Welcome to The Mystical Underground

I came across this on Laure Raines’ blog, Threads of the Spiderwoman, which is like visiting an artist’s rendition of Joseph Campbell:

Mercury, the trickster planet that rules Gemini and Virgo, turned retrograde on Saturday, October 4, in Scorpio and has traveled back into Libra, where it will turn direct on October 25. This planet turns retrograde three times a year and is supposedly a time for review, revision, and reconsideration. For writers, it’s a wonderful time to revise, rewrite, re-plot. For daily life, it can be frustrating.

Mercury rules travel and communication – including electronic transfers, the purchase of electronics of any kind- contracts, both verbal and written. The general advice is that it isn’t wise to schedule travel during a retro, to buy expensive electronics, to sign contracts, to make irrevocable decisions about relationships.

So, here’s how our retrograde has panned out. In one electronic snafu, $1800 was mistakenly transferred to a credit card we don’t even use. In another electronic bank withdrawal, we were charged for $500 we didn’t withdraw and had to file a dispute over an ATM withdrawal. In this case, I learned that when you go to a bank and punch in an amount that goes over your daily withdrawal amount – $500 for our account – and then cancel the withdrawal, the money goes into a “bank receptacle.” Your account is charged for the withdrawal – until the bank “balances” their books.

The $1800 eventually found its way back to our account, as did the $500, but only after hours spent on the phone and at the bank.

During the retrograde, we took a five-day trip to the Florida keys, to stay at my agent’s home on Sugarloaf Key. Here’s the view:

He had told me to pick up the key from his neighbor. Given the snafus earlier in the week, I was concerned that the neighbor might not be home and that if he wasn’t, I didn’t even have a cell number for him. My bad. I should have gotten a number. I voiced my concern at one point during the drive to Sugarloaf and Megan sort of rolled her eyes. “Mom, the fact that you believe in these retro snafus may be why they happen.”

Okay, I accept that. I accept that our beliefs create our reality. But I also know how astrology works. Just as our beliefs can’t influence the tides during a full moon, I don’t think our beliefs alone can negate the influence of a Mercury retrograde. We can mitigate the effects, but one way or another, we are forced to slow down, reconsider, revise, review.

So we arrive on Sugarloaf. I run next door to ask Joe the neighbor for the key to the house. Joe isn’t home. I hear a small dog barking inside. I knock and knock. No Joe. No phone number. I walk back to Al’s place and inform Rob and Megan that Joe isn’t home. We unload the car and settle in on the porch. It’s late afternoon, 95 and humid. We wait. We break open the cooler, snacks. I call Al’s assistant, ask if he has a number for Joe. He doesn’t. Al is on his way back from France and his assistant has no way to contact him.

We walk down to the water, dip our feet into the coolness. Megan hears a car pull in next door, so I run over there again. A young man stands at the top of the stairs. “Are you Joe?” I ask.

“Nope. I’m Andy.”

Great. I introduce myself, explain the situation,  ask Andy if he has Joe’s phone number. He does, but I can tell he is hesitant about giving it to me. He’s one of Joe’s tenants and has dropped by to leave off his rent check. I explain some more. He gives me the number and I call Joe and reach voice mail. Within minutes, Joe calls me back. I explain who I am.

“Oh, wow, Al called me and I totally forgot. I meant to put the keys under the mat. Are you at the house?”

“Yes.”

“I’m in Key West. I’ll be there in about forty minutes.”

Near dark, Joe arrives. We finally get into the house after a two-hour wait.

Fast forward. We reserve a boat for Sunday and are supposed to split the price with 3 of Megan’s friends. But Saturday evening, two of the friends back out. We learn there is a $200 cancellation fee for a boat that will cost us $250 plus gas to rent. Sunday morning, we – the MacGregors and Miguel – decide to go ahead with the rental, for a smaller boat, which is less expensive.

Fantastic. We’re off into the blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico, four of us in 17-foot long boat. Unbelievable weather, incredible views, even an island visit where we can walk ashore. Here’s a shot as we’re approaching:

After we left the island, we went in search of Looe Key, a great snorkeling spot over the coral reefs. En route, somewhere in the shallows, there’s a sickening screech, the engine dies,  and the boat refuses to start.

I call the guy who rented us the boat, reach voice mail. Miguel and Rob keep trying to restart the engine. It finally catches. We snorkel through a coral reef that is stunning, then head for Looe Key, where the coral reefs and snorkeling are supposed to be even better.

