Welcome to The Mystical Underground

 Today, we received an email through the contact form on our blog from Graeme Heddle of Scotland about a remarkable synchro he had connected to Aliens in the Backyard and The Synchronicity Highway. I think his story illustrates how awareness of synchronicity often triggers the experience. Here’s Graeme’s synchro:

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Greetings from Scotland. Just thought I’d share this with you. I discovered your book Aliens In the Backyard on the ebook subscription service Scribd. I really enjoyed it so decided to have a look and see what other books of yours were available and started reading The Synchronicity Highway last night. It’s also very interesting, but I couldn’t really relate to the whole synchronicity thing as I can’t recall anything like that ever happening to me. That all changed today as I’m just back from a local crystal shop after enquiring about a crystal I was looking for that I’d forgotten the name of.

All I could remember was that it was from a meteorite that crashed into the earth somewhere in central Europe. The shopkeeper didn’t know what I was talking about, but said if I could remember the name he would be happy to source it for me. Of course when I got home I completely forgot to search for it on Google as intended. But I did pick up my iPad and continued reading the book.

Imagine my astonishment when I continued reading from where I’d left off, the section entitled Telepathy with Strangers, only to discover the story of Trish and the woman in the New Age book store both looking for MOLDAVITE, the very stone I was enquiring about today! (original post https://themysticalunderground.com/?p=15632

I’m gobsmacked, totally gobsmacked! I’d like to thank you both for tuning me into to synchronicity and I’m looking forward to reading many more of your books! Kindest regards, Graeme, Burntisland, Scotland

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I emailed Graeme and asked if we could use his story on our blog. He replied that he would be delighted if we did and added, “It gets weirder still.”

Just after I sent the email to you, my fiancée Ben emailed me to ask how I would feel about us getting these rings for our wedding. (According to the website, the ring is crafted from solid billet of Gibeon meteorite)

I couldn’t believe it! I’ve tried to explain to him what I’m so excited about,  but he’s not convinced, bring a die hard skeptic. He has promised to give your book a go though!

The Sanskrit term for psychic abilities is siddhi, and these extraordinary abilities were described more than two thousand years ago by a yogi scholar named Patanjali in a four-volume book called, The Yoga Sutras. The third book, called Vibhuti Pada, describes the siddhis in 56 sutras.

Patanjali attested that these abilitities, which he divided into primary, secondary and inferior siddhis, were best achieved through deep meditation. Mainstream science hasn’t done much to explore the validity of the connection between meditation and psychic ability. But a few researchers have taken up the challenge.

I write about that research in my new book, The Jewel in the Lotus: Meditation for Busy Minds. Here’s a brief excerpt about research related to the siddhis.

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Parapsychologist Dean Radin in his book, SUPERNORMAL: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities, writes: “From a scientific perspective, the mere existence of these phenomena, regardless of how weak or unreliable they may be, is astonishing. It tells us that the modern understanding of the human mind, which is based on the neurosciences and its approach to studying brain functions, has completely overlooked a fundamental aspect of our capacity and potentials.”

More recently, British psychologist Serena Roney-Dougal studied Tibetan Buddhist meditators in northeastern India with the intent to find out if increased levels of meditation result in increased psychic abilities. The participants relaxed for five minutes, then meditated for 15 minutes. Then they were asked to describe a photograph on Roney-Dougal’s laptop computer, and sketch it. Afterwards, they were shown four photos on the computer and asked to select the photo that was closest to the image they saw in their vision.

A variation of the procedure tested meditators’ abilities to see the future. They were asked to describe and draw a picture that would be randomly selected on the computer from a collection of twenty-five photos.

The result of the study revealed evidence that more experienced meditators performed at a higher level when it came to exhibiting psi abilities. When all the tests were compiled, the odds against chance were 8,500 to 1. While scientific studies of meditation have become popular and the results positive, mainstream researchers continue to shy away from studying the siddhis. It’s almost as if they are saying, If the siddhis exist, we don’t want to know about them.

