Welcome to The Mystical Underground

Rob and I usually take Noah to the dog park somewhere between 3 and 5 every afternoon. He has an instinctive awareness about this time and usually starts getting restless around 3. On Fridays, when Rob teaches a private yoga class at 3, I often take Noah to the park by myself. He, of course, is hopeful that squirrels will put in an appearance.

On this particular Friday, not too many people were there when we arrived around 3:15. He trotted off looking for squirrels and I walked over to a woman who has two really cool dogs, both rescues. Jo-Jo is a female yellow lab mix, and adores Noah. They sat together for awhile and the woman and I talked. I’m ashamed to admit that although I know the names of her dogs, I don’t know her name. That happens a lot at the dog park. But for the sake of the story I’ll call her Rachel. I do know she works with pre-schoolers at a Jewish center. That day, she was talking about how grandparents visited the preschool that day and it had exhausted her because she had to be “on.”

The conversation veered into a story about a Golden Retriever she and her husband had owned several years back. The dog ended up with cancer and had to be put down. It devastated both of them, but her husband took it especially hard. They had the dog cremated and decided to bury the ashes in their backyard. Her husband dug a huge hole in the back yard that would accommodate not only the dog’s ashes, but the entire ottoman where the dog had spent so much of his time in the final days of his life. She finally suggested that they cut off the cushion and bury that with the ashes.

Not long afterward, her husband was diagnosed with cancer and lasted about five months. It was, she admitted, a sad time. Now, when I hear a story like this, I have to ask: “Do you ever feel him around?”

“All the time.”

“In what way?”

“Well, he was a frugal man, and very soon after his death, I started finding pennies in odd places around the house, in my car, in my clothing, in my suitcase when I was traveling. I knew it was him. These were pennies, not quarters,” she said with a quick laugh.

I told her about white feathers,  the archetype that our blogging friend Mike Perry has talked about on his blog.

“A medium was invited to our Jewish women’s group and he stood in the middle of our circle of chairs and started talking about what he was receiving.” The medium explained that whoever felt this information pertain to them should raise their hand. “He said an accountant was coming through. ‘Does anyone have an accountant in spirit?’ he asked.

No hands went up. So Rachel raised her hand and said, “Yes, my husband was an accountant.”

“He wants to know why you stopped kissing his picture,” the medium said.

Rachel was floored. On the wall above her head were photos of her kids and husband. Every night before she went to bed, she kissed her fingers and touched them to her husband’s photo to wish him good night. But recently, she’d been renovating her bedroom wallpaper and had to take the photos down and had stopped kissing her husband good night.

“No one knew this,” Rachel said. “Not even my closest friends. I’d never told it to anyone. So how did this guy know that?”

“He was a genuine medium,” I replied, and asked her if she knew about Cassadaga, the town of mediums and psychics just north of Disney World.

Nope. She’d never heard of the place, which is the usual reaction when I mention Cassadaga. But she took down the name, we looked at Google maps, and she said that she has friends in Orlando that she’s visiting in a few weeks and she’s going to check it out.

“So has your husband been around recently?” I asked

“Not so much anymore. That first year after he passed, he was around all the time.” She pointed at Jo-Jo. “But he urged me to get her.”

In other words, he was around for the important stuff.

At this point, Noah spotted a squirrel and took off at the speed of light across the field and I followed him. I made a mental note to put a copy of Synchronicity & the Other Side in the car so I could give it to Rachel when I ran into her again. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the first in a series of stories about spirit communication that I would hear from women I didn’t know. The second is coming up  on the 17th. I’m expecting a third.

Our dog park may be the most interesting place in town!

During our infrequent cool spells in South Florida in January and February when the temps dip into the low 50s and even briefly skirt with the 40s, Trish and I like to sit outside by our fire pit. Once the rainy season is here or near, the fire pit goes into hibernation. The sub-tropics don’t cool in the evening like it does in the North or the desert Southwest. So we take advantage of these few days by stocking up on wood and watching for ‘cold’ fronts to come our way.

