CAN THIS BE TRUE?

Published June 22, 2016 by Nan Mykel

My oldest daughter Sallie sent me a link to a truly astounding coincidence. What I first saw was from You Tube: /www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_j3bVYwAp4 It seemed real, but I noticed that the date was April 1, so I felt forced to discount it. An awful lot of people get off on playing tricks. I don’t want this site to be spoofy. I have read instances of identical twins separated at birth whose lives turn out so extremely similar that it’s hard to believe, but then genetics itself is pretty surprising.

Sallie and Nan at the airport. New Years Eve, 20152016

Then she sent me a link to a radio program about the incident: /www.wnyc.org/radio/#/ondemand/91686 and http://www.radiolab.org/story/91686-a-very-lucky-wind/#commentlist

Here are several excerpts from some of the 67 responses that describe the coincidence:

Yu from Anaheim:

There was a story of Laura Buxton who lives in England. It seems that in June 2001 she released a helium filled balloon during celebrations for her grandparents’ gold wedding anniversary in Blurton, Staffordshire, England. Attached to the balloon was her name and address and a note asking the finder to write back. Ten days later she received a reply. The balloon had been found by another Laura Buxton in the garden hedge of her home in Pewsey, Wiltshire, 140 miles away. One Laura was 10 years the other was 9 years 6 months. Both had three year old black Labradors, a guinea pig, and a rabbit. When they met t hey were the same height, had the same hair color, and were dressed in similar outfits, both wearing pink jumpers and jeans. They each had brought, unbeknownst to the other, their guinea pig with them to the meeting. Both guinea pigs were brown and each had an orange patch on their bottom. Each girl had a pet rabbit – a gray one, and a 3-year-old black Labrador .

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Li Zhi from Cleveland

There’s so many holes in this story. Most obvious is that Jad claims that the girls are both 10, yet previously the first admitted she was only 9. Jad also admits that he selected from a long list of traits those the girls shared. Not one comment here suggests that the TV show they met on for the first time did the same thing. Do you really think they both decided to bring pets onto the stage without any prompting? Really? How about their clothes, chance or influenced by the producers? How many guinea pigs did each girl own? There’s a lot of missing information and yet a lot of comments on this ancient thread aren’t interested in finding out the facts, they want to believe what they want to believe, damn the facts. I wonder which of the girls, the one studying science and the other liberal arts, I wonder which was the one believing in miracles. The other was, not so strangely, silent – I’d hope that the science oriented mind would be more interested in facts. But I’d be stereotyping…

Jun. 17 2016 04:01 PM

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Gene Yakub from Italy

For those who believe in coincidences these types of events, and similar ones which can be placed under “coincidence”, seem wondrously unrelated and unexpected. But to those, like myself, who know that reincarnation is a reality, everything happens as it is supposed to, as has been chose by us before each reincarnation.
How can it make sense that as we look around us, there is a continuity and a unity even in diversity that has been there since the year dot, all fits together perfectly, everything sustains everything else – or it did before we interfered.
Yet we humans supposedly live a comparatively brief life span and all our experiences and knowledge disappear into thin air with that body? Why would that be true of the most sophisticated component of all creation?
What is human life about then, what is the purpose of being alive? Just to waffle along and accumulate book knowledge so as to earn money? No, life is for learning and growing, to rid ourselves of the negative consequences of the mistaken choices we previously made (the Law of Action and Reaction, Cause and Effect) by having as many other opportunities as necessary to understand where we went wrong and correct ourselves so we can move on.
Destiny v. Freedome of Choice? No versus, they act in tandem when we have to make choices every single moment of our lives because we don’t remember what happened in a previous life except during the transition stage between one life another when we make our choices for the next one.

Dec. 04 2013 01:43 PM

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WatchTheClock from Up

The balloon story was really interesting, but I couldn’t help but think of all of the wildlife destruction that is caused by balloons.
PLEASE don’t release a balloon. Balloon releases are “celebrating by littering.”
Dolphins, whales, turtles, and many other marine species, as well as terrestrial animals such as cows, dogs, sheep, tortoises, birds and other animals have all been hurt or killed by balloons.
More information here: http://balloonsblow.org/impacts-on-wildlife-and-environment

Jul. 14 2012 02:17 PM

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Gina Mireault from Vermont

I also teach Research Methods in Psychology as well as Developmental Psychology. In the latter, we explore the “uncanny” similarities between between identical twins who are reared apart. Researchers make the assumption that these similarities (e.g., using the same unusual toothpaste or drinking the same brand of beer) are genetically based, even though they would not apply such explanations to the same similarities found between total strangers (like the Laura’s in this edition of RL). I’ll use this segment in class to illustrate that coincidence works as a third variable in explaining such similarities, as well as to discuss the human tendency to “see patterns in randomness”. Thanks for an outstanding show!

