Welcome to The Mystical Underground

Jung was such an atypical psychiatrist for the time in which he lived that he never went through psychoanalysis himself. Instead, as Deirdre Bair notes in her biography about him, he used his “‘personal myth’ as the starting point to formulate what he believed were enduring objective truths. He juxtaposed his personal myth against the myths of many disparate cultures, eventually adding new terms to the common vocabulary and new ways of thinking about ideas.”

As a result, he coined two other words beside synchronicity that are now part of the lexicon of western culture: the collective unconscious and archetypes. The first phrase refers to a kind of psychic repository of our history as a species. It contains images Jung called archetypes that are common to all people regardless of nationality, race, gender, cultural background, or religious beliefs. These images are found in folklore and mythology, fairy tales and fantasies, in legends, dreams, even in hallucinations. Mother, father, child, family, wise old man or woman, animal, hero, trickster, shadow, orphan, victim, quest, separation from parents, and, of course, birth and death. Those archetypes are the most common.

Archetypes, when used effectively in storytelling, touch us deeply and tend to stay with us. Take Indiana Jones, the embodiment of the likeable adventurer and hero, or Luke Skywalker, the young, innocent hero whose ultimate quest was to defend the universe against Darth Vader. Vader is the personification of two archetypes – father and the shadow. Dexter was also a shadow archetype, an anti-hero, but not quite as dark as Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lambs.

In Alice Siebold’s 2002 novel The Lovely Bones, a teenage girl is raped and murdered by a neighbor and from her “personal heaven” keeps tabs on her family and friends, witnessing how her death impacted their lives. The novel’s large archetypal themes- the death of a child, the survival of consciousness, the fractured family structure – made the book a bestseller. Peter Jackson directed the film adaptation which was released in 2009. Toward the end of the novel and the movie, there’s a powerful spirit communication scene where the spirit of Susie, the murdered teen, enters the body of her friend, Ruth, while she is with Ray, who had a crush on Susie before she was murdered. Ray senses Susie’s presence and when he and Ruth make love, he knows he is making love to Susie.

One of the best movies about spirit communication was the 1990 blockbuster Ghost. Patrick Swayze, a banker who is murdered, tries desperately to warn his lover, Demi Moore, a potter, that his co-worker, Carl, is responsible for his murder. Carl needs to obtain Swayze’s book of passwords so he can access and launder excess money in various bank accounts and figures he can do this by wooing Moore.

Swayze learns how to manipulate physical objects from the spirit realm and several times, these objects divert Moore, saving her from danger. But Swayze’s real break in communicating with Moore comes through Goldberg, a con artist who claims to be a medium. When Goldberg hears Swayze talking to her, she realizes she really can hear spirits and from that point forward, she becomes instrumental in communicating with Moore and exposing Carl’s plans.

The story has many of the elements common to spirit communication – sounds and noises generated by Swayze’s spirit, Moore’s sense of his presence, a medium with whom he can communicate. And there’s a scene at the end similar to one in The Lovely Bones, where Goldberg allows Swayze’s spirit to inhabit her body so that he and Moore can experience one slow, romantic dance together.

Then there’s The Sixth Sense, which is probably M. Knight Shyamalan’s best film, with Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment, who plays the kid who communicates with spirits who don’t realize they are dead.

Stories like these capture the archetypes of spirit communication, illustrating how a tragedy ignites our awareness that nothing is what it appears to be, that there’s a deeper order in the universe and that the language of this hidden order in synchronicity. But in real life, spirit contact is often stranger than fiction.

Bernard Beitman has one such story in his new book, Connecting with Coincidence. A woman named Saundra was eating Chinese food at her dad’s place and texted her sister that one of their favorite movies, The Wizard of Oz, was on TV. Her sister replied that she recalled watching that movie with their mom, who was deceased, and that their mother would always fix popcorn. While Saundra was reading her sister’s text message, she popped open a fortune cookie. What did the fortune say? Popcorn.

