As I’ve written before, I am one of those people who has a synchronistic relationship with 11:11. 11:11 was my original wake up call, and it continues to be sort of a master number for me. But 11:11 opened the door to a whole river of synchronicities that I swim most every day. All kinds of things can be synchronous. I keep my eye out and try to follow the strings when they occur. They are breadcrumbs marking the way.

Numbers other than elevens show up synchronistically in phases. They are a subtle line of communication between me and my higher self, or so I think anyway.

For a while I had sets of consecutive twos showing up all over the place. Then it was fives. Lately it has been consecutive fours. Fours all over the place. One of the more striking examples of this is that I keep jolting awake from a deep sleep and looking at the digital clock on the other side of the room at 4:44 a.m. exactly. It occurs so often that I now wake up my husband as a witness when it happens. All I need to say is: “4:44 AGAIN!”

The other night I woke up early on with anxiety about work. In desperation, I asked the universe to help me learn from and heal my job situation. I fell back asleep and hours later woke with a start. I sat up to check the clock on the other side of the bed. Sure enough, it was 4:44. I thought that my higher self was trying to tell me something about my work. I had the thought that fours mean transfiguration. Then I fell back asleep.

I dreamt I was in a bookstore café. The guy at the next table had Daniel Pinchbeck’s 2012 book in front of him. I commented on it, telling him I had read it and it was good, though actually I haven’t read it yet.

There was a young woman sitting at the table behind me. She had two books in front of her. I started a conversation with her and told her not to buy the books. I said I would check for them at home and give them to her if I had them.

The first book was Look Homeward Angel. I have never read this book. I have never intended to read this book. I haven’t even thought of it twice before now, though I’ve known of its existence.

The identity of the second book was unclear in the dream, but I left the young woman at the table thinking that I had to look at home for Thomas Wolfe and Robert Penn Warren, so perhaps the second book was All the King’s Men.

Okay, once again, I have not read All the King’s Men, nor have I read anything else by Robert Penn Warren. I have not felt the urge to. I knew of their existence – both book and author, but that’s it.

I woke up as I was leaving for home to go look for the books.

In the waking world, I went to work (ugh), where I googled the second two books and authors because their presence in the dream was odd to me. I learned that Thomas Wolfe set Look Homeward Angel in a thinly fictionalized version of his hometown — Asheville, North Carolina. I didn’t know Asheville existed until recently when it came up synchronistically in another context, so the dream connection got my attention. Then I learned that both Thomas Wolfe and Robert Penn Warren died on September 15th. I have no idea what significance this has, if any. It just makes me think I should visit Asheville, North Carolina. Perhaps on September 15th.

Have you checked out Asheville, North Carolina online? There is a website where someone makes the claim that if you’re into 2012, Asheville is the place for you.

Okay, maybe I am babbling. Then again, maybe not.

I will end this post with the following thought, which has nothing to do with anything else I’ve written . . .

I want to be able to say that I stand by what I perceive in the world.

That’s all for now.

I attended the Omega Institute’s “Being Fearless” conference in NYC this weekend. The event brochure fell into my hands just after I posted 2012: Two Paths. Since I was doing a lot of thinking about LOVE vs. FEAR at that time, I took it as a synchronistic nudge and decided to go.

It was an interesting experience and the speakers were amazing. But the conference was targeting a different audience from me, and I knew that would be the case going in. For example, there was a lot of “God” there (though in an inclusive, open-minded way that allowed for someone like me). On the other hand, I didn’t hear anyone talking about 2012, the precession of the equinoxes, wage slavery or homo luminous.

Mainly I doubt many of the attendees are pounding the walls of their lives with a strange version of “All Along the Watchtower” playing in their heads. They weren’t people of the fringe. Like me.

But the overall theme was one that I can wholeheartedly relate to: We live in an extraordinary time and the urgent call of the hour is to integrate our shadows, transmute our fear and help give birth to a new world.

