Welcome to The Mystical Underground

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.

This woman’s encounter/sighting was suppressed for a long time, then was included in a documentary in the 1960s. Fascinating.

With the popularity of The Hunger Games – books and movies – I started hearing the word dystopia more often. Dictionary.com defines the word as “a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, depression, disease, and overcrowding.” Its antonym, of course, is utopia.

The Hunger Games  wasn’t the first dystopian novel. Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and 1984 by George Orwell are probably two of the most famous. I’ve always had a fascination with dystopian novels, probably because they illustrate the worst WHAT IF  scenario – what happens when a world, civilization, or society  goes to extremes to control its people. These novels expose the dark underbelly of humanity.

Since the 18^th century, there have been numerous dystopian novels. Here’s a partial list of the better known novels:

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

The Time Machine by HG. Wells (1895)

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

The Trial by Franz Kafka

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis

Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Minority Report by Philip K. Dick

Anthem by Ayn Rand

Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Logan’s Run by William  F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson

This Perfect Day by Ira Levin

Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy

 The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula LeGuin

The Running Man by Stephen King

The Children of Men by P.D. James

The Giver by Lois Lowry

The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Special by Scott Westerfield

The Passage by Justin Cronin

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

The Road by Cormanc McCarthy

The Day After Tomorrow (based on Whitley Strieber’s book the Coming Global Superstorm)

Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut

A number of these titles were also made into movies. Sometimes, the movies were better than the novels. They breathed life and color and texture into the dystopian world.

Today, I came across a fascinating website, Dystopia Tracker, that keeps track of how many of the concepts in dystopian novels, movies, TV shows, and games have become a reality. They even have categories for these concepts: State & Control, Body & Mind, Relationships & Communication, Work & Business, Leisure & Entertainment,  Cities & Environment, and War & Geopolitics.

There are excerpts from the various novels and movies.  Beneath a startling number of them, you see the number of realizations that visitors have noted.  Under the quote for Farenheit 451, for example, there are 2 realizations.

When you click it, you’re taken to a page that actually shows 3 realizations. The third one is rather curious: a Kindle user claims that you don’t really own your ebooks, that Amazon wiped out his entire Kindle library without explanation. I supposed that would be a form of book burning!

So when I was poking around on the site, I wondered what I have always wondered: do storytellers tap into a future that’s fixed? Or are they tapping into a quantum field of possibilities?  If the future is NOT set in stone, if we create it collectively, moment to moment, then do these dystopian stories help us to avoid the future they depict?

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Happy Summer Solstice! May we collectively create a more humane and loving world.

The video speaks for itself.

You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter by Dr. Joe Dispenza, was recommended to us by Nancy Pickard and it may be the most important book I’ve read in years.

In April 1986, Joe Dispenza was a 23-year-old athlete and chiropractor, competing in a Palm Springs triathlon. He had just finished the swimming segment and was in the biking portion of the race when a red four-wheel drive Bronco going 55 mph slammed into his bike from behind. He was catapulted into the air and landed on his backside. The Bronco kept coming toward him and in order to avoid being run over, Dispenza grabbed the bumper and was dragged down the road before the elderly driver of the Bronco realized what had happened.

The diagnosis wasn’t good. He had broken six vertebrae and a number of shattered bone fragments went back toward his spinal cord. The orthopedic surgeon told him that in order to contain the bone fragments he needed surgery to implant a Harrington rod. This would entail cutting out the back parts of the vertebrae from two to three segments above and below the fractures and clamping two 12-inch stainless steel rods along both sides of his spinal column. If he didn’t have the surgery, paralysis seemed certain. Three other orthopedic surgeons concurred with the first surgeon.

But Dispenza decided against the surgery. “I believe that there’s an intelligence, an invisible consciousness, within each of us that’s the giver of life. It supports, maintains, protects, and heals us every moment.” He was taken by ambulance to the home of a friend and began his journey toward healing. For two hours twice a day, “I went within and began creating a picture of my intended result: a totally healed spine.”  

His description of this process is riveting. He admits that in the beginning, he didn’t really know what he was doing, but now he does. “I was actually starting to think about all these future potentials that existed in the quantum field, and then I was emotionally embracing each of them. And as I selected that intentional future and married it with the elevated emotion of what it would be like to be there in that future, in the present moment my body began to believe it was actually in that future experience. “ And his spine began to heal.

