Welcome to The Mystical Underground

This flash mob of dancers in India is one of the most moving I’ve seen.

 Richard Feynman was a theoretical physicist who won the Nobel in physics in 1965 for his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics.  I had read about him from time to time, but he didn’t really register until I was reading a book about Wolfgang Pauli and  his obsession with the number 137.

The number puzzled most physicists. But it was Feynman, though, who said that physicists should put a sign in their offices to remind themselves of how much they don’t know. The sign would be simple: 137.

 So the other day when I was at Barnes & Noble, I found a book called Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science.  I realized I didn’t know much about Feynman except for this 137 detail, so I bought the book.

 The book is fascinating – not only for insights into Feynman the scientist, but insights into Feynman the man. The love of his life was Arline Greenbaum, whom he met at a party when he was 15 and she was just 13. She was his opposite in every way – right brain to his left brain, endowed with artistic and musical talents.

“Richard and Arline were soul mates,” writes Lawrence M. Krauss, the author of the book. “They were not clones of each other, but symbiotic opposites – each completed the other. Arline admired Richard’s obvious scientific brilliance, and Richard clearly adored the fact that she loved and understood things he could barely appreciate at that time. But what they shared, most important of all, was a love of life and a spirit of adventure.”

 Feynman proposed to her when he was a junior at MIT. During the five years between his proposal and her death from tuberculosis, they corresponded constantly.  “…her spirit provided him with the vital encouragement he needed to keep going, to find new roads, to break traditions, scientific and otherwise,” writes Krauss.

 Their parents were concerned about their relationship. His mother was afraid that Arline’s physical condition – the TB – would be a drain on his ability to work and on his finances. But as  Feynman wrote his parents, “I want to marry Arline because I love her – which means I want to take care of her. That is all there is to it…”

 And so they were married. But  on June 16, 1945, six weeks before the atomic bomb Feynman helped to build was exploded over Hiroshima,  Arline passed away. “After she breathed her last breath in the hospital room, he kissed her, and the nurse recorded the time of death as 9:21 PM.”

 He later discovered that the clock by her bedside had stopped exactly at 9:21.

 Unfortunately, Feynman didn’t recognize the synchro. “A less rational mind might have found this cause for spiritual wonder or enlightenment – the kind of phenomena that makes people believe in a higher cosmic intelligence. But Feynman knew the clock was fragile. He had fixed it several times and he reasoned that the nurse must have picked it up and disturbed it to check on Arline’s time of death.”

I found this part of Feynman’s story deeply sad. He had just lost the love of his life, the clock on the bedside had stopped precisely at the time she had died, and he didn’t recognize it as significant. Yet, this phenomenon has been experienced by numerous people, under the same circumstances, and certainly qualifies as a synchronicity.

I think it illustrates how all too often we humans dismiss the obvious because to acknowledge it would force us, at the very least, to question how the world works and, at the outer extreme, might shatter our current worldviews.

 The day this photo was taken, it was 95 degrees in the shade and the heat index was 105.  Cody,  the husky,  and Red, some sort of hound, were so hot they simply found a cool spot in the dirt and panted.

Red belongs to Estis, a pianist who teaches music to elementary school kids and is on break this summer, and Cody belongs to Karin, who was out of town. Estis usually shows up at the dog park around four, and she’s   chatty and happy.  But when she walked in today with both Cody and Red, she looked miserable.

“What’s going on?” I asked her.

Estis rolled her eyes. “Well, Karin left town on Thursday. My husband was going to drive her to the airport, so he first dropped me off at the dog park with Cody and Red. I had forgotten the park is closed  for maintenance on Thursdays, so I had to walk home with both dogs.” She lives about a mile from the dog park and Cody isn’t easy to walk on a leash.

But Estis and the two dogs finally got home and everyone settled in the kitchen – Estis and her two daughters and the two dogs.  Her daughters were painting and working on something and no one was paying much attention to the dogs.  Suddenly, Red begins to howl from another part of the house, a wild, frantic howling, and Estis and her daughters raced to the back of the house.

At the end of the hall, there’s a bathroom where they had put their caged parakeets while Cody was visiting, and the door was no longer closed. Cody had somehow managed to open the bathroom door and the door to the cage, and had grabbed one of the parakeets.

