Welcome to The Mystical Underground

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiPctjrei80

In Aliens in the Backyard, we have a chapter called “Earth Shakings,” which is about planetary empaths. This chapter grew out of pieces we posted on our blog about this phenomenon.

On March 11, 2010 and on March 11, 2011, we posted our first two pieces on planetary empaths. These individuals are so attuned to the planet that they experience physical, emotional and psychic symptoms days and sometimes weeks before a natural disaster.

Periodically, we receive emails from some of these planetary empaths about the symptoms they are experiencing. In late March/early April 2013, several empaths reported recurring and persistent symptoms. These symptoms apparently were related to the events at the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013, and possibly to the 7.8 quake in Iran the same day.

So we created a page where these individuals can report their symptoms. On April 25, 2015, Nepal suffered a massive 7.8 – 7.9 earthquake, depending on which source you read. On the day of the quake, a woman named Liz posted on the empath page:

Yesterday evening I became extremely nervous and sick at my stomach. This morning my friend sent me the link to this page about Planetary Empaths. After reading my email, I checked my Facebook and had a message that a FB friend was okay after the earthquake. That was the first I had heard about the quake. I am Buddhist and am sure that my unease was due to this quake. I still feel sick and keep wanting to cry.

Sharlie West, who periodically emails me her visions and dreams, some of which are precognitive, sent me this:

Three weeks ago I told husband Jim that there would be a huge explosion, possibly an earthquake, and thousands of people would suffer. This was before  I went to sleep, in that in-between state. I could see them running. 

Three weeks before 9/11 I dreamed about bodies floating upward near the buildings, all in black and white. Guess I was seeing the negative.

And it’s not over yet. There will be a series of them. There’s a heaviness knowing it can’t be stopped.

Did anyone else experience any symptoms before the quake on April 25? Connie? Debra?

Nicholas Carroll pointed this out on Facebook. It’s pretty cool – the bird lands on the book and looks at itself on the page.

Here’s another very old post we put up on 2009. It’s about a cluster of synchros. As you can see, clusters can involve virtually anything – even a sweatshirt!

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Ten years ago (in 2009) our neighbor, Annette, was on her way home from the hospital, where her father had just undergone an amputation of his leg. It was chilly and she stopped to buy a sweatshirt. As she got back onto the interstate, she suddenly witnessed a horrendous car accident – a truck slammed into the rear of a smaller car, which flipped over several times and finally came to rest on its side. Annette pulled to the shoulder, leaped out of her car, and ran over to the car to see if she could help.

The middle-aged man inside was terribly injured but still conscious. Annette shouted at the crowd of gawkers, asking someone to call 911. Then she stayed with the man, talking to him, urging him to remain conscious, assuring him help was on the way. Two days later, she stopped by the hospital to visit him and he told her he would never forget her, that her voice and encouragement forced him to cling to consciousness.

Now, fast forward to 2009. Annette was on the interstate again with a friend and her kids. It was another chilly night and she stopped to buy a sweatshirt. As she did so, she flashed back on the last time she had bought a new sweatshirt while headed somewhere on the interstate. She felt a sort of superstition about it, but shrugged it off. Ten minutes later, an SUV raced past her, weaving all over the road. Annette suspected the driver was drunk and slowed down to put some distance between them.

Then, suddenly, just ahead, she saw the SUV slam into a smaller car. “The moment of impact was like an explosion. That’s how hard the SUV hit the other car.”

She swerved to the shoulder, scrambled out, and ran toward the accident scene, as she had ten years ago. Just like before, gawkers were clustered around and Annette, who had left her cell phone in the car, shouted for someone to call 911. She leaned into the car to see if she could help the driver, but he was unconscious, his legs bent at an awkward angle, his torso slumped over the steering wheel. She didn’t feel a pulse when she touched his wrist, but detected a faint pulse at his carotid.

“Stay with us,” she said. “Help is on the way. Just stay with us.”

But when the paramedics started removing the man from the car, she saw that his face was split open from his skull to his chin and knew he wouldn’t make it. “I told my husband about this, about how in both instances I had just bought a new sweatshirt and what did he think about that? He told me I was looking for meaning where there isn’t any. But I can tell you this. I will never again buy a new sweatshirt if I’m driving on the interstate.”

