The “Al-Naslaa” rock in Tayma oasis of Saudi Arabia looks like it’s been cut in half perfectly with a laser technology. The rock, which stands on two adjacent platforms, is over 4,000 years old, and no one knows how it happened. The person at the bottom provides perspective on the size of the rock.
Considering how things are divided in this country and elsewhere, Al-Naslaa is a perfect symbol of our times.
Today, I remarked to someone that it feels like the country has lost its soul. Just take a look:
– Banned abortion, a right women have had for nearly 50 years
– Invalidated gun restrictions, no licenses needed in states that used to require a license
– Publicly funded school voucher programs must now include religious establishments and districts are required to allow coach-led, post game prayers on the field
– Oh, and they also struck down carbon emissions standards, limiting the EPA’s ability to slow climate change. The principle they used to do this can also reduce the government’s power to regulate much of anything.
People who throughout the pandemic were screaming about my body, my right about not taking vaccines, probably don’t have any problem with the government controlling women’s bodies when it comes to pregnancy. After all, they reason, abortion is murder.
A neighbor said this to me during a heated text exchange one night and what I should have asked was: By what edict is abortion murder? God? Religion? Science?
When I told another podcaster about the flooding in Miami Beach at high tide, he nearly lost his mind. “Trish, the sea hasn’t risen a centimeter in a century. Show me your proof!”
My proof? Drive to Miami Beach during high tide.
And people like the podcaster will be celebrating the supremes’s decision about carbon emissions. No such thing as climate change, nope, not happening.
Many in this crowd also adhere to the belief that the pandemic was all a government hoax intended to instill fear in people, to get them to take the evil vaccine which would enable the government spy on them. This theory is all twisted up with 5G, with multiple versions of the perils of the vaccine. In another text message exchange with the person who claimed abortion was murder, I said, “Well, we’re all vaccinated and if we turn into aliens, we’ll come for you.”
The erosion of the separation of state and religion is evident. Unless something drastically changes – in the makeup of the supreme court, in their apparent impunity, in the length of their appointments – then things look terrifying. We’ll be living not only in an autocracy, but a theocracy, where you’re told what you must believe in terms of religion.
Throughout all this bedlam the supreme court has created, there are some interesting synchronicities. Here’s the trickster.
– Rudy Gulliani, when disputing the testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson about who asked for pardons, said, “She wasn’t around when I asked for a pardon.”
-Or take Ron Johnson, republican senator from Wisconsin, who pretended to be on his cell while being pursued by a reporter by an NBC who wanted more information about the “alternate state of electors.” This was after the June 22 hearing, when it was revealed that his chief of staff had texted an assistant to Mike Pence to offer an “alternate slate of electors” backing Trump before Congress officially certified the 2020 election results.
The reporter – Frank Thorpe V- told Johnson he could see the screen of the senator’s phone and he wasn’t on a call. Johnson finally gave up the pretense and engaged with reporters. Another trickster? Or does that one even qualify as a synchro?
But here’s another oddity. A neighbor ended up owing $111,000 to a hospital for an ailment she had in early 2020. She divulged this particular fact when we ran into each other at the grocery store. I said, “That sure makes the case for universal health care.”
“Forget that,” she snapped. “I want to be able to choose my own doctor.”
Huh?
This is an instance, I think, where the trickster provides the missing link. Universal health care means you walk into a hospital and pay a minimal charge for the visit or nothing at all. Health care for profit means you’re charged $111,000 for your care. The trickster whispers, You’re not connecting the dots.
The problem with the trickster is that all too often we don’t recognize its presence or hear its voice because it makes us look bad. We can’t laugh at what we don’t perceive, especially when it concerns ourselves.
This edition of Popular Science has some fascinating articles on where the future may be taking us though technology and innovation. It covers everything from memory to health, transplants, urban futures, work, species and ecosystems, climate change and a world without cars. One of the most intriguing articles is called “Saving democracy” and concerns the profound implications of the Internet and social media and access to information.
The author, Stephen Lewandowsky, is a cognitive scientist at the University of Bristol in the UK. When the Internet first emerged and its potential was realized, “people celebrated the global village, the interconnectedness that would enable democracy to flourish. “This optimistic endorsement crash-landed in 2016 when Cambridge Analytica, Russian bots, Brexit, and the election of Donal Trump revealed the darker side of global connectedness and the ability of large-scale organized manipulation and disinformation to polarize societies and to undermine democracy,” the author writes.
As he points out, we’re only now beginning to understand the implications of this technology. It can “both erode democracy and expand democracy, can be a tool of autocrats as well as activists and…provides a voice to the marginalized while simultaneously giving reach to fanatics and extremists.” He refers to it as a Jekyll and Hyde technology that developed so quickly the full consequences weren’t understood. That’s an understatement.
