Welcome to The Mystical Underground

This morning I came out of our local grocery store and spotted something on the right side of my car, at the back. I unlocked my trunk, put my bags of groceries inside, then took a closer look at the object.

At first, I though it was some sort of weird leaf or bud. But when I nudged it with my thumbnail, it moved slightly and I realized it was a snail. It wasn’t the usual kind of snails you see in Florida – the little black devils that slowly work their way through your yard, devastating everything they find edible. This little sucker was a pale gold.

As I drove home, I thought about the esoteric meaning of snails. The obvious stuff is that they carry their homes with them, like turtles; that they move by producing slime (oh yuck); and that they are usually found in gardens, yards, even in the sea, but NOT on cars. By the time I pulled into the garage, I decided that interpreting this like a dream might be more relevant.

In dreams – at least in my dreams- a vehicle is quite often symbolic of the self. We own two cars – both Mazdas. But the one I think of as my car was the one I was driving – a black 2008 Mazda 3 that I had named Synchronicity.  The snail had attached itself to the back right side of the car. The right side of the body symbolizes the left side of the brain, the reasoning, logical side, the yang, the male.

Anyway, I went into the house with the groceries, then went back into the garage with my iPhone and snapped a couple of photos of the snail. Both photos catch all the reflections from sunlight and the yard and nearby trees and it’s difficult to tell what is what. I figured I would take another picture at night.

the snail is that weird lump halfway up the photo

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So as I puzzled over the snail’s appearance on my car, I zipped around doing errands and stuff around the house in preparation for our trip to Minneapolis. One of the things I did was put four eggs in a pot on the stove so that we could have some hard boiled egg snacks when we drove to our daughter’s place in Orlando, the first leg of our journey.  And I promptly forgot about the eggs.

Twenty or thirty minutes later, while working on a chapter in my new novel, I smelled something odd and wondered if Rob had put something on the stove that was now burning. Instead of getting up to look, I went back to my story. Awhile later, I heard Rob shouting, “You gotta see this mess.”

I went out into the kitchen – and this is why Rob is the cook in this family – and my four eggs had exploded  -big time. Egg was everywhere – bits of shells and yolk on the cabinets, the microwave, the electrical outlets, in crevices and nooks, on the wall, the stove. A major mess. I considered taking photos, but this sort of mess was, well, really AWFUL

One facet of the snail’s message became abundantly clear as I started the cleanup: PAY ATTENTION.

Later in the day, I began researching snails. These creatures don’t have the ability to hear; I am 90 percent deaf in my left ear for the range of the human voice, due to a skull fracture when I was five. Yet, with my deaf ear, I can hear dog whistles, which are well above the range for human hearing.

Every snail is an hermaphrodite – it has the reproductive organs of both genders. (I’m not transgender or an hermaphrodite!) Yet, snails can’t fertilize themselves, they have to mate to reproduce. But after mating, both partners are able to deliver a set of eggs. Pretty weird, but okay. I took this to mean that I needed both my right and left brains – yin and yang energy – to complete the novel I’m working on, part of which takes place in a world two hundreds years in the future.  It’s not enough for my right brain to wander around exclaiming wow, wow…I need a left-brain blueprint.

And since I’ve been reading Joe Dispenza’s books, I realized the snail was addressing the process of manifesting desires. Pay attention, move slowly, be self-sufficient, believe in who you are.  Snails usually emerge from their eggs within four weeks, so I’ve got a time frame. One month.

Young snails are born with a shell, but it’s fragile and the first thing they usually consume is the egg from which they emerged – it’s rich in calcium. I take that as a message that perhaps I need more calcium in my diet. This seems unlikely. I love cheese and eat it at every opportunity. But okay, I’ll give more calcium a whirl.

When I went into the garage tonight to take a third picture of the snail, with the door shut and the sun gone so there wouldn’t be any reflection,  the snail wasn’t there. I inspected the car carefully, but no snail.  It had delivered its message and departed for – well, wherever, maybe our yard.

