Welcome to The Mystical Underground

Our interview  on Dreamland is going up today. We discuss Synchronicity and the Other Side with Marie D. Jones. It’s free to non subscribers for a week. Hope you’ll tune in!

Also available is the interview Rob and Trish did with Whitley Strieber on the connection between the dead – and the visitors. This one is riveting!

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An update. The mystery about the “Ecuadorian Alien” has been solved. We heard from Guayasamin Foundation. Here was their comment, with links:

Fundación Guayasamin says:

A brewer’s blackbird

Several times a day we let the dogs out into the backyard to snoop around the landscape and do their business. If there’s   a neighborhood cat silly enough to climb the fence for a peek around, the dogs quickly dart after it, sending the offending feline back over the fence.

On this particular afternoon, Noah and Nica trotted over to the pool and stared down into it. That’s something they never do unless one of them has dropped a ball into the water. We took a look, but there was no ball, nothing but a few stray leaves that had blown into the unscreened pool. A few minutes later, I noticed the dogs were still studying the pool intently as if they were about to take a dive – something neither of them ever do.

I went outside, picked up our long pole with the leaf basket at the end and began casually scooping out the leaves. While working my way around the pool, I was thinking about contacting someone on Facebook who had just read Romancing the Raven and left a complimentary message. I thought I would ask her if she would put up a review on Amazon.

I set down the pole down and lifted the cover of the circular strainer at the edge of the pool and discovered that it was full of leaves. I reached in for the strainer basket, and suddenly there was a flutter of black wings in the pool right next to me.  My first impression was that a bird had crashed into the pool.

I jumped up, grabbed the pole and scooped up a black bird. I carefully directed the net to a nearby tree and the soaking bird latched onto a branch. I was not only startled by the sudden appearance of the bird so close to me, but the fact that I’d been thinking about Raven at the time.

It took me a few moments to realize what had happened. The bird probably had been  standing on the submerged ledge between the pool and the strainer basket. The ledge was covered with a couple inches of water, but the bird could rest, breathe….and hide from the snoopy dogs.

Who knows how long it had been in the pool. We had just returned from a trip to Orlando a couple of hours earlier. I studied the bird closely on its partially shrouded perch and realized that ‘blackbird’ is a generic term that covers a variety of species. Back in the house, I Googled blackbird and this Birds of North America site came up. Interestingly, the description of black birds mentions ravens in the second paragraph.

I knew my blackbird wasn’t  a raven, so I looked at several choices and finally recognized it as a brewer’s blackbird, like the one pictured above. For me, the synchro suggested that something was brewing with the book. If nothing else, a kind lady, Kathleen Ryan, from Lafayette, Louisiana, had read it and enjoyed.

Noah and Nica, chilling when she was just a tiny pup:

During one of our trips to Ecuador, I remember that we walked through an outdoor arts and crafts exhibit. Everything I saw – from jewelry to paintings – was vibrant, alive, mystical, strange, and just staggering in terms of  creative talent. But the piece pictured above is what I bought, for about $15, if I remember correctly. It’s made of rose petals. I think of it as the Ecuador alien, and it hangs in our living room.

Tonight, I was rewriting a chapter from the third book in my hungry ghost  series, which takes place, like the first book, in Esperanza, Ecuador. This city, which lies at more than 13,000 feet in the Andes – and is totally fictional, okay?- was once a nonphysical place where the souls of the dying – transitionals – went. Here, they decided if they wanted to continue in physical life or move on. These transitionals were preyed upon by brujos – hungry ghosts who seized them, healed them, and then lived out their mortal lives in order to experience the pleasures of physical existence.

The light chasers, evolved souls who have overseen affairs in Esperanza for millennia, decided that the only way to get rid of the brujos was to bring Esperanza into the physical world, which they did 500 years ago.  Esperanza now, in the 21^st century, retains the magic from when it was a nonphysical location. The veil between the living and the dead is so thin that both chasers and brujos can assume virtual forms and communicate with the living. There’s a community of shape shifters. There are human tensions and needs. But here’s the synchro:

Wayra, the dog/wolf shape shifter who appeared in the first two books, now lives just outside the city, in a home that overlooks Esperanza. As a being that has been alive in one form or another since the late twelfth century, he has quite a collection of art.  Charlie, a chaser, drops in to see Wayra…and I immediately wondered how the shifter’s house was decorated. So I Googled Ecuadorian artists and this is what came up first:

The similarities between the Ecuadorian alien piece I bought eight or ten years ago and this piece by Oswaldo Guayasamín floored me.  Guayasamin, born in Quito  in 1919, is apparently famous for his paintings depicting Andean people. According to this website, “He exposed racism, poverty, political oppression, and class division; common themes throughout the Andes. His work reflected the misery and pain that many people around the world had to experience in the 20th century. He spoke out often against the US and other governments. His work was exhibited around the world. A day of national strikes occurred at his death by indigenous people, who he spent his life supporting.”

Until now, I’d never heard of this artist. I haven’t been able to find out what this particular painting is called, but it’s so strikingly similar to the Ecuadorian alien that I suspect the artist whose work I bought was mimicking Guayasamín.  

