Of course, it’s hard to read that and not think of what is now being called the Great Recession. So I could easily say that the signs were right and we are currently passing through what they predicted for so many years. But are we? This question has occurred to me many times in the last couple of years, and my sense is that this does not match the severity of what they have predicted.

I’ve just gone back to a summary of the various CMPEs that I wrote in early 2008. Here are a couple of relevant quotes from that:

It will be like the Great Depression. It will be like what was predicted for Y2K. The banking system will collapse. It will be very difficult for the government to guarantee that basic services are maintained. For this reason, people should store food, and possibly water as well. The collapse will be serious enough that many people will not be getting by. They will need concrete help in order to survive. Consequently, many people will band together in systems of mutual support. In short, there will be a need for people both to offer help to those in need and to rely upon each other, to a greater degree than in normal times.

They [the signs] say we are on a path to national suicide. They speak of “the convergence of multiple crises: Over-extension of the army in foreign lands. Profound debt. Foreign countries selling off the dollars they hold; the dollar massively depreciating. Dangerous dependence on China. A looming fiscal crisis, based in part on lack of inter-generational equity.”

Clearly, this scenario is far beyond what we are experiencing now. So, thus far, the Great Recession does not fit what the signs have predicted. That much is clear.

So what do we make of this? One possibility, of course, is that the CMPEs I’ve had on this subject are wrong. Another possibility is that they are exaggerating. Signs typically exaggerate, so that could well be happening here. However, we can’t just casually assume that, as there have been times when I assumed they were exaggerating and they weren’t. Another possibility is that the Great Recession is a foreshadowing of another, larger crisis that takes place years down the road.

My current best guess, however, is reflected in a New York Times column written by the Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman. His June 27th column, “The Third Depression,” began by referencing the Long Depression (which started in 1873) and the Great Depression of the 1930′s. Then he said, “We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression.”

Based on my experience with CMPEs, that is my best guess of what is going on here: we are in the early stages of a depression. Will it be as bad as what is described in the two paragraphs I quoted above? God, I hope not. Krugman says, “It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression.”

I really wish I knew what the signs thought about this topic. They were chatting it up about the coming crisis throughout 2007, right up to the official beginning of the recession. My last sign on the subject was November 26, 2007 and economists consider that the recession began the very next month in December. Since then, however, the signs have been silent. I don’t know, therefore, if they think this is the early stages of a real depression, if this is a foreshadowing of a depression years down the road, or if they have changed their mind entirely.

Like I said, though, my best guess is that rather than pulling out of this recession soon, we will be going deeper in. I’m no economist. I am simply saying that based on my experience of how the signs work.

I don’t really have a conclusion to this post. It’s simply been on my mind for some time to share this guesswork with you. And to be honest, part of why I’m writing this is in the hopes of eliciting a CMPE. Three years of silence on such a crucial subject is a very long time.

What I have learned is that we need to always ask this question, and be open to a range of answers, realizing that only time may tell the real answer. Let me give you an example that just came to mind the other day.

In 1999, a man who had moved to Sedona to help the Circle of Atonement came to me and said he was bowing out. After a year of trying, it just wasn’t working. Ideas and personalities weren’t gelling, and he felt it was best to step back. He said that maybe this was only chapter 1 in a longer story, and that chapter 2 would come later.

I felt terrible about it, both because I wanted it to work with him—he had, after all, moved to Sedona for this purpose—and because his background and abilities carried so much promise for the Circle.

That day, an interesting thing occurred. A man showed up in Sedona and wanted to have lunch with me and Allen Watson, one of our other teachers at the time. The man said he felt a connection with the Circle and wanted to help. As he spoke, I was really struck by how similar his potential contributions were to the man who had just bowed out. I didn’t write the parallels down (this was back in the day before I fully processed all CMPEs), but I was certain it was a sign. And its message was clear: There was a replacement for the man we had just lost. We wouldn’t be without his gifts. Someone else was there to provide them.

But what happened subsequently was very interesting, as well as instructive. Nothing ever really happened with the second man. He didn’t maintain communication. And just a couple of years later, he ended up contributing his abilities to building an online Q&A archive for another Course in Miracles teacher. He wrote me some feedback on an article of mine, from the perspective of this other teacher, basically implying that I had deviated from the pure Course.

