Welcome to The Mystical Underground

This afternoon Rob and I turned into our neighborhood and saw the above car leaving our neighborhood. Google Earth. Wow, I thought. That would be a weird job to write about. I felt like telling Rob to stop so I could run over to the car and pound on the windows and ask the driver how she’d gotten the job and where could I apply?

The Google Earth history is here. Basically, it amounts to Google mapping every shadowy corner and surface on the planet through 3-D images taken from a street view, satellites, and any other means that are available. The last time I looked up our address on Google Earth, it showed a van in our driveway that we hadn’t owned for about five years, a van that actually had blown its engine on a trip to Atlanta when we were traveling with our teenage daughter, a bird, and a dog. Our front lawn in that photo was parched from months without rain.

I have mixed feelings about all this readily available information. On the one hand, I love the idea that no place on the planet is hidden, inaccessible, so remote that it exists in a time warp. On the other hand, I am appalled at just how much information is out there and that it’s not necessarily accurate. Anyone with a website, anyone who blogs, anyone with a Facebook or Twitter account or any kind of social media interaction is online, there, clickable.

And yet, don’t we all live a good portion of our lives in our own heads? Don’t we construct elaborate worlds inside our skulls, our consciousness? Aren’t we continually weaving the threads of our personal stories that even Google can’t fathom or document?

So, carry on car from Google Earth. Keep that camera humming. I’ll know the right version of my house when I see it. Our SUV sits alone in the driveway, the grass to the right is green and flourishing now because we’ve had rain and Rob has cut back on the bamboo and other trees and plants that blocked the sunlight. The Google camera may capture the tall avocado tree in our backyard – the one that produced so many avocados last year that we had to give them away. It might even capture one of our three mango trees, the branches blooming and promising a bumper crop this summer.

Ah, Google. In just 16 years, you have entered our lexicon in a way that few other words/concepts have. When someone asks me a question to which I don’t have an answer, my response is always the same: Google it. When I’m lost, creeped out, need a menu, a nearby restaurant, store, a particular book, product, the place with the cheapest gas, when I need anything at all, I Google it.

And I find something. It isn’t always the very thing I’m searching for, but if I click enough links, I eventually get to what I need.

So seeing that odd Google car leaving our neighborhood of perhaps thirty homes drove home the weird and sometimes uncomfortable reality of what we have become as a society, a planet, a collective people. Privacy is who you are inside your own head. Everything else is open to scrutiny, observation, judgment.

But in five years or ten, will Google or some other technology have found its way into your head? Your soul? Your essence? Is that technology already in development?

When I came across this metaphorical tale about life after death, I couldn’t pass it up. It also works as a window to open-mindedness and provides a glimpse of the holographic universe. As above, so below.

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In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other: “Do you believe in life after delivery?” The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.”

“Nonsense” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. What kind of life would that be?”

When we walked into the dog park yesterday, this sign was post in the billboard. Now, someone please tell me, how do you lose a potbelly pig?

Our neighbor’s orange tabby, Copper, performing acrobatics in a tree.

Our dog, Noah, cooling off at one of the local parks.

Nika, helping Rob drive.

Kilt, the border collie, finally at rest!

Noah, retrieving the morning newspaper

SQUIRREL?

Definitely a SQUIRREL on the other side of this fence! We’ll jump it, fly over it!

If you found a magic lamp in a second-hand store, wouldn’t you expect a miracle? I’m not sure that Jane Clifford rubbed the one above, but it seemed she did experience something of a miracle a short time after purchasing the mysterious lamp.

Here’s what she wrote when she sent the above photo.

“I found this magic lamp in a charity shop today for £1. Within minutes I had a miracle! I bumped into my estranged half sister in the street, she has not spoken to me for many years. She hugged me & said how sorry she was for the hurt, we chatted an hour & hugged and forgave the past. I have been transmitting healing to the situation for a few months.”

Miracles happen.

Postscript. Jane had sent me this photo and her story months ago, but I’d forgotten about it. But this evening, I received a query from our editor of a new astrology series we’re writing called Genie in the Stars. He asked if we had a picture of a magic lamp for the cover art. (He’d sent one for us to look at awhile back, but lost track of his copy.) So when searching for the pic, I came across Jane’s story. Voila! A new blog post.