Some years ago, not long after we moved into our current home, a neighbor and I were en route to pick up Megan from middle school. A dragonfly kept pacing us, touching down on the windshield, flying away again, playing tag with us. My neighbor, Maya, a Peruvian woman, said, “Trish, messages are headed your way and they’re good. Very positive.”

“Huh?” I said.

“The dragonfly. It’s lucky. It pertains to communication, your work.”

A few days later, I landed a nice publishing contract for two more Tango Key books that featured psychic and bookstore owner Mira Morales. From then on, my relationship with critters changed significantly. They are always messengers. But we have to decipher the code.

And well, there’s the incident with the exploding eggs…

After reading Dr. Joe Dispenza’s You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter, I ordered one of his earlier books. Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: Losing Your Mind and Creating a New One promises to be equally good. The first chapter, The Quantum You, is one of the clearest explanations of quantum reality that I’ve ever read.

All potential possibilities of the life you want to live exist in the quantum field – what Abraham/Esther Hicks call the vortex. Think of it as a wave of potential. Our job is to collapse the wave of what we desire – health, wealth, happiness, a more satisfying job/career, a great relationship, friends, whatever it is – into a particle – i.e. manifest it in physical reality. But a particle can’t manifest in physical reality  until we observe it.

Quantum physics calls this phenomenon collapse of the wave function or the observer effect. Dispenza writes: “We now know that the moment the observer looks for an electron, there is a specific point in time and space when all probabilities of the electron collapse into a physical event. With this discovery, mind and matter can no longer be considered separate; they are intrinsically related, because subjective mind produces measurable changes on the objective, physical world.

“The thoughts we think send an electrical signal out into the field. The feelings we generate magnetically draw events back to us. Together, how we think and how we feel produces a state of being, which generates an electromagnetic signature that influences every atom in our world. This should prompt us to ask, What am I broadcasting (consciously or unconsciously) on a daily basis?”

The field of potential won’t respond in a consistent way when we think one thing and feel the opposite. If, for instance, you want to be healthy or wealthy and are thinking thoughts about health and wealth but feel unhealthy or poor, then your reality won’t change. However, “…when our thoughts and feelings are aligned, when we are in a new state of being, then we are sending a coherent signal on the airwaves of the invisible.”

Dispenza adds another piece that I don’t recall reading anywhere else before: that to change our reality, the outcomes we attract “have to surprise, even astonish, us in the way in which they come about.” We shouldn’t be able to predict the outcome because if we can do that, then it’s nothing new.  If you try to control how an outcome will unfold, then “you just went Newtonian. –  Newtonian physics was about trying to anticipate and predict events; it was all about cause and effect.” Instead, he says, change your internal environment – what you think and how you feel and see how your external environment shifts.

He shares a terrific story about an experience his 20-something daughter created. She was in college, it was spring and he asked her what she wanted to manifest during her summer break. Her desires were specific: to work in Italy, learn and experience new things, visit at least 6 Italian cities, and spend at least a week in Florence. She wanted to work for the first six weeks and then spend the rest of the summer at home.

“I asked her to create the vision in her mind until it was so clear and real that the thought she was thinking became the experience, and her brain’s synapses began to wire that information as if it was a reality.”

His daughter called a few weeks later and told Dispenza that her university was offering an art history summer course in Italy. She could get the cost of the program and all expenses down from $7,000 to nearly half that and asked if he could help pay for it. Dispenza felt she was trying to control the outcome of this particular experience “instead of allowing the quantum field to orchestrate events. He told her to really “inhabit” the trip to Italy until she got “lost” in the experience.

Several weeks later, she called again. She and her art history teacher had been in the library  and started speaking in Italian, which they both spoke fluently. The teacher said he suddenly remembered that one of his colleagues needed someone to teach Level I Italian to some American students who would be studying in Italy that summer.”

Dispenza’s daughter got the job, she would be in 6 different Italian cities for 6 weeks, with the last week in Florence, and would be home for the second half of the summer. In short, she got everything she had desired. “My daughter changed her state of being to the extent that she was causing an effect. She was living by the quantum law.”

