Welcome to The Mystical Underground

When Rachel Maddow began her cable news program Monday evening, she began with a story about a red panda named Rusty that had escaped from the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. Fortunately, at least for the zoo and no doubt for Rusty as well, the panda was captured after traveling about 14 blocks from his exhibit. A woman spotted the unusual creature outside of her house and called the zoo, asking if they had any animals missing.

How Rusty escaped is still a mystery. Zoo officials began reviewing security footage Monday morning to see if there is any evidence of how he escaped or whether he may have been taken by a human and then set loose. No security cameras are pointed directly at the red panda exhibit, though, and the zoo plans to add more cameras.

Maddow seamlessly shifted into a story about Edward Snowden, the NSA leaker, and his efforts to evade the long arm of the U.S. justice system as he fled from his temporary refuge in Hong Kong to Russia and supposedly en route to Cuba and asylum there or in Venezuela or in Ecuador.

Maddow saw the parallels in the two stories – at least the escape aspect. But if you think about it, there are more links suggesting that the two stories, both making news Monday, form an interesting meaningful coincidence. Red pandas are native to southwestern China and the Himalayas. We tend to think of pandas and China as intertwined. But a red panda makes the creature sound even more at home in China.

So a red panda makes a mysterious escape as Snowden, the whistle blow who has exposed the secrets of the ‘thought police,’ flees China under mysterious conditions.

Also, it wasn’t any zoo that Rusty escaped from. It was the National Zoo in the nation’s capital and the zookeepers began an all out search for the rogue creature. Similarly, the Justice Department has issued an arrest warrant, changing Snowden with espionage, and calling on foreign countries to capture and extradite him.

A related synchro is that, astrologically,Pluto is in Capricorn, where it has been since 2008. Pluto is the great transformer, the planet that moves at a snail’s pace and ushers in permanent and irrevocable change. Since 2008, it’s  been about exposing secrets of those people and institutions that are in power.

We saw it in 2008 with the exposure of the banking and mortgage fiasco at the end of the George W. Bush era, and over the ensuing years we’ve seen more secrets come to light through the Wikileaks organization. Now we see the Snowden exposure of the NSA spying on U.S. citizen’s telephone conversations and Internet communications, as well as spying on foreign governments.

If Starlight News astrologer Nancy Sommers is correct, there will be one more similarity between the red panda and Snowden…and it won’t be that Snowden’s nickname is Rusty. Instead, unfortunately for Snowden, his life on the run will probably end with his capture by this fall.

In astro-speak, Nancy explains: “The August through September 2013 Neptune station square to Snowden’s Jupiter (3Sagittarius08) may bring another round of flight from reality and consequence, but that seems quite likely to by smashed by late September. Essentially, from September 17 through November 11, 2013, Snowden will be in an increasingly difficult, desperate situation, including perhaps an unhappy return to the US.”

Whether you see Snowden as a hero for  exposing government invasion of privacy that began with the Patriot Act or a treasonous criminal, it’s clear that his story is one that has caught our attention and spawned global synchronicity. Also, his name invites a synchro: snowed-in. For people who lives in northern areas, this term usually means trapped.

 Several months ago, Megan told us about a PBS series she loved: Downton Abbey. 

“If it’s about zombies, we probably won’t watch it,” we said.

“No zombies. It’s set in England in the early 1900s, on this fabulous estate.  You’ve got the aristocratic family, the Crawleys, and their servants. They…oh forget it, it’s complicated. I’ll stream the first episode and we’ll watch it, okay?”

And we did.   Rob and I were hooked.

The lives of the Crawleys – Robert, his American wife Cora, and their three very different daughters , Mary, Edith, and Sibyl– unfold with great drama and human emotion alongside the lives of the multitude of servants who tend to them. The first episode opens the day after the sinking of the Titanic, April 16, 1912, so from the start, we sense we will see how some of the great historic events will impact British social hierarchy – and the lives of their servants.

We’re nearing the end of the third season and so far, have lived through the outbreak of World War I, the Spanish influenza pandemic,  the Marconi scandal, the formation of the Irish free state. Now we’re into the rip-roaring 1920s, when the middle daughter – the only one not married – begins writing a column for a London newspaper, a totally scandalous thing for an aristocrat to do!  

The lives of the servants, though, are as intriguing and complex as the lives of the Crawleys. We see the scheming that goes on among them to be first footman or the butler who dresses Robert Crawley every morning or the female servant who brings Cora Crawley breakfast in bed. We see their love dramas, their life dramas, their conflicts and triumphs. We see the relationships that develop between them and the Crawleys. After all, if you dress someone day in and day out, it’s inevitable that a relationship of some kind develops. 

