Welcome to The Mystical Underground

There’s a synchro here, but you have to keep reading because Rob added it at the end. I used Rachel’s photo because she was really  the star of the 2nd Democratic debate.

What a refreshing difference the 2^nd Democratic debate was from its Republican counterpart. The Republican format – with the silly kid’s table for those candidates whose poll numbers were low and then the real deal with a bunch of guys and one woman shouting at each other – was a carnival. The Dem debate in South Carolina, with Rachel Maddow moderating for MSNBC, was great. Rachel interviewed each candidate one on one for 30 minutes and I actually learned something about each of the three candidates.

Martin O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland, has been a progressive for most of his political career. He’s slick, smooth, smart, savvy, and has a record to prove it.  He can be funny, too. Rachel did an interesting thing where she had each candidate choose an envelope with some questions in it that were intended to reveal a bit more about who they are as people as opposed to who they are as candidates. One of the questions: What’s the most outrageous (or some other adjective) article of clothing you own? The response? A kilt that was given to him. O’Malley’s poll numbers, though, are in the tank and when Rachel pointed that out, O’Malley flashed a big politician’s smile and said he loves a challenge.

Bernie Sanders was the next candidate Rachel interviewed. It’s apparent that Sanders likes Rachel, that he opens up to her. Sanders is trailing Hillary Clinton by a huge margin in South Carolina. But out of the three candidates, he came across as the most genuine. Toward the end of her interview with him, she showed a photo of Sanders when he was in college at the University of Chicago in 1962. He was directing a protest about segregated campus housing. “What was that younger Bernie Sanders thinking at that time?” she asked.

And he told her what that protest was about and how he’d been marching for civil rights with Martin Luther King Jr., and it confirmed the sense I’ve always had about Sanders – he’s the real deal. There’s no super PAC money giving to his campaign. No Wall Street dudes. No corporations. More than 750,000 people have donated an average of $30 to his campaign. This is about as grass roots as you can get in this country. Sanders has drawn larger crowds than his competition wherever he has gone and it’s because his message resonates – that the economy in this country is rigged for the upper 1% and the middle class is basically getting screwed and that he would change that as president.

When Rachel asked Sanders what he would do about ISIS, I loved his answer. No boots on the ground. No war. Muslim countries in the mid-east need to step up to the plate as a coalition and not just depend on the U.S. as the world cop who will take care of it. He voted against the war in Iraq because he felt that Bush and Cheney and the rest of that gang were lying. Clinton voted for the war in Iraq – and has since apologized for that vote, but her apology doesn’t change the repercussions, that the entire region is now in chaos, with refugees pouring into Europe by the millions.

Sanders also talked about climate change – how real it is, that it’s a national security issues, that he doesn’t want to leave his seven grandchildren with a planet that is basically uninhabitable. In Iowa, he said, thirty percent of the power in that state is now generated by windmills. And I’m thinking, why isn’t the same true in Florida of solar power?

Then there was Clinton. Yes, she’s qualified. Yes, she’s smart and has a lot of foreign policy experience and yes, I would love to see a woman as prez. If she’s the nominee for the Democratic party, I’ll vote for her. She was engaging, on target, answered questions with great intelligence and knowledge. But my choice is Sanders and here’s why.

I sense Bernie is genuine, a real person and not a politician who has been subsumed by his public, political personality. Yes, he’s the oldest of the candidates, 74, but that also means he has the longest public voting record in congress and his record shows stunning consistency. This man’s stance against war, for civil rights, for equality across the board, has been unchanged throughout his career in politics. When he talks, I see passion fueled by deep beliefs. When Clinton talks, I see controlled passion deeply colored by ambition. When O’Malley speaks, I see a quick smile, a thoughtful frown, and political verbiage.

I think Sanders beat out the competition tonight. But the real star was Rachel Maddow. This woman holds a PhD from Oxford, is a lesbian and self-avowed flaming liberal, and should be running for president. Her interview format was terrific, her questions for each candidate were spot on, and the time allotted to each candidate actually provided viewers with information.

So let’s see, my ideal ticket would be: Sanders, Rachel or Elizabeth Warren in any combination. What a different country this would be with any of these 3 in charge. What a changed world it would be.

Here’s a good roundup.

