Welcome to The Mystical Underground

from Deviant Art

Whenever there’s a disaster, natural or man-made, there are always stories about people who missed the doomed flight, left town the day before the quake hit, didn’t board the ship that sank, people who avoided the disaster because of a hunch, dream, or vision. Records indicate that 899 people who had booked passage on the Titanic didn’t show up. Why not? Was it purely random blind luck?

In 1960, Dr. Ian Stevenson, now deceased but then a professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia Medical School, researched the paranormal experiences connected to the sinking of the Titanic. Writing about it in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, he found 19 documented cases of passengers who had premonitions about the voyage. Some heeded the premonition and survived and others didn’t heed it and drowned.

“When people dream of accidents correctly and do not take the plane or ship, it is not the actual future they were seeing,” wrote David Bohm to author Michael Talbot in a private communication in 1988. “It was merely something in the present which is implicate and moving toward making that future. In fact, the future they saw differed from the actual future because they altered it. Therefore I think it’s more plausible to say that, if these phenomena exist, there’s an anticipation of the future in the implicate order in the present.”

We’ve written before about Bohm’s implicate order. He theorized the existence of a deeper order in reality called the implicate or enfolded order, a kind of primal soup that births everything in the universe. He believed that in the implicate order all time exists simultaneously. The explicate—the external reality we experience—unfolds from the inner order and then time is perceived in a linear way. Could precognition be the phenomenon that occurs when the implicate and the explicate, the inner and the outer, briefly coincide?

As Talbot noted in his book, The Holographic Universe, “Bohm’s assertion that every human consciousness has its source in the implicate implies that we all possess the ability to see the future.”

This idea is echoed by researchers who conduct various types of experiments to prove —or disprove—the existence of psychic phenomena. Lynn McTaggart, writing in The Intention Experiment, said it may be that our future “already exists in some nebulous state that we actualize in the present. This makes sense, since subatomic particles exist in a state of potential until observed or thought about.” If, as Bohm suggested, consciousness rises from the implicate order, if it operates at what McTaggart calls the “quantum frequency level,” then we can impact moments other than the present.

What’s fascinating is that many of these scientific experiments concerning precognition, what author Dean Radin refers to as presentiment experiments, have parallels in New Age beliefs. From Louise Hay to Esther Hicks, Pam Grout, Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra and others, the core belief is that you get what you concentrate on. The sheer power of your thoughts, emotions and intentions collapse the quantum wave of potential—the possible future—and it enters physical reality as a particle, the future you desire.

People who avoid a disaster because they heed a premonition have created a new future for themselves. So yes, if we pay attention, the future appears to be malleable. But if we’re dealing with issues other than life or death, how malleable is that future?

I’ve often thought about the Many Worlds Theory of quantum physics – the idea that our world and everything in it is constantly splitting into alternative timelines. Or, put in a more personal sense, it’s like Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

But suppose you DO travel both – and then some? The Many Worlds Theory suggests that for every decision and choice you make – to live here and not there, to marry this person and not that person, to try this and not that, to be a mathematician instead of an artist – there’s an alternate timeline where what you didn’t choose is lived out. A mind, blower, right?

Yet, I’m sure that some of you have uncovered skills and talents you didn’t know you had, stuff that came so easily to you it’s as if the information was downloaded directly into your brain and soul. Are you tapping into one of your alternative timelines where you possess that talent?

Can you die on one timeline at a particular minute, date, place, but not on an alternative timeline?

When authors write Dystopian novels, are they tapping into one of those alternative timelines? What was the source of DaVinci’s inventions? In live science check out 5 of his inventions that are relevant today.

The tricky thing with precognition – and synchronicity – is that when you experience it, you may be tapping into a multidimensional self, a you that exists in numerous dimensions and alternative timelines. So, which road do you take?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7CIHFwM3Uo

On two different occasions in the last few weeks, an orb-shaped object has been caught on security cams at the U.S Space Walk Hall of Fame Museum on Pine Street in Titusville, Florida. Charlie Mars, the president of the museum, says he and his staff can’t explain it. “Nor can the fellas who put in the system for us.”