This year after stoking the fire on our cool nights, I would typically sit back on my Adirondack chair and gaze skyward into the night. I had a view between our front yard palm trees of one particular bright star that I would watch. What fascinated me was that after staring at the fire, then looking up, the star would appear blue. That reminded my of the Hopi Indian legend of the Blue Star kachina.

When a blue star appears in the sky, the blue star kachina will dance alone in the plaza indicating the end of the Fourth World and the beginning of the Fifth. Kachina dances are held in the plazas of the Hopi villages during a variety of seasonal-related festivities. But the Blue Star kachina has yet to appear for its world-changing dance. The exception is in my novel, Time Catcher, my fourth and last novel in the Will Lansa mystery saga that starts when Will is a high school student and ends in Time Catcher when he is in his late 20s, a cultural anthropologist who is called back to the reservation by his aging grandmother.

Seeing the ‘blue star’ hovering in the southeastern sky was more of a personal experience than a shared one. In fact, when I pointed it out to Trish, she found the star, but it didn’t appear blue to her. Maybe she was staring at the iPad on her lap, instead of the fire, before she looked.

Regardless, blue or not, I was staring at the most mysterious star in the sky. It’s embedded  in legend and mythology of  numerous  cultures. It is, of course, Sirius, the Dog Star, of Canis Major, the most luminous star in the night sky. Mystery schools and secret societies throughout time have attributed special status to Sirius. Is it merely because of its brightness that Sirius it is the brightest star in the sky, or do humans have an ancient connection with the star?

Sirius played a large role in the mythology of ancient Egypt. It was revered as Sothis and was associated with Isis, the mother goddess of Egyptian mythology. Isis is the female aspect of the trinity formed by herself, Osiris and their son Horus. Anubis, the dog-headed god of death, was linked with the dog star and Toth-Hermes, the great teacher of humanity, was also esoterically connected with the star.

The Egyptian calendar system was linked to Sirius. Its appearance was linked with feasts and celebrations.  Several occult researchers have claimed that the Great Pyramid of Giza was built in perfect alignment with the stars, especially Sirius. The light from these stars was said to be used in ceremonies of Egyptian Mysteries.

The star’s celestial movement was also observed and revered by ancient Greeks, Sumerians, Babylonians and countless other civilizations. Legends of a tribe of people in Mali tell of a watery planet within the Sirius star cluster that is the home of a race called the Nommos. Supposedly, the Nommos came to Earth and instructed humans in science and trade. Maybe it’s a synchronicity of sorts that the tribe in question that still maintain legends of the dog star are called the Dogon people.

Finally, I decided to look for any Hopi legends related to Sirius. I figured there might be something, and I was right. Amazingly, and here is my synchronicity – the Hopi name for Sirius is Blue Star kachina. Seriously? I did not know that – or if I did, I had forgotten. I’m not sure how that fits with the prophecy of the appearance of a blue star, since Sirius has been up there shining brightly throughout all human eras. But there it is. Sirius, the blue star kachina. I just knew it looked blue from my chair at the fire pit!

We recently posted about the unique creativity of poets that enables many of them to sense the future. And then we ran across a study by James Pennebaker, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas.

In 2001, Psychosomatic Medicine published Pennebaker’s article about a study he conducted that showed how a poet’s words can foreshadow their suicides. It sounds like a tool along the lines of Minority Report, doesn’t it?

In the movie, three precognitive women predicted crimes before they happened. In Pennebaker’s study, the tool was a computer analysis of 156 poems written by nine British, American, and Russian poets who killed themselves. The analysis found stark differences in words and language patterns compared with the work of nine poets who died naturally.

Among the suicidal poets who were studied were Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Hart Crane, Sergei Esenin, Adam L. Gordon, Randall Jarrell, Vladamir Mayakovsky, Sarah Teasdale.

Their work was compared with 135 poems written by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Boris Pasternak, Matthew Arnold, Joyce Kilmer, Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Osip Madelstam, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Pennebaker’s findings are intriguing.