Meanwhile, three years later, the first man came back into involvement with the Circle. Just as he said might happen, there was a chapter 2, and a few years after that a chapter 3 as he came onto our board, where he remains very actively today. He is one of the real pillars of the Circle and we rely on him a tremendous amount.

In hindsight, then, I think the CMPE was using the second man as a symbol. Rather than saying he was there to replace the first, he was just there to symbolize the fact that what the first man had come to bring would not be lost, that this was not the end of the story but that there would indeed be future chapters.

I guess at the time I could have possibly read the sign correctly. I could have seen the second man as a symbol that confirmed the truth of the first man’s statement about there being future chapters. But how could I have known that? How could I have known that he would turn out to be his own replacement?

I realize this can be discouraging. It definitely makes sign interpretation a more difficult process. But it’s just the way it is. When we get a CMPE, we need to realize that its message may be just as specific as it seems to be, but then again it may be more general.

So here’s what happened. The night before the sign I wrote about last week, we had an uncannily similar one about my 18-year-old daughter Anna. Both CMPEs had the following characteristics:

• A discussion with a daughter before bedtime (Anna and I had a Skype conversation; Nicola and Miranda had the vacuum cleaner converstation)
• A story read at bedtime by Nicola to Miranda from the new book of 50 bedtime stories
• That story that turns out to be incredibly parallel to the preceding discussion, to the point of sharing specific imagery with it.
• The CMPE comments on a situation of that daughter’s and how her parent(s) should respond to that. (The one about Anna was about my concerns about her new tattoo.)

How could one not see a relationship between these two CMPEs? Remember, they were only 24 hours apart. It is this sort of unmistakable connection that I’ve seen time and time again and that has shown me that the interrelationship between CMPEs is one of their essential characteristics.

So then, a week later, the third one in the series came. Miranda was watching Pete’s Dragon while I sat next to her and worked, and she kept asking  me if a character named Dr. Terminus was Pete’s father. I wondered if I should answer her honestly, because in fact he is a lying, conniving con man. He runs a traveling medicine show and doesn’t care if people are hurt by his medicines as long as he profits. I decided that it’s probably time she is told about some of the harsh realities of this world, so I said, “No, he’s a flim-flam man, a con man. He sells medicines that he says will make people better, but they just make them worse. I said he’s lying to them in order to get their money.” She kept asking why, and I said that’s what business he’s in. I explaned that mean people need to lie, or people won’t do what they want. The doctor needed to tell people that his medicines would help them, because if he told them the truth, nobody would buy his wares.

I don’t remember talking to her this frankly about the darker side of human nature before. But it seemed right that she be told about such things.

In the movie (set in the early 20th century), when Dr. Terminus arrives in town, he discovers he’s been there before, and various people step forward and show how his medicines backfired. One of them is a large middle-aged man who takes off his hat to reveal a big head-full of pink hair. He says, “My hair was gray and thanks to you it turned into pink!”

An hour or two later, I was doing some research online, and a video caught my eye that I decided to watch, however frivolous a use of my time it was. It was called ”8 Videos of People Who Look Like Special Effects Creations.” In relation to the third such person, the narrator said,

Argyria is a condition that turns your skin and eyes blue and drains all the color from your hair….Since you get Argyria by ingesting colloidal silver, a common ingredient in traveling medicine show tonics, it’s a lot rarer now that people don’t consider anything that’s shiny to have curative properties.

One of the examples shown (who was labeled “Papa Smurf”) is a large middle-aged man with grey beard and mustache.

This, of course, just seemed too weird. It seemed like an utterly trivial CMPE, but the references to traveling medicine show tonics seemed too specific to be random. So I sat down to write a list of the parallels between the two events. Here’s what I came up with:

1. Traveling medicine show tonics
2. They contain exotic ingredients that make you worse rather than better. (In Pete’s Dragon, the doctor is obsessed with slicing up the dragon to use his parts in various potions. The other video talks about colloidal silver being the culprit ingredient.)
3. They change the color of your hair, either drain all color from it or put weird color into it.
4. They turn some part of your body an unnatural color (pink, blue).
5. This happened in the past when people were less discerning about medicine.
6. An example is shown of a large middle-aged man with gray beard and mustache.