Nov. 22 2009 09:21 PM

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Alexander Nekrasov from Purchase, NY

I have a logical explanation for this event. As a matter of fact I am convinced that the following has happened. Somebody who knows the second girl(or where the Buxton family lives)saw this balloon floating around and dropped it in front of her house not paying too much attention to the address. The fact that they turned out similar is in fact a coincidence, however this simple coincidence makes this event possible on the scale of the world population.

Nov. 27 2014 08:17 PM

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SNOPES

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/trivia/buxton.asp

Indeed, a farmer in Milton Lilbourne, Wiltshire — about 140 miles away from Staffordshire — had found the balloon in a hedge adjoining his property. He was about to discard the deflated balloon in the rubbish when he spotted the name “Laura Buxton” on the attached note, and knowing his neighbors had a daughter by that name, he delivered the balloon to their home instead.

But the neighbors’ daughter wasn’t the same Laura Buxton who had sent the balloon winging on its way from Staffordshire; she was a different girl who coincidentally bore the same given name and surname as the originator of the message. (Contrary to the account reproduced in the “Example” block above, the balloon wasn’t found in the Buxtons’ back yard, and both Lauras were not 10 years old at the time — oneof the girls was just short of her tenth birthday.)

Laura Buxton #2 in Milton Lilbourne, Wiltshire, wrote to Laura Buxton #1 in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, to inform her that her balloon had been found and report the unusual coincidence of that it had ended up in the hands of someone with the very same name. The two girls got in touch by telephone, and the coincidence was amusing and harmless enough that the girls’ parents arranged for them to meet face-to-face, whereupon they discovered a number of similarities beyond the two girls’ sharing a name: the Lauras were the same height, had the same build and eye color, both were fair-haired, both wore jeans with pink jumpers to their initial meeting, and both had grey rabbits, guinea pigs, and three-year-old black Labradors as pets. Both girls brought their guinea pigs (which were of the same color with similar markings) to their initial meeting.

Outside of the similarity in the girls’ names (and they didn’t have terribly unusual names), much of this tale isn’t all that remarkable: it’s hardly amazing that two girls of similar age would be the same height and build, or that two girls from the same geographic region would have the same color of hair and eyes, or that two young girls would keep the same types of animals at home (since Labrador retriever dogs, rabbits, and guinea pigs are all very common household pets). Nonetheless, the balloon coincidence led to the two Laura Buxtons’ striking up a friendship that was unlikely to have begun without it, and the girls have kept in touch ever since, with the mother of Laura Buxton #1 reporting nine years later that:

[The] Laura Buxton that released the balloon is my daughter and she is now 19 years old. The girls are still very good friends and meet up as and when time and commitments allow them — in fact, they are meeting again before they both go back to University. We have no idea why this happened but it did and out of it has come a wonderful friendship.

GIFT GIVING BY Ruth Reilly

Published June 21, 2016 by Nan Mykel

This November I went to Chicago with my daughter Vanessa to celebrate my son Gabriel’s 26th birthday along with his wife Christina, because we hadn’t been able to be together for it the last six years. September 11th had given me the strong compelling urge to see him, be with him, to hug and kiss him again. Also, 10 months before I had had breast cancer and surgery. My chemotherapy and radiation were done and I was grateful to be alive.

Gabe and I had had a fun outing in downtown Chicago one afternoon and were heading back to his home. The train was crowded so we had to find separate seats which disappointed me. However, I slid into a spot next to a young black boy of about 15 who was sound asleep with his head against the window.

It was a typical big city train ride with no one making eye contact or conversing. Even Gabe had closed his eyes to rest. There was a young black man in front of me sitting in a seat facing into the aisle, He appeared to be about 30, a man of style with his shoes of black, grey and maroon, his sweater with its Calvin Klein label on it and his shopping bag from Saks. The train jostled us along , and after awhile, the young black boy next to me shifted, putting his head on my shoulder.

As unexpected as it was, I didn’t mind and smiled a little, not moving. Shortly after, the man in front of me glanced in our direction noticing that this bespectacled, middle-aged white woman with a maroon beret and a silk scarf around her neck had a young, curly headed black boy asleep on her shoulder. He leaned in towards me a bit and said, “You can sit on the other side of me if you want. I’ll move my bags.”

