Welcome to The Mystical Underground

With practice, anyone can ask a question and glimpse the future as it is most likely to unfold from that moment in time. By taking advantage of certain readily available tools, you can hurl open the window to events before they unfold. When you do so, you’re stepping into the world of divination.

Throughout time and across cultures people have peered into the future with divination tools – the I Ching, tarot cards, astrology charts, patterns made by tea leaves or the toss of bones, numerology, scrying. The principle of synchronicity lies at the heart of every divination system. When you toss coins or lay out cards, they form a pattern intrinsic to that moment. The pattern, Carl Jung pointed out, is meaningful only if you’re able to verify the interpretations through your knowledge of the subjective and objective situations, as well as the unfolding of subsequent events.

The term ‘divination’ comes from the Latin divinare, meaning ‘to foresee,’ and it probably was practiced even before humans learned to control fire. Diviners among the ancient Babylonians read patterns in animal entrails, in smoke, oil on the surface of water, and through the behavior of animals. The Druids favored crystal balls and read patterns in knotted tree roots, the calls and movements of birds, and in the patterns of clouds and stars. The ancient Greeks had their Oracle at Delphi, of course, but also divined patterns in dreams, in the murmuring of springs, and by tossing small stones or pieces of wood, knucklebones, or dice.

In Mesoamerican religious life and in every civilization from the Olmecs to the Mayans and Aztecs, divination was a part of daily life and scrying was commonly practiced. This system involved looking at any smooth or translucent surface— water, stones, crystals, mirrors— with the belief that images about the future would appear.

Eventually, divinatory tools were created. Around 1,200 B.C., the Chinese used a divination system called fuji, similar to a Ouija board, which was followed a millennium later by the I Ching. Tarot cards arrived in Europe from Turkey near the end of the Middle Ages, where related card games had existed for centuries.

Any question you ask a divinatory tool is personal, a one-time experience that can’t be replicated. So, like art, it falls outside the scientific process. It exists as a subjective reality, one that can confirm your own anecdotal encounters and explorations.

My two favorites are the tarot and the I Ching. The tarot is fascinating because it’s visual and the 22 major arcana card images are archetypal. From the first card in the Major Arcana, The Fool, to the last one, The World, our journey through life is depicted.

The other 56 cards in the deck represent the details, events, people, and situations in our lives. My favorite deck is the round Tarot of the Cloisters, where the images are presented like stained glass. I’ve had the deck for about 20 years and it’s difficult to find now. I’ve never thought there’s much point in reading reversed cards and this round deck makes that impossible!

The I Ching – a divination system that dates back several thousand years to ancient China – is chatty. I use the Richard Wilhelm translation and also enjoy Adele Aldridge’s take on the I Ching. With this system, there are 64 possible hexagrams you can get by tossing 3 coins six times. Heads count for 3, tails are 2, and the numbers 6 (three tails) a broken line, and 9, a solid line, are considered to be changing lines that become either solid or broken. Visionary Terrence McKenna believed the I Ching illuminated the nature of time.

These days, I use an app for the I Ching – the I Ching Pocket App of Wisdom – that I have on my phone and my iPad to toss the coins and then look at the interps of James de Korne  or Adele’s interps. She is illustrating every line in each of the 64 hexagrams – a staggering total of 960 lines! – and knows this stuff inside out. And I email Nancy Pickard, who for years was the only other person I knew who used the Ching, thus my name for her – Mistress of the Ching.

When I need a quick answer I pose a question, then open a book at random and point to a spot on the page. Sometimes, the word or phrase makes no sense at all. But other times, the word/phrase is right on target. Another method I love is to think of a question and state that the next thing I hear will answer it. This works nearly every time.

So, tapping into the future is something we can all so and you don’t have to wait for a dream, vision, or a hunch!

Visual tricksters: these cracked me up.

and my personal favorite:

E-books have been around for years now and Trish and I have gotten most of our old out-of-print books available through Kindle and other formats. There’s one big exception. None of my seven Indiana Jones novels have made the transition. I keep thinking that’s going to change. Every so often – like every other year – I go into the Kindle Store on Amazon.com and take a look.

