Welcome to The Mystical Underground

When we lived in Venezuela, most of the TV we watched was in Spanish. We watched One Step Beyond, Twilight Zone, Highway Patrol, Rin Tin Tin and Tales of the South Pacific in Spanish. Those were the family favorites – although, frankly, I never understood why Highway Patrol with Broderick Crawford fell in the lineup. It was my dad’s choice. But every Saturday morning the local channels showed a movie in English. It was usually a John Wayne film, wild west shot ‘em up, with Wayne riding off into the proverbial sunset.

It was somewhat synchronous that years later, Rob connected with Ed Smart, an iconoclastic adventurer from Aspen, Colorado and Utah who was one of Wayne’s closest friends. We spent a couple of vacations with Ed at his home in Utah, when Rob tried to pull together Ed’s voluminous notes about his and Wayne’s various adventures. The project never panned out.

This evening we watched The Mists of Avalon , based on Marion Zimmer Bradley’s bestselling novel.  We saw it years ago, but decided to watch it again and onto the Netflix it went. For some reason, it reminded me of Ed Smart and John Wayne. Wayne’s movies and Bradley’s novels – like the Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies, like Body Heat and Harry Potter- deal with large archetypal themes. These movies enter Joseph Campbell territory, the hero’s journey, the quest rejected and then embarked upon.  In fact,  screenwriter Robert McKee wrote a book called Story  about how the hero’s journey is integrated into every bestselling script/movie /novel.

Mists of Avalon is a three-hour film. We planned to watch it over the course of two nights, but it takes the Camelot and Avalon myth and humanizes it so well that we watched the entire three hours. The fundamental struggle in this film is that the magical world of Avalon can’t exist unless there are people who believe in paganism – its magic and beauty, its sacred honor of the natural world. The opposing worldview is Christianity.

What makes this story work on so many levels, even when it’s emotionally cheesy, is the Shakespearean stuff, the emotional interactions among the characters. There’s  Arthur and his half-sister Morgana, Lancelot and Guinevere, Arthur and Lancelot,  Arthur and Guinevere, Arthur and Mordred, his incestuous son, and Morgana’s magical apprenticeship to become the lady of the lake who guards Avalon. In a time when women were publicly marginalized, they actually ruled behind the scenes.

So, here’s another weird little synchro. Years ago at a writer’s conference, we sat on a panel with Marion Zimmer Bradley, who was at that time one of the grand dames of sci-fi/fantasy. The panel moderator had cancelled at the last minute and the people in charge of the conference asked Rob to moderate. He mistakenly introduced Marion as Marion Zimmerman Bradley, and she got quite huffy about the mistake.

“It’s Zimmer,” she snapped.

But we had recently spoken with our friend RD Zimmerman  so the mistake was innocent. But Marion refused to speak to us for the rest of the night. Too bad. I had a lot of questions for her about how she’d written her novel, whether she felt it had been channeled.

The movie was  made in 2001, so there’s a video quality about it that you don’t find with more recent films. But the emotional resonance remains genuine and true.  And the way Avalon is depicted – as a magical world separated from the “real” world by a mist that only the guardians of Avalon can part – is brilliant.  The movie was certainly worth three hours of our time!

Every new year’s eve for years, Rob and I have brainstormed about our joint new year’s resolutions, goals, hops and dreams. He transcribes them by hand ( and probably still has them stashed away somewhere). And most new years, we look back to see which goals, dreams, and resolutions have been  achieved and which have fallen by the side of the road and which are still unfolding.

Resolutions prompt us to focus, if only for a few moments, on how we can improve ourselves, our lives, the difference we make in the world. We are all diamonds in the rough who dream big dreams and have expansive visions. I believe we all have the capacity for optimism and laughter. Yes, life sometimes get in the way, but really, at the end of the day, what is most important?

The money in your bank account? Well, okay, the higher the amount, the more freedom you have. What you do with that freedom is what counts.

Your prestige? In comparison to who or what? By whose measurement?

Your achievements? Well, yes, but relative to what?

You see what I mean?

