Welcome to The Mystical Underground

I mean, really. Who can resist a three-year-old activist who holds a sign saying he’s part of the 99 percent?

His mom, Jen, gave us permission to use his photo. Here’s what she had to say.

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Well done, Jen!

Back in my college days, I had a friend named Jeff, who lived next door and worked on campus in the university hospital at a menial job. He wasn’t a student, had never gone to college, but he was bright and well read. He’d gotten drafted, sent to Vietnam, and deserted. He made his way to India, where he lived awhile, before returning to the States, and facing the consequences of his actions.

He accepted everything that occurred in his life, every relationship, every positive event, every negative event as if it were meant to happen.  He talked about his time in India as an important learning experience. But when I asked him if he would like to go back, he said that it didn’t matter whether he was here or somewhere else. “Wherever you go, there you are. You still have to face yourself. The only way to change is by going within.”

I thought of Jeff the other day when I noticed something called The Four Principles of Indian Spirituality that had been posted in the comment section on Marcus Anthony’s blog. The principles are somewhat fatalistic, just as I found Jeff’s beliefs. Yet, the concepts  well worth considering, especially because they suggest an underlying reality that exists beyond our everyday world. In essence, while cause and effect and free will are the order of  our normal reality, the principles suggest that neither necessarily apply on the deeper level of existence. -R

The First Principle states: “Whomsoever you encounter is the right one.”
This means that no one comes into our life by chance. Everyone who is around us, anyone with whom we interact, represents something, whether to teach us something or to help us improve a current situation.

The Second Principle states: “Whatever happened is the only thing that could have happened.”
Nothing, absolutely nothing of that which we experienced could have been any other way. Not even in the least important detail. There is no “If only I had done that differently…, then it would have been different…” No. What happened is the only thing that could have taken place and must have taken place for us to learn our lesson in order to move forward. Every single situation in life, which we encounter, is absolutely perfect, even when it defies our understanding and our ego.

The Third Principle states: “Each moment in which something begins is the right moment.”
Everything begins at exactly the right moment, neither earlier nor later. When we are ready for it, for that something new in our life, it is there, ready to begin.

This is the Fourth Principle, the final one: “What is over, is over.”
It is that simple. When something in our life ends, it helps our evolution. That is why, enriched by the recent experience, it is better to let go and move on.
 I think it is no coincidence that you’re here reading this.
If these words strike a chord, it’s because you meet the requirements and understand that not one single snowflake falls accidentally in the wrong place!

Be good to yourself.

Love with your whole being.

Always be happy

I came across this video on Whitley Strieber’s site, the best source for this kind of information. Its supposedly from Milan, Italy, and as I was watching it, I thought, Hey wait a minute. If this is from Italy, how come I understand what this guy is saying? He’s speaking Spanish, that’s why. I need to do a bit of research about that discrepancy. It seems the broadcast is coming from a Spanish-speaking  country. Regardless, the video is fascinating.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7-OVU2HqL4&feature=player_embedded

…Al Gore had been president?  I thought about this today when I heard that Gore threw his support behind the Occupiers.

This is the guy who won the popular vote in the presidential election of 2000, who went on to win the Nobel peace prize, became a climate change activist, started Current TV, and always seems to come down on the side of the people.

“With democracy in crisis, a true grassroots movement pointing out the flaws in our system is the first step in the right direction,” he wrote on his blog. “Count me among those supporting and cheering on the Occupy Wall Street movement.”

Would Gore have invaded Iraq, as Bush did? Would he have allowed Wall Street to continue its heinous practices with derivatives? If we’d had 8 years of Gore instead of 8 years of Bush, how would our country be different now? Would  millions of homes be in foreclosure? Would the financial meltdown of 2008 have happened? Would banks and financial institutions that are “too big to fail” still be operating? Would we be in Afghanistan? Would we have universal health care?

I voted for Gore in 2000. But we had recently moved and had so much trouble at the polling station that we had to return two or three times with proper documentation before we were allowed to cast our votes. After the hanging chad debacle in our county that went straight to the Supreme Court, where Sandra Day O’Connor cast the deciding vote that ushered Bush into office,  Palm Beach County switched to Diebold voting machines.   Hardly an improvement.

In 2004, when I cast my vote for Kerry – Bush’s name came up. It took three attempts before I was able to cast my vote for Kerry. We all know who won the election in 2004.

But let’s say Gore had become president in 2000. Would he have invaded Iraq? Probably not, since Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11. Would he have invaded Afghanistan? Probably not. I frankly can’t recall the specifics of what we’re doing in that country, but no one has ever conquered Afghanistan. Just ask the Russians.  Read James Michener’s novel about the country, Caravans. Gore might have cut off our access to Saudi oil, however, and forced the auto and power industries to find alternative solutions quickly.

