The Mystical Underground: Juliet Trail: Compassion Revolution

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Trish and Rob

A new episode of The Mystical Underground is live! “Juliet Trail: Compassion Revolution”:

Join Trish and Rob for a conversation with…

Juliet Trail is the Managing Director of The Coincidence Project, which is dedicated to advancing the use and understanding of coincidence, synchronicity, serendipity, and Simulpathity. Juliet is also the founder and director of Courageous Compassion Connection, an initiative dedicated to bringing contemplative practices and approaches to diverse groups and individuals in the service of resilience, wholeness, healing, and compassion for all beings.

She has 19 years of experience in leadership, organizational development, and contemplative education in higher education at the University of Virginia and New Mexico State University. Her Ph.D. from UVA focused on Network Enablers: empowering individuals who enable the success of others across their professional roles and networks. She is a trained Mindful Self-Compassion teacher and is also a poet and singer who explores the intersections of creativity and contemplation in her two bands, Unheard Sirens Inc. and Phoenix Noir.

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FLORIDA’S STATS

Posted on July 31, 2021 by Trish and Rob

 

I’ve been following Florida’s stats on Covid cases since the beginning of the pandemic.  IO use Worldometer. Today,  July 28, 2021, the count was 17, 589 new cases, with 56 deaths for the state, 398 deaths for the country, and that’s without all states reporting.

When I cite this statistic to friends who think the pandemic is overblown they shrug and usually reply, “Well, not as many people are dying.” As though that justifies – well, something.

And that’s true. With 49 percent of the country vaccinated, there  aren’t as many deaths now. But even one death is tragic. Every number represents a family impacted by the person’s death. And just because the numbers of death has gone  down, case numbers are rising daily. On July 28, the total number of new cases in the U.S. was 92,485.

I’ve been vaccinated and still were a mask when I’m indoors. At the gym, though, I remove my  mask if the place isn’t crowded and I’m not close to anyone else on a machine. But everywhere else, mask on. If it’s true that the vaccinated can still transmit the virus to the unvaccinated, then it would be selfish of me to NOT were a mask.

But this is Florida, where our idiotic governor has declared no masks mandates, and vowed the state will  never shut down again. He even sued the CDC about their mandates concerning cruise ships. Many of them leave from Florida ports and want to be able to implement protocols about who is vaccinated – and who isn’t.

DeSantis is a mini trump married to an ex-Fox News host, and doesn’t have a clue about governing anything. He acts like some delusional Ayn Rand character who believes that true capitalism is screwing your competition – in the case of DeSantis, the “competition” is the people of Florida.

The only person on his cabinet who speaks the truth about anything is Dem Nicki Fried, a lawyer and the 12th Florida commissioner of agriculture since 2019. She points out that DeSantis instructed the Florida Department of Health to stop providing daily numbers on anything related to Covid. Now, with the number of cases rising along with positivity rates – (17%) – her department will now be collecting daily figures from the CDC and posting them to the public.

I noticed that the dailies started up about a week ago.

If you know family or friends who haven’t been vaccinated, do what you can to change their minds. Don’t get annoyed or angry, as I often do. Don’t make it emotional. Give them facts.   CDC statistics. Be left-brained.  We had two Pfizers back in March. We haven’t grown  extra heads or limbs. If Bill Gates is on a chip somewhere in those vaccines, then I feel bad for him if he’s watching us. Not much happening here Bill. No inventions you can buy.  I haven’t gotten sick.

Mask up and get vaccinated. Otherwise, we’ll still be having these conversations into 2023.

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The 3 Aliens

Posted on July 29, 2021 by Trish and Rob

 

In October 2001, Nancy Pickard and I attended an Eric Pearl workshop in Alabama. Pearl wrote The Reconnection, about how he’d discovered that his chiropractic treatments of patients was resulting in spontaneous healings of other ailments. His discovery eventually led to the development of a healing technique he began teaching to the public. It involved complicated hand movements over and around a person’s body and energy field without touching the physical body.

It was held in an auditorium where medical tables were set up. Several hundred people attended. During the first day of the workshop, Pearl demonstrated various hand movements, then asked people to pair up with a stranger. “One of you will stretch out on the table,” Pearl instructed. “And the other will perform these hand movements.” And he demonstrated the movements.

