Welcome to The Mystical Underground

The other day I went to Facebook and read a semi-crazed rant by someone who was complaining vehemently about how stupid it was  to click ‘like’ every time you read a post. “Are you brain-dead? What was the point?” He mentioned that some people even do so on posts about a death in the family or a personal tragedy of some sort.  I guess he has a point there. Bad taste. I was actually tempted to click ‘like,’ but for obvious reasons thought better of it. Instead, I scrolled on.

Then I came to this strange post by a guy named Mark Johnson:

“Are you filthy rich? Do you have so much money you don’t know how to spend it? Do you have a fascination with the paranormal? Before you spend it on another Bentley or buy that island in the South China Sea, we have a better suggestion.

“Why not give a huge chunk of change to us? We are looking for a benefactor/sugar daddy/sugar momma to toss a ridiculous amount of unneeded cash our way to fund our pet paranormal project. We want to take 3-4 months off work, buy a motor home, and travel across the United States investigating some of the most haunted paranormal locations for a new documentary series.

“We will be communing with ghosts and chasing demons till they drop! There will be no return on your investment, which means you can use us as a tax write off and at least get a producer credit. So if you have a few hundred thousand to a few million burning a hole in your pocket, give us call! Your investment will be well spent! My mommy always said if you don’t ask, you don’t get, so we’re asking!”

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Was he serious or was it a joke? Maybe both. I don’t know Mark Johnson well. I only met him once when Trish and I appeared on his radio/podcast show called, Unknown Origins. I noticed no one had responded, and kind of felt sorry for him. So I clicked ‘like’ and moved on.

Within the hour, I received a message from Mark.

“Hi Rob.  Thanks for liking my joke post.  It’s ironic as I just listened to your interview with Whitley Strieber on Dreamland about your book on Synchronicities, and I was wondering if you and Trish would like to come back on our radio show.  We are now on Art Bell’s Dark Matter Radio Network on Monday nights from 9-10 PM, and I’m currently booking guests for June.  Let me know if you’re interested and we’ll pick a date.  It’s a subject I’m interested in.”

I wrote him back and told him that he’d had a synchronicity – the subject we would be talking about on his show. So clicking ‘like’ really ain’t that bad. Sometimes good things can come out of it, even synchros!

I’ve mentioned before how synchronicities sometimes just pass us by as if what just happened wasn’t unusual. I had a chance to observe one of these instances a a few weeks back when a meaningful coincidence occurred during a somewhat tense moment  while I was off-road biking with my friend Don.

First, I should say that Don is a retired fire chief, a man whose work was extremely stressful at times, and boring and tedious at other times. He lives here in Wellington and commuted 60 miles to Miami. Lots of firemen live far from their fire stations, preferring rural or semi-rural lifestyles when not on the job. Since they work long shifts, they only make the commute a couple of times a week.

I should add that synchronicities aren’t something that Don normally tunes into. In fact, he can’t recall ever having one. Yet, I witnessed one occur, an event that defied the odds, and he didn’t seem to recognize it. At the time, his focus was elsewhere and what happened, paraphrasing his words, was ‘just one of those things that worked out.’ Yes, but look how it worked out.

Here’s the story. We’d completed our five-mile trail ride without incident…or so we thought. Back in the parking lot, we congratulated ourselves for not taking any tumbles on the ‘technical trail,’ which means there are log piles, nasty roots, steep inclines and drops to contend with, besides an occasional sandtrap.

Then Don realized his cell phone was missing. He’d carried it in a pouch, but had forgotten to zip it closed. So we headed back to the trail, wondering about our chances of finding it. The phone could be anywhere along the trail, maybe invisible in the underbrush.

As we rode along the road that led to the trail entrance, Don suggested that once we were actually on the trail, I should call his phone and hopefully we would hear it. A good idea, I thought, except for one thing.

When Don noticed that I was hesitating, he added: “I hope your battery is good.”

