If you prefer the written version, it’s in the masthead.
Mind-Blowing Synchronicities
aliens in the bsckyard
The Shift: Reports from the Mystical Underground
White Crows
Mercury retrograde alert
About every 3 months, Mercury – the planet of communication, the intellect, the conscious mind – turns retrograde; it looks as if it’s moving backward relative to Earth. The retro lasts about 3 weeks. The last one of this year is in Libra and starts on September 27 at 1:10 am Eastern, and at 10:10 pm Pacific on September 26. It ends on October 18 at 11:17 am Eastern and 8:17 am Pacific.
Mercury governs both Gemini and Virgo, so these two signs may experience the retro more intensely. But we all have Mercury somewhere in our charts and are likely to experience communication snafus during these periods. These miscommunications span the spectrum from the absurd to the not amusing at all.
Here are some DOs and DON’Ts and MAYBES for these retros:
– Take nothing for granted. Clarify everything you say.
– Don’t buy a computer, car, or anything else with moving parts. You may regret it later.
– Revise, reconsider and rethink rather than starting or submitting something new.
– Double check appointments
– People you haven’t seen in a long time may suddenly reappear in your life
– Old issues may resurface
– Don’t sign contracts
– Try not to travel during a retro. But if you do, be flexible. Your itinerary and schedule are likely to change, especially now, with Covid regs so fluid.
Don’t buy plane or cruise tickets during a Mercury retro.
This list is just for starters. To find out how this Mercury retro may impact you, click here, the September forecast.
Vonnegut re-do
Kurt Vonnegut self-portrait
Here’s an older post from years ago that I came across about Kurt Vonnegut and Alan Vaughn. A good one, worth re-posting.
Synchronicities can happen anywhere, anytime, even when waiting out a major storm. As Hurricane Matthew approached, we kept the Weather Channel on, listened and occasionally watched the latest updates. Our house was shuttered and Trish and I were settled in with two dogs and three cats. Stuck inside, I took the opportunity to organize some of our books that were piled here and there, and see if I could find shelf space or set some aside for recycling.
I noticed two books separate from the others, one atop the other. One was The Dreaming Universe, by Fred Alan Wolf. The other was Kurt Vonnegut’s Man Without a Country. I considered putting Wolf’s book in a bag for Goodwill, but noticed there were several paper tabs marking various pages. So, curious, I open the book to one of them, glanced down the page and my gaze stopped on the phrase… ’Vonnegut’s experience.’
That seemed like an interesting coincidence since Vonnegut’s autobiographical book had been resting atop Wolf’s dream tome. So I backtracked a few paragraphs to find what Vonnegut’s experience was about.
The story comes from a book on dreams in which Alan Vaughan, one of the co-authors, wrote that he had watched an interview on TV with Vonnegut and a few nights later dreamed of Vonnegut. He wondered if the dream meant anything to Vonnegut, so the next morning, March 13, 1970, he wrote him.
“You appeared in a dream I had this morning. We were in a house full of children. You were planning to leave soon on a trip. Then you mentioned that you were moving to an island name Jerome. As far as I know, there is no such place, so perhaps the name Jerome or initial ‘J’ has some related meaning.”
Vonnegut wrote back a couple of weeks later. “Not bad. On the night of your dream, I had dinner with Jerome B. (an author of children’s books), and we talked about a trip I made three days later to an island named England.”
Here’s what Wolf had to say about the exchange about the dream. “Clearly there was a connection between Vaughan’s dream and Vonnegut’s experience, all happening the same night, although it is probable that the discussion between Vonnegut and his friend Jerome took place before the dream. But the connection cannot be considered to be causal or local since there was no signal between the two events. One would have to consider this a spontaneous telepathic dream containing the fact of the conversation mixed in a capricious manner, typical of such dreams.”
You could call it telepathic, yes, but also synchronicity.
I was going to end the post there, but as I wrote Wolf’s name in the title, I suddenly realized there was yet another synchronicity here. Just before I took on the book organizing task, I’d been working on a chapter on shamanism for a work in progress on spirit contact. Specifically, I was writing about the meaning of power animals that can appear in shamanic journeys. I looked back to where I’d stopped and yes, I’d left off with Wolf. For the record, some of the attributes of Wolf Medicine are communication, working in harmony, and sharing knowledge in a structured way.
