It’s July 20th and non-locality is happening all over.

The Sync-Heads are meeting at this year’s Sync Cabin in northern Idaho, a region known for its raging rivers and its white supremacists. I’m in Olympia, mustering my resources for Radio8Ball’s next big campaign but I wish I was there with them; swaddled in an enclave of enlightenment, riffing on synchronicity in those primordial woods, with eco-psychology on our side.

Last year’s Sync Cabin, held in Central Washington on the weekend of August 8th, on a mountain Gary Snyder and other nature-loving Beat Poets invaded and documented decades earlier, was the beginning of my collaboration with Sync Book Press. That gathering, which felt like a meeting of high functioning neurotics who shared my particular brand of insanity, was an awakening of sync, for me at least, the ripples of which are still being felt today. (Can you feel ’em?) No topic was off limits. Everything was funny in those woods. Everything was a sync, or an archetype, or a wink from the universe.  Then things got “real”.

That’s where Alan Abbadessa-Green asked me to finish my book so he could publish it. All of a sudden I wasn’t just losing my mind in Olympia and writing about my expeditions in The Tree, I was writing a book for Sync Book Press, which didn’t exactly exist but who cares, right? Fake it ‘til you make it. That’s what W. Morgan Sheppard always said in his unwittingly shamanic acting classes. And it’s been working. In under a year Sync Book Press has become a reality, publishing four books: The Sync Book, Accidental Initiations: In The Kabbalistic Tree of Olympia, Winter’s Labrynth & The Sync Book – Volume Two (due in December 2012).

Considering today’s Dark Knight-inspired movie theater massacre, not too far south of the northern Idaho Sync Cabin, I’m sure the syncs are running thick as blood in the direction of Heath Ledger, Terry Gilliam, Dr. Parnassus, Christopher Nolan, Columbine, South Park, Michael Moore, Obama as Batman, Bain Capital and Mitt Romney, and all the associated archetypes like The Death Card, The Hanged Man…and down the rabbit whole we’d go. As an out-of-the closet narcissist, I’d be very surprised (and disappointed?) if my name isn’t a part of their cabin conversation. I know my absence is a drag to Alan, probably even more than it is to me, and I’m pretty damn bummed not to be there. Plus, there’s all this controversy surrounding me and my book, and the numerous synchronicities gathering around my media self this week.

For example:

Will Morgan just delivered his first cut of Psycho Cinematic Analysis (due in August 2012); the long-awaited second installment to his synchromystic exploration of the entrainments between my films and the exploration of the psyche through media.

Here’s his previous effort on the topic.

At the same time I’ve been Skypeing in along with a crew of filmmakers running all over Los Angeles interviewing integrity artists and teachers like Dan Bern, Seth Green, Dr. Theresa Bullard, Rick Shapiro, R. Walt Vincent, Lili Haydn & Julia McAlee about Radio8Ball and the concept of synchronicity for our upcoming Kickstarter commercial.

In the mean time, I’m in a fight with one of the Sync Cabin attendees. Seems I’m always in a fight with someone. Just like Batman. (Or that guy from Aurora?) If I was at The Sync Cabin now I’m curious how it would play out between me and this once funny, now seemingly humorless fellow Sync-Head who finds me “offensive” and “just fucking lame” for writing about my syncs in a way that hooked him (or her). Non-locality being what it is, on the very day I would have liked to have been resolving, or engaging, my conflict with this person in the woods, it was an encouraging synchronicity that Daniel Pinchbeck got back to me.

A previous conflict between me, and Pinchbeck, and my fellow sync writer, Jennifer Palmer, is what ignited the ire of the man in the cabin with whom I am currently at odds. In short, Daniel and Jen deemed my use of the word “cunt” in the “Cunt Punch” chapter of Accidental Initiations too offensive to be published in Reality Sandwich. The piece in question is similar to other essays I have posted on the site – the only significant difference being my use of the word “cunt”; a word Daniel himself has employed several times on the very same site.  As I asked him at the time, “Do you imagine yourself the only good man who is allowed to use that word without being a sexist?”

