Welcome to The Mystical Underground

Sometimes we drift a bit from synchronicity on the blog. So it’s good to re-focus on the subject at hand from time to time. We’ve done so here with a primer of sorts, about synchronicity. These paragraphs come from the introduction of our next synchro book, THE SYNCHRONICITY HIGHWAY: Navigating the Signs and Symbols of Life’s Journey.

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Synchronicity or meaningful coincidence can be one of those delightful little surprises the universe springs on you just to keep you on your toes, aware and mindful. Other times, it slams into you out of the blue, a coincidence so startling that you marvel at the odds. It can be a trickster or an ally, clarify and confirm, guide or warn, laugh at you or with you.

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who coined the term, first wrote about synchronicity in the introduction to Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the I Ching: The Chinese Book of Changes, published in 1949. In that introduction, he talked about how tossing three coins six times, could yield one or two of 64 hexagrams that provide a response to a question that enlightens or guides the questioner. He defined the phenomenon as the coming together of similar inner and outer events in a way that can’t be explained by cause and effect and is meaningful to the observer. In the case of a divination tool, such as the I Ching, the inner event is the question, the outer event is the toss of the coins and resulting hexagram.

But of course synchronicity typically unfolds naturally without any tools. A simple example: you’ve been thinking about a former friend, roommate, lover, someone you haven’t heard from in years. You log onto Facebook and find a friend request from that individual. Or you’re digging a grave for your cat that died, have the car radio on in the background, and Peter Gabriel’s song, Digging in the Dirt, comes on. Or you dream about a stranger and the next day, that person enters your life.

Jung lumped extra sensory perception under the broad umbrella of synchronicity. This stance is sometimes controversial. Some people feel that calling ESP an aspect of synchronicity suggests that accurate psychically obtained information is merely coincidental. But Jung was simply saying that telepathy, precognition, mediumship, clairvoyance and other psychic abilities work outside of cause or effect. In other words, if a psychic predicts that someone will receive a surprise sum of money and two days later, an unexpected check arrives in the mail, that’s an example of precognition. But it also fits under synchronicity because cause and effect weren’t involved. The psychic didn’t tell anyone to send a check to the client. So an inner experience – the psychic’s premonition– and an outer event – the receipt of a check – came together outside of cause and effect and no doubt it would be meaningful to the client who received the check.

Synchronicity is an equal opportunity experience.  Anyone, anywhere, at any time, can experience a meaningful coincidence. Your awareness and receptivity to the phenomenon creates an atmosphere in which you recognize synchronicities when they occur. It’s likely that more occur when you’re aware and accepting of these occurrences.

There are also situations and environments where synchronicities flourish. They are threaded throughout mass events like natural and man-made disasters. They occur in travel and creative endeavors, in social movements and popular culture, and they even might proliferate during and after UFO encounters. When our lives are in transition and during intensely emotional periods, synchronicity is usually right there with us.

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Happy Birthday, Rob!

 Several months ago, Adele Aldridge sent us a box of beautiful Origami Peace Cranes. These cranes came into being because of Sasaki Sadako, who was just two years old when  the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945.  In November of 1954, Sadako caught a cold and lumps developed in her neck. It wasn’t long before she was diagnosed with leukemia, which people in Japan called “the atom bomb” disease. In February of 1955, she entered the Hiroshima Red Cross Hospital.

While she was there, she was told an old Japanese legend: anyone who folds a thousand paper cranes will be granted a wish. Sadako hoped  that by folding the paper cranes, she would get well again. So she began making them and complete more than a thousand of them before she died on October 25, 1955, at the age of 12. While making the cranes, she also wished for world peace and vowed: I will write peace on your wings and you will fly all over the world.

 Her classmates built a monument to Sadako and all the children killed by the bomb. They collected money for it and in 1958, a statue of Sadako holding a golden crane was unveiled in Hiroshima Peace Park. The children also made a wish that’s inscribed at the bottom of the statue: This is our cry. This is our prayer. Peace in the world.

 Since then, people all over the world fold paper cranes and send them to Sadako’s monument in Hiroshima, in memory of all the children who died. The crane is an interesting symbol for this peace effort. The Red-crowned Crane on which the origami crane and the Japanese legend are based is seriously threatened. Health of the crane population is often a good indicator about the health of the whole wetland ecosystem.

