Welcome to The Mystical Underground

– the Montauk lighthouse

Every time our daughter comes home, she introduces us to some riveting movie or new TV show we’ve never heard of. Over the Christmas holidays, it was a new TV series, Showtime’s The Affair.

 There were a couple of interesting synchros associated with this series. First, it takes place on Montauk, Long Island.

Given our interests and the weird stuff we write about, Montauk is up there with Roswell and Area 51. But instead of UFOs, time travel, and things that go bump in the night, the series focuses on what happens when two  individuals married to other people have an affair with each other.

From the official Showtime website: At once deeply observed and intriguingly elusive, THE AFFAIR explores the emotional effects of an extramarital relationship. Noah is a New York City schoolteacher and novelist who is happily married, but resents his dependence on his wealthy father-in-law. Alison is a young waitress trying to piece her life and marriage back together in the wake of a tragedy. The provocative drama unfolds when Alison and Noah meet in Montauk at the end of Long Island.

 What this summary doesn’t mention is that:

– Noah and his wife have four children,  he has published one novel that didn’t sell well, and that he and his family are spending the summer on Montauk with his in-laws, so that he can write his second novel.

– The father-in-law is also a writer, but one who has made it in a huge way – bestsellers, movies, etc. He’s an obnoxious and arrogant man  who lives with his wife on a sprawling estate on Long Island Sound, pays for the private school tuition for Noah’s kids, and lent him and his wife, Helen, the down payment for the Manhattan brownstone.

– Alison is married to Cole, whose family has lived in Montauk for seven generations and  two years ago, her four-year-old son drowned. Her son’s name was Gabriel and Cole has a massive tattoo on his back of the angel Gabriel.

This information is revealed in the first three episodes that Rob, Megan, and I watched. When I saw the tattoo on Cole’s back and learned that her son’s name was Gabriel, I thought: Cluster synchro! Here’s why:

During the five days or so that we watched these episodes, I finished a draft of a new novel in which the antagonist has an angel tattoo on the back of his right knee, communicates with a woman he believes is an angel, and whose name is Gabriel. I’m not sure what any of this means, not yet, anyway.

But I know that if I meet a Gabriel any time soon, my mind won’t rush to a fictional four-year-old boy who drowned. It  will leap to Gabriel the antagonist in my novel, a truly bad, sick dude, and I will spin around and race in the opposite direction.

I found this 8 minute interview with scientist and science fiction writer David Brin startlingly comprehensive in terms of mechanistic views of the universe and metaphysical views.

Spam. When I was in college, it came in a tin can, was cheap, and I ate a lot of it. Today, I can’t even stomach looking at a can of spam, much less consuming it. But the 21^st century version of spam is, in some ways, more palatable for me. It’s often funny and even brings synchronicity with it.

There seem to be 4 types of spam: compliments; condemnation; self-help; and general info.

Here’s an example of a compliment:

Good web site you’ve got here.. It’s hard to find high quality writing like yours nowadays. I truly appreciate people like you! Take care!! And then the link leads you to something like a plumbing company.

Here’s an information type of spam:

My programmer is trying to convince me to move to .net from PHP. I have always disliked the idea because of the expenses. But he’s trying none the less. I’ve been using WordPress on several websites for about a year and am worried about switching to another platform. I have heard fantastic things about blogengine.net.
Is there a way I can transfer all my wordpress posts into it? Any help would be really appreciated!

Self-help, which I have apparently deleted, usually revolves around a product or service like vitamins and herbs that help you lose weight, find a healthy and optimistic outlook on life, maintain an erection, look 20 years younger.

And here’s a condemnation:

The next time I read a website, I am hoping that it doesnt disappoint me around this one. I mean, I know it was my decision to learn, but I actually thought youd have something interesting to say.

Recently, we’ve gotten a lot of sexual spam under a static page setting for my book Unlocking the Secrets to Scorpio. 

