Welcome to The Mystical Underground

UPDATE: Rob and I and Connie Cannon were interviewed on Whitley Strieber’s Dreamland about the unusual sighting her son had. We did a post on it here. The next link gives you the first 34 minutes of the interview. The rest of the hour is through subscription at Dreamland. The link to listen to it is here.

This little gizmo is a free iPhone app developed under a NASA program by Russell Targ at Stanford Research Institute. Targ, a physicist and a pioneer in the development of the laser, was also cofounder of the Stanford Research Institute’s investigation into psychic abilities in the 1970s and 1980s. ESP trainer helps in the development of psychic ability. From Targ’s website:

We have found that people are able to improve their ESP scores by using a machine just like this and get in touch with the part of themselves that is psychic. The player is presented with four colored squares. For each trial, one has been selected at random by the ESP Trainer. Your task is to choose the correct square. If you succeed, you will hear a chime, feel a vibration, and see a large color picture. Otherwise, the system lights up the correct square, and you proceed with the next trial. The score indicator at the top counts the number of correct choices. Words of encouragement appear as you achieve the scoring levels of 6, 8. 10, 12 or 14 hits. After 24 trials you may begin a new game.

The game offers multi-sensory feedback, reinforcement, and an opportunity to Pass, meeting all the requirements needed for learning this skill. ESP Trainer improves your ability to recognize your intuitive impressions, and it can bring you to a level of intuitive awareness beyond anything you’ve experienced before.

The purpose of the trainer is to allow you to become aware of what it feels like when you psychically choose the correct square. When you don’t have that special feeling, we encourage you to press the Pass button. (So this is not a “forced choice” test.)

The website notes that in a year-long NASA program with 145 people, many were able to significantly improve their scores. “Four of the subjects improved their scores at the hundred-to-one level or better. This approach has been used with surprising success on Wall Street.” If you continually score 12 or higher, then Targ wants to hear from you!

I downloaded it to my iPhone and Rob and I both gave it a whirl. He got 7 out of 24, I got 4 out of 24 🙁 on the first try. On subsequent attempts, I took more time. I discovered that when I held my fingers up close to the iPhone screen, but without touching it, I could sometimes sense which color held a photo, and did better than I had when I just quickly tapped away.

It’s a neat little app, something you can whip out while you’re waiting in line somewhere or just need a break from whatever you’re doing. I plan to practice until I can get 12 out of 24 – or better!

Zimmerman, who killed Treyvon Martin, a 17-year-old black kid wearing a hoodie, has been acquitted. The special prosecutor, Angela Corey, is a Republican appointed by Florida’s corrupt Republican governor, and is on TV right now, defending the tactics that her team of prosecutors took in this case.

It’s pathetic. This verdict is pathetic. But in a state that the NRA rules, where i in 17 individuals carry a weapon,  where a neighborhood volunteer like Zimmerman was allowed to carry a concealed weapon, is a travesty. The idea that race had nothing to do with this is absurd. It has everything to do with it. Sanford is a good ole boy town, deep south, as deeply south as you can get.

But perhaps, as with OJ Simpson, Zimmerman will become embroiled in something similar 13 years up the road, to the day. Or not. One way or another, the universe will balance it all out.

UPDATE: Rob and I and Connie Cannon were interviewed on Whitley Strieber’s Dreamland about the unusual sighting her son had. The link to listen to it is here.

From The New Yorker

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Recently, someone asked me why I don’t go to church. It was something of a synchro for me since I had been thinking about how when I was really young, church was not only mandatory but included a catechism class taught by Catholic nuns.

In one of these catechism classes (I think I was 12) the nun was talking about heaven and death. “When you die,” she said, “you go to one of four places: heaven, purgatory, hell, or limbo. The last was the place you went if you hadn’t been baptized to clear your soul of original sin – you know, Adam’s fooling around with Eve in the garden and grabbing that apple off the tree.

I remember thinking, Huh? That’s wrong. What happens is what we believe happens. This is all a lie. After that realization, I found a reason to be sick or extremely fatigued on  Sundays, and my younger sister bore the brunt of church and catechism.  I still had to attend occasionally, but by the time I was 16 I mustered the courage to tell my dad that I just couldn’t do church anymore, that I didn’t believe a word of it.

I thought he was going to be angry, but instead he started laughing. “Fantastic. Now I don’t have to go to church anymore.”

Now, many decades later, I see organized religion as a real detriment to our evolution as spiritual and creative beings.

In North Carolina.

In Texas.

In North Dakota.

Other states have initiated  the same types of restrictions on women’s health. Why? What is it about women’s health that drives these aging white men nuts? Well, just a simple fact: these women can conceive, give birth, have children – their children –and oh my god, your child’s life begins at conception. But never mind that once this revered child is born, it’s on its own. The Repubs  don’t want to care for this child, have public education for this child, or even acknowledge this child if he or she isn’t white. In fact, they hope to restrict women’s access to birth control.

