Welcome to The Mystical Underground

GOOD MORNING (afternoon, evening). Had any Kebernarans lately?

That word, kebenaran, which is Javanese, relates to unusual coincidences, and it sounds like something out of the world of Kurt Vonnegut with his karass and granfaloons.  Here’s some Javanese wisdom related to synchronicity.

“Events do not happen because of chance, but manifest themselves because of hidden forces that bring about each co-incidence, each kebenaran.   A new event is a crossroad, a co-inciding, in which the shadow of inevitability becomes a fact.”

– Niels Mulder, Mysticism in Java: Ideology in Indonesia, Amsterdam: the Pepin Press, 1998, p.84

‘Kebenaran’ comes from the root benar which means true.  The word means truth as a noun, but in its adverbial form it means by chance, by accident.  Thus, a Javanese understanding of the relationship between “truth” and “chance”?

The term “hidden force” is also suggestive and was the title of a novel from a century ago about Java by L. Couperus.

We’ve talked about the scarab beetle here before since it played a major role Carl Jung’s development of his concept of synchronicity. His story of a female patient telling him about her dream of a scarab beetle just as a beetle very similar to the scarab struck Jung’s window. He opened the window, caught it in his hand and showed it to the woman. She had been extremely rigid in her thinking and the remarkable meaningful coincidence was a break-through in her therapy.

Now we have a collection of ‘lost’ fairy tales surfacing from Germany that are entitled Prinz Roßzwifl. That’s a local dialect for “scarab beetle.” The scarab, also known as the dung beetle, buries its most valuable possession, its eggs, in dung, which it then rolls into a ball using its back legs. Erika Eichenseer, cultural curator in the Bavarian region of Oberpfalz, sees the beetle’s lifestyle as symbolic of fairytales, which she says hold the most valuable treasure known to man: ancient knowledge and wisdom to do with human development, testing our limits and salvation.

Eichenseer published a selection of the 500 new fairytales that were compiled in the 19^th century by a local Bavarian historian, Franz Xaver von Schönwerth (1810–1886), the same time a sthe Grimm brothers were gathering fairytales that became a world famous collection. The fairy tales had been locked away in an archive in Regensburg, Germany for over 150 years.

According to an article in The Guardian, Von Schönwerth spent decades asking country folk, laborers and servants about local habits, traditions, customs and history, and putting down on paper what had only been passed on by word of mouth. In 1885, Jacob Grimm said this about him: “Nowhere in the whole of Germany is anyone collecting [folklore] so accurately, thoroughly and with such a sensitive ear.” Grimm went so far as to tell King Maximilian II of Bavaria that the only person who could replace him in his and his brother’s work was Von Schönwerth.

Von Schönwerth compiled his research into a book called Aus der Oberpfalz – Sitten und Sagen, which came out in three volumes in 1857, 1858 and 1859. The book never gained prominence and faded into obscurity.

Many of the fairy tales do not appear in other European collections. For example, there is the tale of a maiden who escapes a witch by transforming herself into a pond. The witch then lies on her stomach and drinks all the water, swallowing the young girl, who uses a knife to cut her way out of the witch. However, the collection also includes local versions of the tales children all over the world have grown up with including Cinderella and Rumpelstiltskin, and which appear in many different versions across Europe.

Von Schönwerth was a historian and recorded what he heard faithfully, making no attempt to put a literary gloss on it, which is where he differs from the Grimm brothers. However, says Eichenseer, this factual recording adds to the charm and authenticity of the material. What delights her most about the tales is that they are unpolished. “There is no romanticising or attempt by Schönwerth to interpret or develop his own style,” she says.

So now we have a whole new world of magic animals, brave young princes and evil witches coming to light. Thanks to Jim Bansholzer for alerting us to this story.

 Here is one of those stories about a mysterious person who appears at the scene of a tragedy, make a difference, and then can’t be found.

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On Sunday, August 2, around 9:00 a.m, a 19-year-old woman, Katie Lentz, was hit by a drunk driver in a small Missouri town. Badly injured but still alive, Katie was trapped between the steering wheel and the seat. A rescue vehicle arrived at the scene and workers tried for 45 minutes to extricate her from her mangled car, but to no avail.