Saundra, surprised, stunned, texted this development to her sister. “They both felt the presence and comfort of their mother,” Beitman writes

Over the years, we’ve cracked open a lot of fortune cookies and have never seen the word popcorn. What are the odds? How many words are there in the English language? Even when you Google the question, the range of words in the English language extend from the Oxford Dictionary’s estimate of a quarter of a million distinct words to the estimate by the Global Language Monitor that, as of 2014, comes up with 1, 025,109.8.

Whichever figure you choose results in astronomical odds that Saundra’s fortune cookie would include the very word that she and her sister were texting about. And these huge odds are one of the first things that synchronicities involving spirit communication usually have in common.

When Seth Lloyd was a college student, he read a short story called The Garden of Forking Paths, by Jorge Luis Borges. In the story, Borges envisions a world in which all possibilities actually happen. At each decision point, each fork in the path, the world takes not one alternative but both at once.

To quote Borges: “He (Ts’ui Pen) believed in an infinite series of times in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us.”

Lloyd was fascinated by the concept in this story because it sounded like the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. “In this interpretation,” Lloyd writes in his book Programming the Universe, “whenever anyone makes a measurement that reveals information about the world being one way or another, the world splits in two and takes both paths.” So he wondered if Borges got his idea for the story from quantum mechanics.

In 1983, when Lloyd was a graduate student in physics at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, he was standing with a group of fellow grad students talking casually about life in Cambridge when a woman approached and said: “You fools! Don’t you see that the world’s greatest author is sitting over there with no one to talk to?”

Lloyd looked up to see an old blind man in a white suite sitting on a bench. It was Jorge Luis Borges, and the woman was his companion. Astonishingly, Lloyd realized he now had a chance to ask Borges in person about the question that had been on his mind for years.

Lloyd introduced himself and asked whether or not the foundations of quantum mechanics had influenced his writing of that story. Borges answered no, but went on to say that although he had not been influenced by quantum mechanics, he was not surprised that laws of physics mirrored ideas from literature.

In fact, The Garden of Forking Paths was published in 1941, years before John Wheeler’s student Hugh Everett introduced the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. “So if there was influence, it was from literature to physics, not the other way around,” writes Lloyd.

The only thing missing in Lloyd’s story is that he failed to note the extraordinary unlikelihood of his meeting with Borges. If he seemed astonished by the coincidental meeting, he didn’t make note of it. In fact, nowhere in Programming the Universe does the word ‘synchronicity’ appear. But then he refers to the universe as a giant computer, and perhaps in Lloyd’s view synchronicity was not programmed into it. That seems hard to fathom, and I would like to ask him about that.

Maybe someday I’ll be at a conference and someone will approach me and says, “You see that man over there? He wrote Programming the Universe.” If that ever happens, I have a question for him, just as he had one for Borges. I will ask: “Dr. Lloyd, considering the meaningful coincidence you experienced when you met Jorge Luis Borges, where does synchronicity fit into the programming of the universe?”

Here’s the thing about election season politics in the U.S. It’s wild, unpredictable, and has revealed the dark underbelly of the American psyche – that we are a deeply divided and polarized nation. We elevate a reality TV star and billionaire to an unprecedented status, apparently won’t mind a second Clinton in the White House, and have a media that pretty much ignores the only candidate with a truly progressive platform.

The other night for the MSNBC town hall meetings with Clinton and Sanders, I experienced something new – a disappointment in the network’s coverage. Clinton got an hour with Rachel Maddow, Sanders got 30 minutes. Why?

More and more frequently, I find that the media, even the progressive media that we usually like and watch, are leaning toward Clinton. Why? She represents the status quo. She will embroil us in endless wars, will feel that she must be tough on national security because she’s a woman – and that kind of tough means an increased defense budget- and she will dance with Wall Street even though she says otherwise. In the end, nearly everything she says is about her, what she has done and accomplished, and why she is the only one who can take on Trump. When I hear her speak now, I turn off the news and watch House of Cards.