Suicidal poets, Pennebaker said, used words that indicated detachment from other people and a preoccupation with themselves. Words like I, me, and my were used more frequently by suicidal poets than by non-suicidal poets. “The words we use, especially those that often appear to be the unimportant words, say a lot about who we are, what we are thinking and how we approach the world,” Peneebaker noted in the article. “People who are suicidal or depressed use ‘I’ at much, much higher rates and there is also a corresponding drop in references to other people.”

Just as the precogs in Minority Report pinpoint strong probabilities of a crime that will be committed based on the patterns of violence and emotions in the images they pick up, Pennebaker found that suicidal poets generally reduced their use of words like talk, share, and listen as they approached their deaths. Non-suicidal poets, he found, generally increased their use of those words as they got older. The potential suicides used words associated with death more frequently than the second group, but there wasn’t much difference in the use of words like hate and love.

Pennebaker also noted that suicide is more prevalent among poets than other writers or the general population. “Poets are more prone to depression. No one would call poets a particularly bubbly, chipper group.”

He believes these patterns of language used by poets who eventually killed themselves could be “linguistic predicators of suicide” in poets who are still with us. “We are not saying that if you use I a lot, then you will commit suicide. It is simply a marker of greater risk.”

The danger in technology using “predictors” for any sort of behavior is that people change, grow, evolve. Our emotional lives are as ephemeral and ever changing as the oceans. The priorities we had at fifteen, the emotions we experienced, the way we understood the world and ourselves within it bears little resemblance to what we experience at thirty. Or fifty.

The poets in this study who were suicides lived in times and cultures that no longer exist. In today’s world, if you’re a depressed poet, you probably tweet about it, start a closed Facebook group, Instagram it, publish a You Tube video. You write a free e-book that is downloaded two million times and you’re offered a six-figure publishing contract and suddenly have a renewed interest in life. In other words, the Internet offers an almost instantaneous community. What would make for an interesting study is the words that poets use now, fourteen years after Pennebaker’s article was published.

Since 2001, the world has changed drastically. If you would like the specifics, just Google (there’s one of the changes!) How did the world change between 2001 and 2016? You can bet that today’s poets are among the first who have reacted and are shaping those changes. Our friend Jenean Gilstrap – Gypsy – is one of them. Google her name on Facebook and treat yourself to her beautiful words.

Barring a major loss in the March 15 primaries, it does look as if Trump – sigh –  will be the Republican nominee. None of them are good, but he’s the worst of a rotten crop. In the Super Tuesday primaries – 11 states – he swept 7 states – Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia and Massachusetts and Vermont. Clinton also won 7 states. So, can Clinton win against Trump? Questionable. This troubling article from The Atlantic explains why.

One of the pundits I like is Cenk Uygur, who wrote an insightful piece about why Bernie Sanders actually won Super Tuesday.   The other reason Sanders was the big winner is because in February alone, he raised more than $42 million from small donors – not super pacs – and $6 million of it was raised on the last day, leap day, February 29. He raised more than everyone else, even Clinton.

But in the end, when all is said and done, how can so many Americans support a man whose platform is based on hatred? Is racism and xenophobia and misogyny still that entrenched in our culture? Well, yes, that appears to be the case if the Republican debate this evening is any indication.

I found it deeply disturbing that so many people in the huge Fox crowd cheered and applauded Trump when he mentioned how he would ratchet up torture, build his fifty-foot wall along the Mexican/U.S. border torture, boost the military, ban Muslims from entering the country, deport 11-12 million illegal immigrants. Really? We’re going to have a parade of buses and motorcades filled with millions of illegals being taken back to Mexico? We’re really going to have a 50-foot wall built along the border that Mexico is going to pay for?

The NY Daily News ran a clever – and horrifying – article about what Trump’s first hundred days in office would be like.

The only thing I like about Trump is that he has sent the establishment of the Republican party into a feeding frenzy that may well result in its collapse. If that happens, there will be no Rest in Peace message from me. My response will be, Good riddance, dudes.