The best resolution I ever kept probably didn’t have anything to do with new year’s. It occurred after I read Carl Jung’s introduction to the I Ching, the Chinese Books of Changes. Jung wrote the forward for the Richard Wilhelm edition of this book in 1949 and in it, first spoke about his theory of synchronicity. I had one of those aha! moments when I recognized that Jung was referring to stuff in my life for which I’d never had any explanation. My resolution was to research this thing, this weirdness, this whatever it was – in any way I could.

In fact, when Rob and I first met, I remember asking him if he’d ever heard of synchronicity. He had and I thought, Okay, this guy may be a keeper.

I have a few more answers than I did when I made this resolution, but not by much. As the world continues to change and humanity evolves, synchronicity reflects that.

New archetypes and experiences emerge. Until the advent of blogging, for instance, I’d never heard of white feathers as symbolic of contact with a deceased loved one – which I first read about on Mike Perry’s blog.

I learned how synchronicity manifests itself through music, as it did for Darren when he was burying his cat Sylvester  and Peter Gabriel’s song “Digging in the Dirt” came on the radio.

I have discovered how powerfully a single synchronicity can shake up someone’s worldview, as it did for Gabe Carlson with his teapot synchro.

I have discovered how powerful dreaming can be, that we can all dream a better world, as our friend Adelita says.

Through blogging and connecting with people whose interests in synchronicity parallel my own, I have realized we are all both teachers and students. Our personal lives and worldviews vary, our goals and dreams are different, but all of us seem to acknowledge the essential mystery of the world in which we live. And since synchronicity is an equal opportunity phenomenon, no one is excluded. It doesn’t matter what culture you’re from, whether you’re male or female, young, old or middle aged, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, or a blue skinned alien from Pluto.  Anyone can experience this phenomenon simply by recognizing coincidence as personally meaningful.

So as the sun sets on 2012 and it passes into history, the MacGregors thank you all for increasing our knowledge and understanding of synchronicity and all things that go bump in the night. We wish everyone a happy, prosperous, and healthy 2013 filled with many… well, synchros, of course!

This video is intriguing.   You can hear a man and woman speaking in Spanish about the spectacle: “There are three,” the woman says.

“They’re gigantic,” the man replies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LrssYOEeGT4

I think this is something that has to change.

In the  late 1970s, I knew a guy named Harry. He was into guns. He was from Chicago, where he said guns were endemic to the culture. He gave me a .22, with ammo, which I still have, stowed away somewhere in our attic. He taught me how to load it, clean, it, shoot it.  This is a gun which, if you shot it at someone who is threatening you, would only piss the person off.

That first day at the shooting range, I knew I was not a gun person and that Harry was slated for that slot in my life entitled History of Ridiculous Men. Harry mistakenly believed that because I was worked at a prison (as a librarian and Spanish teacher, positions not exactly famous for their gun control advocacy), I obviously had to understand the importance of guns. I told Harry that whenever a gun appeared in a novel or movie, it was always used to kill someone – or was used for suicide.   As in art, so in life.

Harry said he had no sympathy for anyone who committed suicide – with a gun or anything else. “There’s always help for these people. All they have to do is ask.”

A year later, his son  committed suicide with a gun.

After Harry’s brief appearance in my life, I wrestled with this gun issue with my prison boss – a gun advocate, of course – who really got off on the hunts for escaped inmates. On these hunts he where he could  legally stalk these inmates and shoot them if he chose to because the law said he could.

My boss was a good ole boy southern idiot.

In Florida prisons between 1976-1979, there was a raging drug trade within the prison system. Guards sold weed and other drugs to inmates who then sold it to other inmates.   I know this because in my double wide trailer library in the middle of0 the prison compound I had five inmates assigned to my area who talked openly about the trade. These guys were in their late teens and early twenties and talked freely about life in prison. They talked because they trusted me. I was Ms. Trish who brought them food, books, and contact from the outside. The library was their safe haven, where they could talk about anything, say anything.

When an inmate hung himself  in solitaire, I heard it first from another inmate , The ssistant superintendent  had taken this young man back to his trailer in the employee park, and forced him to have sex. This young man was black. No one believed him, no one  gave a damn, he was a statistic, too bad. But I started asking around, I went to the superintendent, talked to some of the other employees, and eventually the assistant superintendent was forced to resign. No charges were ever brought against him. He and the superintendent are probably now long dead. Good riddance.

