Welcome to The Mystical Underground

Have you heard of this herb? It’s widely used by men for prostate health. I took it daily for years in the hopes of forestalling the growth of my prostate, a condition faced by more than half of men over 50. Unfortunately, in that battle, the prostate won, and I had to seek other remedies—first, medications to relax the muscles around the prostate and supposedly to shrink it. Again, unfortunately, the prostate won.

Last September, I resorted to surgery, and it was a success. The prostate, which had grown nearly three-times its normal size, was trimmed down and all the annoying symptoms – along with the temporary catheters – vanished. I no longer needed any medications or saw palmetto – though I guess it wouldn’t hurt to continue taking it. But I wasn’t too happy with saw palmetto, and admit that I had bad-mouthed the natural remedy as bogus. Even a scam. I figured I was done with it.

But not so fast. Last week, my friend Don and I went on an early morning off-road bike ride on a trail an hour north of here. I’d only ridden it once and that was years ago. The trail was relatively easy, especially compared to our local technical trail with numerous log piles, criss-crossing root pattern, steep drops and sharp turns along tight trails through heavy woods.

We’d been riding nearly an hour when we crossed a narrow wooden bridge over a creek. Don was ahead of me and had disappeared around a bend as I came off the bridge. I swerved to avoid a mud puddle and paid for the move. I was slammed down into something sharp and prickly. As I slowly got to my feet, I looked back and saw that I’d crashed into a patch of saw palmetto.

I didn’t see the irony, though, until a few days later when a friend, upon hearing the story, replied, “I thought saw palmetto was good for men.” Maybe for some, but not for me. A broken stem about the size of six toothpicks had pierced through the top of my ear. Don, a retired paramedic/fire fighter, pulled it out and I stopped the bleeding with a kerchief. We continued on, but I knew I’d bruised a rib or two and that I would feel it more after we finished.

Back at home, I cleaned the ear and found another splinter, shaped like an arrowhead, wedged into the top of the ear. I couldn’t get it out, neither could Trish, so I ended up at a walk-in clinic. I’d been there before, back when I was realizing the saw palmetto formula wasn’t working for me.

So much for my encounters with this prickly plant. I don’t know if I’ll take any more of the herb, but I will definitely respect it when I encounter it again along the trail.

This You Tube video is intriguing. It’s from NASA footage of the space station.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT9j1nm6Y6s

 Our dog park is across the street from the Aero Club, a suburban community where many houses have hangars and the private airstrip is now paved. The flight path to that runway brings many types of planes directly over the dog park.

On February 17, when Rob and I were at the park, an experimental plane – like the one depicted above –  came in very low over the park and dog owners peered upward or ducked. Yeah, ducked. It was that close. Rob said to some people nearby, “Did you hear about the plane that crashed here?”

“What?” I asked. “When?”

“Oh, you know, that plane that crashed four or five years ago. But it’s going to happen again.”

Two people had died in that crash, a man and a woman who had left behind two small children. But I was struck that Rob initially referred to it in a way that led me to believe there had been a recent crash.                

The next  morning, the 18th, I dreamed that the Palm Beech International Airport had changed its flight paths so that planes now came directly over our house. In the dream, I saw a twin engine plane plane  lying perilously low and headed straight for our house. I could hear its noisy engines and thought, My God it may hit us.

It didn’t, though, and I woke up and walked out into the kitchen, eager for coffee and food. Rob eventually joined me and I told him about my dream. Then forgot it.

At nearly one this afternoon, Rob and I were waiting for a call from Whitley Streiber. We were going to be doing an interview with him about The Synchronicity Highway.  Our windows were open, the air here has been cool, and I heard this shrieking chorus of police alarms and commented on it to Rob.

Then we did our interview and I forgot about it until I received a text message from a Karin, a woman I know from the dog park. She asked if I’d heard about the plane that had crashed across the street from the dog park. The pilot, she said, was killed. It was the experimental plane that had flown in so low the other day. The pilot flew for American Airlines and was a friend of our neighbor, who is also a pilot for American.