Mars says that both times the security cams caught the orb, the lights and air conditioning were turned off, which is why he dismisses the possibility that the orb is the result of glare or a dust ball.

“There are many items in here that were brought in by people who are no longer with us,” said Mars. “They could be coming back to check on it.”

The museum recently moved into a century-old building that used to be the original county records facility, and some people speculate that the structure might be haunted.

“We have had a number of things like that have occurred in the past 10 or 12 years that we didn’t have an explanation for,” said Mars. “We love having something come in unexplainable. It gives us a chance to interchange with each other and talk about what it could possibly be.”

Check here for the original broadcast on an Orlando TV station, and take a look at some of the comments. They’re nearly as interesting as the video!

Whenever we spend time with our daughter, we find out about new TV shows. Most recently, Megan told us about Wayward Pines. We’ve now watched three episodes and are hooked. The premise, from IMDB, sounds fairly simple and straightforward: 

An FBI agent, played by Matt Dillon, is searching for two missing FBI agents. As the result of a car accident, he ends up in Wayward Pines, Idaho, and quickly discovers he may not ever get alive.

By episode three, it’s obvious that Wayward Pines is not your usual reality. But is it the land of the dead, as in Lost? Is it some bizarre sociological experiment perpetrated by one the government spook agencies? Is it the result of some weird time twist? Right now, any of these or something else entirely, seems plausible.

So, here’s the real world weirdness. After watching episode three, Rob went back to his computer to continue researching the prices for our new auto insurance policies. He noticed on the policy that Progressive emailed a note that included an at fault accident on June 2, 2014.

The only time we have filed a claim on either of our cars is after tropical storm Isaac, in 21012 when our neighborhood was so inundated that on my way home from the gym, my Mazda simply died. I finally managed to get the engine to turn over and coasted into our driveway. The engine was shot and was eventually replaced with a much newer engine that had only 4,000 miles on it. I had to pay the $1,000 deductible and the insurance company paid the rest.

So Rob went online with an employee from the insurance company and asked for details about this alleged June 2, 2014 accident that neither of us could recall, where we were at fault. The accident had supposedly been reported through LexisNexis, a company we’d never heard of.

I poked around on that website for awhile and began to feel really creeped out – like Wayward Pines had followed us out of TV land and into the real world. In Wayward Pines, no one can speak freely, your every word is monitored; this LexisNexis outfit feels like that, a Big Brother company.  While I was thinking this, Rob called out from his office: “It feels like we’re in Wayward Pines. In an alternate reality.”

This was occurring right before and right after Mercury went direct at 6:33 p.m. this evening.  The culprit? Well, there were several. The first was a typo. The insurance report should have read: not at fault. The second was just plain weird. The insurance company employee reported that the accident had happened to our daughter’s car, but no driver was present. No driver? How does that work? As he drilled down deeper, he uncovered the truth: the accident involved a dog. No, the dog was not driving.

On June 2, 2014, our daughter’s dog, Nika, was hit by a driver in Orlando, who then turned around and took her to small claims court for the damage to his car.

The only “claim” Megan had made was to call Progressive to find out if her car insurance would cover the damage to the driver’s car. It got recorded as an accident with no driver in the car, for which we were at fault. In the end, it cost $1200 in vet’s bills and an additional small claims court price of $900 to the guy who hit Nika.

But by the time Mercury had gone direct and the typo and actual facts had been uncovered, we saved nearly $700 in car insurance – and realized we weren’t living in Wayward Pines, but were just experiencing the tail end of a Mercury retrograde that began on May 19 this year, and ended tonight, June 11.

Then we went out to dinner to celebrate the end of the retrograde!

I was searching for a person name Briggs, and came across an interesting article by a David Briggs in the Huffington Post. (Not the same person. Never did find the other Briggs.)

