Chapter Thirty-three: Synchronicity City

We moved in to the new house on my birthday on February 12th.  Although the interior still needed cosmetic improvements, it was like moving into a palace after five years in the shack-becoming-a-house in the woods.  Sandra came on moving day, bringing a feast and a cake.  We all celebrated our return to the “real world”.  All except Larry, that is.

We purchased materials for improvements on the house to prepare it to sell, so we could make our big quantum leap to the state of Montana.  But Larry was fired from his job.  I knew there was a gradually building antagonism between Larry and his boss, but that didn’t ease the blow when it came.  The only thing I could do was to work as fast as possible to get the house into saleable condition.  Larry was far too depressed to help.  So I got a job.

I went to work for an attorney who was among the first to realize the potentials of the “age of information”.  He had created a human resources service for large corporations.  The resources and skills of a private investigator were employed to create dossiers on potential employees.  The litigious nature of our society had made such a service almost mandatory to protect a potential employer from lawsuits claiming various types of exclusion.  If a hard file of facts justified refusal of employment, such litigation was easily answered.  By the same token, employees who might not be fit, and who might later be a cause for suit by a client, were also able to be excluded.  Finally, the best candidates for any position, from simple clerks to CEO’s, could be identified.  The benefits to their dossiers of such validation of experience, expertise, and references were considerable.  A fully “vetted” candidate could be placed at the head of the line for consideration.

The company handled mostly large corporate accounts where hundreds and thousands of dossiers were compiled.  After a short time as a sort of glorified clerical worker, my employer decided I had potential and I was trained in the law and was assigned to handle the accounts of several major airlines.  My specialty soon became “pilot dossiers”.  Some airlines wanted to collect certain “psychological” facts about candidates for pilot positions without the obvious psychiatric examination, so I was further trained in certain psychological assessment techniques.  I soon developed an interviewing style designed to elicit very deep information relating to these issues.  The company was pleased with my work.  My thoughts and opinions were valued, my skills were praised, and I learned many new things – most especially, about computers, and fell in love with them almost instantly – and for the first time in many years began to experience myself as a valued human being.

Larry felt threatened by my new job.  His response was rather strange.  Instead of finding a “real” job, as he could easily have done with his intelligence and skills, he took a job driving a parking lot vacuum truck on the night shift.

He took our children to accompany him on his rounds and collect the garbage while he swept the lots.

I was extremely unhappy for my children to be out at night bagging garbage from public trashcans.  Aside from health considerations, the demeaning, soul-killing aspect troubled me deeply.  His view was that it was a “noble and worthy service”.  As a good Christian, the “sweat of the brow” deal was almost mandatory in his mind, and the more “humble” the work, the greater the crown of glory he would receive!    Clearly, if we were going to enjoy a big new house, there was a price to be paid for it.  Naturally, the children were not asked whether they wanted a crown of glory.  It did put them alone in his company for many hours at a time.  I believe he did his damndest to convince them I was not only on a path to damnation, but crazy to boot.

Two months into this routine, me working days and Larry working nights, an event of terrifying significance occurred.

I was sleeping – alone – and I was awakened by a series of noises.  The drawers of Larry’s chest were pulled open and the contents rifled through.  I thought Larry had stopped off to pick something up and was just doing it in the dark to avoid turning on the lights and waking me up.  I lifted my head and saw that it wasn’t Larry.  A strange man was in my bedroom, going through the top drawer in the dresser.

Maybe I had awakened in a different life!  A life where I was married to someone else, and that man stood here in my bedroom.  But I sort of did a reality check and quickly realized this wasn’t the answer.  I was in this life, and not another, I was married to Larry, and not this strange man whose back was still to me as he continued to search for something.

My next thought was that Larry had brought someone home with him – a helper, perhaps.  Maybe he had sent the guy into the bedroom to get something for him while he made coffee in the kitchen.

I discarded that idea immediately because Larry would never send a strange man into the bedroom where I was sleeping to get anything.

The only obvious solution: Larry wasn’t home and this strange man had come into the house illegally.

Now, of course, all this happened rather quickly and when the final conclusion was drawn, my heart nearly stopped!

I decided that pretending to be asleep would give me an edge if I needed one.  I dropped my head back on the pillow and quickly pulled my hair over my face to hide the fact that my eyes were open and I was watching.  The man turned and looked at me, thought I was still “sleeping,” and tiptoed out of the room.  In horror I saw that he was carrying a knife.

I rolled over to reach the phone under the bed and managed to find the zero in the darkness.  As soon as an operator answered, I whispered: “There is a strange man in my house and he’s armed!”

