Dodona Update
Zip Dobyns
Greetings from Dodona to all of our readers. We hope your holiday season is a happy one. I’ve spent a lot of this year of 1994 on the road, meeting interesting people and enjoying exchanging stimulating ideas. But it is also a supreme delight to come home to Dodona where I can read and swim and experience the world of nature.
My last excursion was a 9-day seminar in October in Roanoke, Virginia which was hosted by one of our newest ministers, Barbara Taylor. I had a small but eager group of astrology students in a beautiful home and the catered food was fantastic. One of the students has started me on a new research project by offering a small grant to CCRS to see whether astrology can offer psychological insight into AIDS. I have previously mentioned that Lois Rodden analyzed 200 or more horoscopes of individuals with AIDS and found Pluto the most aspected planet. Her effort was limited to the traditional planets. I am starting my project by checking some of the possibly relevant asteroids in these charts.
I would like to appeal to our readers to send me any reliable birth data they have on AIDS. Please, no rectified charts! Subjects are anonymous, of course. Please just send the sex of the individual with the birth date, time, and place. If the information is available, please add when the individuals became ill and/or were diagnosed, where they were if it was other than their birthplaces, the source of the infection if known (such as sex, needle sharing, blood transfusion, etc.), and their date of death if this has occurred and is known.
I am starting with the natal chart, so this additional information is not essential but would be helpful for later stages of the project. I assume that this effort will continue for years since it will be interrupted frequently by my travels and constantly challenged by my over-extended life.
Some of our readers may not know that Mark’s CCRS computer program for astrology has a great research module that lets you formulate any theory and test it on a batch of charts. So far, I have been getting the total number of charts in my sample which have stress aspects between pairs of asteroids or planet-asteroid pairs. The initial queries include seven asteroids named for healers and several variations on names for love and/or sex, for wisdom/discretion, for possible drug/alcohol involvement, etc. The initial totals I have gotten look promising, but we won’t know whether they are really significant until Mark expands his FAR (Frequencies for Aspect Research) computer program to include the “new” asteroids. This program specifies the amount of time any pair of planets were in your specified orb in any specified aspect in the range of years that matches the birth dates of your subjects. Using this program, you can avoid problems of spurious significance caused by astronomical artifacts. I’m not sure how soon this expansion of FAR will be ready, since Mark is as over-extended as everyone else in our enterprise, but the new project is on its way and additional birth data will be much appreciated. If any of our readers are involved with local AIDS support groups, they could represent a source of data. Please emphasize the need for the data to be reliable—preferably from a birth certificate.
As readers will note in one of the articles in this issue of The Mutable Dilemma, I am also collecting data for individuals who believe that they have been abducted by aliens, presumably occupants of UFOs. This is also a long-term project, and information on the dates and places of the experiences is also helpful. As with the AIDS data, do not include names unless the individual is willing to be identified publicly. There is still a lot of negative press connected to these experiences. As I may have written in previous issues, one of the conferences which I attended in the spring of 1994 put me in touch with individuals who have been collecting birth data on people who demonstrate psychokinetic ability by bending silverware and on people who believe that they have had Kundalini experiences. I suspect that all of these experiences include a mixture of physical and psychical components, so will eventually be comparing the sets of charts for common patterns.
In a preliminary comparison of 20 charts of abduction experiences with data from people who had out-of-body experiences, I noted water factors (Moon, lunar nodes, Pluto, Neptune) or Uranus within about 5 degrees of a major angle, Ascendant axis or MC axis, more often than would occur by chance. Obviously, this is hardly a beginning, but I want our readers to know what is underway in case they have data for individuals in any of these categories.
One of the fun activities at the Roanoke seminar was a final PK party. Others were invited in addition to the seminar participants, and there were over 30 people in Barbara’s big recreation room. Silverware (mostly stainless steel) was provided, and only two participants failed to bend something. I was one of the two. This was my third PK session and I was not successful at any of them. Spoon-bending is obviously not one of my talents. One of the astrology students in the Roanoke seminar had brought a heavy silver tablespoon from home. It proved resistant during the party but she was able to bend a steel knife. She put the silver spoon on the table by her bed when she went to sleep, and found it bent the next morning!
I am most impressed when the narrow section of the utensil is not just bent over, which can be done with ordinary physical force, but when it is curled into tiny, tight circles—as many as three or four circles touching each other. But even a simple bend was impressive to participants who “felt” the difference in the utensil when it was “ready” to bend. I was told that the metal gets hot and feels soft, “like clay.” One man who was present has a Ph.D. in economics and is married to a very psychic wife. He was unable to bend a utensil by himself, but when an accomplished spoon-bender put her hands over his, he felt the spoon get hot and soft and it bent with almost no pressure. Afterwards, he kept exclaiming about the sensation. I probably should have done what he did. His feeling was quite similar to mine and is common for highly educated people. He knew that psychic things happened because he had seen them with his wife, but he doubted his own ability to produce or experience them. His wife, by the way, produced three tight curls in the stem of her spoon on her first try.
The Philosophical Division of CCRS has one new project in the planning stage which I want to mention before closing this report. One of our newest ministers, Collette Fields, has been working for some time with groups trying to help Native Americans. Some Native Americans in the San Diego area will be cooperating with CCRS and the San Diego Unitarian Church to hold a conference on the last weekend in April 1995. The featured speakers will be spiritual leaders from a number of native groups in North and South America and in Africa. They will be describing their perceptions of the current world and the coming years in light of their personal beliefs and traditional prophecies. We will have more information on the speakers in the next issue of The Mutable Dilemma.
I was present for one of the planning sessions with some of the main movers for this conference. The general discussion included comments on psychic phenomena which is, of course, a normal part of life to most native people who have not been converted by western education to become materialists. I had described my last two PK parties in the spring and fall of 1994, and Dr. James Pottenger, my brother who founded CCRS, showed the bent silverware I had brought back. I mentioned that only the utensils bent in tiny, tight curls were really impressive to me. An American Indian who was present for this discussion asked if he could handle one of the spoons which had just a single, simple bend in its stem. We said “yes,” and he produced three tight curls in the stem. The PK parties I have attended have all involved 30 or more people who were emotionally stimulated by the “crowd spirit,” so this accomplishment by a single individual in a small group engaged in calm conversation was even more impressive.
Meanwhile, in light of the mail jam at Christmas and our material reaching you at the non-profit rate, you may not get this until January. But all of us in CCRS are hoping that your holiday season will be or was wonderful.