The last time I did so, it was business as usual, none of my Indiana Jones novels were available – though they are still available in print editions. But there was another book that caught my attention. As you can see from the cover, it appears to be an Indiana Jones-like illustrated story for kids. But look at the author’s name – my last name combined with the first name of one of the characters in the first three movies – Marcus Brody, Indy’s mentor and museum director. I thought the name might be a one-time pseudonym, but I Googled Marcus MacGregor and there is a writer of young adult books by that name.

This seems to qualify as a combination of digital library angel and trickster synchronicity. In other words, I went into Kindle looking for my Indy books, so the digital library angel tossed me a bone. ‘I don’t see yours, but take a look at this one!’ When I did, I could hear the chuckle of the trickster in the background.

The dictionary defines camaraderie as “good fellowship,” usually among a group of people. Or, in another definition, it’s defined as “the quality of affording easy familiarity and sociability.”

But what’s that mean, exactly? This word has come up three or four times in the last few days, so I’m thinking of it as a cluster synchro that I should explore.

One definition I found describes camaraderie as a “spirit of good friendship and loyalty among members of a group.”

Since my work happens mostly in solitude, this definition doesn’t really fit for me except in a general sense, in that I feel camaraderie with other writers I know. We may not see each other often, but we exchange emails and phone calls and Facebook messages. We read each other’s books. We blurb each other’s books. We’re on the same page.

I experience a camaraderie with my animal buddies in that I talk to them, play with them, and they sleep beside my bed, at the foot of my bed – or sometimes in my bed. But that camaraderie is vastly different from the human variety.

We’ve been going to the same dog park for six years and there are certain people I’ve met there with whom I feel a camaraderie. The husband of one woman, a retired nurse, is in hospice and a friend and I stopped by her house last month with wine and goodies just to hang out. She was moved to tears. “I’ve spent so much of my life caring for other people that I can’t get used to people coming here to care for me.”

Another dog park friend is on a list for a kidney transplant. When I see him and his wife at the park, I just want to hug him and assure him it will all work out.

Then there’s the more intimate type of camaraderie that we share with our partners, kids, our siblings. In the best of partnerships, it seems, there’s true camaraderie, a sense that we’re part of a team, that we’re united with – or against – whatever comes our way.

This type of camaraderie ebbs and flows over time, through the course of daily life. I saw it in the marriage of my parents, see it in my own marriage, in the marriages and partnerships of others throughout the years. But it’s not constant. What worked a decade ago may not work now. Or the reverse might be true. We humans are continually changing, evolving, adapting to external circumstances that shift the balance of things. Health challenges, financial difficulties, births and deaths and other pivotal life events impact us in individual ways. Our needs and desires change. The self I was at 18 is not the same self I am now, many years later.

I recently ran across a blog post from a dating site where applicants pay an enormous fee to join and in return, are matched with the ideal partner. The gist is that these matches are made through some in depth psychological analysis rather than, as the blog post pointed out, through the kind of superficial match that happens on a site like Tinder, where matches are based strictly on looks, appearance. Swipe left, swipe right. And how does any of that work out in the camaraderie department? No telling. They don’t post their success rate. The idea is that the people who pay these enormous sum are too busy making money to meet men or women with who they might be compatible.

I Googled images of camaraderie and all kinds of weird stuff came up. People with guns, women listening to each other’s travails, figure skaters executing incredible maneuvers, in camaraderie, I guess, with their own bodies. There were a lot of animal photos, too, like the one at the top of Noah and Nika that exemplifies  my concept of camaraderie. Animals get it completely. We humans – well, we’ve got a ways to go.

In my fiction, I develop camaraderie with my characters. In writing non-fiction, I develop camaraderie with ideas. In life, my camaraderies are mostly intuitive, emotional. I recognize it when it occurs and when it’s not there, I mourn its absence. Maybe camaraderie really is the force that moves the world and its people forward toward something better.

Now that I’ve explored this cluster synchro, will it stop appearing? Is it like repetitive numbers – 11:11, for instance – that once you’ve acknowledged it, dived into it, gotten the message, it stops happening? Or is it like my Lotto tickets, where week after week, I get one number?