I paired up with a woman nearby, a total stranger, and got on the table first. As she worked on me, I felt waves sweeping over me, then light shot out of my skull and penetrated the ceiling of the room. At the top of this column of light were three aliens – not hostile, just very curious about what was going on.  They seemed to be talking among themselves about what they were seeing.

They resembled the aliens on the cover of our book, Aliens in the Backyard, which was published in 2013, a dozen years later.

These three aliens appeared three years later during Hurricane Frances, which battered South Florida for hours. We had boarded up the house, had our supplies and a cooler ready in case the power went off, had gassed up our cars, and brought in the animals – a dog, cats, a bird. It was 2004 and our daughter, Megan, was still in high school.

That night, as Frances raged, Rob, Megan, and the animals slept in our bedroom and I lay there, wide awake, listening to the howling wind. Exhausted, unable to fall asleep, I worried that the storm would rip off the skylight panels that I could hear vibrating madly in the wind. I worried that the front door might be ripped off, that the water accumulating in the street in front of our house would keep rising and eventually reach the front door.

I finally shut my eyes briefly and suddenly, the top of my skull felt like it blew off and the column of light shot out of it and pierced the bedroom ceiling. At the top of this light column were the same three aliens, peering down, watching. Oddly, I found comfort in their presence and instantly fell asleep. When I woke up four hours later, the storm had moved on. The sun shone. The house was intact.

I haven’t seen those three aliens since.

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Past Lives of Animals

Posted on July 27, 2021 by Trish and Rob

In March 2019, our beloved Golden Retriever, Noah, passed away from cancer of the spleen. I wrote about it here. Not long afterward, I had a reading with animal communicator Heather Bristol and a year later, after we’d started our podcast, she was a guest on The Mystical Underground.

During that reading with Heather, she mentioned that Noah had been with us before – as a squirrel in our backyard and as one of our cats. The inter-species reincarnation is a detail some animal communicators don’t believe in and I loved the fact that Heather did. After all, why not? She believes that human and animal souls can choose whatever physical form they want. And Noah as a squirrel made a kind of intuitive sense. His greatest passions were chasing Frisbees – and squirrels.

Whenever he spotted a squirrel scrambling up a tree or along the fence, his barking was the clarion call to every other dog in the park to join him in the chase. None of them ever caught a squirrel and the squirrels made fun of them, scampering higher into the branches where even a dog with wings couldn’t catch them.

So yes. Yes, I could imagine Noah as a squirrel in our backyard.

Noah as one of the many cats we’ve had over the years? Sure.

When I asked if Noah would return to us at some point, Heather said he would.But maybe not as a dog.

I’m vigilant. And waiting. So are Nigel and Nika.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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August Star Power

Posted on July 25, 2021 by Trish and Rob

If you prefer the written forecast, it’s in the masthead. Enjoy!

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Bollingen Tower

Posted on July 22, 2021 by Trish and Rob

During my only trip to Europe many years ago, I had two primary goals. I wanted to go Arles, France, where van Gogh had lived and lost his mind and produced some of his most brilliant work. It was the only part of France that interested me. And I wanted to see Carl Jung’s castle on the shores of Lake Zurich in Bollingen, Switzerland.

My interest in van Gogh always felt like some remnant of a past life. I’m not an artist, but I love his work and the texture of his weird life fascinates me. He died impoverished. But in March 2021, Sotheby’s sold a van Gogh landscape for $15.4 million.

In the 1990s, Rob and I got to know a Richard Demian, a psychic from Brooklyn who we subsequently met several times. We called him Fids, although I’m not sure why. The first time we met him, Megan was really young, in a stroller,  and he gave her a beautiful gray teddy bear that she called The Fids Bear. That bear went everywhere with us. It eventually started falling apart- an ear, part of his nose, the neck leaned to the side.

Fids felt that the three of us had been together before, when he was van Gogh, Rob was his brother Theo and I was Theo’s wife. It felt oddly correct and explained my earlier intrigue and interest in Arles and van Gogh.

Then there’s Jung’s castle. I first became acquainted with his work when I was 18 and bought a copy of Richard Wilhelm’s translation of The I Ching. Jung wrote the introduction for the book in 1949 and and connected it to his theory of synchronicity. The only place I really wanted to go in Switzerland was Bollingen, to see Jung’s castle on Lake Zurich.