I shook my head and said, “It’s OK. I’m a mother.” I was oddly touched by this accidental connection.

But suddenly I noticed that others had noticed us, too. There was an elderly black man down the aisle facing towards us who couldn’t take his eyes off us. Behind him was an elderly Asian man staring at us also. Others were looking too and finally Gabe woke up and lifted his eyebrows in note, saying nothing.

“All are one,” the Buddhist mantra came to my mind and suddenly I felt the truth of that state Thich Nhat Hanh calls interbeing. While I also felt special, as if I had been chosen to be there at this moment, I was clearly only a part of it. Everyone else who was witnessing this strange little scene was a part of it too. And then there was the boy. Who was this child?

The young man in front of me took all this in as well and decided to address the young boy asleep on my shoulder. “Hey, bud, do you know whose mother you got your head on?” He laughed.

But the boy never woke, never stirred.

“I think he’s exhausted,” I said. He looked clean and neat to me but thin and tired–he may have been ill.

“You’re a good woman,” the man replied getting out a dollar and stuffing it into the boy’s jacket.” …”And I thought I had had it rough.”

“A good woman?” I questioned to myself, thinking, sometimes, but but certainly not always, like most everyone else I knew. How about just lucky to be alive and lucky, through my own terrorist attack of cancer, to have learned the sweet moments are to be cherished? My voice was suddenly altered with a surge of emotion when I thought to say, “These are unusual times.”

“Indeed they are,” the man responded, looking away, “Indeed they are.”

“OK Mom, this is it,” Gabe announced as all 6’3″ of him got up to reclaim his mother a full stop before we would’ve normally gotten off.

I gently patted the young boy on the head, saying, “Gotta go,” and got up to stand by the door. But before leaving I looked back and saw him still crumpled over in the direction I had sat and wondered again–who was this child–and hoped he’d be all right.

Then as I took Gabe’s right arm with my left and walked down the street, I realized that my whole right shoulder and arm still had that warm good feeling of that young boy’s body heat in it. This was the side I’d had my surgery on, the side that still had 11 metal clips under my arm and that easily ached and stiffened….but it felt great.

I smiled, realizing while I thought I had been helping someone else out, he too had been helping me and probably everyone else who chanced to notice as well. We were all in it together – interbeingly – on a packed train at the end of a busy day in he beautiful city of Chicago.

Used by courtesy of Ruth Reilly

Addition to ME AND BERTRAND RUSSELL (Philosopher)

Published June 20, 2016 by Nan Mykel

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic, political activist and Nobel laureate. Wikipedia (Also no-goodnik, but I didn’t know that when I developed a crush on him and almost wrote him a fan letter in 1967.) He died in 1970, and fortunately I never connected with him personally. I had read his autobiography for the years 1872-1914 while depressed, and fell in love with his words, which were depressing also. I was certainly old enough to know better, but his words really touched me. I copied 6 pages of quotes in tiny handwriting in my journal. What turned me on? Russell Quotes like these:

,,,,in human relations one should penetrate to the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that (p 220)

…one needs, as the key to interpret alien experiences, a personal knowledge of great unhappiness, but that is a thing which one need hardly set forth to seek, for it comes unasked. When once one possesses this key, the strange, tragic phantasmagoria of people hoping, suffering, and then dying, begins to suffice without one’s desiring to take part, except occasionally, to speak a word of encouragement where it is possible. (p 253)

ADDED 6/25/16: (p 287): We stand on the shore of an ocean, crying to the night and the emptiness; sometimes a voice answers out of the darkness. But it is a voice of one drowning; and in a moment the silence returns. The world seems to me quite dreadful; the unhappiness of most people is very great, and I often wonder how they all endure it. To know people well is to know their tragedy; it is usually the central thing about which their lives are built.

Well, I could go on and on with these words which I related to so positively because of my own depression. I felt a connection with his experience and him. Perhaps I felt he somehow raised the experience of my own depression to a valuable, esteemed level. Fortunately, as I learned later, it was best that I did not pursue contact. I read that one girl did, and traveled to England to see him and later suicided. Moreover, in my reading somewhere a man who knew him personally referred to him as an undesirable person. (Since I cannot recall the exact word used, I won’t risk making a mistake, but it was not good).