If, in today’s Republican party, you are not white and male, then, oh sorry, you don’t count. Never mind that most of American voters are female. Never mind that Hispanics are the fastest-growing minority in this country. The Repubs are playing to some extreme, shrinking base  and if they continue on this path, they won’t qualify as a national party.

But their base is powerful. I saw it today when I went to my usual beauty salon and overheard the woman who colors and cuts my hair talking about the George Zimmerman trial.

If Treyvon Martin had been white, you can bet we wouldn’t be having this trial or discussion,”  she said.

I wanted to call her on it, wanted desperately to say, Hey, hon, guess what? Racism is alive and well in South Florida, and you are its face, its reality, its heart. But I didn’t. I wasn’t up to it. But you know what? I think it’s time for me to find a new hair stylist, like a gay guy who gets it. Or a gay woman who is raising kids with her partner. Or even a straight man or woman who understands that we, as a human collective, are  at a cross road, and that what worked for us as a people and as a country in earlier decades is no longer relevant.

If we look at these events as dreams, as our blogging friend Adelita Chirino does,  what’s the message? Are we entering the realm of Margaret Atwood’s visonary novel The Handmaid’s Tale? Or  are these events necessary steps toward some greater and more humane paradigm? Right now, in the thick of it, the answer isn’t clear.

In Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, Nobel laureate Kerry Mullis writes movingly of how he received a letter in the mail that would determine his future. If memory serves, I believe it concerned whether or not he’d been admitted to the college/graduate school of his choice. He stood there, the letter in his hand, and realized that until he opened it, until he actually read it, the content was like Schrodinger’s cat, the classic quantum physics thought experiment. The cat is trapped in the box. Is it alive or dead? You don’t know until you open the box.

Until you open the box – or the letter – there is only a wave of probability. But once you open whatever it is, that wave crashes into physical reality as a particle, as the reality. I feel like that’s where we are now as a human collective: we’re Kerry Mullis, holding that letter in our hands. We’re Erwin Schrodinger, contemplating the box that holds the trapped cat. What’s it going to be? Business as usual? A new paradigm? Or something altogether new and different?

                                                                      Emerson

  The other day, I got a call from our friend Jeri Young, whose good year blimp synchro we posted here.  She had just experienced another synchro and was eager to tell me about it.

 Her husband, Steve, had called her and suggested they meet at Panera Bread for lunch. Panera is a fast-food chain that serves terrific fresh soups, salads and sandwiches, for a reasonable price.  So they put in their order, and grabbed a table. While they were eating, Jeri noticed a saying on the wall behind Steve. It was a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson that read: Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

 At about the same moment, Steve was reading the same quote on a wall behind Jeri and called her attention to it. She glanced around, laughed, and told him to look around. “I was just reading that!”

 After they got home, Jeri picked up the mail. There was a graduation announcement from Steve’s half-sister, who is just graduating from high school. When she opened it, she found a photo of the graduating class and behind them, on the wall, was the class motto. Yes, you guessed it: the same quote by Emerson.

 We’ve been running across these types of synchronicities more frequently – where a photo is involved, almost like evidence, the giant exclamation point at the end of the cluster! Rob has affectionately called them, photo-synchros.  They sort of make you feel like what our friend Cassie Hague captured in this photo. Like, OMG!

A bunch of synchros unfolded Tuesday morning, not all good, but some very strange. The day started when I read an article on the front page of the South Florida Sun Sentinel about how the police have started using a new tool called ‘SmartWater CSI’ to nab thieves. They left a bait car unlocked with a package visible. When a thief showed up and opened the door, he touched the package and his hand was sprayed with a small amount of the chemical-laced water that leaves a stain visible only under ultra-violet light. The article included photos from a video taken when the thief opened the door.

I didn’t have time to ponder how practical this watery crime-busting tool would be, because I was in a hurry to meet a friend for an off-road bike ride. I went outside and – synchronicity – I found that MY car had been burglarized. I’d forgotten to lock it last night and someone had opened the glove box and the center console, rummaged around, and made off with the garage door opener. I couldn’t help wondering how ‘SmartWater CSI’ would help me find the person who stole the opener. Not at all that I could see.

I left our 111-pound dog Noah to watch the house, and headed out to the trail for an abbreviated ride. Trish and I had a radio show coming up  mid-morning, so one lap through the woods would be all.

I rushed home and arrived half an hour ahead of time. The radio show was scheduled with Martin Willis, host of PodcastUFO and we would talk about our book, Aliens in the Backyard. We’d already had a Mercury retrograde experience with Martin. We’d thought the interview was scheduled for Monday at 1 p.m., but apparently it was a misunderstanding. When Martin didn’t call, we went about our business. I sent him an e-mail, and he apologized for the confusion and set up the interview for the following morning.