“He was totally wild, Trish, and raced up the hall with blue parakeet feathers plastered all over his muzzle, and his eyes were…just wild, I’ve never seen his eyes like that. My daughters were screaming, Red was still howling and cowering in a corner, and I raced after Cody, trying to catch him.”

Estis finally offered Cody a treat and as he opened his mouth, the dead parakeet fell to the floor. At this point, her daughters were freaking out, Red’s howls filled the air, and Cody raced up and down the hallway, “totally out of control.”

Estis got everyone calmed down and eventually put Cody out on the porch while she cleaned up the mess. Karin’s daughter was home, so Estis called her and  asked her to pick up Cody.

I was frankly astonished by this story. At the dog park, Cody is unusually gentle with other dogs, even when they’re playing and roughhousing. He races into the park every afternoon to greet his buddies – humans and canines alike – and  his joy so obvious that it’s a treat just to watch him. Then he  trots off, pursuing scents, chasing squirrels, playing king of the mountain on the mound of dirt at the far end of the park. Rob and I have often called him Cody the Trickster because he can be so mischievous. Estis’s story prompted me to think about the emotional lives of dogs, which is certainly as real as the emotional lives of humans.

Cody actually belongs to Karin’s son, but when he was in college he became Karin’s dog. She is his main person. Whenever she leaves the park to get something out of her car, Cody paces along the fence, watching her, waiting anxiously for her to return. She left town to meet her husband in upstate New York because her brother-in-law is dying. There has been a lot of tension in the household this summer and Cody, like most animal companions, has probably sensed it. So when his human drove off in the car with Estis’s husband that Thursday morning, bound for the airport, and then Cody ended up at Estis’s house, the bottom probably fell out of his world.

As Cody and Red panted in the shade this afternoon, I ran my fingers through Cody’s thick, soft fur and he dropped his head back, looking up at me with  eyes that are such an exquisite turquoise it’s as if you’re peering into an undiscovered sea. He ran his tongue over my hand, then my cheek as if to say, I know you what you and Estis were talking about. But I’m not a bad dog, really I’m not.  

 Red nudged Cody’s back with his snout. Hey Dude, I’m here, pay attention to me.  And they curled up in the hot shade, best friends forever.  

GOOD MORNING (afternoon, evening). Had any Kebernarans lately?

That word, kebenaran, which is Javanese, relates to unusual coincidences, and it sounds like something out of the world of Kurt Vonnegut with his karass and granfaloons.  Here’s some Javanese wisdom related to synchronicity.

“Events do not happen because of chance, but manifest themselves because of hidden forces that bring about each co-incidence, each kebenaran.   A new event is a crossroad, a co-inciding, in which the shadow of inevitability becomes a fact.”

– Niels Mulder, Mysticism in Java: Ideology in Indonesia, Amsterdam: the Pepin Press, 1998, p.84

‘Kebenaran’ comes from the root benar which means true.  The word means truth as a noun, but in its adverbial form it means by chance, by accident.  Thus, a Javanese understanding of the relationship between “truth” and “chance”?

The term “hidden force” is also suggestive and was the title of a novel from a century ago about Java by L. Couperus.

We’ve talked about the scarab beetle here before since it played a major role Carl Jung’s development of his concept of synchronicity. His story of a female patient telling him about her dream of a scarab beetle just as a beetle very similar to the scarab struck Jung’s window. He opened the window, caught it in his hand and showed it to the woman. She had been extremely rigid in her thinking and the remarkable meaningful coincidence was a break-through in her therapy.

Now we have a collection of ‘lost’ fairy tales surfacing from Germany that are entitled Prinz Roßzwifl. That’s a local dialect for “scarab beetle.” The scarab, also known as the dung beetle, buries its most valuable possession, its eggs, in dung, which it then rolls into a ball using its back legs. Erika Eichenseer, cultural curator in the Bavarian region of Oberpfalz, sees the beetle’s lifestyle as symbolic of fairytales, which she says hold the most valuable treasure known to man: ancient knowledge and wisdom to do with human development, testing our limits and salvation.

Eichenseer published a selection of the 500 new fairytales that were compiled in the 19^th century by a local Bavarian historian, Franz Xaver von Schönwerth (1810–1886), the same time a sthe Grimm brothers were gathering fairytales that became a world famous collection. The fairy tales had been locked away in an archive in Regensburg, Germany for over 150 years.

