Welcome to The Mystical Underground

After five parts of Larry’s story, here’s a light synchro, sort of!

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Rob and I visited the Norton Museum today, a really wonderful place where you can wander around for a few hours and enjoy a visual feast. As we got out of the car, Rob said, “There’s only one Monet piece on exhibit.”

“I think it’s Matisse we came to see.”

“I think it’s Monet.”

As it turned out, Rob was right that we’d come to see Claude Monet’s Nympheas – Water Lilies – on loan from a museum in Switzerland until July 12. But neither of us knew that the Norton also had some of Matisse’s paintings exhibited. A kind of synchro?

Monet was a founder of the French impressionist movement and one of its most prolific painters. He did a number of these water lily paintings and in 2014, one of them – the painting at the top of the post – sold through Sotheby’s for $54 million. Yet, Monet, like Van Gogh, like so many of the famous artists, suffered from depression and poverty for most of his life.

At the museum, his Water Lily painting was in a room by itself and took up most of the wall. When I first saw it, I wished the museum had lit the room differently. The painting seemed ominously dark and the nuances in blues really weren’t evident to me until I took a photo.

Matisse’s paintings were in another room, with interesting company – Joan Miro, Picasso, and Georgia O’Keefe. Matisse, trained as a lawyer, may have been an exception to the depression and poverty element so many artists experienced. He supposedly came to art late – at the ripe old age of 21! I kind of get lost in his paintings, like this one, of a woman whom he painted a number of times. Her face supposedly intrigued him:

She hung next to a painting of Matisse’s wife. I didn’t snap a picture of her. I found the wife’s face disturbing; her eyes were lopsided, veiled, strange. Was the woman in the above painting Matisse’s lover? Mistress?

Then there was Georgia O’Keefe, whose art is always a delight – straightforward, an expression of whatever she loved in the moment she was painting. Her work is the perfect expression for anyone in the creative arts- love what you’re doing as you’re doing it:

The real surprise today was a photography exhibit of the Florida Everglades that the Norton has commissioned. This exhibit struck me as the most mysterious, the one that expressed only a fraction of the secrets that I suspect the Everglades holds. I set one of my novels – Kin Dread – in the Everglades – and this photo not only captures the essence, but bears an eerie resemblance to the cover:

Eliot Porter (1901-1990); Cypress Slough and Mist, Cypress Lodge, Punta Gorda, Florida, January 31, 1974; 1974; Dye imbibition print; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, Bequest of the artist; P1990.51.2171.1

Finally, we asked Larry why he thought some people experienced UFO/alien encounters and others did not. It’s a puzzling question. From all the stories we’ve heard, it’s apparent that they (whoever they are) don’t select people on the basis of intelligence, cultural status, or even their willingness to believe that beings from elsewhere are here.

After all, it’s just as likely that a truck driver will be abducted as a quantum physicist.  Is it solely based on opportunity? Could be genetic…related to the deep past? In other words, are they related to us somehow?Are certain people more susceptible in some way to encounters and abductions than others?

Here’s Larry’s take:

“As to the question, I have pondered that myself, especially in the light of me being so “average” in most ways.  I have always been an average student, a person in average shape, of average athletic ability, etc.  So there is nothing about me (that I can perceive, anyway) that would seem to indicate aliens (or ANYONE of intelligence, for that matter! LOL) would want to study me.

“I wish I had a better answer.  I am reasonably certain neither of my brothers were studied.  If my parents were, they never mentioned it, and I never overheard them talking about aliens when they did not know anyone was within earshot.  My spouse has not had these experiences, and she is the opposite of me in many ways.  She is VERY intelligent, VERY driven, an excellent student, was talented athlete, and is now both working full time AND pursuing a doctorate in nurse education.  In my mind I have always thought that aliens would want to study the brighter members of the species.

“As scary as these experiences were, I am glad in some ways that I had them.  It has certainly opened my eyes to the fact that reality and the universe consists of so much more than we can see and perceive, or even THINK OF, as human beings.  I do not know if other experiencers feel this way or if many of them wish they had never been abducted.

“As I was writing the above paragraph it occurred to me that maybe the aliens want abductees to tell their stories, for reasons unknown.  Maybe it actually works AGAINST whoever they are that humans are so reluctant to relate these experiences to persons outside of the group of those, such as you and Rob, who do not ridicule, but instead try to help and understand these things.”