But a mile from Looe Key, the water is suddenly infested with Portuguese Man of War. These beautiful, alien-looking creatures have toxic stings that paralyze their prey – fish and plankton. For humans, the painful sting isn’t fatal. But I suspect if you’re attacked and stung by dozens of these suckers simultaneously – and that’s how thick they were in the water – it might be a different story. Was it mating season? A migration? We didn’t know and sped back to the island where we could walk ashore.

Man of War- under Megan’s feet, those strange blobs in the water, a luminous pink:

We get lost on our return to the channel where we are  supposed to meet the boat’s owner. With the phone GPS on now, Megan guides us to the right channel, the right canal, and we make it in with five minutes to spare before we have to pay a hefty overtime rate. Relief. Then the boat is pulled out of the water and oh guess what? One of the engine’s propeller blades is bent and cracked and it will cost $400 to repair.

So, our final tally for a boat excursion that was fantastic? About $700. But, all things considered, we didn’t pay for lodging. I figure it’s the total cost of the vacation in paradise. Megan, embracing it:

Rob, embracing it:

Megan and Miguel, enjoying it:

Megan’s dog, Nika, navigating:

During this same period:

I landed an astrology project and wrote the editor about signing a contract under a Mercury retro. Yes, I know, it sounds nuts. But in the past, any contract I have signed under a retro has turned out to be a major hassle. To my surprise, the editor said he would release the advance money and I could sign after the retro, if Al was okay with it. He was.

Five attempts were made to hack one of our email accounts, but the attempts were, fortunately, blocked.

I lost my watch – and found it.

Rob lost a pair of glasses and didn’t find them.

Despite all this, we had a fantastic time!

Go figure. Ha-ha, Trickster.

Today, we went to a local science museum for the opening day of an Egyptian afterlife exhibit. This intriguing exhibit has been seen by more than 4.5 million people worldwide since it first came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2004.

According to the Palm Beach Post, the exhibit was revamped in 2010 and now has more than 200 new artifacts, some of which are at least 5,000 years old and came from several British museums. The updated exhibit was most recently in Taipei, Taiwan, where nearly a million and a half people waited up to six hours to see it.

I’m happy to say that we didn’t have to wait at all. Rob, Lynn and Bruce Gernon and I breezed right in. The celebrity of the exhibit is a 3,000-year-old mummy believed to be the son of Ramses II, the Egyptian pharaoh known as Ramses the Great. Now here’s the interesting thing about Ramses. Museums that have housed the mummy all claim to have had “some sort of unexplained phenomena,” as the Post put it.

In Taipei, sixty seconds after the mummy was placed at its location, an earthquake hit Taipei that knocked out all the lights in the museum- except the one shining down on Ramses’ son. The young woman who was telling visitors about the mummy mentioned this story, so I asked her if anything had happened since the mummy had arrived at the science museum.

She lowered her voice and said, “Actually, yes, there have been some strange reports.” The night after the exhibit had arrived, two employees had returned to the museum after hours and were gathering up their belongings when they heard moaning. “The museum was closed, okay? No visitors were here, no employees except them.”

“What’d they do?” I asked.

“One of them said, ‘Do you hear that? I think the moaning is coming from the exhibit. The moment he said that word, moaning, the sound stopped.”

“Has anything else happened?” Lynn asked.

“Some visitors have reported that the mummy’s eyes move.”

By then, Lynn and I had our phones out, with our Ghost Radar apps up and running. Anomalies kept appearing on the screen and every so often a word appeared on her screen or mine that seemed connected to what we were doing. Pretty soon, a couple more employees came over to take a look at our apps and wanted to know what it was called and was it a free download? We were probably the oddest group of visitors today!

The other mummy that intrigued us was that of a young girl who was supposedly between four and eight when she died. But the mummy was so small – maybe two feet long – that we were confused about her supposed age. The girl’s mummy recently had a CT scan at a local children’s hospital to determine her cause of death. That will be revealed on October 16. When we used our ghost radar apps around the container in which she lay, our screens really lit up.

The mummies were laid out in a room that supposedly resembled a burial chamber. They are inside plastic cases that are regulated for temperature and humidity in order to preserve the mummies. And they travel in these cases I asked the young woman who had told us about the male mummy if the images on the walls were the original ones. She said the images had been replicated by archeologists – a daunting task that certainly looks like it could have taken decades to do!

We even saw pets and animals that had been preserved. Here, a falcon:

Here, an alligator or crocodile and cow’s eyes…Not sure why those would be preserved.