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Trish wrote above that there was no synchronicity, but I stumbled on one, of sorts. Just before the candidate forum, we were busy cleaning two closets that we’d ignored for quite awhile. We were appalled by the dirt and dust and who knows what we found hiding behind the boxes on the floor. Yuck! Then, of course, there’s the possible symbol stuff— cleaning up hidden issues that we’ve buried in the closet or unconscious of our minds. I didn’t think about that until later, when I had a dream that night.

As we were finishing and the forum was about to start, Trish said, “I bet Hillary and Bill don’t do stuff like this.” It seemed an odd thought. I guess the idea was that they would have someone else do it. Her comment came into play in my dream.

We watched Rachel interview the three. She’s very good, but I was a bit disappointed that there no debating, just q&a. It was worthwhile, and Sanders came off a winner, as Trish said above, at least a winner on that night. I went to bed early and dreamed of a large dirty house, and there in the dream was, who else but Hillary with a broom cleaning up!

Dreams are usually about ourselves, not other people, but I couldn’t help thinking that Hillary might indeed be working on cleaning things up from the past to sanitize her campaign. After all, who doesn’t have a dirty closet hidden away somewhere waiting to be discovered? So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut used to write when there was no need to say more.

It’s interesting how similar ideas and concepts come together from diverse sources. For instance, recently within an hour I experienced a collision of concepts about parallel or alternate universes.

First, the hard science part. I read this in Huffington Post.

“Alternate or parallel universes may actually exist, according to the findings of one astrophysicist, but many in the scientific community aren’t convinced.

“Ranga-Ram Chary, U.S. Planck Data Center’s project manager in California, recently discovered a “mysterious glow” by mapping the Cosmic Microwave Background, otherwise known as the light that was left over from a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang.

“Ordinarily, Chary would have found nothing “except noise.” But the spots of light were 4,500 times  brighter than they should have been.

“Chary concluded that the glow could represent matter from another universe ‘leaking’ or colliding into ours. This would validate the hypothesis that our universe is merely “a region within an eternally inflating super-region,”  said Chary in an Astrophysical Journal study published in September.

“Cosmologists have speculated about multiple universes for years, but have thus far been unable to prove their existence. Chary’s research is therefore significant because it could lend credence to the theory that cosmic inflation—which is the notion that the universe began inflating right after the Big Bang — led to multiple universes.

“However, this type of claim would require a very high burden of proof. Chary admits that there’s a 30 percent chance that the glow is nothing out of the ordinary.”

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So that must mean there’s 70 percent chance that the glow is a window to alternate universes. If that’s the case, then the odds are with the multi-verse. Of course this is from mainstream science so there’s no talk about the role of consciousness, which from the materialistic view places consciousness as an outgrowth of the brain. In other words, intelligence and awareness are manifested from the physical realm.

But when we look into alternate worlds from the point of view of theoretical quantum physics things become far more mystically oriented, with consciousness becoming the defining element of reality, and all physical existence emerging from consciousness, or Source energy.

Just before reading the Huffington Post article, I’d been consuming a chapter from Robert Moss’s book, The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse. This paragraph caught my attention:

“Physics tells us that it is probable that all of us are living in this moment, in one of a possibly infinite number of parallel universes, that every move we make (or fail to make) causes our world to split, through we rarely, if ever, notice. How can we gain experiential knowledge of the Many Worlds? How can we possibly use such knowledge? Through dreaming, and above all by becoming active dreamers.”

Moss began that chapter with a quote from William James. “Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness.”

I wonder how long it will take before mainstream science recognizes the rightful role of consciousness. Science supposedly is not a belief system and explores all options. Yet, when it comes to consciousness and extrasensory perception, scientists vigilantly protect their set of rules about the nature of reality, and often scorn those who suggest that science has become a cult with it’s own beliefs.

Six years ago, I bought Dean Koontz’s book A Big Little Life: a memoir of a joyful dog named Trixie. It was about a Golden Retriever that he and his wife, Gerda, had for nearly twelve years, a dog that transformed their lives. The book caught my eye not only because it was by Koontz, but because of the retriever on the cover with the reddish gold fur.

We’ve had two Golden Retrievers – Jessie, who was with us for nearly 12 years and whom we had to put down in 2007, and Noah, whom we adopted in 2009, after I bought Koontz’s book. I was never able to read the book because the first few pages left me choked up. But those pages prompted me to visit the site of the Golden Retriever Rescue of Palm Beach County. And in November 2009, we adopted Noah. The other dog in the photo below is Nika, our daughter’s dog.