Here’s the gist of the article addresses this question:

Is the paranormal becoming the normal?

The answer, according to three researchers, is yes, at least in the U.S.. More than two-thirds of Americans have paranormal beliefs, according to sociologists Christopher Bader and F. Carson Mencken of Baylor University and Joseph Baker of East Tennessee State University. They report their findings in a recent book, Paranormal America. .

These spiritual seekers are accepting practices and experiences that are not recognized by science and not associated with mainstream religion, say the researchers. However, not everyone is a believer. Interestingly, the more deeply religious you are, the less likely you’ll be curious about UFOs, psychics or Bigfoot. Meanwhile, those with no religious or spiritual beliefs are  likely to be dismissive as well as disinterested.

Statistically, those who report a paranormal belief are not the oddballs anymore. The average American holds slightly more than two paranormal beliefs, report Bader, Mencken and Baker. “What we can say with certainty is that we live in a paranormal America.”

The 2005 Baylor Religion Survey found that women are twice as likely as men to believe in astrology, that people can communicate with the dead (a big reason Medium lasted for seven TV seasons) and that at least some psychics can foresee the future. Men, on the other hand, are more likely to believe in UFOs and Bigfoot.

“Women tend to want to improve themselves, to become better people,” said Bader, who is also a director of the Association for Religion Data Archives. “Men tend to want to go out and capture something, to prove it’s real.” Gatherers and hunters!

Here are some more of their sociological findings:

• Belief in Bigfoot, ghosts, psychic abilities and other paranormal phenomena declines noticeably with increases in age and income.
  • Unmarried and cohabiting individuals are far more likely to embrace the paranormal. Asked whether they have had any of five paranormal experiences from witnessing a UFO to contacting spirits, the typical unmarried respondent claimed close to two experience, while the average married respondent had no paranormal experiences.
  • Republicans are “significantly less interested” in the paranormal than Democrats or independents.

Overall, the researchers said, conventional lifestyles and stakes in conformity are strong predictors of paranormal beliefs, with highly unconventional people the most likely to turn to otherworldly possibilities beyond the realm of traditional religion.

Going out on their own limb, the researchers predict that by 2050 nearly three-quarters of Americans will report at least one paranormal belief.

You can find more on the book in the Huffington Post article here.

What seems apparent, though I’m not sure the researchers say so, is that more people are looking for direct spiritual experiences, not just the word of religious leaders. The sheep are starting to stampede!

We’ve written about the spiritualist community of Cassadaga, Florida on a number of occasions and have mentioned in passing a related community in Upstate New York.  In an article simply called Angels, Anne Streiber recently talked about a visit she and Whitley took to the Lily Dale Assembly, the summer spiritualist community near Cassadaga, New York. They both had readings with medium Gregory Kehn, who told  Whitley something that Kehn could not possibly have known. It resulted in an astonishing synchronicity.

Kehn asked, “Do you remember the time your car died on the highway?” Whitley was  astonished because the comment was both specific and accurate. Indeed he remembered the incident.

Anne describes it this way: “In the early nineties, we were driving toward our cabin when our fancy Volvo suddenly died. Whitley manhandled it over to the side of the road and after a couple of minutes, it started up again. Relieved, we continued on to the tollbooth, which was about a mile away, and went on to the New York State Thruway and then along back roads to the cabin.”

Kehn proceeded to explain that Whitley’s guardian angel had stopped the car because there was a carload of people on the Thruway who would have recognized Whitley. They would’ve followed them home and killed them.

Whitley was telling the story to their son a few days later, while driving the same car. He concluded by saying,”If I’m going to believe a thing like that, I’d need some sort of a sign.” Suddenly, the Volvo’s engine died! Once again, it started up a few moments later. Those two incidents were the only times that car died in the years that they owned it.

Quite a synchronicity. You can read Anne’s entire story here.

…aliens landed in the backyard?

That’s a question that the Statesman Journal of Salem, Oregon asked a group of fourth and fifth graders recently. Since we wrote a book on that very subject: Aliens in the Backyard, we of course were interested in what the kids had to say.

