Welcome to The Mystical Underground

This post was adapted from a news item by Laurel Airica that appears on the Unknown Country website.

Most of us are fascinated by astonishing coincidences when inner experiences collide with outer events outside of cause and effect and against all odds. However, one aspect of meaningful coincidences that we often overlook is linguistic synchronicities, including anagrams, puns and homonyms.

For example, the word coincidence is a homonym for co-incidents. Although the meanings are something different, the words are linked through synchronicity.

Then there’s prescience. Opened up it becomes ‘pre-science.’ That’s something to think about.

An anagram of significance can be found in the two words, ‘earth’ and ‘heart.’ The synchronicity is that we need to treat the earth with heart. And ‘heart’ is about compassion.

The human heart has a two-way dialog with the brain—each influencing the other. The heart has the strongest electromagnetic field, which changes with our emotions. We actually evolve from the heart, not the brain. The heart has over 40,000 sensory neurons that have both short and long-term memory, and more information is sent from the heart to the brain than the other way around. So we need to bring heart-based thinking, the home of compassion, into the world, into our everyday lives.

One way to do so is through meditation, in other words not-doing, rather than doing.

An eight-week study conducted by Harvard neuroscientists supports that idea. The study involved 16 participants practicing mindfulness meditation for about 25 minutes a day for eight weeks.

Magnetic Resonance (MR) scans were taken of their brains two weeks before they began the program and two weeks after they completed it. Scans were also taken of a control group to make sure that any observed changes in the brains of the meditators could not be ascribed simply to the passage of time.

The researchers found an increase in ‘grey matter’ in the areas of the pre-frontal cortex related to empathy and compassion, memory and a sense of self. At the same time, there was a decrease in the density of the amygdala – the primitive area of the brain responsible for the fight-or-flight response.

Notes Laurel Airica, creator of WordMagic: An Enchanted Literary Entertainment, “Given that meditation increases the part of the brain related to compassion, and the effects of meditation show up throughout the day in more compassionate interactions – even with strangers – perhaps meditation should be widely encouraged as an important form of mental/emotional hygiene because it makes us more socially responsible. Meditation may even be an evolutionary strategy that could give our species the necessary impetus to make the ultimate, life-saving leap from Humankind to HumanKindness.”

You can find more details in Laurel’s article.

Have you ever wondered where that phrase comes from? DOG TIRED. Well, I’m still not sure of the origin of the phrase, but these photos definitely illustrate what it means. Thanks to Nancy McMoneagle for sending! No synchro here, but plenty of laughs.

And now, the cats in the dog tired act:

And my personal favorite:

In mid-April, we posted a story about an experiment I conducted based on Pam Grout’s new book, E-Cubed. One of the interesting comments about it was from Stephanie, who had read Grout’s E-Squared, saw the experiment post, and decided to do her own thing with it.

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I love the E-Squared book, fun experiments. Because of your post, I took seven $1 bills and had my 13 year old son help me craft the notes. I then drove around with my 15 year old daughter taping them to car windshields. What fun!

As I was taping a dollar to a windshield, my ex-husband called my daughter and she told him what I was doing. He laughed and asked, “Why in the world would she do that?”

My daughter “To spread happiness, I guess.” Indeed!

The best part is that he always hated when I donated or gave away money; he simply didn’t understand it. He said “If you’re going to give money away, give it to me!” I guess I’m still up to my old tricks.

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A few days after I’d done my $1 bill experiment, I decided to try it with $5 bills. I only had one, so I taped my note to the bill, dropped the tape dispenser in my bag, and headed to the gym.

I recently changed gyms. Now that I’m on Medicare, Humana offers free gym membership through a program called Silver Sneakers. I can’t say I’m crazy about the name, which I equate with silver/gray hair, but since it’s free, I can’t complain. The only thing this gym lacks is a rowing machine and aerobic classes, but that’s why the membership is inexpensive – or, in my case, free. The clientele are working class folks, the ones who work 8-5 for minimum wage and should be voting the Democratic ticket.

In our previous gym, much more upscale, I was paying about $31 a month and it draws the upper middle class folks – and the uber rich and famous, like Bruce Springsteen. If I had left a $1 or $5 bill on the inside of the restroom door here, with a note about the generosity of the universe, it probably would have been dumped in the trash can. But when I taped a $5 bill on the inside of the restroom door at the new gym, I felt that it might mean something to whoever found it.