“It’s not the battery that’s the problem, I forgot my phone at home,” I told him, and suddenly it seemed that chances of finding his phone were dimming.

That’s when we noticed a man walking along the sidewalk and wondered if he might be willing to keep calling Don’s number for the next half hour as we circumnavigated the trail. Of course, maybe that guy didn’t have a cell phone with him, either, or his battery was low. Or maybe he had something better to do.

Before I had a chance to suggest the idea, Don rode ahead and stopped the man. As I arrived, they were talking like old friends. Indeed they were. The other man was also a retired firefighter and they used to work together. The friend had no problem calling Don’s number over and over. In fact, the number was already listed among his contacts.

What were the chances of that? I thought. But, like I said, Don seemed unfazed by the idea that another former Miami firefighter, a friend, just happened to be walking along the sidewalk in a fairly out-of-the-way area. We never did find out what he was doing there, but he kept calling Don’s number and within ten minutes of backtracking along the trail, we found the phone. Fortunately, no other riders had come along and ridden over it.

Don was lucky, and he’d experienced a synchro, even though he didn’t know it.

David Wilson, the publisher of Crossroad Press, who published our last two books on synchronicity, has sent us some intriguing synchros in the past. This one is stunning and concerns an event that happened nearly 30 years ago.  I think it falls into the category of what goes around comes around, or something to that effect.  And it’s another great example of Indra’s net, that web that connects us all.

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My ex-agent introduced me to a guy a while back who has a couple of books we decided to publish. He’s a bit odd, but we’ve been working with him. The cover of his book has been a problem. But he wrote me tonight and said he had a friend who had lived in Rota, Spain for a number of years, teaching English to sailors and that he had photos we can use for the cover.

Rota, Spain isn’t exactly on the tourist track. It’s a Spanish naval base commanded by a Spanish admiral and funded by the U.S. government. 

I was stationed there between 1982-1985 and since I took English in Rota, I asked the author his friend’s name. Sure enough, the author’s friend, his brother-in-law, is the teacher from whom I took an English course. I remember he gave me a great grade because I wrote an essay espousing my theory that the reason people dislike the classics is because of the way they are taught by English teachers. I remembered that grade – and, thus, his name.

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What are the odds on that one?

One day a professional artist came to Paint Nite, and painted the painters. That’s Megan teaching in the background.

Sometimes I don’t immediately recognize a synchronicity, but days, weeks, or even months later, I suddenly realize what an amazing synchro had occurred. And I also wonder how I could’ve missed it.

That was the case recently when I was talking with Trish about how well daughter Megan is doing this year in both her jobs, including her dog walking biz and her work as a Paint Nite artist/teacher. With dog walking, she has managed to expand her downtown venue and now works with a partner. With Paint Nite, she’s progressed from one class a week to three or four, and her boss who owns the Orlando, Florida franchise considers Megan her top artist. She’s now involved in selecting paintings and training new artists.

The synchro, or actually synchros, that I overlooked occurred the day she was interviewed and hired for Paint Nite.  That day everything came together for her, and that was after weeks of frustration getting turned down for part-time jobs she was well qualified for, but probably would’ve hated.

When her future boss, Carolyn, asked Megan about her experience as an artist, she mentioned her degree in fine arts from Florida’s top public liberal arts honors college, then added that she currently had a gallery show in Orlando. The show, she explained, was in a bar called BART, which stood for Bar & Art.

Probably mentioning an art gallery show in a bar wouldn’t be that impressive, except for the fact that the job she was applying for involved teaching art in bars! People learn to paint and they’re served drinks.

So that was a synchro, but there was more. The day of the interview her art show was feature on a local TV news show. So she told Carolyn that if she couldn’t stop by BART to see the show, she could see her interviewed that evening on the news.

No wonder she got the job. The stars were surely aligned that day and the synchros were flowing. She was definitely on the fast-track of the synchronicity highway.