Aw, c’mon, universe. Deliver all the winning numbers, please!

I recently posted this image on my FB page with the message: Happy b-day, Noah. Age 7 and looking good. Noah attracted a surprising number of likes and a few comments.

Then I received a series of private messages from FB friend Fiona. She began by asking me:

“Would you like to hear about how you were either part of a synchronicity today, or were helpful in getting a message to someone from spirit?”

A few minutes later, the followup message arrived:

“I have a friend who lost her son, Noah, 8 years ago. He was 7 years old. She just phoned me this morning to tell me that she has breast cancer. The very second that she phoned me, I opened up my Facebook account and your post, saying happy b-day to Noah, seven years old and looking good, was the VERY FIRST POST that I saw, the very second that I heard her voice on the line. Also, Noah died on his 7th birthday. I told her what I was seeing even before she told me her news.

“She and I both think that it was a message from Noah, just showing that he is around, and still able to see what is going on in his parent’s lives.”

Definitely a meaningful coincidence. In this case, it wasn’t my synchronicity. Instead, I conveyed information that someone else saw at a critical moment and passed the information on to a third party, the mother of Noah, who died on his seventh birthday.  It’s interesting how these things come together…and in this case right at the precise moment.

Of course I can’t forget the roles played by Noah, our big red Golden, and Trish. Noah posed on the pipe, and Trish snapped the photo with her phone. It all came together.

Indra’s Net

Rob and I watched some of the CNN democratic town hall this evening. These town halls are fascinating because it’s just one candidate at a time answering questions from the moderator – and the audience.

At the tail end of Sanders’s stint, the moderator asked him about his religious – spiritual beliefs. Sanders is Jewish and rarely mentions anything about his faith or his views on religion. It’s a major difference from the Republican candidates, who fall all over themselves to quote the Bible and mention god and faith and all the other stuff you expect to hear from candidates trying to win over the religious right. And it’s different from Clinton, who periodically tosses in references to her “faith.”

So when Sanders was asked to explain his spiritual beliefs, he pointed out that all major religions – Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism –emphasize do unto others what you would have them do unto you. “In other words, we’re all into this together. What affects you, affects me.”

Stunned, I looked at Rob and exclaimed, “Indra’s net!

Sanders then went on to say that we can’t ignore a person who’s starving by telling ourselves it’s someone else’s problem and that we have to focus on making our next 5 million. We can’t ignore climate change that will destroy the planet because we’re all in this together.

As author Stephen Mitchell explained in The Enlightened Mind, “The net of Indra is a profound and subtle metaphor for the structure of reality. Imagine a vast net; at each crossing point there is a jewel; each jewel is perfectly clear and reflects all the other jewels in the net, the way two mirrors placed opposite each other will reflect an image ad infinitum. The jewel in this metaphor stands for an individual being, or an individual consciousness, or a cell or an atom. Every jewel is intimately connected with all other jewels in the universe, and a change in one jewel means a change, however slight, in every other jewel.”

In an earlier town hall on CNN on February 3, Anderson Cooper asked Sanders this same question. Here’s his response, which was pretty much the same thing he said tonight in South Carolina:

I can’t recall any other presidential candidate ever talking about his or her spiritual/religious beliefs in quite this way. It’s something most of us probably sense at one time or another – the Butterfly Effect? Chaos theory? David Bohm’s implicate order? But regardless of what we call it, the notion of interconnectedness speaks to something profound within all of us. And I was blown away to hear Sanders say it.

This weird synchro is the sort that happens when you least expect it. I suspect it has its own category, but I’m not sure what to call it yet. It’s a mix of trickster, cluster, confirmation.

A couple of weeks ago, Carol Bowman and I were catching up by phone. Carol is an author, past-life researcher and regressionist. In the early 1990s, after an appearance on Oprah where she discussed her research, her book Children’s Past Lives was published. It was triggered by her young son’s sudden fear of loud noises – specifically, fire crackers at a 4^th of July party. This book was followed later by Return to Heaven, where Carol talks about how in some past life cases, the present body bears physical evidence of the previous life in terms of scars or birth marks. We met because one day in a browse through Borders, her first book literally fell at my feet.

