Welcome to The Mystical Underground

Computers. Hacking. Big corporation. These three phrases relate to the recent hacking of Sony Picturdes, presumably because Sony was going to release The Interview, a comedy with Seth Rogan and James Franco about the assassination of Kim Jong-un.

The hacking was apparently huge and compromised Sony. Because the hackers threatened to target theaters that showed the film, chains started cancelling the showing of the film. We were essentially being held hostage, through censorship, by a little snit of a dictator in a very isolated country.

An outcry ensued and theaters and Sony ultimately relented and allow us to watch this movie in various online formats for $5.99. The movie also opened at selected theaters around the country. Not at a lot of theaters, but at enough so the film will probablyi be huge. So this evening, after a lot of hassle with the computer and online viewing, Rob, Megan and I watched The Interview.

With any Seth Rogan movie, you have to be prepared to be grossed out.  He breaks all the rules about what the consensus moviegoers want to see and gives you his version of a worldview about life in North Korea. James Franco, as the TV host who lands an interview with Kim Jong-un, is terrific.

He was the protagonist in 127 Hours,  a drama based on a true story. I found that movie so uncomfortable that at one moment I turned it off to watch the news. It was nominated for three Golden Globes and a bunch of other awards,  and thrust Franco into the America lexicon of I know this guy.

 In this movie, Franco really steals the show from Rogan. At one point he does an imitation of Smeagol from Lord of the Rings that is so spot on the three of us were in stitches. The Interview is political satire at its best, gross and irreverent and yeah, I understand why Kim Jong-un might be offended by it. It’s as if Mark Twain intervened.

But hey, Kim dude. You’re a despot, your people are apparently starving, and in this movie, karma is not your friend.

Kudos to Sony for changing course. A foreign despot should never be able to censor what we watch or read. What I took away from this movie was a sense of the absurd: that some silly little guy half a world away could intimidate a huge corporation to pull a film.

When we live from a fear-based reality- we’re going to bomb or attack any theater that shows this film – then we become the terrorists, the censors, the silly nuts who perpetuate their agenda.

For six bucks, you can rent the film.  Let North Korea know that you will not be censored!

It’s worth it. And really, even though a lot of the laughs are gross, there’s something to be said for this sort of comedy to be made – and then censored!

Shamanism is considered the first religion going back tens of thousands of years, and surprisingly there’s a connection with Christmas.

First some background. Ancient peoples in various parts of the world couldn’t contact one another in the ordinary way that we think of as communication. In other words, no Internet, no telephones, no mail, no telegraph. Yet, peoples around the globe conducted rituals that were very similar. They connected with power animals and spirit beings in similar ways through trance states, usually involving drumming. And they all journeyed to a Lower World, a Middle World and a Higher World.

How did they figure that out and come to the same conclusions? Possibly, through shamanism, itself. They were all interconnected at a deeper level of awareness existing beyond the everyday world, the realm of the shamanic journey.

One way that shamans traveled to the Higher World or the Lower World was by climbing or descending the World Tree or World Post. According to Michael Harner, author of Cave and Cosmos: Shamanic Encounters with Another Reality the shamans of Siberia envisioned the North Star or Polar Star at the top of the pole or pillar. Supposedly, that tradition is the source of the term, North Pole. The pre-Christian Germans and Scandinavians also referred to the World Tree or World Pillar, known as Yggdrasil.

Now comes the Christmas story, courtesy of Harner’s fascinating book.

“The evergreen winter solstice tree (the ‘Christmas tree’) came to America reportedly from Germany, which shares the World Tree tradition with Scandinavia. It seems like a miniature reminder of Yggdrasil, the ‘always green’ World Tree symbolized in pre-Christian Sweden by a huge evergreen tree near the pagan temple in Uppsala. The star traditionally place atop the Christmas evergreen tree echoes the Polar Star, now reincarnated as the Star of Bethlehem.

“The lights (formerly candles) on the branches, circling the tree, remind one of the stars circling the North Pole. Nineteenth-century Christmas trees had representations of angels hanging from their boughs, not unlike how the Siberian Evenki (Tungus) shamans’ spirit helpers and guardians were thought to sit on the boughs of small trees that shamans cut and erected in their dwellings to represent the World Tree.