In those three years, I sat in on parole hearings, saw from the inside out how the system works, how corrupted it was. And I don’t think much has changed in all the years since I left in 1979. Florida’s present governor, Rick Scott wants to privatize prisons, turn them into bastions of profit like Halliburton, Bush’s favorite private security company in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, good ole Governor Scott and his Republican legislature have made concealed weapons permits in Florida easier to obtain. As of today, December 21, one million concealed gun permits have been issued in Florida. 1,000,000.

This evening, we built a fire in our outside fire pit. Our neighbor dropped by. At one point in the conversation, she said to Rob, “You’ve got to stop slamming  me on Facebook.” Rob.”

“I’m not slamming you,” Rob told her. “I’m talking about why we need control in this country.”

“But you’re always saying it’s the fault of the Republicans. I’m a Republican.”

“Assault weapons should be banned.  They’re not used for hunting. They’re combat weapons used in war, by the military, to kill people.”

You can see where this conversation was headed. Sure enough, we then got into religion, then politics again, then the education system,  families…all over the map.  After she left, I went to Huffington Post to find out if the ending of the world had been delayed and was nearly upon us, and saw this:  If  the event the headline has changed when you click the link, here’s the link for the full article. :

The headline, TO LIVE AND DIE IN AMERICA, is followed by a list of the shooting deaths in the U.S. in just one week since the Sandy Hook massacre.  They top 100.

The synchro is disturbing. It may also be a reflection of something that zipped through my head today when Megan and I were at Sports Authority doing some Christmas shopping. I noticed a guy who just walked around with his hands in his jacket, never touching any of the merchandise, never picking up anything. Back and forth he went through the aisles, looking around, here, there. And I thought: Suppose he’s one of the million who got a concealed weapon permit this year? Suppose he’s a wacko? What would I do if he pulled out a gun and started firing?

And this whole scenario unfolded in my mind, how I would find Megan, grab her hand and head for the nearest exit. Or we would  hit the floor and play dead. Or…I suddenly realized I was interjecting great emotional power into a what if scenario, that my weird paranoia was connected to Sandy Hook and the million permits I’d read about this morning. I cut the thought off, but then it was followed by the conversation with our neighbor, and the Huffington Post headline.  And now, this blog post.

For Rob and me, there’s a wider conversation here. Our neighbor, for instance, said the election is over and we shouldn’t be talking about politics. But politics permeates every aspect of our lives: the food we eat and the cars we drive, the public services we have or don’t have, health care and our access to it, where and what we build, who can vote and where and when we vote, the taxes we pay, the rights we have, the roads on which we drive, the national parks in which we camp and hike and reconnect with nature, how our most vulnerable citizens are treated, rich and poor and everything in between.

Politics isn’t just elections. It’s not just some isolated game politicians play. It has real consequences in our lives.

So, back to those million permits, prisons, guns, and Harry.

Nika and Noah with no interlopers around

Ah, the dog park. At this time of year,  when the snowbirds have been arriving in droves and the polo people are descending for the season, the park is filled with unfamiliar dogs of all shapes, sizes and temperaments.

There’s Cruiser, the Burmese Mountain dog, 100 pounds of fur and sociability, who races into the park and greets everyone in exactly the same way. She instantly flops onto her back, usually landing on your feet, and offers her tummy for a rub, a scratch, then is off and running toward the next person.  She instantly flops over on her back, offering her tummy for a rub, a scratch. But her type is less common among the new dogs.

A Rhodesian Ridgeback, a young, intact male who arrives at the park in a electric cart. The scuttlebutt is that his owner, associated with the polo industry, is a snob.  His dog isn’t a snob, but he’s certainly a troublemaker.  He’s constantly mounting other dogs, fights break out,   and the owner always blames the other dog and its owner.

Ivan, a huge Doberman male, also intact, is aptly named (Ivan the terrible!). He scopes out the other dogs, then dashes straight for his target, barking ferociously. Gender doesn’t seem to matter to him. He is equally aggressive and rude  and when dogs protest his attempts to mount them, fights break out.

