Welcome to The Mystical Underground

Our mornings are pretty loose, but ritualistic. Rob gets up before I do, brings in the newspaper, lets the dogs out, starts the coffee and his day. By the time I reach the kitchen, the coffee is hot, the cats are waiting to be fed, and my beautiful grapefruit is begging to be sectioned. I glance at the newspaper, go through the email, then get out the laptop and take a look at my favorite news sites.

But there are some headlines not fit for breakfast viewing. Not fit for any viewing at all. And these are the ones I feel compelled to read because they underscore the shocking contrast between democracy – even when it’s shrinking, even when the Bill of Rights is being rendered irrelevant – and theocracy. Here was the headline that made me read:

Saudi woman beheaded for “practicising witchcraft”.  Or here.

In a statement issued by the SPA state news agency, Amina bint Abdulhalim Nassar was executed in the northern province of Jawf for “practising witchcraft and sorcery.”

What does this mean, exactly? None of the articles I read explained the specifics of her “witchcraft.” Did she reveal her knees to a man who was not a relative or her husband and, thus, lure him into temptation through the sorcery of her flesh? Did she read cards for a friend? Did she concoct some sort of Harry Potter brew for her neighbors? Did she treat an ailment with herbs?

Years go, we had a friend who owned a mystery bookstore in Fort Lauderdale. He had spent years in Saudi Arabia teaching English to the locals. He went there because the pay was fantastic and he didn’t have to pay U.S. taxes. But his stories about the country and culture were chilling. I remember one in particular: that it was illegal to offer weather forecasts. Yes, you read that correctly. In the Saudi worldview, weather forecasts – at least back then – were considered to be prognostication, telling the future, so they were forbidden by the kingdom laws.

So was this woman, perhaps, offering her version of a weather forecast? Is that considered to be such dire sorcery that you’re beheaded for it?

It’s shocking that in a democracy that prides itself on freedom of expression, we do business with a country like Saudi Arabia. It’s even more shocking when you consider that the majority of the 9-11 hijackers were Saudis. In Saudi Arabia, women aren’t permitted to drive, to leave home unless accompanied by a male relative, have to cover themselves and on and on. We recently mentioned Saudi women in another post – Plan B.

I read stories like this one about the beheading and about a Saudi woman who was raped by a male cousin, then released from prison with the suggestion that she marry the guy, and I get angry. Can’t help it. Then I look at the Republican candidates for the 2012 presidential election and realize they aren’t so different from their Saudi brothers.

Keep women oppressed.

Maintain control over women’s reproductive systems.

Make them pay for their poverty, their single motherhoods, it’s all their fault, they didn’t please their guy.

In China, another one of our staunch business allies, hearsay contends that female babies are often killed because females babies  are less desirable than males.

And on it goes. These kinds of stories drive me nuts. And if the law of attraction works on a grand scale, then my focus on the repression of Saudi women suggests that I could end up as a  Saudi female in a future life. Oh shudder, please, no. Anything but.

Okay, now I’m turning the newspaper page to something fluffy, about a dog that found its way home.

On New Year’s Day, Rob, Megan and I headed over to the dog park. The weather was just gorgeous, in the low 70s, a cloudless sky,  and the park was crowded. While Rob and Megan played Frisbee with Noah and Nika, I sat with a group of the regulars.

Colleen, who is unemployed right now, used to work for a company that is hired by banks or owners of homes and apartments to remove furniture and anything else that has been left behind by the renters or previous owners. Many of these places are foreclosed homes.

But last year, a friend asked Colleen if she and their sons could do her a favor – empty out a multimillion dollar mansion. The friend couldn’t pay her because she hadn’t been paid by whoever had hired her, but told Colleen that she and her sons could keep everything they removed. So one morning, Colleen and her son drove their truck over to the mansion.