While at the time I recognized the synchro with the TV interview, I’d overlooked the oddity that both her gallery show and her potential new job as an art teacher took place in bars. But in downtown Orlando, it all makes sense. There are lots of bars and lots of bar-hopping young people living downtown. And it seems quite a few of them are looking for an artistic outlet as well as a couple of drinks.

As I was writing this, Megan called and told us that she’d just taught a class at a new bar downtown with 50 patrons painting, about double the size of her usual classes. And when you teach painting in a bar, you also get tips that some evenings doubles her income.

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It looks like a magic lamp, and once in the hands of Jane Clifford, a healer from Wales, it acted like one as well. Here’s Jane’s story about the lamp.

“I found this in a charity shop today for £1. Within minutes I had a miracle! I bumped into my estranged half-sister in the street. She has not spoken to me for many years. She hugged me and  said how sorry she was for the hurt. We chatted an hour, hugged and agreed to forgive and forget the past.”

Jane noted that she has been transmitting healing energy to the situation for a few months. But it was only after she purchased the lamp that she encountered her half-sister on the street.

***

Jane, who is an empath, also mentioned that in the week before the mining explosion in Turkey that killed more than 200 miners, she had a premonition about a big explosion that would hit the news. She mentioned it to her son and a friend a few days before the explosion.

On the morning of the disaster, she felt “spun out and very strange – not here.” She had to lie down for an hour, but still remained restless and uneasy until she heard the news about the explosion.

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And happy birthday, Rob!

Since we often write about our books here, we like to plug other people’s tomes from time to time. Synchronicity, Science & Soul-Making, by Victor Mansfield, has been around awhile, published in 1995. In fact, when we wrote our first synchro book, The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity, Mansfield’s work on meaningful coincidence was one of our reference sources. The writing is somewhat academic in tone, as might be expected from a physics professor, but the pages are filled with an abundance of interesting stories.

Here’s one from a young woman who was preoccupied with a question that repeated itself over and over again in her head: Who am I? “I have carried it for years through studies in psychology and philosophy and it has been the foundation for many hours of meditation.”

Her story began with a friend telling her that the Havdensvanee (or Iroquois) name for Seneca Lake was Ganadasege ti karneo dei. He told her the spirits of the lake love to hear the old name as no one says it much any more. And they respond, he added.

“I am a person who believes in the living nature of our surroundings and so, without much hesitation, decided it was a friendly gesture to go to the lake and chant the name. I frequent a particular beach, so I grabbed my coat, hat, and my mother, who was visiting me, and headed to the beach one cold blustery October morning.”

She and her mother walked along the shore, both chanting the ancient name for the lake. At one point, she felt warmth. She continued on and it was cold again. She backtracked and found the place of warmth. For some reason, she thought, she was being called to this particular place on the lake’s edge. She looked down and scanned the small rocks until her gaze fell on a peculiar stone. It was smooth and black and had several hollows in the surface that seemed to form eyes, two nostril holes, and a gaping mouth.

She stopped chanting and picked up the stone. She felt it was important for her to take the stone home. She kept it by her bed and at night before turning off the light she would pick it up and ask: What song am I to hear? The stone offered no response.

One day her brother-in-law came to her house and picked up the stone. He blew into one of the holes. Suddenly, a sharp whistling emanated from the stone. He kept blowing until he discovered eight distinct tones. They named it the ‘Singing Stone.’

She continued asking the stone what song she would hear, and one night she got an answer. She came home late from a philosophy class, stood outside and gazed at the stars awhile. When she went inside, she had an impression that she should look at her bookshelves. She was drawn to two books, one of Native American stories, the other by Ramana Maharshi, a Hindu sage.

Opening it, she was stunned to see: The Story of the Singing Stone. Her spine tingled as she read about the story of a girl’s long search for the Singing Stone, a stone that would be magical for the one who found it. She searched in the four directions, but was unable to find the stone. One day, she stood on a bluff and looked down to see her family below, their arms open, beckoning her. “Welcome home Singing Stone!”

