Time, Space, Will and Synchronicity

Thanks to Anita Moorjani posting the link on her Facebook page, yesterday's blog post about her wonderful book Dying to be Me, created quite a stir. There were a few fascinating and important things about the experience - and the great reaction to the blog post - that I thought I would write about today.

For those who didn't read through the comments below yesterday's post, there was another fascinating occurrence yesterday which only confirmed what I have been writing and speaking about all these years: that mind and cosmos are intimately linked, and that mainstream science has got it hopelessly wrong in its understanding of who we are as human beings and where we fit in the greater scheme of things. 

I wrote the post about Anita late (by my standards) on Sunday night, the same day I met her. I normally go to bed by 11.00 pm, because I have to get up by 6.00 am to commute to work. But that night I felt very relaxed and energised, so I decided to write of my synchronicity in meeting Anita, beginning around my normal bedtime. I completed it still feeling relaxed and barely tired, but went to bed to try to get a decent six hours of sleep.

Early  Monday morning at around 5.00 am I had a vision as I was sleeping. At the age of 26 (twenty years ago) I began having regular visions and prophetic dreams. This coincided with my new habit of meditating and recording dreams and intuitions. Ever since that time, such visionary experiences have been a regular part of my daily life (I give a semi-autobiographical account of how this happened in my brand new e-novel Shadow Light). Visions have a slightly different quality from dreams, and tend to be very short - often just a flash of insight, or even a mere symbol which is 'embedded' with information which is telepathically "transmitted" without words. At least that is how I experience many of them.

In my early morning vision yesterday I saw a friend of mine standing before a huge computer screen - Doug Seiddon, the transpersonal psychologist I mentioned in yesterday's post. There was a vertical white bar of 'energy' on the right-hand side of the screen, and it began to expand upwards, beginning near the bottom of the screen, then shooting upwards towards the top. The energy was white luminescent, quite bright to look at. The screen looked like the image at the top of this blog - the guy standing in front of the earth (but in this case the man was Doug). I intuitively knew that the white bar of energy represented traffic on a web site - this blog. I felt slightly apprehensive, as I wondered whether the increased 'attention' might attract some negative posters (this happened in a previous viral 'hit'). As he stood there examining the bar of light (in the vision) Doug said; "This is because of something you wrote." 

I awoke immediately. I knew that in the dream Doug represented the mystical side of the cosmos (he is a transpersonal psychologist, after all!). 

Around 1.00 pm yesterday, I opened my blog and went to the 'design' section to check on web traffic. I was not overly surprised to discover that instead of the 10-20 hits I normally get for a blog post within the first 24 hours of posting, the blog post about Anita had already received 400 odd hits in only half a day (In fact the post has now gotten 1400 hits so far, and this blog got a total of 1800 hits yesterday, massively above the average 180-200!)

The fascinating thing for me is that, as far as I am aware, Anita did not share the link to the post till sometime late morning, several hours after I had the vision. If Anita reads this, perhaps she can confirm the timing. (Edit: Anita has confirmed that she didn't post the link till about 11.00 am - six hours after the vision)

The vision was therefore a precognition of a significant event that was about to unfold in my day. It is interesting to note that so much of what Anita learned during her NDE mirrors perfectly what I (and many others) have come to understand from developing Integrated Intelligence, or INI (my term for spiritual intuition - see my book Discover Your Soul Template if you are interested in developing INI). Time is not the simple linear concept that we often assume it to be; and mind is not confined to the head. Human beings are perfectly capable of sensing connections in other places and times - just as Anita did during her NDE. You don't actually need to die to access this ability! Not everyone will experience it the way I do though. My brain is very visual and auditory. I also developed the 'feeling' aspect of INI through many years of practice, and thanks to having the privilege of working with some wonderful spiritual teachers.

There is one more important point I would like to make about yesterday's synchronicity in meeting Anita. A few people leaving comments suggested that I had "willed" the event into existence. Actually, this is not true. I made no attempt to create the meeting with Anita at any time. When I wrote that I had been imagining the spontaneous meeting with her in the days leading up to the the actual meeting, I was not trying to do anything. This imagined scenario was coming into my mind regularly as a kind of daydream (at least 3 times, I recall). There was an element of 'desire' - perhaps 'excitement' is a better word - with the scenario, but I wasn't trying to create it, or manifest it as some New Age law-of-attraction philosophies might suggest is possible.