So in this conversation, Carol  asked if I knew about the Travis Walton abduction case in 1975. It’s probably one of the best abduction cases on record, so yes I’d heard of it. I explained that not long after our Aliens in the Backyard had been published, we received an email from one of the men in the logging group with Walton when he was abducted.

“Which guy?” Carol asked.

“Ken Peterson.” His email, in fact,   had begun with an explanation that he was sitting next to Walton in the truck at the time of his abduction.

“Great. I’m mailing you a documentary called Travis that my friend, Jennifer Stein, produced.”

The DVD arrived last week and reminded me that I hadn’t heard from Ken for a long time and that I should probably email him. I got caught up in work and never got around to it.

Today, Rob and I were on our way to Whole Foods. We had planned to see Star Wars tonight with some friends, but it got pushed to the next day, so we agreed we should watch Travis. A few minutes later, I received an email from Ken. Synchro, I thought.

We watched the documentary that night. It’s well done and includes interviews with Ken and a couple of the other men who were part of that logging crew all those years ago. It includes scenes where Travel and Ken return to the site of the UFO experience all those decades ago. When I wrote back to Ken after we’d watched the movie, I explained the details of the synchronicity.

Trish, Thank you. That is fantastic. I figured something would happen if I got back to you. The 1st interview I did with Travis was 27 years after the encounter, and the ABC special was in connection with Shymalan’s movie Signs. It took 38 years for Travis and me to return to the UFO site together. We were with 2 people. Jennifer Stein was one of them!

– Ken

Ken is searching for answers, just like Travis and the other men who were with him that night. Because of the connection to Carol Bowman, I suggested that perhaps the message of this synchro was that he should find a qualified regressionist in his area who could take him back to that night. I noted that I had asked Carol in the past if she could regress an abductee or someone who’d had a UFO experience, but she felt she wasn’t qualified to do it. “I know how to deal with a client who has a deeply emotional reaction to past life memories,” she said. “But with something like this, I would be in unchartered territory.”

I told him I’d like to write a post on this sequence of synchros and asked if it was okay with him.

Trish, Yes, please do a post, and we will see where it leads. The other posts you did led to some incredible things.

So, we’ll see!

Last month, I wrote a post about Sixto Castillo, an inmate in a New Mexico prison who read The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity and wrote us about his interest in metaphysics and synchronicity. He’d said his spirit guide told him about an eighth secret of synchronicity. So, of course when I wrote him back, I asked what it was.

His response: “So what is the 8th Secret of Synchroncity? It’s the linking of 7 very important parts of our being – the 7 chakras.” He went on to say the link was related to kundalini energy, electromagnetism and DNA. I didn’t understand how that fit into synchronicity, and he seems to have figured that.

“How is this even relevant, you may say. Okay, let’s look only at the root and the crown. These two chakras are the most important vortexes, why? Because one keeps us anchored to the ground or sister Earth and the other hooks us to the outer most region of the atmosphere into and beyond the gravitational field. These two connect us to two different consciousnesses – the Earth where we live, and the higher place where…we connect with   synchronicity, and the Universe or Orchestrator of all the vast events and all that seem unexplainable.”

He also wrote again about his spirit guide he calls ‘Connie.’ He explained that she lived in the 11th century and was enlightened at the age of 11. She was praying to know things that others wouldn’t know because she was tired of being treated like a dummy and boom, she ‘knew.’ She seemed to outwit and out teach a lot of the philosophers of the day, but had trouble controlling or grasping the knowledge until she was taken in by an aging Chinese man who guided her.

All that said, the part of this letter that really caught my attention was near the end when he asked me about the word ‘glint.’ “Glint…man, I’ve been trying hard to find this place or whatever it is. I know that it means flash, beam, sparkle. But so far I don’t know what it means, but maybe you can help me with this mystery.”