I came across a long list of famous and not-so-famous coincidences on a Facebook synchro page. The image above is from one of them. Here it is:

That’s spooky, but it was another one about twins that caught my attention, even though I’d already read it elsewhere. It was about twins who were split up at birth and adopted to different parents. As I read it, I paused at the words ‘adoptive parents’ when Trish interrupted me to say that she’d just found out that a friend of ours was adopted and still refuses to tell her grown children that she had adoptive parents – their grandparents.

So I was staring at those words, ‘adoptive parents,’ as she told a story about adoptive parents. Weird. Here’s the full story I was reading. It’s actually one that we had written about here some years ago.

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Perhaps the weirdest twin story of all time occurred in Ohio. Identical twin boys were given up for adoption and were adopted by different families who didn’t know about each other. They ended up growing up only 45 miles apart. Their adoptive parents happen to name both of them James. Both twins married twice – their first marriages were to women named Linda. Their second marriages were to women named Betty. They both had a son that they named James Allen. They both owned dogs named Toy.

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The list also had a third story about twins. A middle school in Lincolnshire, England had 20 sets of twins attending at the same time. That’s definitely a coincidence, but my guess is that it was probably more confusing than meaningful to the students and teachers.

There was another one in the list that also took place in Ohio. It’s not exactly about twins, but about two cars, which were probably identical, considering the times. In 1895, there were only two cars in Ohio. Regardless of the empty roads, the drivers of the two vehicles crashed into each other! (I wonder if they had car insurance!)

Here’s the link if you want to read more of these historical coincidences.

 Bernard Beitman is a visiting professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia who has written a book on meaningful coincidences. We’ve used his material before. In this story, he’s addressing a curious type of synchro that, in 7 Secrets of Synchronicity, we wrote about in Secret 4: The Creative. That secret is that creativity lies at the heart of synchronicity.

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As of 1/29/15 , on the website for his book The Improbability Principle, statistician David Hand starts with the story of the simultaneous publication in the US and England of the cartoon character Dennis the Menace in March, 1951.

Cartoonists in both countries introduced audiences to a trouble-causing little boy named Dennis, each of whom had a dog who helped create the chaos. The boys were quite different in their attitudes but not their results. The British Dennis intentionally caused trouble, while the American Dennis, always good-natured and angelic, consistently stumbled into trouble. Both boys were immensely popular. They each had hit a cultural pleasure nerve—the archetypal bad boy.

The British Dennis had gone to press ten days before the publication of the American Dennis, so there was no evidence of plagiarism.

Professor Hand suggests that this coincidence is an example of low probability events that happen in large populations, sometimes known as the law of very large numbers. He does not recognize the phenomenon of simultaneous discovery, a well-established subset of coincidences. Simultaneous discovery appears to have an explanation more complicated and more specific than the law of very large numbers. The low probability draws our attention but does not explain the coincidence. It appears that cultures evolve with explorers on the edge, those seeking ideas that fit with current cultural interests, needs, and demands. The telephone, for example, was invented by two Americans each of whom presented their discovery to the US patent office on the same day: February 14, 1876. Also on the same day, Google and Stanford University separately announced the enhanced capacity for computers to recognize images. Each did not know the other was working on the project. There are hundreds more examples most without evidence of plagiarism.

The simultaneous appearances of two Dennis the Menace and many other examples suggest that it is probability at play but another form of explanation involving cultural curiosity and need. “When the time is ripe for certain things,” remarked the Hungarian mathematician Farkas Bolyei, “they appear at different places in the manner of violets coming to light in early spring.”

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Rob and I have experienced this kind of synchro  several times with other writers. It’s as if the ideas are all flowing through the same river and when writers dip into that river at the same time, the result is similar plots and characters.

Three years ago, I was at the dog park and saw my friend Colleen eagerly reading something on her phone. I asked her what it was. “Oh my God, this book is incredible,” she gushed. “50 Shades of Grey. You have to read it, Trish.”

I asked her what it was about. She handed me her phone and I reads a steamy passage about a young woman in a sadomasochistic relationship with a handsome man who was, of course, a billionaire. A hackneyed plot. I passed. Then a couple of days later, I read on the Internet that the author of the book would be doing her first signing at Books & Books in Coral Gables, one of the best independent bookstores left in South Florida. I learned that the book started as fan fiction for the Twilight series and got so many downloads that a major publisher had picked it up for an exorbitant amount of $ and thought, Okay, I need to take a look.