In his brilliant autobiography, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, he writes movingly about how he built it and why. I was traveling through Europe with Chris, a woman I worked with in social services at the welfare department. She didn’t understand why we needed to take a train trip to Bollingen, but went with me.

We missed our first train from Zurich, and that’s where the synchro begins. If we’d arrived earlier, we would have missed the man with his dog in the backyard of Jung’s place. He looked like photos I’d seen of a young Jung. I walked up to the fence and introduced myself.

He turned out to be Jung’s grandson. We spent about 30 minutes talking about synchronicity, dreams, the unconscious – and how the tower had changed since Jung had built it – like it now had electricity.

If we had made our first train, I wouldn’t have met Jung’s grandson.

 

 

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WHAT IF

Posted on July 20, 2021 by Trish and Rob

The other night, I was wondering how the world now might be different if Martin Luther King had survived. If Robert Kennedy had survived. If Lennon had survived.

Let’s take Lennon. He was 40 when he was assassinated by Mark David Chapman outside the Dakota, in NYC where Lennon lived with Yoko.

Mark David Chapman arrived in New York on Saturday December 6, and checked into a YMCA about nine blocks from the Dakota. He was seen hanging around an entrance to the Dakota. On December 7, he was outside the Dakota again and also changed hotels, moving into the Sheraton Centre farther downtown. On the morning of December 8, he lingered outside the Dakota once more and had Lennon and Yoko’s album, Double Fantasy with him for Lennon to sign.

Chapman struck up a conversation with Paul Goresh, another fan hoping to glimpse Lennon. Around 5 p.m. that afternoon, Lennon and his wife finally left the building on their way to The Record Plant Studios on West 44th Street. Chapman approached Lennon and held out a copy of Double Fantasy. Lennon scrawled his name across the front. Goresh snapped a photo of that moment.

The two men waited outside the building for another two hours. Goresh got tired of waiting and said he had to go home and would come back another day to see Lennon. Chapman tried to get him to stay and remarked, “I’d wait. You never know if you’ll see him again.”

Goresh left, Chapman waited.

The Lennons mixed sound for a new single, Walking on Thin Ice, a Yoko creation, until 10:30 that night. The title smacks of precognition, since in the aftermath of Lennon’s death, Yoko would be walking  on thin mental  ice.

At 10:50 p.m., their rented limo stopped at the curb in front of the Dakota’s 72nd Street entrance. Yoko got out first, with Lennon a few paces behind her. He walked walk under the archway and Chapman called out his name.

He was crouched five feet away, both hands clutching a .38 special, and opened fire. Four bullets tore through Lennon.

Nut case Chapman was obsessed with J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, specifically with the fictional character Holden Caufield, an icon for teen rebellion. He was reading the book outside the Dakota when the police arrived and arrested him.

So, let’s say Lennon survived. What did he create between 1980 and – let’s pretend – 2022?

I like to imagine that he started a worldwide movement called Give Peace a Chance. I like to imagine that the movement mitigated 9-11, or changed it so that there was never any Afghan War. Never a Gitmo where prisoners were tortured. No Bush, no Cheney, no Rumsfeld, and no trump. BUT – and it’s a big but – if Gore had won in 2000, would we have had an Obama? Without an Obama would we have had a trump? And without him, would we have a Biden?

The what if games are the ones that tie me in knots.

If the multiverse is real, then all of these scenarios are playing out…somewhere…

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The Mystical Underground: Rob MacGregor: The Devil’s Chair

Posted on July 18, 2021 by Trish and Rob

A new episode of The Mystical Underground is live! “Rob MacGregor: The Devil’s Chair”:

Join Rob as he reads from Trish and Rob’s short story collection “The Outliers”…

“The Devil’s Chair is a story based on an urban legend about a brick chair that faces two gravestones in a cemetery in central Florida, north of Orlando. The cemetery is located outside the spiritualist community of Cassadaga, which offers weekly ghost tours of the town. In this story, the spookiness is enhanced when a reporter looking for a Halloween story visits the cemetery at midnight as he investigates the urban legend.”

*MacGregor, Rob; MacGregor, Trish. The Outliers. Crossroad Press.