So this evening, Rob opened his final meditation class – shamanic meditation – by building a medicine wheel that included these beautiful origamis. The objects that create the outer border of the wheel are stones, bits of pottery, odds and ends we’ve collected in our travels. Then we meditated on each of the four directions.

The journey begins in the South, home of the archetypal serpent, where we learn to shed the past and begin to detach from our wounds and personal stories. We learn to released heavy energy accumulated in our bodies.

In the West, we learn about the Jaguar, who teaches us about life, death and rebirth. We face fears and family shadows, and step across the bridge to learn to walk as warriors, without enemies.

 In the North, we meet the archetype Hummingbird and learn to taste knowledge directly, to manifest the impossible, and to receive ancestral knowledge.

In the final gathering we explore the East and the archetype of the Eagle, who demonstrates how to experience vision, destiny and the possibilities of becoming. We develop our vision of peace.

At the end of the class, Rob invited everyone to take one of the origami cranes with them.  It was a powerful final class.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6OASdiqH1o

Indiegogo.com allows anyone, anywhere, to raise money for a project – video, art, movie, TV show, book, any venue. This evening, Daz sent me a couple of links to one particular project by Rae Dawn Chong who is attempting to raise money for a TV show called Celebrant.  That clip above is about death and dying, love and life and synchronicity.

I’d love to see a show like this on TV.

And here’s Rae talking about the show:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-celebrant

When we moved from blogger to wordpress three years ago, we lost some readers. So I was delighted when I ran across a link to Jama Genie’s blog while I was going through some of my old notes. I went to her blog and left a comment about how great it was to find her again. Today, she dropped by for a visit and left this fascinating story about a trickster ghost.

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I’ve never understood the meaning of “trickster” either until I read this post. Thanks! That said, my perception of the Trickster has always been similar to the one you describe in connection with your father’s death. A few weeks ago, though, I had an encounter with the version of Trickster that isn’t so comforting… I had to go to an out-of-state funeral on a Saturday which required renting a car with unlimited mileage. What the heck, I said. I have to keep the car all weekend, might as well take advantage of those unlimited miles and make a road trip out of it.

My first stop was a 2-day visit with an 87-yr-old legally-blind friend I only knew online and through phone calls. I was to drive her to church Sunday morning, and she wanted to be there early, so I set my trusty travel alarm for the crack of dawn. As soon as I got out of bed, I turned it off and clearly remember placing it in a side pocket of my soft-side vanity case, which I then zippered shut. I don’t wear a watch and the legally-blind have no reason to keep regular clocks on the bedside table, so I opened the vanity case to look at the travel alarm, but it wasn’t there! Or anywhere else in the room! My friend’s response: “Mizz Fisher”, whom I would later learn was the previous tenant who’d lived in the apartment for 17 years before she died, but apparently had never left.

Weird things had happened while her son had been packing up her things. My friend felt cold spots in the kitchen. She’d find a cabinet door, that she couldn’t possibly reach without standing on a chair, wide open of a morning. Being blind, she naturally put certain things in certain places, but a special rosary went missing for several days until a sighted friend found it in a dish at the other end of the occasional table where my friend kept it. All Mizz Fisher’s doing, they decided. I suspect she was attracted to my travel alarm because it had a colorful dragon sticker on a silver background on the cover.

After church and brunch, I turned the room upside down again and emptied my luggage on the bed, and the clock was still missing. Then my friend and I left to visit a couple of area cemeteries and were gone several hours. On our return, I sat on the side of the bed farthest from my friend’s treadmill machine. Something shiny on the treadmill caught my eye. Yep, it was the travel clock, but sitting topside up, perfectly aligned with the edge of the rubber tread! Definitely placed there, not even close to where it would’ve landed had it slipped out of the vanity case or I’d dropped it without noticing.

I’m usually quite comfortable in residences with a “leftover” occupant, but the idea that an invisible entity was present that could remove an object from the inside pocket of a closed piece of luggage totally freaked me out, and that night I barely slept! At one point I heard a kitchen faucet handle turn and water hit the stainless steel sink. An hour or so later, it was the squeak of a cabinet door opening. Both times my friend was snoring away in a room across the hall. Trickster? Oh, yes! A playful trickster? Not MY definition of “playful”!