Noah  spent the first nine months of his life crated. His Miami owners intended to use him as a stud because both of his parents, whom they also owned, had such pure bloodlines. But the family went bankrupt and mom, dad, and Noah were surrendered to the rescue organization.

He’s large for a Golden – now over 100 pounds of muscle, back then about eighty pounds, with these massive paws and a head as big as a cat. His first night with us, he helped himself to a raw chicken breast Rob had left on the counter to cook for dinner and gobbled it down before we even realized what had happened. The next day when we returned from the gym, we found our living room filled with feathers from couch pillows Noah had torn apart. We discovered he was terrified of young kids. We enrolled him in dog training lessons and started taking him to the dog park to get him socialized. The dog park made the difference.

Today, he’s the king of the dog park, one of the largest dogs in the park, and his primary interest is chasing Frisbees and balls unless there’s a squirrel nearby, and then all bets are off. He’s still shy around kids, doesn’t like dogs that get in his face as he enters the park, but never bullies puppies or female dogs. He doesn’t tolerate the male dogs who haven’t been neutered, the ones who strut up to him as if challenging him to prove who and what he is. When there’s a fight somewhere in the park, he keeps his distance, unless the dog involved is Nika, or another dog he likes, and then he runs the offender down. Submit, surrender, his stance says, and the dog does.

I mention all this because in the book on precognition that Rob and I recently sold, there’s a chapter on animals as natural precogs. I happened to pick up Koontz’s book from my desk, and paged through it. I figured Koontz had to have a story about Trixie and precognition. This was the author, after all, who had written one of the best thrillers I’d ever read – Watchers, about a genetically altered Golden Retriever. What I found was a spirit communication story that blew me away.

After Trixie’s death, Koontz encountered writers’ block for the first time in his many decades as a writer. He sat in front of his computer day after day, and couldn’t write a word. Few things are more terrifying to a writer than this inability to scribble a single word. Koontz realized “that few human beings give of themselves as a dog gives of itself. I also suspect that we cherish dogs because their unblemished souls make us wish – consciously or unconsciously- that we were as innocent as they are…”

Trixie died on a Saturday. On the third Saturday after her death, Dean and Gerda walked the acres the dog had walked, as they’d done the previous two Saturdays, during the hour that Trixie had passed on. They visited her favorite spots. “Three weeks to the minute after Trixie died, we were walking the larger lawn, a brilliant golden butterfly swooped down from a pepper tree. This was no butterfly like any we had seen before; nor have we seen it since. Big. Bigger than my hand when I spread my fingers, it was bright gold, not yellow.”

Koontz describes how the butterfly flew around their heads, wings brushing their faces and hair, then flew off. Gerda immediately asked if that was Trixie and Koontz, said, Yeah, it was.

“No landscaper who works here has ever before or since seen such a butterfly, nor have we,” Koontz writes. “It danced about our head at the very minute Trixie had died three weeks earlier. Skeptics will wince, but I will always believe our girl wanted us to now that the intensity of our grief wasn’t appropriate that she was safe and happy.”

Koontz posted this story on his website and received hundreds of responses from others who had lost their beloved dogs and experienced “uncanny events that were quite different from ours but that seemed to be intended to tell them that the spirits of their dogs lived on.”

Now I’m going to read this book from beginning to end.

PS Have been reading it at the gym and am nearly done. As one reviewer said, It’s a love letter from Koontz to his dog. Just beautiful.

In our trips to canyons and Anasazi ruins in the Southwest, I’ve always been curious about the numerous spirals among the petroglyphs on canyon walls. So I was fascinated to come across a detailed explanation of spirals in Partnering with Nature by Catriona MacGregor. I’ve been slowly reading this book (which I wrote about earlier here), usually just a couple of pages in the morning out on the porch with a cup of coffee.

She began by telling a story of watching an osprey with a fish in its talons. Instead of flying directly to its nest, it made ever-expanding circles…spiraling outward. “During this time, the image and meaning of the spiral was integrated into every cell of my body….It seemed that everything I looked at—each blade of grass, each tree branch, and even the trees’ very trunks—rose up from the ground as joyous spirals before my very eyes….It was as if I had seen the wizard behind the curtain—the magic that gracefully weaves itself through all existence.”