This is soap opera elevated to a new, riveting level.

The acting is superb. Maggie Smith, who plays the Dowager Countess, seems to have been born for this role – just as she was born for the role of Professor Minerva McGonagall in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. As Robert Crawley’s mother, she is the family caretaker – and also quite a trickster.  She meddles in the affairs of the family and the servants in an always dignified way, behind the scenes, pulling strings. She’s got some great one-liners.

Carson, the head butler, is totally dedicated to the Crawley family. Mrs. Hughes, second in command below Carson, is a softie for the downtrodden, the vulnerable. In one episode, a kitchen maid is impregnated by a soldier staying at the abbey when it’s turned into a rehab center for wounded warriors from WWI. Even though the maid is fired, Mrs. Hughes takes her and her baby food, supplies, helps to support her.

One of the most interesting relationships occurs between John Bates, Robert’s personal valet,  and Anna, who is the abbey’s head housemaid. There’s a tense period when he’s in prison for the murder of his first wife.

One of my favorite episodes included a scene with  a Ouija board; the 1920s (third season) coincides with the rise of Spiritualism.

The series has won all sorts of awards and acclaim – Golden Globes, Emmys, even the Guinness Book of World Records because it earned the most nominations of any international TV series in the history of the Primetime Emmy Awards. By the third series, Downton Abbey had become one of the most widely watched TV shows in the world.

The writing is pitch perfect, the characters are cast exactly right, and you come away from each episode with a feeling that you’ve just glimpsed a real slice of history. You feel like a time traveler who has landed on the grounds of this magnificent estate. And you, the time traveler, knock at the kitchen door and are admitted by Anna or Mrs. Patmore, the head cook (Irish) at the abbey. Maybe you’re hired as kitchen help. Or as a chauffeur. Whatever your job as a servant, once you’re in, you become a member of a larger family.

And there are three distinct families in this show: the Crawleys, the servants, and  the estate itself, the land, the history of the place,  the physical building with its dozens of grand rooms, its spires, its intricate secrets. The consciousness about class – who you’re born to – is utterly clear. So when Sibyl, the youngest daughter, marries the Irish chauffeur, it becomes a family scandal. When Mary, the oldest daughter, marries her cousin (yeah, you read that right), because he has money they need for the estate, it’s a surprise when they actually fall in love.

In every episode, there are numerous surprises, plot twists, character revelations. And always, there’s this intriguing connection to history as it’s unfolding. Clothes, cars, and mores change accordingly. The evolving historical backdrop feels genuine.

I didn’t expect to like this show – not much that’s paranormal, no Mulder and Scully, no twilight zone. But what Downton Abbey has is humanity. It’s about how we evolve as a family, a culture, a country, nation, a world, a collective. It’s about people tossed into the cauldron of historical events and how they cope within the restrictive mores of their time. if you haven’t seen this show, by all means give it a try.

from a deck called The Cloisters

Our neighbor, Annette, is an avid reader, so whenever we have a new book published, we give her a copy. The other day, she was headed to the beach with her kids and stopped by to borrow a book. “You mentioned that Tango Key series, Trish, can I borrow one of those?”

The Tango Key series actually started back in the late 1980s, with five books that I wrote as Alison Drake. Four of those books featured a local cop, Aline Scott.  Later, in the mid-90s, I returned to the fictional island of Tango Key with another set of characters – psychic and bookstore owner Mira Morales; her partner, Sheppard, an FBI agent; her young daughter, Annie; and her grandmother, Nadine. So I gave Annette a copy of The Hanged Man, the first book in that series.

Only later did I remember that the characters don’t get to Tango Key until the second book in that series. I also remembered that Annette isn’t a fan of tarot cards, which figure prominently in the murder investigation around which the plot centers.

A few days later, Annette dropped by and said  she’s ready for the second book. “And you wouldn’t believe the synchronicity I had while I was reading The Hanged Man on the beach.”

Okay, I’m all ears. (She, by the way, had the actual book, not the ebook. That cover was not my favorite. But the publisher was afraid to put an actual tarot image on the cover.)

Annette was reading the part in the novel about the tarot deck that Mira and Nadine are using to gain insight into a vision Mira had of the murder that Sheppard is investigating. She suddenly noticed that the  woman closest to her on the beach was laying out cards from a tarot deck.

