A new episode of The Mystical Underground is live! “Trish MacGregor: Star Power For February 2022”:
Join Trish for the February 2022 astrological forecast!
Sometimes when I mention Mercury retrograde – and describe its effects – I get odd looks that scream, Yeah, sure. So here are some examples of the kinds of snafus the trickster planet has stirred up. Unfortunately, we’ve experienced most of them when we didn’t follow the advice for these retrogrades:
– Don’t start anything new. Instead, revise, reconsider, review.
– Don’t sign a contract.
Don’t submit anything – ideas, products, a manuscript or screenplay, a query or synopsis.
Don’t buy a car or anything else with moving parts – including computers and electronics.
Don’t make irrevocable decisions.
Don’t have surgery.
Don’t take anything for granted – appointments, guarantees. Communicate clearly.
Don’t make travel plans during a retrograde unless you don’t mind changing the plans later.
If you travel somewhere during a Mercury retrograde, it’s likely that you’ll return to that place.
Old friends show up.
Here are some examples.
A friend told me her husband was due to have cataract surgery. When she told me the date – during a retrograde – I advised her against it. “If he has the surgery then, he may have to have it redone.” But his date was set and he didn’t want to change it. Sure enough, something got botched and the surgery had to be redone.
When Rob and I were writing the Sydney Omarr series of astrology books, I signed a contract during a Mercury retrograde – a big no-no since Mercury rules contracts. Sure enough, everything that could go wrong, did go wrong for the year that contract was in effect. The project started with one editor, then she was replaced with another and by the end of the contract, we were on our third editor. Payments got screwed up. Galleys were filled with errors.
We once bought a used car during a Mercury retrograde. One of the Do Nots for these retros is not to buy anything with moving parts – a car, computer, a merry-go-round! You get the idea. This car was a disaster right from the beginning, a lemon with multiple mechanical problems. I sometimes felt like I was driving Christine, you know, from the Stephen King book by the same name. It seemed to have a consciousness all its own. We got rid of it less than a year later.
Recently, a friend’s dog – Abby, an American bulldog- was limping and Lloyd took her to the vet. Turned out she had an ACL tear and surgery was recommended to repair it. The surgery was scheduled a week or so before the retrograde but was postponed when several of the vets were out with Covid. It was rescheduled for the day before Mercury turned retro. That made me uneasy. But later that day, Lloyd texted and said she’d come through the surgery fine. Then, the next day, with Mercury now retro, Lloyd texted to say the surgeon had operated on the wrong leg.
Our daughter, Megan, is buying a house and it’s supposed to close during this current Mercury retro. The woman who owned the house where she was living was unwilling to extend her contracts by two weeks so she could move directly into the new place when she closed. Instead, we moved her out of her place the weekend Mercury turned retro and she’ll be staying with us. The move was a nightmare. Now we’re in a Mercury retro holding pattern, waiting to find out if her loan has been approved.
Some years ago, Phyllis Vega, my co-author for Power Tarot, and I attended a book festival in northern Florida where our book was going to be featured. Mercury was retrograde. Shortly after we checked into our room, a bee stung Phyllis on the hand and we knew it meant we were going to get stung. Sure enough, copies of our book hadn’t arrived and never showed up during the entire book festival. It meant no signings, no PR, no sales.
Mercury is a trickster even under the best conditions. But when it’s retro, the trickster has a blast and delights in messing up things that should otherwise be simple and straightforward.
Don’t take my word for it, though. If you’re skeptical, test it on your own. The next Mercury retro beings on May 10 7:47 a.m.ET and 4:47 a.m PT. It ends on June 3 at 4 a.m. EST and 1 a.m. PT. Let me know how your little experiment unfolds!
Close up of Asian women with hi tech digital technology screen over the eye.
This intriguing spirit contact story comes from a long-time blogging friend, Judi Hertling. I think she was one of the first people who commented on our blog on synchronicity when it began in February 2009. She had worked with Robert Moss in his dreaming studies and has used synchronicity in her life for years.