Andrew Harvey gave one of the weekend’s most memorable speeches. It was a passionate expression of the same vision he describes on his website, where he writes:

Everyone whose eyes are open knows the world is in a terrifying crisis. As many of us as possible need to undergo a massive transformation of consciousness and to find the sacred passion to act from this consciousness in every arena and on every level of reality. It is my deepest belief that only Sacred Activism – the fusion of the deepest mystical knowledge, peace, strength, and stamina with calm focused and radical action – can possibly be of use now. A mysticism that is only private and self-absorbed leaves the evils of the world intact and does little to halt the suicidal juggernaut of history; an activism that is not purified by profound spiritual and psychological self-awareness and rooted in divine truth, wisdom, and compassion will only perpetuate the problem it is trying to solve, whatever it’s righteous intentions. When, however, the deepest and most grounded mystical vision is married to a practical and pragmatic drive to transform all existing political, economic, and social institutions, a holy force and power of wisdom in action is born, a force and power that can re-fashion all things in and under God, and bring humanity, even at this late desperate hour, into harmony with its self and original nature. This force of Sacred Activism I believe will be the source of the birthing power that humanity will need to create a new world from the smoking ashes of the one that is now passing away.

On the other hand, The New York Times recently ran a story by Alex Williams about how doomsday survivalism is going mainstream and middle class.

LOVE vs. FEAR.

These are interesting times indeed. I’d say “fasten your seatbelt” if that didn’t run flatly counter to my philosophy.

I tend not to get worked up about conspiracies. I am glad that there are people delving into the shadows and bringing specific instances to light, but my main concern is the open conspiracy that we all live every day. How is it that a small minority has made it so most of the rest of us must sell our labor power to them in order to survive? Or turning it around, how is it that the majority lives in either wage slavery or dire poverty (or both) for the profit and enrichment of the few?

As I see it, the laundry list of what’s wrong with the world we’ve constructed is rooted directly or indirectly in that fundamental violation.

Our labor power – our ability to make and use tools to create things and modify our living conditions – is the very thing that defines our species. Having to sell it to survive alienates us from our essential humanity. Aside from genocide or chattel slavery, I can’t think of a more potent way to hold us down, sap our life energy and block our evolution.

And now the ruling class is baring its teeth as it fortifies its power and profits in a world of accelerating change. It is orchestrating an intensification of brutality, oppression, repression, exploitation around the globe – greasing it all up with FEAR.

But I sense a quickening under the surface as 2012 approaches. Some people are awakening, and in awakening, they are becoming.

In “Old Struggles on a New Earth,” Daniel Pinchbeck offers a constructive way to look at this period and the opportunity in presents:

My view is that “2012″ is useful as a meme if it helps us to catalyze a shift in global culture and consciousness. Rather than fretting about what may or may not happen on that date, we should concentrate on the work that needs to be done now, on an inner as well as outer level.

Neil Kramer also talks about our potential power (and responsibility) in his post Crossing The Rubicon: Breaking The Fake News Trance:

The very act of comprehending the nature of our creative consciousness undermines the Control System by raising the frequency of consciousness out of the manipulation field and into inspired independence. I believe, as others have for millennia, that the outer world is a direct reflection of our own private inner consciousness. When a critical mass of people understand that the game is not a good game anymore, that there is a better way of living and evolving, then the awesome synchronous power of the universe begins to paint a new world into being.

So what if a growing number of us begins to awaken to the idea that this is a game and not a good one — that there is a better way of living and evolving? What if we spread, and constellate? And what if we find ways to bring our evolving consciousness into positive manifestation in the world – to help liberate others as well as ourselves?

We will form the chrysalis of a new world in the belly of the dying beast. We will grow and when we are ready, we will shed the old outer world like a snake shedding its skin.

Back to the choice we face as we spiral down the hourglass of the age. In 2012: Two Paths, I talked about LOVE vs. FEAR and then relayed a dream of a global catastrophe in which I did not choose as I would have hoped. As strongly as I feel about choosing LOVE over FEAR, some unaligned levels of my being have their own ideas.