Her condition deteriorated and she finally asked the rescue workers to pray with her. That’s when a priest with gray hair, dressed in black and wearing a clerical collar, appeared on the scene and offered a prayer. He told everyone to remain calm and said that when they were done praying, Katie would be freed from her car.

Right after the priest finished praying for her, the fire department arrived with the equipment necessary to cut Katie free from her car. When she was pulled from the wreckage, nearly a dozen firefighters turned to thank the priest for his help. But he was nowhere to be seen.

The highway where the accident occurred had been blocked for a quarter of a mile during the 90 minutes rescue and there were no bystanders and not  a single parked car nearby. A friend of Katie’s told the local new affiliate KHQA hat they were looking for the priest to thank him, but so far no one had seen him.  He wasn’t in any of the dozens of photos that were taken of the accident and no one has been able to identify him.

New London Fire Chief Raymond Reed, one of the rescuers at the scene, told KHQA that it was a miracle. “I would say it was either an angel that was sent to us in the form of a priest or a priest that became our angel, I don’t know. Either way, I’m good with it.”

Katie’s mother agrees. She told USA Today that emergency workers said her daughter should not have lived through the crash. She believes the man may have been “an angel dressed in priests attire because the Bible tells us there are angels among us.”

 The young woman remains in serious condition  and has gone through surgery for her injuries.  The image above is a sketch artist’s rendition of what the priest looked like.

Stories like these have circulated for years. There’s a phenomenon called the third man factor or the third man syndrome that refers to an unseen presence – a spirit, perhaps – that provides comfort during traumatic and life-threatening experiences. But in this instance, the priest was a physical presence witnessed by others.

Thanks to Adele Aldridge, who sent us the cartoon.

This very strange video – caught on a condo surveillance camera – shows an unidentified object dipping into a condominium swimming pool. As NBC news put it: A skinny dipping UFO?

Today we’ll be live with Kate Valentine to talk about Aliens in the Backyard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=RIsanHSS_FM

Right now, we’re working on our new book, The Synchronicity Highway. I was doing some research on telekinesis – also known as psychokinesis or PK – which is mind-matter interaction, the movement of or effect upon  matter  through nothing more than the power of mind. Hollywood loves this stuff. Think Carrie, The Fury, the X-Men, Matilda, Firestarter…

One of the most famous telekinetics in the 1970s and 1980s was Uri Geller, the Israeli spoon bender. He claims his telekinetic powers came from ETs. Maybe they did. Enhanced paranormal abilities are often reported in the wake of UFO encounters and abductions. But Geller’s problem wasn’t ETs: it’s that his credibility was seriously undermined by professional skeptics like James Randi, who insisted Geller’s alleged telekinetic feats were sleights of hand, just stage magic. Even noted scientists attacked him. Richard Feynman and Martin Gardner claimed Geller was fraudulent in his claims.

At some point during 1974, I happened to see Geller on TV one night, at the height of his popularity. He was bending spoons. It fascinated me, watching this guy’s fingers moving up and down the spoon until the curved end started to droop like a wilted flower.  I thought how I would love to see him do this in person, close up. About ten years later,  I had an opportunity.

Rob and I had been married about a year and happened to be in a South Florida mall, where Geller was  demonstrating his telekinetic abilities. We wandered over to the small group that watched -– maybe two dozen people – and were able to move in close to the platform that elevated him somewhat above the crowd. It was hardly  Madison Square Gardens!  

First he demonstrated the spoon-bending thing and talked about what was happening as he ran his fingers repeatedly over the spoon.  We were close enough to Geller to reach out and touch him, so we had an excellent view of the spoon. As we watched, the upper part of the handle started to bend, so that the spoon curved downward, like something out of a Dali painting. Then Geller asked for keys from the audience. People gladly turned over their keys – but we didn’t. We had just seen what he’d done to the spoon and we didn’t  intend to get stuck at a mall ten to fifteen miles from home!

As sets of keys were handed over to Geller, as he ran his fingers over them, a tight hush settled over the small crowd. Keys were bent at weird and impossible angles and handed back to their owners, who held them up for everyone to see.