Dispenza said that what he was learning during this process is one of the main principles of quantum physics: that mind and matter aren’t separate, “that our conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings are the very blueprints that control our destiny. The persistence, conviction, and focus to manifest any potential future lies within the human mind and within the mind of the infinite potentials in the quantum  field. Both of these minds must work together in order to bring about any future reality that potentially already exists.”

Nine and a half weeks after the accident, Dispenza  was able to walk again. And his true journey began.

The book’s content has many parallels to the Seth material and to Abraham/Hicks philosophy that we all create our own realities through our thoughts, beliefs, and emotions. But You Are the Placebo breaks things down in a way that demysitifies the process of manifestation. He includes fascinating stories about the placebo effect in the brain and the body, and illustrates how thoughts change both body and brain.

In one chapter, he dissects the nature of beliefs, illustrates how they originate, and how we’re suggestible only to what we consciously or unconsciously believe to be true.  And what we believe may limit us in some way, keep us from getting well, or make us utterly miserable!

In order to change a belief, says Dispenza, you have to begin by accepting that it’s possible. Then you have to alter your energy with heightened emotion and then allow your biology to reorganize itself. “Once the amplitude or energy of that decision becomes greater than the hardwired programs in your brain and the emotional addiction in your body, then you are greater than your past, your body will respond to a new mind, and you can effect real change.”

Included in the book are three stories of personal transformation – three different women of various ages – and their journey toward healing and wholeness. The focus in part 2 is on meditation, specifically on how to change beliefs and perceptions through meditation.

Dispenza’s afterword is entitled Becoming Supernatural. It’s stunning. Here’s a taste of it:

“Imagine a world inhabited by billions of people…living as one, where everyone is embracing similar uplifting thoughts connected to unlimited possibility, and these thoughts allow people to make more inspired choices, demonstrate more altruistic behaviors, and create more enlightening experiences.  People would then no longer be living by survival-based emotions we’re so familiar with now: feeling more like matter than energy, separate from possibility. Instead, they’d be living by more expanded, selfless, heartfelt emotions – feeling more like energy than matter, connected to something greater.  If we could do this, then en entirely different world would emerge, and we would be living by a new credo based on the open heart.”

 We’ve talked before about how the Internet facilitates synchronicity and this certainly was the case with an email we received recently.

Joanne emailed us through the synchro secrets website with a question about a sighting that Jenean – gypsy woman had in the late 1960s, that we wrote about in Aliens in the Backyard.  She said she’d done a search for newspaper articles about the sighting, which took place on a bus in Louisiana, and couldn’t find anything on the Internet. She was curious about how other people on the bus had reacted.

So I wrote Jenean and asked her if the story had received coverage in the local press at the time. She replied that it had. She and her son clearly remembered that the media had written it off as a “cloud” from a nearby industrial plant in Sterlington. Jenean noted that she had Google Joanne’s name and sent the link.

I was surprised to learn that Joanne lived in Clarksburg, West Virginia,   just a few miles from our friend, Millie Gemondo. In a subsequent email, I mentioned it Joanne. She replied that her friend had graduated with Kim Gemondo from Shinston High School in 1970, but her friend didn’t know if Kim was related to Millie. She was excited, though, that Millie was a psychic.

I knew Millie had graduated from that same high school and recalled that she’d once told me that she was probably related to any Gemondo in her area. So this afternoon I called her and told her the story and asked if she was related to a Kim Gemondo. She laughed. “Sure am. He’s my nephew, my brother’s son. He’s the editor of the local newspaper.”

So what are the odds on something like this? Jenean doesn’t know Millie or Joanne.  She simply was curious about Joanne and Googled her, something I didn’t do. I think this is an example of Indra’s net, where we are all connected at some level. That conscious, visual connection used to be six degrees. Now it’s much less. Will this one lead somewhere? Who knows? But it is certainly one of those oddball synchros.

Here’s a clip from a new film about synchronicity by Katy Walker. In The Synchronicity Highway, we wrote about an encounter she had years ago in Germany. We’ve posted several of her synchros on the blog, too. There’s a 24 minute clip on her website.  We look forward to seeing the full movie when it’s released!

As I drove to the Moksha Yoga Studio on a recent morning, I was thinking about writing a blog post about a somewhat obscure topic called ‘bodhichitta,’ which was to be the theme of my meditation class at the studio. I was hedging a bit because there wasn’t any obvious synchronicity related to the subject. Then, on NPR, a story came on about an artist who was working with Moksha Art Collective.