According to an article in The Guardian, Von Schönwerth spent decades asking country folk, laborers and servants about local habits, traditions, customs and history, and putting down on paper what had only been passed on by word of mouth. In 1885, Jacob Grimm said this about him: “Nowhere in the whole of Germany is anyone collecting [folklore] so accurately, thoroughly and with such a sensitive ear.” Grimm went so far as to tell King Maximilian II of Bavaria that the only person who could replace him in his and his brother’s work was Von Schönwerth.

Von Schönwerth compiled his research into a book called Aus der Oberpfalz – Sitten und Sagen, which came out in three volumes in 1857, 1858 and 1859. The book never gained prominence and faded into obscurity.

Many of the fairy tales do not appear in other European collections. For example, there is the tale of a maiden who escapes a witch by transforming herself into a pond. The witch then lies on her stomach and drinks all the water, swallowing the young girl, who uses a knife to cut her way out of the witch. However, the collection also includes local versions of the tales children all over the world have grown up with including Cinderella and Rumpelstiltskin, and which appear in many different versions across Europe.

Von Schönwerth was a historian and recorded what he heard faithfully, making no attempt to put a literary gloss on it, which is where he differs from the Grimm brothers. However, says Eichenseer, this factual recording adds to the charm and authenticity of the material. What delights her most about the tales is that they are unpolished. “There is no romanticising or attempt by Schönwerth to interpret or develop his own style,” she says.

So now we have a whole new world of magic animals, brave young princes and evil witches coming to light. Thanks to Jim Bansholzer for alerting us to this story.

 Here is one of those stories about a mysterious person who appears at the scene of a tragedy, make a difference, and then can’t be found.

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On Sunday, August 2, around 9:00 a.m, a 19-year-old woman, Katie Lentz, was hit by a drunk driver in a small Missouri town. Badly injured but still alive, Katie was trapped between the steering wheel and the seat. A rescue vehicle arrived at the scene and workers tried for 45 minutes to extricate her from her mangled car, but to no avail.

Her condition deteriorated and she finally asked the rescue workers to pray with her. That’s when a priest with gray hair, dressed in black and wearing a clerical collar, appeared on the scene and offered a prayer. He told everyone to remain calm and said that when they were done praying, Katie would be freed from her car.

Right after the priest finished praying for her, the fire department arrived with the equipment necessary to cut Katie free from her car. When she was pulled from the wreckage, nearly a dozen firefighters turned to thank the priest for his help. But he was nowhere to be seen.

The highway where the accident occurred had been blocked for a quarter of a mile during the 90 minutes rescue and there were no bystanders and not  a single parked car nearby. A friend of Katie’s told the local new affiliate KHQA hat they were looking for the priest to thank him, but so far no one had seen him.  He wasn’t in any of the dozens of photos that were taken of the accident and no one has been able to identify him.

New London Fire Chief Raymond Reed, one of the rescuers at the scene, told KHQA that it was a miracle. “I would say it was either an angel that was sent to us in the form of a priest or a priest that became our angel, I don’t know. Either way, I’m good with it.”

Katie’s mother agrees. She told USA Today that emergency workers said her daughter should not have lived through the crash. She believes the man may have been “an angel dressed in priests attire because the Bible tells us there are angels among us.”

 The young woman remains in serious condition  and has gone through surgery for her injuries.  The image above is a sketch artist’s rendition of what the priest looked like.

Stories like these have circulated for years. There’s a phenomenon called the third man factor or the third man syndrome that refers to an unseen presence – a spirit, perhaps – that provides comfort during traumatic and life-threatening experiences. But in this instance, the priest was a physical presence witnessed by others.

Thanks to Adele Aldridge, who sent us the cartoon.

This very strange video – caught on a condo surveillance camera – shows an unidentified object dipping into a condominium swimming pool. As NBC news put it: A skinny dipping UFO?

Today we’ll be live with Kate Valentine to talk about Aliens in the Backyard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=RIsanHSS_FM

Right now, we’re working on our new book, The Synchronicity Highway. I was doing some research on telekinesis – also known as psychokinesis or PK – which is mind-matter interaction, the movement of or effect upon  matter  through nothing more than the power of mind. Hollywood loves this stuff. Think Carrie, The Fury, the X-Men, Matilda, Firestarter…

One of the most famous telekinetics in the 1970s and 1980s was Uri Geller, the Israeli spoon bender. He claims his telekinetic powers came from ETs. Maybe they did. Enhanced paranormal abilities are often reported in the wake of UFO encounters and abductions. But Geller’s problem wasn’t ETs: it’s that his credibility was seriously undermined by professional skeptics like James Randi, who insisted Geller’s alleged telekinetic feats were sleights of hand, just stage magic. Even noted scientists attacked him. Richard Feynman and Martin Gardner claimed Geller was fraudulent in his claims.