Their answers are hilarious. Here’s a sampling.

Dana Smith, Grade 5, Four Corners

I would teach them math, how to dance and how to eat like a normal person like using plates, spoons, and other things.

Arlet Lopez, Grade 5, Four Corners

I would teach them how to ride a bull, play soccer, and how to get dirty in the mud with pigs.

Kevin Ramos, Grade 5, Four Corners

Three things I would teach friendly aliens about Earth would be sarcasm, music, and animals.

If you want to read more of their responses, look here.

Obviously, these kids need to grow up and read our book!

These synchros came from artist Lauren Raines, who has been traveling to LA from her home in Arizona for her guest artist appearances at the Renaissance Faire. That beautiful mask featured above is one of hers. It’s called “Changing Woman,” and is a reflection of where Lauren feels she is in her life now.

As she puts it, “Since my mother passed away not yet 3 months ago, I feel much is changing, within and without.  I no longer am a caretaker, and see that role slipping away from me gradually like a skin peeling off – what’s underneath feels rather brittle and hyper sensitive.” Some of her best synchronicities happen when she’s traveling and we’ve used several of them in our books and on this blog. These two spoke to her in a powerful ways.

+++

The Renfair is in Santa Fe Dam in Los Angeles, a beautiful park with an impressive view of the mountains that ring the city.  On the other side of the park  from the Faire is a nature walk, an area I always return to when the show is not on.  It has beautiful indigenous plants, and a sandy area with a stone circle.   I walked into the circle, made some offerings, and created a circle and cross with some stones in the center, representing the 5 directions – a kind of prayer, a way of centering myself.

When the show opened the next day, my booth opened onto a sandy path, and in the heat and the hum of voices passing by, it can get rather hypnotic, unless I’m working with a customer. Sitting in the back of the booth, I noticed there was a man with a carved staff of some kind in front of my booth.  Right in front of my booth, in the sand, he made a circle with a cross in it with his staff in the sand!  I watched him do it, then he walked off and disappeared in the crowd.

It was not only the symbol I had created the previous day, the symbol of the 4 directions, but this is also a Native American motif called “Spider Woman’s Cross”.

It occurs on prehistoric Mississippian amulets, in Pueblo pottery, and is woven into Navajo (Dine) rugs as a sacred motif representing Grandmother Spider Woman.  It is an ubiquitous symbol of balance, wholeness, unity. It’s also a symbol I’ve explored in my own humble way with my projects exploring the mythologies of Spider Woman – because I feel She is very important for our time.

So it gets better.  On Monday, after the Faire closed, I was leaving  L.A. via I-10.  Leaving L.A. is no small feat, as L.A. is huge, with many suburbs that go on for a good 50 miles.   I saw, near the exits for Fontana, a banner that caught my attention – I didn’t have time to see the building it was attached to, but I’m assuming it was over a park of some kind.  It read:
SPIDER WOMAN’S LEGACY

Navajo Rugs (………….)

I couldn’t read what else was on the banner, but SPIDER WOMAN’S LEGACY was in big letters, right there on the side of the freeway! Not only was it there, but rather amazing that I happened to be looking over to the other side of the freeway and saw it.

I see, according to Google, that there is an exhibit in San Bernardino country called “Spider Woman’s Legacy: Navajo Rugs and Textiles,”

In my experience, this is one of Spider Woman’s favorite ways to communicate…….with synchronicities!

My last synchro occurred once I crossed the Arizona border, traveling east on I-10.  I had been thinking as I drove about the article I posted last on this Blog, about the meaning of Psychic Vampires.  And about, also, my personal efforts to grow out of a “victim stance” in my own life.  How I’ve missed so many opportunities, devalued my work,  sustained a great deal of loss because that sensibility is so deeply rooted in my family of origin.  How I’ve been kind of my own “vampire” by having that sensibility, and how it has to end now and here.