Despite her husband’s skepticism, Annette recognized the pattern and found it meaningful. Buying the sweatshirt didn’t create the accident, but ultimately it enhanced her awareness.

In 2010, we posted a story called The Ghost & the Straight Pins. It was also in The Synchronicity Highway. As you’ll see, there was recently an oddball synchro associated with this story that happened to poet Sharlie West.

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During my (Trish) last year in college, I lived in a small apartment on the third floor of an old building in Utica, New York. My roommate, Linda, and I, shared our cramped living space with a tabby cat. Early in the school year, Linda’s grandmother passed away. One day not long afterward, Linda’s mother found a straight pin on the grandmother’s tombstone. A few days later, our tabby, Tigger, was about to jump into a chair where I was reading when she suddenly did a 180 in midair and tore into the bedroom. Linda and I just looked at each other, wondering what that was about.

The next morning, I found straight pins scattered around the living room – a pin stuck in a couch cushion, pins laying on the rug, a couple more straight pins on the kitchen table. This began to happen consistently. When Linda mentioned it to her mother, she sort of laughed and said it was Linda’s grandmother. “Nana G loved to sew. I’ve been finding straight pins all over the house, even underlining passages in the bible.”

I didn’t have any problem believing in ghosts  and was certain that Tigger had seen Nana G the night she did that 180, but straight pins? How did a ghost manipulate physical matter, even matter as small as a straight pin? But one weekend when we visited Linda’s parents, her mother showed up the straight pins underlining passages in the bible.

“How does Nana G do that?” I asked Linda’s mom.
“I have no idea,” she replied. “But isn’t it amazing?”

The straight pin phenomenon continued consistently for several months,  then gradually stopped. About ten years later, I was visiting St. Augustine with Linda and her mother. We were in that fort featured in the photo, Castillo de San Marcos. The Spanish began construction on this fort in 1672 to protect the city. It’s the only existing 17th century fort in North America.

There’s nothing in this place, just stones and empty hallways. Our footsteps echoed in the emptiness. The whisper of the past was everywhere. But everything was bare – the thick walls, the well-worn floors, not even a piece of trash in sight. So the three of us were moving through the interior, marveling at how cool it was despite the summer heat outside. I happened to look down and stopped, incredulous, staring at a single straight pin.

I picked it up and showed it to Linda’s mother. “What’re the odds of finding a straight pin in this place?” I asked.

Her mom smiled. “I’ve been feeling Nana G around.”

“Looks like she wanted to tour the place with us,” Linda said.

“So is this an apport?” I asked.

Neither of them had an answer. But to this day, an apport – the paranormal transference of an object from one place to another – seems to be the best explanation.

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Now jump ahead five years since we posted this. Poet Sharlie West emails me whenever she has had an intriguing vision or dream, as it was in her most recent note:

Last night I dreamed about straight pins that I was collecting, lining them in two rows

next to each other like railroad ties. In the dream I said to someone, this is a coincidence, I just saw a television movie that had straight pins in it. (I didn’t)

I woke up thinking, what was that about? Then as I was reading The Synchronicity Highway I came to the part about Straight Pins in Castillo San Marcos and had to share. So funny after last night’s dream. I have no idea if this is a meaningful sync. I don’t even sew.

We shall see. The parallel lines might mean something. Oh, and as I sat down at the computer to mention this, it was 11:11.

Whatever the dream means to Sharlie, it struck me as precognitive.

This post was adapted from a news item by Laurel Airica that appears on the Unknown Country website.

Most of us are fascinated by astonishing coincidences when inner experiences collide with outer events outside of cause and effect and against all odds. However, one aspect of meaningful coincidences that we often overlook is linguistic synchronicities, including anagrams, puns and homonyms.

For example, the word coincidence is a homonym for co-incidents. Although the meanings are something different, the words are linked through synchronicity.

Then there’s prescience. Opened up it becomes ‘pre-science.’ That’s something to think about.