LOVE vs. FEAR is the essential struggle within me.

I know FEAR. I am something of a specialist in it. My childhood was marked by trauma, and this designated me the likely heir to the legacy of my female forebears on my father’s side: panic, anxiety and agoraphobia.

But modern American life didn’t offer me the option of staying home and cooking elaborate family recipes all day, so I battled back, or else it seemed I would fall off the face of the earth.

I refused meds but tried some mainstream behavior therapies. I made what was called progress, but I have to say that much of my adult life was a white-knuckle ride, with me endlessly struggling to “overcome my fears” and coming away from both victories and defeats with the same raw, battered, exhausted feeling that told me I was just too fundamentally defective to deal with the world.

Basically my life was shaped, circumscribed and defined by FEAR.

Somehow, though, another way of thinking unfolded in my consciousness. It started with 11:11 and the chain of synchronicity that I began following at that time. The Kybalion came my way, and through it I learned of the Principle of Polarity and its conscious manipulation: To change an undesirable mental vibration, concentrate on the opposite pole. For me this was a profound revelation. You don’t overcome or otherwise eliminate the darkness. You let in the light.

So that’s path I’ve been traveling. It has been a transformative period. A period in which I’ve come to realize that the way is not to eliminate my “defects” or to adopt “ideal” behaviors as they are defined in American culture, but instead to fully become who I am.

I also came to understand that the opposite side of FEAR is not courage – it’s LOVE.

But while I’ve been moving toward LOVE and away from FEAR, the dominant culture around me has been moving sharply, aggressively, emphatically in the opposite direction. I happen to live in a stronghold of the dominant culture, so I am swimming in waters that are cold, dark and inhospitable. The contradiction is intensely painful – I long to find my Right Place in the World, but that is another story. The point now is simply that the culture in which I live does not support heart-centered living. Instead it is like Michael Corleone’s Family – it keeps pulling me back into my own negativity.

So the LOVE/FEAR polarity is a dynamic opposition within me. The Global Catastrophe dream is a gift because it dramatizes my contradictions and gives me an opportunity to resolve them.

Two points stand out for me:

Although my intention is to choose LOVE, I have trouble actually receiving it. Case in point: the dream opens with me moving to the place I love most in the world. I have longed to move to Maine for almost twenty years now. And there I am in the dream, in the early stages of buying a house there. I went out into the backyard and took a handful of earth, breathing it in deeply because that’s how overjoyed I was. The opening scene is LOVE LOVE LOVE.

Sadly, my dreaming mind could not allow me to receive this abundance. It recoiled from LOVE and put me in a place many people I know FEAR. I lived in Newark for several years. I know better than to react to it with knee-jerk FEAR, like the average white suburbanite around here. Nevertheless, it was not the most pleasant place to live, not back then. It is currently undergoing a renewal, but then it was grim and dilapidated — and very inconvenient in terms of access to reasonably priced goods and services. It had still not recovered since the time of the Rebellion. Newark history and politics aside, when I lived there, my life was circumscribed by scarcity and FEAR.

So my dream consciousness turned from LOVE to FEAR. It diverted me from my ideal place to a place of grim limitation. I need to think more deeply about the ways in which I am not accepting LOVE and instead living in self-imposed scarcity.

The second point concerns my anxiety about how I might react in a crisis of horrific proportions. Up until now, I have been assuming that – in the event of a global catastrophe – evolving might not mean surviving. I guess on some level I was thinking that a global catastrophe would involve a quick exit from this plane. I was not prepared – mentally or otherwise – to live in a post-catastrophe world of slow death by radiation, starvation and mob violence. When faced with that world in the dream, I reverted back into base-level FEAR, absurdly wishing I had stashed cash so that my family and I could somehow finagle our own little way to some semblance of safety.

Clearly I have work to do. The question is not which energy I am carrying because I have both LOVE and FEAR churning within me. I don’t have the answers, but I do know the path lies in the heart. I will continue to work on the heart chakra and on expanding the LOVE that flows through me.