Once I reflected on it a bit, the interpretation seemed obvious. The occasion for my conversation with Miranda was what the parallels are about—traveling medicine show tonics that hurt you rather than help you. But the substance of the conversation, of course, was about the deception involved in selling those tonics. The CMPE was clearly confirming the frank talk I had with her about that deception. Here is what I wrote:

It is right that Robert told Miranda about the harsh reality that certain people have a deceitful way of life, in which they benefit from selling something they promise will help others when they know that in reality it will hurt others. This seems to back up the need to explain to Miranda some of the harsh realities of this world, particularly human deceitfulness.

This certainly seems related to the previous CMPE about Miranda’s fears. In both cases, a parent of hers is explaining to her how the world works (vacuum cleaners won’t suck you up; people will try to deceive you for personal gain). Clearly, explaining how it works in this world is an important part of our role as parents. And we’ve always said that Miranda can take it. She is constantly asking about big subjects like death and sickness and evil in the world. We learned long ago that she can’t be “fobbed off” (as Nicola says) with flowery, empty answers designed to reassure children. She won’t rest until she gets a straight answer that satisfies her.

None of the three signs I’ve mentioned here are particularly profound. But they are helpful, as well as clearly related. It says something about the nature of this phenomenon that larger messages will come through a cluster of CMPES that all come within a short time period.

The other night, Nicola was vacuuming before the kids’ bedtime, with the nearly-unusable little red canister vacuum with long black hose that came along with the house and is stored in the closet under the stairs. Miranda said something that, in essence, asked, “Can I be sucked up by that?” Nicola answered, “No, you can’t get sucked up. Don’t worry. You can’t get sucked up.” Then she demonstrated this by vacuuming over her own foot. Then Nicola went towards Miranda and said, “Shall I do yours?” But at that point Miranda was still scared and pulled her foot away. So Nicola explained that the vacuum cleaner is only for the little bits, just the small pieces. There was a leaf on the floor and she said, “I don’t think it will even suck that up.” So she tried, and it did. (I’m amazed—it doesn’t pick anything else up!)  But she still stressed it was for the tiny things. Nicola then vacuumed her own foot again. Finally, Miranda held her foot out. She was a bit nervous, but then she said “It tickles.” Nicola had succeeded in coaxing her out of her fear, with a combination of patient explanation and repeated demonstration.

Just a few minutes later, Nicola was reading bedtime stories to Miranda. She picked at random a short story called “Woof’s Worst Day” from a book of 50 stories she had just bought for the kids. Since the book was new, she had no familiarity with the stories, and the title didn’t really signal anything about the story, beyond that it was about a dog having a bad day.

The story turned out to be about a family of string people—little people made of string who live undetected in our houses—who live in the kitchen of one Mrs. Bun. One night when Mr. String was ready for bed and about to take their dog Woof for his last walk, Woof was nowhere to be found. Finally, one of the children said, “When her friend went home Mrs Bun gave the floor a quick clean with the snake-box machine.” The “snake-box machine” of course was the vacuum cleaner. So the family realized that Woof had been vacuumed up. They then went on a rescue mission. 

After they ascertained that Mrs Bun kept the vacuum cleaner “In the cupboard under the stairs,” Flax, the little string girl, said, “I’m scared. Are you sure the vacuum thing won’t eat us?” Mr. String replied, “Of course not, come on.” So they all went, formed a chain, and pulled Woof out from inside the vacuum cleaner bag. At this point, we see an illustration which shows that the vacuum cleaner is a red canister vacuum with a long black hose.

Afterwards, Nicola said to me, “I think we just had a sign.” She said that Miranda had been afraid of getting sucked up by the vacuum cleaner and that she then read a story to Miranda in which the dog got sucked by the vacuum cleaner. This sounded like a possible sign, but there was an obvious problem, in that Nicola had demonstrated to Miranda that she couldn’t get sucked up, but the dog did get sucked up. That contradiction would be very odd for a real CMPE.

But, of course, when I read the story, I noticed the important part: the exchange in which the little girl expresses fear that she might get sucked up, and her father reassures her that she won’t. That exchange wasn’t the focus of the story, but it was in there, and that was the part that connected so directly with what happened on our end.

The list of parallels isn’t a long one, but it is impressively specific:

1. There is a family at bedtime.
2. The floor in their house has been or is being vacuumed.
3. The vacuum cleaner is a red canister vacuum with a long black hose.
4. It is stored in the cupboard under the stairs.
5. The little girl in the family expresses fear that the vacuum will suck her up.
6. Her parent reassures her that no, it won’t.