Since Scorpio is the most sexual sign of the zodiac, I’m amused when I see a spam here for live porn videos, live threesome, raw sex…. These blatant sexual spams don’t ever appear elsewhere, just under the Scorpio entry, so I’m taking that as a synchro. I don’t have any idea what it means other than the fact that the synchros seem to be a reflection of what is.

If you’re a Scorpio sun or have a moon, rising or other planet in this sign, take heed.

Just as there are people who write books about synchronicity, there are others who write books attesting that there is no such thing, invoking randomness, what I prefer to call randomania.

A few such writers discussed their ideas in a recent article in Men’s Health Magazine. The article, called COINCIDENCE, actually is generally favorable to meaningful coincidence and included an interview with Dr. Bernard Beitman, a proponent of synchronicity, whose work we’ve written about here on a few occasions. His comments are both near the beginning and the end of the article.

However, underlying all the good stories and the belief that something unusual and special is taking place when these events happen, is the other point of view that it’s all quite meaningless, and people (silly us) seem to need to search for meaning, even when there is none. To the question of how an extraordinary coincidence with outrageous odds happen, the answer is simply: it was bound to happen.

Instead of ignoring this point of view, let’s take a closer look. After all, these anti-synchro scholars are bright people, even if their contentions take away all the magic many of us find in these experiences.

I’ll quote from the article.

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With 7 billion increasingly interconnected people on the planet, sooner or later things are going to intersect. In fact, as the world becomes “smaller,” expect the unexpected to happen more often. In his book The Improbability Principle, statistician David Hand explains that “with a large enough number of opportunities, any outrageous thing is likely to happen. No mysteries are required to explain [coincidences]—no superstitions, no god. All that’s needed are the basic laws of probability.”

David Spiegelhalter, a University of Cambridge statistician, reached the same conclusion after reviewing 3,500 stories of coincidence submitted to his website. “Lots of people believe some external force leads to all these bizarre events,” he explains. “But they’re what we would expect by chance patterns.”

Do you think being killed by lightning is an unfortunate coincidence? Your odds are actually 1 in 136,011, according to the National Safety Council. That’s just slightly less probable than dying from a dog attack (1 in 103,798). Believe a par-3 hole in one is a rare mark of good fortune? Actually, in a 100-person amateur tournament on a course with four par-3s, the odds of an ace are 1 in 32.

Despite the irrefutable laws of probability, it’s still hard for most people (read: non-mathematicians) to accept that life and lightning strikes are entirely random. Indeed, it takes effort to act randomly. (Admit it: devising secure passwords isn’t easy.) That’s because accepting the concept of a meaningless world requires accepting the fact that maybe we’re meaningless too. “The basic human drive for safety and security induces a fundamental unease with the notion that events happen by chance,” writes Hand.

“…So the brain continually searches for patterns. It even cross-checks information while we sleep, which occasionally enables us to wake with fresh insight. And it seizes on coincidences as possible clues to a new order or way of understanding the world. Linking cause and effect is a basic evolutionary process that helps us adapt. “By creating self-referential meaning out of coincidence, we build a sense of personal order and control in our lives,” says Steve Hladkyj, Ph.d., a psychology researcher at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. “This, in turn, may reduce stress and may increase the functioning of the immune system to fight disease.”

The article’s author concludes: “So the woeful state of your apartment or office aside, you are wired for order. We all are. It makes us healthier and, by inflating our egos with the air of self-importance, more assured. Little wonder, then, that we want to believe in something more.”

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Interesting how the scientists turn around the question of cause and effect. A synchronicity, as we use the term here, is when two unrelated events come together outside of cause and effect and the resulting coincidence is meaningful to the experiencer. But the scientists say that by applying ‘meaning’ to coincidence, we are searching for the missing cause and effect when, in fact, we are recognizing that a deeper reality exists outside of the everyday world of cause and effect, a reality where everything is connected. The scientists, of course, don’t address that matter, because they don’t believe in any deeper reality outside of the mundane world where there are no mysterious connections outside of cause and effect—except synchronicity, which is what they are dismissing.