An anagram of significance can be found in the two words, ‘earth’ and ‘heart.’ The synchronicity is that we need to treat the earth with heart. And ‘heart’ is about compassion.

The human heart has a two-way dialog with the brain—each influencing the other. The heart has the strongest electromagnetic field, which changes with our emotions. We actually evolve from the heart, not the brain. The heart has over 40,000 sensory neurons that have both short and long-term memory, and more information is sent from the heart to the brain than the other way around. So we need to bring heart-based thinking, the home of compassion, into the world, into our everyday lives.

One way to do so is through meditation, in other words not-doing, rather than doing.

An eight-week study conducted by Harvard neuroscientists supports that idea. The study involved 16 participants practicing mindfulness meditation for about 25 minutes a day for eight weeks.

Magnetic Resonance (MR) scans were taken of their brains two weeks before they began the program and two weeks after they completed it. Scans were also taken of a control group to make sure that any observed changes in the brains of the meditators could not be ascribed simply to the passage of time.

The researchers found an increase in ‘grey matter’ in the areas of the pre-frontal cortex related to empathy and compassion, memory and a sense of self. At the same time, there was a decrease in the density of the amygdala – the primitive area of the brain responsible for the fight-or-flight response.

Notes Laurel Airica, creator of WordMagic: An Enchanted Literary Entertainment, “Given that meditation increases the part of the brain related to compassion, and the effects of meditation show up throughout the day in more compassionate interactions – even with strangers – perhaps meditation should be widely encouraged as an important form of mental/emotional hygiene because it makes us more socially responsible. Meditation may even be an evolutionary strategy that could give our species the necessary impetus to make the ultimate, life-saving leap from Humankind to HumanKindness.”

You can find more details in Laurel’s article.

Have you ever wondered where that phrase comes from? DOG TIRED. Well, I’m still not sure of the origin of the phrase, but these photos definitely illustrate what it means. Thanks to Nancy McMoneagle for sending! No synchro here, but plenty of laughs.

And now, the cats in the dog tired act:

And my personal favorite:

In mid-April, we posted a story about an experiment I conducted based on Pam Grout’s new book, E-Cubed. One of the interesting comments about it was from Stephanie, who had read Grout’s E-Squared, saw the experiment post, and decided to do her own thing with it.

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I love the E-Squared book, fun experiments. Because of your post, I took seven $1 bills and had my 13 year old son help me craft the notes. I then drove around with my 15 year old daughter taping them to car windshields. What fun!

As I was taping a dollar to a windshield, my ex-husband called my daughter and she told him what I was doing. He laughed and asked, “Why in the world would she do that?”

My daughter “To spread happiness, I guess.” Indeed!

The best part is that he always hated when I donated or gave away money; he simply didn’t understand it. He said “If you’re going to give money away, give it to me!” I guess I’m still up to my old tricks.

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A few days after I’d done my $1 bill experiment, I decided to try it with $5 bills. I only had one, so I taped my note to the bill, dropped the tape dispenser in my bag, and headed to the gym.

I recently changed gyms. Now that I’m on Medicare, Humana offers free gym membership through a program called Silver Sneakers. I can’t say I’m crazy about the name, which I equate with silver/gray hair, but since it’s free, I can’t complain. The only thing this gym lacks is a rowing machine and aerobic classes, but that’s why the membership is inexpensive – or, in my case, free. The clientele are working class folks, the ones who work 8-5 for minimum wage and should be voting the Democratic ticket.

In our previous gym, much more upscale, I was paying about $31 a month and it draws the upper middle class folks – and the uber rich and famous, like Bruce Springsteen. If I had left a $1 or $5 bill on the inside of the restroom door here, with a note about the generosity of the universe, it probably would have been dumped in the trash can. But when I taped a $5 bill on the inside of the restroom door at the new gym, I felt that it might mean something to whoever found it.

Two days later, Rob and I received more than $500 in unexpected royalty checks. The thing with this experiment is that you can’t be thinking, Gee, what am I going to get back in return? You tape your bills to wherever, without any expectation of compensation, and simply hope that it helps someone, somewhere. I keep putting myself in the shoes of someone who finds a note and a bill. I hope their reaction is: WTF??? Is this for real?