And oh, a rather shallow postscript here. How about if Trump’s wife or one of his ex-wives, find him a new hair stylist?

Another PS, not so shallow. Thanks to super delegates – Democratic politicians who can votes on candidates – Clinton is well ahead of Sanders. This super delegate thing is a rigged system designed to keep out candidates that the establishment doesn’t want. Google it. So much for democracy.

With practice, anyone can ask a question and glimpse the future as it is most likely to unfold from that moment in time. By taking advantage of certain readily available tools, you can hurl open the window to events before they unfold. When you do so, you’re stepping into the world of divination.

Throughout time and across cultures people have peered into the future with divination tools – the I Ching, tarot cards, astrology charts, patterns made by tea leaves or the toss of bones, numerology, scrying. The principle of synchronicity lies at the heart of every divination system. When you toss coins or lay out cards, they form a pattern intrinsic to that moment. The pattern, Carl Jung pointed out, is meaningful only if you’re able to verify the interpretations through your knowledge of the subjective and objective situations, as well as the unfolding of subsequent events.

The term ‘divination’ comes from the Latin divinare, meaning ‘to foresee,’ and it probably was practiced even before humans learned to control fire. Diviners among the ancient Babylonians read patterns in animal entrails, in smoke, oil on the surface of water, and through the behavior of animals. The Druids favored crystal balls and read patterns in knotted tree roots, the calls and movements of birds, and in the patterns of clouds and stars. The ancient Greeks had their Oracle at Delphi, of course, but also divined patterns in dreams, in the murmuring of springs, and by tossing small stones or pieces of wood, knucklebones, or dice.

In Mesoamerican religious life and in every civilization from the Olmecs to the Mayans and Aztecs, divination was a part of daily life and scrying was commonly practiced. This system involved looking at any smooth or translucent surface— water, stones, crystals, mirrors— with the belief that images about the future would appear.

Eventually, divinatory tools were created. Around 1,200 B.C., the Chinese used a divination system called fuji, similar to a Ouija board, which was followed a millennium later by the I Ching. Tarot cards arrived in Europe from Turkey near the end of the Middle Ages, where related card games had existed for centuries.

Any question you ask a divinatory tool is personal, a one-time experience that can’t be replicated. So, like art, it falls outside the scientific process. It exists as a subjective reality, one that can confirm your own anecdotal encounters and explorations.

My two favorites are the tarot and the I Ching. The tarot is fascinating because it’s visual and the 22 major arcana card images are archetypal. From the first card in the Major Arcana, The Fool, to the last one, The World, our journey through life is depicted.

The other 56 cards in the deck represent the details, events, people, and situations in our lives. My favorite deck is the round Tarot of the Cloisters, where the images are presented like stained glass. I’ve had the deck for about 20 years and it’s difficult to find now. I’ve never thought there’s much point in reading reversed cards and this round deck makes that impossible!

The I Ching – a divination system that dates back several thousand years to ancient China – is chatty. I use the Richard Wilhelm translation and also enjoy Adele Aldridge’s take on the I Ching. With this system, there are 64 possible hexagrams you can get by tossing 3 coins six times. Heads count for 3, tails are 2, and the numbers 6 (three tails) a broken line, and 9, a solid line, are considered to be changing lines that become either solid or broken. Visionary Terrence McKenna believed the I Ching illuminated the nature of time.

These days, I use an app for the I Ching – the I Ching Pocket App of Wisdom – that I have on my phone and my iPad to toss the coins and then look at the interps of James de Korne  or Adele’s interps. She is illustrating every line in each of the 64 hexagrams – a staggering total of 960 lines! – and knows this stuff inside out. And I email Nancy Pickard, who for years was the only other person I knew who used the Ching, thus my name for her – Mistress of the Ching.

When I need a quick answer I pose a question, then open a book at random and point to a spot on the page. Sometimes, the word or phrase makes no sense at all. But other times, the word/phrase is right on target. Another method I love is to think of a question and state that the next thing I hear will answer it. This works nearly every time.