I downloaded the book and got through half of it before I put it aside. I thought the female protagonist was kind of an idiot and that the billionaire guy had some major psychologist issues. Erotic fiction is tough to write and the author has to have the soul of a poet – like Anais Nin, in her novel Henry & June, about her affairs with author Henry Miller and his wife, June. That novel is brilliant because Nin was able to dig deep into the psychology, spirituality, and inner lives of her characters. 50 Shades is, ironically, completely lacking in shading, in nuance.

All that said, the book went on to sell zillions of copies, and became a movie that opened over Valentine’s Day weekend here in the U.S. As a result of my review about 50 Shades three years ago, we had a sudden uptick of hundreds of hits on our blog. Many of these hits came were the result of the query phrase: the deeper meaning of 50 shades of grey.

Huh?

I went back and looked through the first book – and the second, which I eventually downloaded – and I just don’t see any deeper meaning to this title. The premise is simple: young woman meets billionaire with control and S&M issues. She submits. They eventually fall in love. The premise was explored in the book and movie 9 and ½ Weeks (1986) 5/ with Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger, but the 21^st century version is more graphic.

The movie reviews of 50 Shades have been pretty bad, but for probably the wrong reasons. Is sex supposed to be a war? A torture chamber? A platform of domination and submission? Are we so messed up as a society that sex is the final summary of who we are as human beings and as a species? Is sex the personal equivalent of endless war?

My sister visited recently and I asked her if she’d seen the movie. She hadn’t, but her son and his wife had. They hated it. I asked if she’d read the books. Yes, she had, all three of them. What did she think?

“I liked them. I thought they showed the evolution of their relationship.”

On its opening weekend, the movie grossed more than $80 million.

So what the hell do I know about what appeals to a mass audience? Well, apparently not much!!

Recently, I was in Barnes & Noble looking for something interesting to read. I usually find a book and then search for it on Amazon to see if it’s an ebook, and download that for a fraction of the cost for a print book. But when I plucked The Sociopath Next Door off the shelf and opened it, I experienced an odd synchro. The first chapter was called The Seventh Sense, the title of one of my novels. I turned to the introduction.

“Imagine – if you can – not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful or immortal action you’ve taken.”

Okay, I thought. The author, Martha Stout, is describing the antagonists in many of my novels. I need to buy this book. And I did.

You can read this book from cover to cover in a single sitting, if you’re so inclined, if you don’t mind being inundated with some heavy duty stuff about sociopaths. I have been leafing through it, reading a chapter here and there at the gym, at night, while eating a meal. As loath as I am to admit it, I think Stout is really onto something with her material.

The character she describes is the antagonist in countless mysteries and thrillers, in movies, and in real life. Think: Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, David Berkowitz, Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono (Hillside Stranglers). But clinical psychologist Martha Stout points out that 1 in 25 of every American is a sociopath. This person could be your spouse, neighbor, friend, sibling, or kid.

Many years ago, I worked as a librarian and Spanish teacher in a minimum security youthful offender facility. One of the inmates who frequented the library was a 15-year-old kid who was doing three years for raping and murdering a four-year-old girl. Yes, you read that correctly. Three years. His sentence was short because he was underage and was adjudicated as a juvenile. Both of his parents were psychologists.

Roland and I used to sit around in my office talking about books and music and the world outside. One day, I asked him to tell me about the crime that had landed him in prison. At first, he claimed he was too high to remember anything. But as I pressed him with questions, he became somewhat agitated and then admitted that the girl was there and he was there, so why not? He raped and strangled her because he could. No remorse.

Roland was a sociopath.

At some point during the three years I worked at this prison, an inmate in solitary hung himself. It was later discovered that he committed suicide because he had been raped by the prison’s assistant superintendent, who was bringing inmates on outside patrol to his trailer for sex. This perpetrator, a short, cigar-smoking ha-ha sort of guy, was asked to resign and did and collected his pension and was never charged with anything.

He was also a sociopath.