Given these parallels, and given that the CMPE was surely about our family (rather than the string family!), the meaning was obvious. The sign is giving us a way of dealing with Miranda’s fears. Specifically, it is saying that Nicola had the right idea. We need to have talks with Miranda in which we reassure her, explain to her, and demonstrate to her, and thereby progressively bring her to a place in which the fear is gone.

It’s not life-changing, but it certainly is helpful. Every day we see Miranda have these fears. She seems to have more than her fair share and we are concerned about their effect on her life. And this gives us a template for how to get her past them.

Another nice thing about this CMPE, which I plan to discuss next week, is that it intimately related to one we had the night before, about my older daughter, and one we had the following week, again about Miranda. As I often explain, this is typical of how CMPEs work. A single CMPE is rarely isolated, but is almost always connected to a whole network of other CMPEs.

A few weeks after arriving, she had a CMPE that was clearly about her building Course-based community. It involved a Swedish movie called As It Is in Heaven. In order to process this sign for her, I needed to watch the movie. So Nicola and I sat down one night and watched it. A fair ways into the movie, we both were stunned to hear one of the characters say, “God does not forgive. He has never condemned.” Now that line is straight out of A Course in Miracles. I genuinely doubt that anyone ever said that before the Course. We then noticed another line from the Course as well as some apparent Course themes. For example, one of the characters describes seeing angel’s wings on certain people, an apparent example of what the Course calls Christ’s vision.

So the next day I started poking around online and found that the director, also one of the writers, is a student of A Course in Miracles. He even has a book that appears to be based on the Course that is available on Amazon. Another one of the writers, Anders Nyberg, is also a Course student. One website claimed that he was the model for the lead character in the movie, who is a choir conductor. I found a website that spoke of Nyberg leading a choir in singing lines that are straight out of Lesson 106 in the Course.

So I wrote Kay Pollak, the director, praised the movie (both Nicola and I enjoyed it immensely) and asked him about the Course connection. A few days later, I received a very kind email from him, in which he said, among other things,

I am glad you wrote and told me about the connection you and your wife could see from A Course in Miracles. Thank you! And of course, so it is. I have studied the course since 23 years now. And all this reading and studying has in many ways also affected me as a filmmaker. In “As it is in Heaven” you can, for example, see in the end a “holy instant” [a key Course concept] including around 2000 persons. And there are for example lines said in the movie which are from ACIM. Especially I like when the priest’s wife tells her husband: “God does not forgive. He has never condemned.” I remember how very important that line was for me when I met it the first time in ACIM. The movie was an enormous success and a blockbuster here in Sweden and then in many countries all over the world. So many people has mailed to me about just that line. How much it has given them!

So here we have a CMPE that is about Amy building Course-based community. What she didn’t realize at the time—indeed what hardly any viewer realizes—is that the lead character in the movie is doing exactly that. He is creating Course-inspired community. The choir he creates is a community full of joining, forgiveness, and the healing of old wounds. These could be seen as merely Course-friendly themes. But now we know that the movie was profoundly influenced by the Course itself. This, however, is not easy information to find out.

(Searching the Internet with Google, I could only find one person who connected the movie with the Course, a friend of mine who in on an A Course in Miracles forum highly recommended the movie and then said, “It is so far the best movie on holy relationships I have ever seen. There are so many connections with ACIM that I am convinced Kay Pollack must have studied the Course.”)

The CMPE, in other words, seems to display a kind of insider knowledge about the movie. I see this all the time with CMPEs. They seem to know everything there is to know about the events they use. I remember in 1993 I had a three-event sign about The Lion King, a movie which wouldn’t be out for six months. Only when I saw the movie six months later did I realize how closely and in what detail it paralleled the other two events in the CMPE. It’s as if that sign knew the entire plot of the movie, even though I myself had no way of knowing it.

I have come to count on this idea that CMPEs have insider knowledge of the events they use. But it’s great when you see what appears to be a clear-cut example of this. Makes you wonder what the mechanics of these things are.

Between 10 am and 10:40 approximately on Wednesday 21st July, I was reading The New Cambridge Shakespeare version of Hamlet, edited by Philip Edwards [because he’ll be teaching it in the fall], and found myself consciously reflecting on Edwards’ footnotes. They are very detailed, and it was this level of detail that drew my attention. My first response that I can recall was to be amused by the detail—for instance, the pains he takes to explain what a particular word means, and to chase down other instances of the same word being used in the Shakespeare canon. (This even when, to my mind, the word is quite minor.) Then on further reflection I went on from amusement to concede that, actually, the thoroughness of the footnotes was a good thing. I was finding them useful, and they allowed me to feel really confident about Edwards as editor.