Catriona notes that spirals are everywhere, “from luminous spiral galaxies ablaze in dazzling colors to the tiny spirals at the tips of our fingers. The spiral is simultaneously a structure and a movement.” She points out that spirals can be both creative and destructive, as in the movement and shape of a tornado or hurricane. At the same time, the spiral connects us to all life forms on Earth—it’s the blueprint of existence. DNA, which contains the genetic instructions needed to create cells, protein, and RNA, is spiral-shaped.

Catriona suggests that the reason spirals are found in ancient art and at sacred sites around the world is because the shape reflects the connection between the physical and spiritual worlds. “The spiral itself is infinite, which links it to the Creator (who is also infinite), and yet the spiral is also found throughout the universe in all ‘limited’ life forms. Thus the spiral, in effect, is capable of going from the physical realm of the material world to the world of spirit, and ultimately the birthplace of all creation. The spiral unites us with all life, with the Creator, and ultimately with our deepest selves.”

Just a day or two before I read Catriona’s pages on spirals, I’d led a meditation at the beginning of my yoga class that focused on the seventh or crown chakra. For each chakra, I focus on a seed sound or bija associated with the chakra, (AUM for the seventh) which we chant.  We also hold a mudra or hand gesture, and visualize a geometric shape right at the chakra. The shape associated with the crown chakra is a spiral, which we visualize circulating endlessly inward right above the head. The crown chakra is ruled by the principle of unity, the interconnection of all things. So meditating on this chakra allows you to connect to a place outside of time and space, a place of wisdom, higher knowledge, bliss.

I wrote an e-mail to Catriona about that synchronicity while we were staying at Trish’s sister’s house in Atlanta. We drove to Orlando that day to stay at our daughter Megan’s house, en route home to West Palm Beach. The next morning, sitting at Megan’s kitchen counter, I read Catriona’s response, which included the spiral image above. I looked up from the image and noticed a ceramic plate on the counter a couple of feet away. It was made by Megan’s roommate. I did a double-take when I looked closely at it.

Here it is below…another spiral!

On December 26, 2004, a 9.1 undersea earthquake erupted in the Indian Ocean. It triggered a massive tsunami that slammed into the coastlines of eleven Indian Ocean countries. Nearly 250,000 people died. Yet, in Sri Lanka’s Yala National Park, the largest wildlife reserve, there wasn’t a single report about dead animals. According to the deputy director of the National Wildlife Department, elephants, wild boar, monkeys, jackals, and deer moved inland to avoid the killer waves.

Khao Lak on Thailand’s western coast was hit particularly hard by the tsunami. But hours before it struck, elephants trumpeted and an hour before the tsunami crashed to shore with waves more than thirty feet high, the elephants became agitated again and took off for higher ground.

Along India’s Cuddalore coast, where thousands of people died, the Indo-Asian News service reported that buffaloes, goats, and dogs were found unharmed.

The indigenous tribes of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which lie near the quake’s epicenter, noticed the unusual behavior of dolphins, birds, and lizards and retreated to higher ground. The tribes survived without a single fatality.

Even though premonitions in animals have been well-documented over the years, mainstream science is slow to accept that it happens and typically offers alternate explanations. That was the case in 2004, when Florida was hit by four hurricanes in rapid succession —Frances, Charlie, Ivan, and Jeanne.

Birds delayed their migration during these tumultuous weeks. When Hurricane Jeanne was still hours away from Gainesville, University of Florida biologist Thomas Emmel noticed that the butterflies in the university’s enclosed rainforest took shelter among rocks and trees. When Hurricane Charlie was within twelve hours of southwest Florida, scientists at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Florida, noted the odd behavior among ten tiger sharks they had tagged. Eight of them fled the estuary for the safety of the open ocean.

In 1992, Hurricane Andrew slammed into Homestead, Florida, and nearly wiped it off the map. In its path was the habitat of crocodiles that live in the cooling canals of the Turkey Point nuclear power plant. Not a single dead crocodile was found in the aftermath of the storm. It’s speculated that they fled into open water or to the bottom of the twenty-foot canals.

“It doesn’t make any difference if it’s a hurricane, a fire, or an earthquake,” said Frank Mazzotti, a wildlife biologist at the University of Florida. “They start moving away from danger before humans pick it up. It’s likely a combination of smell, vibrations, and pressure.”

But suppose it’s simpler than that? Suppose animals are natural precogs?