As soon as they drove up to the place, Colleen was blown away. This place was one of the sprawling mansions you see around here that usually belong to the movers and shakers in the equestrian community. But this place had belonged to a woman who owned a health care agency. “I walked into her bedroom, opened this tremendous walk-in closet, and just balked. Inside were stacks of shoeboxes that had never been opened, handbags that had never been used, clothes with the tags still in them. We removed at least 50 pairs of Loeffler shoes, dozens of Luis Vuitton handbags, Chanel suits.”

A pair of Loeffler shoes goes for between $200-$800. A Louis Vuitton handbag sells for between $800 -$1000. A Chanel suits starts at about $5,000. When Colleen started tallying up the cost of everything this woman had left behind, it was staggering. The Loeffler shoes alone were worth about forty grand. Then there were Gucci shoes and handbags… Colleen figured the woman had left behind about a hundred grand worth of goods. None of it had ever been used.

Then there were the furniture items – an exquisite dining room table, a set of sofas, the outrageously expensive alarm system….

“My God,” one of the women exclaimed. “You could’ve sold it all on ebay and made a fortune.”

“Nope. I sent most of the shoes and handbags to my niece. I kept the dining room table and the sofas.”

“She was a hoarder,” another woman remarked.

Colleen nodded. “Sure. But it went deeper than that.”

You sometimes read about stuff like this – Imelda Marcos and her 1200 pairs of shoes, for instance. But this seemed truly extreme. “Why did she leave all the stuff behind?” I asked.

Colleen shrugged. “She didn’t feel like moving it. Look, this woman was so wealthy that one afternoon she went shopping and in just  a couple of hours, blew more than eighteen grand on clothes that she probably never wore. Pocket change to her.” Colleen tapped her temple. “Some screws loose.”

On the way home, I told Rob and Megan the story. I thought about what it night be like to have that kind of money, where eighteen grand is pocket change and you don’t look back as you drive away from a hundred grand worth of stuff you never used. Does it change you in some fundamental way for the worst? Or was this woman always like that and now she’s simply more so?

Here’s a list of the 50 most generous philanthropists in 2011. I hope these people outnumber the ones like this woman who never looked back.

During the recent lunar eclipse, I cleaned out the closet in my office and tossed out many of the issues of Mountain Astrologer, a must have for any astrologer.

But I happened to save the February-March 2008 issue, and found it this evening when I was looking for something else. The lead story, as you can see by the cover, is about Pluto in Capricorn from 2008-2023. So I turned to that article and started reading.

Whenever astrologers are dealing with the outer, slowing moving planets, they look first to the historical references. Pluto, the snail of the zodiac, takes 250 years to move around a horoscope. Between December 24, 1515 until the end of 1532 when Pluto was in Capricorn, Europe saw the incipience of the Protestant Reformation; Megellan  set sail for the first time; Cortez conquered Cuba; the Ottoman Empire reaches its pinnacle.

Between 1762 and 1772, the last time Pluto was in Capricorn, James Watt invented the steam engine, one of the driving factors in the birth of the Industrial Revolution. During this period, we produced a lot of stuff that was released into the market. The slave trade was at its height. In 1762, Jean-Jacques Cousteau published Social Contract.  According to Wikipedia: “The social contract is an intellectual device intended to explain the appropriate relationship between individuals and their governments.”

Now, for the synchros in all this. Mountain Astrologer is published bi-monthly. This issue was the 137^th, February-March 2008.  That means the author probably wrote it in the late fall of 2007, before the economic meltdown in March 2008, before Obama was elected, before the Euro crisis, the Arab spring, the Occupy movement, the housing meltdown. Here are some of the highlights, under “Global Trends’:

–       Ecosystem breakdown: well, we had the  BP oil spill and more and more species are going extinct. https://dodosgone.blogspot.com

–       Increased tectonic movement: As the planetary empaths know, earthquakes have increased dramatically in this century, particularly since 2008. Take a look. Scroll down the page for the graph.

–       The end of cheap oil: When George W. Bush entered office, gas cost $1.43 a gallon. Today, it ranges between $3.49 to just under $4. But it has gone over four bucks a gallon at various times this century. The cost in Europe and other parts of the world may be higher.