The last time the scenario came to me was Saturday night (the night before I met Anita), when I met two of my friends, Doug Seiddon and Alick Lau in a Hong Kong Central restaurant for dinner. We had agreed to meet at a Chinese restaurant, but when we got there we decided to make a late change to an Indian restaurant. When we arrived at the Indian restuarant and started eating, I began to 'feel' that Anita was close by. I actually looked around the restaurant to see if she was there!

Rather than my creating the event, I think what was happening was that I was sensing an important upcoming connection. Time was collapsing in on itself - in a sense - and I was already experiencing the energy of the upcoming meeting with her, still about sixteen hours away. 

This is not the first time this kind of thing has happened to me. I have had numerous precognitions in the past. The first similar one I recall was about twenty years ago when I was walking down the street in Grafton, New South Wales, Australia. I was merely passing through the town at the time. As I was walking down the main street I looked up and saw a man walking towards me. For some reason I thought he was Warren, a guy who had lived on my wing of the University of Newcastle campus hall of residence some five years previously. When the man got closer, I saw it wasn't Warren. It struck me that it was truly bizarre that I had thought it was Warren, as I barely knew the guy, and hadn't thought of him even once in the preceding five years. But what happened next was even more bizarre. I walked around a corner, and down a street, and on a whim decided to pop into a little clothes shop. I was shocked to see Warren buying a shirt at the counter! I went over to him, and even mentioned how I'd just been thinking of him!

Again, I think this was simply a case of the mind drawing in information - and especially emotional energy - from the 'future.' When an event has special emotional or spiritual importance, the intuitions will be stronger.

It's a wonderful and mysterious universe we live in. There is so much we don't know or understand. I suggest we all relax and just enjoy living here!

Blessings,

Marcus

Dying to be Me. Incredible!

Marcus T Anthony's new web site and blog can be found at: is www.mind-futures.com.

The universe works in mysterious ways. 

Last week I was out and about with my wife in the IFC Mall, one of Hong Kong's more pricey shopping establishments. Walking around on the third floor, I stumbled across a book shop and went in. There, right on top of a pile of books on a table near the front of the bookshop was a certain volume which caught my eye: Dying to be Me, by Anita Moorjani. I picked it up and did what I always do when deciding whether or not to buy a book: I stilled myself, bringing my mind fully present, then felt the book. My intuition told me that the book was for me, so I went straight to the counter and bought it.

I wasn't disappointed. The author, I found out, is a Hong Kong woman of Indian decent. Several years ago she was diagnosed with cancer. The book details her experience with the disease, and her remarkable visit to death's door. To cut a long story short, Anita describes how her condition gradually deteriorated, until she was admitted to hospital in a coma. Her doctor's had basically given up on her, and her organs had begun to shut down. One of the doctor's wrote down that her family should be informed of her true condition, meaning that he was convinced that she was about to die.

The author then describes the miracle that happened next. She had a classic near death experience where she was able to hear not only what was being said by doctors who were treating her, but she could also see into the minds of her close relatives, including a brother who was on  plane, rushing to see her. She saw her current life in a grand spiritual context, witnessed her past lives, and experienced an expanded state of mind which transcended time and space. This is mental state is what I call a classic experience of Integrated Intelligence (INI), as I outline in my book Discover Your Soul Template, INI is the experience of mind which extends out from the body and interacts with other people, places and even other times.

Anita Moorjani shares her wonderful spiritual insights with the reader. The message is clear. We spend too much of our lives denying our own magnificence, living for some future goal, or just believing that we are inadequate. It is these beliefs and attitudes that the author sees as being central to her becoming sick. Her cancer was an expression of a greater dis-ease in her mind. The genuine miracle occurred when Anita awakened from her coma. Within two weeks her cancers had reduced dramatically in size, and soon they had vanished from her body without a trace.

I love the book. In fact, as I read it I realised that I had a strong connection with its message. Although I have never had a near death experience, I have experienced many non-ordinary states of consciousness and had many spiritual experiences where I received insights that mirror those of Anita Moorjani.

As I was reading the book, I texted one of my good friends in the consciousnesses movement here in Hong Kong, transpersonal psychologist Doug Seiddon, and told him he should read the book. He texted me back saying that he had met Anita two years previously at the Hong Kong Consciousness Festival. He said she was a very nice woman. I felt rather envious.

What I will relate next is actually true, even though it may seem rather incredulous. I was seriously considering contacting the author, as we live in the same city. A scenario kept popping into my head during the first few days after I purchased the book. 

I am sitting in a public space. Suddenly I realise that Anita Moorjani is sitting right beside me. I walk over to her and say "Are you Anita Moorjani?" I point to her book, which I am holding.

In fact this scenario came to me just yesterday when I was travelling on public transport. It was as if I could feel Anita very close to my physically. There definitely felt like a connection.