A couple weeks into the new year, I received this email from her:
Hi Trish,
Hope you’re well and happy, and surviving these crazy times.
I’m sad to write that my sister, Jean, whom I was very close to, passed away in August. The reason I tell you this is a week after her funeral, her husband had a visitation from my sister – he said he saw her very clearly standing in their bedroom next to the bed and she was dressed all in red. Weeks later, he saw her again and this time she was dressed all in white.
His daughter-in-law, who knew nothing of this, told him a few weeks before Christmas that after my sister died she had seen her. My brother-in-law asked what she had been wearing and was told that she saw Jean dressed all in red.
I’ve researched and can find nothing in regard to seeing a spirit dressed in red and then appearing later in white. Have you come across this at all? On a synchro level Jean was taken into hospital unexpectedly on our Mom’s birthday, and passed on our Dad’s birthday a few weeks later at home. As an aside, red was one of my sisters least favorite colours.
Hugs,
Judi
I told her that I didn’t know of any spirit contact where the spirit was dressed in red. In fact, in most the experiences we’ve researched, mention of clothing and its color is rare. ,Even if red wasn’t Jean’s favorite color, maybe she used that color to attract the attention of the people to whom she was appearing. It’s hard to ignore a red.
I also said that the synchronicities involved in her sister’s death are stunning: she was taken unexpectedly to the hospital on their mother’s birthday and passed on their dad’s birthday. The odds?
The tragic and all too common element in her sister’s death during this pandemic, was that she Judi lives in Canada and her sister lived in the UK and Judi couldn’t travel there. As Judi said, “…not seeing my sister was awful and left me feeling helpless and emotionally raw. But then so many people have lost loved ones to Covid without getting to see their loved ones, so I have compassion and understanding for those families. My sister had cancer, it was very aggressive and very fast from diagnosis to her passing was only a few weeks. So unexpected.
“But in regard to the visitation and the color red. Have you read the book Mary Magdalene Revealed by Meggan Watterson? She is a Theologian and has a Master of Divinity from Harvard and Columbia. Is it possible do you think that with my sisters deep religious faith that the two could be connected?
“Okay, I’m probably grasping here right? What do you think? And yes you can post – it may bring comfort to others who may have lost a family member.”
When we attempt to decipher the meaning of a synchronicity or spirit contact experience, we look into and consider every possibility. It’s all fair game.
Your sister in red? Sure, why not? The last time I “saw” my parents, my mother was laughing and directing people into a local theater. There was no sign of the Alzheimer’s that she’d had the last 8-10 years of her life. She’d died at 83 of pneumonia, a complication from the disintegration of her left hip and her dementia. In my vision was looked to be in her late 30s or early 40s, in the full beauty of her life. At one point in that vision, she waved at someone and my dad joined her. He had Parkinson’s in the last years of his life, was in a wheelchair, and died about a month short of his 92 birthday. But in this vision, he was young and vibrant – no walker or wheelchair this time – and looked happy.
When they realized I could see them, they faded away.
A skeptic would tell me I imagined it. A skeptic would tell Judi and her relatives that it was all imagined. But I’ve come to realize that skeptics are telling us to deny the reality of our own experiences, to deny that emotional gut punch you feel when this happens. And so often, that gut feeling is what we know to be true.
Join Whitley Strieber, renown author and contactee, in a workshop on Saturday, January 29. When you register, please use code 1125773_w8d6rm9f
You’re definitely in for an eye-opener!
A new episode of The Mystical Underground is live! “Sharon Rawlette: Mysteries Of Consciousness”:
Join Trish and Rob for a conversation with…
Sharon Rawlette, is a writer and philosopher fascinated by coincidences: those strange, enigmatic experiences that are so often personally meaningful and yet push the boundaries of what we consider scientifically possible. Her May 2019 book The Source and Significance of Coincidences presents a wealth of evidence concerning the statistical significance of coincidences, their range of probable causes, and how we can best interpret their implications for our lives. She also writes about coincidences on the Psychology Today blog, Mysteries of Consciousness, and has presented some of my most recent research at the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.