The book went on to interpret the tale as addressing the question: ‘Who am I?’ The young seeker was the Singing Stone.

The woman picked up the second book, and opened it to a chapter entitled, ‘Who am I?’ She realized the stone had answered her through the story. She was the Singing Stone. This was her song.

* * *

As if that story within a story was not strange enough, there’s something more. I’m in the midst of writing a meditation book, based on the meditation classes I teach, and just recently I was working on a new meditation. It’s called: ‘Who am I?’

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Postscript: 2008 was a significant year in Victor Mansfield’s life. His last book, Tibetan Buddhism and Modern Physics: Toward a Union of Love and Knowledge, was published and included an introduction written by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Victor gave a copy of the book to him during a visit to Colgate University, where he taught for 35 years as a professor of physics and astronomy. Also in April, he was the co-recipient of the Sidney J. and Florence Felten French Prize for inspirational teaching. He died of lymphoma June 3, 2008.

from deviant art

Over Mother’s Day weekend, our daughter came home for a long weekend. And whenever Megan is home, her friends drop by to touch base and hang out. One of her friends, Ashley, is nine months pregnant and due to deliver – a girl – any day now. 

Rob and I were in the backyard talking with her husband, Moe, about where Ashley is going to have the baby, what sort of delivery she wants, the details. She plans to go natural – controlling the pain through breathing techniques. But since the baby already weighs 8 pounds, Ashley’s OB says he will induce the delivery if she doesn’t deliver in the next three days.

“May her labor be short,” I remarked. “Mine was 30 hours, and it’s painful.”

“No epidural for Ashley,” Rob remarked.

“Nope,” Moe said.

“Trish had an epidural,” Rob said.

Huh? I looked at him, sort of shocked that he remembered it all wrong. First off, I have an version to needles. And the idea of someone sticking a needle into my spine, numbing me from the waist down for hours, is terrifying. “Are you kidding?” I said. “The doctor offered an epidural and I told him to forget it. I had a shot of Demerol that took the edge off.” And that Demerol took me into some other place and time, but that’s a whole other story!

I remember this conversation with the doctor clearly. I also remember telling this to actor Jamie Cromwell, when Rob and I were working with him on a project several years after Megan was born. No epidural. Oh yuck and gross and no way.

So how can his memory of the delivery be so different than mine? What is memory, anyway, and how often do our memories of an event we share with someone else differ? According to this article, there are three types of memories: sensory, short term, and long term.

In Alzheimer’s and dementia, short term memory is the first thing to be swallowed up by the disease. This can span the spectrum from, What did I have for breakfast to who is the person sleeping next to me in bed? For my mother, who suffered with this disease for at least eight years, it started with small things – she thought the cleaning lady was stealing stuff, she forgot appointments, she got lost driving home from the mall that was only a few miles from her house.

The memory gaps gradually grew much larger and more alarming. She eventually forgot how to play bridge, a game at which she had excelled for at least 50 years; my dad was the stranger in her bed, incidents that happened several times and prompted calls to 911; to confusions so profound she forgot how to use utensils, to feed herself. And toward the end, she didn’t recognize my dad, my sister,  or me. 

Memory. According to Carl Jung, we also have a genetic memory – the collective unconscious . From Jung’s Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious:

 “… in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.”

 I don’t think Rob’s memory versions of Megan’s delivery were connected to the collective unconscious. His experience of her birth differs because he wasn’t the one giving birth. But I do think the collective unconscious played a role in the later stages of my mother’s Alzheimer’s. During many of our visits to the facility where she spent the last two years of her life, she said that her mother – who died in 1969 – had dropped by for a visit. Or that her brothers and two sisters, who had also passed on, had come by bearing gifts. I believe she was tapping into the collective unconscious during these periods, where the dead aren’t dead, where we have access to other dimensions of consciousness, where synchronicity flourishes.

