Uncanny

In October of 2019, I wrote an email to a gentleman I consider to be knowledgeable about geo-political goings on in the world, asking if I’d be safe traveling to Spain in November. He replied that he thought I’d be alright. I’d purposely avoided Spain in the past because I despised bullfighting. My small one woman protest.

An amazing package deal had come my way and my nearly constant wanderlust took over, so just before Thanksgiving off I went. Madrid was noisy and exciting. I loved the Prado and other museums and squares filled with night life. Vegetarian food was hard to find, but not impossible. These folks are big meat eaters.

A delicious tapas plate of fried peppers in Madrid.

A day trip to the walled early Spanish capital Toledo was beautiful but disappointing because almost everything was closed during the hours I was there.

View from the walled ancient city of Toledo down to the newer Toledo below.

My last stop was Barcelona. Here the Catalan language could be heard. There were peaceful protests in the streets everyday and signs warning of pickpockets. One did not wear one’s purse on the outside of one’s clothes. Pickpockets were all over the Rambla, Barcelona’s long main street filled with market stalls and tourists even in the slow season of November 2019.

Inside the Cathedral of the Holy Cross and Saint Eulalia, also known as Barcelona Cathedral constructed between the 13th through 15th century.

Both the medieval architecture and the more modern Gaudi contributions were breathtaking.

The author at Gaudi’s Parc Guell.

After buying varieties of turrón candy for gifts and for my own consumption, I really wanted to get something for myself to remember this trip. Finally I came upon this wonderful mask shop run by two charming elderly people. Then I saw it, a doll of Dr. Peste, the plague doctor, a famous figure in Southern Europe during the Black Plague. I knew that was what I wanted. It was not inexpensive but it was handmade and well worth the money in my opinion.

Dr. Peste figurine with clothes from Arlequi Màscares.

Little did I consciously know at the time, but a novel disease from China was already making a small inroad in Spain.

Fahrusha is a professional intuitive and host of “Shattered Reality Podcast.”

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Pareidolia and A Silly Synchronicity.

Two photos I took late last year could be pareidolia or ???

Pareidolia is the phenomenon of recognizing patterns, shapes, and familiar objects in a vague and sometimes random stimulus, says RationalWiki.org. Faces are thought to be the most common things seen as an effect of pareidolia.

 

Photo taken by Fahrusha on November 15,2018

Multiple faces can be seen beside the cat witch nightlight.

Photo taken by Fahrusha on December 8, 2018

This is a shadow caused by towels hung on a hook in a bathroom. Seeing these faces while alone in a quiet place can be somewhat unsettling to the average person. Each individual must decide for herself where pareidolia ends and anomalous experiences begin.

An amusing case of precognition occurred while I was attempting to get some exercise this past Sunday. I was walking with a companion around a half mile plus Rundgang around a large pond or small lake. To break the monotony, I sometimes make up silly simple songs to sing softly to keep myself amused. These ditties are generally very absurd stream of consciousness numbers like:

Emergen-cy

Brain surgery

Is not for me.

Is not for me!

At a particular point on the path and out of no where, I began to sing:

Doggie treats are good to eat

For me and you

And doggies too.

Eat some doggie treats today.

Woof woof. Yum yum!

Granted, this is nonsensical and silly but exercise for the sake of exercise can be mind numbingly boring. I stopped singing and continued to walk around the path sometimes pumping my arms for extra exercise benefits. When I got around the lake to the same place where I had been singing my impromptu doggie treats song about 20 minutes earlier, there stood a tiny elderly lady in a winter coat, Hello Kitty pajama bottoms and an unusual thick embroidered helmet hat. Very elfin. She was with a younger man who could have been her son. In her hand she had a pouch of dog treats and was handing them out to two smartly attired Scottie dogs who were walking with a woman on the path. None of those people or dogs were present during my earlier circumnavigation. The elfish pixie and her companion continued to walk very slowly around the body of water and stopped twice more to give other dogs some treats.

The key to this precognitive event, I think, is the use of my stream of consciousness for the silly songs, freeing up my mind. What made it memorable was the fey and whimsical appearance of the little lady who was well under five feet tall.

See also Precognitive Dreams, and Pareidolia Or?

