Synchronicity Streams & Bookish Dreams

As I’ve written before, I am one of those people who has a synchronistic relationship with 11:11. 11:11 was my original wake up call, and it continues to be sort of a master number for me. But 11:11 opened the door to a whole river of synchronicities that I swim most every day. All kinds of things can be synchronous. I keep my eye out and try to follow the strings when they occur. They are breadcrumbs marking the way.

Numbers other than elevens show up synchronistically in phases. They are a subtle line of communication between me and my higher self, or so I think anyway.

For a while I had sets of consecutive twos showing up all over the place. Then it was fives. Lately it has been consecutive fours. Fours all over the place. One of the more striking examples of this is that I keep jolting awake from a deep sleep and looking at the digital clock on the other side of the room at 4:44 a.m. exactly. It occurs so often that I now wake up my husband as a witness when it happens. All I need to say is: “4:44 AGAIN!”

The other night I woke up early on with anxiety about work. In desperation, I asked the universe to help me learn from and heal my job situation. I fell back asleep and hours later woke with a start. I sat up to check the clock on the other side of the bed. Sure enough, it was 4:44. I thought that my higher self was trying to tell me something about my work. I had the thought that fours mean transfiguration. Then I fell back asleep.

I dreamt I was in a bookstore café. The guy at the next table had Daniel Pinchbeck’s 2012 book in front of him. I commented on it, telling him I had read it and it was good, though actually I haven’t read it yet.

There was a young woman sitting at the table behind me. She had two books in front of her. I started a conversation with her and told her not to buy the books. I said I would check for them at home and give them to her if I had them.

The first book was Look Homeward Angel. I have never read this book. I have never intended to read this book. I haven’t even thought of it twice before now, though I’ve known of its existence.

The identity of the second book was unclear in the dream, but I left the young woman at the table thinking that I had to look at home for Thomas Wolfe and Robert Penn Warren, so perhaps the second book was All the King’s Men.

Okay, once again, I have not read All the King’s Men, nor have I read anything else by Robert Penn Warren. I have not felt the urge to. I knew of their existence – both book and author, but that’s it.

I woke up as I was leaving for home to go look for the books.

In the waking world, I went to work (ugh), where I googled the second two books and authors because their presence in the dream was odd to me. I learned that Thomas Wolfe set Look Homeward Angel in a thinly fictionalized version of his hometown -- Asheville, North Carolina. I didn’t know Asheville existed until recently when it came up synchronistically in another context, so the dream connection got my attention. Then I learned that both Thomas Wolfe and Robert Penn Warren died on September 15th. I have no idea what significance this has, if any. It just makes me think I should visit Asheville, North Carolina. Perhaps on September 15th.

Have you checked out Asheville, North Carolina online? There is a website where someone makes the claim that if you’re into 2012, Asheville is the place for you.

Okay, maybe I am babbling. Then again, maybe not.

I will end this post with the following thought, which has nothing to do with anything else I’ve written . . .

I want to be able to say that I stand by what I perceive in the world.

That’s all for now.

Spiritual Clock: What Time Are You?

I am reading Shakti Gawain’s Living in the Light. I was looking for a mass market paperback I could carry around in my bag and it fit the bill. Anyway, I am glad I picked it up. It introduced me to Ram Dass’s analogy for the process of spiritual growth and enlightenment. It is a round clock, and Gawain outlines Dass's hours as follows:

12:00 to 3:00 – submersed in the illusion of form
3:00 to 6:00 – increasing disillusionment with worldly concerns
6:00 – feels like you are hitting rock bottom, and probably looks that way to the world as well, but it is actually the beginning of awakening
6:00 to 12:00 – increasing enlightenment

The process occurs over lifetimes and within a lifetime. There is a grand cycle as well as subcycles. According to Gawain, you are past 6:00 if you have the awareness to be thinking seriously about it.

I think I came into this life well past three o’clock. I have never been comfortable in the world of form. From the time the light of consciousness first flickered in my little head, I have felt a jarring disconnect with consensus reality. I’ve always been reaching for something beyond the veil. Always looking for transcendence instead of busying myself with conventional milestones and making my way in society.

I feel like I’ve hit 6:00 at least once in my life, but in the bigger picture, those may have been subcycle sixes. It may be that I came into this life at 6:15 or something like that (I was literally born at 6:15, FWIW). At any rate, I think I am now somewhere past 6:00 but well before 9:00. I am too angsty to be past 9:00, that’s for sure!