Pretty cool. So, what do you desire?

 On May 29, we posted a terrific bird synchronicity that Nancy Pickard sent us.  It started with a book Nancy was reading – Providence of a Sparrow by Chris Chester. As a result of that book, Nancy ordered Following the Wrong God Home by Clive Scott Chisholm, a close friend of Chris Chester’s, and it triggered another synchronicity.

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 It all started with that bird book I sent you. Now, jump from it, over the baby goose in that synchro, to yesterday when a book arrived that I had ordered because of the first book. This second book was written by Chris Chester’s best friend who seems to be equally brilliant and interesting.

Now for some background on this new syncho: in the novel I’m writing, there is a character who I’ve been afraid may come across as a stereotype instead of real. I made him as real as I could, and I know men like him exist, because I’ve met some. But still, some people *do* seem like stereotypes in real life, and fiction has to 3-dimensionalize them, somehow, in ways they may not even do for themselves. If you follow, as I know you do.

So yesterday the second book arrives. I decide to open it at random to see if there’s a message for me. My finger lands on the beginning of a scene–a real life scene–WITH AN OLD MAN WHO IS JUST LIKE THE CHARACTER IN MY NOVEL!!! I’m not kidding, even down to his loss of three children. There he is, my guy, coming alive on the page, reassuring me that I got him right and did him justice. But it also helped because it made me see more clearly to the heart of him, and now I think I can change my characterization of him just slightly to deepen him.

What’s next with the bird book synchros, I wonder? 🙂

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How often have you been in a bookstore and opened a book at random just to see if there’s something in the book that speaks to you?  And when the message is pertinent to something in your life, you probably buy the book. This kind of thing is probably another form of the Library Angel synchronicity.

And, Happy July 4th to our American friends and may everyone have a great weekend!

In 1972, Regency Press published a novel called Black Abductor by Harrison James, the pseudonym for James Rusk Jr. The story centered around a terrorist group led by a black man who kidnapped a college student named Patricia. Her father was wealthy, well known, and had right wing sympathies.

In the novel, Patricia was kidnapped near her campus and her boyfriend, who was with her at the time, was badly beaten by the abductors. For a time, he was even a suspect in the case.

The fictional Patricia initially resisted her captors but soon subscribed to their ideology and become a champion of their cause. The terrorists send Polaroid photos to her father and describe what they’d done as America’s “first political kidnapping.” They predicted that they would eventually be surrounded by police, tear-gassed, and wiped out.

In 1974, two years after this book was written, Patricia Hearst – college student and daughter of wealthy, right-wing Randolph Hearst, was abducted from her apartment near her campus. Her kidnappers were members of the Simbionese Liberation Army, a terrorist group led by a black man.  Her boyfriend, Steven Weed, was with her at the time, was badly beaten, and became a suspect in the case. Patricia Hearst, like the fictional Patricia, became a sympathizer of her abductors’ cause. She eventually robbed a bank with her abductors and was photographed carrying an M1 Carbine.

The FBI had apparently read the novel and the author became a suspect in the case. The real Patricia’s abductors were eventually surrounded by the police, tear-gassed, and killed, just as the fictional kidnappers had predicted they would be. 

So, were the terrorists familiar with the novel? Or was this another instance where an author tunes in on a future event? We’ve written about this phenomenon before:

1) Parallels between the sinking of the Titanic and a fictional vessel, the Titan, depicted in Morgan Robertson’s novel Futility, written 14 years before the Titanic sank

2) The eerie connections between Edgar Allan Poe’s unfinished sea adventure novel and a real life event 48 years later

3) Author Nancy Pickard’s experience when a scene from one of her novels, Virgin of Small Plains,  came true

4) Trish’s experience where her novel, Storm Surge, had eerie parallels to the devastating effects of Hurricane Andrew.