Yes, it’s Netflix’s fiction. But is it? Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright are moderate Democrats who also happen to be really despicable. I love the show, but can’t think of a single character – except, perhaps, the poor writer who has fallen in love with the First Lady, who is likeable. Are the Underwoods fashioned on the Clintons?

Today, our neighbor Annette stopped by. She’s giving us a bed she no longer needs that we’ll put in the guest bedroom. She happened to mention that she’s voting for Trump. We told her that she will be voting against her family’s self-interest and why not vote for Sanders?

“Because he won’t be the candidate,” she said. “And I can’t vote for Clinton.”

“She’s under investigation by the FBI,” I said. “If she’s indicted, she won’t be a candidate.”

Annette just rolled her eyes. “She won’t be indicted. She’s a Clinton.”

Really? Do we tune into House of Cards because it depicts every dark facet of politics that we always suspected was true?

The Wisconsin primary is today, April 5. If Sanders wins by a big margin, then he has a good shot. There’s a chance that if he wins, some of the super delegates – the most UNdemocratic wrench in the Democratic party – may give him a thumbs up. If that happens, Trump will be reduced to shredded lettuce.

In fact, Trump’s latest remarks – that women who have abortions should be prosecuted – may be exactly what Sanders said it was, another stupid remark to grab headlines. But it also resulted in a skyrocket of Trump’s negative ratings, even among Republican women. The media salivates over stuff like this and it all could end up as a contested convention – also depicted in this season’s House of Cards. If that happens, who knows what jerk will win the nomination? It could be anyone. Kasich, Rand Paul, Sarah Palin.

Voters who dislike Clinton may end up voting for her simply because the alternative is too awful to contemplate and they believe she can win against Trump. But if you’re going to vote on that basis, she’s not your candidate. Sanders is.

But don’t listen to me. Go watch House of Cards. It’s possible that some of the writers were tuning into the future when they wrote this season’s episode a year ago.

PS And Bernie wins  Wisconsin by double digits!

Here’s an interesting article  by Jule Beck that appeared in The Atlantic on synchronicity. Beck does her best at trying to balance meaningfulness with randomness. Of course, if you do that, you get all twisted in knots, and it sounds as if you can’t make up your mind.

Beck doesn’t exactly scoff at those who see meaning in coincidences, but she seems to think that statistician David Hand, is making an important point when he writes in his book, The Improbability Principle: “Extremely improbable events are commonplace.”

Obviously coincidences are not that commonplace or Hand wouldn’t go on to say that people only pay attention when an event is coincidental, while ignoring the that thousands of events that happen that are not coincidental. (Should we be amazed when something isn’t coincidental?)

Beck notes: “Humans generally aren’t great at reasoning objectively about probability as they go about their everyday lives.” That’s the scientific bias against people’s ability to make sense of the world. (I don’t think that’s necessarily true about probability as it is about politics. After all,  35-40% of Republicans think Donald Trump would make a great president. And some of them no doubt are scientists!)

Fortunately, Beck balances Hand’s randomania with the more synchronicity-friendly point of view of Bernard Beitman, whose new book Coinciding Coincidences takes on the view of statisticians like Hand.

There are lots of good examples in the article and it’s worth reading. Beck spins some clever zingers, like this one:  If a rare event happens in a forest and no one notices and no one cares, it’s not really a coincidence. That is true. If you don’t pay attention, coincidences can pass right over your head.

The bottom line: It all comes down to whether you see meaning in life or are convinced everything is basically random and meaningless. A sad state of affairs.

As Beitman puts it: “You really come across a question of just what belief system you have about how reality works. Are you a person who believes the universe is random or are you a person who believes there’s something going on here that maybe we gotta pay more attention to? On the continuum of explanation, on the left-hand side we’ve got random, on the right-hand side we’ve got God. In the middle we’ve got little Bernie Beitman did something here, I did it,  but I didn’t know how I did it.”