The problem now isn’t mentioned in this issue. Right wing extremism – the fanatics – are hoping to rewrite the constitution, an idea proposed by Rick Santorum (remember him?) and other conservatives like John Eastman and Sean Hannity. As the Insider reports: “You take this grenade and you pull the pin, you’ve got a live piece of ammo in your hands,” Santorum, a two-time GOP presidential candidate and former CNN commentator, explained in audio of his remarks obtained by the left-leaning watchdog group the Center for Media and Democracy and shared with Insider. “34 states — if every Republican legislator votes for this, we have a constitutional convention.”
So far, 19 states have joined this movement to call for a new constitution. “Article V provides two methods to amend the Constitution. Either Congress can pass an amendment — which is how all 27 amendments to the Constitution were added — or two-thirds of US states can call for a convention to amend the document, which has never been done.”
And you can be sure the result will annihilate more rights, limit the powers of congress, the DOJ and the executive branch.
The Right Is Trying to Rewrite the Constitution to Cement Minority Rule Forever
A new episode of The Mystical Underground is live! “Angela Willhoft: I See Hearts”:
Join Trish and Rob for a conversation with…
Angela Willhoft is a spiritual medium, a conduit between two worlds. As an evidential medium, she serves the physical by giving hope that life continues after death.
In serving the spiritual realm, Angela aims to honor the life they lived and pass along messages of love and comfort to the bereaved.
She looks to provide hope and comfort to people questioning the possibility of life after death and healing for those who are suffering from grief.
Honoring her commitment to two worlds, she offers facts about the life and personality of the departed that can only be confirmed by her clients. Using intuitive guidance, mediumship, and astrology, Angela helps clients through decision-making and healing.
Synchronicities that involve numbers are some of the most intriguing. There are the popular elevens- 11, 111,1111, and the clusters of threes – 3, 33, 333 or of any number, really.
This evening, while working on a novel, I had one of those weird number synchros. In my book, the character, psychic Mira Morales, is looking for a particular address from years earlier. She knows the street, but not the house number. So I jotted down our house number now and when we lived in Boynton Beach more than 20 years ago.
2784 -2+7+8+4= 21 or 2+1=3
6168 in Boynton 6+1+6+8= 21 or 2+1=3
This was the first time I’d broken down the numbers. Here’s another. In the 1980s, we made a trip back to Venezuela with my parents. One of the places we went was Maracaibo.
We lived there when I was 5 and my mother was pregnant with my sister. We lived in a neighborhood – called an oil camp back then – for the foreign employees of Creole, a subsidiary of Standard Oil – you know, Exxon.
My dad was hurrying along the sidewalk that day, glancing at the house numbers, trying to remember what number had been ours. Then he stopped at the end of the driveway and pointed at the number on the house. “This is it!” he announced. “Number 57!”
5+7=12 and 1+2=3.
So I think it’s safe to say that the number 3, for me, spells home.
We seem to be surrounded by patterns that appear in a variety of ways, in various forms. Astrology has its own patterns. So do the tarot and The I Ching. The numbers that reappear in our lives have a pattern as well.
In our book 7 Secrets of Synchronicity, secret 6 is The Trickster. We define it as: a synchronicity can reveal itself with a twist of humor or wry irony so startling it stops us in our tracks.
The trickster is usually intriguing and sort of plays with us, makes us look silly or naive or ill informed. But it has a counterpart in what I think of us as The Dark Trickster. It does basically the same thing as its sibling, but in a way you’re not likely to forget.
For instance:
Our friend Evan, a physical therapist, has been really careful during this pandemic. For awhile he worked on the road, going masked to homes for PT sessions. Then he changed jobs and went to work for one of Orlando’s hospitals, always masked. He has been vexed and boosted, but recently came down with Covid. His symptoms were mild but persistent. Finally, he went back to work and was assigned to – the Covid wing! He says this was unintentional. In my mind, that qualifies it as a dark trickster.
Here’s another example. Before the pandemic, daughter Megan came home one night from a movie with friend Denise and they found her beautiful cat, Piper dead on the living room floor. Megan, hysterical, thought one of the dogs she was watching had killed her. But a veterinarian who arrived shortly afterward to pick up her dog, saw that Megan was distraught and examined Piper. She said there were no bite marks, that it was likely Piper died of a heart attack, that her heart was congenitally weak in some way.
Now here’re the strange synchros. Denise, who had given Piper to Megan, was with her when she got back from the movie. Denise actually spotted Piper’s body first and stayed with Megan for a long time in the aftermath. The next day, October 29, National Cat Day, Megan buried Piper and Denise called her, hysterical because she’d found the cat she’d rescued dead on her porch. The cat had been hit by a driver who had left her a note of apology and placed her cat on the porch. Megan went over to Denise’s to comfort and console her and to bury her cat. While she was doing that, she found out that another friend had to put down his cat. All of this on National Cat Day. Dark Trickster.