At some point during 1974, I happened to see Geller on TV one night, at the height of his popularity. He was bending spoons. It fascinated me, watching this guy’s fingers moving up and down the spoon until the curved end started to droop like a wilted flower.  I thought how I would love to see him do this in person, close up. About ten years later,  I had an opportunity.

Rob and I had been married about a year and happened to be in a South Florida mall, where Geller was  demonstrating his telekinetic abilities. We wandered over to the small group that watched -– maybe two dozen people – and were able to move in close to the platform that elevated him somewhat above the crowd. It was hardly  Madison Square Gardens!  

First he demonstrated the spoon-bending thing and talked about what was happening as he ran his fingers repeatedly over the spoon.  We were close enough to Geller to reach out and touch him, so we had an excellent view of the spoon. As we watched, the upper part of the handle started to bend, so that the spoon curved downward, like something out of a Dali painting. Then Geller asked for keys from the audience. People gladly turned over their keys – but we didn’t. We had just seen what he’d done to the spoon and we didn’t  intend to get stuck at a mall ten to fifteen miles from home!

As sets of keys were handed over to Geller, as he ran his fingers over them, a tight hush settled over the small crowd. Keys were bent at weird and impossible angles and handed back to their owners, who held them up for everyone to see.

Sleight of hand? We aren’t professional debunkers or magicians, but were close enough to see the metal bend, to see what the keys looked like when the owners dangled them from their raised hands for minutes after Geller returned them. The metal was curved, bent, abnormal.

Some years later, in the early 1990s, we were at a writers’ symposium on censorship in Gainesville, Florida. Science fiction writers Jay and Joe Haldeman – brothers – were also there, along with Martin Caidan, an aviation and aeronautical expert and   author of more than 50 books. His 1972 novel, Cyborg, became the basis of the TV series The Six Million Dollar Man and its spinoff, The Bionic Woman.

 We got to talking to him because of Indiana Jones. Rob had recently finished writing the sixth of his original Indiana Jones novels for Lucas Films, was burned out on the character, and now Caidan was going to continue the series.

After the symposium, Marty invited us back to his place. He was eager to show us the  experiment he’d devised to prove that telekinesis is not only real and possible, but that he himself was telekinetic. The room was on the second floor of his house. At one time, it probably had been a bedroom, but Caidan had redesigned it with a large picture window that looked into an elaborate array of psi wheels. A psi wheel is a pyramid-shaped device that consists of a piece of paper or foil that’s balanced on the tip of a toothpick or needle. The room resembled a field of miniature weather vanes.

He explained that the room was specially sealed against currents of air so that nothing but the power of the mind could cause those psi wheels to turn. As the three of us stood at the window, Caidan went into a trancelike state and focused intently on the psi wheels. For several minutes, nothing happened. Then a couple of the psi wheels began to turn. They weren’t spinning, weren’t going nuts, but were definitely moving without an apparent source or trigger. It looked strangely beautiful and weird, as though we were in the midst of an ongoing psychic opera.

Parapsychologist Loyd Auerbach was a friend of Caidan’s and sometimes accompanied him to demonstrations and workshops. In his  June 2004 Fate magazine column, Auerbach wrote, “Martin Caidan was capable of moving things with this mind.”

James Randi offered his rebuttal three months later, saying that in 1994, he had offered to test Caidan’s ability, but that “he frantically avoided my challenge by refusing even the simplest proposed controls.”

What’s interesting about Randi’s comment is his apparent assumption that he is the final authority on whether someone’s psychic abilities are genuine. And since he is a professional skeptic, who makes his living by debunking others, he won’t ever be able to pronounce that anyone is actually psychic because it would make him look bad.  Also, he would have to pay the million bucks he has offered to anyone who can prove they are psychic.

Being a skeptic is easy. It’s far more difficult to approach an apparent impossibility with an open mind and investigate what might actually be going on.