Oddly enough, in 2009 we wrote another post here about synchronicity involving Alan Vaughan and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Interestingly, Even though it’s a completely different story, it also involved Vaughan writing a letter to Vonnegut and in that instance Vonnegut had written back about being surrounded by children. He and his wife had adopted six children all at once after their parents had both died – the late mother was Vonnegut’s sister.
Happy Fall Equinox
It’s that time of year when day and night are of equal length, supposedly representing both the light and dark in our own lives. Astrologically, the sun enters air sign Libra, which always strives for balance, harmony.
The weather doesn’t change much in Florida – it’s still a hot, muggy summer – but more northern states begin to feel a change in the weather and maybe some color in the trees.
Rob’s theory is that our cooler weather comes around mid-October. That may have been true decades ago, but now we’re lucky if we can turn off the air by mid-November or early December. Hurricane season officially runs from June 1 to November 30. This year it started on May 22. For me, living in Florida, the fall equinox represents hope that the state will escape hurricane season unscathed.
The Mystical Underground: Rob Macgregor: Staff Of Kings: Episode 2
A new episode of The Mystical Underground is live! “Rob Macgregor: Staff Of Kings: Episode 2″:
Join Rob MacGregor, the author of the Indiana Jones prequel novels and the Mystical Underground, as they present the second episode of an audio production of the unpublished novel “Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings.”
Sometimes called “The Lost Indiana Jones novel,” Staff of Kings will come out in six episodes on The Mystical Underground’s podcast feed, beginning August 22. It will continue each month through January of 2022. An extra mystery episode will post in February of 2022.
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Tagged Indiana Jones, MacGregor, novel, novelist, rob, Staff of Kings
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The Cassandra Project
In the spy thriller, Six Days of the Condor, by James Grady, Ronald Malcolm is a bookworm who works at the American Literary Historical Society. Actually, the society is a front for the CIA, and Malcolm is an agent who spends his days reading novels with a few colleagues combing the pages for clues that might predict real life upcoming scenarios. Of course things go bad for Malcolm in the book and the 1975 movie, Three Days of the Condor that starred Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, and Cliff Robertson. I’ve seen it a couple of times. It’s a good one.
Now we have a real-life program, called Project Cassandra, that was set up three years ago to do about the same thing. The German military collaborated with literary academics at the University of Tübingen to read novels and search for hints of possible future conflicts. The small team of literary scholars was led by Jürgen Wertheimer, a professor of comparative literature.
“Writers operate on a plane that is both objective and subjective,” Wertheimer said in an interview with the Guardian.
But the German press wasn’t greatly impressed when word got out about colonels meeting with literary academics to predict wars and humanitarian crises.The idea that literature could be used by the defence ministry to identify civil wars and humanitarian disasters ahead of time, wrote the Neckar-Chronik newspaper, was as charming as it was hopelessly naive. “You have to ask yourself why the military is financing something that is going to be of no value whatsoever.”
From the Guardian article: Charges of insanity, Wertheimer says, have forever been the curse of prophets and seers. Cassandra, the Trojan priestess of Greek myth, had a gift of foresight that allowed her to predict the Greek warriors hiding inside the Trojan horse, the death of Mycenaean king Agamemnon at the hands of his wife and her lover, the 10-year wanderings of Odysseus, and her own demise. Yet each of her warnings was ignored: “She’s lost her wits,” says Clytaemestra in Aeschylus’ play Agamemnon, before the chorus dismiss her visions as “goaded by gods, by spirits vainly driven, frantic and out of tune.”
There are plenty of novels that predicted future events. Three decades before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, H.G. Wells wrote The World Set Free, about atomic bombs with radioactive elements that contaminate battlefields. British author John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, published in 1968, pictured European states forming a collective union, China’s rise as a global power, the economic decline of Detroit, and the inauguration of a “President Obomi.”
We’ve written here in the blogs about novelists who have predicted future dramatic events. Fourteen years before the Titanic sank, Morgan Robertson wrote Futility: The Wreck of the Titan that accurately predicted a cruise ship very similar to the Titanic hitting an iceberg and sinking. In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a one-party state uses “telescreens” to identify people from their expressions and heart rate. It was written more than sixty years before facial recognition software became prevalent. Even more creepy was Edgar Allan Poe’s unfinished novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, that predicted an act of cannibalism at sea with eerie accuracy, including the victim’s correct name–Richard Parker–forty years before the event.
Closer to home, Trish wrote Category 5 predicting a massive hurricane hitting Miami the year before Hurricane Andrew struck. A few years after the hurricane hit, meteorologists upgraded it to a category 5.