I came across a bit of blurb from the publisher, in fairly small print near the front of the book, the first sentence of which is: “Philip Edwards aims to bring the reader, playgoer and director of Hamlet into the closest possible contact with Shakespeare’s most famous and perplexing play.”

Now for the second event:

At 10:40 approx I opened (and immediately replied to) an email from my friend Michael in which he specifically asked me for my view on his footnotes in his new translation of the Gospel of Thomas.

Michael is doing a reconstruction of the Gospel of Thomas, trying to recover as closely as possible its original wording. This means deciding between the Coptic version and the Greek fragments as well as filling in lucanae. His aim is to try to give the reader a sense of being in direct contact with the original gospel. 

Michael, however, had become increasingly concerned about his extensive footnotes. He has two different kinds of notes. One explains his editing decisions and the other explains some of the gospel’s difficult language. He worried that these might be intrusive for the reader. So in the email he asked Alec, “Do you think the footnotes, with their explanations of passages, go too far? They are actually the part I’m most worried about.” Later, he shared with Alec that this concern had reached the place where he remembered, in the day or two before this, asking for divine guidance about their appropriateness.

Alec says that he did not notice these events as a possible CMPE until later in the day and also comments on their extreme improbability:

Coda: BECAUSE EVEN I AM NOT TOTALLY STUPID, I had realized, as soon as I read Michael’s email, that there was a sign-like feel to this, but it was only later that evening, while talking to Michael on the phone, that I saw the possibility of deeper parallels. Edwards’ footnotes serve two purposes. One is to act as a bridge between the reader and the text—by explaining Shakespeare’s arcane language. The second is to explain and justify Edwards’ editing decisions. [The same is true of Michael’s Gospel of Thomas.] This latter purpose springs from the fact that there are essentially three basic printed texts of Hamlet in circulation, and no manuscript, so any editor has to exercise and support his judgment. (Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet and see section 5, texts, for a very quick summary of the three texts background.)

And just to set the record straight: it is an extremely rare thing for me to be reading Shakespeare, let alone thinking about Shakespeare footnotes. And it is likewise extremely rare for me to find myself responding to a writer’s concerns about the quality of his own footnotes. I’m just not this sort of person. I’m far too rock-and-roll for that. I was clearly having a very bad day.

The parallels between these events are truly impressive:

1. Alec is or has been reading an important piece of literature.
2. Multiple versions of this work exist.
3. He is specifically reading a newer edit of this work done by a scholar.
4. The point of this edit is to get back as closely as possible to the author’s original, in order to bring the reader into the closest possible contact with this work.
5. This is very difficult in this case, in part because of scribal errors.
6. The scholar has put cross-references in his work.
7. He has also extensively footnoted his version.
8. One kind of note is there to explain and justify his editing decisions.
9. Another kind is to act as a bridge between the reader and the text, helping the reader to understand the difficult language.
10. Alec reflects on or is asked about the appropriateness of these extensive footnotes.

The meaning is obvious: The extensive footnotes in Michael’s version of the Gospel of Thomas are appropriate. Their thoroughness is a good thing. Michael can stop worrying about them. 

This CMPE, in my opinion, is very impressive. The parallels are extremely specific and the events were simultaneous. Given that, I find it quite instructive that Alec didn’t initially notice the CMPE. This is despite the fact that, as a participant in the study, he is watching for CMPEs, and despite the fact that in his email response he explicitly drew the parallel between the footnotes in both works. There he said,

Funnily enough, in the last half hour I’ve been reading part of Hamlet in a version with very full footnotes. There, I found myself consciously reflecting on and mildly amused by the editor’s anal approach of the footnotes – why did anyone care enough to invest energy in giving a minute account of textual variants and cross-references to similar words in other Shakes texts? But then, I considered that it might be of interest to, and helpful to, other readers and so decided it said something positive about the editor’s diligence and wish to provide every possible help to his reader. Maybe my idle thoughts about the Hamlet footnotes, coming in the last half hour or so, apply equally to yours. 