Me and Robert Louis Stevenson

Published June 20, 2016 by Nan Mykel

Image result for Robert Louis Stevenson Rain

I guess I was feeling kind of depressed as a senior in high school, because the main lines I recall from Robert Louis Stevenson on RAIN are not those scattered over Google, but the following:

I am like one who has sat alone

all day on a level plain

with drooping head and trailing arms

in a ceaseless pour of rain.

I discovered that, unlike me, he didn’t stay depressed, but went on to his last verse:

And the purple fringes of the rain
Rose o’er the scarlet west,
And the birds sang in the soddened furze,
And my heart sang in my breast.

SERENDIPITY/SYNCHRONICITY

Published June 19, 2016 by Nan Mykel

See my new page for a background to the terms above, I plan to report S snd/or S’s in posts. Here’s the first one which occurred about 1979 and involves my daughter Lili (sh lili and allan ort for Little Liz). See her photo to the right.

It involves the I Ching, whch I am explaining via Wikipedia–

The I Ching ([î tɕíŋ] or Classic of Changes, is an ancient divination text and the oldest of the Chinese classics. Possessing a history of more than two and a half millennia of commentary and interpretation, the I Ching is an influential text read throughout the world, providing inspiration to the worlds
of religion, psychoanalysis, business, literature, and art. Originally a divination manual in the Western Zhou period (1000–750 BC), over the course of the Warring States period and early imperial period (500–200 BC) it was transformed into a cosmological text with a series of philosophical commentaries known as the “Ten Wings.” After becoming part of the Five Classics in the 2nd century BC, the I Ching was the subject of scholarly commentary and the basis for divination practice for centuries across the Far East, and eventually took on an influential role in Western understanding of Eastern thought.

The I Ching uses a type of divination called cleromancy, which produces apparently random numbers. Four numbers, 6 to 9, are turned into a hexagram, which can then be looked up in the I Ching book, arranged in an order known as the King Wen sequence. The interpretation of the readings found in the I Ching is a matter of centuries of debate, and many commentators have used the book symbolically, often to provide guidance for moral decision making as informed by Taoism and Confucianism. The hexagrams themselves have often acquired cosmological significance and paralleled with many other traditional names for the processes of change such as yin and yang and Wu Xing.

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One day about 1980 my daughter Lili showed some curiosity about the I Ching, whch I had been playing with. I let her toss the coins and we were both surprised when it came out Lili/Lili. Not to be distracted by so strange an occurrence, I had her toss the coins again. Again, they spelled out Lili/Lili, whereupon, somewhat shaken, we put the book away.

NEXT WEEK I’ll record another S/S, this one involving my youngest daughter.

SHARE ANY OF YOURS, VIA A COMMENT

START A NEW PAGE OR KILL ONE?

Published June 18, 2016 by Nan Mykel

Monkeys as Judges of Art, 1889. Retrieved from WikiArt.

openbook

I know 14 pages is way too much, but there’s another I want to have and so this is a time of decision-making. I refuse to give up Incest or Dear Downs, tho people run from it like mad. Relief is pure pleasure, and Life Issues can handle so many important things! There’s really some things I want to share and encourage on “Journal Your Way into Being,” and if I had the time I’d like to share mucho on the Dreams page (I’ve had experience with a public access show on dreams, led a dream group at a mental health center and prison, attended two annual meetings of the International Association for Dreams (at Charlottesville and Santa Fe), attended an ARE weekend workshop on dreams, and taught a creditless course on dreams at O.U. But there’s no way I can tackle the possible meanings of anothers’ dreams. (It’s too embarrassing and personally infringing).

I’m revising “Shattered Boundaries,” my novel and could post it as I go along, but I could just tuck that under ‘MY books.” Let’s see, what is left? Our Shadow Selves–no, I won’t kill that one because sometimes I just use it to think and wonder and try to figure out our human nature. I could let go of Poet/try as far as my poems are concerned, but I have a few (credited) poems I love by others included, and that leaves “Secrets,” which if anyone ever visited would be revealed as a place to store new (to me) discoveries from science, so I can refer back to them. For instance, that the left side of the brain is more positive in outlook than the right? Revealed by experimentation. But I’m 80 and I want to share more, especially about SERENDIPITY–yours and mine, to include not only “coincidences” but more from my life and how it is that an avowed current atheist can feel like she has a guardian angel? (Well, that could be my ISH)..

ANSWER: Start a new page. Thanks, Blogland, for helping me decide.