What were the chances that as I headed to one Moksha, another one would be mentioned on the radio. (Moksha is a Sanskrit term that means enlightenment and liberation.) So that little synchro impelled me ahead to address this other Sanskrit term, the topic of the post.

So what is bodhichitta?

The word, pronounced BODI-CHITTA, translates to ‘awakened heart,’ but what does that mean? It’s hard to define precisely, but essentially it’s a meditation practice that aims at overcoming fears, suspicions, aggression and defensive posturing. By practicing bodhichitta, you become exposed and vulnerable. But you also become a spiritual warrior, one who aims to change the world through inner transformation.

So what do you do to become a spiritual warrior?

You remove your mask, drop your shield, pull down the protective walls made of opinions, prejudices, barriers built on a fear of being hurt. You face the world with an open heart. It’s not a cozy, comfortable experience, but one with high potential.

“These walls are further fortified by emotions of all kinds: anger, craving, indifference, jealousy and envy, arrogance and pride,” writes Pema Chodron, author of Bodhichitta: The Excellence of Awakened Heart. “But fortunately for us, the soft spot—our innate ability to love and to care about things—is like a crack in these walls we erect. It’s a natural opening in the barriers we create when we’re afraid. With practice we can learn to find this opening. We can learn to seize that vulnerable moment—love, gratitude, loneliness, embarrassment, inadequacy—to awaken bodhichitta.”

According to Chodron, we all have the possibility of pursuing bodhichitta. Even the toughest, meanest person on Earth has a soft spot, a feeling of tenderness and open-heartedness toward something – though it might be a double cheeseburger. In essence, an open heart is considered the most important tool for creating a better world, and overcoming the common theme that what’s wrong with the world is the ‘other guy’s fault.’

But what if we take personal responsibility and change ourselves? As more and more people practice mindfulness and focus on the meaning of an open or an awakened heart, on compassion, we move toward an enlightened society, one where cooperation is more valued than aggression or defensive posturing.

Numerous scientific studies have shown the value of meditation, how it can help you relax and become more in control of your life, and improve your health and well being. Now I would like to see a study showing that meditation can change the world.

Oh, and how did my meditation go? Did we change the world? Nope. On that day, for whatever reason, no one showed up for class. Maybe that was one of those trickster synchronicities. You think people are ready to change the world by opening their hearts? Well, think again. Or, maybe, You think you can teach bodhichitta? You better open up your own heart first.

Maybe so. But I will try again, and maybe when the teacher is ready, the students will show up.

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Happy Friday the 13th! May good luck and synchronicity be yours!

the Amazon jungle

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For years, the established procedure for an unpublished writer was fairly straightforward: find a publisher who looks at unsolicited manuscripts or find an agent.

Ordinary People by Judith Guest was an unsolicited manuscript and was published to great reviews, fantastic sales, and was made into a movie. But that outcome was rare. Today, I don’t think there’s a traditional publishing house anywhere that takes unsolicited manuscripts. Everything must go through a literary agent.

In the past,you queried agents until you found one that asked to see your manuscript,  and if the agent liked it, then the submission process began. I found my first agent, Diane Cleaver, through a referral from another aspiring writer who had met her at a writers’ conference. She had recently left Simon & Schuster, where she’d been an editor, and was looking for clients. The first five novels I wrote didn’t sell. My sixth novel, In Shadow, sold on its 24^th submission to Chris Cox at Ballantine Books.

Today, there aren’t 24 publishers left in New York. There are five conglomerates with multiple imprints.

Part of the former established procedure when a book was published was to schedule publicity. Books by authors paid huge advances (Stephen King, for instance) were promoted and publicized. Books by midlist authors got far less – a few bookstore signings.

It was a fine idea when there were multiples chain bookstores and many independent stores.  Now, there is one large chain left – Barnes & Noble, with Books a Million trailing behind it in second place. Borders is defunct. Little Professor is history. Walden Books is long gone. Brick & mortar chain bookstores may eventually go the way of the dodo bird, just as brick and mortar record stores and video stores have. 

There are several stellar independent bookstores that will still be standing when the dust settles: Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, and The Tattered Cover in Denver, Colorado. But chains? It doesn’t look good.  In fact, the other day a writer emailed me about an article he’d read that Barnes & Noble might close its doors in early 2015.