–       Popular unrest and Global conflicts: Gee, this is daily news now. The Occupy movement and the Arab spring go into  this category.

–       Economic Crisis and reform of the monetary system: the accuracy here is eerie, and I quote: “One of the main consequences of all this is likely to be a large-scale economic crisis. The financial institutions will almost certainly gain a great deal…and will try to use the situation to increase their control over the people.”

The author, Maurice Lavenant, concludes his article with what may be a battle cry:

“As always, it is largely up to the people to decide what they consume and how it is I produced. It’s also up to the people to decide how their resources are managed and, indeed, how they themselves are managed…How much abuse we can tolerate before we take our destiny into our own hands is anybody’s guess. In this case, though, the stakes are high because we are dealing with no less than the long-term survival of the entire biosphere. Given this fact, can we afford to be complacent?”

So now that we’ve stepped into  2012, there are many things to consider. How can we embrace the change around us and within our own lives? Do we need to redefine ourselves professionally, personally, spiritually, emotionally? If so, how?  What do we desire for ourselves, our families and loved ones in the coming year?

I’m always looking for the absolute bottom line and for me, it’s this: If I knew I had one day to live, what would I do? How would I live? With whom would I spend my time?

We decided to start off the new year with a joke about 2012 and the end of the world. Unfortunately, all the ones we found were really lame. Probably the best was very short: “The Republican candidates for president.” Enough said.

 Instead, we decided to go with a religious joke, a classic by Emo Phillips. It was voted as one the “75  Funniest Jokes of All Time” in GQ magazine (June 1999).  It’s hilarious, and so right on.

Here it is.

Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump.  I said, “Don’t do it!”

He said, “Nobody loves me.”

I said, “God loves you. Do you believe in God?”

He said, “Yes.”

I said, “Are you a Christian or a Jew?”

He said, “A Christian.”

I said, “Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?”

He said, “Protestant.”

I said, “Me, too! What franchise?”

He said, “Baptist.”

I said, “Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?”

He said, “Northern Baptist.”

I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?”

He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist.”

I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?” He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region.”

I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?”

He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.”

I said, “Die heretic!” And I pushed him over.

Nearly twenty-five years ago, on August 16-17, 1987, the Harmonic Convergence drew people from all over the world to supposed power spots on the planet. I remember that the evening news had a piece about Machu Picchu and the people who had gathered there to welcome the new energy that was allegedly being ushered into human consciousness. If memory serves, it got a brief mention on the evening news because actress, author and New Age proponent Shirley MacLaine believed it was important. The mention, I should add, was a kind of – Ha-ha, look at these weirdos.

I’m pretty sure the news piece mentioned Jose Arguelles and  his book, The Mayan Factor, because Arguelles was credited with starting the first  “globally synchronized meditation.”

So at dawn on August 16, 1987, Rob and I met our friend and psychic Renie Wiley on a Lauderdale beach with a whole lot of other weirdos to celebrate and welcome this new energy into the world. I remember thinking that I must be insane to be up before dawn and on a beach to watch the sun rise. I don’t do dawn. I’m an owl, always have been, and when I have to go to bed before eleven to get up at a certain time, I hardly sleep at all.

So on the morning of August 16, as I watched the sun punch a hole in the horizon, I was sleep deprived, but also aware that something felt very different. Maybe it was the energy of the crowd, maybe it was the energy of whatever was rushing toward us. But I do know that something changed for me that day, something internal, a tectonic shift in beliefs. Two years and a few weeks after that dawn on the beach, Megan was born, we moved, our lives went through a complete revolution. Our writing changed, became more psychic, esoteric, and delved into the areas that interested us.  It’s as if who Rob and I really are became more obvious, prominent, pervasive.

Now here we are, in 2012. I feel that same momentum, that same strangeness and yet a weird familiarity. The 5,126-year astrological cycle the Mayans knew about comes to end on December 21, 2012. There are some fascinating synchros involving the date, but the one that takes the cake, is that the Mayan calendar ends at 11:11 UT on December 21, 2012. The 11:11 element is something we’ve written about in our books and here on the blog. Think: portal, spiritual evolution, heightened awareness and psychic ability.