So he noticed that he had been reflecting on the appropriateness of an author’s extensive footnotes right before another author asked him about the appropriateness of his extensive footnotes. He also noticed, as he said, that “there was a sign-like feel to this.” Yet he didn’t notice any other parallels, until a later conversation in which he just happened to explain the Hamlet version to the editor of the Thomas version. If that conversation hadn’t happened, this whole thing would probably have just disappeared from memory.

This incident, in my mind, affords us a window onto what is probably happening with most CMPEs. Someone says, “Funnily enough, in the last half hour I’ve been reading something similar.” It feels slightly weird to them. But it ends there. Even though the initial parallel they noticed is surrounded by a surprising wealth of other parallels, they never see that. They don’t have the CMPE model, so they don’t look for those additional parallels. And even if they did have the model, it’s quite possible that they still wouldn’t.

All of this bears directly on how prevalent CMPEs are. To state the obvious, these things could be under our noses a lot more than we realize.

She graciously put me in touch with Bruce Greyson, one of the fathers of NDE research. But she also was kind enough to read my manuscript. While she was reading it, I could tell she was feeling that my CMPE model threatened to devalue those synchronicities of hers (which she likes to call “Cosmic Postcards”) that didn’t fit the rigorous criteria for a CMPE. However, as she read the final chapter, she had a very powerful CMPE herself, which affirmed a continuity between CMPEs and the guidance that had been leading her in her life. In the process, it affirmed that she had indeed been guided in her journey, in spite of having to make some extremely difficult decisions. And it implied that she had a role to play with this phenomenon of CMPEs, just as she had played a role in the field of near-death studies.

Barbara experienced this CMPE as revelatory, and since then, she has been sold on this phenomenon. She wrote the foreword to Signs and has been enthusiastically sharing  the CMPE model with her rather large network of friends and colleagues. She is not only a researcher in the pilot study we are doing but is also a participant. In addition, several of the other participants came to the study through her. If only we had a few more Barbara Whitfields, our culture would already be aware of CMPEs!

Now Barbara is playing the role of CMPE ambassador once again. She has just posted to her blog her most recent CMPE. She seems to have a knack for experiencing CMPEs that speak to core, emotionally-laden situations with decades of history, and this is another one of those. She introduces the story with these words:

For those readers who have experienced synchronicities, “signs,” or what I have called “Cosmic Postcards” — the attached document is a deeper way of looking at them.  Perhaps our “signs” are showing us deeper meanings and we haven’t known until now how to read them.  The  document (link below) is my attempt at explaining one deep CMPE (Conjunction of Meaningfully Parallel Events ) that happened recently.  I’ve listed references at the end of the document to help you go deeper if you want to understand this better.  In fact, there is a reference to connecting with Robert Perry, the originator of this brilliant theory — so you too could have one of your deep signs read by him.

That last comment refers to the fact that (based on a suggestion from Barbara!), I am going to begin offering my services as a CMPE interpreter. Nicola, my wife, has been offering her services in this capacity, but after Barbara’s suggestion, we think we will get more takers if it’s me doing the interpreting. This will be reflected on the website soon.

If you are interested in reading Barbara’s CMPE, follow this link or go to http://barbara-whitfield.blogspot.com/.

Personally, I don’t expect anything particularly out of the ordinary to happen in 2012. On the other hand, ordinary life is full of its own difficulties and calamities, isn’t it? So how do we face the ever-present possibility of impending crisis? 

My basic approach to crisis in the world that might affect me—and this is hardly theoretical in the current economic downturn—is to live right and then assume I am coated with Teflon. I assume that, in spite of troublesome appearances, I am in God’s loving hands. 

But what does living right mean? For me, it means making each day about taking into my mind and heart as much goodness as I can, and then taking care to extend that goodness to the people in my life. I’m only partly successful at this, but the success I have I owe to the discipline I’ve learned from A Course in Miracles. This involves morning study and meditation, reminding myself of a higher thought throughout the day, seeking correction for anxious or angry thoughts, and asking for guidance for my actions. 

That latter point of seeking higher guidance is a major element for me. I assume that if I’m living where I’m meant to live, with the partner I’m meant to have, doing what I’m meant to do, then I’m, in a sense, living on holy ground, and no real danger can enter that hallowed place. 