When I first started my page titled “Relief–Refreshing”…

Published June 17, 2016 by Nan Mykel

…I began the content with the best words I could remember. Tonight I found out more about the man (Jim V. Goure) who gave me those words 35 years ago, and I’m moved to share that information with you, found at http://www.urlight.org/?page_id=14: …

Jim was a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and served as a Commander in the Navy shortly after World War II, then was attached to the Atomic Energy Commission in Washington, D.C. as a Senior Executive Officer. During his work with this commission, Jim became aware of the very real threat of a nuclear war. He realized that none of the methods tried had established world peace. For years Jim had been protecting himself and loved ones by placing them in “bubbles of light.” The same could be done for the planet, he said, so he asked friends in Virginia Beach to join with his family using the Effective Prayer [see below].

In 1970, he took early retirement and moved with his wife, Diana, and their eight children to Black Mountain, NC. Here in the nurturing energy of these mountains, Jim and his family began to pray for peace four times every day. In 1976, Jim and Diana formed UNITED RESEARCH, INC., a nonprofit corporation to provide a vehicle for the receipt of individuals to have a place to come and pray and meditate.

I’m not a religious person, but a hopeful one. That year I had attended the Friends Yearly Gathering and had met an older woman with the most startling blue eyes I had ever seen. I mentioned her to Jim when I visited the Light Center , and he spoke her name (Mary Gilbert) and said that she was living with them at the Light Center.

In December 1986, Jim made his transition, but his legacy continues. Diana made her transition on September 11, 2013.

machupicchumid80s

Imagine that you are being filled with a soothing white light that permeates your entire body, then say to yourself the following, as often as seems useful:

I release to the light all my past… I release to the light all my negatives… I release to the light all my fears… I release to the light all my human relationships… I release to the light my future… I release to the light my death… I release to the light my inner self…

I am a LIGHT BEING I RADIATE the light from my light center throughout my being I radiate the light from my light center to EVERYONE I radiate the light from my light center to EVERYTHING I am in a BUBBLE of light and only light can come to me and only light can be here now.

(Optional: Thank you God for everything).

The Door — Ha Ha on Me!

Published June 16, 2016 by Nan Mykel

I could write a short book about my foray into blogland! I was dutifully reading my followings today and saw a bunch of doors labeled photo challenge or some such thing. Having just come from entries on statues, I chose a door and wrote something about it (see below). I had been told that on the “Home Page” of Dverse is a calendar of topics for the month. I couldn’t find anything called home page but did find that tonight was something called “poetics,” without explanation on that page that I could see. I don’t know how–maybe it was talk of us writing on “moods” that alerted me I had goofed again. Will return after the July vacation (f I read correctly). (signed with love, Nan the Nerd).

door

Bi-paneled, it can be opened wide

to let the right ones come inside.

Does not the grandeur of this gate

make you pause, even hesitate?

I want in, but do I dare face

this sacred, special holy place?

A heathen, I would be shut out

even if I should knock and shout.

A great archetype, it stands sedate

against my wisdom come too late.

The Witness of the Waking State

Published June 15, 2016 by Nan Mykel

ish from dropbox

This is a drawing from my journal December 28, 1975, and reprinted in Fallout: A Survivor Talks to Incest Offenders, 2014 p 244. It is from a mental image of my “ISH,” or Inner Self Healer (or Helper), as recognized and discussed by Christine Crawford, 1991, in Dissociation 4 (3), and E. Sue Blume, in Secret Survivors, 1990. Babette Rothschild (2000) refers to it as developing dual awareness. Ganga Stone (1996) appears to be referring to the same concept, although from a slightly religious perspective. She says, The Witness of the Waking State is so constant a presence in our lives that it’s hard to stay aware of it…But it’s very important to learn to catch hold of and identify with it because that changeless Witness is the One who makes it through the transition we call death….NOTE: The detached spectator is the Witness of the Waking State. That Witness is who you actually are….She suggests substituting in our thought self referants as our own name or “he” or “she” instead of I, such as “Nan is having a bad day today.” (Start the Conversation–The Book About Death You were Hoping to Find, Warner Books.)

My journal has often utilized drawings from my imagination in order to express more than words alone can. The journal portion of Fallout contains 28 drawings.

The drawing’s name for instance is “Nan,” the ISH, or the Witness of the Waking State, not “I.” A tad esoteric, eh? But try it; you might like it. P.S. I may add more to this–or should I make it a separate post? I forgot to include Allison, who came up with the ISH name, and Beahrs, who talks of purposefully utilizing healthy dissocation.