Sleight of hand? We aren’t professional debunkers or magicians, but were close enough to see the metal bend, to see what the keys looked like when the owners dangled them from their raised hands for minutes after Geller returned them. The metal was curved, bent, abnormal.

Some years later, in the early 1990s, we were at a writers’ symposium on censorship in Gainesville, Florida. Science fiction writers Jay and Joe Haldeman – brothers – were also there, along with Martin Caidan, an aviation and aeronautical expert and   author of more than 50 books. His 1972 novel, Cyborg, became the basis of the TV series The Six Million Dollar Man and its spinoff, The Bionic Woman.

 We got to talking to him because of Indiana Jones. Rob had recently finished writing the sixth of his original Indiana Jones novels for Lucas Films, was burned out on the character, and now Caidan was going to continue the series.

After the symposium, Marty invited us back to his place. He was eager to show us the  experiment he’d devised to prove that telekinesis is not only real and possible, but that he himself was telekinetic. The room was on the second floor of his house. At one time, it probably had been a bedroom, but Caidan had redesigned it with a large picture window that looked into an elaborate array of psi wheels. A psi wheel is a pyramid-shaped device that consists of a piece of paper or foil that’s balanced on the tip of a toothpick or needle. The room resembled a field of miniature weather vanes.

He explained that the room was specially sealed against currents of air so that nothing but the power of the mind could cause those psi wheels to turn. As the three of us stood at the window, Caidan went into a trancelike state and focused intently on the psi wheels. For several minutes, nothing happened. Then a couple of the psi wheels began to turn. They weren’t spinning, weren’t going nuts, but were definitely moving without an apparent source or trigger. It looked strangely beautiful and weird, as though we were in the midst of an ongoing psychic opera.

Parapsychologist Loyd Auerbach was a friend of Caidan’s and sometimes accompanied him to demonstrations and workshops. In his  June 2004 Fate magazine column, Auerbach wrote, “Martin Caidan was capable of moving things with this mind.”

James Randi offered his rebuttal three months later, saying that in 1994, he had offered to test Caidan’s ability, but that “he frantically avoided my challenge by refusing even the simplest proposed controls.”

What’s interesting about Randi’s comment is his apparent assumption that he is the final authority on whether someone’s psychic abilities are genuine. And since he is a professional skeptic, who makes his living by debunking others, he won’t ever be able to pronounce that anyone is actually psychic because it would make him look bad.  Also, he would have to pay the million bucks he has offered to anyone who can prove they are psychic.

Being a skeptic is easy. It’s far more difficult to approach an apparent impossibility with an open mind and investigate what might actually be going on.

 While doing some research for our new book, The Synchronicity Highway: Exploring Coincidence, the Paranormal, & Alien Contact,  I ran across the transcript of a remote viewing session that Joe McMoneagle did in 1984.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Joe McMoneagle was a psychic spy. He was known as Remote Viewer 001 in the U.S. Army’s Stargate program, which used soldiers with psychic talents to peer across borders and spy on enemies. They also explored diverse topics, including life on Mars 1 million years ago.

Joe has been featured in Newsweek, Time, Reader’s Digest, and on ABC’s Nightline and CBS’s 48 Hours, and on prime-time British and Japanese television. He’s the author of a number of books on remote viewing. He now teaches remote viewing at the Monroe Institute in Virginia, which was started by his father-in-law, author and consciousness researcher Robert Monroe.

I was riveted by what Joe had described in this transcript and asked if we could interview him for the book. One of my questions was about this particular RV session:

We ran across a transcript of an RV session you did in 1984 that was fascinating. You were handed a sealed envelope with a 3X5 index card inside with 3 sentences on it – the target you were supposed to view. You didn’t look at the card and the envelope wasn’t opened until the RV session was finished.  Written on the card was: the planet Mars, time of interest approximately 1 million years B.C.  Your monitor then gave you a set of geographical coordinates. Can you tell us about that viewing? Do you recall how  you felt at the time about what you were seeing? How did your monitor choose those coordinates? And why were there so many of them?

Here’s Joe’s response:

At the time, I was working with Bob Monroe in his lab over extended weekends. This had been set up by the Army in the hopes that it would shorten my cool down periods and extend my abilities to remote view. I was becoming very stressed by the demands within the Stargate Project.