For that reason, I do a lot of asking within for guidance throughout the day; for instance, asking what to do next after finishing a task. But the guidance I trust the most comes from what I informally call “signs” or more formally CMPEs (Conjunctions of Meaningfully Parallel Events). These are a kind of extreme form of synchronicity I’ve learned to work with over the years. They don’t come every day, but when they do come, they are incredibly helpful. 

And that’s actually how I’ve ended up living in England. As the economic downturn affected our lives and livelihood, my wife Nicola (who’s from England) began to feel that it would be better for us and our two small children to move from America to England. This was a huge issue for me. Not only were my older children (who are young adults) in America, but my guidance had always said that our Course in Miracles organization would build something at its current location in Sedona, Arizona. How would it do that without us there? We discussed this issue and sought guidance for months without an answer. But the process was important. It required me to look at and challenge all of my assumptions about my life. 

In the end, we had a clear CMPE that said that we should move to England and that a key person would come work for and build community for our Course organization in Sedona. In other words, both sides were affirmed, an option that had never crossed our minds. 

So now, as of June 1^st, I’m here in England. (And the woman spoken of in that CMPE is at our home in Sedona.) Times are still tough and that does affect us very directly. But I know I am where I’m meant to be, and so I assume that I am coated with Teflon and that only good can come to me.

This was a question I wanted answered myself. These sorts of synchronicities are rare enough that a lot of people feel sure they never have them. And even those who do have them want them more often. It would be great if there was something we could do to increase their frequency.

To try to answer this question, I went through about 70 CMPEs in my log. I catalogued all events in which someone actively did something to deal with a situation in their lives, and then that very action became part of a CMPE, a CMPE that addressed that very situation. As an example, let’s say my Course organization, the Circle of Atonement, had a meeting to deal with its financial issues, and that meeting then became event 1 of a CMPE, one that addressed those very financial issues. (This actually happened the other night.) Those are the kinds of events I collected.

Once I collected all the events of this nature, I looked at two characteristics of them. First, what kinds of actions were performed that were associated with CMPEs? Second, what kinds of situations were the CMPEs about?

I’ll spare you the details, but once I brought it all together, the overall gist of it was clear. It all came down to a simple idea: trying to bring about forward movement in the key areas of your life. The situations involved could all be classed under the heading of “key areas of your life.” And the actions involved could all be seen as attempts to bring about “forward movement” in those areas.

What a simple idea: Doing something to bring about forward movement in a key area of your life seems to heighten your chances of getting a CMPE.

However, this isn’t what got me excited. My excitement came about because for years I have envisioned this very thing as the goal of CMPEs themselves. Here, for instance, is something I put in a very early (2004) outline of my book Signs:

Taken as a whole, signs treat our lives as if there is an overall purpose to our existence, a purpose which spans and encompasses the four areas just covered [life purpose, inner development, relationships, major life events and decisions]. We might envision this purpose as a broad river, composed of these four currents and flowing toward some larger goal, and envision ourselves as a boat on the river. Using this image, we can say that the whole thrust of signs is to encourage forward movement on this river.

There it is: forward movement in the key areas of our lives.

So for years I had observed that CMPEs themselves are trying to bring about forward movement in the key areas of our lives. Now I find that the chance of having a CMPE seems to increase when we try to bring about forward movement in the key areas of our lives. The conclusion was obvious: We have more CMPEs when we align ourselves with their agenda, when we are rowing in the same direction they are. That’s what excited me. Every thinker loves something that brings together a huge amount of data in such a simple and logical way.

Therefore, if you want to increase your chances of having a CMPE, don’t avoid dealing with the meaty situations of your life. Face them and do what you can to take them to their next step. And when you do, see if another event doesn’t come along shortly after which strikingly mirrors the action you’ve just taken. If that happens, you probably have a CMPE on your hands, one that could contain untold wisdom about your life.

* * * * * *

In case you are curious, here are the specifics of what I gleaned from the research I described above:

The kinds of actions were: asking for guidance, asking a question (of a person), proposing an idea, making (or trying to make) a decision, acting on an important decision, moving a project forward, sharing information with others, conversation, writing, teaching a class, thinking about an important situation, meeting about something important, responding to a request, and offering help or healing. 

The kinds of situations were: CMPEs (e.g., discussing them), relationship issues, life purpose, inner growth, matters of truth and conviction (e.g., expressing one’s strongest convictions), improvement of health or lifestyle, work/business, transformative life event (e.g., writing about a transformative life event), relocation, and helping, guiding, or parenting another.