In 7 Secrets of Synchronicity, secret four is about the link between creativity and synchronicity. Perhaps in periods of heightened creativity, our consciousness, drifts free of the present, and soars through it, tapping into probable future events.    

Today’s ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court reflects what’s deeply wrong with this country.

The specifics: Hobby Lobby, a Christian owned hobby company, challenged the contraception part of the health care mandate in the Affordable Care Act that requires most companies to cover a broad spectrum of birth control for female employees. The ruling said that “closely held corporations could not be required to provide birth control coverage for their employees.” The owners of Hobby Lobby believe that some forms of contraception are akin to abortion.

And because corporations, thanks to an earlier court ruling, are now viewed as “people” who have rights, five men on the court ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby. This ruling did NOT include vasectomies and Viagra.

It’s not clear how a for-profit company can be considered a religious organization. But what IS clear with this ruling is if you are a woman who works for Hobby Lobby, your boss is the one who will determine whether you can use an IUD.  Your boss is the one who will tell you what these five male justices did – you want birth control? Tell the government to pay for it.

Yes, women can pay privately for birth control. But it’s not cheap and if you’re working for an hourly wage, you’re probably already struggling to make ends meet.  So the ruling is likely to result in a greater number of abortions – IF you live in a state where you can even find a clinic that still performs them.

Republicans in many states have succeeded in passing laws that have placed such dire restrictions on abortion that in some places in this country, a woman has to drive hundreds of miles for the procedure. Or she has to wait several days and must be “informed” about the viability for the fetus – you know, scare tactics. Brainwashing.

These same politicians are the ones who claim to believe in the sanctity of all life – but are eager to send you into war.  You are of more interest to them when you’re a fetus than when you’re born. After you’re born, well, you’re on your own. And oh, when you come back from that war, torn apart, your body in shambles, you’re lucky if you can see a doctor soon because the Veteran’s Administration is a bureaucratic nightmare.

So now, corporations aren’t just people; they have more rights than you do as an individual.  And what’s incredibly hypocritical about Hobby Lobby is that they have significant investments in pharmaceutical companies that manufacture the very contraceptions  they are denying to their employees.

The five men on the supreme court who supported this ruling might as well be aliens from Saturn; that’s how little they understand about how most Americans live. Then again, once you hit the highest court in the land, you are breathing rarefied air. You’re up there in history with the feudal lords, the king and queens, the slave masters, the profiteers, the money changers.

Yet, it’s possible – dimly possible – that the ruling might eventually push health insurance for contraception away from employers and into the hands of government through Medicare or some other single payer system. That would be the best end result. But who knows how many hoops this will entail, how many  legal arguments, how many detours.

My main question at this point, more than forty years after Roe v Wade is this: why are supreme court justices appointed for life? I know the original thinking was that a lifetime appointment would supposedly separate them from the political party in power. Ha. Take a look at the five men who voted for this travesty:

John Roberts – chief justice – ROMAN CATHOLIC, appointed by George W Bush in 2005

Anthony Scalia – ROMAN CATHOLIC, appointed by Reagan, 1986. Supposedly a member of Opus Dei (Google that one unless you’ve read Dan Brown and already know!).

Anthony Kennedy– ROMAN CATHOLIC, appointed by Reagan, 1988.

Clarence Thomas – ROMAN CATHOLIC (oops, Anita Hill is here somewhere. Google her),  appointed by George Herbert Walker Bush (W’s daddy) , 1991.

Samuel Alito-  ROMAN CATHOLIC, appointed by George W Bush, 2006.

ALL CATHOLICS. Really?? Are you kidding me?

Is it any wonder that the court ruled the way it did??

In 1934, Victor Goddard of the Royal Air Force was flying a Hawker Hart biplane over Scotland when he was caught in a heavy storm and got lost. He realized he needed to find a landmark in order to orient himself, so he eased his plane down through the clouds, hoping he would find clear weather below him.