This evening, so many new dogs  romped through the middle park, where we usually hang out, that we moved to the far end, where there’s a mountain of dirt and large pipes that seem to fascinate dogs. Pretty soon, a pair of black and white pugs invaded the area, interlopers. They don’t intimidate through their size, but they are fierce little things, yappers and snappers that lunged at Noah and Nika to keep them away from the pipes, then tried to steal their Frisbee and orange ball.

In terms of personalities, these new dogs don’t mix too well with the regular crowd. Most of the regulars have known each other for several years and their differences have long been resolved. I wish I could say the same for  the 112^th Congress.  With the deadline of December 31 looming for the “fiscal cliff,” things don’t look too promising.

On the 31^st,  emergency unemployment compensation for millions of Americans will expire. Also due to expire: the Bush-era tax cuts and the start of $1 trillion in spending cuts that Congress mandated in 2011 in a deal to raise the debt ceiling.  During that fiscal cliff, the Republicans let the deadline come and go and the standoff resulted in Moody’s downgrading the U.S. credit rating. They’re up to their same tricks this time.  They’re like Ivan the Doberman, bullies who scope out their targets, then zoom in on them.

Ivan and his faction fight for the millionaires, whose numbers have multiplied since the Bush era tax cuts.  Raise taxes on couples who make more than $250,000? No way.  They proposed hiking taxes only for people who make over a million bucks a years. Keep in mind that a billionaire like Romney paid only 15 percent in taxes, while most middle class Americans  pay 25 percent or more.

Also, FICA – the tax that goes to Social Security – is supposed to rise by two percent as well. This rise impacts the poor and middle class because the threshold is $110,000 (set to rise to $113,700 in 2013). Anything an individual earns beyond that is FICA-free. Seniors will be hurt by the cuts to what Medicare pays doctors, which means fewer doctors will accept Medicare patients

This maneuver is similar to the sneaky way the pair of pugs kept stealing the Frisbee and the ball.  It wasn’t a game to them; it was warfare.

For the larger picture, though, these Republican tricks are like the behavior of the aggressive Ridgeback who rides to the park every day in his human’s electric cart. While his human stands off by himself, talking on his cell phone, the dog wreaks havoc. Ha-ha, you poor suckers. Go over the cliff. What do I care.  The tax code, like the Republican Party and its mouthpiece, Fox News, favors the wealthy and corporations.

Take a look at this Forbes article – for how the  top 20 U.S. corporations fared taxwise.

When the interlopers became so numerous they outnumbered the regulars,  we called it quits at the park. Nika and Noah were happy to leave. Unfortunately, the EXIT strategy isn’t an option for taxpayers – unless you don’t mind having the IRS breathing down your neck and threatening to impound your salary, home, and anything else you own. And in the event that you deem the Internal Revenue Service way down on your list of formidable government agencies, think twice. The IRS did in Al Capone.

However, at the dog park, as with the looming fiscal cliff, there’s a high note. The interloper will eventually go back home and if we go over the cliff, the Pentagon budget will be drastically cut. Now that can’t be a bad thing.

I’m not sure when my thing with frogs started. Maybe it was always there, a motif in my life that didn’t really make sense until I began to notice repetitive patterns with these little critters.

One year for instance, we returned from a trip and found one of our ceramic frogs in bits and pieces on the floor. Two days later Rob’s father died. Another year, we found a baby tree frog in our kitchen and Rob won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best YA fiction. In 2003, a tree frog appeared at the back of the house and I quickly scooped it up and set it outside. That afternoon, I found out I’d been nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award. 

Time after time, the frog has accurately depicted the patterns that were prevalent in our lives.

I was reminded of this when our blogging friend Daz wrote a recent post about red-eyed green tree frogs . We met these little beauties during our trip to Costa Rica in 2011. They are exquisite, lovely in the extreme, and small. But  for me, they portended big things major changes,  transformation of some kind.

When animals are messengers – and they often are, particularly when our lives are in the throes of transition – synchronicity is inevitably involved. Over the last three plus years, we’ve done a number of posts on animals as messengers. In addition to frogs, we’ve covered owls as messengers between the living and the dead, as camouflage or shape shifters in UFO encounters, and as a kind of precognitive message about something that’s surfacing.