Precognitive?

They call it murmuration. It begins about 30 seconds into the video and it’s astonishing. It’s truly an example of a collective self in action.

they-went-for-a-canoe-ride-to-the-island-what-they-saw-on-the-way-back-was-unimaginable

Some things in life manage to come full circle. Author and past-life researcher and regression therapist Carol Bowman sent us this story that seems to illustrate that adage “one good turn deserves another.” It’s also a good synchro!

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On Valentine’s Day, Carol and her husband, Steve, went out to dinner. They had hoped their daughter would be able to join them, but the northeast has gotten so much snow this winter that she wasn’t able to get out of Manhattan, where she lives. Carol and Steve had been cooped up in their house for several days because of snow storms, so it was nice to get out and do something.

“We were in the middle of dinner and the owner stopped by our table and asked

where we had parked.  Apparently, someone had hit our car-Steve’s beloved cream puffy ’93 Camry – and we confirmed that that’s where we had parked.  

“The couple who hit the car had come in trying to find the owner. How often does that happen???  Steve went out with them to look at the damage and thanked them for telling us.  They wanted to pay for the damage and not go through the insurance company.  

“The woman told Steve she was a therapist, and Steve told her I was too. (I was still in the restaurant and missed this exchange.)  It turns out that she had come  to me some years ago, asking for help for her daughter!

“Is that karma?  Or CARMA?”

In 1959, Mike Wallace interviewed Rod Serling (Twilight Zone) about censorship. What he says is eerily relevant today:

 Most of us have experienced what I call the mystery of the  lost sock in the dryer. It’s not always a sock, of course, and it’s not always in the dryer.  Over the years, a number of objects have vanished in our house: a $100 bill, shoes, keys, flash drives. Sometimes the objects have reappeared in a place where we’ve already looked for it.

 But the experience Anne of Tennessee had  is a new twist!

 I had a leak in my bathroom sink 10 days ago and had to call the plumbers.  Twice, in fact.  This left water running across my bathroom floor.  I had my mop in the bathroom, mopping up water as needed.  After the plumbers left the second time, I left the mop in my bathroom in case there was still another leak. 

 My daughter called me at work, yesterday, looking for the mop, and I told her it was in my bathroom.  She couldn’t find it.  When I got home from work, we both looked for the mop.  In closets. Under beds.  In the garage.  It’s gone.  Disappeared. I am on my way to Walmart to buy another one. Strange.

 Two days later, I received an update from Anne on the missing mop:

 I am almost totally unnerved.  That mop that totally disappeared a few days ago?  It showed up sometime yesterday.  When I got home from work around 7:30, I found it leaning against my bathroom door.  My daughter didn’t believe me until I showed it to her.  And my granddaughter is now spooked as she says something is really off here.

 Yep, my old mop is back and for how long, I don’t know.  And I am really rattled about this.  Just makes me wish some of the other things I have lost/misplaced would return.

 Don’t know what to think of this.

 I asked Anne if she thought there might be a poltergeist or some other phenomenon at work in her house or some other trickster:

 I have wondered if i have something around that would do a stunt like that mop thing.  Laura and I searched the house completely twice for that mop, each time starting in my bathroom.  It was not in the house.  

Since it has reappeared, that leaves a lot of options open…like tricksters.  Just what we might have, I don’t know. I don’t even have an idea about how to figure out what is doing what.

 A mop is larger than a sock, keys, a bill. Is it possible that a person could disappear like the mop did?

Perhaps. In November 1878, 16-year-old Charles Ashmore of Quincy, Illinois went out into the night with a water bucket. When he didn’t return after several minutes, his father and sister went out to look for him. They found his footprints clear in fresh snow, leading hallway to the well, where the footprints suddenly stopped.

 In July 1854, Orion Williamson, a farmer near Selma, Alabama, supposedly got up from his porch chair and stated out across a field to bring in his horses from the pasture. His wife and child watched from the porch and on the far side of the field a couple of neighbors on horseback waved at him. Right then, Williamson vanished.