I’ve been quiet for a while because I seriously feel like I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole. I posted some entries trying to define my sense of what may be ahead for us on planet Earth as we careen toward 2012. Suddenly I am finding things that I’ve long been searching for. I am becoming aware of the greater chorus of voices saying similar things and much more. What is freaking me out is how often the same phrases and metaphors are used independently. It’s like we are tuned into the same frequency.

As I explore what’s out there, I am experiencing incredible synchronicities. They are piling up and accelerating and ushering me toward a door – a one-pointed focus. Before I was a dreamer struggling to maintain lucidity in the dream. Now I think I am awakening.

I think others are doing well in their research and commentary. I am trying to figure out where I fit into this – what is my contribution. My first response is always to go within. I need to take my sword of discernment – such that it is with all the first-house Pisces I’ve got going on – and sort through the new material that I’ve been absorbing. All I know now is I feel energized despite what’s on the horizon. I feel I have something important to work toward. We all do.

I had a destination in mind with the series of dreams I’ve been posting. I’ve been taking the back roads to a particular point. The question is how to approach 2012 and whatever that may mean: the transition of the ages, earth changes, earth initiation, mass extinction or ascension . . .

Some are hunkering down. They are discussing where in the world to flee, what to hoard, how to fortify themselves with the arms, skills and materials they’ll need to survive.

I can only respectfully say what I feel in my heart to be true: approaching this period with a bunker mentality is the exact opposite of what we need for our highest good and the highest good concerned.

Ever since I was a child, certain words and phrases have hung in the air and glowed for me. The glowing words turn up repeatedly in chains of meaningful coincidence. Over time, they become laden with mysterious significance, and if I follow them, they eventually lead into deeper mysteries. One of my longtime glowing words first came to me courtesy of Led Zeppelin: there are two paths you can go by . . .

Reality is usually not so clear. We face an apparent maze of many highways and byways, but underlying it all are two basic directions. You can label them with various names, but I prefer LOVE vs. FEAR. In one way or another, we approach that fork and make that choice countless times each day. Most of us are inconsistent in our choices, so we tend to walk a rambling road of alternating directions. But our daily choices have a net effect. They add up and the sum total determines the fundamental direction of our lives. Similarly, our individual choices add up and the sum total determines the overall direction of humanity. Ultimately, our choices serve to expand one or the other – LOVE or FEAR – in the world, even the universe. We have free will (more glowing words), and intentionally or not, we shape our world with our choices.

Some forks in the road are milestones, and choices we make there are weighted with profound significance. I believe what we are approaching is a historic milestone for our species, our planet.

We can rationalize all we want, but at the root, it’s either one or the other. LOVE or FEAR. The bunker approach – arming, hoarding, hunkering down – is the path of FEAR. Walking this path expands the principle of FEAR at a critical point in history. Perhaps it might help a couple of those who travel it to survive a cataclysmic event, but at what cost? Is survival on such terms worthwhile? Basically, the means determine the ends. A path rooted in FEAR leads to a more fearful world.

I have no idea what will happen as we spiral down the hourglass of the age, but my inner voice, my dreams, my every intuition tell me that FEAR is the last thing we need. My feeling is that we need to release our small-minded expectations and embrace the potentiality of change with open hearts and minds – with LOVE. We need to cooperate with each other and evolve with our planet. Come what may.

Meeting change is a lot like meeting waves in the ocean. If you meet a wave with fear, you’ll try to hold your place. You’ll be rigid and the water will hit you like bricks. But if you welcome the wave with love, you’ll be flexible and light on your feet. The wave will lift you up and take you somewhere else.

That’s what I choose: LOVE. Somewhere else.

BUT . . . as I mulled over these thoughts and gathered the courage to post them here, I had a dream that seemed to throw a major monkey wrench into everything. At the risk of boring readers but in the name of honesty, I am including the whole dream. The catastrophe and monkey wrench occur in the last five paragraphs:

Dream: Global Catastrophe

On 12/30/07 I dreamt that my husband and I were looking at a house in Maine. I went out into the yard, took a handful of dirt and brought it to my face. I breathed it in deeply and thought about how much I love the earth of this place.