We’ve covered other types of birds – crows, geese, hummingbirds. And numerous types of animals: caterpillars, flies, mice, dragonflies, butterflies, grasshoppers, snakes, wolves, Paul the precog octopus, geese, dogs, cats, dolphins, whales, goats and even anteaters. I’m sure there are more that I didn’t tag. But I think we’ve been all over the animal kingdom. The point is that any animal can be a messenger for you and an agent of synchronicity.

When deciphering the message an animal brings, I usually start with the animal’s life cycle – how long does it live? That may hold clues about the timing. How many young does it typically have? Where did your encounter with the animal happen? What was going on in your life at the time of the experience? How did you feel when the encounter was happening – a sense of wonder or revulsion or something in between these extremes? Has this animal appeared in your life before at important junctures?

When I was 12 and living in Venezuela, the American newspaper, in conjunction with a local rum company,  ran a contest: caption a cartoon that depicted an alien holding a bottle of rum. The prize? A trip for four to the island of Barbados. So my dad entered. His caption read: Yes, we do deliver.  He won and off we went to Barbados for a week. It was 1959.

Every  afternoon at tea time, when a waiter from the hotel appeared with a tray of tea and crumpets, a hummingbird would show up. It would perch at the edge of the sugar bowl and alternately nibble granules of sugar and steal bits of our crumpets. At that time, I was clueless  about animal symbolism, synchronicity, or what any of it might mean. Now it’s 53 years later and I can still see the colors of that hummingbird’s feathers, can still see its delicate beak, and its eyes, its intelligence.

Fast forward many years, a trip to Ecuador. We stayed at a place in the mountains, where hummingbird feeders hung outside the dining room windows. The country has at least 27 different types of hummingbirds, and every evening, I swear we saw every type. Dozens of these gorgeous birds descended on the feeders, their wings moving so fast there seemed to be a perpetual hum in the air.

I flashed back on the Barbados hummingbird and suddenly realized that for me, hummingbirds symbolize joy, luck, and the most profound of mysteries.

As I have been writing this post, a frog suddenly appeared on my window, a tree frog.  That’s him (or her) in the photo above. See the suckers on its feet? There’s a moth on the glass, too, and that’s the frog’s target.  He has now been sitting here for about 20 minutes, slowly and patiently angling his body so it’s aimed at that moth just past the decorative bar in the window. I think patience is part of frog’s message.

We don’t see many tree frogs at this time of year. They tend to be spring and summer critters. But today, it was 85 here. In fact, it’s been in the 80s since our brief cool spell a few weeks back. However the rest of the winter unfolds weather wise,   I’m primed for the appearance of frogs, hummingbirds, owls, dragonflies, dolphins…

From the MacGregors to all of you!

It seems there are now apps for just about everything: fitness, travel, radar, games of all types, weather, divination….you get the idea. Think of something and there’s probably an app for it. Many apps are free or available for a nominal charge. The most I’ve spent for an app so far was $29.99 for an astrology app that does nearly everything my astrology program does and that program cost several hundred dollars. But the best app I’ve found yet, for $1.99, is a game called The Room.

Once you turn that knob in the image at the top of the post, you enter a room where an intricately carved, pyramid shaped wooden box rests on a table covered with a green cloth.

This box contains a myriad of secrets and appears to be connected somehow to alchemy. By zooming in and out on the image, you find clues, hints, strange figures, puzzles within puzzles and an array of “inventory items” that help you move deeper and deeper into the mystery.  The inventory items are things like intricate keys, a screwdriver, journal entries from a man who took on this alchemical search, shape-shifting objects, strange photos, symbols.

In many ways, The Room is a perfect metaphor for synchronicity. When you experience a synchro, the meaning is sometimes obvious, just as some of the clues and hints in the game are. Other times, you have to figure out how the pieces of a synchro fit together or connect with something else, and you’re led deeper into the mystery. It’s the same thing with The Room. Just when you have an aha moment in the game, you realize there are more layers to the box.

One of the inventory items is a telescope. When you press a button on the screen that activates it,  you suddenly see other details on the object you’re examining that aren’t visible to the naked eye. The power of this telescope is akin to intuition, a different kind of seeing you often have to employ to understand the larger context of a synchronicity.