Fahrusha is a professional intuitive and the co-host of “Shattered Reality Podcast”. 

 

Everyday Precognition

The day was so cold I wasn’t sure I’d make it to yoga class. I was in the bathroom washing and getting dressed while planning my strategy. If I wasn’t ready in time I’d have to go to the gym instead and be bored senseless on the treadmill.

My mind wandered. I started thinking about making a headband. The best way might be to crochet one in an alternating rib stitch. That would give it a bit of elasticity and keep my hair off my face and my ears warm. What color should it be? Maybe close to my hair color which is a light auburn brown. Would I ever get the time to do such a thing? I continued musing that I used to do such things fairly regularly. Where does my time go nowadays?

I was out the door in plenty of time to make the yoga class, in fact I was there before the teacher. A young woman with cropped black hair walked in two minutes later. Bizarrely she was wearing the very same hair band that I had a half hour prior considered making, crocheted in an alternating rib stitch in a muted brick red. I asked her if she had crocheted herself and she looked at me as though I might be slightly daft and mumbled something about her mother. She was clearly uninterested in chatting with me about it, which was okay, but I was a bit blown away. This was clearly not a commercially common head band but the very one I had imagined making.

This is the kind of thing that happens to me on a regular basis and I don’t often write about. Was it synchronicity, intention or precognition? I honestly don’t know and am not sure if the word matters. It is what makes everyday life magical.

Fahrusha is an intuitive reader and co-host of “Shattered Reality Podcast.”

 

The psychic mushroom

Author in front of rooftop UFO.

A few days before Memorial Day weekend 2017, I went to the NJ shore. There I visited with a woman friend of many years. We walked the boards and talked about our escapades of previous years, including singing “We German” to the tune of Bob Marley’s “Jammin'” in Upper East Side night spots along with another mutual friend. That, and the UFO model on the roof of a boardwalk business led us into a discussion of psychoactive substances such as ayahuasca. But what did our Northern European ancestors do to commune with the higher realms? Why should we have to travel to South America to partake of this magical substance to become enlightened? Our conversation turned to fly agaric also known as Amanita muscaria.

fly agaric illustration

This mushroom is associated with shamanism, Santa Claus, and reindeer. You can see it on many German and Swedish Christmas cards. It is prevalent in illustrations across Iceland and probably other Nordic countries as well, but I am speaking here from experience only. I actually purchased a delicate glass tree ornament of a fly agaric mushroom at a Christmas shoppe in northern Iceland. Now think about Santa Claus. According to tradition, he lives at the North Pole and flies in a sled pulled by reindeer and he wears a red suit. This description fits that of a Siberian or Lapland shaman. It is known that tribes from the Arctic region, particularly their shamans, ingest fly agaric to go on spiritual journeys. They also herd reindeer and the reindeer also eat the mushrooms which incidentally grow underneath fir trees (Christmas trees).

Santa as shaman. (courtesy of Ancient Time News on Tumblr)

So my friend and I agreed that probably the most culturally appropriate way for us to experience higher realms would be to dose ourselves with fly agaric. This was all said largely in jest and under the influence of a vodka and tonic. No way that either of us intended to go out and find and consume potentially poisonous mushrooms that neither of us had ever seen in the “flesh”. In fact we doubted that it grew in our area of the world.

Shortly thereafter I drove to Northern New Jersey where at a familiar location I found these mushrooms.

Northern NJ fly agaric mushroom

A NOT intrepid explorer and fly agaric mushrooms in a bed of sweet woodruff under fir trees.

 

I have spent much time at the location in various seasons but NEVER saw this type of mushroom there or anywhere else. I am interested in mushrooms and as a child broke out in a horrible rash from excessive handling of puffball mushrooms. I always stop to look at mushrooms when I see them in the wild. Needless to say I was blown away by this seeming synchronicity, I actually felt like the mushrooms were calling me to have a taste. But I didn’t. I had heard all the stories of professional wild mushroom pickers who died from making a wrong identification.

About a week later I visited Providence Rhode Island and came upon these sweeties on an evening walk.

Providence RI fly agaric?

This was beginning to get uncanny.

Then I received this toy figure as a gift.

 

Toy fly agaric figurine.