Rob experienced one of these on his recent trip to Minneapolis. He stayed with a friend who is a chain smoker and didn’t sleep well that night because to the smoke. So he decided to get a motel room. Turns out they had only one room left – in the a smoking room. “It smelled just like the apartment I’d left,” he said.
I’m not sure what the purpose is of this type of synchronicity. We certainly take notice of these Dark Tricksters, we tell other people about them, talk about them. Maybe they happen just to remind us that the universe is a strangely conscious place, after all.
Today, August 8, 2022, when I heard that the FBI had entered Mar a Lago, I cheered!I figured there had to be a global synchro of some kind with this. After all, this hasn’t ever happened before in American history. Then again, neither had the insurrection of J6. I figured there had to be a global synchro involved in this one.
Sure enough, there is. On the evening of August 8, 1974 Richard Nixon addressed the American public from the Oval Office and announced his resignation.
Then there’s a third component. Earlier today, before this news, Rob sent me something from a site called Unity, about how August 8 is the day of the Lion’s Gate Portal. It’s when our sun is pst 15 degrees Leo, the center of the Leo zodiac, and the fixed star, Sirius are in direct alignment during this period. “The sun receives a new codex of light and genetic information. The light of our sun holds all genetic information for our Earth and all organic life on this Earth is a photonics expression from our sun.”
My interpretation is that the combination of the sun and Sirius brings truth into the light.
A new episode of The Mystical Underground is live! “Rick Bettua: BREATHE”:
Join Trish and Rob for a conversation with…
Rick Bettua served thirty-two years as a U.S. Navy diver and is back to tell us more about his incredible survival stories that are now featured in his book, BREATHE: A Master Diver’s Survival Tales. He finished his career in 2008 as a command master chief petty officer and master diver, then returned for another three-year stint as an advisor, retiring in 2011.
In October 2004, he became the Navy’s command master chief of salvage diving, and in that role, he managed the world’s largest and most diverse diving command with more than 250 personnel operating throughout the Pacific and Indian Oceans as well as Iraq and Kuwait. Rob is quite familiar with Rick’s story since he edited his book. After Rick retired, he moved to Queensland, Australia where he is married, and has two children.
One other thing, if you think this introduction doesn’t sound like a typical mystical underground interview that explores the paranormal and mysteries of the unknown, you would be wrong. Rick’s story is not without some mind-blowing synchronicities, intuitive experiences and a touch of other-worldliness as well
Florida is uninhabitable without air conditioning, at least during the summer and part of the fall. So today, with a temp outside of 91, our AC was blowing out warm air. I called the company we usually deal with for AC issues, but they couldn’t send anyone out until tomorrow.
In the meantime, the dogs were panting and the temp inside the house was 83. Our offices were rendered too hot to sit in. So I called another company. They sent a technician within 15 or 20 minutes. He identified the problems – a clogged hose, a burned lizard on a piece of the equipment, and a dead frog that may have gotten into the converter.
I walked out to the mailbox and one of the two pieces of mail was the image above. Synchro about air-conditioning and, fortunately, wrong about the message!
If I meet someone with my first name, Rob, it’s not a synchronicity. There are a lot of us around. But names do play into synchronicity when the odds of two unusual ones coming together seems highly unlikely. That’s what happened to me recently on two different occasions with names that I’d never previously heard.
One of the names is Tarun. I’m ghostwriting a novel with a character by that name and at one point I realized that Tarun needed a last name. I do ghostwriting through a British company called Reedsy. So I went to my Reedsy site to contact the author ask him for a suggestion for a last name.
However, before I found him on a list of authors who had contacted me, I noticed a new inquiry had popped up and amazingly the author who was looking for a ghostwriter was named Tarun. Since I’d never heard the name prior to working on the novel, I was surprised to see another Tarun come to me for help with his novel.
I saw this Tarun’s last name was Morar and decided that would work fine for the other Tarun. So with that, the hopeful author’s full name became a character’s name in another author’s book. Synchronicity.
Ultimately, I did not work with the new Tarun on his project. I did relate the synchronicity to him, though. His response was silence. A case of a synchro impressing me, but not one of the participants in the synchro.
The second name synchro that happened in close proximity to the first one involves a character’s name in the Netflix series, Succession. The daughter in the well-to-do neurotic family that owns a media empire goes by the nickname Shiv. But her full name is the other one that I wasn’t familiar with. After watching an episode recently, I tried to remember the name but couldn’t. That bothers me when I forget names. So I went online looking for it and quickly found it: Siobhan. In doing so, I went on Facebook and saw that I had a new friend request. Amazingly, the request was from a Siobhan. Like attracts like! What are the chances of that?