At the heart of their randomness argument is the curious theme that more people means more coincidences. Okay, maybe statistically that’s true. Let’s say it is. But what about when there are no people, zero? How did we appear out of the random, meaningless universe? What were the chances of specs of stardust drifting through a black void forming humans, who could ask such questions?

Here’s Hand’s answer, in short: “The tendency to synchronize is one of the most pervasive drives in the universe, extending from atoms to animals, from people to planets.”

Hmm, if there is such a ‘tendency,’ that would indicate consciousness underlying all matter. And consciousness suggests meaning, not randomness. As the cartoon at the top tells us: “That’s the thing about randomness. You can never be sure.”

The MacGregor Christmas cactus, which always knows when to bloom!

It began blooming a couple of days before Christmas and as of this writing, it still blooms. I suspect that once we’re a week into the new year, the beautiful red flowers will fall off and it will go dormant until next year.

This cactus, like the lily that invariably blooms on or around Easter, intrigues and bewilders me. I know there are scientific and biological explanations for why these plants bloom when they do. But I haven’t been able to find an explanation that satisfies me. Even though the date  for Christmas remains static, the date for Easter does not. Yet, the lily blooms every Easter without fail, regardless of what date the calendars say.

Our Christmas cactus started blooming on December 21, the winter solstice, and on Christmas day, was really decked out in full color, plumpness, beauty.

For me, these two plants are nature’s synchros, its way of saying, Hey, humans out there. Pay attention. There’s wisdom for you here.

HAPPY 2015 to all of you from us! May the new year bring you everything you desire and deserve! And someone, please tell me where 2014 went? It seems I took a brief nap and suddenly, it was a new year.

Sharlie West and I have been corresponding ever since we started our blog in 2009. I’m not sure what prompted the correspondence, except that it was undoubtedly a synchro. She’s a poet who lies in Maryland, has tuned in frequently on the planetary empath stuff,  has an active dream life that often taps into future events, and is undoubtedly quite psychic. If you enter her name in the blog’s search box, the posts we’ve written about her will come up.

The other day, she sent me this rather enigmatic synchro:

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I did want to share with you an odd coincidence. Recently I had a dream about my granddaughter, Grace. In the dream Grace had a tiger as a companion. The three of us were together, as though that was perfectly normal.

I told my daughter Karen about the dream. Seems that years ago she dreamed that Grace’s mother, Susan, also my daughter, visited her and had a tiger with her. Susan had died years before from ALS.   It’s possible that Susan is protecting Grace from the other side and since Karen and I both had the same dream, we are included.

If you haven’t read Proof of Heaven, it’s an incredible book. Have the sequel and will be   readinin the new year.

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A short, to the point synchro. Except…how many of us dream the same dream ever, much less years apart? Is the tiger some sort of personal family symbols for Sharlie?

Some years ago, I had returned from a writers’ conference and that first night after I got home, I dreamed that someone at the conference handed me a note that read: Your mother has died. At breakfast the next morning, I related my dream to Rob and to my dad, who was living with us then. My mother was in an Alzheimer’s facility and our lives were fairly chaotic.

My dad’s dream wasn’t at all like mine in terms of details, but the bottom line was identical: my mother and his wife of forty years had passed on. The day before, we’d had an owl synchro  that pointed to this very possibility. So when my mother actually passed on, I wasn’t surprised.

Do the dead protect us, the living?

Well, why not?

But the bottom line is even more puzzling. What are dreams and how do they connect us with who we really are in a larger, collective sense?

We have Proof of Heaven but I haven’t read it yet.

Computers. Hacking. Big corporation. These three phrases relate to the recent hacking of Sony Picturdes, presumably because Sony was going to release The Interview, a comedy with Seth Rogan and James Franco about the assassination of Kim Jong-un.