I look to  astrology, since that’s what the Mayan calendar was based on, and, wondered what transits would signal Armageddon, the worst possible scenario, the end of life on earth. Well, I don’t see the world ending.  But there’s no question we’re in the midst of a paradigm shift and I feel it’s a shift for something better, more equitable for all people.

Uranus, the planet that represents sudden, unexpected change,  takes 7  years to transit a sign. It entered Aries, the warrior, on March 11, 2011, and due to retrogrades, will be in that sign until early March 2019.  The day it entered Aries, there was a 9.0 earthquake in Japan. It triggered a massive tsunami which destroyed a nuclear plant.  Uranus rules earthquakes.

This particular event is a fitting metaphor for the kinds of planetary changes that accompany a paradigm shift. It was an 11:11 kind of wakeup call. Uranus also rules innovations, technology, discoveries, rebellion, revolution, genius, lightning.  Uranian energy isn’t subtle. It sweeps into our lives, stirs up mass movements, knocks down the old to make way for the new.

In mid-January 1928, Uranus entered Aries and remained there until late March 1935. Here are some of the events that occurred during this period:

• First air conditioned office opens in the U.S. in San Antonio
•  Scotch tape first marketed by 3M company
• First Atlantic TV image received
• Amelia Earhart first woman to fly the Atlantic – as a passenger
•  Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin
• Yo-yo introduced
• First regularly scheduled TV is broadcast 3 nights a week
• German airship Graf Zeppelin begins a round-the-world flight
• Stock market crash
• Salvatore Dali’s first one-man show
• Bingo invented
•  Planet Pluto named
• Hostess Twinkies invented
• NY Yankee Babe Ruth hits 3 consecutive homers
• first nudist colony opens –
• first radar detection of planes –
• NY World reports disappearance of supreme court justice Joseph Crater -NYC College offers first course in radio advertising
• A bloodless coup d’état in Brazil –
• First  Dracula movie released
• Empire State Building opens in NYC
• Al Capone is indicted on 5,000 counts of prohibition & perjury
• Babe Ruth hits his 600th home run
• Alka Seltzer goes on sale
• Jane Addams – first US woman- named co-recipient of Nobel Peace Prize
• El Salvador army kills 4,000 protesting farmers
• first patent issued for a tree, to James Markham for a peach tree
• Amelia Earhart is first woman to fly solo cross the Atlantic
• Yellow fever vaccine for humans announced
• US Federal gas tax enacted
• Earthquake kills 70,000 in Kansu China
• Hitler proclaims end of Marxism
• Bank holidays declared in 6 states, to prevent run on banks
• FDR inaugurated as 32nd pres, pledges to pull US out of Depression & says “We have nothing to fear but fear itself”
• FDR proclaims 10-day bank holiday
• Dachau, first concentration camp, completed
• first flight over Mount Everest
• Nazis stage public book burnings in Germany
• Loch Ness Monster is first reportedly
• German Secret State Police (Gestapo) established
• In London, 500,000 march against anti-Semitism
• Alcatraz officially becomes a federal prison
• Flash Gordon comic strip debuts
• FDR signs Home Owners Loan Act
• first Sugar Bowl and first Orange Bowl
• first canned beer is sold
• Monopoly is invented
• first Penguin book is published
• 400,000 demonstrators against fascism in Madrid
• Billboard magazine publishes its 1st music hit parade
• The first stock car race is held in Daytona Beach, Florida
• Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell is published
• Spanish Civil War begins, General Francisco Franco leads uprising
• King Edward VIII abdicates throne to marry Mrs. Wallis Simpson

Lots of firsts on this list as well as plenty of rebellion  (Occupiers) and revolution (Arab spring). Change is the only constant.

Happy 2012 and many thanks to all of you for contributing your stories and broadening our understanding of synchronicity!

We’ve posted at least two hundred synchronicities this year, probably more, and we’ve selected one that we believe stands out from all of the others for a number of reasons.

