This was a flawed meeting because of multiple problems with Zoom. Hopefully it was a start, and things can get cleared up for a continuation sometime in June.
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Sheer Zed: A refreshing, engaging and interesting four way discussion, once the initial Zoom issues resolved, bringing forth new information. Another talk with the same group would be good. "And what is the all? It’s just the eye and sights, the ear and sounds, the nose and smells, the tongue and tastes, the body and touches, and the mind and ideas. This is called the all." - Saṁyutta Nikāya 35.23 Sabbasutta-Bhikkhu Sujato.
Jonathan Zap: Great talking to you all today. Bernie, your book seems to have a doctrine-of-signatures, form-follows-function aspect where the slightly playful style seems to invite serendipity and synchronicity as happened to me on the turning point day I read your book and was immediately able to apply your Dr's Notes principles. Several people have told me that the book stories sometimes mirror their own minds-a variation of the domesticated synchronicities of the mantic arts.
Just wanted some of my more spectacular synchronicities. Keith, I would love to follow up with you sometime because though I line up with your approach to ufology perfectly, there is one crucial area where we have a difference emphasis. You talk about Ken Arnold connecting what he experienced with death, but I have a lot more to say about that and give it central emphasis in my thinking. I'll put in an excerpt at the end of this to give you an idea.
From my intro to synchronicity:
A personal example of a synchronicity involves a day some years ago when I was reading Jung’s book, Synchronicity, the Acausal Connecting Principle. At the time, I was living in the East Village area of Manhattan and was reading the book in the library. In the passage I was reading, Jung recounted a series of synchronistic events that began with dreaming about a fish. He awoke from the dream, and the first book he opened had a picture of a fish. Then there was fish for lunch, and later he saw a dead fish on the sidewalk, etc. I remember being greatly underwhelmed by this anecdote. A fish is such a common thing, I thought, if you were looking for it, of course, it would seem to be everywhere. I gathered up my stuff and exited the library, walking the two blocks to my apartment building. I unlocked the outer door of my building and walked up the four flights of stairs to my apartment. Someone had drawn a picture of a fish in white chalk on the door!
Jung's fish seriality had the quality of being close in time and different forms of fish. You were emotionally involved in the fish story, although negatively, which may have contributed to your adding a 7th fish to the story. I wonder how many others have done the same thing.
On Dec. 5th of 1978, which was my birthday (just turning 21) I had recently graduated from a college, (Bernie, hopefully this won't count against me, but according to your book they beat you in football—-Ursinus) I got a concussion tackling an Ursinus guy and in another game, I was going for TD and an Ursinus player caught me from behind. Very embarrassing. Playing them in baseball, I got caught too far off of first base and the pitcher threw me out getting back to the bag. Afterwards there was a great place to eat in town that had endless boiled shrimp to eat. Made up for the problems.
All my close friends were somewhere else, so I had no one to spend my birthday with so I decided to go clubbing in Manhattan. I walked into a club, and within seconds, another young man about my age approached me. He was a friend from the Bronx (where I grew up) I hadn't seen in years. I talked to him for a about a minute when another young man about the same age approached. It turned out that he knew each of us independently of each other. So, we all knew one another, but the three of us had never been present at one time, nor did we have a school or specific neighborhood in common. I suggested we get a table and a drink. We sat down at a table ,and something compelled me to look up at the ceiling which I saw was decorated with a giant Zodiac circle. I was struck by a synchronicity, it was my birthday, and we had sat directly underneath Sagittarius. I pointed this out to my two friends, and we discovered it was both of their birthdays too.
Jefferey Kripal points out that the etymology of telepathy includes pathos—emotion--- and we know that high emotion correlates well with telepathy—and the etymology of emotion relates to motion, a movement of the soul as in the literal change in magnetic field of the heart emanating three feet from the body as Bernie points out in his book. Three lonely young men with an existing affinity and no one to spend their birthday with converged under the sign of Sagittarius. I love this one. The unknowing birthday boys being smiled on by the zodiac.
About 25 years ago, Michael Fulton, the president of Ion Beam Optics, a company that made high-performance optical coatings EG they manufactured the windows on the ISS heard me as a guest on Coast-to-Coast AM and immediately contacted me to set up a meeting. We met to do a recorded dialogue at the Adam's Mark Hotel in Denver. While the camera crew was setting up, Michael told me a synchronicity story. He went on a few dates with the woman who was to become his wife. Only after several dates did they discover that they had the same birthday. They got married and decided to adopt a child. After a long process, a baby girl was assigned to them. It turned out that she also had the same birthday. This story really impressed me because their three-way birthday was Dec. 5, my birthday. You seem to be the birthday seriality maven.
Finally, here is the most spectacular synchronicity of my entire life. I wrote about it in my sci-fi epic, Parallel Journeys, where I break the third wall and appear as a character in a long epilogue filled with mostly true accounts from my life. I narrate this ultimate synchronicity in part 6, "Twilight Zone Map" of the epilogue, so scroll down. It's an intricate and epic synchronicity constellation, and the account gets into a lot of autobiographical material, so it's a few pages long. Here's a link to online verion of the epilogue: https://zaporacle.com/epilogue/
Jonathan Zap in Iceland Epilogue by Jonathan Zap . 1 Chaos Magic Navigation. When a thousand improbable misadventures kept me from using my road trip to write a second edition of Crossing the Event Horizon—my book about what I call the Singularity Archetype, I resolved to continue the journey using a transgressive, chaos magical way of navigation.
If you look at the lower left-hand corner of the screen, you'll see a golden eye symbol with a slash through it, which opens a Kindle-like readability menu where you can change background color, font size, and color, etc.
The synchronicity account ends with the sentence: But to be fair, Travis did warn me about his nature early on.
Keith, if you scroll down further to part 11 "Hungry Ghost Aliens" you'll see what I want to follow up with you on.
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