“The contemporary American Christmas celebration of December 25th is only a few days removed from the (northern hemisphere’s) winter solstice date and seems to retain shamanistic elements. It is partially a survival of solar traditions, such as keeping a Yule fire burning to encourage the Sun to strengthen its light.”

I suppose some readers might think this is an anti-Christian story, but it’s not. It’s just a bit of deep history. The similarities between the Christmas tree and the World Tree could be related to genetic memory. Or it could be synchronicity—the coming together of two traditions outside of cause and effect. One thing is for certain. No matter what your race, culture or nationality, if you go back far enough your ancestors were most likely part of the shamanic tradition. That’s all there was before the emergence of religions.

Harner’s explanation reminded me of an experience several years ago in which Trish and I went to a shamanic cleansing ritual. It was conducted by several Qero Indians who had been brought to the U.S. by Alberto Villoldo of the Four Winds Society. We took part in this ritual in a church, Unity of the Palm Beaches. The five or six Q’ero shamans, wearing their traditional red woolen garb, sat on the floor of the stage and spent maybe 40 or 45 minutes preparing for the ritual by chanting and working with herbs and sacred stones and other materials, all the while chewing cocoa leaves. Then members of the audience came to the stage where the shamans chanted and ran feathers along their bodies, cleansing and blessed them.

A few feet away on the stage was a huge Christmas tree. It was a strange juxtaposition of traditions, one pagan, the other Christian. But now, thanks to Harner’s book, I realize that there’s a much closer tie between the Christmas tree and ancient shamanic practices.

Merry Christmas!!!

On this past Sunday, Trish and I were at the gym, the one we’ve written about before where we’ve seen Bruce Springsteen working out. No Springsteen sighting, but I did experience a music-related synchro. The music playing on the gym’s sound system that day was classic rock with a variety of tunes from the late 60s, early 70s. That was different from the usual more up-to-date selection, much of which doesn’t appeal to me. One of the tunes was Joe Cocker’s cover of the Beatles’ tune, She Came in Through the Bathroom Window. When I heard the song, I wondered what had happened to Cocker. I hadn’t heard anything about him for a long time.

Then late Monday, an old friend who works as a deejay at a radio station in Iowa that plays classic rock put up a Facebook comment about Cocker. He mentioned that Cocker was 70 years old, and noted it didn’t seem that old when you’re pushing 66. He apparently assumed that everyone reading the post would know that Joe Cocker died earlier in the day. I didn’t, not until Tuesday when I received an e-mail from a friend in London who said that she was mourning Cocker’s death and wrote a synchro related to him.

So in honor of the dynamic bluesy British rocker’s passing, here’s the story from Barb.

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When I lived in Sheffield, I used to go Latin dancing at a working men’s club in Tasker Road, the street where Joe was born. I’d never seen Joe live, but one day in 1994, there was a lovely documentary about him on TV, and as he was going to be playing in Sheffield with Sheryl Crow as support, I wanted to go.

I asked friends – some were going to be away, others were working nights (nurses!), and some just plain didn’t want to go as the ticket was too expensive. So I kind of gave up. No one would go with me.

Then, one day in my local supermarket, I was waiting to pay when I overheard the checkout woman talking to her manager. “So are you going to see Joe Cocker?” she asked. “No,” said the manager, “I’ve got no-one to go with. Nobody wants to go.”

I paused a while then said to her, “I’m in the same boat. I’ll go with you, if you want.” So once I’d bought my groceries, the manager took my number, told me she’d get tickets. The day before the gig, she called and told me she would come get me in her car.

Amazing trust. She didn’t know me and I hadn’t given her money for the ticket, but she bought the tickets anyway and I paid her on the day of the gig. Before it began, we had a drink in the pub opposite Sheffield Arena, then went to see Joe. And he was awesome.

I’ve never seen the woman again. I can’t even remember her name, but that event still stays in my mind as something magical. A synchronistic experience. Thank you, universe. Thank you, Joe.

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And thank you, Barb.