From approximately mid-1982 until September 1^st of 1984 I was the only remote viewer left within the unit, so I was carrying the full load. This was beginning to wear thin. So, Bob was working with me in his lab to try and reduce the stress and increase my ability to respond. During this period of working with Bob, they would occasionally bring down a test target to see how I was doing. It could be a target of importance or simply one utilized to test my abilities.

On this one occasion, I was taking a nap during lunch hour inside the controlled isolation chamber in the lab, when Bob woke me up by announcing that he had a target for me. Lieutenant Atwater had brought him a card with seven sets of coordinates on it, and an envelope which was sealed. Bob told me he had the target envelope in his shirt pocket and that he would read off the coordinates to me one at a time, and I was to describe what I saw at each set. I agreed.

What I remember is that the first coordinate was a huge pyramid, like none I’d ever seen before. I asked him if this was a new discovery, because it seemed this was larger than the one at Giza, Egypt. He said he didn’t know, all he had was the sealed envelope and the coordinates. So, I described it to him. He gave me another coordinate and this one appeared to be some kind of a ruin. And on it went.

I remember at one point looking up at the location and getting a very strange impression of the sun. I told Bob, “The sun, it looks very weird.”

He said; “I’m not interested in the sun, I’m interested in what’s at the coordinate.”

So, onward we went. At the end of the session neither he nor I could figure out what this target was – it was mostly ruins, a few pyramid shapes, and feelings like the whole thing had to do with the preservation of life, the need to pass along a great deal of information.

I began seeing a race of people who were very much like us, but much larger – like, huge larger – over ten feet in height. And these people were fighting to stay alive, were building hibernation chambers inside pyramids, and trying to put aside information for those who might come later, informing them of what went wrong.

In any event, when we finished the remote viewing effort, Skip Atwater asked Bob to open the envelope and tell us what was inside. The card within the envelope said; “MARS ONE MILLION BC.” The coordinates were for specific locations on a certain area of Mars, which included what appeared to be ruins, lots of pyramids of different shapes and designs. I asked Skip where the coordinates had come  from. He said they originated with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA).

When I was doing the viewing, I kept getting a really sad feeling – these people were losing their home, and a handful had volunteered to stay behind to try and set up messages for those who might come after them. I got the distinct feeling that the pyramids were being set up to be used as hibernation chambers, and some point at some time in the near future they had some expectation that someone would eventually find them and understand what they did to save their people. It was very moving. I don’t think I expected such a powerful response to the remote viewing.

In any event, when we were finished with the viewing and the discussion of the results, Bob was asked to open the envelope. Inside we discovered the “Mars, one million BC” targeting instruction. It really surprised us both.

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Site of the supposed Dulce underground base.

Part 3 of  The Synchronicity Highway, a work in progress, deals with UFO encounters and synchronicity. So it’s fitting that, as we’re working on the book, we experience synchronicity related to UFOs. This is sort of a couch potato synchro, but still relevant.

We took a break from writing on a recent evening and clicked on our list of recorded TV programs. Ancient Aliens popped up…or so I thought. I clicked it and selected an episode that we had seen years ago related the supposed Dulce, New Mexico underground base and its relationship to aliens. It turns out this was actually UFO Hunters, the History Channel’s earlier UFO program, which we hadn’t watched since it went off the air (or off the cable) about five years ago.

We found the speculative episode interesting, though a bit far out with speculation of genetic engineering taking place, such as creating a man-cow creature, supposedly with the help of aliens. Whew! Okay. But we figure there’s usually some truth to these stories, though the presentation can be way over the top.

Meanwhile, back at the computer, I received a lengthy e-mail from documentary TV producer Katy Walker, who is working on a synchro documentary, as we’ve mentioned. Much of it was about ongoing synchros she has experienced related to owls, but she also touched on her UFO film clip that we put up earlier and, surprisingly, mentioned the Dulce Underground base. Here’s what she said:

“The day we discovered the UFO recording I also came across the UFO Hunters episode (which got the show cancelled) about the Dulce Underground base near an Apache Indian reservation where a worker allegedly saw beings experimenting  with human/alien hybrids. And we fall further down the rabbit hole…”

Oh, yes we do, Katy, because Trish and I had just watched that same episode. How strange. I had never heard that the episode was the reason the UFO Hunters was cancelled, so I looked it up. Indeed, Bill Birnes, the leader of the pack, claims that very thing in a radio/podcast interview with Jim Harold.