I poked around on this website for awhile and on this one and honestly wondered if Guayasamin was an abductee or if his creativity, his art, had enabled him to tune into something beyond his own experiences.This synchro is one of those that leaves me completely clueless about the meaning.  Maybe it’s just an answer to the question I ask every time I pass my Ecuadorian alien en route from my office to the bedroom or back: What are you? Where did you come from? Why did I buy you and what can you teach me?  Until tonight, I’d never heard of Guayasamin. Now he’s on my radar. I have no idea what that means, but I’m hopeful that something more  will be revealed.

We typically think of the law of attraction as a focused effort to attract whatever we desire – a job, money, a car, improved health, a romantic partner. Whatever.

But it doesn’t always happen that way. Sometimes the law of attraction spins into someone’s life as a result of a good deed.  That is, by acting in a selfless manner and being of service, you just might be rewarded by the Universe with a surprising endowment.

That’s what happened recently to U.S. Marine Corporal Alexander Degenhardt who months ago decided to become a bone marrow donor. On leave and en route to Las Vegas for a quick overnight stay, he was contacted by a military health official and told that a matching recipient has been found. He was asked if he was still willing to serve as a donor.

“They asked me if I was sure I wanted to go through with it, because it’s kind of painful. But what’s a little pain if it will save someone’s life?”  Cpl. Degenhardt said he was ready whenever they needed him.

The next day, (Feb. 19) about twelve hours after arriving in the gambling capital, he sat down at a ‘penny slot’ – the Money Vault Millionaires Seven slot at the Bellagio-  and a short time later he was $80 ahead. He was feeling good and it was getting close to time to leave for the airport to catch his plane back to Washington D.C., where he is stationed, at Nellis Air Force Base. He decided to play again, and that’s when $$$$ filled the screen. He’d hit the jackpot: $2.9 million.

Appearing on CNN on Sunday evening (2-26), he was asked if he thought the two experiences – his willingness to be a donor and winning the jackpot – were related. He nodded. “Yes, I think everything is connected.” It’s a kind of good karma, he said.

“Actually, though, I’m more excited about helping someone with the marrow donation than I am about winning the money.” He added that he planned to remain in the military and live on his pay while saving the jackpot.

He said that when he saw all the $s come up on the screen, he didn’t know what it meant. “Dude, what just happened?” he remembers asking a friend. “It’s something you always want to happen, but when it does happen you don’t believe it.”

Read more here.

Eaton Centre, Toronto’s enormous downtown underground commercial complex

It seems that when we travel, we always experience an increase in synchronicities. But our Toronto trip in mid-February produced a flurry of them. That was probably because the unusual nature of the trip and that synchronicity was on our mind. So the meaningful coincidences just kept coming our way.

We’ve already written about several of these experiences, but there were more. Not all of them were sensational, but they were a constant reminder of the ‘Weird or What?’ connection we were embracing by pursuing this trip.

En route, via Canada Airlines I was reading Stephen King’s 11/22/63, and came to a passage where King described a woman wearing a long tartan coat. I paused and thought briefly that I’d never seen a tartan coat. A few hours later, sitting in the bar adjacent to our hotel, where we ate a light dinner, I had a view of people coming and going into our hotel, Pantages. Our drinks had just arrived when I spotted a woman wearing a long tartan coat enter the hotel. I pointed it out Trish, who said she’d never seen such a coat, either. But then, we live in Florida.

The next afternoon we took a Beck’s taxi to the loft studio where Trish would make her debut before the camera. After the interview, we gave a copy The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity to Stephen Grant, the director and interviewer.

He immediately launched into his own recent multi-layered synchronicity involving a Canadian singer named Andy Kim, who was famous long-ago for a song called Sugar Sugar when he was in a group called the Archies.  Stephen had just told an off-color story involving the singer when he spotted Kim walking their way in the airport. The story was synchronistically linked to the name of that song, and there was more, but I lost track after getting distracted by the memory of that bubble-gum tune from so long ago.

Finally, after we left the studio with Stephen’s synchros fresh in mind, our Beck’s taxi pulled up. As we climbed in, I noticed the license plate on the car in front of us. It read BEXT. When pronounced, it sounds just like the taxi company’s name. Cheryl Welch, whose story brought us here, might call that an example of government mind control if it happened to her. But to us it was just another synchro on the journey.

Finally, one more taxi, and one more synchro. En route to the airport, our taxi driver asked us why we were visiting Toronto and we talked the entire trip about synchronicity. How strange it was to be picked up by a driver who was not only familiar with synchronicity, but fascinated with it. She not only drove the taxi, but held her own on the subject and told us about the meaningful coincidences that led her to getting a freelance art gig with Disney World. Of course we had to tell her that was where our daughter worked.

Meanwhile, en route Trish got an e-mail for a mystery writer friend who said she will be in Orlando for the next few days and why don’t we visit. Any day except Tuesday when she would be visiting the Epcot Center – right where Megan works.