And, in some corner of heaven, there must be a lot of old rockers hanging out, commiserating about the past, and planning for future lives…if not already simultaneously living them.

Fiona Harris-De Assis from Calgary, Canada had a very unusual UFO experience about six years ago. It’s a great example of the role of synchronicity in sightings. Fiona also offers another explanation. The role of perception certainly plays a role in this sighting.

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My really crazy UFO experience may have been synchronistic or else I unwittingly summoned it. I am not into UFOs, but I found something on the Jeff Rense’s website about a man in the UK who was taking lots of pictures of UFOs that were morphing, and were almost organic in appearance. The pictures really freaked me out. I checked out that site for a while, then forgot about it.

A year or so later, my 14-year-old cousin came to stay with us, and I found out he was into UFOs. So I thought that I’d show him those pictures, but I couldn’t find them. I spent a hour or so on the internet looking in vain for the pictures and finally gave up. Meanwhile, my cousin went to stay with another relative that evening. After supper, I was washing dishes and happened to look out my kitchen window.

I noticed a black balloon floating across the sky. It was quite far away, but absolutely recognizable as being a black balloon. It was summer time, around seven in the evening, bright and sunny. I casually watched it floating as I washed the dishes, thinking nothing of it, when all of sudden, the balloon popped. However, it continued floating slowly across the sky, and looking very much like it had been ripped open. I thought that was odd, but was still not really suspecting anything weird.

After a minute or so, the balloon caught my full attention because now it looked like a bird! It wasn’t flapping its wings. It was slowly gliding across the sky. At this point, I thought to myself that maybe it was a bird all along! But how could it have looked like a balloon? And how could it have looked spattered when I thought that the balloon had broken?

Then, suddenly it changed into the shape of a bat! It looked just like the Batman symbol. At that point, I knew that it was a morphing UFO, and I could not believe that it was showing itself to me! Was it a coincidence, a meaningful one? Or was it manifested by me? I have no idea!

I called my husband into the kitchen to see it. He doesn’t believe in ANYTHING!!!! So he came in to look at it, and said, ‘So what? It’s a black balloon floating in the sky. Oh, no it’s not. It’s a bird. Oh, I mean, it’s a bat.”

So in the minute or two that he watched it, it morphed again! Now here’s the really strange part. Suddenly, there were TWO bats! My husband and I watched as they floated past the kitchen window and out of our view. We went into the dining room and watched them, then to the living room until they were far away, and disappeared. They never flapped wings, and continued in a straight line, without wavering, and stayed at the exact same speed.

My husband and I didn’t freak out, didn’t call people, or tell people. We didn’t even get excited, or talk about it amongst ourselves. Seriously, we felt almost shut down, but not in a bad way. It just wasn’t such a big deal, when really it was A VERY BIG DEAL. We didn’t talk about it for a few years, and then I brought it up one night. He remembered and didn’t try to refute it. Normally, he would totally try to say that it never happened, because he doesn’t like to admit stuff like that. It didn’t frighten us in the least bit, but I did feel as if they wanted us to see them, and that they were almost putting on a show of what they could do.

I have never before or after seen anything like this. A few years ago, I sat outside one night and try to summon something. The moon suddenly got a weird look to it. I can’t exactly remember how, but it was odd. I’ve tried a few more times, but I’m too impatient to wait around to see anything!

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As I read about the transformation of the black balloon, I couldn’t help wondering if it was a matter of perception. For example, looking at it from different angles might make it look like other different objects. Maybe the balloon had a Batman image on it. But when two people are seeing the same thing, it’s hard to deny that something weird is taking place.

A bit of promotion today.  You might know that a flock of crows is actually known as a murder of crows. But you probably didn’t know that a bundle of mystery novels is called a Murder of Mysteries. Well, at least, it is now. Here’s a bundle of e-book mysteries, including two by Trish, one by Rob.

Imagine what it would be like to lug around 20 hardcover (or paperback) novels. Probably impossible. But through the magic of e-books, you can get those 20 novels under one cover…and for only $2.99.

Enough said. You can find this bundle at Amazon here, Barnes&Noble here and elsewhere.