First, it’s very easy to understand what the synchronicity is. It’s also easy to realize why it is a meaningful coincidence. In addition, it is a synchronicity for which the odds of it happening can be quite easily calculated. Finally, it is a synchronicity about synchronicity, which makes it sort of a double synchronicity. Besides all of that, the synchro has a personal element directly related to us and the blog.

It came to us as a comment on Dec. 20. Like many coincidences that happen in our lives, it could have been overlooked or dismissed with a shrug. Darren, however, who writes as Brizdaz or just Daz, noticed the synchronicity, even though at the time he didn’t understand how unusual it was.

Here’s what happened. Daz came to our blog, read the daily entry, and decided that he wanted to read something else about synchronicity. So he looked down the list of 52 blogs on our blog roll at the right of the page below the book covers.

He picked H2O Radio, one that he’d never visited. He entered the site and saw that there was a broadcast playing. He clicked on and was surprised to tune into an interview with Trish and me. He’d even entered it near the beginning. He figured out that it was a recent interview, but he didn’t realize that it was live!

So what are the odds? Well, let’s figure it out. First, he picked a blog from the list of 52. Let’s simplify it and call it 50, especially since one of those in the list is his own blog. That’s one out of 50.

But what are the chances that he would click on exactly on the hour that we were being interviewed? Well, the H2O blog has been on the list since August. Again, to simply let’s say it has been available for 100 days– a low estimate. So 100 days times 24 hours a day equals one chance in 2,400. Now multiply that by 50 and we have odds of 1 in 120,000. Pretty slim odds of his tuning into us by random chance. Clearly, he found it meaningful.

There’s also the big picture of how we are all interconnected at the conscious and unconscious levels or, to put it another way, we are connected both at the everyday level and in a reality that exists outside of cause and effect. On one hand, it’s amazing that Daz who lives in Brizbane, Australia could press a few buttons on his computer and hear us talking live from Florida to a radio show based in New York.

Then there’s the deeper level, of course, that he was able make this connection outside of cause and effect. We know that because we had not publicized the radio interview on our blog or anywhere else. In fact, we’d almost forgotten about it.

For all of these reasons, we’ve picked Daz’s H2O synchro as the best of 2011. It was Daz-zling!

We ran across this video on Marcus Anthony’s blog. It’s stunning. Here’s part one:

And part two: no need for any explanation.

***

On Christmas Day, 18-year-old Ben Breedlove died. Fifteen hundred people turned out for his funeral.

This synchro came from Renee Prince, whose stories we’ve used before. This one really underscores how synchronicity connects us to other people.

+++

My mother and I were  at a Native American (Indian) casino when she called me from somewhere inside the building and asked me to meet her because “something weird” had happened and she couldn’t tell me over the phone. When I got to her, she wore a stunned expression and an amazed smile.

She told me that she had been sitting at a slot machine, feeling really, really bad. She was agonizing over her husband’s Alzheimer’s and worrying over how she would pay for her husband’s nursing home when he had to go, worrying over the possibility of her having another stroke… But she hadn’t been talking to anyone—she was just sitting by herself.

Then a cocktail waitress came up to her and handed her a $20 bill. The waitress said that a man had given her the bill and asked her to give it to my mother “so she would know things weren’t as bad as she thought.” When my mother asked the waitress to point him out, the man had disappeared. She was very touched and awe-stricken—nothing like this had ever happened to her before. She says she will keep the $20 bill and never spend it.

The next day, my mother had just gotten dressed, and came out of her room wearing a “new” necklace and a strange expression. The necklace was a beaded thing with a tiny Native American “medicine pouch”, and it was a used item, something my sister Sonja had given her a few years ago as a stocking stuffer. Sonja often buys bags of jewelry at garage sales, hoping for diamonds or gold in the usually costume stuff, and she had just given my mother the beaded necklace without looking inside the pouch, since it seemed flat and empty. But for some reason my mother had looked inside when she put it on that morning and found—a $20 bill.