“Now, you know I don’t like tarot cards. But I was really struck by the synchronicity. I mean, there I am, sitting on the beach reading about the various kinds of tarot decks that exist, and a woman next to me is laying out tarot cards. What are the odds?”

And because Annette can strike up a conversation with anyone, anywhere, she walked over to the woman and told her about the synchronicity.

Then she went swimming for awhile with her kids, and when they returned to the beach, the woman came over to her and handed Annette a three-page, handwritten tarot reading that she’d just done for her.

Annette had never heard the word synchronicity until we gave her and her twin copies of 7 Secrets of Synchronicity several years ago. The day she finished the book, she stopped by to let us know that she experiences “this stuff” all the time. She just never had a word for it other than coincidence, which she intuitively knew just didn’t quite capture the fullness of the experience.  

“Now,” she said with a laugh, “even my kids know what a synchronicity is.”

This video tugs at my heart. There’s something about “pet” birds that speaks to me. Happy summer solstice!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=O7D-1RG-VRk#!

  Ever since The Hunger Games was released as a movie, I’ve read a number of blog posts about why dystopian novels are not the blog author’s favorite type of story. But I am, quite frankly, fascinated by dystopian novels.

 First, there’s that word, dystopian. It rolls off your tongue in a weird, uncomfortable way, doesn’t it? According to dictionary.com, a dystopia  is  “usually an imaginary place where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives.” Let’s look at some of the best ones:

 In Orwell’s classic, 1984 (yeah, he was off in his timing!)  the world is one in which books are banned – not just censored, but banned, forbidden, so there are small groups of rebels and outliers who spend their days memorizing books.

Blade Runner, probably one of Philip K. Dick’s best novels, became a movie of the same name in 1982 and was one of the first movies in which Harrison Ford played the protagonist. It depicts Los Angeles in 2019 (that’s six years from now!) in a world where corporations are king.

A Wikipedia summary: The film depicts a dystopian Los Angeles in November 2019 in which genetically engineered organic robots called replicants —visually indistinguishable from adult humans—are manufactured by the powerful Tyrell Corporation as well as by other “mega–manufacturers” around the world. Their use on Earth is banned and replicants are exclusively used for dangerous, menial or leisure work on off-world colonies. Replicants who defy the ban and return to Earth are hunted down and “retired” by police special operatives known as “Blade Runners”. The plot focuses on a brutal and cunning group of recently escaped replicants hiding in Los Angeles and the burnt-out expert Blade Runner, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), who reluctantly agrees to take on one more assignment to hunt them down.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I read this book in two sittings. McCarthy is a powerful writer and I was blown away by this book. It‘s a strange, post- apocalyptic  story about a father and son – who are never named, they are simply man and boy – as they travel through a ruined landscape in search of…well, hope. We have a heartbreaking sense of their relationship, of how the father will do anything to protect his young son. McCarthy won the Putlizer prize for this novel and it went on to become a movie with Viggo Martenson. The movie wasn’t nearly as moving as the book. I should add that Rob found this book so depressing he couldn’t finish it.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, and yes, it also became a movie. It’s the first in a trilogy about a world that has suffered some terrible calamity and in its wake, North America has been divided into 12 districts ruled by an oppressive government. The Hunger Games are an annual event in which one boy and one girl ages 12–18 from each of the twelve districts are selected by lottery to compete in a televised battle to the death. In other words, kids killing kids.

What I found most interesting about the trilogy and the subsequent movies is that this trilogy is for young adults because the protagonist is a 16-year-old girl. That means it’s okay to show kids killing kids, but these same kids can’t swear or have sex. Really? Kids killing other kids is okay, but kids having sex or saying shit is not?

There are many other dystopian novels – Stephen King’s Running Man,  Philip K Dicks’s Minority Report, and Scott Westerfield’s series that begins with The Uglies.   A good number of them are young adult books, but for the moment let’s focus on these.

1984 made us aware of literary censorship and probably helped to spawn many of today’s anti-censorship organizations. When a book is censored, attention is brought to who and why. The American Library Association publishes annual lists of censored books and all the relevant details.

Blade Runner may actually be happening now, with the recent whistleblower revelations by 29-year old high school dropout Edward Snowden. This young man worked for the NSA through an outsourced company and you can read all about him here. Is he a version of the Ford character in Blade Runner ? Is he a hero or a traitor?

The Road is a literary journey through a world where anarchy rules, nearly everyone is dead, and the survivors are desperate.  The emotional relationships between father and son is what makes the story work.