On February 4, 2015, our blog will be six years old. In its early days, when we got maybe ten hits a week, we had some great synchronicity stories. I culled together some of the best and will re-post them periodically.

Here is one of our favorites, which occurred when our daughter was just eight. She’s now 25:

During an elementary school Thanksgiving project, eight-year Megan showed a dog she had made from clay and announced that she was grateful for the golden retriever she was going to get. Her parents (us!) were puzzled about it. We had no plans to get a golden or any other kind of dog. After all, we had three cats.

But shortly before Christmas, a family friend asked if we would adopt a golden retriever that needed a home. We said we would try out the dog for a week.The retriever, Jessie, immediately got along famously with the cats, settled in front of Rob’s desk, and found a new home.

We remained baffled by how Megan had talked about the animal as if she’d known it was coming. It was a synchronicity – specifically one of foreknowledge or precognition.

That’s Jessie in the above photo, in 2005. Sadly, she passed away in 2007.

Our daughter recently moved into a house with her friend, Erin. They met nine years ago, when both were interning at Dolphins Plus in Key Largo, a dolphin research facility that is leagues above anything at Epcot or Sea World. The house, built in the 1920s, sits on an acre of land that backs up to a lake.

Megan’s dog, Nika, who has been living in an apartment building for the last three years, is beside herself with joy. She has a yard! Squirrels in the trees! She can run outside whenever she wants! Doggie paradise, in other words. Erin also has a dog, Bailey, but he only visits because he lives nearby with her parents. She also has a cockatoo, Bird, whom she moved into the house about a week after Erin and Megan made the move.

Bird has a lot of freedom. His wings aren’t clipped and he pretty much has the run of the house, flying around the rooms, touching down on any shoulder that suits him, and chasing Nika. But on his second or third day in the house, Bird flew through the open door to the backyard and vanished. Erin and Megan called for him, heard his answering cries, then those dwindled away to nothing. They moved his cage out into the yard, with food inside, and kept searching for him.

Erin was devastated.

After three or four days, she accepted that Bird wasn’t coming back. Then a weird thing happened. Erin had posted something about Bird’s escape on Facebook. A neighbor of her mother’s friend saw the post and wrote that the other night, she’d heard a bird on her roof and had crawled out a second story window and rescued it. A cockatoo. Could this possibly be Erin’s Bird?

It seemed unlikely. The woman lived nearly an hour’s drive from where Erin and Megan lived. But it was within the vicinity of where Erin’s parents lived, and where Bird had lived most of his life. Was it possible that Bird was trying to get back to its home with Erin’s parents?

Erin knows about synchronicity and decided to check out the cockatoo. When she walked into the woman’s house and saw the bird, she knew it was her Bird. She said, “Bird? Is it really you?” And Bird responded to his name. He is now back at the house where Megan and Erin live and is doing his usual Bird stuff – flying around the house, terrorizing Nika, and cuddling up to Erin.

So, let’s talk about odds on this one. Bird flies away on what turns out to be a very cold night in Orlando, and ends up nearly an hour away from where Megan and Erin are living, but not too far from his former home. He’s white, doesn’t blend with the environment, but manages to survive for several days and nights of very cold temps for Florida. It’s the kind of thing in our area that escaped green parrots do well. They bond quickly with a flock, learn the ropes of life in the wild, and find plenty of food top sustain them. But cockatoos, because of their color, stand out. In all my years in this state, I’ve never seen a wild cockatoo.

Bird finds refuge on the roof of a home whose owner is friends with a friend of Erin’s mother. Two degrees of separation? The woman sees Erin’s post on Facebook about Bird. The rest is synchro history.

Skeptics can cite all kinds of statistics about how such an improbable thing might happen because so many of the planet’s 7 billions plus inhabitants are now connected through the Internet. But that doesn’t explain how Bird just happened to end up on the rooftop of a house owned by a woman who was a friend of a friend of Erin’s mother.  It doesn’t explain anything  unless Bird and his ilk have access to the Internet and Facebook.

This is kind of a whimsical post just because I (Rob) proved to myself that I don’t know what I’m talking about. It started as an analysis of what I thought was a trickster synchro someone else experienced, only to discover that I was the one tricked. But let me back up.