 Witnesses searched the field but found no trace of Williamson. Journalists flocked to the property to investigate. One of them, Ambrose Bierce, wrote about the incident in a story called, The Difficulty of Crossing a Field.

 Author Paul Begg, in his anthology of strange disappearance Into Thin Air, concluded that all these stories about disappearance are probably duplicates of the same story.  But when you experience one of these mysterious disappearance, it’s not as easy to dismiss.

 I’ve often wondered if these missing objects somehow slip into another dimension or something. Do our homes have vortices that act as portals between dimensions? If so, what activates them?  

And, totally off topic,  Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone!

 About a week ago, we posted a story about asteroids and stunning name synchros.  Well, there’s an update.

 We heard from Alex Miller today, thanking us for steering him toward David Wilson and Crossroads, the publishing company that has released our last two synchronicity books, and many of our back list titles. Crossroad is going to bring out Alex’s backlist title and perhaps his original titles as well.

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I’ve been nosing around your blog, good stuff there!  I thought you might like to know, after your post on Christie, that his sun is T-square to asteroids Washingtonia and Bridges!  (and he has an exact opposition from asteroid Kelly to Nemesis – Bridget Kelly being the aide who sent the infamous email.)  ’nuff said, right?  Also, sun was conjunct Hoffman and squared Greenwich when Philip Seymour Hoffman was found dead in his Greenwich village apartment. As you can see, this stuff is constant!

 So I asked Alex how these names can be so literal. His response:

 I’ve been working with this for 8 years now and I still can’t wrap my head around it.  On the one hand, it seems to put paid to the theory of ‘free will’, but on the other, it’s not like every Hoffman on the planet died in Greenwich village that day, so we’re still missing some component that narrows it down to specific individuals.  I have a full length piece worked up for daykeeper (where he writes articles about astrology)  for March on Hoffman. The story goes much deeper when you look at his chart and points representing death, addiction, drugs, etc.

By the way, the Olympics just opened with sun conjunct both Olympia and Olympiada, sun squared Russia and an exact Saturn/Apophis conjunction, which is troubling vis-à-vis terrorism concerns; the upcoming academy awards have sun conjunct Oskar (Oskar squared Hoffman when PSH won best actor for ‘capote’ in 2006).

Explanation: a conjunction is when 2 or more planets are in the same sign and degree. It’s a beneficial aspect. A square is when two or more planets form angles of 90 degrees to each other, considered a challenging aspect. But the bottom line is the astonishing name synchros associated with events. As Alex mentioned in one of his email, what does any of this mean about free will? Does it negate free will? Support it in a way we don’t yet understand?

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Alex publishes articles at  daykeeper. His newest piece is on the Mars retrograde that begins on March 1. He delves into myth and, like Joseph Campbell, like Jung, talks about how these myths apply to ordinary life. It’s an insightful read.

It was 8:20 a.m. on a recent Sunday and I was driving north from the West Palm Beach area to Jupiter, Florida to meet a friend for a bike ride.  It’s not a time that I’m often on the road, except for these occasional bike rides. I turned on the radio to NPR and was surprised to hear that the next interview would be about the meaning of coincidences.

Trish and I had often wondered why National Public Radio never seemed to take on metaphysical topics, such as synchronicity, and we often made jokes about appearing on NPR and talking about the subject. So, it finally happened. Not to us, but someone else, another writer, and I was curious to hear what he/she would say. Was NPR actually opening its radio doors to the paranormal? If so, then maybe the paradigm shift was really happening, the mystical/spiritual and science were starting to merge.

But as soon as the author and his book were introduced, I knew it was going to be another skeptical take on the subject. The author was a British statistician from the Imperial College of London with a lot of impressive credentials in the world of statistics and mainstream science. The book is called: The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day.

The sub-title, I suppose, is an intentional head scratcher. After all, these events are either rare or they happen everyday. Which is it? I’ll go with the latter, because that’s what I experience. But the author incredibly tried to argue both sides. Astonishing coincidences rarely happen, he told listeners, and gave a well known example involving Anthony Hopkins. (We wrote about it in The 7Secrets of Synchronicity.) Yet, he quickly added they happen every day because humans look for patterns. The underlying idea was that it was all just random, as any statistician will tell you.

