Welcome to The Mystical Underground

Nika and Noah on the dog dune

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We’ll be posting links to our most recent radio interviews on the right side of the blog, beneath the cover for Aliens, and at this link in the pages.

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Polo season will continue for another few weeks here, until Easter, and that means a lot of dogs that come to the park are strangers to us. But even the strangers exhibit the same attributes as the regular dogs – a focus on the immediate, the now, this instant.

The now is different for every dog, just as it is for every human. Some dogs just want to sniff around and explore on their own. Others are here to run, play, and commune with other dogs. Some are focused on a specific task – catching the ball, the Frisbee, or that pesky poodle’s tail. Some prowl the fence, hoping to spot a squirrel. Then there are the dogs who bound into the park and greet everyone, human and canine alike, the social butterflies. We have an occasional aggressive dog with anger or dominance issues, but considering how many dogs visit the park, they are surprisingly few. With each dog, though, there’s an immediacy to what they’re experiencing and for the most part, that immediacy strikes me as joyful.

So I find myself marveling at the possibility that most dogs live naturally in a state of joy, bliss, happiness. Are they, in their focus on the moment, teaching us, their humans, something? We humans come to the park with our issues and concerns, our stuff about partners, kids, jobs, and sit around in sun or shade, depending on the season, then talk about what’s wrong instead of about what’s right.  We gripe and complain, advise and tell stories.

If we are energy that vibrates at a particular frequency and that frequency attracts corresponding experiences and people, situations and opportunities, then we should probably pay attention to our dogs – and to all the animals, domestic and wild,  with whom we share our lives. They live more fully in the moment than most of us do.

For the most part, dogs don’t seem to fret about the future and or dwell consciously in the past. They don’t hold grudges. They apparently forgive and forget. Even abused animals can overcome the memories with the right owner, the right alchemy of love and companionship.

And so here we are, with a treatise about the dog park and life and our ability to create our reality from the inside out by being fully present in our own lives. And not once did I mention human politics!

I’m watching less news these days. I walk around outside every morning, appreciating the beauty of my backyard. I make a daily list about what I’m going to do – and what I hope/expect the universe to do. Maybe it’s all silly. But suppose it isn’t? Suppose this is how it works at the quantum level, each thought and desire connecting with Indra’s Net?   Suppose this is how tipping points in ideas, products, and belief systems are achieved? Suppose, just suppose, this is how our collective reality is woven together? What we, as individuals, do and think, feel and act upon is important. It takes just one of us to change the world.

Our animal buddies seem to know this. Do we?

From time to time we’ve written about synchroncities that have occurred in our gym. For example, one day Bruce Gernon, who co-authored THE FOG with me, mentioned he saw Bruce Springsteen in the gym – he’s a member and frequents the gym in winter when he’s living here – and then , as if on cue, a Springsteen song comes on the satellite radio station.

Now recently, I’ve gotten entangled in a series of synchronicities related to the Mitchell-Hedges crystal skull and Indiana Jones. Here’s how it unraveled.

A young guy at the gym, who Trish pointed out on a couple of occasions as being a good match for our daughter Megan, came up to me one morning, introduced himself, and mentioned he knew I’d written several Indiana Jones novels. Then he asked if I had anything to do with the last Indy movie, I.J. and the Kingdom of Skulls.

I told him my first novel was called Crystal Skull, published a year before I started working with LucasFilm, but it wasn’t related to the movie.  Tom said he was asking because there was someone I should meet, the father of a friend. The reason I should get in touch with him was because Bill Homann is the current owner of the famed Mitchell-Hedges skull.

At the time, I was getting Crystal Skull republished as an e-book. So I wrote Bill Homann on Facebook, mentioned Tom, and asked if he had any photos I could use for the cover of the e-book. But I never heard back. Weeks passed and Tom pestered me about calling him every time he saw me at the gym. Finally, one day I called and left a message. Then, minutes later, checking my cell phone, I noticed that Bill had called me the previous week. We finally got in touch. He sent me a dozen unusual photos the skull – including the one above – and he invited us to see the skull in Sedona, where he lives.

Bill also mentioned that he has stopped showing the skull publicly because of threats from certain individuals to confiscate the skull. I didn’t know what he was talking about and wondered if he was being a bit paranoid. But I would soon find out otherwise.

That happened on March 13 when the Huffington Post ran a strange story  about an archaeologist in Belize who was suing Lucas Film and Disney over the use of crystal skulls in the movie. Dr. Jaime Awe also claimed that the Mitchell-Hedges skull belongs to the people of Belize and was stolen from a ruin. He wants it returned. The law suit is bizarre since the acrylic skulls in the movie looked nothing like the Mitchell-Hedges skull. But there it was, Indiana Jones tied in with the Mitchell Hedges skull. Fiction and real life entangled.