Radin puts it this way: “The siddhis are a core component of most meditative traditions, so one would think that any serious research on this topic would have to include a discussion of the siddhis. But most haven’t, and the abyss is especially conspicuous in the neurosciences, where merely this topic in a positive tone is strictly forbidden.”

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Some of my meditation students have told me about their paranormal experiences during meditation, and usually they’ve been about contact with deceased loved ones.

Recently, I had a curious experience myself while meditating at the end of a yoga class at the studio where I teach. As I relaxed and moved into a meditative state, an image came to mind. I saw two people standing at the counter in the lobby of the yoga studio. One of them was massaging the shoulders and back of the other one. It seemed an odd thing to pick up. So as I left the class, I asked the instructor behind the counter, who was checking in students for the next class, if anyone had been giving another person a massage while standing at the counter. I told her I’d seen it during the final relaxation.

She smiled and said: “No, but I wish somebody would give me a massage.” I left it at that and headed home. I was still in the car when she texted me: “Hey, after you left a couple came in, and the guy rubbed his wife’s shoulders while she checked in. Does that count?”

“Sure,” I responded. “But who’s counting?”

Whether you call it a siddhi or a synchronicity, it was meaningful to me.

When I saw my first Star Trek years ago, somewhere in the late 1960s, I was totally captivated by Spock. Who was this guy, anyway? The pointy ears, the maddening logic, the mind meld thing he could do.

Spock, a human hybrid, was probably one of the most complex characters in the TV show and the subsequent movies, an individual uncomfortable with emotions, yet with a profound need to feel. I loved this guy. He was Kirk’s right hand guy, but often carried the show/movie. He was supposedly cold, distant, but there were times, especially in the Trek movies, where his humanity shone.

He died yesterday at the age of 83. Thank you, Spock. Thank you, Leonard, for who you portrayed and who you were. Live long and prosper! May the afterworld be enlivened and enriched by your presence.

This afternoon Rob and I turned into our neighborhood and saw the above car leaving our neighborhood. Google Earth. Wow, I thought. That would be a weird job to write about. I felt like telling Rob to stop so I could run over to the car and pound on the windows and ask the driver how she’d gotten the job and where could I apply?

The Google Earth history is here. Basically, it amounts to Google mapping every shadowy corner and surface on the planet through 3-D images taken from a street view, satellites, and any other means that are available. The last time I looked up our address on Google Earth, it showed a van in our driveway that we hadn’t owned for about five years, a van that actually had blown its engine on a trip to Atlanta when we were traveling with our teenage daughter, a bird, and a dog. Our front lawn in that photo was parched from months without rain.

I have mixed feelings about all this readily available information. On the one hand, I love the idea that no place on the planet is hidden, inaccessible, so remote that it exists in a time warp. On the other hand, I am appalled at just how much information is out there and that it’s not necessarily accurate. Anyone with a website, anyone who blogs, anyone with a Facebook or Twitter account or any kind of social media interaction is online, there, clickable.

And yet, don’t we all live a good portion of our lives in our own heads? Don’t we construct elaborate worlds inside our skulls, our consciousness? Aren’t we continually weaving the threads of our personal stories that even Google can’t fathom or document?

So, carry on car from Google Earth. Keep that camera humming. I’ll know the right version of my house when I see it. Our SUV sits alone in the driveway, the grass to the right is green and flourishing now because we’ve had rain and Rob has cut back on the bamboo and other trees and plants that blocked the sunlight. The Google camera may capture the tall avocado tree in our backyard – the one that produced so many avocados last year that we had to give them away. It might even capture one of our three mango trees, the branches blooming and promising a bumper crop this summer.

Ah, Google. In just 16 years, you have entered our lexicon in a way that few other words/concepts have. When someone asks me a question to which I don’t have an answer, my response is always the same: Google it. When I’m lost, creeped out, need a menu, a nearby restaurant, store, a particular book, product, the place with the cheapest gas, when I need anything at all, I Google it.

And I find something. It isn’t always the very thing I’m searching for, but if I click enough links, I eventually get to what I need.

So seeing that odd Google car leaving our neighborhood of perhaps thirty homes drove home the weird and sometimes uncomfortable reality of what we have become as a society, a planet, a collective people. Privacy is who you are inside your own head. Everything else is open to scrutiny, observation, judgment.