She also came in 3rd place in the Robert Bigelow essay contest to prove that consciousness survives death.
We’ve all heard stories of deceased friends or family members greeting a new arrival to the afterlife. The stories typically come from people who have had near-death experiences and were told it wasn’t their time yet. But apparently deceased loved ones sometimes visit us in our everyday lives and tell us that it’s our time to leave this life.
That’s the case with the following story which appeared in by Sharon Hewitt Rawlette’s 25,000-word essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for Survival of Human Consciousness. The essay was entered into the Bigelow Institute’s contest for proof that life continues after death, and Sharon won $50,000 for her entry. At this writing, we’re looking forward to interviewing Sharon for The Mystical Underground podcast in a few days.
Here’s one of the stories she includes that suggests that our deceased loved ones can cross into our world and let us know we’ll join them soon.
# # #
As we’ve seen, one type of new, verifiable information that can be provided by an apparition is that the person appearing is recently deceased, as well as the manner in which they died. But sometimes the information provided is about someone other than the one doing the appearing. For instance, a widower named Gary confided in researcher Dianne Arcangel that he was starting to have a lot of vivid after-death encounters. He was puzzled in particular by something that had happened while he was washing his car in preparation for trading it in.
He told Arcangel, “I saw my wife standing there as plain as day. She said, ‘Don’t bother. Just enjoy your family and friends because you’ll be with me soon.’” Gary was in great health and actually starting to enjoy life again, so he didn’t know what to make of his wife’s comment. Nevertheless, only hours after Gary told her this story, Arcangel got a call from Gary’s work informing her he’d just been killed in a car accident.
# # #
I thought it was interesting that his wife told him not to bother washing the car, which not only suggests that she knew he would die soon, but also possibly that she knew he would die in a car wreck.
Throughout the years of writing about synchronicity, we’ve heard from a number of people who have experienced what I call anomalistic weirdness. The experience usually changes their idea of what’s possible, often alters the course of their lives, and becomes a memory as indelible as India ink.
One January night in 2019, Joe Killian encountered what he believed to be an alien being in the parking lot of a restaurant.
In 2012, Canadian Charles Fontaine witnessed a UFO in his backyard and experienced a cascade of synchronicities related to that experience that we wrote about in our book Aliens in the Backyard: UFO Encounters, Abductions and Synchronicity. During this strange time in his life, Charles had an encounter while sitting in his car outside a grocery store, as a tall, ant-like creature came right toward him.
Joe says his experience left his questioning everything he thought he knew about the nature of reality. It took Charles nearly six years to recover from his experience.
Several years ago in the Florida Keys, Priscilla of Pembroke Pines drove through a dense fog and moved forward in time.
Her experience was eerily similar to that of Bruce Gernon, who in 1970 was flying his Cessna back to South Florida from Andros Island in the Bahamas and was surrounded by “electronic fog,” and moved forward in time. Bruce and Rob have written two books about the experience – The Fog and Beyond the Bermuda Triangle and Bruce has appeared on dozens of TV shows to talk about what happened that day.
In 1964, John Murphy was stationed aboard a U.S. Coast Guard cutter that docked near Pennos Wharf near St. George Bermuda and experienced the inexplicable – a kind of time travel love story. He believes he walked 300 years into the past with a young woman he had just met. Not only did John and Barbara both feel an uncanny sense that they already knew each other, but during a walk they encountered a small 18th century British village with a church dominating the village square where they felt certain they’d lived before. They even recalled their lives as young married couple with children. Yet, when John returned to this location alone two days later, the village was gone. He later learned the village had been wiped out in a hurricane in the late 18th century.