Over Valentine’s Day weekend, Megan came home to attend the wedding of a former college roommate. On Saturday, she headed up to Jupiter with another friend to see some sea tortoises, so I loaded Nika and Noah into my car for some time at the dog park. There was some sort of festival going on.

But as I reached the end of our neighborhood, Megan’s car turned in and we both stopped. “I forgot Chelsea’s cupcakes,” she said. Chelsea had asked Megan to pick up some Valentine’s Day cupcakes and they were still in a box in our fridge. “Is the house unlocked?”

“Nope,” I replied. “I’ll follow you back.”

I did a sloppy u-turn that took me over the front lawn of the house on the corner and I suddenly got stuck. Really stuck! We’ve had an unseasonal amount of rain for January and February and the ground was so saturated that every time I gunned the accelerator, the front tires of my Mazda 3 just kept digging in deeper and deeper. Mud flew everywhere. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any photos, but the picture above was what my front tires looked like, only they were sunk deeper than that one.

By this time, Megan was at our house and I called her and told her what had happened. She appeared about 30 seconds later and we tried to push the car back out of the mud. Nope. Didn’t work. A couple of young guys from the neighborhood had seen our dilemma and hurried over and tried to push us back. Nope.

By now, less than five minutes after the car had gotten stuck, a lawn service truck was coming out of the neighborhood across the street. The driver saw us, and quickly parked, and three Mexicans hurried across the street to help. Equestrians in golf carts wandered past and a couple of them stopped and offered to help. But it was obvious a golf cart wasn’t going to pull the car out!

The three Mexican guys pushed and pushed to no avail and they finally connected a chain to the underside of the car. I put the Mazda into neutral and their truck finally pulled my Mazda out of the muck. I drove home to pick up the dogs but the mud was so thick on my car I had to hose it down first and kept thinking OK, this is important, like an image from a dream. What’s it mean?

This incident is the kind that happens in the magic of every day life, where the universe speaks to us constantly. When we don’t hear the message, then the message becomes more literal and visceral – like getting stuck!- until we are forced to pay attention.

So what I took away from this experience is that even if I’m stuck – in a book, career, family, relationships, finances, whatever it is – help isn’t just on the way, it’s quick! And the help comes through strangers.

What I don’t know right now is the specific nature of the muck in which I got stuck. I suspect it’s my novel. We’ll see.

Synchronicity sometimes acts as a kind of alchemy that transforms us or a decision we’re making in an essential way. The alchemy occurs because of what the synchronicity says to you, its impact on you. This was certainly the case for Carl Jung during a visit in the 1950s with Henry Fierz, a chemistry professor with whom he had become friends over the years.

Friez had dropped by at five o’clock one afternoon to talk with Jung about a manuscript by a scientist who had recently died. Friez felt the manuscript should be published, but Jung, who had read it, thought otherwise.  Their debate about the manuscript apparently became somewhat heated and at one point, Jung glanced at his watch, as if he were about to dismiss Friez.  Then he seemed puzzled by the time and explained that his watch had just been returned after repairs, but it read five o’clock, the time that Friez had arrived.

Jung asked Friez the time; it was 5:35. As Richard Tarnas recounted the incident in Psyche and Cosmos, Jung apparently said, “So you have the right time, and I have the wrong time. Let us discuss the thing again.”

In the ensuing discussion, Friez convinced Jung the manuscript should be published. “Here, the synchronistic event is of interest not because of its intrinsic coincidental force,” Tarnas wrote,  “but because of the meaning Jung drew from it, essentially using it as a basis for challenging and redirecting his own conscious attitude.”

Many of us might not draw a correlation between the stopped watch and the discussion. But synchronicity, by definition, is the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that is meaningful to the individual and can’t be explained by cause and effect. This means that the outer world – and all of nature and our surroundings – can carry meaning just as the inner world does. Jung, who was accustomed to perceiving and thinking symbolically, recognized the synchronicity and changed his thinking accordingly.