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We’ve asked a number of other abductees and researchers this same question about why some, but not others. We’ve received some fascinating answers, which we’ll save for our next book on the subject…More Aliens in the Backyard.

In the previous post, Larry mentioned that he had a sexual encounter during one of his out-of-body experiences. He also said if we wanted more details on any of experiences, we should ask. I couldn’t help wondering what sex is like outside of the physical, beyond the fleshy encounters. Since Trish has been corresponding with Larry, I suggested she ask him for more details.

“I’m not asking him that. You do it,” she said. Okay. So I did. His answer was not only detailed, but quite startling and enlightening. Ultimately, it’s about a spiritual journey, albeit a highly erotic one. His experience also had ramifications in his married life, which he also talks about. The story begins with a more detailed description and explanation of the mansion Larry talked about in the last post.

Warning: If you’re offended by reading about a sexual encounter, don’t read the post.

Here’s his story.

“The experience took place during the winter of 2005 or 2006.  I had gone to bed and before getting sleepy, I told myself that I intended to have an out-of-body experience, and that I wanted to go to a place I had heard about, the place where knowledge and the events of our lives are stored.  I did not really know what the place was called, but I had read books about OOBE, and some writers told of a huge mansion where all souls live when they are between lives.

As I began to get a little drowsy, I relaxed from head to toe and began a countdown from 900 toward 0.  I relaxed, controlled my breathing, and thought about the target of my astral travel.  As was usual for me, a ringing started in my head, and soon the vibrations were running head to toe.  I felt my body getting heavy. That is the best I can describe it.  I then sort of pushed (I guess MENTALLY pushed) and I was out of my body.  I would like to point out for clarity that I had not drifted into sleep but was still fully conscious when I pushed out of my body.  Next I shot through the ceiling of my residence and up into the night sky.  For the first few minutes, the experience of free flight was so exhilarating that I temporarily lost sight of my mission.

If you have ever seen the beginning of the Star Trek shows where the Enterprise suddenly goes into warp speed and the stars begin to flash by at hundreds per second, this is sort of the same sensation as I have when I fly through the night sky.  It is such a sensation of freedom, and I suspect it is the same sensation that people feel when they leave the body permanently.  After a few minutes I absorbed this freedom and exhilaration and then was able to focus on my pre-determined mission.  I thought that I wanted to see the great mansion, it is talked about in the Bible…when Jesus said in My Father’s house are many rooms.

As soon as I thought about the mansion I was no longer flying at warp speed, but I was floating gently toward this mansion.  I floated above the mansion and just watched for awhile.  There is no way I can even begin to describe the beauty of this mansion, the ornateness, the intricateness of the design and details.  It was HUGE and I cannot even guess at the size.  As I floated there, I saw that there were other people floating, some entering smaller compartments in the huge mansion, some leaving the mansion.  Some of the people were visible as people, but others were auras of different colors.

I somehow knew these auras were people or rather souls of people who had chosen not to have or to currently shape themselves or cloak themselves in human bodies.  I would say that the size of each compartment was about the same as that of a large hotel room, large enough to hold a bed and several pieces of furniture; however, there was no furniture in any of the rooms.  Instead, each room contained only a very large vase, about twice or three times the size of a human body.  Each vase or urn that I saw looked different, and each one was very beautiful, again beyond my description.  Some appeared to be of marble, some of granite, some of jade, and other of materials I could not name.  There were designs and inscriptions on each vase.  The mansion itself was so pure white that it was brilliant, but the floors of each of the compartments were of a material like marble, and so smooth they shone like glass.

As I floated above there, I finally noticed that there was a courtyard.  The mansion was built in a square and the courtyard, in the center of the mansion, was also built in a square or rectangular shape.  The compartments had three walls, but the fourth side had no wall and opened into the courtyard.  I saw people walking around on the broad sidewalk and sitting in very ornately designed benches.  There was a swimming pool in the center of the courtyard, and there was a fountain that was about ten feet taller than the edge of the pool, and from this fountain a gentle waterfall flowed constantly into the pool.

While I was viewing all this in a state of utter amazement, an older woman approached me. (I was in my forties so I thought she was probably in her sixties.) She was very regal and attractive and was wearing a flowing gown.  She asked me if I knew what I was looking at, and I said I was not sure.  The woman told me to come sit with her on a bench.