Available in print and digitally on Amazon.

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Life and Death Synchronicities

Posted on July 17, 2021 by Trish and Rob

 

I know this photo might look somewhat brutal to some folks, a shark with a spear protruding from its head. But you need to know the story behind it and why Rick Bettua went after this particular bull shark. Rick was a U.S. Navy diver for thirty-two years. Diving has been his life. After he retired, he moved to Queensland, Australia where his wife was from. It’s also close to one of the world’s best places for spearfishing, the Great Barrier Reef.

Rick likes to remain active so besides spearfishing he took up a martial arts practice called Muay Thai. His instructor, Glenn, became curious about spearfish and Rick started taking him out on dives from time to time. One day en route to the marina, Glenn said he was concerned about sharks while diving, and Rick assured him that the chances of getting bit by a shark are far less than the chances of getting hit by lightning.

That same day, Glenn was snorkeling in shallow water, about ten feet deep, when a bull shark attacked him and shredded his leg. Rick was able to get him back into the boat and apply two tourniquets that saved Glenn’s life. But he lost his leg.

The next day, Rick went back to the small reef that was surrounded by sand and talked to fishermen there who were familiar with that shark and they told Rick how to attract it to his boat. He revved his engine, as they’d suggested, and within a couple of minutes the shark came right up the boat. Rick shot it, killing it.

Three years later in October of 2020 Rick was free diving on a reef not far from where Glenn was attacked and a bull shark attacked him ,and he nearly bled to death before he reached shore 90 minutes later. But a series of synchronicities occurred that saved his life. Twenty miles from shore, they came upon a larger fishing boat, which could go faster. On board coincidentally was a pediatric cardiologist, who help save Rick and helped assemble a rescue team that awaited Rick’s arrival on shore.

I know about Rick’s story because I (Rob) have been editing his survival/adventure book that covers numerous dangerous encounters he faced over three decades as a diver. I’ve been very impressed with Rick, who has written a very compelling story.

Rick’s story will be featured July 17 on an episode of the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, called I Was Prey, 

Also, here’s a video about Rick made by Kimi Werner. Rick calls Kimi the best known woman diver in the world. It’s an excellent video.

 

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Happy 38th!

Posted on July 16, 2021 by Trish and Rob

In November 1981, I was teaching English to Cuban refugees through Florida International University in Miami. It was a government-funded program and I was assigned to the Fort Lauderdale office. But it took us three months to find an office because back then the resentment against Cuban immigrants was at a peak.

Once we got settled and classes actually began, we were contacted by a journalist at the Hollywood Sun Tattler who wanted to know if the Cubans were actually learning English.  When the journalist  walked into our office, I thought, Holy shit, I know this guy. It’s difficult to describe this kind of  soul recognition. Yes, it’s visceral, but as soon as you   feel it, you doubt it, write it off to imagination. But it stays there, in the pit of your stomach.

When I went home that evening, I told my roommate I’d just met the guy I was going to marry.

That journalist was Rob.

Five months later, we moved in together.

Today is our 38th anniversary. He thought it was our 35th. But hey, I’ve found that women are better at remembering dates!

For 38 years, we have been creative partners, exploring the areas that interest us, much of it outlier stuff that is slowly making its say into mainstream thought. Pick an oddball topic and we’ve probably written about it – synchronicity, aliens, dreams, meditation, yoga, astrology, divination, magic… Between us, we’ve written more than 60 novels, hundreds of non-fiction books and, during this pandemic, we’ve ghostwritten another eight or ten books.

Our daughter just finished her first novel – Dystopian – and is looking for representation Our podcast,  The Mystical Underground, is 18 months old and a source of connection with other writers and individuals who are exploring different facets of this underground place.

In these 38 years, we’ve been fortunate enough to travel extensively, often in search of answers to the bigger questions about the nature of reality. We’ve grown to love dogs and cats and birds, have  discovered our boundaries as separate human beings, now know what we like and dislike abut each other.

He’s too quiet, I’m the opposite.

He’s a natural skeptic, I’m not.

As a Gemini, I live in my head.

As a Taurus, he lives  through his body, his physicality.

But. Toss us a challenge about the occult, any facet of it, and we’ll run with it.

Happy 38th, Rob!

 

 

 

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