The important thing about these experiences is that the individuals involved recognized that the seemingly impossible had happened to them and it changed them in a fundamental way. John Murphy, who passed away in 2019, spent years looking for Barbara and finally found her. She remembered much of what had happened that night. We recounted his story in our book Beyond Strange. Bruce’s experience – when he was 24 – shaped the rest of his adult life.
Often, when people experience this anomalistic weirdness, they don’t talk about it with others, usually out of fear that they’ll sound nuts. But when Priscilla read about Joe’s experience, she asked us to give Joe her email and now they’ve had several conversations about their respective experiences. Joe says it has helped him wrap his head around what happened to him. Charles Fontaine offered to communicate with Joe as well.
Synchronicity of one kind or another was involved in all of these experiences. I’ve come to think of these types of synchros as mind-blowing and life-altering precisely because they are so beyond strange and prompt us to question the nature of our personal and collective reality.
Is there a difference between coincidence and synchronicity? I think there is a huge difference, but decided to start with the dictionary.
From an online dictionary, coincidence is defined as: a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection.”They met by coincidence.”
From the same online source, synchronicity is defined as: the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection. “Such synchronicity is quite staggering.”
Notice the difference. We go from remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances to the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related…
The difference between those definitions is subtle and easy to miss. In the definition of synchronicity, the 2 significant words are the simultaneous occurrence… with what? Jung defined it better in the introduction he wrote to Richard Wilhelm’s translation of The I Ching. “Synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance, namely, a peculiar interdependence of objective events among themselves as well as with the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers.”
In other words, there’s an acausal connection between inner and outer states that is meaningful to you, the person who observes or experiences it.
“Wow, what a coincidence!” The next time you hear that, get the details. It’s likely the person experienced a synchronicity. The fact that they noticed indicates it held personal meaning and probably happened recently enough so they connected the dots.
Coincidence is the tidy word for synchronicity, the more acceptable word even though they don’t mean the same thing. Coincidence has a randomness to it that synchronicity does not.
Jung: Synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have eyes to see.
David Richo: We do not create our destiny; we participate in its unfolding. Synchronicity works as a catalyst toward the working out of that destiny.
Dalai Lama: I am open to the guidance of synchronicity and do not let expectations hinder my path.
A new episode of The Mystical Underground is live! “Jennifer Hough: The Wide Awakening”:
Join Trish and Rob for a conversation with…
Jennifer Hough is president of The Wide Awakening, founder of the largest integrative nutrition practice in Canada, and the first mentorship program for complementary entrepreneurs over two decades ago. Jennifer’s main focus is the science of flow in everyday life, which she refers to as ‘applied physics.’ She has mentored doctors, executives, and thought leaders globally. Her passion is to make physics practical after working with mystics, scientists and shamans from eight countries to free herself of her own struggle with chronic fatigue and self-sabotage. She has appeared on numerous podcasts, radio and television shows. The topic she would like to talk about today is How to create a viral movement using applied physics.
View of planet Mercury from space. Space, nebula and planet Mercury. This image elements furnished by NASA.
Tomorrow, January 14, at 6:41 a.m., Mercury turns retrograde in Capricorn. It happens when the planet that rules communication appears to be moving backward relative to earth. During these retro periods, there tend to be a lot of communication snafus. Cars and computers and anything else with moving parts develop problems. Travel is riddled with abrupt changes, delays. Any contracts signed during a retro will need to be revisited. It’s best to reconsider, revise, and review.
I once signed a contract during a Mercury retro and regretted it the entire duration of the contract. The book’s publication date was pushed back. The editor quit and some other editor took over in her absence.
Don’t list your home for sale during a retrograde, double check appointments, don’t schedule surgery or air travel. Delays are common. People you haven’t seen in years may suddenly reappear in your life, unresolved issues surface. If you do travel during a retro, it’s likely that you’ll return to that place.
This one will be done on February 3, at 11:13 p.m., when Mercury turns direct in Capricorn. Good luck!