I have to say I was a bit stunned, because in fact I had been thinking about ‘glint’ that morning. I wrote back saying…

“Sixto, I’m going to help you with the mystery of ‘glint.’ Well, at least I will tell you about glint. The day I received your letter I was reading a novel called, THE QUEST, by Nelson DeMille, one of my favorite authors. On page 324, I read this line, in which the ‘love interest’ character addresses the protagonist: “You were going to tell us what a glint is.” When I read that (before your letter arrived) I thought that’s a strange thing to focus on. Doesn’t she know what a glint is?

“The protagonist, Frank Purcell goes on to explain that “It’s what it sounds like—a quick reflection of light on a shiny surface. Pilots in combat look for the glint of an enemy aircraft, or the glint of a metal target on the ground.” Purcell is in Ethiopia with two others in search of a black stone monastery hidden in the jungle where supposedly – legend has it – the Holy Grail is kept. A deep secret. They fly over the area taking photos and looking for a glint that might reveal the location of the monastery. The story carries on for a couple of chapters about the search for the glint, and there are more references later. So it’s really strange that you send me that off-the-wall comment about a glint…”

I think Sixto has developed some interesting psychic abilities while behind bars. It seems that he can ‘see’ from a distance – clairvoyance or remote viewing. A handy ability when you’re a prisoner. In spite of it, he seems to have a certain ‘glint’ in his eye.

Fair warning: there’s no synchro here.

I first became aware of Rachel Maddow when she used to be a guest on the Keith Olberman show on MSNBC. Then one night she substituted for Keith when he was out of town and I was impressed by her grasp of issues, her clarity, her humor, and her admitted nervousness about hosting the show.

By the time she anchored her own show on MSNBC, I knew she was a Rhodes scholar who held a PhD from Oxford, that she is the first openly gay woman with her own news show, and that she is a true Aries. This woman is outrageously intelligent, a consummate communicator, and totally fearless. She was also one of the first news people to bring national attention to the disaster in Flint, Michigan, a city of 100,000, where drinking water has been poisoned by lead. Tonight, she held a town hall in Flint that was so powerful it wouldn’t surprise me if Governor Rick Snyder comes under federal investigation, as he should.

The situation in Flint has been like this since 2014, when the Republican governor cut a billion bucks in taxes for the rich and decided to save millions by switching Flint’s drinking water from Lake Huron – a glacial lake, with pure water – to the Flint River. This river is so polluted that it corroded the lead in the water pipes. For nearly two years, the residents have been drinking and bathing in this lead poisoned water. This means that children, the elderly, pets, and everyone else has lead in their brains. In young children with developing brains and nervous systems, this can be catastrophic.

In October 2015, Snyder finally acknowledged that the water wasn’t safe to drink. He apologized. Really? An apology is all he has to offer? And yet to date, not a single lead pipe has been removed in this city. Donated bottled water has been pouring into Flint, but how many bottles of water does it take to bathe? As of today – January 27 – the governor has no plan to remove the lead pipes and replace them.

Rachel interviewed a local pediatrician who has been tending to these young kids, a master plumber who gave estimates on what it would cost to replace all these lead pipes, a professor, an engineer, an activist, and residents of the city.

The master plumber said that he could galvanize a thousand plumbers to Flint to get to work on this problem and they could have the job done in a lot less time than the 15 years Snyder said. More, like, well, months. The pediatrician tried to remain upbeat, but you could tell she’s deeply concerned about the developmental issues these children face. The activist said straight out that Snyder needs to resign and be imprisoned. The mayor has met several times with Snyder and come away profoundly disappointed – and angry.

It’s clear that the problem began when Snyder fired all the elected officials in Flint and appointed an emergency manager for the city who would make all the decisions. In otherords, he suspended democracy. He silenced the people, of whom more than 40 percent live below the poverty threshold and sixty percent are black. They aren’t part of his voting constituency. They don’t count.

Listening to Rachel’s show, I was reminded of Frank Herbert’s classic book, Dune, where water is the most precious commodity. But that was fiction. What’s happening in Flint is real life. You turn on the faucet in your kitchen and brown, smelly water pours out. Your kids break out in rashes. Their hair falls out. Pregnant women may give birth to deformed children. The elderly with compromised immune systems can‘t fight off the toxicity. Here’s what the Mayo clinic has to say about lead poisoning.