It’s rare when synchronicity can be seen in a photograph. But there it is in the above photo –   a young Bill Clinton shaking hands with President Kennedy. Young Bill already had his eyes on the White House and the White House photographer captured synchronicity.

It was July 1963 when 16 year old Bill Clinton traveled to Washington D.C as part of a Boys Nation retreat. One of the events involved attending a White House ceremony with the president. Before leaving, Bill promised his mother that he would come home with a picture with the President. Upon arrival, Bill worked his way to the front row of seats in the Rose Garden.

When Kennedy finished speaking, Bill leaped to his feet and reached out to shake President Kennedy’s hand. Then, as if fated by history, the White House photographer was ready and captured the handshake between the president and future president. As he arrived home clutching his picture for his mother she would later comment to others, “I knew right then that politics was the answer for him.”

It was a picture that would change Clinton’s life and tie him directly to Kennedy. Kennedy would be assassinated only a couple months after the picture was taken and high school senior Clinton suddenly became one of the few in the Hot Springs, Arkansas area to ever have met Kennedy. The teenage Clinton became a sought after speaker in all the Kiwanis, Rotary, and other clubs in town talking about Kennedy and politics.

After Clinton moved into the White House as the new president, he gave orders to his friend Webster Hubbell to get the facts related to two great mysteries – the Kennedy assassination and UFOs.

“If I put you over there in justice I want to you to find the answer to two questions for me: One, who killed JFK. And two, are there UFOs.”  — Friends in High Places by Webster Hubbell,   former deputy attorney general

Think about this era for a moment. Men and women dressed like the cast in Grease, Afro-Americans still couldn’t vote, and in most states, the only way you could divorce your spouse was to prove he or she was guilty of a crime.  The Cold War was in full swing, and Harry S Truman, the unpopular incumbent president, had decided not to run in the November election. Eisenhower won that election and ended twenty years of  Democratic rule.

But in July 1952, Truman was still president and, according to CIA historian Gerald Haines, his administration was alarmed about a “massive buildup of (UFO) sightings over the United States.”

The sightings in Washington, D.C. began on July 19, at 11:40 p.m., when seven to ten UFOs were tracked on radar at Andrews Air Force Base and Washington National Airport. They  were about fifteen miles south-southwest of the city, no known aircraft were in the area, and they didn’t follow any established flight path. The UFOs reportedly moved along at normal speeds of 100-130 mph, then accelerated to speeds estimated to be over 7,000 mph. They were observed for more than six hours.

The objects were seen by pilots, air-traffic controllers, civil engineers,  and ordinary citizens. Around three that morning, shortly before jet fighters arrived from Newcastle Air Force Base in Delaware,  the UFOs vanished simultaneously from all radar screens.  But when the jets ran low on fuel and had to return to base, the objects reappeared, which convinced a senior air traffic controller, Harry Barnes, that the UFOs were monitoring radio frequencies.

Over the next ten days, the UFOs reappeared  and F-94 military jets were dispatched to intercept them. But the jets were never able to get close enough to shoot. According to Lt. Colonel Moncel Monte, an Air Force public information officer, they sometimes outflew the pilots by “as much as a thousand miles an hour.”

The media, of course, had a field day, with headlines screaming about flying saucers in restricted airspace over the White House and the Capital. The headlines of the Washington Post on July 28 read: ‘Saucer’ Outran Jet, Pilot Reveals. From The New Yorker: ‘Saucers’ Spotted on Capital Radar. The Washington Daily News headline for July 29: Jets Ordered to Hunt Down Flying Saucers.           

On July 29, Major General John Samford apparently realized the Air Force had to make some sort of official response, so he held a press conference. It was the largest and longest pres conference the Air Force had held since the second world war.  The following day, July 30, the Washington Times Herald ran a cartoon featuring flying saucers, with a caption that read: Are these what you saucer?  Beneath it was: Mirage, Says AF Officer of ‘Saucers.’  The officer, of course, was James Samford, who told the press corps that he was satisfied in his own mind that the appearances of the objects were the result of atmospheric conditions.

The article went on to explain that radar experts from the Air Force Technical Intelligence Center at Wright Patterson AF Base said that false radar images often are created “by a type of air layer that ‘bends’ the electrical beams.”  Temperature inversions as an explanation was readily accepted by debunkers, but Air Force Captain Edward Ruppelt wasn’t convinced. Even though temperature inversions occurred nearly every night in June, July, and August, none were strong enough to effect radar.

So, way back in 1952, sightings by dozens of ordinary citizens and technical experts were relegated to the land of “weather.” And anyone who thought otherwise instantly became an outlier, to be shunned and ridiculed. It’s an effective weapon. And it has worked for decades.