He felt he was near Drem, an abandoned airfield, and if he could spot it, then he could take new bearings and get to where he was headed. When he was about a quarter of a mile from the airfield, something strange happened. As he later wrote, “Suddenly, the area was bathed in an ethereal light as though the sun were shining on a midsummer day.” 

The bright sunlight spilled over Drem, but it wasn’t abandoned. Goddard saw mechanics in blue overalls working on yellow planes. He swept in low over the field – no more than fifty feet above it – and was surprised when no one looked up as he plane passed over them. Then he ascended into the clouds again, confident about his direction.

In 1934, Drem airfield was an abandoned ruin.

In 1938,with the growing threat of war, Drem was reopened as an air force flying school and the color of British training planes changed from silver to yellow.

Had Goddard flown four years into the future?

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This story – taken from Signs of Things to Come by Angus Hall – has some eerie similarities to what happened to pilot Bruce Gernon,  who experienced a time displacement in 1970 while flying through the Bermuda triangle. When I read stories like this, I can’t help but wonder if there are portals all over the planet that lead backward and forward in time.

It’s ironic, if not a synchro, that TM is the well known abbreviation for both Transcendental Meditation and trademark. That’s because TM, the entrepreneurial meditation company, has literally trademarked meditation—or at least that’s how it seems.

Of course, you can meditate without signing up for TM, but if you read their website it sounds as if their option is the one that’s both easy and it works.

As a meditation teacher, I must confess I’ve never gotten involved in TM. The reason: I’m just naturally suspicious of attempts to corral meditation and charge for mantras. It seems crass. I feel the same way about energy companies that want to harness solar energy and sell it as their own product. C’mon, it’s the sun.

So, call me cheap. I never paid for a mantra. But maybe deep down I didn’t like the name, or at least the ‘dental’ part of transcendental. It sounded painful. Maybe that’s why they just call it TM. Okay, I’m making fun.

From all the advocacy for TM generated from the scientific, business and entertainment communities, transcendental meditation apparently works for many people who participate. I guess sometimes we feel that if we pay for something, then it must be worthwhile, and we better practice to get our money’s worth.

TM also homogenizes and Westernizes meditation. The TM website describes it as effortless. “Unlike other techniques, the TM technique involves no concentration, contemplation or control of your mind. It is effortless and enjoyable, and can be practiced sitting comfortably in a chair.”

Wow, sounds like you could be watching your favorite TV show and eating popcorn at the same time. (Yes, I’m making fun again. It beats getting angry.) Meditation is more challenging than that. But  it’s a good come-on to get people interested.

Lynn Stuart Parramore took a TM course in Manhattan and paid $2,500 for it. Writing in AlterNet.org, she disassembles her experience. “Transcendental Meditation is just a fancy name for a common variety of meditation in which a mantra – a word or series of syllables – is repeated with the intention of creating a meditative state. Pretty much any word or syllable will do, despite the hype of TM, which insists that a mantra can only be given by a ‘qualified’ instructor.

The TM initiate is told never to reveal her mantra under any circumstances, lest its magic be lost. My instructor suggested that he had some particular insight into me in choosing my mantra, but this is utter nonsense. People who have taught TM have admitted that they are given a list of mantras they’re supposed to divvy out according to age and gender. Nothing mystical about it.”

You can read Lynn’s entire article here. It’s well written, and an eye-opener.

That said, it’s worth pointing out that more than 350 studies published in 160 scientific journals have found positive results from practicing TM. You’re more relaxed and focused, you’re more in control of your emotions. The practice reduces stress, anxiety, and fatigue, and promotes balanced functioning of mind and body.

Of course, similar results have been found in studies of other types of meditation. In other words, other methods also work, even ones where you don’t have to pay thousands of dollars for a mantra.

If you’re thinking about beginning meditation, should you try TM?  Think of it as one option, an expensive one. If you’re employed with a corporation that advocates TM, and some do, go for it—especially if it’s a perk, or at least you’re getting a corporate discount.

But other methods also work, and you don’t have to pay thousands of dollars for a mantra. The bottom line: OM is free.