I don’t usually do a photographic essay for a blog post, but this little episode really calls for it. I still haven’t ingested any fly agaric, though I can’t say I’m not tempted. I think that the late Terence McKenna explained this best. He spoke of mushrooms being conscious and their spores traveling through outer space. Could these mushrooms have been speaking to me? I think that they were. I think they were speaking directly to the Neanderthal in me.

Listen to Terence MaKenna on this subject (short) on YouTube.

Fahrusha is a professional intuitive and co-host of Shattered Reality Podcast.

 

Jill Jacobson’s Poem

Wreckage courtesy of Emmanuel Foudrot/Reuters

Germanwings Flight 9525, an Airbus A320, took off at 10:01 a.m. March 24, 2015 from Barcelona, bound for Dusseldorf. The plane had 144 passengers and six crew members on board. At approximately 10:40 that plane crashed into difficult terrain near Digne-les-Bains in the French Alps. By now, dear reader, you probably know all about this very sad tragedy.

10 a.m. Barcelona time is 4 a.m. New York time. A client and friend of mine, Jill Jacobson, was at home in Brooklyn NY in the process of falling asleep. She was roused, she estimates, at 1 a.m. the morning of March 24 (3 hours before the plane took off) because words, a poem perhaps, were rolling around in her head while she was in the liminal state. She got up from bed and wrote them down. Then she promptly went back to bed and immediately went deeply to sleep. When she got up the following morning she forgot all about the words she had jotted down on the paper, perhaps because she wasn’t fully awake when she wrote them. She went outside to do some errands. When she returned home and put on Channel 7 news, she heard about the plane crash and something on the broadcast triggered the memory of the poem she wrote, something about flying and jet fuel. She went to her desk and found the note she penned during the night and this is what it said:

 

Pareidolia or ?

A re-useable bamboo paper towel with the owner’s face accidentally imprinted on it.

Dictionary.com defines Pareidolia as the imagined perception of a pattern or meaning where it does not actually exist, as in considering the moon to have human features. Here we see a remarkable resemblance between the owner of the bamboo paper towel and the towel itself. The man noticed the face the day after he had used the towel and put it up to dry.  A cutting board had been laid against the wet towel and flattened it. The man received the roll of reusable bamboo towels as a gift from his ecologically aware daughter.  I would have been more freaked out about this phenomena if the towel looked like one of my recently deceased friends. What do you think, dear reader, pareidolia or???

Happy Halloween!

Fahrusha is a well known NYC area intuitive and can be reached at fahrusha@fahrusha.com. She is available for events as well as private consultations.

Man looks like his paper towel!

 

Two Life Changing Examples of Synchronicity Based On Intense Focused Intention

A few days ago I received a link to a mind-blowing account of  synchronicity reported by Dean Radin on YouTube.  Dean Radin is an amazing parapsychologist who is the author of  three books including the award-winning The Conscious Universe (HarperOne, 1997), Entangled Minds (Simon & Schuster, 2006), and the 2014 Silver Nautilus Book Award winner, Supernormal (Random House, 2013). I am a great admirer of his work.

After sharing this video on FaceBook I received this wonderful account of a somewhat similar synchronicity from a friend, Jon Decker, a retired educator and chiropractic doctor. He has kindly allowed me to share it with you, dear reader:

 

The Oldest Man in the World is a Ufologist!

Dr. Alexander Imich recently.

My friend Nadira likes to clip interesting newspaper articles, put two or three of them into an envelope and send them to me. Often they are about horrible things that very sick men in the Middle East do to women in the name of Islam (Nowhere in the Koran does it say that you must cut a woman’s feet off if her shoes make too much noise. I’ve checked.), sometimes they are interesting animal stories about tiny kangaroos called bilbys or a cat that rides a bus in England everyday. Almost never are there clippings about UFOs.

I am a person who has the nasty habit of jotting down notes on the backs of envelopes that people and businesses send me, causing me to retain a paper mess sometimes. Several days ago I was looking through some of my voluminous papers replete with odd notes featuring telephone numbers of forgotten people with no names attached and appointment times without a reference to whom I was supposed to meet or why. When I find a note that is still important and decipherable I jot it into a spiral bound note-book and then the envelope is recycled.