But in five years or ten, will Google or some other technology have found its way into your head? Your soul? Your essence? Is that technology already in development?

When I came across this metaphorical tale about life after death, I couldn’t pass it up. It also works as a window to open-mindedness and provides a glimpse of the holographic universe. As above, so below.

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In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other: “Do you believe in life after delivery?” The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.”

“Nonsense” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. What kind of life would that be?”

When we walked into the dog park yesterday, this sign was post in the billboard. Now, someone please tell me, how do you lose a potbelly pig?

Our neighbor’s orange tabby, Copper, performing acrobatics in a tree.

Our dog, Noah, cooling off at one of the local parks.

Nika, helping Rob drive.

Kilt, the border collie, finally at rest!

Noah, retrieving the morning newspaper

SQUIRREL?

Definitely a SQUIRREL on the other side of this fence! We’ll jump it, fly over it!

If you found a magic lamp in a second-hand store, wouldn’t you expect a miracle? I’m not sure that Jane Clifford rubbed the one above, but it seemed she did experience something of a miracle a short time after purchasing the mysterious lamp.

Here’s what she wrote when she sent the above photo.

“I found this magic lamp in a charity shop today for £1. Within minutes I had a miracle! I bumped into my estranged half sister in the street, she has not spoken to me for many years. She hugged me & said how sorry she was for the hurt, we chatted an hour & hugged and forgave the past. I have been transmitting healing to the situation for a few months.”

Miracles happen.

Postscript. Jane had sent me this photo and her story months ago, but I’d forgotten about it. But this evening, I received a query from our editor of a new astrology series we’re writing called Genie in the Stars. He asked if we had a picture of a magic lamp for the cover art. (He’d sent one for us to look at awhile back, but lost track of his copy.) So when searching for the pic, I came across Jane’s story. Voila! A new blog post.

I came across a long list of famous and not-so-famous coincidences on a Facebook synchro page. The image above is from one of them. Here it is:

That’s spooky, but it was another one about twins that caught my attention, even though I’d already read it elsewhere. It was about twins who were split up at birth and adopted to different parents. As I read it, I paused at the words ‘adoptive parents’ when Trish interrupted me to say that she’d just found out that a friend of ours was adopted and still refuses to tell her grown children that she had adoptive parents – their grandparents.

So I was staring at those words, ‘adoptive parents,’ as she told a story about adoptive parents. Weird. Here’s the full story I was reading. It’s actually one that we had written about here some years ago.

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Perhaps the weirdest twin story of all time occurred in Ohio. Identical twin boys were given up for adoption and were adopted by different families who didn’t know about each other. They ended up growing up only 45 miles apart. Their adoptive parents happen to name both of them James. Both twins married twice – their first marriages were to women named Linda. Their second marriages were to women named Betty. They both had a son that they named James Allen. They both owned dogs named Toy.

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The list also had a third story about twins. A middle school in Lincolnshire, England had 20 sets of twins attending at the same time. That’s definitely a coincidence, but my guess is that it was probably more confusing than meaningful to the students and teachers.

There was another one in the list that also took place in Ohio. It’s not exactly about twins, but about two cars, which were probably identical, considering the times. In 1895, there were only two cars in Ohio. Regardless of the empty roads, the drivers of the two vehicles crashed into each other! (I wonder if they had car insurance!)

Here’s the link if you want to read more of these historical coincidences.

 Bernard Beitman is a visiting professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia who has written a book on meaningful coincidences. We’ve used his material before. In this story, he’s addressing a curious type of synchro that, in 7 Secrets of Synchronicity, we wrote about in Secret 4: The Creative. That secret is that creativity lies at the heart of synchronicity.

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As of 1/29/15 , on the website for his book The Improbability Principle, statistician David Hand starts with the story of the simultaneous publication in the US and England of the cartoon character Dennis the Menace in March, 1951.