We floated downward and landed on the sidewalk, then walked a short distance to a very beautiful bench.  We sat down and the woman explained to me that the mansion was built by the Creator and it was so large that I could not see all of it at once.  She explained that each soul had a room in the mansion, and pointed toward one of the rooms.

She told me that the large vase in the room contained all the knowledge that the soul had gained while going through various lives on the earth and in other places as well.  She did not explain the “other places” and I was too overwhelmed to ask her about these other places.  The woman told me that people lived many lives, as well as spent time between lives by staying on different planes that are not visible to humans on the physical realm.

Then the woman dropped a bombshell.  She said that people in the astral realms sometimes disguised themselves for various reasons while they traveled.  I did not understand this at all, but she explained that people sometimes did not want to be recognized, sometimes needed to appear different for other reasons, and sometimes did not use bodies at all, but moved around as auras.  She also said that people could appear older or younger than they really were on the physical plane, or even be of a different race than in the physical plane.  Then she told me that she was not actually an older woman, but was really my age.  She said that she travelled as an older woman both to appear wiser and trustworthy to new travelers, and so that some persons would not recognize her.  I did not think to ask the whys of all this.

Next the woman stood up from the bench and instantly was a fairly attractive white female of about forty to forty-five years old.  She was not a “knock out” by any means, but was attractive.  Her clothing suddenly vanished and she was nude.  At this point I could also see that she had a green aura.  I knew I guess telepathically that she wanted to have a sexual encounter with me.  Then she said aloud that she wanted to make love if I wanted to.

I realized I was nude at this point, and actually I am not sure that I have ever even thought about clothing while I traveled, so for all I know I may travel nude all the time.  But I was suddenly overcome with both an erotic feeling and the realization that I desired to BOND with her.  I can’t explain that term or even how I knew it, I just did.  But I remember thinking that all these other people were around and were watching.  She told me to look around, and I noticed that many people were engaged in what appeared to be sexual contact all over the courtyard as well as while floating above it!  I realized now that both of us were floating and that I also had an aura that I think was blue.  The woman moved towards me and I embraced her.

I can’t adequately describe what happened next, but I will try.  While floating we were in a reclining position, that we would have been in the missionary position.  I penetrated her (I apologize for the graphic language!) but then somehow part of my very soul or molecules were INSIDE her soul or molecules or both.  Our auras merged and we merged too.  Merge is the best word I can think of, because we were two but we were literally ONE at the same time.

I know that we made love in the usual physical way, but at the same time we COMPLETELY joined in soul and mind.  I cannot even begin to describe the total pleasure, the total ecstasy!  Ecstasy is even inadequate.  There were vibrations shooting through us that I can sort of relate to as being shocked by a faulty cord or an appliance with a short in it.  But it was not painful…it was the greatest pleasurable feeling I have ever had in my life, bar NOTHING.

As pleasurable as sex is, as making love is, this experience was completely off scale.  And the love was total even though we were strangers, but not love like a husband and wife, love like we were all part of one creation.

Sorry, that is the best I can do on that.  I do not know how long this encounter lasted, but I believe that the experience lasted longer than most of my other travels combined.  There was a huge climax of energy, not like an orgasm, but more like huge electric shock, maybe like being struck by lightening that lasted for several minutes instead of just a split second.  Then we separated.  She told me that I probably needed to go back into my body because this experience was so intense and it was the first time for me.  I did feel completely tired.  The woman had instantly assumed the form of the older woman again.  She told me there was so much for me to learn and that she hoped she would see me again sometime, then disappeared.

I suddenly felt sucked back into my body and I was instantly lying in bed awake.  I was tingling and vibrating all over.  I literally could not move, and I was tired, but exhilarated at the same time.  The tingling was so severe that the bed was shaking and I actually thought that I would wake up my wife.  But this tingling sensation eventually subsided to a dull tingle, but lasted for three days after the experience.

For obvious reasons, I didn’t tell my wife about this particular incident although I had told her about several of my OOBEs.  But I could not see what was to be gained from telling her this story.  So I typed it and put it in a file on my computer, labeled astral adventure.  Then I forgot about that file.

Unfortunately my wife was using my computer one day and saw this file.  She was curious and read it.  She was mad for days, and actually contemplated leaving me, as she looked at this as an extramarital affair.  So I would certainly counsel my fellow travelers NOT to mention these encounters and also to protect the file with a password or something to prevent what happened to my wife and I.  She was hurt badly and was heartbroken.  But she eventually forgave and we are doing well now.