John Mack, right, with the Dalai Lama

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It’s rare that a mainstream magazine or newspaper tackles the subject of alien abductions without ridiculing the entire field of ufology and the people involved or, at the very least, without dripping sarcasm. But Ralph Blumenthal has accomplished this in a piece for Vanity Fair.

The piece begins in Rhode Island, where a group of abductees have gathered to share their experiences free of stigma and ridicule, and it ends with new information (at least to us) about Harvard psychiatrist John Mack.

 In the article, we  learned that John Mack had two unpublished manuscripts – one that he considered his “cri de Coeur against scientific materialism and ontological fascism,” and another about life after death. We also learned that after four years of negotiation, the film and TV rights to Mack’s story are going to MakeMagic Productions, which has partnered with Robert Redford’s Wildwood Enterprises. A major film is in development.

One the abductees Mack worked with, a man referred to as ‘Scott,’ recalled his last conversation with Mack in 2004. He was afraid about dying and this is what Mack told him in a reassuring manner. “You never know when it will be your time. We could all go at any time. I could walk out on the street and get hit by a car.”

A few weeks later, while in London, Mack was crossing a street in London when he was struck by a drunken driver and killed.

The article is here. The video link is courtesy of Daz.

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And Happy Mother’s Day to all moms out there!

Do yourself a favor. If you haven’t seen The Impossible, by all means do so! This film, starring Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor, may be one of the most emotionally powerful films I’ve seen in a long time, and it’s based on a true story. 

The premise is simple: a family – husband, wife, three sons – travel to Khao Lak, Thailand  for a family vacation.  Maria Bennet (Watts) is an English physician who no longer practices because she’s raising three sons. She and her  Scottish husband, Henry (McGregor) and their sons – Lucas, Tomas and Simon- stay at a resort in Khao Lak, Thailand over the Christmas holidays in 2004.

They arrive on Christmas Eve day and we get a sense of them as a family. Lucas is the rebellious older son who bullies Tomas, nearly 8, the middle brother. He’s interested in astronomy. Simon, the youngest, is a cutie, an innocent. Maria and Henry appear to have a good marriage, beset by uncertainties – he may be losing his job.

On the morning of December 26, a tsunami slams into the coast, decimating the resort, and sweeping away Maria and Lucas, the oldest son. At the moment the tsunami hits, Henry and the other two sons are in the resort swimming pool.

Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter  begins with a 2004 tsunami scene. But compared to The Impossible, Hereafter’s opening is like afternoon tea. As our daughter remarked while we were watching the movie, the opening of Hereafter is just for effect; in The Impossible, the tsunami and its aftermath are the story.

Without giving away too much, this story is about how human beings react and persevere in the midst of a natural catastrophe so devastating that nearly a quarter of a million people were killed. By focusing on one family, the emotional resonance is powerful, utterly genuine. Maria is severely injured, and she and Lucas end up in a makeshift Thai hospital, where the conditions are so gross, so unsanitary, that at certain points I writhed.

Maria keeps asking Lucas about the color of her severely injured leg.

“Red, “ he says. “Red. Why?”

“Red is good. Black is not good.”

Henry, meanwhile, has found his two youngest sons and sends them into the mountains with other refugees, so that he can stay behind on the coast and search for his wife and Lucas. This decision seemed like a plot flaw to me, but as Rob pointed out, maybe it actually happened, Henry only wanted his sons somewhere safe. In a situation like this, where a natural catastrophe has ripped apart normal, it’s difficult to know what decisions you might make. What’s immediately obvious about all the survivors are shell shocked, profoundly traumatized.  

There are moments in this film that show humanity at its worst – like when Henry asks a fellow survivor if he can use his cell phone to call his father-in-law and the man says the battery is low and he’s waiting for a call, so no. 

And there are moments when we see humanity at its best and most heroic. Henry and other survivors are sitting around a campfire somewhere, sharing their experiences about the loss of spouses, children, the sudden, unpredictable horror that slammed into their lives. Henry starts telling what he experienced and breaks down, sobbing, and one of the fellow survivors hands him his nearly depleted cell phone. “Make the call,” he says.