Not sure what all that means, except that we’re on the right path with the new book.

 On August 1, Edward Snowden left the transit zone in the Moscow airport and officially entered Russia and left for parts unknown. The administration is ticked off that Putin defied their requests for extradition and apparently ignored their assurance that Snowden wouldn’t be tortured (that’s illegal in the U.S., attorney general Holder told Russian authorities) and would be tried in a civil court, without threat of the death penalty.

All of this is rather ironic in light of the fact that Bradley Manning, who admitted leaking classified documents to Wikileaks and Julian Assange, has been sentenced to 100+ years in prison. If I were Snowden, would I board a plane to return to the U.S.?

Are you kidding?

If I were Snowden, I would keep running, moving, doing whatever I could to stay well ahead of the U.S. We’ve become worldwide bullies.  For some reason, this country seems to believe it has the right and might to spy on whoever they please, when they please, to gather records on our phone calls, emails, what we do on the internet, the doctors and dentists we consult, what we earn, how much we pay in taxes, how we vote, who we marry and…well, you get the picture.

In short, the United States – through its various spy agencies like the NSA – has become Orwell’s 1984. Like many visionaries, Orwell got the big picture correctly, but was off on timing.

Or was he?

The other day at the gym, I was talking to Wild Bill, a guy Rob and I have known, through gyms, for probably ten years. He and I first realized we were on the same page when, in our former gym, he got into an argument with a Republican about Bush. And I, unable to keep my mouth shut, chimed in. Wild Bill, it turned out, is a musician who is also well-informed about politics. When he realized Rob and I are on his page politically, he started attending Rob’s yoga and meditation classes. Periodically, he and I still talk politics.

“Things are so screwed up, Trish.”

“I blame Bush.” Of course, I blame Bush for everything that gone wrong in this country since the 2000 election. It wasn’t just  Bush, though, but his entire team – Cheney, Wolfowitz, Gonzalez, John Yoo, Rice, et al – and not a single one of them has been charged with war crimes or done a day of time. Cheney, in fact, even got a new heart – and it wasn’t the heart of a liberal!

“It goes back to Reagan,” Wild Bill said with a shake of his head. “I started then. We aren’t a democracy. We’re run by corporations and lobbyists.”

Reagan. Sigh. There are two things in Reagan’s favor in my book – he allegedly saw a UFO and his wife, Nancy, was into astrology and tried to use it to protect him. Bottom line, in 2013, we seem to be living in a version of reality that sometimes feels like Blade Runner, one of Harrison Ford’s first movies.

Is there a Rick Deckherd who is going to save us from ourselves? A Hans Solo who will save us from – well, universal threats? An Indiana Jones who will get the bad guys in the end?

Probably not. But whistleblowers like Snowden and Manning and Assange may form some weird archetype triad of the hero – Assange, holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in England; Manning recently sentenced to 100 plus years; and Snowden, hiding out somewhere in the country of  Dr. Zwivago. The three of them: what did they do?

They exposed the extent to which the U.S. government spies on its citizens and its allies all in the name of we’re keeping you safe, we’re keeping you secure, we’re allowing you to enjoy your Lattes, to enjoy walking your kids to school, and to appreciate how volunteer citizen watchdogs like George Zimmerman can gun you down if they feels threatened. Not to worry. We have a system of checks and balances in this country, a great judicial system…and yes, the best military on the entire planet. Ha-ha. We are the world cop.

 To Assange, Manning, and Snowden I say, Thank you. These three are the public, collective face of an emerging political paradigm, the one that says, If we are to survive as a planet, a human collective, we must be transparent, honest, forthright.

The synchro, I think, is that Snowden sought refuge in a country not known for its adherence to human rights, to freedom of anything. Yet, its main guy, Putin, refused to cave to pressure from the U.S. to extradite Snowden.