This is the only encounter of this type I have ever had.  I have never attempted it again, because for one thing I am not sure what is to be gained, and also I am still confused as to whether or not this is actually cheating on a marriage.  I have read some who call this cheating and some who say it is not, and that it is beneficial.  I do believe that some sort of understanding was passed to me during this encounter.  The understanding was that there is an unseen realm and that we apparently live many lives in many forms.  But the WHY of it all was not communicated to me.

This is my experience.  Have you had any others describe astral sexual encounters to you?    I hope you can make heads or tails of this information.  There is no way I can communicate this fully, but this sketch will give you some idea of what happened.
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The final part of Larry’s story comes up next (July 23) in which we return to his UFO encounters as he addresses the question of why some people have these experiences and others do not.

Since Larry made a point of linking his initial UFO encounter with out-of-body experiences, we asked him for more details. While he’s not certain the two phenomenon are related, we’ve heard many stories about paranormal experiences – telepathy, synchronicity, and other psychic abilities – occurring to experiencers in the aftermath of their encounters. So why not OOBEs?

Here’s what Larry told us:

“I have had both spontaneous out-of-body projections and targeted, intentioned trips.

“The very first astral projection I had was the one I mentioned that occurred shortly after the UFO sighting in my childhood.  I suddenly found myself floating near the ceiling of my bedroom.  It was a large room and all three of us kids slept in it.

“My older brother had gotten up and turned on the light.  I was able to look down on him as he walked through the bedroom and out to the bathroom.  I did not know what was happening, but it was so different that I was not really scared.  A few minutes later he walked back into the bedroom and walked to my bedside.

“As I looked down, I could see that he was shaking someone in my bed.  I heard him calling my name.  I looked at the person in bed and saw that it was me!  My brother called my name a couple of times.  I suddenly felt myself being pulled and the next thing I was telling my brother that I had been above the bed floating.  I know it must have sounded weird.  He told to shut up and go use the bathroom.

“He was already in bed when I came back into the room and he told me to go to sleep.  The next morning I again told him about what had happened last night, but he just laughed and told me I was dreaming.  He also told my dad that I was talking crazy.  When I told Dad about it, he told me I was dreaming and to quit making up stories.  I had no idea at the time that there was such a thing as OOBEs, but I knew that this happened.  “I’ve had numerous out-of-body journeys. I‘ve traveled in my local neighborhood, and I saw another traveler on one occasion.

“I have simply ‘flown’ through the sky or space many times, very exhilarating.

“I have floated around my house (actually two or three houses that I lived in).

“I have gone to a plane of reality (or dimension) where there were colorful geometric shapes, about twice the size of a person, and each of these geometric shapes possessed and/or imparted different powers or qualities (wisdom, knowledge, confidence, etc.)

“I have had one experience in which I travelled to a place that I can only call a large mansion, filled with many rooms.  In this place I saw people, both in human form and in the form of auras floating into their own rooms in this large mansion.  Inside each room was a vase, very ornate and beautiful beyond anything I could describe.

“In this travel, I was met by a guide, a very lovely mature lady, who told me that the vase contained each person’s LIVES and all the knowledge that the person, or soul, had gained through many lifetimes.   I cannot begin to communicate to you the beauty and profoundness of this dream.  I had been raised to believe that there was one life and then you died, either going to Heaven or Hell.  But this experience convinced me that we do indeed live many lives, and that we spend time in this other realm as non-embodied persons.  You have to understand that this idea went against everything I had been taught at church.

“Once I was able to travel to my wife’s job when she was working nights as a nurse.  I traveled to her break room where she was taking a fifteen-minute nap.  I was able to see her “astral body” and she saw me.  She was very confused.  When she came home the next morning, I asked her if anything unusual had happened.  She said she had thought about me a lot during the night.

“I described where she had been sleeping in the break room and how she had wrapped her jacket around her.  She was surprised, but not totally convinced because I had seen the break room before, and I knew she often wore a sweater in the break room because it was cold there.

“I have found it harder to initiate OOBE’s as I have gotten into my fifties.  There are a lot of distractions and I let them distract me.  I have a goal, and that is to somehow use astral projection to locate a classmate of mine who disappeared while visiting her estranged husband. She had gone to see him specifically to get the divorce papers signed.  So far, no luck on that one.