Two days later, Rob and I received more than $500 in unexpected royalty checks. The thing with this experiment is that you can’t be thinking, Gee, what am I going to get back in return? You tape your bills to wherever, without any expectation of compensation, and simply hope that it helps someone, somewhere. I keep putting myself in the shoes of someone who finds a note and a bill. I hope their reaction is: WTF??? Is this for real?

In fact when I posted the first story I wrote on Facebook, I’d forgotten that my neighbor – who is a Facebook friend – was one of my recipients.

You did this? she wrote. Thank you!!

I plan on continuing this experiment. We’re going to a writers’ conference this weekend in Tallahassee, a college town. Unless college life has changed drastically, it means these kids are living hand to mouth. I figure I’ll have my printed notes about the abundant universe and my tape dispenser and my bills. And in between our home and Tallahassee, there will be many hundreds of miles of turnpike – and rest stops. What better place for this kind of thing than a turnpike restroom, where women from all over the country converge?

Maybe Grout has hit on something big here. It’s like that very old TV show The Millionnaire,  It ran from 1955-1960, and was actually about this kind of giving, but on a much larger scale:

According to IMDB: John Beresford Tipton is a multi millionaire and among the things he does with his money is to give away a million dollars to people he doesn’t know. So every week Tipton who is not seen, instructs his assistant, Michael Anthony to go bring the person he chose their check. And he asks them to sign an agreement not to tell anyone how they got the money. And we see how the recipients’ lives are changed.

It’s not as if a buck or five bucks is going to drastically change anyone’s life. But the thought behind it, that we live in an abundant universe that always has our backs, is powerful.

The other day we received an interesting synchro through the contact form on our blog. It was from Jeff, who lives outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, and involves a math/numbers synchronicity. Here’s what he wrote:

I was born on May 24. My friend is born on April 15. Our birthdays are 39 days apart.

“39 is the smallest natural number which has three partitions into three parts which all give the same product when multiplied: {25, 8, 6}, {24, 10, 5}, {20, 15, 4}.”

The second group of numbers contains the numbers 5 (May) and 24. It also contains the number 10. 10 in Roman numerals is X. I have one X chromosome (XY).

The third group of numbers contains the numbers 4 (April) and 15. It also contains the number 20. 20 in Roman numerals is XX. She has two X chromosomes (XX).

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I was struck by the numerical stuff and emailed Jeff, asking if he’d experienced anything like this before. His response:

This is the first time I’ve experienced something like this.

I was checking out the date range on wolframalpha.com and for some reason I decided to search for the number 39. I read an encyclopedic article up until I noticed our birthdays in the section containing the quote from my first email. It took me a while to make a connection between those other numbers in the groups containing our birthdays and the number of chromosomes we have.

I don’t work in the math field but I have taken calculus classes in high school and college. 

The woman is aware of the connection. She didn’t seem interested in it though.

Does anyone have a take on what this synchro could mean?

“Where do you get your ideas from?” That’s the question people often ask novelists probably more than any other. I never know quite what to say when I hear it. Since Trish and I are headed to a writer’s conference in Tallahassee this coming weekend, where we’ll be featured speakers, I probably should come up with an answer.

Whatever my answer might be, it won’t compare to the astonishing answer to that question that Liz Whittaker can provide for her latest novel, The White Tower. Liz, a resident of Wales, has written numerous novels set in the British Isles. Our friend Jane Clifford explains the fascinating story of how this one came about. (Jane has offered some unusual stories, charged with synchronicity, over the years of our blog. However, this one might top them all.)

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“My friend Liz, who is dying of cancer, launched her last novel, The White Tower, which she originally wrote in 1975. It’s very strange how she came by the story.

“A friend of hers got a message through a ouija board: “Tell Liz to go to Pencarreg.” That was it. No reason given.

“Liz didn’t tell me about the message, but came to me with an ordnance survey map and asked me to dowse it with a pendulum to find where she should go for a day out. The pendulum indicated Pencarreg. Then Liz told me about the message. She went to another dowser friend and repeated the question, again without revealing the reason. Likewise, the pendulum indicated Pencarreg.

“So she went there with another friend, where they visited the remains of a Roman fort on top of a small mountain. Whilst there the weirdest thing happened to her. She felt the presence of a girl from centuries ago step into her and Liz began to channel an unknown language at the same time as this girl showed her events from centuries before.