In fact when I posted the first story I wrote on Facebook, I’d forgotten that my neighbor – who is a Facebook friend – was one of my recipients.

You did this? she wrote. Thank you!!

I plan on continuing this experiment. We’re going to a writers’ conference this weekend in Tallahassee, a college town. Unless college life has changed drastically, it means these kids are living hand to mouth. I figure I’ll have my printed notes about the abundant universe and my tape dispenser and my bills. And in between our home and Tallahassee, there will be many hundreds of miles of turnpike – and rest stops. What better place for this kind of thing than a turnpike restroom, where women from all over the country converge?

Maybe Grout has hit on something big here. It’s like that very old TV show The Millionnaire,  It ran from 1955-1960, and was actually about this kind of giving, but on a much larger scale:

According to IMDB: John Beresford Tipton is a multi millionaire and among the things he does with his money is to give away a million dollars to people he doesn’t know. So every week Tipton who is not seen, instructs his assistant, Michael Anthony to go bring the person he chose their check. And he asks them to sign an agreement not to tell anyone how they got the money. And we see how the recipients’ lives are changed.

It’s not as if a buck or five bucks is going to drastically change anyone’s life. But the thought behind it, that we live in an abundant universe that always has our backs, is powerful.

The other day we received an interesting synchro through the contact form on our blog. It was from Jeff, who lives outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, and involves a math/numbers synchronicity. Here’s what he wrote:

I was born on May 24. My friend is born on April 15. Our birthdays are 39 days apart.

“39 is the smallest natural number which has three partitions into three parts which all give the same product when multiplied: {25, 8, 6}, {24, 10, 5}, {20, 15, 4}.”

The second group of numbers contains the numbers 5 (May) and 24. It also contains the number 10. 10 in Roman numerals is X. I have one X chromosome (XY).

The third group of numbers contains the numbers 4 (April) and 15. It also contains the number 20. 20 in Roman numerals is XX. She has two X chromosomes (XX).

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I was struck by the numerical stuff and emailed Jeff, asking if he’d experienced anything like this before. His response:

This is the first time I’ve experienced something like this.

I was checking out the date range on wolframalpha.com and for some reason I decided to search for the number 39. I read an encyclopedic article up until I noticed our birthdays in the section containing the quote from my first email. It took me a while to make a connection between those other numbers in the groups containing our birthdays and the number of chromosomes we have.

I don’t work in the math field but I have taken calculus classes in high school and college. 

The woman is aware of the connection. She didn’t seem interested in it though.

Does anyone have a take on what this synchro could mean?

“Where do you get your ideas from?” That’s the question people often ask novelists probably more than any other. I never know quite what to say when I hear it. Since Trish and I are headed to a writer’s conference in Tallahassee this coming weekend, where we’ll be featured speakers, I probably should come up with an answer.

Whatever my answer might be, it won’t compare to the astonishing answer to that question that Liz Whittaker can provide for her latest novel, The White Tower. Liz, a resident of Wales, has written numerous novels set in the British Isles. Our friend Jane Clifford explains the fascinating story of how this one came about. (Jane has offered some unusual stories, charged with synchronicity, over the years of our blog. However, this one might top them all.)

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“My friend Liz, who is dying of cancer, launched her last novel, The White Tower, which she originally wrote in 1975. It’s very strange how she came by the story.

“A friend of hers got a message through a ouija board: “Tell Liz to go to Pencarreg.” That was it. No reason given.

“Liz didn’t tell me about the message, but came to me with an ordnance survey map and asked me to dowse it with a pendulum to find where she should go for a day out. The pendulum indicated Pencarreg. Then Liz told me about the message. She went to another dowser friend and repeated the question, again without revealing the reason. Likewise, the pendulum indicated Pencarreg.

“So she went there with another friend, where they visited the remains of a Roman fort on top of a small mountain. Whilst there the weirdest thing happened to her. She felt the presence of a girl from centuries ago step into her and Liz began to channel an unknown language at the same time as this girl showed her events from centuries before.