“I also had one astral sexual encounter.

“I have never had a frightening astral projection, such as seeing demons or whatever.  I have learned that the ‘people’ one encounters on astral planes sometimes disguise themselves for a variety of reasons.

“I’ve had one time travel OOBE where I found that I was a Catholic brother of some kind in early Mexico or Texas, very early, maybe in the 1600’s.

“Because I have had so many OBE’s, I could go on and on.  But I will stop here.”

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Part 4 of Larry’s story will delve more into that mansion he mentioned, which will lead into the full story of  his sexual encounter.

Here’s Part 2 of Larry’s story.

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The next year, 1973, was a terrible year because my grandfather died that summer.  A few months later we moved into a house that was closer to my dad’s mother, who was now a widow.  About two weeks after Grand Dad’s funeral, I was lying in bed reading, and I had a small lamp on.  Something, a feeling not a noise, made me look up.  When I did, I saw what I thought was my granddad’s face floating just a few feet off the floor and looking at me.  He was smiling and I was not afraid.  He looked at me a little while, then seemed to float through the wall and outside the house.  I looked out the window and did not see him, just a really bright full moon.  And I still missed Grand Dad but no longer felt such bitter sadness.

“I don’t believe Grand Dad’s ghost had anything to do with these abduction experiences I had, but I believe I was able to see Grand Dad possibly because of the experience with the UFO.  And it was just a little while, maybe months, after seeing Grand Dad’s face that I had my first weird experience, which I thought at the time was just a really damned scary dream.

“That was just a hint of what was to come. The next experience is typical of the paranormal/’alien’ encounters that were to follow, if such a weird thing can be called typical.  But anyway I had been asleep for at least a couple of hours when something woke me up, maybe a noise.  I could not move and could not scream, or maybe I did not even try.  Standing around the bed were maybe six or eight forms about four or five feet tall.  They were all wearing what seemed to be black cloaks with hoods that hid their faces.  I seemed to rise or float out of the bed and the figures floated with me, one of them holding each of my arms.  It seemed like we started circling the bedroom, flying around the perimeter.

“After several rounds around the room, I somehow was in the middle of the circle and the hooded figures were circling around me.  I seemed to be looking up at them, almost like looking up from a bed or gurney and seeing a doctor or nurse standing there.  I do not remember any of the figures touching me other than the two that held my arms when we rose to the ceiling.  I do not remember being on a gurney or table, or having anything done to me, such as probings, etc.

“These types of experiences persisted from the time I was eleven until I was well into my twenties.  They were so similar that the above description just about covers all of them.  Unfortunately, I was not one of the people that felt these were positive experiences.  I was terrified each time.  But I do recall one time that I was actually on a table of some sort, with the figures gathered around me, and other similar figures watching from a sort of gallery.  This particular experience (being in a sort of observation gallery) is the one experience that has led me to believe that I could be an abductee.  I believe that the room I was in COULD have been inside a ship of some sort.  I cannot prove it to my satisfaction, but I do not deny that possibility any longer.  I just don’t know what to think.

“These experiences continued after I was married, and I would see my wife lying in bed alone as I was floating around the room.  I was frightened but I would have given my life to protect her.  The beings did not seem interested in her in the least.  And if they had been, I could have done nothing to help her because I was usually paralyzed during these experiences.

“The only sort of collaboration I have to any of this is that one night I managed to yell while two of the beings were holding me.  My wife woke up and the beings just seemed to turn into shadows.  I had filled my wife in on these things and she believed something was happening, that I was not crazy, but she could not explain them.  On the night that I awakened her, she  found me lying half in and half out of the bed.  She pulled me back into the bed by my left arm.  I told her that the beings had been pulling me out of the bed but I was determined not to go this time.  I told her that they had grabbed my right arm, and that it hurt from the strain of pulling back.  My wife touched my right arm and it was in her words ‘freezing.’  This was a hot summer night and a window unit was running, but it was by no means freezing in the room. However, my right arm from shoulder to hand, was ice cold.