“Liz didn’t feel too comfortable with what was going on, since although clairvoyant she wasn’t used to mediumship. Her friend was astonished to see Liz gabbling away in a strange language. There was an extraordinary noise in the air and to their astonishment a pillar of bees above Liz fell on her and covered her, bees crawling inside her clothes, in her hair, all over her. Terrified, she ran shrieking down the mountain.

“Amazingly, the bees left her unharmed and the spirit girl had gone! During the whole experience Liz downloaded the story for the White Tower. Back in the ‘70s, I read it chapter by chapter hot from the type writer. However, it remained unpublished until I encouraged her to re-write it in recent years. She has dedicated the book to me.

“Last Tuesday, we were discussing the bee incident and Liz told me a friend, who is not psychic, had trouble believing the events that led to the story. A short time later, I was sitting at an outdoor café, while Liz had gone to order coffee, and I watched a woman walk past me with a bee buzzing inside a wine glass. She was holding a card over the top and was walking purposefully up a busy high street taking this bee somewhere. I have never seen someone rescuing a bee in a busy town before!

“Liz returned with the coffees and another woman stopped to chat to her about the book and of course the bee incident was discussed again. The novel tells an extraordinary story of when the Romans brought Christianity here and Druidism and the old ways went underground. So there is mystery and magic in this novel, and it seems that Liz had literally channeled it from a spirit from the past.

Below is the cover image for The White Tower.

Carol Bowman sent us this list as a fun thing to read to a friend in the hospital. It piqued my interest, so I started googling the statements and discovered the original source for this list.

Some of these statements are true, some are true but with caveats, and some are wrong. I didn’t check all of these, but have noted the ones I did check. Fun trivia, for sure. I did check snopes. com to see if they knew about this list. I have to say that I grew disenchanted with snopes when we were writing Synchronicity Highway and found that snopes dismissed the JFK/Lincoln parallels outright, basically writing them off to random weirdness. I think snopes is actually a skeptic site. That said, here’s their take on this list.

For the sake of brevity, I’ve eliminated some of the items on the original list. Feel free to find your own supportive or contradictory evidence as to what’s true – and what isn’t!

A dime has 118 ridges around the edge.

A cat has 32 muscles in each ear. – Yes, but in the outer ears.

A crocodile cannot stick out its tongue.

 True

A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.
 True but…It turns out to be about 5 months.

A dragonfly has a life span of 24 hours. Well, no.

A “jiffy” is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.

A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.

A snail can sleep for three years.

 Apparently true.

Al Capone’s business card said he was a used furniture dealer. Sounds about right, like John Gotti calling himself a plumber.

All 50 states are listed across the top of the Lincoln Memorial on the back of the $5 bill.

Almonds are a member of the peach family.

 True

An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.

Babies are born without kneecaps. They don’t appear until the child reaches 2 to 6 years of age.

  Sort of true.

Butterflies taste with their feet.
 True!

Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds. True.

Dogs only have about 10.

“Dreamt” is the only English word that ends in the letters “mt”.

February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon.

In the last 4,000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.

If the population of China walked past you, in single file, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction.

If you are an average American, in your whole life, you will spend an average of 6 months waiting at red lights.

 Didn’t check this, but it sure feels true!

It’s impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.

Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors. DaVinci invented a lot of things, but not the scissors.

Maine is the only state whose name is just one syllable.

No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple.

On a Canadian two dollar bill, the flag flying over the Parliament building is an American flag.

Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.

The Peanut is one of the ingredients of dynamite .

Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.

 True

“Stewardesses” is the longest word typed with only the left hand and “lollipop” with your right.

The average person’s left hand does 56% of the typing.

The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.

The sentence: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” uses every letter of the alphabet.

The winter of 1932 was so cold that Niagara Falls froze completely solid.

 I believe that Niagra Falls – or parts of it- also froze this past winter.

There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar.

There are more chickens than people in the world.

There are only four words in the English language which end in “dous”: tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous

T

Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.

TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.

Winston Churchill was born in a ladies’ room during a dance.

 Well, maybe and maybe not. If you google this, you’ll find that he was – and that he wasn’t.

Women blink nearly twice as much as men.

Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks; otherwise it will digest itself.