For hundreds of years, the Chinese and Japanese have used unusual animal behavior as part of their national earthquake warning system. It paid off big time in February 1975, when a 7.3 quake struck Haicheng, China and most of the city’s structures. A week before, residents had noticed abnormal behavior in animals – snakes came out of hibernation and into the snow, dogs acted restless and anxious and howled without apparent reason. Small animals deserted the city. In the first three days in February, the bizarre behavior intensified with cows, horses, and pigs. Based on nothing more than the observations of the erratic behavior of animals, officials evacuated the city and more than 90,000 lives were saved when the quake struck on February 4.

But as British biologist Rupert Sheldrake points out in his book, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, the Chinese have also had “some spectacular failures,” like the 1976 Tanghan quake, in which 240,000 people died. Overall, though, Sheldrake believes the Chinese “ have been remarkably successful in predicting earthquakes – in contrast to their Western counterparts, who do not even try.”

If you live in a Western country, can you imagine the officials in your area issuing an evacuation order based on nothing more than the erratic behaviors of the animals? Can you even visualize your CNN or NBC affiliate explaining why such an order was issued? Probably not.

The official stance of the U.S. Geological Survey – USGS – is that there isn’t any reliable technique for predicting quakes, not even strange animal behavior. As stated on USGS website: “Because of their finely tuned senses, animals can often feel the earthquake at its earliest stages before the humans around it can. This feeds the myth that the animal knew the earthquake was coming. But animals also change their behavior for many reasons, and given that an earthquake can shake millions of people, it is likely that a few of their pets will, by chance, be acting strangely before an earthquake.”

James Berkland, a retired USGS geologist in California, however, has a different opinion. According to his research, the number of missing dogs and cats increases significantly two weeks before a quake. The gravitational variations due to lunar cycles create “seismic windows” of greater quake probability. When the number of missing pets also rises, then a quake is likely. As a result, Berkland claims to be able to predict quakes with an accuracy greater than seventy-five percent just by counting the number of ads for lost pets in the daily newspaper, by mass beachings of whales and dolphins, and by correlating these events to lunar-tide cycles.

What about fish? Are they able to sense future quakes, too? In Japanese mythology and folklore, the oarfish is one predictor.

This bizarre-looking creature, though to be the world’s longest bony fish, can measure from twenty to fifty feet in length and lives at depths of several hundred feet. According to the Japanese Times, it’s known in mythology as ryugu no tsukai or messenger from the sea god’s palace. When they come to the beach, it’s an omen of an earthquake.

In March 2010, around the time of the 8.8 quake that struck Chile, Japanese fisherman discovered dozens of oarfish. Not long before the 2011 quake and tsunami in Japan, twenty oarfish stranded themselves on beaches in the area.

Coincidence? Yeah, sure.

According to an article in China Daily, the Chinese also believe that fish can sense future quakes. In July 2015, China Daily reported the seismological bureau in Nanjing has transformed seven animal farms into seismic stations, where the behavior of fish, chickens, and black boars will be monitored for unusual behavior. According to Shen Zhijun, keeper at the Hongshan Forest Zoo in Nanjing, these particular animals are sensitive to infrasound All these animals are sensitive to infrasound but not to other changes in environment or weather.

Cameras to monitor the animal behaviors will be set up across the park, which is home to 200 black boars, 2,000 chickens, and a 36-acre fish pond. Zhou Hongbing, a breeder turned earthquake observer at one of the refurbished animal farms, said that breeders and observers have to brief the bureau in Nanjing twice a day about the animal behaviors. When they observe erratic behaviors, they notify the bureau immediately, through QQ, a Chinese instant messaging software.

“Seismological experts will analyze reported abnormalities to decide whether or not a possible earthquake is imminent,” said Zhou.

Special training at the bureau lists possible abnormal behaviors as chickens flying above trees instead of eating, a large number of fish jumping out of the water, or numerous toads moving home. Zhou Bing, division chief with Nanjing seismological bureau, says that possible animal farms must house more than three species and have a pond that covers dozens of acres, so that the experts have enough samples to do cross checks. Preferred locations should be in quiet neighborhoods away from factories or mines.

The article notes that since the 1970s, 58 kinds of animals have been found that exhibit abnormal behavior before earthquakes. These include wild and domesticated animals such as cats, dogs, pandas, fish, snakes, rats, skunks, ants and bees. Cave animals like rats and snakes, have been found to be more sensitive than those living above the ground, and smaller animals are more sensitive than their larger counterparts.