“After that, I had a few more experiences until I was around 29 years old when the experiences stopped.  I continued to have OOBE’s, however, and still have them. In a way, I sort of miss the experiences, but not the fear.  I wish I knew more about these guys and what they wanted with me.  Why did they come?  Why did they stop coming?  Who are they?  Where did they come from?  Were they real at all?  Am I crazy?  All of these things run through my mind, and have for some time.  In truth I would like to believe I was abducted…but I cannot prove it to myself, and certainly not to anyone else.  And I can’t talk about it either, at least not to anyone I know.

“These experiences are a part of my life, a significant part, and I am glad to finally share them.”

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Part 3 follows (July 19) as Larry provides fascinating details about his numerous OBEs.

Notice the word abductee in the title is in quotes. The reason is that Larry isn’t certain that he has been abducted. But when you read his story, it’s clear he has experienced repeated encounters of some sort with beings from elsewhere. And his story parallels so many of the abduction stories from others people over the years.

Larry  e-mailed us  just hours after we’d been contacted by Daniel, whose alien contact story appeared here recently. A synchronicity in timing. Both men had written us after reading one of our books. They don’t know each other and their stories were unsolicited. In other words, we hadn’t put out a call for abduction stories.

Larry, not his real name, is 53 years old and has kept his encounters to himself all his life. Interestingly, his career has been all about observation,  15 years as a cop in Texas, where he still lives. Then another eight years as child welfare investigator, and three years as a private detective. He now supervises surveillance operations (security cameras, alarms, and visual observation) at a hospital in West Texas. He points out that if he reported his mysterious ‘alien’ encounters to any of those employers, he probably would be relieved of his duties.

(We recently read another story where a security guard reporting a UFO over a chemical plant was told his job was in jeopardy if he formally reported what he saw. That story is here.)

One of the interesting aspects of Larry’s story is that he started having out-of-experiences after his first encounters, and believes they are related. (Hence, the image above.) I don’t think I’ve ever heard about  the two being linked. Here’s his story:

“I am now over fifty years old and have finally been overcome by the need to talk about this but, as you know, most ‘abductees’ are afraid for many reasons to talk with anyone about their experiences.  I feel fortunate to have learned of you two and your work.  I have listened to nearly all of the audio version of Synchronicity Highway.

“The chapter on abductees and synchronicity hit a chord, specifically about the incidence of psychic powers or events being possibly triggered in people after an abduction. This was close to home for me because it was after seeing a UFO up fairly close, and a few months later I had my first OOBE.  I had sort of toyed with the idea of these two things being related, but I could not be certain.

“I still think of the word ‘abductee’ with quotations around it because I am not certain that people have really ever been abducted by non-humans, and because, even if SOME people have been abducted by aliens, I am not certain that I have been abducted, or if I was just dreaming. I am still a fence-sitter, even with my own experiences.  I am far less skeptical than I used to be, and I even occasionally find myself believing that there is at least a POSSIBILITY that these things really happen.  I guess that’s because I prefer alien interaction to the possibility of demonic interaction.

“In 1972, I was riding in the family car with my parents and my two brothers.  At the time I was about ten, my older brother eleven, and my younger brother seven.  It was the Fourth of July, and it fell during the middle of the week.  We had been at a family reunion all day, then drove that evening to my grandmother’s house, about thirty miles from the reunion.  This was in central Texas near Waco.  We left my grandmother’s house around 9 PM.

“This was an unusual July day in Texas, because instead of being 95 degrees, it had been a very rainy day and only in the sixties.  As we were driving home, a fresh cloudburst started.  It was a blinding rain and therefore no stars were visible.  As we were driving up a hilly stretch of the highway, there appeared directly in our line of sight, and probably about 500 feet above the roadway, three bright greenish lights.  These lights were vaguely triangular in shape, but the heavy rain distorted the true shape.

“The lights stayed in front of our car as we continued down the road.  The lights would change colors from greenish to blue to white, and would sometimes rotate around each other, other times would just form a stationary triangle.  We all talked excitedly about the lights, wondered what they were, but were not especially afraid of them.  More importantly, none of us had any sensation of lost time, confusion, or anything like that.

“The lights suddenly vanished.  This is why I did not really place a lot of import on this sighting, because none of us seemed to have suffered any of the usual symptoms of the alien abduction scenario.

“But just a few weeks or months later I had a spontaneous out of body experience.  I was now eleven but I had no idea what OOBE’s were or that they even existed.  This was a brief experience, but very exciting to me, and not frightening at all.  Of course I learned quickly not to talk to anyone about this.  I was almost ridiculed out of my own house!  So I shut up about it.