I remember the embargo of 1973, when I used to sit at a local gas station for three hours, waiting to fill the tank in my aging Pinto. Between then and 2000, when Gore might have become prez, nothing changed. Gas got more expensive, cars got larger and hungrier, the cost of electricity went through the roof.

After Bush came into office and offered tax breaks that facilitated the purchase of a Hummer,  I saw so many Hummers on the road that the vehicle became  symbolic in my mind for the militaristic point of view. The local paper interviewed women who drove Hummers. Their consensus?I feel safer.

Really? Safer from what? IEDs? Sorry, wrong country.  Another woman replied that she liked sitting up high in traffic, so that she could see the the cars. Uh-huh. And while you’re idling in that traffic, you’re using up the gas in your Hummer, which gets – what? Five miles to the gallon?

I think Gore would have accelerated the creation of alternative fuels, green jobs, all the buzz words you hear these days from Democrats. But if Gore had won, would he be the activist and visionary he is today? How have these events shaped who he is now?If we’d had eight years of Gore, would Obama have won he presidency in 2008? That depends.

If 8 years of Gore had left this country in a more prosperous place, with more peaceful and environmentally aware policies, people might not have been so desperate for change. Then  McCain and Palin might have won. Sobering thought, that if Gore had won, we wold now have   a Veep who thinks she can see Russia from her front porch.

So in the bigger scheme of things, how would that alternative history play out? I can’t even go there.

In the end, perhaps it comes down a few simple tenets. We are where we are, the U.S. government is like a two-year-old in the midst of a temper tantrum, no one is held accountable for anything.  But, oh yeah, there’s a ray of hope in the Occupier movement that grows by leaps and bounds. Maybe it all comes back to that, the grass root movements that usher in real change.

The right wing has stopped just short of calling them terrorists. They are anti-American, un-American, anti-capitalism. Yet, when a few hundred Tea Party protestors got together last summer, the extreme right lauded them as heroes. The left wing has been reluctant to endorse the Occupiers – oops, we can’t rock the boat here, we don’t want to look too much to the left – but more of them are crawling on board each day.

Listen to what Matt Taibi, a writer for Rolling Stone who has been following the Occupiers since the beginning, has to say about this movement. 

And since Gore didn’t win and Bush did and Obama did and I’m living in this version of history, I’m off to make an Occupy sign to stick in my front yard.

We watched an odd movie called Timer recently. It had the feel of an extended soap opera or a made-for-TV movie. The concept was that, as a result of a new invention, people had an opportunity to find their true love – that perfect person – by having a timer-strip injected into your wrist. The strip is visible, about two inches long, half an inch wide. On it is a digital timer ticking down to the moment when you’ll meet your true love, who will show up with his or her own timer simultaneously ticking down to zero–the moment of truth and true love.

Although the story was intriguing in a humorous way and the characters surprisingly believable, the concept didn’t seem very well thought out. For instance, the main character’s timer was blank. No explanation was given and she didn’t seem interested in a refund. Finally, when she wanted it removed, it wasn’t because it didn’t work, but that she didn’t want to play the timer game any longer. The clinician who was going to remove it confessed he had never heard of anyone doing such a thing. So apparently no one had their timer removed after their true love was found. Why not?

We also wondered why so many people would want a timer to lead them to true love. Timers were wildly popular and you were a dork if you didn’t have one. In spite of the plot flaws and obvious questions raised by a digital implant guiding, if not directing,  your love life and future, we enjoyed the movie.

But as I watched it, I started thinking there was something somewhat familiar about the concept. Something from my past. At first I thought it might’ve been a story I’d read or maybe one I’d written long ago. Then I remembered.

Back when Trish and I first met, I took a course in hypnosis and started leading people – mainly friends and family – into past life regressions. I seemed to have a knack for it. Trish was my favorite subject because she was susceptible and imaginative. She had great past life stories, went very deep, and usually remembered none of it. I guess it was the latter fact, combined with the time the sessions took, that eventually led to her to decide that she didn’t want do it  any longer. Essentially, we both stopped at the same time and moved onto other things – mainly our writing careers.

Somewhere in my closet I still have a notebook filled with notes from those regression sessions. One of them, interestingly, involved a true love timer! In that regression, Trish moved into an alternate reality. She had just met me – an alternate Rob – and speeding ahead we were making love for the first time when alarms attached to Rob’s bed went off, ringing loudly, filling the room with sound. Rob bolted up, and shouted: “You’re the one!”

Apparently, he had invented a gizmo that allowed him to monitor his compatibility with women that he bedded. The alarm had a variety of tones that allowed him to judge the level of compatibility. Apparently, nothing had ever happened even vaguely close to the alarming reaction set off by Trish’s appearance in his bedroom.

I mentioned that regression to Trish while we were still watching the movie, but she had absolutely no recollection of it.  I’ll have to dig out those notes someday.