In all dystopian novels, we are presented with a horrifying what if, a probable path,  and are invited to live it. As we read, as we watch, we are confronted with the very thing we do NOT want. We are presented with shocking contrasts. I think dystopian novels reveal the probable futures that are available to us as a species, and help us to collectively strive for something better, more positive, more humane.

These novels and movies impact us at a collective level, and often force us, individually and collectively, to evolve as human beings. They teach us things  about who  we are and hope to become.

Here’s a string of synchronicities related to a murder that involves three related men—the killer, his brother, and the killer’s son.

David Berg is a well known Texas lawyer who founded his own law firm and has won cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. He’s also been a civil rights activist and a Clarence Darrow-style defender of the damned: disgraced politicians, grungy protesters and celebrities.

But the most dramatic case of his life, revealed in his memoir, Run, Brother, Run, occurred years before Berg became a lawyer. He and his brother, Alan Berg, were separated at a young age when their parents divorced. They reconnected when Alan moved to Houston after serving in the Navy. The two grew close and David admired his older brother, a salesman who seemingly could sell carpeting to anyone. Alan worked for his father’s carpeting company, but in 1968 he vanished.

“It’s very hard to explain except to say that when a loved one disappears you become detached from anything even remotely that could be described as a normal life,” Alan recently said in an interview on National Public Radio. “I couldn’t take an unlabored breath. My father was so distraught he would throw up. He would bolt from the middle of sales discussions and just leave and look for my brother. So it was devastating.”

David’s father finally hired a well established private detective named Claude Harrelson to search for Alan. Within three days, Harrelson reported that Alan had been murdered. The detective then asked for $3,000 to locate the body. He said he didn’t want to take the $5,000 reward already offered, because he was afraid he would be the killer’s next victim.

A short time later, police arrested the alleged killer, and astonishingly it was Claude Harrelson’s brother, Charles Harrelson.  Supposedly, Harrelson had been hired by a former employee of the carpeting company, who was starting his own business, and was in conflict with Alan’s father. But Charles Harrelson escaped conviction when testimony from the only witness, his wife, was ruled inadmissible because she was his spouse.

But Charles Harrelson would  be convicted of two other murders and he was suspected in at least 20 killings. He also once confess to involvement in the JFK assassination. He died in prison in 2007.

That’s a somewhat lengthy explanation that leads to the next synchro. In 1993, David Berg attended a Simon & Garfunkel reunion concert at Madison Square Garden. Sitting in the adjacent seat was actor Woody Harrelson, Charles Harrelson’s son.

Woody was raised by his mother and knew very little about his father until he was seven years old when he found out his father was accused of murder. That was 1968, the year Charles was accused of killing Alan Berg. As an adult, Woody often visited his father in prison and considered him a friend, more than a father – or a mass murderer.

One year after sitting next to David Berg in Madison Square Garden, Woody Harrelson starred as a crazed serial killer in Natural Born Killers. With that role, Harrelson lost his image of an actor who nice-guy roles. Possibly, his electrifying performance was abetted by his genetic link to an actual killer.

This video is interesting. You can hear the family talking about what they’re seeing about halfway through, which gives it an air of authenticity.

 This morning at the gym, I was on the treadmill when my right shoe suddenly felt like it had a stone or a stick inside of it. I got off the treadmill to remove whatever it was and discovered the side of the right shoe had torn away from the sole. The sole looked like it had gone through one puddle too many and it seemed pretty doubtful that even a cobbler could hammer and stitch things back together again.

I am fond of my workout shoes. They are filled – deliberately – with holes that allow the feet to breathe.  I don’t have to wear socks with them. I think of them as my multidimensional shoes; in these shoes, I can do anything! So, I figured a trip to the sports store would be in order.

This is my third pair of shoes like this. When Nika was a puppy – 18 months  ago –  she chewed up the first pair and destroyed the left  shoe in the second pair. At the time I found the second pair, I realized the right shoe was untouched, so I stashed it away in a plastic bin where we put our shoes before coming into the house. I’m not sure why I did this. Maybe I’m part pack rat, maybe in the back of my mind I thought I might be able to use it if Nika got a hold of my third pair of shoes.

I stashed it and forgot about it.

This evening, I was fishing around in the shoe bin for a pair of workout shoes I could use until I had a chance to buy a new pair  – and came across the stashed shoe. Now my multidimensional shoes are complete once again!