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We’ll continue Larry’s story tomorrow.

Synchronicities often involve names, even clusters of names. You might, for instance, encounter several people over the course of a few days who share the same name. It’s often an unusual name – not John or Jill, not Barb or Bill, but something out of left field –Bella or Selsie or some other weird combination of consonants and syllables.

Sometimes these name synchros involve last names. One of the first novels I wrote in the late 1970s – never published – involved a main character whose last name was McGregor. At the time, my husband, Rob MacGregor, was still years in my future, but that name, the Irish rather than the Scottish version, resonated for this character, resonated for me.

In 1991, I wrote a novel called Death Flats. By then, Rob MacGregor and I had been married for eight years and had a two-year-old daughter. The book has been out of print for a long time and I’ve been going through the formatted ebook version for Crossroad Press and ran across the name Wayne Sheppard.

A kind of shock zipped through me. In 1998, Kensington Books published The Hanged Man, in which a detective named Wayne Sheppard plays a prominent part in a series that spanned four more books. Crossroad has since brought out that book and the others in the Tango Key/ Mira Morales series as  ebooks. A skeptic might say that the name, Wayne Sheppard, was firmly ensconced in my subconscious and I simply drew upon that knowledge and used it in my Mira books. But here’s the thing. I’ve written more than 40 novels and once a book is done and off to my editor, I forget it. I can’t keep all these characters and their names in my head at one time.

So as I was reading through the ebook version of Death Flats and saw Sheppard’s name in a book written seven years before I even wrote the first Mira book, I was tempted to change his name, to make him someone else. In Death Flats, he’s a compromised person, a really nasty dude. In the Tango Key books, he’s a hero, the lover and male counterpart of psychic Mira Morales.

So, now I’m wondering if there’s a Wayne Sheppard somewhere in the universe who resonates to these two very different characters. Am I going to be somewhere tomorrow or the next day and run into some dude named Wayne Sheppard? And if that happened, which Sheppard would it be?

I’ve been teaching private meditation classes to a couple at the local studio where I teach yoga. After our first class I asked them to tell me something about themselves. The man had an interesting answer. He said, “I travel three or four days a week. I’m a psychiatrist and a comedy writer.” He went on to say his busy lifestyle resulted in a lot of stress and that was why he wanted to try meditation.

So the next class I decided to lead a guided meditation called, “Who am I?” It’s about moving beyond your everyday identity of parent, spouse, career/job identity, etc., stripping yourself of all those self-images and identities that others give you. It’s about removing  your mask and connecting with your deeper self…your true self.

You never know what people are going to take from something like that. I didn’t ask. It was their meditation, and it also sometimes helps to allow time for that type of meditation to take hold. If nothing else, the guy might’ve gotten shtick for a new comedy routine!

So this morning the first thing I noticed on Facebook was a post of a quote and illustration from three years ago that Facebook suggested that I re-post. After reading it, I realized it was a synchro for me, fitting with the meditation I’d done the evening before.

Here’s the quote:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
Marianne Williamson

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Earlier, the quote was attributed to Nelson Mandela, but it actually appeared in a book by Marianne Williamson. Doesn’t matter. The sentiment remains the same.

When we attended the Tallahassee Writers Conference in late April, we met a lot of wonderful people. One of them was Terry Crowley, who sent us this interesting synchro about an eagle feather.

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St. Augustine Florida has wonderful quirky shops tourists love to browse. A friend and I entered a Native Indian shop with many authentic works of art. A beautiful ‘eagle’ feather caught my eye. (It really was a painted goose feather because it is illegal to own a real eagle feather.) The quill of the feather was wound in turquoise suede strips, ending in a tassel at the bottom. The entire stem was dotted with turquoise paint. I was really compelled to buy it, but it was $25. I had no use for it, so with regret, I passed it by. Of all of the other neat items in the shop, my mind returned to the feather, but I still resisted buying it. I didn’t have the luxury to spend money frivolously.

The Cherokee spiritual woman who owned the shop offered animal totem readings. The animals represent the power or medicine each person carries in their Earth Walk. I was thrilled when my friend treated me to a reading for my birthday. When asked if there was a particular animal I was drawn to throughout my life, I couldn’t really say, except wolf, but that didn’t feel right. I asked the spiritual woman what animal she was and she said eagle. Eagle hit a chord with me, but I wanted to know what my animal really was, not what I hoped it would be.