I came across a story on one of the Facebook synchro pages and responded. The funny thing is that I apparently mistook the writer’s FB handle for the ‘unique name’ mentioned in the first sentence. So my analysis was skewed, but I still like it. Here’s how it went, starting with the FB entry.

Nana Nana – Synchronicity

Saw a woman with a unique name at work. At the end of work, went to see a movie with the same name at the beginning of the movie. What does it all mean??!! Is someone controlling all this? Is our path written for us? Have no idea what’s going on. Seeing same sort of numbers everyday is bad enough, but words in thoughts, said out loud or in dreams appearing in my normal life? ok ok, I’m not going crazy. lol.

My response:

Good story. When you experience synchroncity, you’re stepping outside the everyday world of cause and effect, if only for a moment. It’s a hint, a sign, that there’s a deeper reality, where our true selves exist. This one also might be a trickster synchro…’nana nana’ sounds like the trickster goading you to see that there more to our reality than meets the eye. We’re staring at a puddle, not seeing the ocean.

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Then I went back to find out who wrote the story and realized it was Nana Nana herself. Oh, oh. Well, that’s a unique name. But, hey, if you’re going to write about someone else’s unique name, tell us what it is.  After inquiring about that very question, Nana Nana responded that the woman’s name is Morag. And at the beginning of the movie Guardians of the Galaxy the words Planet Morag appeared.

All right, now I know. But I like the story better when I thought the name was Nana Nana.

“We tortured some folks,” Obama said. “But that’s not who we are.”

Really? Until people in the Bush administration who authorized tactics that the Nazis used in their death camps are not only held accountable for their policies, but are indicted, then yes, we are torturers. We are a nation that ignores the Geneva Convention, a nation that believes it is above the law. Until Bush, Cheney, John Yoo, Paul Wolfowitz and all the other political mafiosos of that administration are behind bars, then who are we? We’re a nation of hypocrites.

Who are we to cite China and North Korea and other countries on their human rights violations when we subjected detainees to waterboarding, rectal hydration, hypothermia so extreme that one prisoner died, and isolation that would drive any of us into utter madness?

Meanwhile, Bush in retirement has taken up painting. Cheney got a new heart and can be seen occasionally scowling on Fox News. John Yoo is teaching at Berkeley, a real puzzler, since Berkley is one of the most liberal universities in the country. John Brennan, the head of the CIA now, defends his agency’s tactics.

In reading through some of report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee, I thought I would vomit. How can any human being subject another human being to 47 days in complete isolation? To waterboarding? To hundreds of hours without sleep? To standing on broken feet and legs with your arms tethered above your head while you are buck naked? To threats that your mother and sisters are going to be raped and dismembered unless you come clean?

From the Huffington Post:

During the George W. Bush years there was a brief public debate about whether or not waterboarding was “torture.” The late Christopher Hitchens, who was an important intellectual cheerleader for the Iraq War and an advocate for an aggressive “war on terror” wasn’t convinced that waterboarding was torture so he agreed to have it done to him. A few other reporters also willingly subjected themselves to waterboarding as a publicity stunt to “see what it was like.” I doubt if any pro-torture reporter or intellectual would agree to undergo rectal feeding as Hitchens did with waterboarding to find out if it’s really “torture.” We won’t see Dick Cheney on teevee with a blender and an enema bag any time soon.

And then, over the past few days, another kind of torture took place, a financial torture in Congress. The U.S. government was about to run out of money – again, after a government shutdown in 2013 that cost millions and affected millions. At the last moment, provisions were included that basically gutted the Dodd Frank provision. This is a biggie.

The financial meltdown of 2008 was due to the way banks handled your money – risky derivatives, fraudulent loans – and when the sky was falling, when Lehman Brothers went under and AIG didn’t have a life preserver and went under and many of the homes in your neighborhood went into foreclosure– the government bailed out the banks. At the taxpayers’ expense. With taxpayers’ money. The Dodd-Frank provision said, Hey, you want to engage in risky business? Fine. But you do it without the taxpayers bailing you out if your risk goes south.