The Chinese will combine the observation of bizarre animal behaviors with more traditional means of predicting quakes. But, clearly, they are leagues ahead of the West in this area.

A paranormal investigator who supposedly made contact with a ghost girl says she revealed the existence of  rules the dead must follow in dealing with physical beings.

Chris Bores, a paranormal investigator and author of Ghost Hunting 2.0, decided to try out a new technique for contacting the dead at a lighthouse in St. Augustine, Florida that is said to be haunted. By using EMF detectors, Bores and other investigators made contact with the spirit of a young girl named Eliza and were able to interact with her for ninety minutes. During that time, Bores said he learned new information about life after death.

Eliza’s answers to their questions seemed to indicate that there were actual rules to the afterlife regarding matters that spirits needed to keep hidden from the living. Bores made his comments in a radio interview with George Noorey on Coast to Coast.

One of the questions he asked the spirit girl was: “Is being alive the same as being dead?”

“That question brought the conversation to a complete halt – things just stopped. And I couldn’t figure out why.” Worried that he had embarrassed Eliza or scared her away, Bores resumed asking the phantasm what he called fluff questions.

After ten minutes, he decided to ask a deeper question again. “Do you have a body?’ She then went silent again.

Bores was baffled and wondered what these questions had in common. “I started to think maybe she’s not allowed to talk about this stuff.”

Another 10 minutes passed before he lured her back into the room. This time, he asked: “Are there certain things you’re not allowed to tell us?” That’s when the EMF meter spiked.

He pushed ahead with another question. “Okay, are there rules to the afterlife?” The meter spiked again. Then he asked: “Are there certain things we as humans are not supposed to know about?’” The meter spiked for a third time.

Bores told Noorey that one of the other investigators asked: “Will you get in trouble if you talk about these things?’

“And wouldn’t you know it – the meter spiked again! These answers to those questions really blew us away,” Bores said “It really opened the door for deeper discussions…What are these rules that they have to follow? And since there are rules – who’s policing the afterlife? How will they be punished? And it just led me on a search to find the answers to these questions.”

To hear more of the interview with Chis Bores, click here.

I don’t know much about the EMF technique for communicating with spirits, but it sounds like a high tech version of a Ouija board. And possibly, like Ouija boards, you could get misleading answers. In other words, the dead playing games with the living. However, maybe there are such rules related to interacting with the physical world. I’ve actually heard this before in reference to why spirits don’t manifest as physical beings when they want to make contact. Supposedly, it’s possible, but it violates…yes, the rules.

Anyone, have thoughts on the matter on this Halloween, when the veil between worlds is said to be the thinnest?

Okay, so I allowed myself to be tortured this evening and watched the Repub debate with Rob. Every tax plan these people put forth is about trickle down economics – the Milton Friedman  answer to everything. Give the uber wealthy tax breaks and they will create jobs through the trickle down. Naomi Klein made a great case against trickle down economics in her brilliant book, The Shock Doctrine.

 Trickle down economics worked oh so well that the financial market collapsed in 2007-2008 and millions of people lost their homes, their savings, everything.

 The Huffington Post pegged all the Republican tax plans as “basically insane.”

Here’s why:

“Donald Trump’s plan would cost over $10 trillion.

Bobby Jindal’s plan would cost $9 trillion.

Rick Santorum’s would cost $1.1 trillion.

Jeb Bush’s plan? $1.6 trillion.

Marco Rubio? More than $1 trillion over the next decade.

One exception: The Tax Foundation says Rand Paul’s tax plan would save the government $737 billion. But other tax experts are far less sanguine. Citizens for Tax Justice estimates that Paul’s plan would cost $15 trillion. Much of the difference is due to less optimistic assumptions about economic growth. The Tax Foundation assumes that tax cuts benefitting Wall Street and the wealthy will generate very high levels of growth. Citizens for Tax Justice does not.

Total debt held by the public is currently $13.08 trillion.”

None of these candidates likes Medicare, Social Security, food stamps for the poor, Planned Parenthood, and oh, definitely get rid of ObamaCare, which has provided health care for millions since it was implemented. And what would replace ObamaCare?

Ben Carson, the pediatric neurologist: health care savings accounts.

Really? hoh

What middle class family can save enough to pay for an embedded insulin pump for diabetes? For a transplant? Or, for even less drastic health matters, for the birth of a child?