It was a fascinating exhibit and somehow, when you see something as old as these mummies and artifacts, you can’t help but feel a sense of wonderment and awe. And I’m sure some of the employees will be downloading the Ghost Radar app to use after dark, when the museum is empty of visitors.

our mailbox, tropical storm Isaac, 2012

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Most of South Florida sits about six feet above sea level, on a porous limestone plateau. There are no hills. The area is as flat as an envelope and crisscrossed by more than 2,000 miles of regional canals and levees that are intended to prevent flooding in surrounding neighborhoods.

“Imagine Swiss cheese, and you’ll have a pretty good idea what the rock under southern Florida looks like,” says Glenn Landers, a senior engineer at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.  This means that during high tides – or when the water management district releases more water into the canals – water seeps into yards, roads, beneath buildings. In Miami, this seepage at high tide has already become a big problem.

 From a recent piece in the New York Times:

The sunny-day flooding was happening again. During high tide one recent afternoon, Eliseo Toussaint looked out the window of his Alton Road laundromat and watched bottle-green saltwater seep from the gutters, fill the street and block the entrance to his front door.

“This never used to happen,” Mr. Toussaint said. “I’ve owned this place eight years, and now it’s all the time.”

Down the block at an electronics store it is even worse. Jankel Aleman, a salesman, keeps plastic bags and rubber bands handy to wrap around his feet when he trudges from his car to the store through ever-rising waters.

Alton Road runs right through the heart of trendy South Beach, the Art Deco district where a lot of the original Miami Vice TV show was filmed.

Regardless of whether you believe that climate change is man-made, part of a natural cycle, or some combination of both, it appears that South Florida may be ground zero for the rising oceans. The National Climate Assessment, a scientific report recently issued on global warming and climate change, pinpointed Miami as one of the most vulnerable cities.

“The theme of the report is that climate change is not a future thing, it’s a ‘happening-now’ thing,” said Leonard Berry, a contributing author of the new report and director of the Florida Center for Environmental Studies at Florida Atlantic University. “Alton Road is one of the now things.”

Our area of Wellington lies fifteen miles or so inland from the Atlantic and is between thirteen and fifteen feet above sea level.  So, okay, if the seas rise three or four feet, the town will still be high and dry right? Not necessarily. In August 2012, we got a taste of what can happen when the canals fail to do what they were designed to do.

When Hurricane Isaac impacted South Florida, is was just a tropical storm and never made landfall. But it dumped 15 to 20  inches of rain in Palm Beach County in about a 24 hour period and that proved to be too much too fast for drainage canals and pumps. Entire neighborhoods flooded.

I remember that when I drove to the gym that morning, the rain was minimal. We were told the storm had moved on. When I left the gym an hour later, the rain pounded my car, visibility had shrunk to maybe two inches, and I later learned that a band of thunderstorms had stalled just off the coast. When I turned into our neighborhood, water rose to halfway up the doors. I drove up on the sidewalk and through yards, but the water overwhelmed my car, a Mazda 3, and it stalled.

as the water began to recede

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I called Rob and told him what had happened. He advised me to try to start the car and if it wouldn’t start, I should just leave it where it was and hoof it back to the house. I kept turning the key in the ignition and eventually, the engine caught and I was able to make it into our driveway and on into the garage, where the overwhelmed engine promptly died.

The rain didn’t cease. It kept coming down. We watched the water pouring up through the drains, and out in the street and into our yards. At one point, our mailbox looked like an isolated island. The water crept up our driveway and the front yard and sidewalk. It drew closer and closer to the house and our garage. If the water flooded our garage, if it reached the front door, it wouldn’t have to rise more than a quarter of an inch to get into the house.

When you are witness to an excess of any element, you realize just how powerless you are when pitted against nature. I kept thinking of the flooding of New Orleans when the levees broke in the aftermath of Katrina. I imagined Rob and I and our animals on the roof of our house. I completely freaked myself out.

We were stranded in our house for two days- but not on the roof! By the time we were finally able to drive out in our SUV, the canals across the street and behind our neighborhood were still washing across the road. The water management district, which was supposed to prevent this kind of flooding, had failed monumentally. And part of the reason is due to our governor, Rick Scott. After he took office in 2010, he pushed for deep spending cuts in the water management district. As a result, more than $100 million was cut from the agency designed to prevent flooding from Orlando to the keys.