Perhaps the birth process is something like dementia/Alzheimer’s, but in reverse. During birth, we leave the place between lives, where we have access, I think, to our past life history, to the talents and skills and challenges that we have faced in other lives, and we have a sense of what we hope to experience in the life we are entering. With Alzheimer’s, we re-enter that place while we’re still alive, in a physical body, and prepare ourselves for the transition.

In both states, synchronicity is an ally, a friend, a beacon. It may be the voice that whispered to Steve Job as he was dying and uttered his final words, “Wow, wow, wow.” It may be the voice that a woman hears when her child is being delivered about their past-life connections. It may be the voice, the impulse, the feeling that prompts us to follow Path A instead of Path B. 

Who knows for sure? At the end of the day, memory may be the ultimate trickster.

Kilt, after a day of herding sheep

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This story isn’t a synchro. It’s about how dogs penetrate our lives and teach us about what’s important. You know, squirrels, bones, the moment.

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 Between  January 1 and May 1 our friend Cassie and her two border collies, Willow, 10, and Kilt, barely 2, were living with us.

Let me tell you about border collies. Before Cassie and her dogs moved in with us, I would see these two dogs – and other border collies – at the dog park, focused, task-oriented dogs. Give them a ball, a Frisbee, or a herd of sheep – a herd of anything, really – and their instincts kick in.

They are bullets on four legs, these dogs, racing toward whatever the task is, and when the task is captured, caught, herded, they are ready for the next task, goal, herd. And all of this is great if you live on a sheep farm, where the creatures must be herded daily, or on several thousand acres where these dogs can race and run and chase whatever they want.

But in a house with just a backyard, they are easily bored. During the day, Kilt trotted into my room with a worn out Frisbee that she dropped at my feet. If I didn’t pay attention to it, she found an old weathered tennis ball and came  into my office and bounced it in  front if me,. C’mon, Trish, throw me a ball, c’mon, c’mon, let’s play. C’mon – pant, pant – give me a job, a task.  

On Mondays, Cassie’s day off, she took her dogs to a sheep herding place an hour north of us, where Kilt and Willow got to actually do what they were bred to do – herd sheep. They came home exhausted, quiet, satisfied. The rest of the week, though, they had to satisfy themselves with dog park visits, tussles with Noah, and marrow bones, an all time favorite past time.

At first, our two cats were wary of these dogs. Simba, the orange tabby male, spent a lot of time in the garage, hiding out. Our white cat, Powder, named after the character in the movie of the same name, was the first to warm up to them, to accept them. She sat at the edge of the kitchen table and swatted them when they passed by. And because she isn’t declawed, they felt those swats, they respected her.  When she was on the floor and they sneaked up to try to steal her food, she hissed, lashed out – and they kept their distance.

3 dogs riveted on someone with a treat

Simba and Willow sometimes shared the same room. Willow liked the quilts piled up in Noah’s crate in our bedroom and often claimed it while Simba curled up at the foot of our bed. Simba seemed to be fine with this arrangement. And yet, in the beginning, we kept the dogs and cats in separate parts of the house because we weren’t sure how or if they would accept each other. But that’s the thing about animals that share the same space. They adapt. They somehow work it all out They are masters at co-existence, at live and let live.

The photo below is slightly out of focus, but provides a sense of this live and let live motto at which dogs and cats excel. Perhaps there’s a lesson here for politicians!

Since Cassie and her dogs left, Noah has been kind of down in the dumps. We think he has a soft spot for Kilt, who shares many of the same attributes as our daughter’s dog, Nika, a border collie/lab mix. When we biked  down to the park in our neighborhood, all three dogs ran free, without leashes, and Noah somehow managed to keep pace with Kilt, the silver bullet,  and grabbed her back legs and took her down. But Kilt always wrenched free and raced on, forever onward, like the wind.