The hacking was apparently huge and compromised Sony. Because the hackers threatened to target theaters that showed the film, chains started cancelling the showing of the film. We were essentially being held hostage, through censorship, by a little snit of a dictator in a very isolated country.

An outcry ensued and theaters and Sony ultimately relented and allow us to watch this movie in various online formats for $5.99. The movie also opened at selected theaters around the country. Not at a lot of theaters, but at enough so the film will probablyi be huge. So this evening, after a lot of hassle with the computer and online viewing, Rob, Megan and I watched The Interview.

With any Seth Rogan movie, you have to be prepared to be grossed out.  He breaks all the rules about what the consensus moviegoers want to see and gives you his version of a worldview about life in North Korea. James Franco, as the TV host who lands an interview with Kim Jong-un, is terrific.

He was the protagonist in 127 Hours,  a drama based on a true story. I found that movie so uncomfortable that at one moment I turned it off to watch the news. It was nominated for three Golden Globes and a bunch of other awards,  and thrust Franco into the America lexicon of I know this guy.

 In this movie, Franco really steals the show from Rogan. At one point he does an imitation of Smeagol from Lord of the Rings that is so spot on the three of us were in stitches. The Interview is political satire at its best, gross and irreverent and yeah, I understand why Kim Jong-un might be offended by it. It’s as if Mark Twain intervened.

But hey, Kim dude. You’re a despot, your people are apparently starving, and in this movie, karma is not your friend.

Kudos to Sony for changing course. A foreign despot should never be able to censor what we watch or read. What I took away from this movie was a sense of the absurd: that some silly little guy half a world away could intimidate a huge corporation to pull a film.

When we live from a fear-based reality- we’re going to bomb or attack any theater that shows this film – then we become the terrorists, the censors, the silly nuts who perpetuate their agenda.

For six bucks, you can rent the film.  Let North Korea know that you will not be censored!

It’s worth it. And really, even though a lot of the laughs are gross, there’s something to be said for this sort of comedy to be made – and then censored!

Shamanism is considered the first religion going back tens of thousands of years, and surprisingly there’s a connection with Christmas.

First some background. Ancient peoples in various parts of the world couldn’t contact one another in the ordinary way that we think of as communication. In other words, no Internet, no telephones, no mail, no telegraph. Yet, peoples around the globe conducted rituals that were very similar. They connected with power animals and spirit beings in similar ways through trance states, usually involving drumming. And they all journeyed to a Lower World, a Middle World and a Higher World.

How did they figure that out and come to the same conclusions? Possibly, through shamanism, itself. They were all interconnected at a deeper level of awareness existing beyond the everyday world, the realm of the shamanic journey.

One way that shamans traveled to the Higher World or the Lower World was by climbing or descending the World Tree or World Post. According to Michael Harner, author of Cave and Cosmos: Shamanic Encounters with Another Reality the shamans of Siberia envisioned the North Star or Polar Star at the top of the pole or pillar. Supposedly, that tradition is the source of the term, North Pole. The pre-Christian Germans and Scandinavians also referred to the World Tree or World Pillar, known as Yggdrasil.

Now comes the Christmas story, courtesy of Harner’s fascinating book.

“The evergreen winter solstice tree (the ‘Christmas tree’) came to America reportedly from Germany, which shares the World Tree tradition with Scandinavia. It seems like a miniature reminder of Yggdrasil, the ‘always green’ World Tree symbolized in pre-Christian Sweden by a huge evergreen tree near the pagan temple in Uppsala. The star traditionally place atop the Christmas evergreen tree echoes the Polar Star, now reincarnated as the Star of Bethlehem.