Naomi Watts was nominated for best actress for this film, and with good reason. In her scenes, I never had the sense that I was watching a movie. She’s totally genuine, a character in whom you vest your emotions as a mother, parent,  wife,  physician, human being. Through her and Lucas, we witness the chaos in the aftermath,  how the injured flooded rural hospitals unequipped for such massive devastation. Through her, a physician, you feel the horror of her situation, how the deck is stacked against her.

I was surprised at some of the comments about this movie. But the one that really struck me was how this movie showed an insensitivity to the massive loss of loss of native people. I disagree. By focusing on the emotional chaos and horror that a family of tourists experienced, we are led into the heart of the disaster itself and its wrenching, emotional  aftermath. In the end, the message of this film is clear: love pushes us into the unexplored, the unimagined, and can bring about miracles.

Noah and his new girlfriend,Brandy

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Last year, our golden retriever, who was just three then, started acting like a much older dog. He was winded after a few Frisbee runs, had trouble leaping onto the back seat of one of our cars, slept a lot, and then started losing hair from his tail and neck.

We changed his diet, gave him cod liver oil, olive oil, and concocted exotic drinks suitable for human consumption that we shared with him. Nothing worked. Then he developed an ear infection and we took him to our vet, a genius whose diagnoses are rarely wrong. He looked at Noah’s ears, then at his balding tail.

“Thyroid,” he said, and conducted a blood test.

Sure enough, the blood test revealed a low thyroid. Noah is now on the canine version of synthroid. A pill twice a day. In just three weeks, the difference in his energy is astounding. He runs faster, is more competitive at the dog park, chases away doggy thieves who sneak in to grab his ball. He also seems to have developed a crush on Brandy, a female mixed breed who jumps higher than he does to catch a ball.  That’s her in the photo above, looking up and watching a high ball that Rob threw her.

Noah, who was fixed when we got him, now humps Brandy  at every opportunity.  When she runs to chase a ball, he races alongside side her, trying to reach the ball first. People at the dog park who know him have commented about it.

Wow, what has gotten into Noah?

This is how he was two years ago with Cody!

Does he ever get worn out?

The thyroid gland controls how quickly the body uses energy, makes proteins, and controls how sensitive the body is to other hormones. Energetically, it’s centered in the fifth chakra – the throat area – communication.  I’ve noticed that since Noah has been on the thyroid meds, his barks tend to be louder, like explosive booms. Sometimes, he sounds like a hound at the  hunt.  

Golden retrievers are generally known as people friendly dogs who seek human company, seek out human touch and companionship, another form of communication. Noah has never been that kind of golden, probably because he was crated for the first nine months of his life. His previous owners intended to use him as a stud and gave him up when they ran into financial problems.

Yet, since he has been on the thyroid med, he is much less timid about approaching people. Just this afternoon, he went over to Jen, Brandy’s owner, and nudged her, asking for a pat on the head.  Of course, maybe he figures if he can get on her good side, Brandy will be more amenable to chasing him instead of that ball!

We took him back to the vet for a checkup and is thyroid level has gone from .5 to 7 in just four weeks. Normal, the vet says, falls around 4. His fur is growing back, lustrous and thick.

There’s no synchro in this story, no aliens, nothing conspiratorial. Noah has simply reminded me that our animal companions aren’t just ornaments that decorate our lives. They are beings whose inner, emotional lives are as rich – or richer than- our own. They have desires, needs, and longings we can’t fathom. 

Most people I know, for instance, think squirrels are cute or annoying or mischievous little devils. But if you stand in the middle of a dog park and shout, SQUIRREL, nearly every dog will stampede to where you’re standing, looking for that squirrel. They not only understand that word, they react to it.

For a dog, squirrel may represent what for us would be an adrenaline rush – skydiving, that first innocent kiss, winning a marathon, a tennis match, a game of chess. Or, squirrel to a dog may just be synonymous with the thrill of the chase, of running free beneath a vast blue sky.

Since we share our lives with Noah, we are energetically linked to him and vice versa.  So, symbolically, I’m wondering about the thyroid message.  Perhaps it’s saying that we should do more of what we enjoy, what thrills us, what makes us feel as if we are perpetually running free beneath that vast blue sky.

If Rob and I start howling at the moon, you’ll know we got the message.