For Jung, Tarnas noted, “all events, inner and outer, whether emanating from the human consciousness or from the larger matrix of the world, were recognized as sources of potential and spiritual significance.” And as sources of synchronicity. “Jung saw nature and one’s surrounding environment as a living matrix of potential synchronistic meaning that could illuminate the human sphere. He attended to sudden or unusual movements or appearances of animals, flocks of birds, the wind, storms, the sudden louder lapping of the lake outside his the window of his consulting room…as possible symbolic relevance for the parallel unfolding of interior psychological realities.”

In other words, Jung used everything in his environment as potential signs and symbols. It seems that once you recognize coincidence as meaningful, once you’re in the flow of it, the inner self and the larger outer matrix chatter constantly to each other. All we need to do is listen.

Watch the sparrow who joins Bernie Sanders at a rally in Portland, Oregon. I think this is a terrific sign! Here’s the synchro. In P0rtland, there’s a saying- that comes from Portlandia – which is “to put a bird on it.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vh_DKh7VZek

Years ago, when Rob and I had been married just four years, we walked into a bookstore in a mall in a Fort Lauderdale, Florida mall, and immediately spotted a book with an alien face on the cover, a grey alien with wide, almond-shaped eyes, almost no nose, and a tiny mouth. Without saying a word to each other, we both made a beeline toward the display case, reached for the book at the same moment, then looked at each other and laughed. It was one of those moments that came to define much of our next 29 years together. The book was Communion, by Whitley Strieber.

Our fascination with the nature of reality, UFOs, aliens, and everything else that goes bump in the night, led us into freelancing writing for OMNI Magazine in the mid-1980s, where we covered UFO conferences. We spent a weekend with abductee Betty Hill, met author and UFO researcher Budd Hopkins and were present for one of his hypnosis sessions with an abductee in Lake Worth, Florida. It was Hopkins who told us he’d been working with a famous novelist who had experienced a series of encounters and had written a book about it that would be published soon. That day we found Communion, we knew Strieber was the author and Communion was the book.

In the years after, we followed Strieber’s career, devoured his books. But it wasn’t until 2009 that we actually had contact with him. The editor for Trish’s book Esperanza, worked at the publishing house that had published some of Strieber’s books, and asked him to blurb her novel. He did so and in 2010, when 7 Secrets of Synchronicity was published, he invited us to be guests on Dreamland, his podcast.

That’s some of the background. But now comes Strieber’s newest book co-authored with Jeffrey J Kripal, a historian of religions and the J Newton Rayzor Professor of Religion at Rice University. The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained is one of the best books I’ve read in years.

Strieber and Kripal have alternating chapters, a structure that works well for the book. Kripal takes parts of Strieber’s lifelong narrative about the nature of the “visitors” and looks at the material as an academic whose specialty is comparative religions. I initially thought, Huh? Really?

And then I opened the book on my iPad and read the first line, of the first chapter, written by Jeff Kripal. “I am afraid of this book.”

And I immediately liked this man and the fact that he and Strieber had teamed up. That first sentence is followed by:

There is something about it, something explosive and new. It is not a neutral book. It is an apocalypse of thought waiting for you, the reader, to actualize.

And then Kripal lays out the premise of the book, that he and Strieber explore the idea that we are all embedded “in a much larger fiercely alive and richly conscious reality that is only, at best, indirectly addressed by everything the human species has ever thought believed.”

From the beginning of Strieber’s encounters with the visitors, he has always looked at them as evidence that the nature of reality is far more complex, intricate and strange than current scientific thought understands. Kripal explores Strieber’s experiences in light of his own expertise and notes:

“Consider lines like this one, from Whitley’s The Secret School: ‘The vague mythological beings of the past that have focused into the aliens on the present will soon become our selves as we become the very time travelers whose shadows haunt all our history, including the present.”

