, listen, we're at the bottom of the hour.
I've got to break it off here.
I think that I've got the picture.
Hold on, we'll pick it up after the break.
This is Dreamland.
Phil, do you think that the mere consideration of the concept of synchronicity in itself will cause an occurrence?
Not caused, 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.
Remember that movie?
No.
It was shown to high schools and colleges throughout the 50s, 60s, and 70s as a warning to young people about mixing drinking and driving.
Hence the image and the title, Red Asphalt.
Oh my god, I do remember it.
Yes, I was shown that movie.
It was horrible.
It's an hour of car wreck footage.
That's right, that's right.
It's supposed to put the fear of God in you.
So, 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 a thousand miles difference and he heard the voice.
Now, we're right back to that crossroad again.
Is this 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 a thousand miles away, what else do we have the capacity to know?
To hear?
To see?
It's an extraordinary thing.
It is.
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.
That's correct.
Right?
Now, if you have this idea of synchronicity, the coincidences that are possible, the connections that are absolutely time-defined, space-defined, 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.
You have to put the binoculars on, right?
And that's what I see with an idea like this.
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.
That's all.
Well, again though, you gave an example earlier.
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?
Yes, yes.
I see what you're saying.
That's brilliant.
Yeah, I see.
That's a little bit like the idea of gaining momentum in life.
Yes, sir.
If you get right back on that path that you're supposed to be, Then those magic doors start opening up.
It's a little bit like the invisible hands that move in to help.
We see it in movies and books all the time.
Remember the movie Dr. Zhivago?
I've seen it many times.
It's a brilliant one, right?
An incredible book by Boris Pasternak, the Russian author.
When that book first came out in 1961, the English and the American critics just crucified him.
Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, is the director of Profile Investment Services and the host of the Goldstein on Gelt radio show.
He is a licensed financial professional both in the U.S.
and Israel.
Securities offered through Portfolio Resources Group, Inc., Member FINRA, SIPC, MSRB, NFA, SIFMA.
Accounts carried by National Financial Services LLC.
Member NYSE & SIPC, a Fidelity Investments company.
can remember Dr. Zhivago played by Omar Sharif exiles himself out in Siberia and lo and behold
he comes across Julie Christie way out there in the biggest country in the world.
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 that'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.
That which we discussed this evening.
First on the caller line, you're on the air with Phil Cousineau.
Hi.
Hello.
How are you doing?
Quite well, thank you.
Where are you, sir?
I'm calling you from Las Vegas, Nevada.
All right.
Great.
I just wanted to share a couple of things.
You just mentioned Dr. Zhivago, and one of the analogies I always use when I talk about synchronicity is James Bond.
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.
I used 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 stops it.
It doesn't stop 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 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 ten 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.
A bunch of people were 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 a 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 to 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.
On Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Phil Cousineau.
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 writer's conference.
No.
Two days ago in a month-old newspaper.
And I've been, you know, worried because it didn't tell me the ending and the girl was okay.
The same story Phil just told.
Right!
About the woman who was, I think it was Kate Bullock, who was a day early to a writer's 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.
That's wonderful.
This is probably a case of a newspaper serializing something in the book, and they edited it.
Yes.
Well, it could be.
But the original story is available in the book, so.
Thank you for the call.
Oh, that's quite impressive.
Use of the Rockies, you're on there with.
Call the wild card lines, area 702-727-1295.
Doctor, oh, hold it.
We're going to have to start all over again.
There are very few rules we have here.
One of them is we don't allow last names to be given on the air.
Okay.
So you are a physician, and what is your first name?
I'm a Ph.D.
Ph.D., and your first name is?
Gary.
Okay, welcome.
Where are you?
In Illinois.
All right.
Northwest of Chicago.
Yes, sir.
You know, I kept hearing you talking about, you know, we create these things, and I believe that we create reality.
Just a thought.
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?
A collective consciousness, you mean?
Right, part of the collective consciousness or cosmic collective consciousness.
Phil?
Jung used the old Greek word telos.
The doctor may be familiar with that.
In Greek it meant goal.
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.
Yes.
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.
The one way to talk about this, yes, is 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.
Think about that, imagine that uncanny encounter.
It could have something to do with your destiny.
And if it does, And you actually are tipping the scale of your own state, which is another way of saying, you're creating your own world, you're creating your own reality.
Right, exactly.
We're co-creating our reality and the direction of our soul or the purpose of us being here is just another way for synchronicity, it's just another form of which the universe helps direct us through time and space.
Well, do you remember Einstein's thought about that?
He said, coincidence Great coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous.
Actually, I mentioned this, I don't know if I can say this, but I wrote a book and in my book I just touched vaguely on synchronicity.
You may say it.
Okay.
I'm glad to have a kindred spirit out there in the world.
Well, I've read all of Carol Young's work and I've actually used synchronicity my entire life and I found it to be very, very beneficial on Business decisions and help me with a great deal of success in my life.
Every decision you make in your life, not just business, personal, but every decision, every little fork in the road.
I watch very carefully for synchronistic events in my life and it's drawn me or sent me in the right direction in many times.
I've had a lot of multiple businesses and a lot of experiences that I think that I've learned great lessons.
Wonderful.
I appreciate your call, Doctor.
Thank you very much.
And we're almost out of time.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Phil Cousineau.
Hi.
Hello, Phil.
It's Julie again, Part 2.
You forgot me.
Oh, I'm sorry, Julie.
You're absolutely right.
You're going to have to finish up pretty quickly.
Okay, well, it'll be my pleasure.
Mr. Cousineau, I did have a question for you after I brought that dream to your attention, or I should say those two individual dreams.
I'm having trouble hearing you.
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 sounds unusual.
I mean, I would tend to believe the 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 connection.
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 and their encounters.
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.
A moment of really enchantment.
Really remarkable.
Actually, it's a remarkable topic, Phil.
Remarkable topic and it's been a wonderful program and again, the title of your book is Soul Moments.
Marvelous stories of synchronicity, meaningful coincidences from a seemingly random world.
And it's available nationwide in bookstores or you can call 1-800-685-9595.
That's 1-800-685-9595.
Proving that I take notes.
one eight hundred six eight five
nine five nine five that's one eight hundred six eight five
nine five nine five proving that i take notes
uh... so phil it has been wonderful having you here and we shall have you on
again if you are willing Thank you.
It's been a pleasure.
Take care, my friend.
That's it, folks.
We're out of time for this night and this dreamland.
I will be back tomorrow night.
We're going to do a show with computer hackers.
I use that word in a very qualified way.
▲
Export Selection