There was one interesting synchronicity highlighted in the debate, though that term wasn’t used. It was a comment by Mike Huckabee, a genial right-wing religious fanatic who doesn’t have a prayer of a chance of getting the nomination, much less the presidency. Huckabee pointed out that earlier in the day a ‘government’ balloon had escaped creating a hazard. The balloon dragged 6,700 feet of cable that snapped power lines in Pennsylvania and cut electricity to thousands of customers. It  finally came to rest near tiny Moreland Township, Pa., after about four hours on the loose.

Huckabee compared it to bloated government spending, an object full of gas destroying everything in its path. Word to that effect. That’s fine, Mike. But you failed to point out what part of the government you were referring to. Let’s spell it out: the bloated U.S. military. The balloon, which traveled for 160 miles before being corralled, is the most dramatic in a series of problems for a deeply troubled $2.7 billion Army effort to mount powerful radars high in the skies. One independent investigation reported last month that the 17-year effort to develop the system had created an unkillable “zombie” program beset by high costs, low reliability and questionable performance.

The point here is that all the Republican candidates with the exception of the Libertarian Rand Paul want to beef up the military, which no consumes more than 40 percent of the budget and is larger than the military of China and three or four other top militarized nations combined. So much for the Republicans concept of small government.

These candidates live in another universe and they have selective memories. They tout their party as “small government,” yet under George W. Bush, the size of the federal government exploded. We suddenly had Homeland Security, the TSA, and a number of sub-agencies that hadn’t existed previous to 9-11.

Chris Christie sounds like a thug, a Mafia wise guy. If you don’t vote for me, I’ll close the bridge to your county. After Hurricane Sandy devastated his state, he was humbly grateful for federal aid – which his compatriot Ted Cruz voted against. Hurricane Sandy also changed his views on climate change. He believes in it now.

Marco Rubio comes across as an ambitious Cuban-American who is against immigration. He’s a climate change denier, even though in his district, there are parts of South Miami Beach that regularly flood during high tide, something that never happened in the past.

Ben Carson: the government over regulates. Well, even in food? If you do away with the USDA, how do we know what we’re eating? Get rid of Medicare and substitute – what? Private vouchers?

Carly Fiorina: also favors getting rid of most government regulations. Yeah, okay, Carly. You would drive the country into the ground just as you did to Hewlett Packard. She chills me. And she would attack every country that even had hostile thoughts about the U.S.

Ted Cruz: get rid of the IRS, get rid of everything in government. We’re about small government. Sure, Ted. Look back to W’s presidency. And, oh yes, Ted led the crusade against Planned Parenthood, an organization that provides health care to millions of women. A small percentage of their care – three percent?- provides abortions. That’s the thing Cruz hates. Defend the unborn until they’re born – then, oh well, you’re on your own.

Rand Paul: Some things he said I actually agreed with – why are we the world cop? Why are we constantly at war with someone? But if I’m not mistaken, I think his fiscal policies are based on the writings of Ayn Rand – a cheerleader’s guide to the glories of capitalism and the evils of any government regulation.  However, he wants to audit the Federal Reserve – a private organization, not a government unit – that regulates interest rates and $ in this country.  Their genesis is shady and his suggestion doesn’t go far enough. Getting rid of the federal reserve would be a good place to start.

Donald Trump: Sigh.

Jeb Bush: He was our disastrous governor for 8 years, W’s younger brother, and he defends W’s invasion of Iraq, defends most of the things that W did. At one point, he was the front runner, the guy everyone expected would be the Repub candidate against Clinton because his super pac had raised $100 million for his campaign. But Jeb is campaigning in the shadow of his brother and his father, Bush Sr. and I don’t think his campaign is going anywhere except into oblivion.

In the early stages of this campaign season, the media said it would be a Bush/Clinton contest. I would be happy if Clinton would just retire. Yes, Clinton is qualified. But she’s a hawk and I don’t trust her.

In a perfect world, the U.S. presidential ticket would be Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, in any combination that works for the two of them. Since Warren isn’t running, that probably won’t happen.  So who will the candidates be?

In the six plus years since we started this blog, we have posted a number of synchros that our friend in Wales, Jane Clifford, has sent us. Jane is a healer. Several years ago, when Rob was facing prostate surgery, she worked with him by phone, energetically.