On June 23, the temperature in South Florida hit 99, at least according to my weather app. The app, in fact, had been calling for a high of 100.  This temperature is more in line with August or September when temps in the 90s  are combined with incredibly muggy air. But temperatures like this in June are unusual.

Rob was doing some yard work and Noah was outside with him, hoping Rob would toss him a ball or Frisbee. After five or ten minutes, they couldn’t stand it anymore. They dragged themselves into the house, into the air-conditioning, Noah panting hard, and Rob exclaiming how the heat was a “scorcher.”

We usually take Noah to the dog park between four and five, but it was just too hot. Even at 6 PM, the temperature was  94 and still had that “scorched” feeling to it.  “Scorcher” and “scorched” became our favorite words for describing how hot it was. Scorcher, scorched, scorcher, scorched, one a noun, the other a verb.

We decided to take Noah to the park after dinner, when it might be moderately less of a “scorcher.” Rob put some chicken breasts on the grill and I went back to work until dinner. Suddenly, he comes into the house carrying the plate with our chicken breasts on it.

“The temperature on the grill went nuts! The chicken breasts are scorched!” I could almost hear the trickster chuckling when I snapped a photo.

Fortunately, the chicken was still edible, just blackened on the outside. 

Awhile later, I clicked onto Huffington Post and saw a headline announcing that May was the hottest month – globally – in recorded history. How did the article open? “This past May was a scorcher.”

I think that’s a cluster for SCORCHER.

We’ve all heard the phrase, ‘That would never happen in real life.’ It’s often said about over-the-top scenes in movies in which characters seemingly have super human capabilities. Action films, of course, are full of such characters, who in real life would never survive the stunts they pull off on the big screen. But it’s not always action films where unbelievable scenarios are played out.

Imagine this set up: a master hypnotist searches for a truly susceptible person, one who would assassinate a VIP on command and then walk away without knowing what happened. In my novel Romancing the Raven, which takes place in the early 19^th century and present day, Edgar Allan Poe has just been expelled from West Point when he is unknowingly enticed into a scheme aimed at turning him into a hypnotized assassin. His target: Andrew Jackson.

When I wrote the book, I was aware that the idea of a hypnotized killer was controversial. Sirhan Sirhan had said he was hypnotized to assassinate Robert Kennedy, but there was never any proof. So I was surprised to find out about an experiment that became an episode of a show called Curiosity on the Science Channel. Called Brainwashed, the second season episode involved master hypnotist Tom Silver who started out with 185 participants in his search for one person who unknowingly would be turned into a killer and would ‘assassinate’ a foreign dignitary in a staged event. The participants were not told the true purpose of the show.

Silver screened the participants and found that 16 of the 185 were susceptible to  hypnosis. He reduced that number to 11 when he weeded out those who might be psychologically damaged by the experiment. The remaining participants were divided into small groups and taken to busy restaurants for lunch. They were hypnotized first and given the suggestion that their chairs would be extremely hot when they sat down and they would immediately strip to their underwear in the restaurant. All of the subjects complied to varying degrees, but 7 of them were eliminated because Silver thought they were merely playing along or weren’t suggestible enough to fully follow the suggestion.

The remaining four faced a tougher test, one that they could not fake. They were told to settle into a metal bathtub filled with 35-degree ice water. There was no way to fake this test. Under hypnosis, they were told the water would feel like a warm, comfortable bath. Each subject was monitored to test body temperature, heart and breath rate. Normally, someone exposed to water this cold begins gasping, shivering and their teeth chatter. Most people under hypnosis would typically snap out of their trance.

Three of the participants did just that. One lasted 18 seconds, the others just a few seconds. But the fourth subject, Ivan Santiago, remained two minutes in the icy water. Here’s how Joe Dispenza describes what happened to Santiago in his book, You Are the Placebo.