The operator connected me with 911.  I repeated my whispered declaration.  Quickly they took my address and told me to stay on the line.  They asked if I could shut the door and lock myself in the room.  Well, I could have, if Larry hadn’t taken the doors off the hinges in his desultory efforts to work on the house.

As I whispered  “no” to the dispatcher, I realized with a growing sense of terror that the drawer the man had been going through was full of only one thing: boxes of bullets of various sorts that went to the rack of guns on the wall outside my room!    And my children were sleeping in the house.  I think that, at that moment, I nearly lost it.  I hissed to the dispatcher that the guy might now be armed with a high powered rifle.

Within five minutes, I could hear the distinct sounds of police cars approaching from all directions, pulling into the side street, the alley, and in front of the house.  The dispatcher asked me if I knew where the man was now.  I thought he was in the dining room, judging by the sounds.  I was told to stay put.

Well, they came in like gangbusters for sure!    K-9 troops and all.  And as they came in the front door, the burglar flew out the back door.  Apparently he jumped the fence to the neighbor’s yard where he ditched his cap, jacket and weapons.  But it was too late.  The dogs were after him.  He ended up face down in the street about a block away, surrounded by probably more cops than he had ever seen in his life.

They brought him around in a squad car for me to identify, and the whole adventure was over.

The children never even woke up.

The “bust” made the papers two days later and I was toasted by my employers and fellow workers as a veritable heroine who kept her cool.

Larry’s hound dog had been “out” roaming around.  It was time to get a dog who knew his job.  We acquired a half Chow, half Labrador puppy and the kids named her Isis.
***

I was growing in awareness.  I knew this relatively mundane incident had a deep message for me.  This was a “clue” from the universe that I needed to learn something fast.  If I didn’t, I was in danger.  I was coming to the idea that the world around us is a very accurate mirror of what we refuse to acknowledge.  No matter what happened in our lives, if we took the time and trouble to examine our thinking and our attitudes, and to compare them to the symbols of reality, we could isolate and identify the lessons pointing the way toward change.  That way we would not need to experience the lesson again.  It seemed to be so that it was not what we thought that created our reality, but what we ignored consciously and what our subconscious mind was observing and trying to bring to our attention.

It was clear that my “powers of subconscious manifestation” had achieved an all-time high with this one.  I wasn’t making glasses and windows break any more.  Now I was manifesting dramas of full materialization including human actors!

But what was it?  What “doorway” was open in my life that made me vulnerable to being robbed and possibly even killed?  What was I not seeing?  What observation was my subconscious mind making that my conscious mind was refusing to acknowledge?

I proposed this idea to Larry and he went off on an absolute rant that I was really losing it.  He said: “Do you mean to tell me that you think that whatever happens in our lives, all our experiences, are lessons?”

“Yes,” I said.

“If I walk in the room here and somebody has spilled a box of pins and I step on one of them, it’s a lesson?” he inquired contemptuously.

“Yes,” I said, less sure of my ground.

“You are suggesting that every time we have an injury or suffer an illness, or experience an event, there is something we are supposed to learn from it?  It’s a ‘message?’ or a clue of some sort to a spiritual reality?”

“Yes,” I replied – certain that it was so, but unable to articulate how or why I was sure, or even how to make these interpretations of reality.

“Then if that is the case,” he said, smiling like the cat that ate the canary, “what’s wrong with YOU?  Why have you experienced so much sickness?”

I believed my experiences of the past ten years had been the result of my own attitudes borne in the Fundamentalist trap of ignoring these very things: the lessons of life.  I pointed out that, as soon as I had effected some changes, as soon as I had begun to be aware of things, our reality had changed.

Larry wasn’t buying it.  He simply couldn’t see any causal relationship between the changes I had experienced and what had manifested in our lives.  God either gave or took away, and it had nothing to do with us except, perhaps, in the context of whether or not we were “good Christians”.

Finally he said:  “Well, if your theory is right, then it’s obvious.  You have the problem, because I wasn’t even home when the guy broke in.”  Triumphantly, he left the room.

He had a point.

***

In the fall of 1990, our youngest child, the baby, became ill.  I had had to stop nursing when I went back to work, and I sorely missed the constant closeness I had been able to create with each of my other babies.  Mother was living with us, on the waiting list for an apartment in a retirement community, and she watched the children while I was at work.

My baby had received a tentative diagnosis of Cystic Fibrosis, and at a certain point, it seemed to be obvious that she was going to die.  I resigned from my job to stay home so I could be with her as much as possible for whatever time we might have.  It was a terrible time; 7 months of terror, emergency hospital trips, sometimes in the middle of the night, when the baby stopped being able to breathe.  I was a wreck.

Mother came home from the chiropractor one day and announced that he could help our child.  In fact, after she had described the situation to him, he was so confident that he could cure her, he offered to do it at no charge.

I was willing to try anything.  And, as it turned out, he was right.  He thought there had been some glitch in her delivery that “subluxated” her spine at the point where the nerves to the lungs exit.  It was a situation just waiting for the right conditions to exacerbate it, possibly when I stopped nursing and put her on infant formula.  It was true that she had been jammed sideways in the womb while I “held back” delivery for over 45 minutes, waiting for the anesthesiologist to arrive at the hospital the night she was born.  Being squeezed by hard labor for that period of time, in that position, was probably enough to “subluxate” anybody’s spine!

After six adjustments, taking her off all cow’s milk products, and putting her on raw goat’s milk, I was able to take her off all medication, and she began to thrive.
***

As soon as the baby was better, I felt again that I ought to be doing more toward getting us on stable financial footing to sell the house and move to Montana.  I was seeing hypnotherapy clients through contacts Sandra made for me.  At this point, she was a supervisor of a large state agency that managed cases where people had been extremely traumatized and the state was paying for treatment.  Many of my clients came to me through Sandra when standard psychotherapy had not proved effective.  I fully realized the risks I was taking in agreeing to talk to these people.  Sandra had consulted with the legal expert in her office and advised me to obtain religious ordination, have legal release drawn up for each client to sign, and to accept donations rather than charging a set “fee”.

I told Sandra I felt like a fraud being “ordained” by mail, but she was so certain that what I was doing was a necessary service that she always found ways to talk me out of my objections.  Sandra, herself, had many inner conflicts about the Catholicism of her background.  I think that my work, which I always discussed with her, was her way of getting questions answered that plagued her as much as they did me.  Of course, her interest and overt activity had to be kept secret from her family and co-workers.

Because of her position and contacts, these encounters became subjects in our search for answers about the true nature of life and death, good and evil, and most of all: the nature of our reality itself.  However, more often than not, those who needed therapy the most were unable to pay more than a token amount.

I was becoming adept at applying the Past Life Therapy techniques to good benefit.  Issues could be carried from one life into the next, causing problems that ordinary psychotherapy did not even attempt to address.  That, of course, raised the significant question about life itself.

Nearly everything we are taught about life, cradle to grave, seemed to be a deliberate system of lies built to protect the edifice of the religious teachings of One God, the monotheism of Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

These were dangerous systems, designed to keep people ignorant and distinctly vulnerable to Evil with a capital “E”.  Of course, my idea about who was behind it all ran along the lines of just simple greed for money and power being used to control gullible human beings.  After all, it wasn’t possible for this to be deliberately imposed from “above”.  Was it?

Even if mankind had distorted the “word of God” and had twisted it in the Bible, or promulgated fraudulent versions of it, it was still possible to find the threads of truth in all religions and by gathering them together, to find what was really of truth and beauty and goodness in the earth, wasn’t it?

Well, I wasn’t sure.  It was time to begin an in-depth study of demonic possession, exorcism, and the nature of Darkness.  For this, I needed books.  For books, I needed money.

Hypnotherapy was not a moneymaker  for sure even if the information I was acquiring was utterly priceless.  I tried various “work at home” schemes and read the employment advertisements daily in hopes of finding the perfect “work at home” deal in the same way I had found the perfect house.

Which reminds me: there was another unusual thing about this house: it was right down the street from the house that had belonged to Grant’s mother.  Yes, the Grant of my first “love”.  Not only that, but his mother had died, leaving him the house, and he now lived there, just a few blocks away.

I came by this knowledge by walking down our new street one day to get the “feel” of the neighborhood.  On the corner of Lincoln and Montana, there stood a house with the complicated Polish name that I knew so well on the mailbox.  I went home and looked the name up in the phone book and found that it was, indeed, the same person.  What a surprise!

On an impulse, I called Grant just to see how his life had progressed since last I saw him.  He launched into a pathetic tale of woe.  He’d been in a car wreck not long after marrying the woman who had answered the phone and accused me of destroying his life.  He received a large settlement from this accident and invested in a motorcycle dealership in partnership with his best friend.  His wife then fell in love with this friend, and ended up divorcing him, acquiring in the divorce settlement not only his house, but his business also.  He said she “took him for everything he had.”

At the end of this recitation, I admit that I was less than “holy” in my response.  The only thing I said was: “There IS a God!”