So today, Sunday, I went out in the afternoon to the Pacific Coffee place in Discovery Bay, not far from my apartment. I sat down and began to do a little writing on my computer. Suddenly a woman's voice caught my attention. I looked up to see three people of Indian heritage sitting just a metre away from me at the next table. The woman, who was turned away from me, was talking about her publicist. I realised that she must be a writer. The idea immediately came to me that this woman was Anita Moorjani. I couldn't see her face clearly, but I could see a distinguishing facial feature on her right cheek. So I opened my copy of Dying to Be Me (which I had on the table) and turned to the author page. Sure enough, the woman sitting a metre away from me had the same feature in exactly the same spot on her face. I checked her energy intuitively, and saw that she had a soft and very feminine energy, and was very relaxed in her body. It was a perfect match!

I was just thinking about how I might interrupt their conversation (as I am not a natural extrovert) when suddenly the Indian man chatting to the woman got up and walked over to me. "Is that book any good?" he asked. He was smiling. 

"Yes! Is this Anita?" I asked indicating to the woman. They were all smiling.

Sure enough it was her. I kindly invited myself over for a chat with them! The man was Danny, Anita's amiable husband. We chatted for about twenty minutes or so, and I was delighted to discover that Anita was as genuine as her book suggests. But the synchronicity didn't end there. I discovered that the couple live in Discovery Bay too. But even more incredibly, we found out that we had both lived in the same tiny village of a few hundred people in Hong Kong's New Territories at the same time (2008) - at opposite ends of the village. They knew several of my friends in the village. The odds of that must be astronomical. I honestly can't remember seeing Anita or Danny there, but I must have seen them at some time, because the village is quite isolated, with only one mini-bus which takes about 25 minutes to get to the nearest train station.

 

Anita and Danny

What a wonderful series of synchronicities! 

Even better, if you go to Amazon.com you'll see Anita's book has become an instant best seller. I have to be honest and say I have read some spiritual best sellers which I would describe as simply awful - where I intuitively sensed that the author was not capable of walking the talk. Happily with Dying to be Me, this is not the case. I give it five stars out of five.

(* I have written a little more about the aftermath to this incident and a profound vision I had the next day in the following blog post)

Blessings,

Marcus

A Profound Encounter

In 1997 I had a rather profound encounter with an amazing woman. If you have read my book Discover Your Soul Template you will be familiar with the story. It involves a woman who I refer to as Jessica. Here I recount the tale at the 2012 TEDx conference in Hong Kong. This is just three minutes of the talk. The rest will come later!

Marcus

Synchronicity and Half of Darwin's Head

Synchronicity is a fascinating subject. Firstly, we can dismiss it as pure coincidence, as mere projections from minds that are, by their nature, pattern recognisers. This is the standard way of looking at all coincidences, from the perspective of modern science. The second way to look at synchronicity is to assume that the coincidences emerge from an intelligent cosmos, or intelligent agents of the cosmos. In this sense synchronicity implies that the universe is playful, and has an inbuilt directionality. It suggests that there is an intelligence(s) which "wants" us to move in a certain direction.

Two weeks ago I gave a talk at the Hong Kong TEDx gathering at the HK Polytechnic University. My talk was called "Cosmos, Psyche and Our Brilliant Futures". In my allotted eighteen minutes I made an argument for an intelligent cosmos, and predicted that soon the mechanistic paradigm that still dominates much of modern science will be replaced by the metaphor of an organic universe. Machines are unconscious, while organisms have intelligence and intention. 

Part of my talk was about synchronicity and how it indicates just such an organic universe - where consciousness is a central component, not just an accidental bi-product. Fascinatingly, there was an intriguing synchronicity which occurred in regard to my talk. The Polytechnic Uni offered me the services of a student assistant, and her job was to make my slides as attractive and readable as possible. Part of my presentation was looking at the way that modern education and learning destroy certain natural abilities, and I used Charles Darwin as an example. Here's the slide I put up for this particular part of the speech.

To go with this slide, the preceding slide was an image of Darwin. Below is my original slide, which I gave to my assistant.

However, when my assistant returned my PP file to me with the adjusted slides, my Darwin slide looked like the one below.

Darwin really had lost half his head! Later I was speaking to my assistant, and I said it was a clever idea. However she then confesed that it was all a mistake, and she hadn't realised the slide had come out this way! I ended up leaving the slide exactly this way for my presentation, and using it as a great example of synchronicity.

The video of the talk should be posted here in a couple of weeks.