Later we were in Newark with my mother-in-law, Christmas shopping I guess. I volunteered to drive us home (in a little MG we were driving for some reason), but then I realized that my mother-in-law had wandered across the street. We waited for her, and while we waited, some man approached us in a strange and aggressive manner. He ended up retreating, but then my mother-in-law almost went out into the street in front of an oncoming car. We went to help her. By the time we all were back in the little car – a tight squeeze – my shoes were off and I couldn’t get them back on. I was rattled from all the scares and frustrations. I told my husband I was sorry but I couldn’t drive after all. My husband said he understood and took the wheel.

Next thing I knew, the three of us were in store that rented gift boxes. I was trying to find the right size for an oversized children’s outfit. The box I found was too big – they said it would cost $2.75 to rent. I responded that there was a lot of wasted space in it and I wanted to find a better fitting box. The whole point of the store was conserving paper products involved in gift giving.

Meanwhile, my mother-in-law was looking for Christmas cards. I was looking too, it seems. Somehow we ended up at someone’s house looking for cards. They had some stacks there and we were waiting for a turn to look through them. Our goal was frustrated by the fact that they were currently in the hands of an inconsiderate young woman who kept looking up from them to chat with her friends for twenty minutes at a time. My mother-in-law was getting nervous. I was getting mad. Finally I said “Forget it – I don’t have the time to wait all day for a turn to look at these cards. I don’t need them. It’s after Christmas anyway.” I was wondering how we would convince my mother-in-law that she didn’t need them either when she emerged from another room with one card in her hand. It happened to have both her name and her recipient’s name on the front of it. At first I thought it was a custom card, but it turned out to be a regular pre-made commercial card. “Perfect!” we said, remarking on the coincidence. “You can’t beat that!” Then I realized that the design on the front of the card was a cross made of blocks, each block with its own symbol.

Somewhere in here a thin little man with a pinched face announced that there would be a global catastrophe soon and that we had better hoard food and stash cash to prepare for it. He gave us the date, but we didn’t pay attention. He seemed like a mean wacko. It wasn’t clear if he meant what he was saying as a threat or as a prophecy.

Next thing I knew, we were in our kitchen with my mother-in-law. The little man was there, too. He started talking and it wasn’t clear if we were hearing him in person or on the radio. He was saying that the day had arrived and that in X seconds there would be a big blast that would definitely get our attention, even if it was ten thousand miles away. He was sneering. At this point, I was taking his message to be threat, not prophecy. I waited for the prescribed seconds to count down to see if he was for real or just a wacko. At the end of the count down, there was quiet for an extra second or two. Just when I was starting to think it was a false alarm, the lights cut off and the ground shook. There was an ominous rumbling in the distance. The lights returned at brown-out level. The alarm on the stove went off and my mother-in-law apologized for having set it. I went to turn it off and found it set at 10. I turned it to zero and it stopped (it was an old-fashioned timer with a knob).

Now I found myself wishing that I had heeded the warning and stashed cash for this day. I had no idea what had happened and what would happen next. I didn’t even know if having cash mattered at all, but I was thinking it would have been better to have it. Wouldn’t it? Maybe it could make some kind of key difference for us in the chaos that would surely follow. Maybe it would make me feel a little safer. All I knew was that what I was feeling now was horrible beyond words.

The little man resumed his address. He sounded smug that the explosion had gone off as planned or foretold, and he was telling us that we were doomed. Soon the rains will come, he said, and they will carry death. Life on our planet would never be the same.

How could we survive in the little man’s new world? It sounded like hell on earth. What had happened? I wondered if the little man was involved in the detonation of massive nuclear devices. An image came to my mind of a chunk of the globe encompassing Canada being blown clear away, but I had no idea if it was correct. Enraged, I started pounding the little man in my kitchen. I was hauling off and punching him repeatedly in his face and head, but his gloating voice continued on the radio. I realized that the little man in our kitchen was just a man-shaped figure of rags.