Among these envelopes I found one from Nadira postmarked 11 OCT 2011. I had read the articles within the envelope nearly 3 years ago so the contents were familiar but vague. There was an article about voodoo in the boroughs of  New York and another about how children think, but the third article really caught my attention. It was titled: A Secret to Long Life: UFOs by Ralph Gardner Jr in the Wall Street Journal April 28, 2011. This article was about then 108 year old Dr. Alexander Imich. And it made my blood boil. Imich seems like a very interesting fellow with interests that parallel mine. He practices the fairly well proven theory that a calorie restrictive diet can lengthen life. Imich has a Ph.D. in zoology and worked in the area of chemistry, yet the author Gardner, seemed to make light of that caloric restriction idea which has many science-based studies that agree. But it was Gardner’s words about UFOs and parapsychology that really bugged me.

 

Holotropic Synchronicity

In August I was browsing through the Kirpalu catalog and was seized by a heretofore unknown urge to sign up for “Holotropic Breathwork” with the venerable Prague psychiatrist Dr. Stanislav Grof and his assistant Tav Sparks. I’m not certain what made me so sure I wanted to do it, but I had absolutely no reservations. Hey, a weekend in the Berkshires in early fall sounds fab, no? Perhaps it was the influence of my holotropic therapist friend in Amsterdam, but no, we hadn’t discussed breathwork during my recent visit.

In any case, I signed up and as August turned into September, it was soon time to go to Kirpalu. I’d been there to visit once and then again to assist Lauren Raine in her mask making workshop several years ago.

Imagine my surprise, directly after checking in, to see my friend Dr. Joe Felser in the hall. He was also there for the breathwork class, drawn to it in an equally mysterious manner. Joe is a professor of philosophy at Kingsborough College in Brooklyn and well versed in metaphysical matters and the author of two excellent books, The Myth of the Great Ending and The Way Back to Paradise. We immediately decided it would be advantageous to choose one another as partners for the breathwork sessions. After all, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know! 🙂 Actually we get along quite famously though we do not have that many occasions to meet up.

The actual sessions at Kirpalu were very interesting. I did manage to enter an altered state of consciousness which was very dreamlike during my breathwork. I was rather surprised at the demonstrative nature of some of the other participants in their altered states. I wish I was better prepared for that as I found it slightly unsettling. The weekend seemed too short a time to become immersed in this very heady work. I felt it was very compelling though I was not attracted to the idea of reliving the birth trauma. In general I am a fairly happy camper and not attracted to “re-suffering” anything. However this is a keystone in Grof’s method and has no doubt helped many individuals understand the reasons for certain traits and mental aberrations. I am very, very interested in learning the part of breathwork dealing with inducing non-ordinary states of consciousness.

Serious synchronicity began to manifest when I returned home. I had purchased and read most of Grof’s book, Holotropic Breathwork  and listened to a series of nine CDs called The Transpersonal Vision before attending the class. During the lecture portions of the seminar, Grof mentioned several times another book he had written called When The Impossible Happens. It sounded so familiar to me. I could even see a trade paperback with a blue and white cover, but I couldn’t remember reading it nor buying it. It was a curious feeling. Once I got home I lifted up a few clothes from a box to be put away and there was the book When The Impossible Happens staring me in the face. I don’t know where it came from nor how it got there, and I have no recollection of buying it and that is certainly not where I would have chosen to place it.

I thought that it was a definite sign that I should read the book.  And so I began to do so. In the opening chapter he speaks of meaningful synchronicity he has observed and that had touched his life. The first example concerned the well-known Joseph Campbell, who was living on the fourteenth floor of an apartment building in Greenwich Village. At the time he was deeply involved in studying a Bushman tribe in Africa that worshipped the praying mantis as a God or as the connection to God and then he found a praying mantis on his window ledge. Quite an unusual occurrence for a Greenwich Village apartment!

This is what I saw later that day INSIDE my home:

Indoor Praying Mantis

Look at that gorgeous face! I got him/her outside safely.

Later the author described his wedding to Joan Halifax the well known anthropologist. (They are no longer married.) They had an unusual shamanic ceremony surrounded by many similar minded friends in Iceland. Oddly, I went to a wedding that Saturday night at the Bronx Zoo where the entertainers and some of the guests dressed as animals, which is probably as shamanic as it gets in New York City. The truth is I hardly ever attend weddings, as most of my friends who are the marrying kind have already done so, and in former years I missed many of their weddings due to working at events on the weekend. I average going to a wedding as a guest less than once in five years.

At the zoo.

After that I temporarily stopped reading the book. The synchronicity shook me to the core. Soon I will resume.

Postscript: I am sending out a big thank you to Dr. Stanislav Grof, Tav Sparks, my co-trainers, Nataliya Tarnovskaya and Allen Howell, and my breathwork partner Dr. Joseph M. Felser.

Post-post script: On Saturday October 12th, I attended a private meditation group which encourages sharing of non-ordinary experiences which may have occurred during the meditation. I had seen a figure of a dancing whirling blue Shiva figure during my meditation and felt I might have been very suggestible due to reading When The Impossible Happens, wherein are described a series of events of Shivaic synchronicity. However that does not explain why a majority of other meditators saw blue figures, blue energy, blue light and blue objects. One meditator saw swirling energy and another an alien figure in the same physical space where I saw the dancing Shiva.

Fahrusha is a spiritual seeker and professional intuitive in the New York area. She can be contacted by email at: fahrusha@fahrusha.com

 

More than Synchronicity?

My keys, cellphone, and handbag with zippered compartment showing.

Last Friday, July 19, I was getting ready to go on a bus that leaves every half hour. I was planning to catch the 12:30 p.m. bus and was all ready to go, bus ticket in hand, when I looked inside my handbag for the keys. My keys and cellphone were put in the front pocket of the handbag (as usual) earlier in the day. The cellphone was there and the keys were not. I searched the entire bag frantically and looked all around for the keys to no avail. I felt the bag for the keys. Nothing. I shook the bag for keys. Nothing. There are five keys on the ring along with a big red R of foam rubber about 3″ x 3″ x 1″. Finally it became obvious I was going to miss the 12:30 bus, so I got a drink of water and began to think about options, like from whom I could get my apartment keys. I looked around some more and went back to my bag and there in the front pocket of the bag right next to my cell phone were the keys with the large red “R” bigger than life. I took the one o’clock bus and pondered what mechanism was at work here. Might I have been mysteriously saved from some tragedy by not getting on the 12:30 bus or were the pixies responsible? I’ll never know, but I do know that those keys were not in there when I looked thoroughly the first three times and I was totally alone, at least devoid of visible human company, so no other person could have tampered with the bag.

Later I went on Facebook and my friend Sue (who I hadn’t I hadn’t spoken to about my high strangeness) posted this account:

“Last Monday, July 15, I was mowing my acre of lawn and had made 2 passes under the 60-foot-tall pine tree at the south edge of the yard. I drove the riding mower another 50 feet west of the pine when I was suddenly unable to steer it. I hit the brake and shut off the mower. When I got off and checked the front of the mower, I found a small piece of 1/4-inch plywood 9 inches wide and 15 inches long wedged between the right front wheel and the mower deck. The wood was quite wet from the recent rains and I was unable to dislodge it or even move it a little. After trying for about 10 minutes, I gave up and since it was almost noon and very hot (Florida), I went in to eat, rehydrate, and rest. When I went out later, I found that a 7-inch diameter, 25-foot-long, living branch had fallen off of that pine precisely where the next pass of the mower would be. The branch was so heavy that I am unable to drag it off. I don’t have any idea where that piece of plywood came from because I didn’t see it when I mowed the week before. I live on my small horse farm and had the branch fallen on me, nobody would have missed me for half a day. I think that this is not only synchronicity but also divine intervention. I still feel shaken by the experience.”

Here we see the fallen pine branch and the lawn mower in the background, courtesy of Sue.

What exactly can be derived from these experiences? One thing I have known for quite a few years: if you are unexpectedly delayed, go with the flow and don’t fight the current. There could be a reason. Your guardian angel, your higher self, your guides or the effulgent light of the universe itself could have your back.

One day over twenty years ago I was walking downtown on the west side of Third Avenue in New York City. I was literally pulled into an expensive (to me at the time) Italian deli a couple of blocks below 23rd Street. I had passed there dozens of times before but never went inside. I just knew my budget couldn’t deal with it. That late afternoon I could not resist going in. I had nothing I needed to buy there and I wasn’t even hungry. Yet I couldn’t resist going in. It was a small but not tiny store. I looked around for several minutes and having gotten uncomfortable with the salespersons’ “Can I help you?” queries, I quickly left.