Kripal writes, “That is the kind of mind-bending comparative practice that we are after here. To really name it, define it, and practice it, however, will take the work of both an experiencer and a theorist working together, in deep conversation and mutual criticism.”

What follows in this book is a journey so provocative that there is an ineffable quality about it. It’s not a book I can lend to my neighbor and say, “Read this and you’ll know you’re living in the matrix.” Or read this and you’ll understand the nature of encounters and abductions.

My neighbor, like me, may very well be living in the matrix. But this book won’t prove it to her. What it will do, though, is to teach her to question consensus thought about everything she believes to be true and to dig more deeply into her life for answers. For people like Rob and me, this book actually deepens the ultimate mystery about who or what the “visitors” are, their connection to the dead, and how it all fits into the matrix we call reality.

As Strieber says early in the book, “…we’re still at the beginning of the journey when it comes to finding useful questions, let alone viable answers.”

Not surprisingly, The Super Natural is a journey into Jungian archetypes – the outlier as hero. Kiplar is one of the hero’s sidekicks, one of his Pancho Villas. But Strieber’s wife and creative partner, Anne, was the muse who defined the insights of his experiences. As Strieber writes in the introduction, he and Anne evolved their approach to the super natural together.

“She provided three foundational insights. The first is that the close encounter experience is something unknown and must be kept in question. Second, that the question must be deepened and can only be resolved by scientific and academic inquiry…Third, that, after reading in excess of two hundred thousand testaments from the public about close encounter experiences, she was able to say with authority that close encounters with apparent aliens often include perceptions of the dead as well.

“It is on her rigorous questioning and tireless inquiry that my own insights deepened.”

So, as Kripal said in the beginning, I was afraid of this book. But by the end, I was steeped in the ultimate mystery, hungry for more.

++

Our interview with Whitley on Dreamland goes up this weekend.

I recently noticed a post on a closed FB synchronicity page that linked lucid dreaming with synchronicity. That caught my attention because I was just about to put together material for a workshop class that relates to lucid dreaming. It’s called Dream and Sleep Yoga, and is about meditation methods and body movements to help achieve the lucid dream state directly from conscious conscious awareness. In other words, programming a lucid dream and moving right into it after falling asleep.

So here was someone – Jo – connecting lucid dreaming with synchronicity. That’s something I had to think about.

Here’s what she wrote: “Lucid dreaming, where consciousness becomes self aware, is likened to synchronicity in ‘waking state’, in that awareness is connected to our higher selves/higher purpose for a flicker of a moment. Just like Lucid dreaming, our consciousness flickers in and out of existence, in both waking/sleep state, due to the dominant nature of ego. To dream is not necessarily to lose the ‘ego’, to lucid dream is.”

I liked the sentiment, but didn’t agree with everything she said.

For most lucid dreamers, connecting with the inner self or true self is an ideal and a work-in-progress, rather than a given. In other words, in lucid dreaming – especially for beginning lucid dreamers who move beyond that ‘flicker of lucidity’ –  the ego is alive and well. Once they can maintain control of the lucid state, they might think they own the entire dream scenario, as if it were private real estate, and can manipulate other dream characters at will.

In other words, at first it seems the dream is a total creation of the conscious mind. Some lucid dreamers fly around and play god, but eventually they discover to their astonishment that some dream characters seem to have conscious awareness and act contrary to the intent of the lucid dreamer. These lucid dreamers discover that they don’t control the entire dream scenario, that there’s a larger dream underlying reality. At that point, the lucid dreamer connects to the true self, which swims in those deeper waters of the unconscious, and surfaces from time to time as we experience synchronicity.

Jo also wrote: “By practicing living in the present, we engage the same technique as we do when we lucid dream. Consciousness becomes self aware, we quiet the mind of the ego, which is firmly placed in past and future.”

Good advice. Lucid dreaming takes place in the forever present. Now.

I recommend Robert Waggoner’s book, Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self, and also for an even more esoteric approach: The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep, by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche.