Break on through to the other side

We chased our pleasures here

Dug our treasures there

But can you still recall

The time we cried

Break on through to the other side

Break on through to the other side

-- The Doors

I understand how people take in a story, and how they need a symbol or a sign on the door. But the owl is meaningless to what is on the other side of the door. It’s just the doorway that’s important. 

The owl is the right symbol for the door. We are on this side, and EVERYTHING else is on that side of the door. There is is a LOT more! We are in this little tight hallway here, and on the other side of the door is this vastness! 

-- Mike Clelland (under hypnosis) 

 

Ere I knew, I had walked to the door, and seated myself with my ears against it, in order to catch every syllable of the revelation from the unseen outer world. And now I heard each word distinctly. The singer seemed to be standing or sitting near the tower, for the sounds indicated no change of place. . . .

Hardly knowing what I did, I opened the door. Why had I not done so before? I do not know.

-- George MacDonald, Phantastes

There's a subtle but discernible sense of frustration from the synchronicity fairies these days, as if they have been trying and trying for some time to nudge me into taking some particular decisive step, and I keep not doing it because, in my mortal obtuseness, I haven't the slightest idea what it is that I'm supposed to do. (Honestly, I don't think they know, either, which is why they can't spell it out for me.) And if the sync fairies ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.

Last night, a bit before two in the morning, I was out walking through the dark neighborhood, with the old Doors song "Break On  Through (To the Other Side)" running through my mind. The combination of the lyrics and the band name ("There are things known and things unknown and in between are the doors") made me think of Mike Clelland's owl as a symbol on the door, "and EVERYTHING else is on that side of the door." At the very moment I was thinking that, I turned my head and saw this:

It's the front door of one of my neighbors. I've passed it thousands of times without ever noticing anything. Can you see what I saw last night -- the stylized form of an owl, complete with facial disks, ears, beak, and folded wings? -- and perhaps, dangling from the beak, a playful hint of a metal worm?

During my lunch break today, I read a bit from Clelland's book. Specifically, I read this:

I've listened to a lot of people tell their owl experiences, and even though these are just stories of people seeing a bird, they almost always get described as a blessing, an honor, a gift, or an outright spiritual event. Almost all the accounts I receive have a similar mystical undercurrent. For me, the consistency of these stories represents a kind of confirmation, that these experiences go way beyond just owls and tap into something much deeper.

In the afternoon, I opened an English textbook to see what pages I needed to assign for homework. The first page to assign was this one:

Clelland wrote that people always describe seeing an owl as "an honor." Here, on a English test, the word honor is missing from a sentence, and one of the possible choices to fill the gap is owl.

Just after writing the above, I had the sudden thought that I ought to do a one-card pull from the Rider-Waite deck -- but then I immediately thought, Why bother? I already know it's going to be the Eight of Wands (the decisive action, strike-while-the-iron-is-hot card), and that's not helpful.

I ended up doing the pull anyway, though, and surprised myself by getting not the Eight of Wands but the closely related Eight of Cups.

That's an interesting twist, anyway. The sync fairies always do have a few surprises up their sleeves. I'll have to think about that card for a while. For starters, what comes to mind is how much its mirror image suggests the Flammarion engraving.

I don't think I'd ever made that connection before. It seems obvious now.

Metal worm claims to be owl

Please don’t eat me, Mr. Owl! I’m just a friendly owl like yourself -- definitely not a delicious metal worm!

-- suspiciously worm-like metallic object

Yesterday I posted "Mr. Owl ate my metal worm," having thought of that palindrome while reading Mike Clelland's The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity, and the UFO Abductee. The associative link was, of course, owls. Little did I realize that a metal worm was also shortly to make an appearance in Clelland's book!

Today, I read a few pages and then came to this:

Metal object says it's an owl

I heard this from a woman who described a very odd nighttime event that happened when she was about five years old. She was awake and lying in bed alone in her room when she saw a metal object zip down from the sky and clamp itself onto the outside of her window. She tried to scream for her mother, when a voice spoke in her head, "Do not be afraid, I am only a friendly owl."

She knew it was no owl, but all the fear left when she heard those words. She stayed still in the bed and stared at it. She was looking at a round lens on a curved metal stalk. . . .

The association of an owl with a metal object would have been a mildly interesting coincidence by itself, but Clelland includes a sketch of this object by the woman who saw it, and I'm going to call it like it is. This isn't just some generic "metal object" -- it's what you would call a metal worm.

Three in a row

I snapped this photo at 2:18 on the morning of July 21, 2022. As usual, the image quality is terrible, but it at least shows the configuration of the heavenly bodies.

That’s the Moon, Jupiter, and Saturn. I suppose it’s fairly obvious which is which. If you draw a line from Saturn to Jupiter, it passes right through the Moon. Although you can’t see it in the photo, it’s a third-quarter Moon, and the terminator runs perpendicular to the Jupiter-Saturn line, with the Saturn-ward side illuminated. The whole configuration is as geometrically precise as a crop circle.

Things like this always feel meaningful, though I struggle to conceptualize how anything as mechanical and predetermined as the motion of the planets could be meaningful. It’s the old Shining Buddha Problem, still unresolved.

Mr. Owl ate my metal worm

Some months before all this owl business started, one of my students noticed that racecar spelled in reverse is racecar. I told her that this was called a palindrome and gave another example: the sentence "Mr. Owl ate my metal worm."

This morning, while I was reading Mike Clelland's book The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity, and the UFO Abductee, that palindrome came back into my mind, and it occurred to me to wonder if it might mean anything.

For starters, what's a "metal worm"? Well, worm can mean "dragon." In D&D, "chromatic" dragons (black, blue, green, red, etc.) are evil, and "metallic" dragons (gold, silver, bronze, etc.) are good. The king of the metallic dragons -- the Metal Worm par excellence -- is the Wyrmking Bahamut. The name Bahamut is taken from Arabic mythology and is cognate to the Hebrew Behemoth. In the Arabic version, though, Bahamut is a giant fish, and Kuyutha (generally assumed to be a corruption of Leviathan) is a giant bull, reversing the Hebrew identities.

So the Metal Worm corresponds to Behemoth, but Behemoth-as-Leviathan, Behemoth as a whale. The name Bahamut evokes both of these mythical monsters as one.

Regular readers will get where I'm going with this. In my April 1 post "Call me Ishmael," I discussed a D&D monster called a behemoth, described as "a killer whale with four stubby legs," and connected it to the then-ongoing sync-stream relating to the many-eyed whale of John Dee.

This little train of thought, taking me from "Mr. Owl" to a killer whale, had taken place while I was reading The Messengers. At this point I returned my attention to the book, turned the "page" (virtually; I was using the Kindle app), and saw that -- completely unexpectedly in a book about owls and UFOs -- the next section bore the heading "Orcas in Puget Sound." It related a story about how "approximately three dozen orcas surrounded a commuter ferry as it crossed Puget Sound . . . carrying sacred tribal artifacts" from a Seattle museum back to the homeland of the Suquamish tribe. What was this story even doing in this particular book? The owl connection was tenuous indeed:

The orcas, like the owls, are animals considered devoid of any higher consciousness by the watchdogs of our consensus reality. But nonetheless they are showing up as totems at an important moment, they are presenting themselves as a beautiful example of this attuned symbolic power. This wasn't a dream vision of orcas, they were physically there, playing the role of escort for something sacred on its journey home.

In other words, this story is inserted more or less randomly in a book about owls. Whales are never mentioned again, although their similarity to owls may be deeper than Clelland himself notes. The book is called Messengers because that is one of the traditional roles of the owl in mythology: The owl flies into the dark, representing the unseen realm, and returns with a message. Likewise, the whale dives deep into the sea and, unlike most marine animals, returns regularly to the surface. It, too, would make a good mythological "messenger."

If the Metal Worm is Bahamut, alias Leviathan, the statement that "Mr. Owl ate my metal worm" takes on an added significance -- because one of the things the Bible says about the Leviathan is that God will give it to his people to eat. "Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness" (Ps. 74:14). "Rabbi Johanan says: In the future, the Holy One, Blessed by He, will make a feast for the righteous from the flesh of the leviathan" (Bava Batra 75a).

Those who eat the Metal Worm are (a) the people inhabiting the wilderness and (b) the righteous in the Messianic Age. The owl is a proverbial creature of the wilderness in the Bible. The Psalmist laments, "I am like an owl of the desert" (Ps. 102:6). Jeremiah says, "Therefore the wild beasts of the desert with the wild beasts of the islands shall dwell there, and the owls shall dwell therein" (Jer. 50:39). And who shall inherit the Messianic Age? According to Daniel, "they that be wise" (Dan. 12:3).

Two hundred and fifty-nine

Last night I stopped at a coffee shop on my way home to buy something for my wife. The cashier gave me a receipt saying that my order number was 259, circling that number with a sharpie.

This is a significant number to me.

Simple English Gematria (S:E:G:) assigns numerical values to words and phrases by adding up the ordinal values of their constituent letters (A = 1, B = 2, . . . Z = 26). In this system, the value of the string "two hundred and fifty-nine" is 259. I am only aware of two numbers that have this property, the other being 251.

Furthermore, 259 is seven times 37, and 37 is a highly significant number. Twice 37 is 74, the S:E:G: value of the words simple, English, and gematria, as well as that of Jesus, cross, gospel, and Messiah. Twenty-four times 37 is 888, the value of the name Jesus in Greek gematria. Eighteen times 37 is 666. Seventy-three times 37 is 2701, the Hebrew gematria value of the first verse of the Bible.

⁂

This morning, I prayed the Rosary in my chapel, as is my habit these days. At the end of my prayers, a phrase popped into my mind unbidden: "to evade this world's snares and penetrate its mysteries." My eyes then fell on two books that I had left on a shelf in the chapel, having forgotten to take them out when I converted the room to its present purpose: Moby-Dick and Strieber's The Secret School. About an hour before my prayers, I had read a few pages of Mike Clelland's The Messengers -- a passage that mentioned whales, and another that said, "An example: a hologram of an owl would appear. When I would see something like that, that would tell me it's time for school."

The number 259 came back into my mind, and I had the distinct impression that I should check the 259th page of each of those books.

In my copy of Moby-Dick, page 259 is the last page of a chapter and only has a few lines of text on it:

This seemed highly relevant to "to evade this world's snares and penetrate its mysteries."

Page 259 of The Secret School is part of the afterword by journalist Ed Conroy. Here is the first paragraph on the page:

The juxtaposition of this with the Moby-Dick page, with its heading "The Albatross," struck me because in my July 2021 post "In the sync stream," I had connected an angel on a temple spire with the albatross and Moby-Dick.

I thought of how the angel Moroni [on the spire of the Nauvoo temple] was occupying the place that would traditionally be given to the cross, which made me think of the Coleridge line “instead of the cross, the albatross.” And this brought me back to Melville: Ishmael’s recollection of the first albatross he ever saw, which he repeatedly likens to an angelic being. “Its vast archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark” — “flew to join the wing-folding, the evoking, the adoring cherubim” — “as Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself.”

Conroy mentions "four-winged angels" -- i.e., cherubim as described by Ezekiel (in contrast to the six-winged seraphim of Isaiah) -- and cherubim is the precise word used by Melville with reference to the albatross.

More halos and another astronomical dream

Last night Jupiter was even closer to the Moon, and again an even cover of cirrostratus made them the only visible heavenly bodies. This time I saw the faintest halo imaginable -- certainly nothing I could pick up on my phone's camera -- but it was enormous. It looked to have about the same radius as a rainbow, which would be 42 degrees. Actually, it must have been 46, since 46-degree halos are a recognized phenomenon. 

According to Wikipedia, 22-degree halos occur around either the Sun or the Moon and are quite common. The article on 46-degree halos says they are rare and only mentions them occurring around the Sun -- so I guess 46-degree lunar halos must be quite rare indeed. Certainly I had never seen one before.

⁂

That night, I dreamed that the appearance of the sky had suddenly and permanently changed. There was a rainbow in the sky now all the time, even at night, but it was not really arc-shaped, nor was it a smooth continuum of hues. It had more the shape and texture of a rainbow-colored spectrogram of human speech, made up of many lines of bright color separated by dark spaces.

I was the only one who was not surprised by this change. I told a few people, "I read a book that said this was going to happen. The author predicted it years ago and said that it would be a sign of the Second Coming. Later scientists will discover that it's caused by the fact that there are now two Suns, a red one and a green one, though we can only ever see one of them at a time and it always looks white."

It wasn't long before the entire world had discovered the book I mentioned, and it was all over TV and the Internet. It had a plain yellow-beige cover, with the title and author's name printed in black and a very simple rosette design, also black, between the two. The name and title were not well-defined in the dream, but it was clear that the author was a French Catholic philosopher -- not Jacques Maritain, but someone of that general breed. The title, which was English (presumably a translation), included the word Rosary, and one of the things the book implied was that people praying the Rosary would be a contributing factor in causing this pre-apocalyptic transformation of the sky.

I was standing outside with a few family members, looking at the new sky. Someone pointed out to the horizon, where an enormous dark figure was looming, and said, "Look at that! Isn't that -- Godzilla?" It wasn't Godzilla exactly -- more mammal-like or even Permian-looking, I think, with a face vaguely reminiscent of Dimetrodon -- but it was a gigantic monster of that general type. "Yes," I said, "the author predicted that as well."

Owl time, and cold noodles

Forget rabbit holes; it's these owl burrows you've got to watch out for!

I ended my July 15 post "Two videos of rehabilitated baby owls, sent 42 minutes apart" with an account of seeing a T-shirt that said "THE TIME IS NOW" and feeling it was significant. On July 17, I posted "The curving corridor, the owl door, and the time is now," in which "now is the time" was associated with owls.

On July 18, I noticed this printed on the pencil case of one of my young students.

I always wonder how products like this come to exist in the first place. What on God's green earth makes a designer think, "Hey, let's decorate it with an owl looking at a set of bullet points that say 'time's up,' 'quickly,' and 'mmm . . . .'"? Perhaps the sync fairies have a hand in it all.

⁂

After work -- okay, this is a little weird. There's a restaurant in my city that went out of business about seven years ago and was just completely abandoned. The city put a perfunctory wall of corrugated metal around it to keep people like me out and just let nature take its course. I used to eat there ages ago. It was quite a large place, with a little courtyard with a pond and some banyan trees. Suddenly, about two weeks ago, I suddenly began to feel a magnetic attraction for the old abandoned restaurant and a strong urge to somehow get inside. This turned out to be easier than expected. There was a gate in the corrugated metal wall, and the latch was extremely rusty but not actually locked. I got a clipboard and some spray lubricant (tip: if you wear a tie and carry a clipboard, people always assume you're authorized), and I was in.

The place was all overgrown with foliage, but I managed to get through it into the restaurant proper. It was as if everything had been abandoned in haste. All the furniture was still there, and many of the tables still had menus and dishes on them. There were still pots on the stoves in the kitchen and big rusty tins of cooking oil in the back. The cash register had been gutted, of course, but aside from that it appeared as if one day everyone had just stopped what they were doing, walked out, taking nothing with them, and never come back.

Over the next few days, I returned to the abandoned restaurant two more times, at which point I figured I had about exhausted the interest of the place. After work tonight, though, I felt an urge to go back. I got the gate open, stepped inside, and just stood there, not actually entering the building. The brick wall in front of me was overgrown with what I had before taken to be some sort of ivy-like vines, but tonight, once my eyes had adjusted to the dark, I saw that the wall was covered not only with leaves but with hundreds and hundreds of what were unmistakably figs -- still green, but quite large. The wall had been overgrown not with ivy but with banyan epiphytes! I had seen that wall three times recently, always in daylight, but I hadn't seen any figs on it; those were new. A line from the Gospel of Mark popped into my head: "and when he came to it, he found nothing but leaves; for the time of figs was not yet" (Mark 11:13). Well, now the time of figs was here -- yet another synchronistic message saying, The time is now.

I stood there staring at the fig-covered wall for several seconds, and then I went back out, latched the gate, and went home.

⁂

When I got home, I used a phone app to search the Bible for the word figs to confirm that I had remembered Mark correctly (I had), and then I thought, Why not search for owl as well?

The Bible doesn't have much to say about owls, but I was using the Mormon "Gospel Library" app, which includes not only the Bible and the Mormon scriptures but also many decades of church-published magazines. One of the search results was about a baby owl, which caught my attention because my original mention of "THE TIME IS NOW" had been in a post about videos of rehabilitated baby owls. I tapped the link and read "A Friend in Need," from the October 1983 issue of the Mormon children's magazine The Friend. It was about, yes, a baby owl that had been rescued, rehabilitated, and returned to the wild.

The ground where the baby owl had fallen was cold and very hard. Grandpa figured that the owlet had lain there for about twenty-four hours. He and Uncle Bruce fixed up a plastic ice-cream bucket with some straw. Then they carefully wrapped a warm towel around the baby bird, placed it inside the bucket, and waited.

For about twenty minutes nothing happened. Then the little owl started to move and to make a tiny peeping sound. Half an hour later it was actively wriggling about, so they decided to feed it something—but what?

What indeed? I certainly didn't see this coming!

Most birds like worms, but the ground was still frozen. Then an idea struck them: Perhaps the baby owl would think that noodles left over from their supper were worms. When Uncle Bruce dangled one before the little bird, it opened its beak and gulped it right down. Then it opened its mouth wide for another one. Soon the owl had devoured almost a cupful of noodles. For dessert it ate a teaspoonful of hamburger!

That's right, they fed the baby owl cold noodles. On July 17, just an hour and a half after posting "The curving corridor, the owl door, and the time is now," I had posted about misreading "odd noises" as "cold noodles." The book I was reading when I made this error was, of course, Mike Clelland's The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity, and the UFO Abductee.

Baby owls and cold noodles -- not exactly a juxtaposition you run into every day!

Apparently the sync fairies want to inform me that the time is now -- but the time for what? That message by itself isn't actually very helpful.