Here’s part of the trickster’s message. You want to live here?  Ok, fine. Your car engine is now ruined. But it’s  going to cost you $1,000 for a replacement engine with 4,000 miles on it. Your insurance will cover the rest. Oh gee, what a deal.

Now it’s hurricane season again. No hurricane has made landfall since Wilma in 2005, and I’m hoping we will be lucky again this year. But the bottom line is that we are in the midst of climate change. And yet, Republican senator Marco Rubio – whose area includes Miami Beach- challenges the science and balks at any government fixes. He’s in good company. Our current governor, Rick Scott, and former governor Jeb Bush, a potential Republican presidential candidate for 2016,  also deny that 7 billion plus souls on the planet leave any carbon footprint.

Maybe it’s time to head for the mountains.

Or to stay put and collectively visualize something far better.

On October 6, 2014, a Nobel prize in medicine was awarded to John O’Keefe, May-Brit Moser, and Edvard I Moser for their discovery of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain. This inner GPS makes it possible for us to orient ourselves in space, to navigate from one location to another.

The grid cells that constitute this inner GPS are located in the hippocampus and may also be located in the anterior cingulate part of the brain, which plays an important role in human emotion. Could this inner GPS help in other ways? Dr. Bernard Beitman, who has written a book on coincidences- not published yet – Connecting with Coincidence, thinks so.

In an article in Epoch Times, the Yale-educated psychiatrist, now teaching at the University of Virginia, said that “the emotional aspect of grid cell mapping could make particular locations more highly charged in our brain-based map. Like the maps used in GPS navigation, these maps could then help us find pathways to emotionally important people, things, and situations.”

Beitman says the connection to emotions is speculative, but his research has made it clear to him that some people are able to map their location in relation to emotionally significant people or places. He had such an experience himself when he was eight and his dog, Snapper, was lost. Beitman went out looking for his dog and made a wrong turn in a familiar neighborhood – and found his dog.

In his book, Beitman speculates about how the physical existence of human consciousness may be mapped and theorizes there may be a conduit of information that he calls the psychesphere. I emailed him and asked if he could explain what this is.

“We are fish-like, immersed in the ethereal waters of the psychesphere. Currents move through it. Some currents passing through us contain information about who we are, where we have been and where we’re going. Tunnels, the only word I can think of that expresses the connection that occurs, open and close, extend and shorten. Through these tunnels, places and objects at a distance can be known. This out-of-awareness medium carries vibrating patterns of energy – information in the same way that air the conducts sound. These patterns can engage similar patters with which to resonate, amplifying the lifespan of the original pattern.”

He noted that researcher Frederick Myers called the energy-information sphere the subliminal self – that part of each of us below the threshold of awareness. It has layers or strata. “They are strata…not of immovable rock, but of imperfectly miscible fluids of various densities and subject to currents and ebullitions which often bring to the surface a stream or bubble from a strata far below.”

This energy-information sphere sounds a lot like what physicist David Bohm called the implicate or enfolded order, a kind of primal soup that births everything in the universe. Bohm believed that even time unfolds from the implicate order. He referred to our external reality as the explicate order. Synchronicity, then, is where the implicate and the explicate, the inner and the outer, coincide.

On October 3, hundreds of people in Breckenridge, Colorado saw several mysterious objects. The local news actually covers it without mockery.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrbLuDZlSao

Long time readers will remember our series of blog posts about Charles Fontaine and his UFO encounter in his backyard in rural Quebec. That story led to our writing Aliens in the Backyard. We hadn’t heard from Charles for a long time so it was interesting to receive an e-mail from him with a synchro tale that returned to the family graveyard where his story began. I’ll let Charles tell the story.

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“I use that same route to go to work and to return home. That route takes me right past my hometown cemetery. Every day I glance at my great grandfather’s tombstone, which is near the road. It brings me fond memories of him. His name was Gédéas Fontaine. I even have pictures of him from last century hanging on the walls of our living room and dining room. When I was a child, he lived in an apartment below us, and as a pre-school kid, I spent a lot of time with him. He died in 1967 when I was 5 1/2 years old.

A year ago, the company where I have been working for 15 years was sold to a man who has the same last name as mine. He’s not a direct relative, but his features reveal some common ancestory. So this new president formed partnership with a financial firm, which is represented by a man named Jean Francois Fontaine.

The first time that I was introduced to him, and before I could even say hello, he told me  that we are related, second cousins. His father and my father are cousins. So we have the same great grandfather: Gédéas Fontaine. Here is the where it gets weird.

Jean Francois only visits our plant once every three months for a meeting. I saw him Thursday when he arrived for one such meeting and told him that I had driven past our great grandfather’s grave this morning. He replied that the man died before he was born, but he remembers his grandfather, Laurent, who is also buried in the same graveyard.

Later that day, I was almost home when I stopped to let a vehicle make a left turn, and guess who was driving it? Jean Francois’ father, who lives 90 to 100 miles away. So I saw them both today and in my dining room is a photo Jean Francois’ grandfather and our mutual great grandfather

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I guess the ancestors were active for Charles that day. And one other thing, he has had no further UFO encounters since the strange incident in March of 2011.

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We recently received this email from Sarah, who lives in Surrey, England.

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Let me introduce myself.  I’m Sarah, a 43 year old married mother of two grown up daughters.  I have a successful job in marketing, although my passion is everything esoteric and the past seven years I have been on a voyage of discovery that coincided with me taking redundancy from a previous role.  Until this summer I have to say that I wasn’t aware of your work. However, your book 7 Secrets of Synchronicity  leapt out at me in a specialist bookshop in Soho London.  Since then I have also read The Synchronicity Highway.  Since reading these books I have had more and more synchronicities occur in my life and certainly noticed them much more. I definitely don’t pass them off as coincidences any longer!

I am currently studying an NLP practitioner course and have noticed the parallels between the Law of Attraction, NLP, the work of Carl Jung and indeed your work, which I believe has helped me in my studies.

Anyway enough of the preamble!

I recently posted a comment on your page that related to my husband and I being in the same hospital, in the same ward when we were both children; following the image of a young girl who was in the background of her future husband’s holiday snap when they were both children. (SARAH’S COMMENT IS at the top of the comment section)

But the story I want to share with you is something that happened in the early morning of Tuesday 11th September 2001.  During the early hours of that morning I had a dream that was so powerful and had such an impact on me that I went to work and looked online to see if anything ‘bad’ had happened in the world over night.  This was in the days before we had iPads and smartphones were something of the future.

Anyway in this dream I was in a glass reception area/ foyer sitting on on a low boxy black leather couch with my back to reception and facing out to the giant windows, with green plants/ ferns etc decorating the windows on the inside and the courtyard on the outside, waiting for a meeting.  As I looked outward the lifts were on my left hand side and I could see people walking through the courtyard outside.  The weather was glorious, not a cloud in the sky and I knew it was going to be hot.

I hadn’t been there long when there was this enormous explosion and suddenly powdery cement like that fine snow you get covered the lobby, myself included.  I remember standing up like it was an earthquake and half crouching down to kind of ‘keep on my feet’ not sure if there was going to be another ‘tremor’/ explosion.  I can remember that there a level of panic by more like people trying to find out what was going on.

Then just like a movie my dream cut to what seemed like a music video or something out of Mad Max.  There were some middle eastern turban-wearing men with one standing up through the sunroof of a orangey/ yellow Datsun Cherry car holding aloft an AK-45 assault riffle punching the air with it, whooping and shouting in celebration.  The sun seemed to be setting and they were driving towards the setting sun in what can only be described and a Martian or Lunar landscape.

I was like the camera man/ director speeding along beside them filming them.  I couldn’t see that’s what I was doing but it’s what I sensed because I was viewing the car and going at the same speed.  I eventually stopped keeping up with then and they drove off into the setting sun with me stationary just watching them until they disappeared.

As I said this had a HUGE impact on me and I literally got to work as soon as I could to do some research on what I had dreamt.  I remember checking out Reuters, Sky News all the major news corporations but nothing came up so I put it to the back of my mind and got on with my day.  It of course wasn’t until just before 2pm BST ( about 9 a.m. New York time) that one of the professors I worked for came in and said what had just happened in New York and that was when it hit me that it’s what my dream had been about.

I have kept this to myself until last week when my husband and I were talking about 9/11 and I explained my dream to him; that’s when he said I shouldn’t be in marketing I should be doing something else related to esoteric field.  I’m not sure about that but this isn’t my only brush with premonitions/ precognitions.

I hope my story is interesting to you.  I hadn’t told anyone before because I had never really found anyone that I thought would take what I had to say seriously and since reading your books and the fact that so many people contact you I thought I had found somewhere where I could share my story.

Many thanks for your time and taking the time to read it.

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There will always be skeptics who adhere to a dying paradigm that write off this sort of experience to chance, to luck, to whatever. But the bottom line is that people who experience synchros, especially those synchros that change their lives, understand the validity of what they have experienced. Thanks, Sarah. You have enriched our understanding.