This weekend, though, our daughter came home for mother’s day. She not only brought her dog, but her roommate’s as well, a yellow lab that looks like Old Yeller. So now Noah has two buddies to play with again.

Happy Mother’s Day to all!

On our way home  from a wedding on Jekyll Island, Georgia I received a text message from Melissa, our former neighbor. She used to babysit for our daughter when she was a youngster and now lives in New York with her husband, a videographer and filmmaker.

Melissa is one of those people who doesn’t send random text messages or emails. She usually has a question or an observation about synchronicity and a post often evolves from her communication.

Her text: Hey, watching an episode of  Elementary, and a woman character who changed identities made a new life and changed her name to Alison Drake. That’s one of your pseudonyms, right?

 I’d never heard of this show. So I  Googled it, of course, and learned that it’s about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Joan Watson “In a modern-day drama about a crime-solving duo that cracks the NYPD’s most impossible cases.” Click the link below and read the full synopsis.

And yes, Alison Drake was one of my pseudonyms. She wrote four books – Tango Key, Black Moon, High Strangeness, and Lagoon. I eventually stole Tango Key – the island – from Alison, and used it for my series about psychic and bookstore owner Mira Morales, who lives on the island.

The synchro here is interesting. When I wrote Tango Key, my editor at the time, Chris Cox, suggested I use a female pseudonym (instead of the androgynous TJ MacGregor) because mysteries by women were then outselling mysteries by men. So, in a sense, I was changing my identity, just as the female character did in the Elementary episode, Ears to You, that Melissa was watching.

I texted Melissa: Is this a synchro or theft?

Melissa: Both! Trickster…maybe.

I have no idea what the odds are here, but it struck me as very weird.

Dr. Bernard Beitman, a psychiatrist and visiting prof at the University of Virginia, is in the process of creating a new field of research called ‘Coincidence Studies.’

One of the interesting aspects I’ve found about his research is that he suggests that we all have an inborn global positioning systems (GPS) that allows us to find lost items, and also things that we might be thinking about, but not actively seeking. Dr B hypothesizes that something in us gives us the ability to locate useful things. He also notes that understanding this ability could even help people find direction in life.

In an article about his research in theepochtimes.com, he offered the example of a student who was looking for a cultural anthropology research assistant position. The student found the search a tough one. One day, while he was running in a marathon, his mother, who was at the event, struck up a conversation with another bystander. As it turns out, that person was looking for a cultural anthropology research assistant and ended up hiring her son.

Voila! Like attracts like…with mother played the role of intermediary. “I think the mother GPSed her way to this person,” Dr. B said.

That story reminded me of something that occurred within minutes of downloading the article from The Epoch Times.  I clicked another website that I’d found in email that led me to a book Trish and I had written years ago. It had been so long ago that I barely remembered The Complete Dream Dictionary. It was being offered as a free download…probably illegally.

I turned around in my chair, stared at the bookcase behind me and my gaze instantly fell on that very book. Oddly, I hadn’t noticed it there or thought about it for years. So I picked it off the shelf, thinking that this might be another out-of-print book that we could send to Crossroads, the publisher that has already re-published more than a dozen of our out-of-print titles in the last year and a half.

I opened the book at random to page 138 in the dictionary section, and my eyes fell on the word…crossroads. The definition read: If you have arrived at a crossroads in your dream, this indicates the need to make a choice. If you are hesitant to take either path, this suggests indecision in some matter. In that case, this is a clear indication that making a choice and moving forward is better than standing still without progress.

That essentially describes what Trish and I have done with Crossroads as the publishing industry has undergone major shakeups with the emergence of e-books and the collapse of many bookstores and bookstore chains. We’ve moved forward by moving our books into the e-book format outside of the floundering New York publishing industry.

Coming across that book and opening it to crossroads just confirmed for us that we’d made the right decision. So after reading about my inner GPS, I then seemingly put it to use.