Seriously………..I was meditating at the wheel on all of this and looked up to see an elaborately painted van in front of me.  It read:
KUNG FU VAMPIRE

www.kungfuvampire.com*

Well Damn!  What more affirmation do I need!  Just to make sure though, when I pulled up at a rest area an hour later, there was the van, right in front of me, again.

NASA photo of Mercury in retrograde

Three times a year, the planet Mercury turns retrograde – that is, it appears to slow down, then stops, then seems to move backward. In astrology, Mercury is the planet that rules communication, travel, moving parts, learning, siblings, your neighborhood and neighbors, education, and contracts.

During a retro period, communications often go awry. If you’re traveling, your itinerary can change without warning. Appliances break down, your computer acts up, your phone goes down, your iPad crashes, your car goes on the fritz. It’s usually a time of delays and not particularly favorable for launching new projects, making manuscript submissions, signing contracts. To mitigate some of the effects, I advise people to follow the rule of three Rs: revise, review, reconsider.

During the last retro in late January/early February, we had to buy a new dishwasher and then had to hire someone to install it because the laminate flooring we’d had put down in our kitchen was too high to remove the old dishwasher. The repairman was great knew what he was doing and the new dishwasher works perfectly. But the preliminaries were annoying.

The current retro started on May 19, with Mercury in Gemini, my sign, and ends on June 11 – not soon enough for me! During this period I should have followed the advice I usually give to other people. A couple of days before the retro began, two things happened. While updating one of our websites, I made a mistake that couldn’t be corrected and we had to change the URL for our blog. The second thing was that our washing machine stopped working. After Googling around for possible reasons, I hoped it would be something simple and called a repair service.

It wasn’t simple.

As the repairman explained, most washers these days come with computer motherboards and when the motherboards go out, that’s it for the washer. So Rob went online and ordered a new machine from Home Depot that would be delivered in a few days – during the retro period. When I saw the confirmation email, I realized he had ordered a dryer – not a washer – and he had to cancel the order and order again. Now the delivery date had been moved ahead by nearly a week. First big snafu and, oh shudder, no washing machine for nearly a week. I ended up doing a wash at our neighbor’s house.

The washer was installed without any issues over the long Memorial Day weekend. Fantastic, I thought. That was the big snafu for this retro. WRONG. Today I discovered that Time Passages, an astrology program I have on my iPad and iPhone, is available now for iMacs. It’s a wonderful program and I was excited that there was something, finally, available for the iMac operating system.

I tried downloading the demo to make sure it worked on my computer. It didn’t. I emailed support and a few hours later received an email with a link about which demo to download for my operating system. I replied to the support person that I wanted to buy the advanced version of the software but – jokingly- remarked that I should probably wait until after Mercury turns direct. But impatient Gemini that I am, I couldn’t wait for another ten days and purchased the advanced version tonight. I was looking forward to entering a bunch of charts in my new software program.

I received an email confirmation of the purchase, with the enabling codes that would unlock the full features of the version I had bought. But the enabling code didn’t work. I downloaded this sucker half a dozen times, kept cutting and pasting the enabling code from my confirmation email, and it still doesn’t work.

The message? Chill. Slow down. BREATHE. At some point, someone will get back to me and the problem will be fixed. And if it isn’t, I’ll cancel the credit card payment and look elsewhere.

But my Mercury retro snafus pale compared to another retro story I heard today. The son of a friend of ours is a successful videographer who owns some expensive equipment essential for his job. The producer of a video he’s working on now wanted to save money so instead of renting an equipment van, he combined the equipment with the food van.

A large cooler filled with ice was placed on top of his $60,000 camera, the ice melted and the water seeped into the camera, ruining it. Fortunately, the young man insured the camera. But in the years since he bought it, the price has risen to $80,000 and he isn’t sure if the insurance will cover the new full price.

His take? “Mom, I now believe in Mercury retrogrades.”