So 10 a.m. came around and again no Martin. I checked e-mail and saw a message from him labeled CANCELLATION. Now here is where it gets a bit strange. This was the message he left.

Dear Rob & Trish,

I listened to an interview this morning with you.  I have decided that I do not want to go in the direction that you two go in. I am very sorry to have wasted all your time.  Martin

Of course, we found that puzzling. What direction are we going that he doesn’t like? we wondered. We thought maybe he’s someone who thinks the aliens are here to save us from ourselves, good guys ready to help whenever we recognize they’re here and waiting.  Aliens in the Backyard takes a more cautious approach that suggests  some aliens might be helpful, others neutral, and still others committed to enslaving or eliminating us. A complicated situation, at best.

I wrote Martin back and asked him to explain what he meant. It gets stranger. Here is what he said:

I feel bad, but I am trying to stay away from the alien thing now. I am getting a lot of flack and losing people every time I go there.  Martin

Um, Martin, hello, your podcast is about UFOs. How do you separate aliens from that topic? I wrote back something to that affect and suggested that maybe he should’ve taken note of the title of our book, if not read it. I haven’t heard any more from him.

I noticed that Martin’s website features old stories of UFO sightings from long ago. Sort of a historical tribute to ufology. One about a Maury Island sighting caught my attention, since we’d just written a post about a UFO sighting in Maury county, Tennessee. We also found out that Martin just started his PodcastUFO in May and apparently is still working out the kinks, so to speak. Apparently, he needs to add a sign on his site saying: NO ALIENS ALLOWED.

Ah, Mercury retrograde meets the aliens.

Addendum: Since the interview was cancelled, we got the garage door people out to put in a new code on our opener. Our next door neighbors were also hit and they lost two garage door openers. They called the cops and sent them our way for more Mercury retrograde nonsense…but I won’t go into that.

Mercury turns direct on July 20.

Picasso’s “Girl in the Mirror”

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A doppelganger could be that image of the girl in the mirror. It’s usually defined as a ghostly double of a living person. The idea is found in mythology, folklore,  throughout various cultures, and has been used in popular culture in movies, novels,  and TV shows. Many notable individuals have seen them – the 16^th century poet John Donne,  the 18^th century Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, another 18th century poet, Abraham Lincoln, the 16^th president of the United States, Queen Elizabeth I, and the French novelist and short story writer, Guy de Maupassant.

 It’s interesting that Donne, Goethe, and Shelley were all poets. It suggests that their imaginations were well-developed and that perhaps they were deeply attuned to other realms and dimensions. Donne was in Paris when he had his doppelganger experience – but it was of his wife, who appeared holding a baby. At about this same time, she was giving birth to a stillborn daughter. Shelley’s encounter happened in Italy, where his phantom self pointed at the Mediterranean Sea. Not long afterward, Shelley drowned in a sailing accident in the Mediterranean. He was just 29.

The encounters  both Donne and Shelley experienced were certainly precognitive – the foretelling of a future event. For both of these men, that future event spelled tragedy. For Goethe, the experience was simply deeply puzzling. It happened while he was riding on the  road to Drusenheim, a city in northeast France.  Riding toward him was his exact double, who wore a gray suit trimmed in gold. Eight years later, Goethe was traveling on the same road, but in the opposite direction. He realized he was wearing the same gray suit trimmed in gold that he had seen on his double eight years earlier. So even Goethe’s encounter  was precognitive. Can a doppelganger, then, be some sort of holographic projection from the future self? Perhaps.

Neurophysiologist Karl Pribram, along with physicist David Bohm, was one of the early pioneers of the theory that we live in a holographic universe. Or, as Michael Talbott so aptly expressed it in his brilliant book The Holographic Universe, “…there is evidence to suggest that our world and everything in it – from snowflakes to maple trees to falling stars and spinning electrons – are also only ghostly images, projections from a level of reality so beyond our own it is literally beyond both space and time.”

 And if that’s the case, if we’re living in a holographic universe, then synchronicity may be one of our most direct experiences with this deeper reality. We can reach this place “beyond time and space” in dreams, during meditation, intense physical activity/competition,  heightened creative periods, during NDEs, and through other kinds of altered states. But synchronicity may be the most easily accessible conscious experience we have of this deeper reality. If so, it behooves us to pay attention.

 In an interview in 1979 in Psychology Today, Pribram  noted that it isn’t that the world of appearances is wrong. “…it isn’t that there aren’t objects  out there, at one level of reality. It’s that if you penetrate through and look at the universe with a holographic system, you arrive at a different view, a different reality. And that other reality can explain things that have hitherto remained inexplicable scientifically: paranormal phenomena, synchronicities, the apparently meaningful coincidence of events.”