So, tapping into the future is something we can all so and you don’t have to wait for a dream, vision, or a hunch!

Visual tricksters: these cracked me up.

and my personal favorite:

E-books have been around for years now and Trish and I have gotten most of our old out-of-print books available through Kindle and other formats. There’s one big exception. None of my seven Indiana Jones novels have made the transition. I keep thinking that’s going to change. Every so often – like every other year – I go into the Kindle Store on Amazon.com and take a look.

The last time I did so, it was business as usual, none of my Indiana Jones novels were available – though they are still available in print editions. But there was another book that caught my attention. As you can see from the cover, it appears to be an Indiana Jones-like illustrated story for kids. But look at the author’s name – my last name combined with the first name of one of the characters in the first three movies – Marcus Brody, Indy’s mentor and museum director. I thought the name might be a one-time pseudonym, but I Googled Marcus MacGregor and there is a writer of young adult books by that name.

This seems to qualify as a combination of digital library angel and trickster synchronicity. In other words, I went into Kindle looking for my Indy books, so the digital library angel tossed me a bone. ‘I don’t see yours, but take a look at this one!’ When I did, I could hear the chuckle of the trickster in the background.

The dictionary defines camaraderie as “good fellowship,” usually among a group of people. Or, in another definition, it’s defined as “the quality of affording easy familiarity and sociability.”

But what’s that mean, exactly? This word has come up three or four times in the last few days, so I’m thinking of it as a cluster synchro that I should explore.

One definition I found describes camaraderie as a “spirit of good friendship and loyalty among members of a group.”

Since my work happens mostly in solitude, this definition doesn’t really fit for me except in a general sense, in that I feel camaraderie with other writers I know. We may not see each other often, but we exchange emails and phone calls and Facebook messages. We read each other’s books. We blurb each other’s books. We’re on the same page.

I experience a camaraderie with my animal buddies in that I talk to them, play with them, and they sleep beside my bed, at the foot of my bed – or sometimes in my bed. But that camaraderie is vastly different from the human variety.

We’ve been going to the same dog park for six years and there are certain people I’ve met there with whom I feel a camaraderie. The husband of one woman, a retired nurse, is in hospice and a friend and I stopped by her house last month with wine and goodies just to hang out. She was moved to tears. “I’ve spent so much of my life caring for other people that I can’t get used to people coming here to care for me.”

Another dog park friend is on a list for a kidney transplant. When I see him and his wife at the park, I just want to hug him and assure him it will all work out.

Then there’s the more intimate type of camaraderie that we share with our partners, kids, our siblings. In the best of partnerships, it seems, there’s true camaraderie, a sense that we’re part of a team, that we’re united with – or against – whatever comes our way.

This type of camaraderie ebbs and flows over time, through the course of daily life. I saw it in the marriage of my parents, see it in my own marriage, in the marriages and partnerships of others throughout the years. But it’s not constant. What worked a decade ago may not work now. Or the reverse might be true. We humans are continually changing, evolving, adapting to external circumstances that shift the balance of things. Health challenges, financial difficulties, births and deaths and other pivotal life events impact us in individual ways. Our needs and desires change. The self I was at 18 is not the same self I am now, many years later.

I recently ran across a blog post from a dating site where applicants pay an enormous fee to join and in return, are matched with the ideal partner. The gist is that these matches are made through some in depth psychological analysis rather than, as the blog post pointed out, through the kind of superficial match that happens on a site like Tinder, where matches are based strictly on looks, appearance. Swipe left, swipe right. And how does any of that work out in the camaraderie department? No telling. They don’t post their success rate. The idea is that the people who pay these enormous sum are too busy making money to meet men or women with who they might be compatible.

I Googled images of camaraderie and all kinds of weird stuff came up. People with guns, women listening to each other’s travails, figure skaters executing incredible maneuvers, in camaraderie, I guess, with their own bodies. There were a lot of animal photos, too, like the one at the top of Noah and Nika that exemplifies  my concept of camaraderie. Animals get it completely. We humans – well, we’ve got a ways to go.