Thankfully, I woke up.

- - -

I am going to let this sit as is for now. This was different from the previous earth change dreams I’ve been posting. I definitely have thoughts on its meaning, but I am still processing. For now, I post it all without further comment. Except to wish us all the strength to make our own choices, consciously and with full intent, in the new year and beyond.

I can’t say that I know what it all means, but in honor of the day, here’s how it happened for me:

I was feeling profoundly restless. I was looking for something I could sense vaguely but didn’t understand. Mostly I was casting around in the dark, but I was trying to follow the chain of synchronicity that was just then returning to my life after many years of absence.

On September 11, 2002, I was driving home from work when I happened to look down at my odometer – not something I do often – and saw that it was showing all ones across. I thought it was a coincidence that my car should hit such a milestone on the first anniversary of 9/11 and that I should happen to look down just then to see it. Then my mind moved onto thoughts of the previous year.

Barely two hours later, my sister was telling me about her recent vacation when she mentioned that the friend she had visited was “into portals and the eleven-eleven.” Huh?!

It felt like there had been a radio playing a half-tuned station in the next room for a long time – just white noise to me – and then, in a flash, it tuned in and I registered it consciously.

“Wait, what is this eleven-eleven?”

My sister said it had to do with “ascension” and “portals.”

“Portals to where?”

She didn’t know. The idea of portals was tantalizing to me even though it made no sense. Now I know that there is a range of interpretation on 11:11, but then my ignorance was total . . .

“But why is it ‘eleven-eleven’?” I asked.

My sister explained that her friend sees elevens everywhere — the number comes up synchronistically for her. I had goosebumps. I told her about how I caught my odometer showing all ones across on the way home from work that very day. I said it was four ones – 1111 – because at the time that’s what I thought, but actually it was five – 11111 (shows how little I pay attention to my car’s mileage).

The odometer turning to all ones on that particular date . . . me noticing . . . then my sister mentioning “eleven-eleven.” There was a convergence of coincidences that felt powerfully synchronous to me. And that was the beginning. Elevens started turning up everywhere. Bill totals, receipts, license plates or signs on cars and trucks cutting me off, email time stamps . . . Odd little things — and some big things — started occurring at 11:11 to draw my attention to the clock at that moment. Some nights I found myself jolting from a deep sleep to look at the clock at exactly 11:11 p.m. Elevens were speaking a secret language to me through the random details of my life.

I did some googling and became familiar with various things people say about the phenomenon. I used to be more interested in reading these theories and speculations, but I’ve lost track of that research. I guess eleven-eleven was indeed a portal and it has led me to other mysteries.

Some say that 11:11 is a wake up call that we coded ourselves with prior to this incarnation. Maybe that’s true. It certainly worked as a wake up call of sorts for me. Whatever the case, I felt the onset was an invitation to the grail quest. I accepted and have been traveling that path ever since. I see the elevens in my life now as little breadcrumbs along the way.

On 11/11/04, at 11:11 PST, Uranus stationed direct in the sign of my Ascendant, Sun and Moon, beginning a long series of transits that are now lighting up my chart like a pinball machine. On 11/11/06, unbeknownst to me, something happened a few hundred miles away that ended up bringing a major crisis into my life for the winter and early spring. When I learned that it all started on November 11th, I knew that however bad it felt at the moment, it would somehow be a transformative experience. It would be a portal to the next level. And it was.

And as many have observed — per the U.S. Naval Observatory — the Winter Solstice will occur at exactly 11:11 UT on December 21, 2012 — which of course is the date posited by people like John Major Jenkins as the culmination of the Mayan Long Count.

I don’t have the answers, but in my experience, the elevens mark the doorway. Approached in a mindful, heart-centered manner, they can lead toward positive transformation. Let’s go through.