Snyder knowingly poisoned the water supply of a city of 100,000 so he could save money. If he were a foreign leader, the U.S. military would invade his country, topple his dictatorship, and probably send in Navy SEALS to take him out. But so far, Snyder hasn’t been investigated, impeached, or indicted. My hope is that as a result of Rachel’s town hall show in Flint, that will quickly change.

It’s unconscionable that in the supposedly richest country on the planet, a city of 100,000 is without clean water. Here’s the Rachel Maddow website where you can read the latest news about Flint. While you read it, imagine how you would feel if this fiasco had happened whee you live. Imagine turning on a faucet and only filthy, toxic water pours out. You can’t drink the stuff or bathe in it. Now what?

Poets are a special breed, able to capture an emotion, thought, or situation in a few words or with a particular phrase that resonates so deeply within us that everything else melts away. Poetry requires the writer to enter an altered state of consciousness that is often so extreme the artist is swept up in the creation, lost inside of it, and merges with whatever he or she has created.

Anne Sexton was that kind of poet, a paradox, a woman who came of age in the fifties and sixties and tackled taboos in a way that few other female writers had at the time. Abortion, menstruation, incest, adultery, sexuality, masturbation, drug addiction, depression, suicide and death. These days, such topics are the stuff of TV talk shows, but in Sexton’s era, propriety didn’t look kindly on open discussions of this kind of stuff.

After the birth of her first daughter, she suffered from post partum depression and in 1954, suffered her first breakdown. The second breakdown occurred a year later and after a suicide attempt, she was hospitalized. At Glenside Hospital, she met Dr. Martin Orne, the psychiatrist who became her long-time therapist and encouraged her to write poetry as a kind of therapy. Orne would later become well known for his work as an expert witness for Patricia Hearst and for his pivotal testimony that led to the Hillside Strangler pleading guilty.

Sexton’s first published book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, brought confession poetry to a whole new level. She continued writing while she battled what was later diagnosed as bipolar disorder. Her work was tremendously popular during her lifetime and even though critics often attacked her poetry for its confessional and taboo themes, she won numerous awards, received a Guggenheim Fellowship, grants from the Ford Foundation, honorary degrees, and became the first woman to receive Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa award. She also held professorships at Colgate University and Boston University and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967 for her third books of poems, Live or Die.

Just in these lines of Sexton’s poetry, you can see the themes:

But suicides have a special language.

Like carpenters they want to know which tools.

They never ask why build.

Twice I have so simply declared myself,

have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,

have taken on his craft, his magic.

In 1974, Houghton Mifflin published The Death Notebooks, the last book of her poetry published while she was alive. On October 4 of that year, a month before her forty-sixth birthday, Sexton had lunch with poet Maxine Kumin to revise galleys for Sexton’s manuscript of The Awful Rowing Toward God, scheduled for publication in March 1975. When she returned home, she put on her mother’s old fur coat, removed all her rings, poured herself a glass of vodka, and locked herself in the garage. Then she started the engine of her car and killed herself by carbon monoxide poisoning.

You might say that because of her mental history, previous attempted suicides, and the themes of her poetry, Anne Sexton was destined to become a suicide. The fact that her last published work was The Death Notebooks certainly qualifies as a tragic synchronicity; she initially wanted the volume published posthumously. But was The Death Notebooks precognitive? Perhaps. It was in this volume she wrote:

For God was as large as a sunlamp and laughed his heat at us and therefore we did not cringe at the death hole.

In the October 27, 1974 edition of the New York Times, author Erica Jong wrote that for Anne Sexton the writing of poetry wasn’t just some literary exercise. “It was a kind of essential, life-giving stay against confusion—and the silence that ‘is death.’”

The epigraph for The Death Notebooks is a quote from Hemingway: “Look, you con man, make a living out of your death.” And as Erica Jong wrote, “ Anne Sexton could not die until she put the whole story of her death into poetry. This was her ‘living,’ and she made it last as long as she could.”