“Although Santiago’s heart rate was high before the experiment, once he stepped into the water, his heart rate calmed down immediately. There wasn’t so much as a flutter of his EKG or a single blip in his respiratory rate. Santiago sat among ice cubes as though he were soaking in a warm bathtub; indeed, that’s exactly what he believed he was doing. The man never flinched nor did his body fall into hypothermia, and the researchers knew they’d found the subject they were looking for.”

They then proceeded to thank Santiago for participating, and told him that he was being dismissed from the show, but asked that he come back  for a final interview. The next day, during a break in that interview, Silver entered the room and instantly put Santiago under hypnosis with a tug on his arm, a pre-conditioned cue. Silver proceeded to tell him that a bad guy was downstairs. “He’s got to be erased. We’ve got to get rid of him, and you’re the one to do it.”

He told Santiago that once he exited the building, he would see a red backpack on a motorcycle, and inside would be a gun. He told Santiago that he would grab the backpack and walk over to a velvet rope, where he would wait for a man, who would be carrying a briefcase. Then he told Santiago that as soon as the man came out the door, he was to shoot him in the chest. “But as soon as you do it, you’ll simply, completely, totally forget that it ever happened.”

Meanwhile, the scene was set. A stuntman playing the foreign dignitary was strapped with blood packs, and an Airsoft prop gun was placed inside a red backpack and laid on the seat of a parked motorcycle right outside the entrance of the building. A velvet rope line was set up  and staged paparazzi were in place with their cameras. Two SUVs were parked on the street, looking ready to drive off with the VIP and his entourage.

So what happened? Santiago was a good guy, a trusted employee, a devoted son, a loving uncle. Not the type of person who would agree to kill somebody in cold blood. Would Silver succeed in turning him?

When Santiago walked out of the building, one of the producers shook his hand and said: “Ivan, you did a spectacular job.” That was the trigger that was supposed to send Santiago back into a hypnotic trance. It worked. Immediately, Santiago looked around, saw the motorcycle, moved over to it, and picked up the red backpack. He walked over to the velvet rope line where the paparazzi were huddled, and slowly unzipped the bag.

Moments later, a man with a briefcase walked out the door. Santiago pulled out the gun and shot the man in the chest several times. The blood bags erupted, and the stuntman, posing as the dignitary, collapsed to the ground. Silver and a psychologist ushered Santiago away from the scene. Moments later, they told him what had happened. Amazingly, Santiago didn’t remember a thing—until Silver suggested that he would.

It’s a pretty scary scenario that someone’s mind could be so manipulated. Now we know that it’s actually possible to program a person to kill. Not just anyone, of course. But someone like Santiago, who is highly susceptible. That part of my novel has now been verified…and it could happen in real life.

I frequently experience simple little synchros—sometimes silly ones—recognize them, but within a day or two they’ve faded from memory. So I decided to jot this one down before I forgot the details. However, as I did it so, it just getting bigger…or weirder…or both. Take a look.

6-20-14: I went on Facebook and saw a message in large type that said: “What is a name that starts with Z? 99% of people fail. I thought about that a moment, then noticed that I’d received a friend request. I clicked it and it was from someone named Zoa. I approved her, went back to the post and commented: “Zoa. I must be in the 1%” and explained how I’d just gotten the name.

When I started writing this post a couple of hours later, I went back to look for the original Facebook post, and was distracted by an artist’s painting. I clicked it to get the full image and the message above the painting said: “Zaria Forman is no ordinary artist.” So there was another one. A double synchro.

But that’s not quite all. After writing the above, I returned to a chapter I was editing on The Jewel in the Lotus, my meditation book. I read a couple of paragraphs and came to this one:

In fact, the night before I began this chapter I had a dream that I was an FBI agent from the city of Z, and I was investigating someone who was also from Z who was making fraudulent claims. But when someone interviewed me about the case, the interviewer questioned my authenticity. “Are you really an FBI agent from Z?” That was when I woke up at 4:30 a.m., thinking ‘No, I am not an FBI from Z.’

You’ll have to read the book to find out what that’s about, but for the purpose of this post…there it was: another Z name. This time a city named Z.