One for All Hallow’s Eve…and beyond.

A bit of promo today…BUMP is out as an e-book and coming soon in print.

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If you’re captivated by the spookiness of Halloween, when the veils between worlds are the thinnest, then BUMP IN THE NIGHT offers you the chance to explore the realm of ghosts and spirits and even alien encounters any day of the year.

Do the dead speak to us? Do they offer guidance? Do our deceased loved ones drop by for visits? What about poltergeists? Do angels have wings? Mediums are touted for their abilities to communicate with the dead, but can anyone make contact? Where do aliens fit into the picture, and are they somehow related to the dead? What about alien abductions? Do they really happen?

Real life stories of haunted houses, phantom ships, and spirit contact nudge us to ponder the mystery of life after death. BUMP IN THE NIGHT relates a variety of tales of the paranormal, including ones that have taken place on the sets of famous horror films. The book even touches on celebrities who have seen ghosts, and former celebrities who are ghosts! In addition, the book includes a bonus: a dramatic preview of Aliens Light: The Better Side of Contact.

I turned on the television one recent Sunday evening after suggesting to Trish that we take a look at the list of recordings for In Search of Aliens. That’s the new (old) H2 Channel documentary that combines archaeology, mythology, and aliens. It’s essentially an updated version of Ancient Aliens, which was an update on UFO Hunter. These alien-oriented, what-if shows apparently have widespread appeal so they keep renewing and revising them. But essentially they keep the same message that aliens were here in our past and had great influence on who we are and how we developed. Maybe they’re still here, or maybe they’re coming back. Take your choice. That’s the basic message.

The latest version, In Search of…, is a one-man show featuring Giorgio Tsoukalus. If you’ve seen any episodes of Ancient Aliens, you will immediately recognize Giorgio as the guy with the wild and crazy hair. He’s originally from Switzerland, of Greek descent, and was a student of Erich von Daniken, the original ancient alien scholar. For Giorgio, aliens are the answer to virtually every mystery, including the roots of our religion and sense of spirituality. So in Giorgio’s world, spirit contact, which is the basis of shamanism and set off the development of religions, was really contact with flesh and blood aliens. That’s the doctrine of these shows.

As it turned out, Giorgio was upstaged by Bill Maher, whose show was also on the list, a surprise since we thought we had discontinued HBO a few days earlier. When I saw Maher’s guest interview was with Elizabeth Warren, the senior senator from Massachusetts, I thought, hey, synchronicity. Someone had just given us her book and, in fact, I’d written a blog post about a related synchro earlier in the day.

Maher’s interview was friendly and Warren was outspoken as usual. Maher wanted to know why there weren’t more senators like her, and ended the interview, plugging her as a possible presidential candidate.

Maher’s panel that night, which followed the interview, captured headlines when he and Ben Affleck got into an argument over Muslim radicalism and how widespread it is. While that heated argument captivated the media, another issue caught my attention.

One of the guests was author Sam Harris, Maher’s comrade in the world of ‘new atheism.’ In that black-and-white world, it’s rational ideas based on scientific fact vs. religious superstition. But Maher, who’s astute on politics, floundered in deep waters when the subject briefly turned to the difference between being spiritual and religious. “What does it mean to be spiritual?” he asked and no one on the panel offered an answer. “I don’t know what that means.” Essentially, he concluded it was all the same silliness with ‘Atlantis and magic crystals’ replacing communion and Jesus. Kind of funny; kind of stupid.

Unfortunately, Maher and many fellow liberal talk show hosts and cable news personalities are seemingly clueless about the nature of spirituality. In other words, they avoid any talk of reality existing beyond the everyday world. They don’t dabble in life after death, past lives, ghosts, spirits or Giorgio’s aliens. Unless, of course, they’re making a joke.

Synchronicities are mere coincidences. Spooky reality is just too spooky. Better to make fun of it, when not ignoring it. People interested in such topics are, at best, misguided, maybe deluded.

Even though there’s a substantial audience interested in spirituality, the paranormal and UFOs, those topics are discussed on podcasts and alternative radio, often times late at night, and sometimes jumbled up with wacko conspiracy theories.

Maybe someday these topics will find their way into the mainstream as serious matters, rather than targets for jokes. Now that would be ‘climate change.’ After all, what’s more important than exploring the nature of reality and questions about life after death, especially when it’s done outside of the limiting beliefs of religious dogma…and, for that matter, outside of alien dogma.