NOW you know everything

One of my great joys in life is visiting bookstores, browsing the aisles, discovering what’s being published and by who, and paging through books that seize my attention. Sometimes, I jot down the names of the books and download them later onto my iPad for a fraction of the cost of the print book. But other times, I feel that I want to take the book home in physical form, plop down on the couch, and get lost in it. On a recent visit, one of the books I brought home was E3 – (E cubed) by Pam Grout, a sequel to her wonderful book E-Squared.

None of the ideas in either of these books is new. The ideas have been around for decades, maybe centuries, but I was first introduced to them in 1973, when I began reading the Seth books by Jane Roberts. Esther and Jerry Hicks and Louise Hay have also popularized these ideas. The basic premise? You get what you concentrate on. You create your own reality. It all begins from inside.

 But Grout excels in the way she presents the material. She’s funny and sometimes irreverent and the nine experiments she poses are fascinating. So I decided to try one of the activities in Experiment 5: Your New BFF Corollary (or Money: It’s Not Complicated).

The “sub-hypothesis” of this particular experiment is, to quote Grout, “If I give money away, I will receive even more money. It’s an unalterable principle. What you give comes back to you multiplied and running over. She and her daughter tried this experiment when they were in Chicago. They took a stack of $5 bills and left them at bus stops, taped to park benches. Pinned them into clothes in stores. With each bill, they left an anonymous note about the abundance of the universe and how this was just one small sign of how much the person who found it was loved. What happened to her within a few weeks of conducting this experiment was that E-Squared hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.

 OK, I thought. I’ll give this one a try. I dug through my wallet for all my $1 bills – I had just five – and thought about the anonymous note I would tape to the bills. I decided Grout’s note would do just fine. There’s a photo at the top of the note and one of the bills. The universe is ever abundant. This is just one sign of how much you are loved. I typed several copies of the note, cut them to size, taped them to the dollar bills, and dropped the Scotch tape in my purse.

Rob and I went out to dinner that night and I taped the first one to the inside of the restroom door at the restaurant. The second one went under a container on our table that held condiments. The third went on my neighbor’s windshield. The fourth was taped to the windshield of a random car in the parking lot. The fifth one was taped to the inside door of the restroom at Barnes & Noble. I thought about how I would feel if I found one of these – startled, amused, a really good WTF? moment.

Within 48 hours, I received a $150 rebate from ATT that I wasn’t expecting until May. That afternoon, Rob and I got a call about a possible ghostwriting project. My next foray will be with $5 bills and I’ll expand my venue beyond restrooms and car windshields! But first, there are some other experiments from this marvelous book that I intend to try. I’ll report back from the field of potential!

Brooklyn-based independent filmmakers and husband and wife team, Joél Mejia and Katy Walker, are close to completing a three year project that documents a mysterious phenomenon called synchronicity, first discovered by renowned psychotherapist, Carl Jung. Their documentary film, Time is Art, follows the journey of a writer trying to make sense of the recurring symbols and strange coincidences that she began experiencing after 9/11 and the death of a loved one.

The filmmakers did not set out to make another “new age” film, instead their film aims to merge science and spirituality, and to address the very real phenomenon of meaningful coincidences. What the filmmakers discovered is that around the world there is a growing ecosystem and culture inspired  by synchronicity that is eager to make sense of a world ravaged by environmental destruction, corruption, inequality, and social unrest. Together with some of the leading voices in psychoanalysis, parapsychology, biology, and activism in art, the filmmakers explore a reality where time is transformed from a unit that can be measured and commodified, “Time is money”, to an experience of oneness with the natural rhythms of nature and the universe. It is here that the filmmakers discover that time is, in fact, art.

The filmmakers aspire to bridge the gap between the format of the cult classic film like Richard Linklater’s “Waking LIfe” and the documentary, “What the Bleep Do We Know”, by taking an unconventional approach that allows audiences to experience reality as Jennifer Palmer, a corporate IT specialist turned writer, begins to see it – one less concerned with linear storytelling, and more open to the cyclical patterns of nature, the hidden meanings of symbols, and the dreamlike overlapping of people, places, and moments. Visually captivating images of urban and natural landscapes, visionary art and street murals, excerpts of Jennifer’s writing, and compelling conversations with fellow seekers and mystics like Toko-Pa Turner, Richard Tarnas, Ph.D, Graham Hancock, biologist, Rupert Sheldrake, and visionary artists, Allyson & Alex Grey, guide us through the underlying premise of the film: perhaps we can tap into a way of being that is not ruled by a finite sense of time, but rather by the ability to live in harmony with the true creative nature of our existence.