To begin, she smudged me and animal cards with white sage. With the energy cleared, she asked me to look at and touch all of the cards, and then she instructed me to draw seven cards. The cards drawn would indicate the four directions, North, East, South, and West, and also the directions above, below, and within.

Not understanding exactly what to do, I drew from the top of the deck, but when it came to draw the card within, she finally told me that I could pick any card in the deck and that I didn’t need to be drawing them just from the top of the deck. I could mix them up on the table or fan them out. She told me to really feel for this card, so I fanned the cards out and felt for a card that seemed right or evoked feeling in me. To my surprise, I chose the eagle card!

I decided this was a sign that I was meant to have the “eagle” feather and that’s why I was so drawn to it in the first place. The shop was filling up people. I rushed to the shelf and snatched it up quickly, fearing someone else might purchase it.

As soon as I returned home, I went to the book store and purchased the Medicine Card Set by Jamie and David Carson that the spiritual woman used at her store. I give animal card readings to friends and relatives ever since, and the readings ring surprisingly true of both their personalities, and sometimes, even their appearance or mannerisms. I use the feather for smudging with white sage before each reading. I found a use for the feather after all!

The “eagle” feather called to me in that store and led me to a divining tool that has helped people understand themselves, their strengths and weaknesses, and their connection with animals. The feather is now one of my most treasured possessions. If it wasn’t for the feather synchro, I would have missed out on knowing the animal allies available to us in life and that their medicine is there to aid us in our Earth Walk, if we would just ask.

In 1999, the movie The Matrix hit theaters. To date, the movie has earned more than a billion worldwide –$1,632,989, 142.

And with good reason. It wasn’t just because Keanu Reeves played Neo and because Laurence Fishburne played Morpheus or even because Carrie-Anne Moss played Trinity. The Matrix was a phenomenon because Andy and Lena Wachowski, the brothers who conceived and directed it, had a message: reality is NOT what we perceive it to be.

Now, fast forward to 2015. Our daughter Megan, is always recommending TV shows to us. You guys gotta see this. Usually, her recommendations are good – The Whispers, a spooky show with Spielberg as executive director; Wayward Pines, with M. Night Shyamalan as executive producer; and now, Sense8, with The Matrix boys- – the Wachoski Brothers – as executive producers. These guys also produced Cloud Atlas.

Sense8, an original Netflix production, is about eight individuals in different countries and cultures who suddenly discover they are connected telepathically to strangers – IMDB calls it linked mentally. Thing is, this connection among the eight goes well beyond telepathic. Each of the eight is able, under duress, to connect physically and emotionally with their counterparts and change the outcome of whatever one of the eight is facing.

The connecting thread appears to be Naveen Andrews, a character from Lost, who is able to manipulate his consciousness so that he can appear to the others – a Hindu woman, a Chicago cop, a tortured singer/performer in London, a thief, a van driver in Nairobi, a gay American woman, a young Korean woman, and a closeted gay Spanish actor. Navene  is apparently trying to protect the others from another sensate who is trying to tap into their psychic cluster and capture them. After we watched the third episode this evening, I was struck by a couple of things.

The Wachoski brothers have a vision for this show, just as they did for The Matrix. But it’s not just a storyboard about who does what to whom and when. It’s not just about plot twists and characters. It’s about the nature of reality. While watching tonight’s episode, I felt as though I were watching a visual depiction of how Indra’s Net works,  how each of us is connected in a real, vibrant way and how this connection is strengthening, gaining momentum.

In this episode, that connection happens through music, where each of the eight are singing, What’s Up by Four Non Blondes, the video at the top of the post, a song from 1992. The scene is extraordinary for television, so real and visceral that when it ended, I was on my feet, shouting, Yes, yes, this is it, this is the Wachoski defining moment for the 21^st century!

Okay, so maybe I overreacted. But honestly, it’s so refreshing to see psychic ability and soul connections depicted in such a real, emotional way across such cultural divides, that I would binge on the rest of the episodes if they were available. Netflix didn’t just pound Blockbusters into the ground. With their original programming, they are redefining television – and the nature of what we may be willing to accept as true.

At the very least commit to three episodes of Sense8. I’m pretty sure that’s all it will take for you to be hooked. The Wachoski brothers not only understand synchronicity; they show us how it works and why.