In my fiction, I develop camaraderie with my characters. In writing non-fiction, I develop camaraderie with ideas. In life, my camaraderies are mostly intuitive, emotional. I recognize it when it occurs and when it’s not there, I mourn its absence. Maybe camaraderie really is the force that moves the world and its people forward toward something better.

Now that I’ve explored this cluster synchro, will it stop appearing? Is it like repetitive numbers – 11:11, for instance – that once you’ve acknowledged it, dived into it, gotten the message, it stops happening? Or is it like my Lotto tickets, where week after week, I get one number?

Aw, c’mon, universe. Deliver all the winning numbers, please!

I recently posted this image on my FB page with the message: Happy b-day, Noah. Age 7 and looking good. Noah attracted a surprising number of likes and a few comments.

Then I received a series of private messages from FB friend Fiona. She began by asking me:

“Would you like to hear about how you were either part of a synchronicity today, or were helpful in getting a message to someone from spirit?”

A few minutes later, the followup message arrived:

“I have a friend who lost her son, Noah, 8 years ago. He was 7 years old. She just phoned me this morning to tell me that she has breast cancer. The very second that she phoned me, I opened up my Facebook account and your post, saying happy b-day to Noah, seven years old and looking good, was the VERY FIRST POST that I saw, the very second that I heard her voice on the line. Also, Noah died on his 7th birthday. I told her what I was seeing even before she told me her news.

“She and I both think that it was a message from Noah, just showing that he is around, and still able to see what is going on in his parent’s lives.”

Definitely a meaningful coincidence. In this case, it wasn’t my synchronicity. Instead, I conveyed information that someone else saw at a critical moment and passed the information on to a third party, the mother of Noah, who died on his seventh birthday.  It’s interesting how these things come together…and in this case right at the precise moment.

Of course I can’t forget the roles played by Noah, our big red Golden, and Trish. Noah posed on the pipe, and Trish snapped the photo with her phone. It all came together.

Indra’s Net

Rob and I watched some of the CNN democratic town hall this evening. These town halls are fascinating because it’s just one candidate at a time answering questions from the moderator – and the audience.

At the tail end of Sanders’s stint, the moderator asked him about his religious – spiritual beliefs. Sanders is Jewish and rarely mentions anything about his faith or his views on religion. It’s a major difference from the Republican candidates, who fall all over themselves to quote the Bible and mention god and faith and all the other stuff you expect to hear from candidates trying to win over the religious right. And it’s different from Clinton, who periodically tosses in references to her “faith.”

So when Sanders was asked to explain his spiritual beliefs, he pointed out that all major religions – Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism –emphasize do unto others what you would have them do unto you. “In other words, we’re all into this together. What affects you, affects me.”

Stunned, I looked at Rob and exclaimed, “Indra’s net!

Sanders then went on to say that we can’t ignore a person who’s starving by telling ourselves it’s someone else’s problem and that we have to focus on making our next 5 million. We can’t ignore climate change that will destroy the planet because we’re all in this together.

As author Stephen Mitchell explained in The Enlightened Mind, “The net of Indra is a profound and subtle metaphor for the structure of reality. Imagine a vast net; at each crossing point there is a jewel; each jewel is perfectly clear and reflects all the other jewels in the net, the way two mirrors placed opposite each other will reflect an image ad infinitum. The jewel in this metaphor stands for an individual being, or an individual consciousness, or a cell or an atom. Every jewel is intimately connected with all other jewels in the universe, and a change in one jewel means a change, however slight, in every other jewel.”

In an earlier town hall on CNN on February 3, Anderson Cooper asked Sanders this same question. Here’s his response, which was pretty much the same thing he said tonight in South Carolina:

I can’t recall any other presidential candidate ever talking about his or her spiritual/religious beliefs in quite this way. It’s something most of us probably sense at one time or another – the Butterfly Effect? Chaos theory? David Bohm’s implicate order? But regardless of what we call it, the notion of interconnectedness speaks to something profound within all of us. And I was blown away to hear Sanders say it.