Doppelgangers – and synchronicities – may also be projections from probable realities. In the early 1960s, author and mystic Jane Roberts (The Seth Material) and her husband, Robert Butts, began experimenting with a Ouija board as part of Jane’s research into ESP. It quickly became apparent to them that the material/information that came from the Ouija entity – Seth- was profound. Not long afterward, they stopped using the Ouija board and Jane began channeling Seth and Rob started transcribing these sessions. At some point between then and when they began writing the first book- The Seth Material – Jane and Rob took a break one night to go dancing.

During that evening, Jane suddenly spotted a dancing couple who looked so similar to herself and Rob that she drew her husband’s attention to the couple.  They were heavier than either Jane or Rob, didn’t look happy, had a kind of grimness about them that disturbed her. She later realized the man and woman were probable versions of herself  and Rob, the version they might have become if they  hadn’t pursued the unknown path that led them to Seth.

What else lies in this deeper reality? I suspect there are gems we haven’t discovered, truths we haven’t uncovered,  and places we haven’t even imagined. Yet.

 This evening, we re-connected with Jeri and Steve, a couple we knew when our kids were young. They lived in our former neighborhood and Megan and their oldest son, Kevin, used to play together. They thought we had moved to Asheville, and didn’t realize that for the last 17 years, Jeri has been in our area a couple of times a week to buy hay and feed for the three horses she and Steve now own.

Their kids, like Megan, are adults now, and they are dealing with aging parents. There are some eerie parallels here. Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s have figured prominently into their parents’ lives, just as they did in the lives of my parents. Steve’s mother and Jeri’s father passed away recently and whenever these kinds of big transitions happen in our lives, synchronicity is in there somewhere. And that’s how it was for them.

Steve’s mother, Jeri, and her kids always had this thing about the Good Year blimp. They would see it, exclaimed  about how cool it was, talked about riding on it. The blimp was one of those connections in the family. Like an inside joke.

The Good Year blimp is a staple in the South Florida skies. It hums along the coast and sometimes drifts inland over the Everglades. Anyone who has lived here for five seconds, has seen it. You invariably wonder how something this huge is airborne, think of the Hindenburg, and wonder how you can hop on board for a ride.

When Steve’s mother was in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s,  in an assisted living facility, they all took turns visiting her.  Steve and Jeri left their home one morning with their daughter, Nicki, to drive her to the facility for a visit with her grandmother.  Jeri noticed that the Good Year blimp seemed to be  following them. “It followed us from our neighborhood, to a Chinese restaurant, and then to the facility.”

The blimp was still behind them when they dropped Nicki at the facility, and then Jeri and Steve  headed out to run some errands. The blimp was still following them. At some point in this errand run,  Jeri got a call from the facility that Steve’s mother had just died. Jeri got off the phone. “We need to turn around,” she said. “Your mom has just passed on.”

As Steve made a quick U-turn, so did the blimp. And that was when Jeri clearly saw the message on the other side of the huge dirigible: www.alzheimersassociation.com,  the very disease Steve’s mother had. “And because the blimp was such a big deal for all of us, I knew, I just knew, it was Steve’s mother saying good-bye.”

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Synchros like this one are so powerful they leave an indelible impression. I wonder at the orchestration of all it. Are there invisible gnomes who move  pieces around on some  cosmic chessboard? How’s this kind of stuff happen, anyway?

Jeri says the blimp followed them – but perhaps it was simply following the road they were on.  Even so, why did it make that U-turn at the precise moment they did, just after they’d heard Steve’s mother had passed on, enabling Jeri to see the message on the other side? Alzheimer’s.  It could just as easily have read breast cancer or diabetes or, for that matter, google. But it didn’t read any of those things.

Our loved ones who have passed on use anything they can to communicate with us.

 Years ago, Reader’s Digest published a book called Mysteries of the Unexplained.  It’s one of the best collections of stories and anecdotes about all the stuff that interests me. I page through it from time to time and usually find some small treasure that I haven’t read before.  The story about this dollar bill is one such story.

The dollar bill pictured above was issued in Dallas just two weeks before John F. Kennedy was assassinated in that city, thus its name. Dallas was and is the location of the 11^th of the 12 Federal Reserve Bank districts. The bill has the letter K to the left of Washington’s image,  which is the 11^th letter of the alphabet.

In addition, you’ll see the #11 in each corner of the bill.  The serial number K23456789A begins with a K and ends with an A – Kennedy Assassination.

Eleven also stands for November, the 11^th month of the year, two 11s equal 22, the date he was killed, and the series number is 1963, the year of the assassination.

What are the odds? It’s like the DaVinci Code of dollar bills.