The other part of the established procedure was to attend writers’ conferences, my favorite part. You networked, made friends with other writers, traded publishing stories, and spoke to a group of attendees about your book, your work. You signed and sold books. This part of the established procedure still exists.

When the Internet came into being for the general populace, the landscape for writers began to shift.  When Google and Amazon were born, when ebooks became a viable venue and not just a passing fad, when the iPhone was born in 2007, when social media exploded, the landscape changed dramatically. Suddenly, you didn’t need an agent to get published. You didn’t even need a publisher.

If you wanted to write, you wrote and published the book yourself through any number of venues that have cropped up in recent years. One of the largest of these venues is smashwords. You still had to market the book, of course, but it didn’t entail sitting in a bookstore for a signing and hoping that people showed up.

Amazon, the behemoth, may prove to be the nemesis for traditional publishing, but it’s an absolute treasure for writers, although there are plenty of writer who disagree. Here’s why I think Amazon is the game changer in publishing:

In traditional publishing, where the books go to an actual physical bookstore, the publisher sets the price of the book. From that price, the author receives between 8-15 percent of the cover price. For a paperback selling for $6.99, the author receives about 56 cents per book. For a hard cover selling for $25, the author receives $3.75 a book. Then there are agent fees – usually 15 percent, taken out of the author’s money. For that $6.99 paperback, that means the author is actually receiving about 47 cents a book. Not bad if you sell 100,000 copies and not bad IF the publisher is honest about their accounting procedures.

Now, let’s say the publisher publishes your book as an ebook and overprices it at $12. From that, you receive 25 % of the cover price – $3. And then your agent takes 15% of that, leaving you with $2.55 Except, oh wait. If you’re being paid on the net price, it means that the publisher first deducts the 30 percent they pay to Amazon, so that leaves $8.40  from which you’re paid your 25% – $2.10. From that, your agent deducts 15%, leaving you, the writer, with about $1.75.

Scratching your head yet? Wondering where the rest of that money goes?

Now, let’s say that in this changing paradigm for writers, you’re fortunate enough to connect with a visionary company that is signing up authors with extensive backlists. These authors have gotten their book rights reverted to them. And this company, Crossroad Press,  brings these books back as ebooks and audio books, at no cost to the author. They also publish original books in trade, hardcover, ebooks and audio.

They do the covers, scanning, formatting and uploading to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple, Kobo, for free. They price the books reasonably – $4.99. Let’s call it $5 for math purposes. And yes, they pay Amazon and the other online stores their 30%,  – so we skim $1.50 off that $ immediately. BUT – and it’s a huge BUT – they pay the authors 80% of the money they receive.

So from the $3.50 Crossroad receives after Amazon’s cut, the author receives $2.80 for each ebook sold. And there’s no agent cut involved because the contracts for many of these backlist titles were negotiated in the days before ebooks. For new, original books, there aren’t any agents fees because you’re dealing directly with the publisher.

In the changing paradigms for writers, the Internet, ebooks, and social media are the locomotives of change.

Not surprisingly, traditional publishing companies have clashed with Amazon. Publishers want to set their own prices for ebooks, balk at the steep discounts Amazon offers, and Amazon wants a bigger cut of the sales. This whole issue has already gone to the U.S. justice department after the five main publishers were accused of fixing prices on books in collusion with Apple.

But now, Hatchette Books and Amazon are butting heads and Amazon has retaliated by not offering pre-orders for books published by this company. Bestseller lists are compiled from pre-orders, so this means that Hatchette sells fewer books. Bestselling authors are outraged.

But the bottom line here is that the traditional publishing model is flawed and Amazon has exposed that flaw.  

Amazon sells 41 percent of all new books in the U.S., making it the largest single book retailer in the country. Arguments are made about how books are “culture” – as opposed to business products – and do we really want a business selling culture?  Please. It’s a specious argument.  The publishing industry in the U.S. is about profit. It’s a business, just like Amazon.  To a publisher, an author is only as good as the sales of his or her last book.  How is that about “culture?”

Other concerns I’ve heard: what will happen to “culture” when Amazon controls 80 percent of the book market?  What will happen, I suspect, is what usually happens – some start-up company will see a niche that can be filled and will come up with something new that will grow and flourish. Competition will still be the name of the game.

For writers, there’s now greater creative freedom. No one is telling you what you may or may not write. What you produce is your vision, no one else’s. You can let your muse run wild! How is that a terrible thing?