“Liz didn’t feel too comfortable with what was going on, since although clairvoyant she wasn’t used to mediumship. Her friend was astonished to see Liz gabbling away in a strange language. There was an extraordinary noise in the air and to their astonishment a pillar of bees above Liz fell on her and covered her, bees crawling inside her clothes, in her hair, all over her. Terrified, she ran shrieking down the mountain.

“Amazingly, the bees left her unharmed and the spirit girl had gone! During the whole experience Liz downloaded the story for the White Tower. Back in the ‘70s, I read it chapter by chapter hot from the type writer. However, it remained unpublished until I encouraged her to re-write it in recent years. She has dedicated the book to me.

“Last Tuesday, we were discussing the bee incident and Liz told me a friend, who is not psychic, had trouble believing the events that led to the story. A short time later, I was sitting at an outdoor café, while Liz had gone to order coffee, and I watched a woman walk past me with a bee buzzing inside a wine glass. She was holding a card over the top and was walking purposefully up a busy high street taking this bee somewhere. I have never seen someone rescuing a bee in a busy town before!

“Liz returned with the coffees and another woman stopped to chat to her about the book and of course the bee incident was discussed again. The novel tells an extraordinary story of when the Romans brought Christianity here and Druidism and the old ways went underground. So there is mystery and magic in this novel, and it seems that Liz had literally channeled it from a spirit from the past.

Below is the cover image for The White Tower.

Carol Bowman sent us this list as a fun thing to read to a friend in the hospital. It piqued my interest, so I started googling the statements and discovered the original source for this list.

Some of these statements are true, some are true but with caveats, and some are wrong. I didn’t check all of these, but have noted the ones I did check. Fun trivia, for sure. I did check snopes. com to see if they knew about this list. I have to say that I grew disenchanted with snopes when we were writing Synchronicity Highway and found that snopes dismissed the JFK/Lincoln parallels outright, basically writing them off to random weirdness. I think snopes is actually a skeptic site. That said, here’s their take on this list.

For the sake of brevity, I’ve eliminated some of the items on the original list. Feel free to find your own supportive or contradictory evidence as to what’s true – and what isn’t!

A dime has 118 ridges around the edge.

A cat has 32 muscles in each ear. – Yes, but in the outer ears.

A crocodile cannot stick out its tongue.

 True

A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.
 True but…It turns out to be about 5 months.

A dragonfly has a life span of 24 hours. Well, no.

A “jiffy” is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.

A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.

A snail can sleep for three years.

 Apparently true.

Al Capone’s business card said he was a used furniture dealer. Sounds about right, like John Gotti calling himself a plumber.

All 50 states are listed across the top of the Lincoln Memorial on the back of the $5 bill.

Almonds are a member of the peach family.

 True

An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.

Babies are born without kneecaps. They don’t appear until the child reaches 2 to 6 years of age.

  Sort of true.

Butterflies taste with their feet.
 True!

Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds. True.

Dogs only have about 10.

“Dreamt” is the only English word that ends in the letters “mt”.

February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon.

In the last 4,000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.

If the population of China walked past you, in single file, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction.

If you are an average American, in your whole life, you will spend an average of 6 months waiting at red lights.

 Didn’t check this, but it sure feels true!

It’s impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.

Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors. DaVinci invented a lot of things, but not the scissors.

Maine is the only state whose name is just one syllable.

No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple.

On a Canadian two dollar bill, the flag flying over the Parliament building is an American flag.

Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.

The Peanut is one of the ingredients of dynamite .

Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.

 True

“Stewardesses” is the longest word typed with only the left hand and “lollipop” with your right.

The average person’s left hand does 56% of the typing.

The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.

The sentence: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” uses every letter of the alphabet.

The winter of 1932 was so cold that Niagara Falls froze completely solid.

 I believe that Niagra Falls – or parts of it- also froze this past winter.

There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar.

There are more chickens than people in the world.

There are only four words in the English language which end in “dous”: tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous

T

Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.

TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.

Winston Churchill was born in a ladies’ room during a dance.

 Well, maybe and maybe not. If you google this, you’ll find that he was – and that he wasn’t.

Women blink nearly twice as much as men.

Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks; otherwise it will digest itself.

NOW you know everything