Here’s more on their ambitious project. And take a look at the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9v4OWWxHqFk

On the evening of April 8, we met Lynn and Bruce Gernan and ten or twelve other people for a memorial service for our friend, author and intrepid explorer Kathy Doore.

The service took place on a catamaran that Lynn’s sister, Holly, owns. Kathy wanted her ashes scattered at sea, so that was the point of the boat. Also, Kathy was a sailor who spent a lot of time on Lake Michigan, where she had some strange other worldly encounters, and it seemed fitting that she should have a memorial at sea.

The catamaran is docked at the Boca Raton Hotel & Resort, a landmark in Boca. The pink tower in the photo has existed since 1926 and was designed by architect Addison Mizner, whose signature buildings – or copies of them – can be seen all over Boca Raton.

Lynn put together a beautiful memorial pamphlet that she entitled Celebration of Life. It included photos of Kathy, some biographical material about her and her love affair with Peru, and Markawasi, and a piece I’d written about her. The weather was beautiful and as we headed out to sea, I remembered something I’d said to Bruce the other day when I ran into him at the gym – that Kathy might put in an appearance. It would be right up her alley to do something like that – as an orb or something else that was unusual.

When we were maybe a mile or two out, Rob and Bruce told me to come topside to see something. It was an unusual cloud formation in the shape of a V, against a sky so blue it made your heart ache. It was as if it was pointing the way to the place where Kathy’s ashes would be scattered. Or, as Lynn said, Kathy left us a farewell message. Lynn later enlarged the photo and said that it appears there’s a white orb in the bottom left-hand corner of that cloud formation in the middle of the V.

Kathy’s closest friend, Marcia, came from San Diego for the memorial. She last saw Kathy when they spent a week together at Chichen Itza in Mexico. Before the ashes were scattered at sea, Marcia pressed her hands against the beautiful biodegradable box Lynn had bought for Kathy’s ashes. It moved me, seeing this close friend of hers speaking to her in the moments before.

Rob also placed his hands on the box and uttered a tribute to Kathy that he uses at the end of his yoga/meditation classes. “May the long time sun shine within you, all love surround you, and the pure light within you guide your way home.”

Then the first mate took the box, removed the top, and began scattering her ashes. It was an unbearably sad moment, close to sunset, the close of the day.

And yet there was a poignancy and triumph as well. Kathy Doore left her mark and was ready to go. She’d completed what she came here to do.

My tribute to Kathy:

Lady of the lake, lady of the stones,

Your nomadic spirit forever searched

For the essential myths, the very bones

of the mystery of human experience.

You listened for the pulse, the heartbeat,

In every world you explored,

Fog, mountain, time, space, every feat

Etched against skies where you soared

Lady of the lake, lady of the stones,

We will remember you for

Wisdom you imparted and loaned,

All those strange, invisible doors

You flung open for the rest of us

Proving we’re more than dust to dust

You and Markawasi, joined at the hip,

Endure as enigmas of what might be

Of what we might discover and see

Cruising the sunset on this final trip.

Lady of the lake, lady of the stones,

You left much too soon

For the far side of the moon,

So we’re asking that you please phone home!

The contact form on the blog often brings in fascinating email from people with questions about synchros or with synchros they’ve experienced. We recently received an email from Karla McNeese from Topeka, Kansas.

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So I have a massive crush on a guy. It has been several years since it started and it’s one of those “he doesn’t even know I am alive” sort of things. I recently discovered I have the same rare-ish disease that his father died from. This is interesting to me because it is rare enough to learn someone has it, let alone like this.

Also, I share the same birth date (different year) as a dear friend of his. Not sure if this lines up to anything other than an astrological alignment. So what say you? Are these synchronicities? Am I simply grasping at things? And what does this mean??? Thanks in advance.

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I asked Karla if she’d ever experienced a synchro before. Her response: To the best of my remembrance, this is the first time I have experienced anything like this. Ever since learning of the phenomenon of synchronicity I keep my mind and my eyes open for the experience. When I learned this fact about my “crush” I got cold chills, then a feeling of warmth came over me. Hard to explain but it was sort of a “knowing” deep down.

My take is that both incidents are synchronicities. But figuring out what they mean is more challenging. Does it mean something will develop between her and this man on whom she has the massive crush? Or is there some other meaning altogether? All opinions and ideas are welcome!