Cartoonists in both countries introduced audiences to a trouble-causing little boy named Dennis, each of whom had a dog who helped create the chaos. The boys were quite different in their attitudes but not their results. The British Dennis intentionally caused trouble, while the American Dennis, always good-natured and angelic, consistently stumbled into trouble. Both boys were immensely popular. They each had hit a cultural pleasure nerve—the archetypal bad boy.

The British Dennis had gone to press ten days before the publication of the American Dennis, so there was no evidence of plagiarism.

Professor Hand suggests that this coincidence is an example of low probability events that happen in large populations, sometimes known as the law of very large numbers. He does not recognize the phenomenon of simultaneous discovery, a well-established subset of coincidences. Simultaneous discovery appears to have an explanation more complicated and more specific than the law of very large numbers. The low probability draws our attention but does not explain the coincidence. It appears that cultures evolve with explorers on the edge, those seeking ideas that fit with current cultural interests, needs, and demands. The telephone, for example, was invented by two Americans each of whom presented their discovery to the US patent office on the same day: February 14, 1876. Also on the same day, Google and Stanford University separately announced the enhanced capacity for computers to recognize images. Each did not know the other was working on the project. There are hundreds more examples most without evidence of plagiarism.

The simultaneous appearances of two Dennis the Menace and many other examples suggest that it is probability at play but another form of explanation involving cultural curiosity and need. “When the time is ripe for certain things,” remarked the Hungarian mathematician Farkas Bolyei, “they appear at different places in the manner of violets coming to light in early spring.”

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Rob and I have experienced this kind of synchro  several times with other writers. It’s as if the ideas are all flowing through the same river and when writers dip into that river at the same time, the result is similar plots and characters.

Three years ago, I was at the dog park and saw my friend Colleen eagerly reading something on her phone. I asked her what it was. “Oh my God, this book is incredible,” she gushed. “50 Shades of Grey. You have to read it, Trish.”

I asked her what it was about. She handed me her phone and I reads a steamy passage about a young woman in a sadomasochistic relationship with a handsome man who was, of course, a billionaire. A hackneyed plot. I passed. Then a couple of days later, I read on the Internet that the author of the book would be doing her first signing at Books & Books in Coral Gables, one of the best independent bookstores left in South Florida. I learned that the book started as fan fiction for the Twilight series and got so many downloads that a major publisher had picked it up for an exorbitant amount of $ and thought, Okay, I need to take a look.

I downloaded the book and got through half of it before I put it aside. I thought the female protagonist was kind of an idiot and that the billionaire guy had some major psychologist issues. Erotic fiction is tough to write and the author has to have the soul of a poet – like Anais Nin, in her novel Henry & June, about her affairs with author Henry Miller and his wife, June. That novel is brilliant because Nin was able to dig deep into the psychology, spirituality, and inner lives of her characters. 50 Shades is, ironically, completely lacking in shading, in nuance.

All that said, the book went on to sell zillions of copies, and became a movie that opened over Valentine’s Day weekend here in the U.S. As a result of my review about 50 Shades three years ago, we had a sudden uptick of hundreds of hits on our blog. Many of these hits came were the result of the query phrase: the deeper meaning of 50 shades of grey.

Huh?

I went back and looked through the first book – and the second, which I eventually downloaded – and I just don’t see any deeper meaning to this title. The premise is simple: young woman meets billionaire with control and S&M issues. She submits. They eventually fall in love. The premise was explored in the book and movie 9 and ½ Weeks (1986) 5/ with Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger, but the 21^st century version is more graphic.

The movie reviews of 50 Shades have been pretty bad, but for probably the wrong reasons. Is sex supposed to be a war? A torture chamber? A platform of domination and submission? Are we so messed up as a society that sex is the final summary of who we are as human beings and as a species? Is sex the personal equivalent of endless war?

My sister visited recently and I asked her if she’d seen the movie. She hadn’t, but her son and his wife had. They hated it. I asked if she’d read the books. Yes, she had, all three of them. What did she think?

“I liked them. I thought they showed the evolution of their relationship.”

On its opening weekend, the movie grossed more than $80 million.

So what the hell do I know about what appeals to a mass audience? Well, apparently not much!!