To compound this, we were finding it impossible to get our bank to allow wire transfers out of the country, and since our income is still American, we need those transfers in order to live over here. The bank said that these things had to be set up in person, because otherwise they couldn’t verify that we were the actual account holders. (This seemed odd since we can still make transfers, write checks, and use our debit and credit cards from over here.) Finally, the message I got from the bank manager was that the only person who could possibly maybe help me was Cassandra, who was on vacation and would be back Monday. Our fate was in her hands.

Fast forward to Monday. At 9:40 that morning, Nicola called up from downstairs and said (or I heard), “Don’t forget your phone call with Sandra tonight.” I thought, “Who on earth is Sandra and why would I have a phone call with her?” So I asked her and she clarified that what she said, of course, had been “Cassandra,” but allowing for the distance and kid noise, I heard “Sandra.”

Twenty minutes later we had a health visitor come for a home visit. When Nicola registered with a local doctor here and they found out we had young children, as a matter of routine they sent out a health visitor. She weighed and measured Michael, our two-year-old, got his health records, and let us know that there is a great children’s center nearby where parents can come and bring small children. And based on earlier phone contact, Sandra had set up an appointment for Miranda, our four-year-old, with the school nurse, who then got an appointment for Miranda to see the community pediatrician. (In England, the only way to get an appointment with a pediatrician is by medical referral.) I knew about Miranda’s appointments, but I didn’t know it was this health visitor who had set it all in motion.

Of course, while the woman was here, Nicola kept mentioning to her how different it had been in America, where we were constantly wrangling with the state, the school district, and the insurance companies to get our children’s needs met. There, it was up to us to wrestle to the ground a recalcitrant system (and, surprise! it was usually stronger than us). Here, the system came to our door to set up services. What a difference.

I only found out the health visitor’s name once she arrived: Sandra.

When I heard her name, I knew it was a CMPE. I could feel a whole list of parallels beyond the name:

1. There is an important meeting planned for today.
2. The meeting is with a woman “named” Sandra.
3. It is about setting up access for the meeting of basic needs of ours here in England (financial needs, health needs).
4. The background for this meeting (which Nicola mentions or I plan to mention in the meeting) is us frustratingly jumping through hoops to get those needs fulfilled yet meeting roadblocks from the agencies involved.
5. The roadblocks are all on the American end.
6. However, this woman, as a representative of the relevant agency, has the authority to change that, to set us up so that we have access to the fulfillment of those needs.

So after Sandra left, I told Nicola that we had a CMPE. She immediately saw that it was one and said, “So what does it mean?” I replied, “It’s a prediction that the meeting with Cassandra is going to work.”

There really was no other way to look at it. The meeting with Cassandra had a big question hanging over it: Could she set up wire transfers for us? If not, we would have to close our account at our bank, find a bank that would set up wire transfers without us being physically present, and then open an account with them and set up those transfers. What a mess.

So the meeting with Cassandra was the question, and the meeting with Sandra was the answer. Sandra had already done what we were hoping Cassandra would do: give us access to service that we required for our basic needs over here. It was undeniable that this CMPE was saying Cassandra would do the same. If that didn’t happen, there was no way of backtracking and saying that the message had been something else.

When I called Cassandra later that day, she sounded curious about why there had been a difficulty. She just said they would Fedex the papers over because they needed original signatures, and we would then mail them back. Done. I questioned her repeatedly about whether that would work and she very confidently assured me it would.

So the sign had been correct. It’s always a bit nail-biting when you get a prediction like this, because clear predictions can be clearly wrong. This one, however, was absolutely right.

But there was a bit more to the CMPE. It wasn’t just talking about our money; it was also talking about our health care. By predicting that the first need would be met and showing us the second need being met, it seemed to be reassuring us about the meeting of our basic needs in general. It seemed to be saying, “Don’t worry, you’ll get yourselves properly set up here.” And there was one other implication. Notice the fifth parallel: “The roadblocks are all on the American end.” That seemed to set up a contrast between how the system here is treating us vs. how the system had treated us in America. It seemed to be highlighting all the closed doors we had encountered with US healthcare vs. all the open doors that are greeting us here.

Overall, then, it was a very positive sign which addressed an uppermost concern of ours right now. And the fact that it included an accurate prediction gave us confidence in its overall message.