With that gutted, many Democrats went ballistic. Elizabeth Warren,  my choice for the presidency in 2016, stepped up to the plate and did what she does best…laid out the perils and led a Democratic insurgency. Spend a little more than nine minutes to watch the barn-burning speech she gave on Friday that makes her a real contender for the presidency in 2016.

From Huff Post again:

After listing the top Citi executives who have gone on to work in the Obama administration, she addressed Citi directly, noting that she agreed that Wall Street reform wasn’t perfect. “I agree with you. Dodd-Frank isn’t perfect. It should have broken you into pieces,” she said.

Unfortunately, the new spending bill passed in the house. Now it’s up to the senate to either approve it or come up with an alternative that excises the Wall Street bailout by taxpayers. The bottom line here is simple. Republicans don’t give a shit about people. They are the Philip K Dick facilitators of Blade Runner, where corporations rule the world. The language in the amendment about the banks was written by Citicorp.

As of Saturday night, the senate passed the bill.

Rob and I were feeling pretty bad about all this  as we sat out by our fire pit, in the South Florida chill. “I feel like we’re de-evolving,” he said. “As a species, as a nation.”

“I kinda hoped the old paradigm would go out with a whimper,” I remarked. “But that’s not happening. Maybe we have to de-evolve before we evolve.”

My fear is that it may take us so long to evolve that neither Rob nor I will be here to see it happen.  But our daughter and her children will be here. And to those of you who say that politics don’t matter, that life goes on, I say: Everything is politics. From the food you eat, to the water you drink to drugs your doc prescribes to the TV shows and movies that entertain you, to the power you claim over your own body, color, ethnicity, religion, to the very identity you have as a human being, everything is politics.

If you don’t speak up, then others will gladly speak for you and you may not like what they have to say. So then, what’re you gonna do??

This evening, Rob and I were leaving our local Barnes & Noble where we’d done a little Christmas shopping, and as we reached our car, I looked up and saw a very weird thing in the sky. The evening was cool, cloudless, and this object was extremely bright and uniformly white. It was similar to what’s shown in the video above, except that it was larger, brighter, and much whiter.

“Hey, Rob,” I said, and pointed upward. “Is that a chopper?”

We often have choppers flying around our area- usually police helicopters that are low, noisy, and have their spotlights focused on a particular street where something questionable or illegal is going on.

But this object didn’t make a sound. It was around 1500 feet up when we first saw it, then dropped lower, to perhaps 500 feet, then to maybe 200 feet, then sped up and went higher, then lower again. Its brightness never diminished and we never heard a sound.

I had to go to Walgreen’s, so Rob parked on the dark side of the lot while I was inside the store and watched it. He said it dropped very low and he could see it through some distant trees.

When I came out of Walgreen’s, the light was still visible, but now there was a small plane in the air that appeared to be headed toward it.

As we braked at a stop light on our way out of the shopping area, a yoga instructor we know pulled into the lane next to us and we lowered the window. We spoke to her for a few moments, till the light changed, and mentioned what we’d seen. But when the light turned green and we moved forward again, the light had vanished. The small plane was alone in the sky and barely visible in the distance.

If there’s a synchro in this, it’s that one of the books we’d bought was Extra-Planetary Experiences: Alien-Human Contact and the Expansion of Consciousness by Thomas James Streicher, a student of Harvard author, psychiatrist and UFO research John Mack. I figured the book wouldn’t make it under the Christmas tree because either Rob or I would sneak away with it. Interestingly, our Barnes & Noble stocks very few New Age books and when Rob picked up this particular book, one of the few on UFOs/aliens, he glanced through it and handed it to me.

“Look at the table of contents. I think this is a keeper.”

I looked at the TOC and into our pile it went.

I later texted Ken Peterson about the incident and explained the details. That’s probably it, he wrote. They may have been letting you know that there is important info in the book.

To this, I replied, Is the communication that personal? Hey, Macs, you bought a book with important info in it?

Ken’s reply: Yes, I think so. I think some contact is close at hand. Can’t wait to find out what you read about. That was a long time they were out there!

So, we’ll see where this one leads! I’m going to be reading this book at the gym tomorrow.