Wertheimer told the Guardian that novelists have a “sensory talent.” Literature, he reasons, has a tendency to channel social trends, moods and especially conflicts that politicians prefer to remain undiscussed until they break out into the open. “Writers represent reality in such a way that their readers can instantly visualize a world and recognize themselves inside it. They operate on a plane that is both objective and subjective, creating inventories of the emotional interiors of individual lives throughout history.”
If states could learn to read novels as a kind of literary seismograph, Wertheimer argues, they could perhaps identify which conflicted are on the verge of exploding into violence, and intervene to save maybe millions of lives.
To find out more about the techniques that Wertheimer and his team used, you can take a look at the in-depth article from the Guardian
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Tagged novels and precognition, precognition, Six Days of the Condor, Three Days of the Condor
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The Yet to be Born
In Sharon Hewitt Rawlette’s terrific book, The Source and Significance of Coincidences, she has a fascinating chapter called Yet to be Born. She writes “While after-death communication is quite frequently considered as an explanation for coincidences, there is another similar explanation that is much more rarely explored -pre-birth communication. As the name suggests, this kind of communication comes from children before they are born, and often before they are even conceived.”
In our book, Secrets of Spirit Communication, we touched on this topic, but Sharon has explored it more deeply. She recounts how a friend of hers, Anna, now in her early twenties, still remembers being elsewhere before she was born and “ feeling the love and encouragement of a whole group of friendly beings gathered behind her. She also recalls a moment in which she felt she was ‘diverted to a different path,’ which she describes like moving on to the next step of some sort of natural progression.
“Anna connects this memory to something she said to her mother when she was a young child. Although Anna is Caucasian American, her mother confirmed to me that, when Anna was still a toddler, Anna told her something along the lines of, ‘You’re lucky to have me, because God was going to send me to China.’ While Anna doesn’t now have any pre- birth memories specifically related to China, she does remember that, at the moment when she felt her pre-birth shift to a new path, she was in a place that was very orange and sky-like, perhaps with some clouds, and that she was alone with one particular being. She imagines this is the being that, as a child, she described as ‘God.’
“When the shift to the new path happened, Anna felt her attention shift to the right, and the orange color of her surroundings became much whiter and more vivid. She also remembers a feeling that she was going to be trying something new, and she could feel the excitement of many other beings regarding this new adventure, as well as their willingness to support her and not judge her if she made mistakes.”
Sharon points out that while some people may find these kinds of stories somewhat far-fetched, there’s a growing body of evidence in the spontaneous reports of young children. Parents often dismiss these reports as fantasy, but researchers have discovered there’s a consistency to these stories and some of them provide verifiable pre-birth details. In Memories of Heaven: Children’s Astounding Recollection of the Time Before They Came to Earth, Wayne Dyer and Dee Garnes wrote about such cases. A sampling:
Janis Monachina’s daughter remembered her grandmother’s deceased twin. She said, “Yes, I was swinging with her in the clouds before I came. We were picking out my family and wearing pretty white dresses.
When Michele Mira and her husband were showing their three-year-old son photos of his deceased grandfathers, he said about his father’s father, “I know him—he’s Poppy Henry. I saw him on my way to you.”
Rawlett’s book is one of the most comprehensive sources of information I’ve found on the many aspects of synchronicity.
The Mystical Underground: Adam Stokes: Ancient Giants Of North America
A new episode of The Mystical Underground is live! “Adam Stokes: Ancient Giants Of North America”:
Join Trish and Rob for a conversation with…
Adam Stokes. Professor Stokes has degrees in religion from Duke University and Yale Divinity School. He is the author of from Egypt to Ohio: a Semitic Origin for the Giants of North America and The Latin Scrolls: Selections from the five Megillah translated from the Latin Vulgate. His work has been featured in various magazines and podcasts including Ancient American magazine, Earth Ancients, Expanded Perspectives, Forbidden Knowledge News, Broadcast Team Alpha and She’s All Over the Place. He currently teaches high school Latin and a college course on the Old Testament.
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Inventory
A September day in 2021. Last year at this time, 2020, the pandemic was still raging, but Florida was open to tourists, of course. Florida was shut down only for a month. But most places – even Disney and its attractions – had protocols in place. Masks, social distancing, the usual things. Vaccines weren’t available yet. But we were hopeful about an easier 2021.