–                                                              Rupert Sheldrake

You’ve probably heard of TED, a global set of conferences with remarkable people giving talks on a variety of subjects. TED is about ideas, or as they say, “ideas worth spreading.” The name stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design. I’ve never attended a TED conference, but have been impressed by videos of talks.

So it was surprising and disappointing to find out that one of my heroes from the world of science, biologist Rupert Sheldrake, has been censored by TED. Sheldrake recognizes that we are more than physical beings and that mainstream science needs to let go of outdated mechanistic view of the universe. He researches the paranormal – specifically telepathy – and his theory of morphic resonance was so controversial when he first introduced it that one science magazine called him brilliant and another – NATURE – called him a “heretic.” NATURE actually said his paper should be burned. But the bottom line is that he’s a scientist with vision, a man whose work is on the fringe, but supported by experimental evidence.

After he gave a talk at a TEDx conference, skeptics of the paranormal attacked Sheldrake for challenging what he sees as dogma in mainstream science. They demanded that  TED take down his video and the TED administrators complied.

Here’s what our Australian friend futurist Marcus Anthony says about the matter.

“Unfortunately, TED took down Rupert Sheldrake’s TED talk about ‘science set free.’ Two skeptics complained about the talk, which posited 10 questions which challenge scientific orthodoxy on a number of key questions, including the nature of consciousness.

“Sheldrake merely asked the ten questions, and suggested they be scientifically investigated. This is indeed a rather disturbing development, given that the discussion page on the issue indicated that the general public was heavily on Sheldrake’s side. If one cannot legitimately ask open questions about the way science is conducted, or about discrepancies in data, then science is no longer open inquiry, but a set of unquestionable dogmas.

“Tellingly, this was the central point in Sheldrake’s talk that has been removed. They also removed a talk by Graham Hancock, who openly supported Sheldrake.”

It’s disappointing to see TED caving in to pressure from skeptics. It seems to show that mainstream science has become a ‘religion,’ a dogma, the very type of mindset that science is supposed to shun.

A ring cutter

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On Christmas day, I smacked my left ring finger on something and didn’t think anything about it until the next day, when I suddenly realized I couldn’t slide my wedding ring off my finger. The ring, in fact, was so tight against my finger that the area above it to the first knuckle looked malformed.  So I started soaking the finger in ice water, hoping the swelling would go down at least enough for me to slide the ring off.

When the swelling seemed to be subsiding, I coated my finger in all types of slippery stuff – soap and shampoos, olive oil and creams. Nothing worked. I continued to soak it in ice water. Then when it seemed like I might be able to slide the ring off, I was getting out of the car with a bag of groceries and smacked the same finger on the door into the house.

It swelled again. I kept telling myself I should probably go to a jeweler and just get the ring cut off. It wasn’t, after all, my real wedding ring. My wedding band had come off in 2004 or so, when I slipped in our local grocery store  and hit this same finger. That time, though, the swelling wasn’t bad and I was able to slide the ring off. Around this same time, Rob and I found silver rings in a catalog that we really liked; they had southwestern designs on them, like petroglyphs from an Anasazi cave. So we bought a matching pair and ever since, that was the ring I’d been wearing.

After my dad died, his wedding ring was returned to us by the Neptune Society, the organization that had handled his cremation. At the time of his death, his fingers were retaining so much water we couldn’t remove the ring. So when the ring arrived, Rob tried the ring on, it fit perfectly, and he’s been wearing it for the last eight years.

Yesterday, February 21, we were at the dog park, hanging with the regulars. Cassie, who owns border collie, Willow, and I were talking about how her boss – novelist Tami Hoag – has finally figured out who the murderer is in her long overdue new novel. Like many Geminis (she’s June 8, I’m June 7) Cassie’s  hands move a lot when she talks and I happened to notice her ring finger.

It was terribly swollen, the knuckle at least four times the size of mine. When I commented on it, she held her hand out, palm upward, and I could see where the skin on her finger was in serious trouble. Worst trouble than the skin on my finger.

“Look,” I said, and showed her my finger.

Cassie just looked at me. “How weird is that? We need to get these suckers cut off.” Her ring is complex, a family heirloom that is actually three gold rings welded together. Mine is a simple silver ring from a catalog. I was able to turn my ring a little; hers was completely immobile and looked as if it was sinking into the skin and headed for bone.

Early the next morning, Cassie texted me. Karin, who owns the husky Codi, had told Cassie to go to the jeweler she uses. Cassie and I agreed to meet at 11:30 that morning and get our rings cut off. The woman behind the counter  owns the place with her husband. She’s a chirpy little thing, and when we presented our swollen ring fingers, she looked up, her eyes wide. “Wow, both of you? This is weird.”