Even though I believe we write our own destinies, that we create our own realities, there’s no doubt that we are influenced by what the planets are doing. Ask any ER nurse about what happens in a hospital emergency room during a full moon.

Rob and I just finished a proposal called Precogs: The Dynamics of Future-Telling, something we actually started four years ago – okay under a Merc retro to revisit stuff from the past   – but we won’t be submitting it to our agent until after June 11.

In Florida, there are lottery draws every Wednesday and Saturday evenings. You can play the regular Lotto – for just a buck – or you can play the Powerball, for two bucks. Wednesday  afternoon, I decided to go big time and bought a Powerball ticket. The jackpot was $154 million.

In Powerball, there are nine different ways to win – at least, according to the website. I came in the door calling out the numbers for Rob. He glanced up from whatever he was doing and said, “What’s the Powerball number?”

“Twenty-three.” I immediately thought of the posts we’d done on that number and recalled that Hexagram 23 in the I Ching is called Splitting Apart.

Rob said, “Oh, good number. What do you win if you get just the Powerball number?”

“Uh, four bucks.” I wondered why he’d asked about just that number.

Around 11:30 Wednesday night, I checked the Powerball website. And yes, you guessed it. The only number on our ticket out of the six was the Powerball number – 23! So, even though we didn’t win $154 million or even a million for getting 5 numbers, I got back the two bucks I’d spent on the ticket plus another $2 and we experienced a straightforward precognition.

A fascinating book that delves deeply into synchronicity is Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, by Richard Tarnas, a philosopher and cultural historian, who has broken away from the mainstream academic world that typically denigrates synchronicity, astrology and divination systems. It took Tarnas ten years to write this 500+ page tome and it’s well worth exploring.

Blurbs on book covers are always favorable, of course, but these are still impressive: “Majestic, sweeping and profound This will be a book for the ages.” – WilliamVan Dusen Wishard…“Cosmos and Psyche is an epoch-making work.” Stanislav Grof….“This is the closest my head has been to exploding while reading a book. – Mary Hynes

What prompted me to write about the book is Tarnas’ comments about the shadow side of synchronicity. Most of us who are fascinated by meaningful coincidences, of course, consider synchronicity in a positive vein—guidance on our path. Tarnas agrees with that assessment, but points out some of the pitfalls. He explains a tendency to overstate the significance of synchronicities. We’ve probably all scratched our heads upon hearing some stories that others attribute great meaning when we just don’t see it. Maybe some of our own stories strike a similar accord with others.

It’s a difficult subject to tackle for a writer, because it’s easy to come off as an arrogant know-it-all. But Tarnas explains the issue well without sounding pompous or self-centered, which ironically is at the heart of the matter. He calls the shadow side of synchronicity, “an exaggeration of the trivial to discover a self-inflating meaning.” Then he moves even darker into the shadow. “Another form this shadow can take is the paranoid’s morbidly narrow interpretation of coincidences in terms of other people’s malign plots cunningly directed at the self, or psychotic delusions of self-reference.”

Yikes! That’s all about the egocentric universe, where in our world is all that counts. But Tarnas has a remedy: “A painstaking cultivation of self-knowledge must be undertaken to avoid succumbing to mere projection….A capacity for acute yet balanced discernment has to be forged, founded not only on an alertness to meaningful pattern but also on a disciplined mindfulness of the large whole within which the individual self seeks orientation.”

Tarnas might sound a bit like a skeptic about meaningful coincidence, but he’s not. “Eventually, there may occur one or more especially powerful synchronicities, unambiguous in their coincidental force and precision of patterning, that have a revelatory effect on the individual and mark a decisive threshold in his or her psychological and spiritual development.”

He adds: “Not infrequently, synchronicities of this category occur in association with births, deaths, crises, and other major turning points in life. On occasion, there may take place a sudden convergence of many such synchronicities, intricately interconnected.”

I think what Tarnas is saying to us about synchronicity—to dumb it down and I’m pretty good at dumbing down—is that you are special, you are unique…just like everyone else.