I was waiting for him to talk about apophenia, but the interview was too short. Statisticians generally believe the so-called pattern-seeking behavior becomes a disorder – apophenia or paternicity – if you find meaning in the pattern. Maybe Professor Hand’s book will shed more light on his take of the ‘disorder,’ aka synchronicity.

Just encountering his brief interview early Sunday morning was a minor synchronicity, since Trish and I have co-authored four books on the subject. I suppose the professor would say that I was looking for meaning in a random event that I see as a pattern, and not a very impressive one at that.

But less than an hour earlier, while sipping a cup of tea and looking at the front page of the local newspaper, I spotted a story about the Bermuda Triangle. This story detailed a report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) that said there is no such thing as the Bermuda Triangle. In other words, there are no more disappearances of ships and planes in that area of the world than any other, and no unusual conditions present in that area of the North Atlantic.

It took a couple of hours, but my pattern-seeking behavior detected a minor cluster of synchronicity. Not only had I written books about synchronicity and heard a radio interview dismissing anything meaningful about coincidence, but within the same hour I had read an article that debunked the B.T., another subject that I’d written a book about.

So was I encountering a conspiracy by the universe against my ideas about how the universe works? That would actually be a contradiction. If the universe was acting with intelligence, why was it promoting these debunkers? Hmm.

The answer, to my way of thinking, was that the universe has a great sense of humor. I had encountered the trickster, one common form of synchronicity. The trickster nudges you along. A paradigm change is underway you say? Well, don’t expect to hear about it on NPR or read about it in your daily newspaper. Look deeper. 

 In life, there are several big challenges: happiness, however you define it; health; the freedom to pursue what you love, to verbalize what you think and believe; and the financial means to pursue all of the above.

Yet, over 800 million people – one in eight – go hungry. If you’re hungry, then nothing else matters.  If you’re sick and don’t have health insurance or the means to pay for the treatment you need, then you are basically screwed. If you live in a repressive country where the Internet is censored, where women must be accompanied by a male relative before they can leave their homes, then you are probably held captive by religious beliefs that say you, a woman, must be controlled, subjugated. But let’s say, for the moment, that you win  500K in the Lotto. Or it’s what you inherit or earn. How does half a million change the dynamics?

Well, if you’re Bill Gates or the Vanderbilts or the Campbell soup heirs, half a mil is  pocket change. This percentage  probably spends that in a week on employees, horses, and other diversions. But if you’re middle class or working class or are among the ranks of the unemployed or underemployed, then 500K is a game changer.

All of us have markers that are game changers: when my book is published used to be one of mine.  But when my first novel was published, I was already into the next book and thought, Okay, when this book is published I will… And when that book got published and I had contracts for more novels, my game changers morphed again, my goals shifted.  At this point in my life, my game changers entail larger stakes, bigger dreams. When the script sells, when the option is exercised… But the older I get, the clearer it becomes that what I’m really talking about here is: how do I want to spend the rest of the time I have on the planet?

Perhaps, in a way, these game changing goals are like new year’s resolutions. Well, in 2014 I will… what? Discover the secret of the universe? Unlikely. But perhaps I will stumble across a story that will shed light on some essential mystery I have puzzled over for most of my life. Perhaps I’ll finally have an OBE that will blow my socks off.  Or maybe I’ll converse with my dead parents or my dead editors and or end up on a space ship. Or maybe I will learn something I didn’t know about life after death. Or about life.

I do know this: the game changers and goals I recognized in my twenties are worlds apart from the game changers in my sixties. The forty some odd years in between tend to change your priorities. When you realize that more than half your life is behind you,  you become even more aware of how every moment counts, of how NOW is the only thing you have for certain and even that NOW is elusive, fluid, ever changing.

So, really, regardless of your age or place in life, the bottom line question seems to be: how can I make a difference, with the time I have on planet Earth?