And for awhile in 2021, after vaccines were becoming available, we were hopeful that by summer, we would be free of this virus. We got our last Pfizer in late March 2021, at a CVS. It felt like a kind of liberation. In May we took our first flight in more than a year. Wore masks all the way to Montana. The summer was looking up. But by July, the Delta variant had taken hold in Florida and our governor, Ron DeathSantis, was holding press conferences about the dangers of the vaccines and that mask mandates were now illegal, and how people had a right to their personal freedom. You know, my body, my choice. Unless it involves abortion, but that’s another story.
No one was really sure how many new Covid cases occurred daily in Florida because the state’s Department of Health had stopped publishing daily info. But the department did report weekly cases, a skewed number of deaths, and the number of new cases added up to more than 21,000 a day. Deaths in the U.S. per day exceeded 1,500. Our governor banned mask mandates in schools, outlawed proof of vaccination on cruise ships, in government buildings….and yet. In public places, I usually saw people wearing masks.
If you’re unvaccinated and don’t wear a mask, then you’re one of the selfish.
And during this time, I got summaries from those who hadn’t been vaccinated about how I was being fed misinformation by the CDC, the government, doctors, science. The virus was no more than a cold. The virus was a conspiracy. The virus was created by Fauci in cahoots with the pharmaceutical industry. Bill Gates had embedded a spying chip in these vaccines. 5 G was infecting my brain. Blah, blah, blah.
“It’s the vaccinated people who are infecting the unvaccinated.”
“It’s my moral obligation to speak out against these vaccines.”
“Trump’s going to be reinstated.”
And that, right there, that trump will somehow be magically reinstated to presidency on a date that My Pillow dude declares, is the real disease in this pandemic. The media calls it The Big Lie. But it’s the trump toxicity spillover into the Biden presidency, a kind of mental black goo that sticks to people’s brains, blinding them so completely that they live in an alternate reality.
This reality is ruled by aging white men so terrified of losing their majority that they enact oppressive voting laws and, in Texas, overturn a 50-year-law, the right of a woman to an abortion. No exceptions. You’re raped by your father? An uncle? A stranger? And you get pregnant? Well, too bad. No abortion for you.
So this is where we stand nearly a year and a half into this pandemic, a harbinger of the paradigm shift that is underway. I used to hope that maybe the old paradigm would just die out with a pathetic whimper. But trump tapped into the darkness of the American psyche, the toxicity of racism and misogyny, of building walls that separate us as human beings inhabiting the same planet. And here’s the fallout.
Maybe it will have to play itself out. But if this darkness wins, we’ll be living in Gillead, a new chapter of The Handmaid’s Tale.
No, thanks.
A Bit of Astrological History
People who hire ghost writers usually have a story to tell, but don’t have the skills to write it. They usually have abundant financial assets, since ghost-writing isn’t cheap, and only beginners would accept a project on spec.
Trish and I have both worked as ghostwriters from time to time and also have watched in fascination as the ‘authors’ have appeared on television talking about their writing careers. The reason they appear on TV is that they are already well known, if not famous, before ‘writing’ their books.
However, in rare cases the ghostwriter is more well known than the supposed author. That was the case with Evangeline Smith Adams, an astrologer from the early twentieth century. In her later years, she began writing books such as Astrology: Your Place in the Sun (1927), Astrology: Your Place Among the Stars (1930), and her autobiography, The Bowl of Heaven (1926). Interestingly, her ghost writer was not only well known, but infamous. He was Aleister Crowley, renowned member of the Golden Dawn, and an explorer of the dark side.
Thanks to Crowley, Adams became famous in her own right and has been called “America’s first astrological superstar.” A resident of New York, she ran a thriving astrological consulting business and hired a team of assistants and stenographers to prepare material for her clients. However, it wasn’t only her books and skills as an astrologer that vaulted Adams to notoriety.
Astrology was illegal in New York and she was arrested three times, in 1911, 1914 and 1923, for fortunetelling. All the cases brought against her were unsuccessful, and the May 1914 trial brought particular notability.
In that instance, Adams went to court to prove that astrology was a science. She asked to be allowed to cast a horoscope for someone chosen at random, working only with the person’s date, time, and place of birth. The judge rose to the challenge and gave her the birth data of an unnamed individual. Adams cast the horoscope and began to talk about the person’s life.
The judge was astounded. “What you say about this person is exactly right,” he told her. “I know because he is my son.” The judge then went on to make the practice of astrology legal in the state of New York.
The story of Evangeline Smith Adams appears briefly in Star Power for Teens, a book co-authored by Rob MacGregor and daughter Megan MacGregor. It’s a story that teens no doubt will not hear in their science classes.