“The lights (formerly candles) on the branches, circling the tree, remind one of the stars circling the North Pole. Nineteenth-century Christmas trees had representations of angels hanging from their boughs, not unlike how the Siberian Evenki (Tungus) shamans’ spirit helpers and guardians were thought to sit on the boughs of small trees that shamans cut and erected in their dwellings to represent the World Tree.

“The contemporary American Christmas celebration of December 25th is only a few days removed from the (northern hemisphere’s) winter solstice date and seems to retain shamanistic elements. It is partially a survival of solar traditions, such as keeping a Yule fire burning to encourage the Sun to strengthen its light.”

I suppose some readers might think this is an anti-Christian story, but it’s not. It’s just a bit of deep history. The similarities between the Christmas tree and the World Tree could be related to genetic memory. Or it could be synchronicity—the coming together of two traditions outside of cause and effect. One thing is for certain. No matter what your race, culture or nationality, if you go back far enough your ancestors were most likely part of the shamanic tradition. That’s all there was before the emergence of religions.

Harner’s explanation reminded me of an experience several years ago in which Trish and I went to a shamanic cleansing ritual. It was conducted by several Qero Indians who had been brought to the U.S. by Alberto Villoldo of the Four Winds Society. We took part in this ritual in a church, Unity of the Palm Beaches. The five or six Q’ero shamans, wearing their traditional red woolen garb, sat on the floor of the stage and spent maybe 40 or 45 minutes preparing for the ritual by chanting and working with herbs and sacred stones and other materials, all the while chewing cocoa leaves. Then members of the audience came to the stage where the shamans chanted and ran feathers along their bodies, cleansing and blessed them.

A few feet away on the stage was a huge Christmas tree. It was a strange juxtaposition of traditions, one pagan, the other Christian. But now, thanks to Harner’s book, I realize that there’s a much closer tie between the Christmas tree and ancient shamanic practices.

Merry Christmas!!!

On this past Sunday, Trish and I were at the gym, the one we’ve written about before where we’ve seen Bruce Springsteen working out. No Springsteen sighting, but I did experience a music-related synchro. The music playing on the gym’s sound system that day was classic rock with a variety of tunes from the late 60s, early 70s. That was different from the usual more up-to-date selection, much of which doesn’t appeal to me. One of the tunes was Joe Cocker’s cover of the Beatles’ tune, She Came in Through the Bathroom Window. When I heard the song, I wondered what had happened to Cocker. I hadn’t heard anything about him for a long time.

Then late Monday, an old friend who works as a deejay at a radio station in Iowa that plays classic rock put up a Facebook comment about Cocker. He mentioned that Cocker was 70 years old, and noted it didn’t seem that old when you’re pushing 66. He apparently assumed that everyone reading the post would know that Joe Cocker died earlier in the day. I didn’t, not until Tuesday when I received an e-mail from a friend in London who said that she was mourning Cocker’s death and wrote a synchro related to him.

So in honor of the dynamic bluesy British rocker’s passing, here’s the story from Barb.

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When I lived in Sheffield, I used to go Latin dancing at a working men’s club in Tasker Road, the street where Joe was born. I’d never seen Joe live, but one day in 1994, there was a lovely documentary about him on TV, and as he was going to be playing in Sheffield with Sheryl Crow as support, I wanted to go.

I asked friends – some were going to be away, others were working nights (nurses!), and some just plain didn’t want to go as the ticket was too expensive. So I kind of gave up. No one would go with me.

Then, one day in my local supermarket, I was waiting to pay when I overheard the checkout woman talking to her manager. “So are you going to see Joe Cocker?” she asked. “No,” said the manager, “I’ve got no-one to go with. Nobody wants to go.”

I paused a while then said to her, “I’m in the same boat. I’ll go with you, if you want.” So once I’d bought my groceries, the manager took my number, told me she’d get tickets. The day before the gig, she called and told me she would come get me in her car.

Amazing trust. She didn’t know me and I hadn’t given her money for the ticket, but she bought the tickets anyway and I paid her on the day of the gig. Before it began, we had a drink in the pub opposite Sheffield Arena, then went to see Joe. And he was awesome.