Apparently he didn’t hear me, or couldn’t hear me, because then he proceeded to reminisce about how much he had loved me, how much he had missed me all these years, how “great and glorious” a passion we had shared.

I replied: “That wasn’t love, it was sickness.”

He didn’t hear me.  On and on he went, hinting subtly and then overtly that we ought to meet and possibly pick up where we left off.

I wasn’t even tempted.  As many difficulties as I could see in my marriage, there was no way on God’s green earth that I would allow emotional hooks ever to hurt people again.  I managed to evade any suggestions, and finally worked my way to ending the conversation.  When I hung up, I thought, “Whew!    I can’t believe I was ever taken in by that nonsense!”

But, thinking about “old times” reminded me about Keith again.  More than anything, I wondered how he had gotten on these many years.  As crazy as he had been, I still had a “soft spot” for his suffering.  We had parted under such unpleasant circumstances, I was sure he’d never want to hear from me again, so I merely mulled it over for a few days.  In the end, I felt that resolution of the issue was better than constantly questioning.

He turned out to be ecstatic to hear from me.  In fact, he wanted me to come and visit him as he had “many things” to tell me about what he had learned in the past seventeen years.  I made a date to come up, bringing a couple of my children with me, and we had a very nice visit.  He had changed in many ways, but he was still the same way about being unable to exert any control over his emotions whatsoever.

Keith was still writing, and I was surprised that he had not modernized and gone to a computer.  He was interested in the idea and, with his secretary’s help, we came up with a plan to find a good system.  He generously offered to buy one for me, too.

So I had my first computer, courtesy of Keith Laumer.

My options for working at home were now significantly expanded.  I obtained a good astrology program for doing horoscopes.  In my late teens I’d learned how to cast a chart the “hard way,” doing all the math and interpretations by hand.  How much easier to have the computer do the chart erection, and I’d just need to type up the text.

Then I thought: why not make money doing what I enjoyed: writing?

I was reading the employment ads daily when suddenly, one day, there was a new one: scriptwriter for a television producer who made infomercials.

What an interesting thing!    I had never heard of any film company in the area.  In the end, it was more curiosity about who was behind the ad than any real anticipation I might get the job that prompted me to call.

And that is how I met Francis Grant Scott.  He became my friend Frank, and meeting him changed my life.

I mention the attitude of non-anticipation because it has turned out to be a clue to “activation” of universal potentials.  I have learned that when I act in the “mind of a child,” without emotional attachment or any anticipation of a given outcome, the universe has a marvelous way of responding with all and everything that is needed.  But I didn’t really know that then!    I was getting a lot of hints, realizing that the Universe speaks to us in the events of our lives as symbols of deeper truths, but I was still, essentially, just “walking on water”.

As it happened, my work experience interested Frank enormously and, after finishing up basic talk about the job, we moved on to discuss metaphysics.  He was particularly interested in astrology and wanted me to do his chart.  He gave me the necessary data, including his birthplace: Ypsilanti, Michigan.

During the course of this conversation, we discovered that we had read many of the same books and held many of the same opinions about various phenomena, and so on.  What was most bizarre was the combination of factors.  Frank had the famous (or infamous, depending on how you look at it) middle name “Grant.”  He also had a cousin with the same name as mine, including my middle name, and who was also the mother of five children.  The only difference in the name was a single letter difference.  He also had a sister whose had a daughter born in the same year and had the same name as my youngest child.  Again, the only difference in the name was a single letter difference.

That was quite a strange list of “synchronicities,” and I wondered if these were “signs and symbols” of the Universe speaking.  Well, could be: question is, were they signs of good things, or warnings?  I decided to keep my own counsel; only time would tell.

We ended the conversation with a date for Frank to pick up the horoscope, and that was that.  As far as the job was concerned, I figured I was out of the running, but I didn’t mind.  Within two minutes after I hung up the phone, it rang again.  It was a wrong number, but the crazy thing was that it was a woman calling long distance trying to contact her relatives in Florida and she wanted me to help her find their number.  She mentioned, without prompting, that she was calling from Ypsilanti, Michigan!  Needless to say, I did a “double-take!”

The Universe was definitely trying to get my attention.

At the appointed time, Frank arrived to pick up his horoscope.  I had an impression of him from his voice, that he would be a very large, portly, man.  But, he was, on the contrary, exceptionally tall and thin.

We began a series of conversations, unlike any that I had before, that continued on for several months.  He made it a habit to visit at least once a week.  He also made sure that I got the job as the “script-writer”.

I didn’t know it then, but Initiation had begun in earnest.

Continue to Chapter 34: That’s Hollywood!