As I made my way further down Third Avenue, I became aware of police and ambulance sirens and then an accident scene between 13th and 14th Streets. Apparently a taxi went out of control and mowed two women pedestrians down killing them. It is quite possible, had I not gone into the specialty food store, that I would have been precisely in the path of that taxi.

Fahrusha is a professional intuitive who does readings in New York’s East Village and elsewhere. She can be contacted by email at: fahrusha@fahrusha.com

 

Ilene Weiss’s Strange Synchonicity

Wikipedia defines synchronicity as “the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated or unlikely to occur together by chance, yet are experienced as occurring together in a meaningful manner”. Karl Jung was the psychologist that first gave attention to the phenomena in the 1920’s.

I like the following account of synchronicity for several reasons. Ilene is a friend of mine outside of the paranormal world and though she is a talented musician, in other ways she is simply an everyday person, without any agenda in the area of the anomalous. This true story shows how synchronicities can pop up anywhere, where you least expect them.

Ilene Weiss is a songwriter, performer, and musical clown. During the summer of 1998 she was working for several weeks as a clown at Hole in the Wall Gang Camp in Ashford CT. For those of you who don’t know, it is a no-fee camp for youth, ages 7 to 15, with cancer and serious blood diseases, who reside in New England, New York or New Jersey. It was founded by actor/ philanthropist Paul Newman in 1988. (Please feel free to click on the link and send them money, you really don’t need a new pair of Louboutin spikes especially if you have hair on your chest. 😉 )

Ilene had two days off between camp sessions and decided to go to to Providence, Rhode Island on a day trip. Providence is about an hour’s ride from Ashford and a nice day’s jaunt.

During the 1970’s Ilene spent just over four years in Providence. She went there originally in the fall of 1973 as an freshman art student at Rhode Island School of Design, lived there until Dec 1977, but left RISD in the of spring 1976. So she was going to Providence for a “memory walk” to see how the town had changed in the more than 20 years since she’d left. Additionally she was currently in the midst of a romantic infatuation with a man who had lived in Providence during the same years she had. They did not know each other then.

During her “memory walk” she decided it might be a clever idea to send the man a postcard of the town, a postcard evocative of the era that they’d spent there separately. She walked around town visiting the places she’d frequented when she lived there, checking out the available postcards but they were all too new and shiny, showing more of how the place changed than how it had been when they’d both lived there, not knowing one another.

Finally she came to the College Hill Bookstore. It had been there way back when and was worth a try. She found a rack of postcards in the back of the store and again nothing but the newer cards. As she turned the rack around she glimpsed a few old ones- the color was different. She had found a few small overlooked postcards that seemed to be of the right era. And the neighborhood even looked familiar. Yes! It was a picture of the corner of Thayer and Waterman, near one of the Brown University Quads. Wow! A find! The man had gone to Brown. And, holy cow, there was the Jo-Art Copy Shop! She knew exactly where that was. She had briefly been the proprietor of Kneecap Natural Foods right around the corner from Jo-Art.

She took one of the postcards to the cash register and paid. A few minutes later she had occasion to sit down. She took out the postcard for another look, wondering what she’d write on the back of it. Something funny, yet romantic and appropriate, but not too forward. The horse cart was unusual. The faces on the card looked somehow familiar and the car was just like the one her old friend Michael used to drive. And, the young woman in profile at the cart kind of looked like her. The woman was even dressed as she dressed then. Looking closer she decided she had had the same clothes. Wait a minute, it WAS her in the photo. She was totally in shock, blown away. How could it be? But it was her, standing in profile with a kerchief on her head on the right side of the horse cart.

After regaining her composure she hurried back to the College Hill Book Store and bought their remaining stock of the postcard.

How does one explain a synchronicity such as this? What are the chances of something like this happening? And moreover, what, if anything, does it mean?

I’d love to hear about your own synchronicity, dear reader.

Fahrusha is an intuitive reader and creative visualization coach in New York City. You can reach her at fahrusha@fahrusha.com.