“Do you get many of these?” Cassie asked.

“Actually, yes, but mostly pregnant women who are retaining fluids.”

“Well, we’re well beyond that,” I told her.

She started to gather together her tools. “Uh, this doesn’t involve a saw, does it?” I asked.

“Nope. No saw. But there’ll be some discomfort.”

“You go first, Trish,” Cassie said quickly.

So I laid my hand flat against the counter, palm upward. The woman picked up a small tool that looked like a miniature can opener. A sort of saw, except that it’s turned manually. It sliced through the ring. Then she took two small pairs of pliers and worked the sliced ends away from each other.  The relief was instantaneous. Blood flowed back through my finger.

Now it was Cassie’s turn. Her finger was badly swollen and the woman had to stop at one point and get a glass of ice water for her to plunge her finger into – numb it. Once she had sliced through the band, she had trouble pulling back the ends and called in the jeweler from the back room. He examined Cassie’s finger with a jeweler’s microscope, then looked up at her and said, “We’ll be talking about you for a long time to come. The skin has started to grow around the band.”

“Just get it off, okay?” Cassie said. “Please?”

“Trust me,” he said. “This is much easier than the emergency room.”

Then, after many winces and groans,  her ring was off. The woman said we could come back in a few weeks, when the swelling had subsided, and have our rings resized. I call Rob and let him know our marriage is being resized. “Cool,” he said.

Cassie and I went to lunch and puzzled over the weird synchro. Two Geminis, two ring fingers. The message? Well, neither Cassie nor I rush to doctors for anything. We’re optimists who figure that ice water soaks and nature will fix the problem. What we learned is: Don’t procrastinate. It sounded sort of silly in this situation, but may be more relevant than we realize.

Whenever our daughter comes home for a visit, we end up watching movies we’ve heard of – but haven’t seen. The first night of her most recent visit, she insisted that we watch Garden State  with Natalie Portman and Zach Graff. “You’ll love it,” Megan insisted.

“Let’s watch Downton Abbey,” Rob said – a TV show to which Megan introduced us.

“No, c’mon, you guys, you’ll love this movie. It’s like Silver Linings Playbook, but better.”

So we watched it. Zach Graff, who plays the protagonist, also wrote the script and directed the film. He is best known for his role on the TV show Scrubs, which we’ve never seen. There are certainly parallels between Garden State and Silver Linings Playbook.  The male protagonists in both movies are damaged goods. In Playbook, Bradley Cooper plays a character who is bipolar. We know this from the beginning of the movie, when we see him in a mental hospital where he has been confined for eight months. Graff plays a man in his late twenties who has apparently gained a bit of fame in Hollywood playing a mentally challenged character in a movie. He returns to New Jersey for the funeral of his mother, whom he hasn’t seen in nine years.  She has drowned in the bathtub.

It’s apparent from the opening scenes that there’s something wrong with this guy. We gradually learn his back story – his father, a shrink – his shrink – has kept him on lithium since he was nine. We don’t know why. We do know he was sent away to boarding school when he was in his mid-teens and hasn’t been home again until now.

He goes to see a neurologist to find out why he has such splitting headaches and this is where some of his back story emerges. The script is written so cleverly that it’s awhile before we find out he was a pissed off little kid who pushed his mother when he was nine. She hit her head on the edge of the kitchen counter and became paralyzed from the neck down. By the time we discover this,  we already love this guy, we feel for him.

We’ve met his emotionally constipated father, some of his buddies from high school, and we’ve been to his mother’s funeral.   We‘ve also met the young  woman, Natalie Portman, who becomes his co-conspirator. She, like the character played by Jennifer Lawrence in Playbook, is also a wounded person. She’s an epileptic, from a strange family, and yes, they fall in love.

If you saw Playbook, then you probably recall that Bradley Cooper used to go running with a garbage bag covering his clothes. Oddly enough, there’s a powerful scene where Zach Graff, Natalie, and Zach’s buddies also wear garbage bags over their clothes. It’s depicted on the cover fro IMDB at the beginning of this post. Maybe wearing a garbage bag is an emerging archetype, who knows?

As similar as the themes are in these two movies, Garden State feels more real, as though it was written from Graff’s life experiences,  from the frozen core of who he was to the  shifting core of who he is becoming.  By the end of the movie, he has known Natalie Portman’s character for four days – and she has changed his life completely.

I immediately went to IMDB to find out if this film had been nominated for anything.  And it was. This Zach Graff guy is a man to watch. He was the star, scriptwriter, director, and many facets of this story are what he lived, I’m sure of it.