I’ve never seen the woman again. I can’t even remember her name, but that event still stays in my mind as something magical. A synchronistic experience. Thank you, universe. Thank you, Joe.

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And thank you, Barb.

And, in some corner of heaven, there must be a lot of old rockers hanging out, commiserating about the past, and planning for future lives…if not already simultaneously living them.

Fiona Harris-De Assis from Calgary, Canada had a very unusual UFO experience about six years ago. It’s a great example of the role of synchronicity in sightings. Fiona also offers another explanation. The role of perception certainly plays a role in this sighting.

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My really crazy UFO experience may have been synchronistic or else I unwittingly summoned it. I am not into UFOs, but I found something on the Jeff Rense’s website about a man in the UK who was taking lots of pictures of UFOs that were morphing, and were almost organic in appearance. The pictures really freaked me out. I checked out that site for a while, then forgot about it.

A year or so later, my 14-year-old cousin came to stay with us, and I found out he was into UFOs. So I thought that I’d show him those pictures, but I couldn’t find them. I spent a hour or so on the internet looking in vain for the pictures and finally gave up. Meanwhile, my cousin went to stay with another relative that evening. After supper, I was washing dishes and happened to look out my kitchen window.

I noticed a black balloon floating across the sky. It was quite far away, but absolutely recognizable as being a black balloon. It was summer time, around seven in the evening, bright and sunny. I casually watched it floating as I washed the dishes, thinking nothing of it, when all of sudden, the balloon popped. However, it continued floating slowly across the sky, and looking very much like it had been ripped open. I thought that was odd, but was still not really suspecting anything weird.

After a minute or so, the balloon caught my full attention because now it looked like a bird! It wasn’t flapping its wings. It was slowly gliding across the sky. At this point, I thought to myself that maybe it was a bird all along! But how could it have looked like a balloon? And how could it have looked spattered when I thought that the balloon had broken?

Then, suddenly it changed into the shape of a bat! It looked just like the Batman symbol. At that point, I knew that it was a morphing UFO, and I could not believe that it was showing itself to me! Was it a coincidence, a meaningful one? Or was it manifested by me? I have no idea!

I called my husband into the kitchen to see it. He doesn’t believe in ANYTHING!!!! So he came in to look at it, and said, ‘So what? It’s a black balloon floating in the sky. Oh, no it’s not. It’s a bird. Oh, I mean, it’s a bat.”

So in the minute or two that he watched it, it morphed again! Now here’s the really strange part. Suddenly, there were TWO bats! My husband and I watched as they floated past the kitchen window and out of our view. We went into the dining room and watched them, then to the living room until they were far away, and disappeared. They never flapped wings, and continued in a straight line, without wavering, and stayed at the exact same speed.

My husband and I didn’t freak out, didn’t call people, or tell people. We didn’t even get excited, or talk about it amongst ourselves. Seriously, we felt almost shut down, but not in a bad way. It just wasn’t such a big deal, when really it was A VERY BIG DEAL. We didn’t talk about it for a few years, and then I brought it up one night. He remembered and didn’t try to refute it. Normally, he would totally try to say that it never happened, because he doesn’t like to admit stuff like that. It didn’t frighten us in the least bit, but I did feel as if they wanted us to see them, and that they were almost putting on a show of what they could do.

I have never before or after seen anything like this. A few years ago, I sat outside one night and try to summon something. The moon suddenly got a weird look to it. I can’t exactly remember how, but it was odd. I’ve tried a few more times, but I’m too impatient to wait around to see anything!

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As I read about the transformation of the black balloon, I couldn’t help wondering if it was a matter of perception. For example, looking at it from different angles might make it look like other different objects. Maybe the balloon had a Batman image on it. But when two people are seeing the same thing, it’s hard to deny that something weird is taking place.