Some of Jane’s synchros have concerned her own healing as well.

Several of the synchros Jane has sent have been about her long-time friendship with Liz, a novelist. Liz was diagnosed with cancer several months ago and recently passed away. Jane’s synchro is about what happened at Liz’s funeral and within an hour afterward. When I read it, I felt it was a form of spirit communication. See what you think.

On October 10, Jane wrote:

Yesterday was the funeral of my dear friend, Liz. A poem she recently wrote – River of Light- was read out loud at the service. An hour after the funeral, I popped into my local café and saw this leaflet (above image) on the ad board!

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I think that Liz was one of those individuals who passes and immediately realizes what has happened, where she is, and how she can interact quickly with the living!

In 7 Secrets of Synchronicity, we wrote about an empath and friend, Renie Wiley, who sometimes worked with police on various cases, using her empathic abilities to provide information that the police couldn’t obtain any other way.  One night in later 1984, we accompanied Renie to a police station to observe her working on a missing child case, which we also wrote about in the book. But there were parts of the story that we didn’t include in the book because the section was on empaths and synchros and not on spirit contact. So here’s the full story:

On May 24, 1984, eight-year-old Christy Luna had walked to a store near her home in Green Acres, Florida, to buy some cat food and never returned. The police suspected foul play and Renie confirmed as much when she used Christy’s stuffed toys to tune in on the girl. In the book, we describe this in some detail. As an empath, she felt what Christy felt when her mother’s boyfriend used to beat up on her and reported the girl was deaf in one ear because of the beatings. Christy’s mother later confirmed this fact.

Later that night, we left the station with Renie and one of the police officers and drove around, following Renie’s directions until we arrived at a wooded area surrounded by a high barbed wire fence. Renie felt that Christy’s body was buried somewhere in the woods and that the mother’s boyfriend had killed her.

Skip ahead twenty-four years, to 2008. Los Angeles psychic Dennie Gooding called to tell us she would be visiting South Florida in March,  that she would be working on a missing person case and was there any chance we could all get together? It turned out she would be in town over the same weekend that other friends involved in the MU (mystical underground) would be visiting from around the country, so everyone agreed to meet at our place.

The day before the festivities, we were going through some old books, weeding out what we no longer needed. A check fell out of one of the books. It was dated 1986, made out to us for $50, repayment on a loan, and was signed Renie Wiley. We exclaimed about how strange it was, that the check had been inside the book all these years, and we wondered if Renie was trying to contact us and we just hadn’t been aware of it. In all the years since she had passed away, we’d never experienced any contact with her.

The night of the festivities (as we gathered with psychics, mediums, a past life therapist, a writer for the Simpsons), Dennie told us she’d been hired by  a police officer at the Palm Beach County sheriff’s department who worked in the cold cases division. When she began describing the case, Trish suddenly interrupted her.

“Is this the Christy Luna case?”

Dennie’s eyes widened with shock. “Yes.”

“You’re not going to believe this,” Rob said, and walked over to the drawer where we’d put Renie’s check, and brought it out. “Here’s how we know.”

It was as if Renie had reached out from the afterlife through the unsolved disappearance of Christy Luna and the psychic who had been hired to delve into it nearly a quarter of a century later. The synchronicities were remarkably layered and the contact occurred in an unusual way. Here are the facts:

Renie and Dennie didn’t know each other. Renie had long since passed away by the time we met Dennie through a Canadian astrologer who touted her psychic ability and gave us her contact information. If Trish hadn’t left a comment on his blog about his post on Mercury’s retrograde during the 2000 presidential election, they probably wouldn’t have communicated at all and we never would have met Dennie.

Rob had a reading with Dennie around 2002 or so. We gave her name to another friend, Nancy, who recommended Dennie to the wife of the police officer who eventually hired her to delve into the Christy Luna case.

Neither of us remember sticking Renie’s check inside a book. In fact, in 1986,  we were just starting out as writers, money was tight, and it’s likely we would have cashed the check as soon as we’d gotten it.

The cluster in this instance revolved around the unsolved disappearance of Christy Luna and the two psychics who, separated by nearly twenty-five years, worked on the case.

At any point in the past, different decisions might have been made and none of the events described here would have happened. So who was orchestrating all this, anyway? And that’s always the bottom line, isn’t it?

Thanks to Adelita for posting this on her blog! How cool would it be to actually be able to do this?