I like the symbolism of shoes. They not only carry us through mud, across treadmills, into and out grocery stores,  they protect and support our feet.  They can dress us up or render us strictly casual. My main rule for shoes is simple: are they comfortable? And my multidimensional shoes are certainly that.

So now that my  shoes are reunited, left and right a perfect match, I’m hoping these shoes are willing to take me across the world.

Some of my most vivid dreams have come at the time of death–or shortly after– of friends and family members. In these dreams, the deceased seem surprisingly alive in the afterlife.

Our friend, Marcus Anthony, an Australian futurist, has also had dreams related to deaths recently. However, Marcus’s dreams have come a week or two before the deaths. The dreams weren’t of anyone close to him, but to a couple of men that he had admired for years. I’ll let Marcus tell the story. – Rob

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Recently on their blog synchrosecrets.com, Rob and Trish Macgregor wrote a post which featured a quote on synchronicity by David R Hawkins, the mystic and author of the influential book Power vs Force. I have written about Hawkins quite a bit over the years, as I feel that much of what he writes has a very high level of truth. That post by the Macgregors inspired me to go to YouTube and watch some of Hawkin’s videoed lectures. Unfortunately I was saddened to see one entitled “David R Hawkins’ last lecture”. I then found out that he had died in September 2012.

I then recalled that I had had a vivid dream of Hawkins’ dying some time ago. I still recall the dream. In it I saw Hawkin’s face, and it was clear that he had passed away. The other thing was that his overall consciousness field appeared to be “empty”. This is hard to explain, but it was as if he was hollow. My sense is that this was because he was in a kind of non-dual state which he had often described himself as feeling like nothingness (BTW, this is not the highest state of consciousness, according to Hawkins).

I have a lot of precognitive dreams, but I only write down my dreams every now and again these days – when I feel they are profound or perhaps precognitive. When I heard that Hawkins had died, I recalled the dream and that I’d written it down somewhere. So I went looking for it. I was particularly interested to find the exact date.

Annoyingly, I couldn’t find it anywhere in my journals or on my computer. Then I recalled that I occasionally write down dreams on the notepad on my mobile phone. I try not to have my phone anywhere near my bed when I am sleeping these days, but I have sometimes kept it there deliberately for this very purpose.

Alas, it was to no avail. The Hawkins’ dream was nowhere to be found on my mobile either (I know I put it somewhere!!!). But what I did find on my mobile notepad was a whole heap of dreams that I had recorded and mostly forgotten about. Some of them were quite fascinating.

But one really caught my attention. Indeed it was even more prophetic than the Hawkins’ dream.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about this dream is that it occurred only six weeks ago. It is dated April 22, 2013. And I had absolutely forgotten about it!

This is not that unusual (though it’s true I do remember a lot of dreams, even when I don’t record them).

When I awake and write a dream down, I am often barely conscious, and in a very, very drowsy state. I fall back to sleep immediately, as soon as I record the dream. I am a very heavy sleeper.

So what was so special about this dream? Well, take a look at it. This is the dream as I recorded it in its entirety. I emailed this to myself directly from my mobile note pad, and I have cut and pasted it here.

I am looking in from a railway station at a pub across the road. It says “Stuart Wilde pub” on the sign. Then I look closer and see that it says: “Stu dead”. I feel great sadness.        

Then I hear someone say: “Is it true?”            

A little boy’s voice returns: “Yes. He had a heart attack.”      

I keep hearing the song “She’s out of my life.” (Michael Jackson) It’s very sad.     

Then I hear another voice. It is Stuart Wilde saying: “I’d like to thank her.”           

Next I am hearing words from the Cold Chisel song “Flame Trees”:           

 ”There’s no change. There’s no pace. Everything within its place. Just makes it harder to believe that she won’t be around”.   

There is a sense of sadness and emptiness, like just after someone dies or leaves.

As many of you will know, Stuart Wilde died of a heart attack on May 1st, just over a week after I had that dream, while traveling through Ireland. I found out about Stuart’s death two weeks after that. I was very sad to hear about it. He had been very influential in my own spiritual journey.  I was moved to write this blog post about his life and its significance.

Incredibly, when I came to write that post I had forgotten all about the dream which I’d recorded just a week or so before he died. I did have a vague recollection of dreaming about it, but it was very hazy, and I didn’t want to mention it on the article.

Everything in the dream is very easy to understand, with perhaps the one vague part being Stuart’s cryptic words: “I’d like to thank her.” It felt as if he was literally grateful to a female who was close to him. My sense is that he was thanking his mother.