By the way, if you are interested in the subject of synchronicity, you will love Rob and Trish Macgregor's  synchrosecrets blog.

Marcus

Surfing the Ocean of Rage

I have been thinking of writing about the recent tragic events in Tucson, Arizona. Rob and Trish MacGreggor beat me to the punch on their synchronicity web site. Check it out for an interesting perspective.

I’d like to add what I consider to be a few poignant insights into the matter. As we all now know, congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot at point blank range outside a convenience store in Tucson. A particularly tragic part of the proceedings was the death of nine-year-old Christina Taylor Green. Christina was born on the day of the 911 attack on New York, and was also featured in the book, Faces of Hope: Babies Born on 9/11. 

Some would call this irony, but was it actually synchronicity?

As an intuitive I have taken a look at the energy of the event, and I’d like to share something of what I’ve sensed.

Road to Bliss: Using Intuition to Buy or Read Books

 So many books, so little time!

 

If you are a person with a spiritual perspective on life, this short video blog should be very helpful to you. It outlines a very simple way to decide whether to buy/read a book or not. Wanting information to follow your Bliss? Look no further! 

Here's the link to the previous blog post I refer to in the video: Entanglement, the Next Big Thing".

Synchro Summit at Yale

Yale University

For those of you interested in synchronicity, here's a link kindly provided by 22C+ member Rob MacGreggor (http://www.ofscarabs.blogspot.com). The link will take you to Dr. Christiane Northrup's web site, and is a rundown the first annual Synchro Summit held at Yale University’s Divinity School. The conference was attended by philosophers, scholars, and authors, and was held on October 15-17, 2010.

http://www.drnorthrup.com/news/news_article.php

I almost made it there myself, but a little thing called work held me up - not to mention that I would have had to fly all the way from Hong Kong to east coast USA and back, all within 4 days! Maybe I will get there next year.

Marcus

The Idiot Opposite Me

Marcus T Anthony's new web site and blog can be found at www.mind-futures.com.

The human mind tends to work in binaries: good/bad, this/that, me/her, us/them, is/is not, and so on. Bart Kosko wrote a book quite some time ago called Fuzzy Logic, where he pointed out that this black and white thinking of the human mind creates distortions in the way we perceive the world. Being aware of the same problem, lateral thinking guru Edward de Bono invented a new word, “po”, to help move us beyond ‘yes’ and ‘no’.

The older we get, the more we tend to label the world and life’s experiences according to  pre-assigned rigid categories. The world then loses its novelty, and we also forgo the opportunity to see things anew, or from the perspective of another. I developed a process called Harmonic Circles to assist people in moving beyond these kinds of binaries.

However, today, I am going to provide you with a piece of wisdom that a spiritual teacher of mine, whom I refer to as Jessica, once told me. She said that when she sat in a circle or group of people, she always took careful note of the person sitting opposite her, because that person represented a polarity that she needed to acknowledge. Ironically, the very first time I ever met Jessica, she was sitting directly opposite me in a large circle of people (and, no, she didn’t mention this idea at that time, but much later). I mentioned the amazing synchronicity that occurred as a result of that meeting in a previous post. As soon as Jessica saw me, she related precisely the same image that I’d had in a dream just a few hours before, where I’d seen my hands covered in blood. That synchronicity helped me to come to terms with an issue I had, related to sexuality.

It is often the people that we push away at a personal or intellectual level that have the most to teach us. The simple process of allowing yourself to look at the person opposite you, and ask, “What is it about this person that I need to acknowledge?”, can produce a great deal of insight. You can also take this in a metaphorical sense and ask the same question about a person whom you see as an intellectual or spiritual rival. Many people who read this blog have a spiritual perspective. “We” (if I may allow myself to place us in a group) often feel threat and hostility from sceptics and those critical of spiritual discourses and mystical experience. You can probably think of one such person or group right now. Is there something that you can learn from them? Is it possible for you to receive them without emotional judgment?

Note here the distinction between ‘judgment’ and discernment’. Judgment is laden with emotionality, while discernment is a nonattached perspective. You can still discern a perceived error in another’s thinking without taking it personally, or needing to change or destroy it. Judgment typically contains an element of destruction – there is an often unconscious desire to annihilate the object of judgment.

I would like now to recount a significant event in my life which helped me to understand this issue at a deeper level. It occurred in 2005, when I attended a Futures Studies conference at Tamkang University in Taiwan. I wrote about this in an essay for The Journal of Futures Studies the following year. Here’s a part of what I wrote there. It involves an somewhat uncomfortable encounter with Michio Kaku, the well-known physicist and author of Visions.