I imagine that 9:00 to 3:00, the upper half of the clock, are relatively angst-free because you are more clearly and comfortably aligned -- with matter or with spirit, but either way, you aren’t walking around feeling a huge contradiction between where you are and where your spirit longs to be. No, 3:00 to 9:00 are the hours of angst, with 3:00 to 6:00 being the downward spiral and 6:00 to 9:00 being the upward climb – just like descending and ascending Kali Yuga. That’s how I see it, anyway – I am taking Ram Dass’s analogy and running with it.

So I am in a personal ascending Kali Yuga. My angst – the contradiction I feel with the context of my life in the third density – drives me ever forward in my climb. I feel that I have made progress in recent years, but I won’t feel that I’ve turned the corner until my external life is somehow aligned with the incessant calling I feel inside.

I think that 9:00 to 12:00 means being able to manifest your inner light in the world. You are a clear and flowing channel. I am not there yet.

Fearlessness: Call to Action

I attended the Omega Institute’s “Being Fearless” conference in NYC this weekend. The event brochure fell into my hands just after I posted 2012: Two Paths. Since I was doing a lot of thinking about LOVE vs. FEAR at that time, I took it as a synchronistic nudge and decided to go.

It was an interesting experience and the speakers were amazing. But the conference was targeting a different audience from me, and I knew that would be the case going in. For example, there was a lot of “God” there (though in an inclusive, open-minded way that allowed for someone like me). On the other hand, I didn’t hear anyone talking about 2012, the precession of the equinoxes, wage slavery or homo luminous.

Mainly I doubt many of the attendees are pounding the walls of their lives with a strange version of "All Along the Watchtower" playing in their heads. They weren’t people of the fringe. Like me.

But the overall theme was one that I can wholeheartedly relate to: We live in an extraordinary time and the urgent call of the hour is to integrate our shadows, transmute our fear and help give birth to a new world.

Andrew Harvey gave one of the weekend’s most memorable speeches. It was a passionate expression of the same vision he describes on his website, where he writes:

Everyone whose eyes are open knows the world is in a terrifying crisis. As many of us as possible need to undergo a massive transformation of consciousness and to find the sacred passion to act from this consciousness in every arena and on every level of reality. It is my deepest belief that only Sacred Activism – the fusion of the deepest mystical knowledge, peace, strength, and stamina with calm focused and radical action – can possibly be of use now. A mysticism that is only private and self-absorbed leaves the evils of the world intact and does little to halt the suicidal juggernaut of history; an activism that is not purified by profound spiritual and psychological self-awareness and rooted in divine truth, wisdom, and compassion will only perpetuate the problem it is trying to solve, whatever it’s righteous intentions. When, however, the deepest and most grounded mystical vision is married to a practical and pragmatic drive to transform all existing political, economic, and social institutions, a holy force and power of wisdom in action is born, a force and power that can re-fashion all things in and under God, and bring humanity, even at this late desperate hour, into harmony with its self and original nature. This force of Sacred Activism I believe will be the source of the birthing power that humanity will need to create a new world from the smoking ashes of the one that is now passing away.

On the other hand, The New York Times recently ran a story by Alex Williams about how doomsday survivalism is going mainstream and middle class.

LOVE vs. FEAR.

These are interesting times indeed. I’d say “fasten your seatbelt” if that didn’t run flatly counter to my philosophy.

Dream: Light and Night

I dreamt I was in a gathering at a banquet table in a manor house. It was night and there was a blizzard raging outside, but the manor house was warm and bright. We were seated around a table engaged in some kind of philosophical discussion. The table held platters of food for us to take from as we wished.

I left the table and went out on the porch to survey the snowy night around us. The manor sat alone on a small hill top. There was a flood light on the porch that lit the entire hill. The storm seemed to have stopped. In the sphere cast by the light I could see a lawn thickly blanketed in white sloping all the way down to where the road began, then blackness. It was perfectly still.

I thought I saw a couple poles emerging from the snow near the perimeter of the light. Somehow this seemed strange and worthy of immediate investigation. I bounded down the slope. Running through the snow in a sphere of pale light enclosed by night was exhilarating. It was easier than I expected to be able to run in snow so deep. I ran through one apparent “pole” then another, finding nothing solid at all. Perhaps they were mirages.

I ran all the way down to the edge of the light and then into the night. As soon as I stepped into the night, I was hit with a blast of blizzard. I zigzagged across the line between light and night a few more times to confirm the impression. It was indeed quiet and peaceful on one side and a fierce storm on the other, with no shades of gray between.

I ran back to the manor house and told the others. No one believed me. Then there was an article in the paper about how I had made these ridiculous claims and that I was lying to stir up trouble.

Image by millicent bystander, used courtesy of a Creative Commons License.