At one point in chapter 2 of the game, the image froze and I had to restart the game. I lost the progress I’d made in that chapter. Rather than starting over at the beginning of the chapter, I cheated. I went to the Internet and found a step-by-step guide that got me back to where I had been before the image froze.  It’s the one thing you can’t do in figuring out the meaning of a synchronicity.

When you zoom in on various parts of the box, you sometimes notice details you missed before – like a symbol etched into a shadowed section of a wall. You suddenly recall seeing something else that may be connected to this symbol.  This is the same thing that happens when an image or scent triggers a memory or a snippet of a dream that you realize is an intimate component of the synchro you’re trying to figure out.

I’m only just starting chapter 3 of The Room, puzzling over a new box that was within the original and another metaphor occurred to me. Physicist David Bohm referred to an  implicate or enfolded order in the universe, a kind of primal soup that births everything,  even time. The explicate order is our external reality. Maybe this box, like synchronicity, exists along the border between the two, where the inner and outer coincide.

The minds that created this cool game should have called it Synchronicity!

One of the lesser known and secretive organizations within the Pentagon is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The agency was established in 1958 and was dedicated to expanding the Department of Defense’ technology usage, some of which included state-of-the-art, and top secret, research into the mind. It has also been called the ‘mad science’ division of the Pentagon.

Probably because of funding requirements, DARPA has listed some of its ongoing projects and they make for a baffling, head-scratching list. Among the strange stuff:

> Shape-shifting Bomber in need of Plow-sharing;

> You Can’t Hide from DARPA;

> Automated Mammalian Training Devices;

> Big Dog Robots;

> Shark Cyborgs.

> Superman underwear- Wearable undies that can help protect soldiers in warfare.

> Cyborg insects with nuclear-powered transponder -Radioisotope transmitter work is to power the insects.

> Bio-metrics at-a-distance – Demonstrate the ability to collect, localize, and evaluate physiological signals (e.g., heart rate) at distances greater than 10 meters.

> SMITE the wicked – Dynamically forecast when deadly moles deep within government departments will likely strike.

The list goes on and on. Reporters for the national media should be having a field day with this stuff, but I haven’t seen anything about it.

While SMITE the Wicked sounds interesting, the one that immediately attracted my attention was called ‘Silent Talk,’  a new project that which according to the description will “allow user-to-user communication on the battlefield without the use of vocalized speech through analysis of neural signals. An adjunct project investigates ‘wireless transmission of decoded thoughts.’

Isn’t that a long, round-about way of saying it’s a project exploring telepathy? Indeed it is. Yet, its a clunky kind of telepathy they’re talking about – ie. ‘mechanical’ or ‘synthetic’ telepathy, which probably is more acceptable to critics of the paranormal.

Note how it’s described:  Synthetic telepathy, the foundations of which lie in neuroscience and signal processing, is the subject of a $4 million grant awarded by the US Army Research Office. “DARPA wants to know if it is possible to map EEG patterns to individual words – for one person. Then, determine if everyone has similar patterns. Finally, decode the pattern and broadcast the words to team mates in the field.”

In essence, DARPA is spending millions of research dollars into building helmets to allow soldiers to telepathically communicate with one another on the battlefield. No intuitive skills required. 

I can’t help but wonder what happened to old-fashioned mind-to-mind telepathy and remote viewing (seeing at a distance) without the use of the weighty gizmos. Beyond that, it seems like a misplaced use of public money to apply ‘telepathy’ – if that’s what this is –  to war games rather than to the benefit of humanity. Besides, wouldn’t it be cheaper to install cell phones in their helmets?

But that wouldn’t be weird science.

+++

Postscript: Even weirder than DARPA’s public domain list of projects are articles on the Internet about a secret one not included on the DARPA list. Project Pegasus supposedly involves time travel, teleportation to a colony on Mars, and ET contact. But reading one of the articles made me think that these folks who write so knowingly about Pegasus are the other extreme from the moon-walk deniers. These folks have congressmen and diplomats taking trips to Mars. If we could only leave some of them there!

A worldwide event for 12/21/12, 11:11 AM UT. Take a look at the video. Hope to see you there!