This aesthetic disagreement between two men and one woman, over a slang word referring to the source of feminine sexual power, led to RS refusing to publish the excerpt from AI. They insist my words are too dangerous and “inelegant” for the readers of Reality Sandwich to handle. They say my “behavior” necessitates RS having nothing further to do with me. It’s all very sad and common and unrealistic (the idea that we can claim to all be one and then act as if we can segregate ourselves from each others’ ideas) and yet the whole episode was so rich with syncs directly relating to ideas expressed in the offending chapter in my book, that it simply demanded to be honored…

…in prose…

“Own Your Lips, Girl”

…in song. …

…and, in continued attempts at spirited communication with the participants.

For the most part Jen and Daniel have been unwilling to engage with me about this, and I’m not ready to let them off the hook, leaving us locked in a small public non-alogue until dialogue is possible. For some reason, I feel justified, almost honor-bound, to hold Daniel and Jen to the principals they espouse in their Reality Sandwich and Sync Book rhetoric. Either we are a community of transforming visionaries, and/or we are just posers. And/Or, perhaps, we are on our way from posing as enlightened operatives to actually becoming what we pretend to be, and affecting this transformation through conflicts like these. Fake it ‘til you make it, right?

So, this week when I heard that Daniel had been excluded from speaking at a panel at Burning Man, and that he was taking to Facebook; calling for justice and a fair hearing – I wrote to him, pointing out the sync between what was happening to him, and his refusal to run my piece in Reality Sandwich. I drew his attention to, what I believe are, deep seated territorial issues, for both of us, arising from our having been lovers with the same person (the sacred whore from my book), and suggested that working these out might be a good idea. To Daniel’s credit, this led to a day-long e-mail back and forth.

In between Skype interviews with movie stars, Kabbalists and rock stars; and with the Sync Cabineers doing whatever it was they were doing in those northern Idaho woods; I engaged in what felt like an epic archetypal Sync-summit with this man who claims to be the re-incarnation of Quetzalcoatl AND this generation’s Timothy Leary, yet accuses me of being on an “ego-trip”. Together we performed a “time wave zero” replay of Freud and Jung’s debate over synchronicity (and psychic territory); with me insisting we are all a part of the same field, and therefore – by censoring me they are censoring themselves; and with Daniel insisting that I am being immature, while telling me he is far too busy to be bothered by this. Yet he keeps writing me and I keep responding to him. Or the other way around. Either way, it was satisfying to let loose and dig in with a good mind at odds with my own, on this auspicious day, even if we still have yet to reach a resolution.

In light (or in dark) of all this, the question which is present for me is; how are my chat summit with Pinchbeck, the non-local Radio8Ball shoot in LA, the Batman shoot(ings) in Aurora, and the synchromystic doings at The Sync Cabin aligned? Are we not all catalytic exteriorizations of the same psychic phenomena? I suspect, and like to act as if, we are, and yet the events related above are but a small window on creation.

I mean, it’s summer. Somewhere kids, and kids at heart, are playing in gardens with puppies, heedless of tragedy or enlightenment. Just being awesome. That’s a part of the phenomenon as much as the shooters and the synchromystics, or me and my self-fulfilling self-righteousness. I know this is true. I can taste it particularly well right now because, the next day, I had a delicious synchronicity I’d like to share with you.

I was having brunch with my friend Rebeca. We were eating in (and from) her garden, with bees buzzing and chickens clucking, and I was telling her about my intention to write this piece. I was explaining my relationship with Pinchbeck in the context of Will Morgan’s latest film, and its references to Freud and Jung, when my phone rang.

It was Will Morgan calling from Fort Collins, Colorado. I picked up saying…

“Will fucking Morgan! I was just talking about you and, like the crack in Freud’s book case, you called!”

“That’s fucking weird man”, Will said, “because I was just talking about Freud and Jung, and that exact same scene, when I just felt like I had to call you.”

This is how things work.