“About one in twenty-five individuals are sociopaths, meaning, essentially, that they do not have a conscience,” writes Stout. “It is not that this group fails to grasp the difference between good and bad; it is that the distinction fails to limit their behavior. The intellectual difference between right and wrong does not bring on the emotional sirens and flashing blue lights, or the fear of God, that it does for the rest of us. Without the slightest blip of guilt or remorse, one in twenty-five people can do anything at all.”

In the days before email and the Internet, I published a novel called Dark Fields, about a female serial killer. Despite what Hollywood and fiction would have you believe, serial killers are rare. There are more men than women, but when a serial killer is female, she is probably more brutal than her male counterpart. A few months after the book came out, I received a fan letter from a female serial killer who was currently doing time.

She was a sociopath.

Stout’s book is a fascinating and profound look inside the mind of a sociopath and helped me sculpt the antagonist in my novel. Her conclusion: “One way or another, a life without conscience is a failed life.”

So what or who is the antithesis of the sociopath? Gandhi? Okay, great. I can buy that. But on a personal level, what does it mean? How are any of us are like Gandhi? It seems that most of us have a moral code, but what is it in man that produces a Bundy? A Son of Sam? What is it that corrupts some humans from the inside out? That deems torture of our fellow human beings as OK? That glorifies war? What is it in man that produces a Gandhi? A Dalai Lama?A Hitler? A Mussolini?

Quite often, the ending sentences or paragraphs in a novel or book have an important message to convey, just as the beginning does. I love Stout’s concluding paragraphs:

For most of us, conscience is so ordinary, so daily, and so spontaneous that we do not even notice it. But conscience is also much larger than we are. It is one side of a confrontation between an ancient faction of amoral self-interest that has always been doomed, both psychologically and spiritually, and a circle of moral minds just as ageless.

Stout says she votes for the people with conscience, for the ones who are loving and committed, for the generous and gentle souls. They are people who have been gone for hundreds of years and the baby who will be born tomorrow. They come from every nation, culture, and religion. They are the more aware and focused members of our species. And they are, and always have been, our hope.

This seems like a Happy Valentine’s Day message, animal style!

In March 2013, we published a post about the Ariel School sightings that occurred in Zimbabawe in 1994. It’s one of the most compelling mass sightings ever and involved 62 elementary school kids. John E. Mack, author and professor of psychiatry at Harvard, investigated the incident. Here’s a recap of what happened:

The morning of September 16, 1994 probably started like any other morning at the Ariel School, a private elementary school in Ruwa, a rural farming community in Zimbabawe. But by mid-morning, when the kids broke for recess, the lives of 62 children and their teachers would be forever changed.

During the recess, most of the teachers were inside the building at a meeting and the kids, ranging in age from five to twelve, were outside. The only adult supervisor at recess was the mother of one of the children, who  operated a snack bar that sold soft drinks and snacks.

At around 10:15, some of the children saw three silver balls in the sky over the school.  These balls suddenly vanished in a flash of light, then reappeared elsewhere in the sky. This pattern was repeated three times before one of the UFOs began to move down toward the school. The craft either hovered just above the ground or landed in an area about three hundred feet from the recess field. The ground here was densely wooded with trees, thorn bushes, and shoots of bamboo. The only path through the area had been carved by tractors when they tried to clear the land.

A “small man” about three feet tall appeared on top of the UFO, then walked a ways across the rough ground. According to the children interviewed by Cynthia Hind, a South African UFO researcher, the man wore a tight-fitting, shiny black suit, had long black hair, and a “scrawny” neck.  His face was pale, his eyes immense. When the man became aware of the children, he allegedly disappeared. He or someone similar to him reappeared at the back of the UFO, which then took off.

Some of the children ran in terror toward the woman who was operating the snack bar, telling her what they had seen, but she didn’t believe them.

Hind arrived at the school the next day. She had already asked the headmaster to have the children make drawings of what they had seen so she reviewed the sketches and then began interviewing the children.

In Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters, John E Mack,  wrote about his involvement in the investigation of the Ariel School sightings.  He and his research associate, Dominique Callimanopulos, had already scheduled a trip to Zimbabwe that was unrelated to the Ariel sightings. So when the BBC bureau chief faxed Mack and his associate  the drawings the children had done at Hind’s request,  Mack decided to investigate and he and Dominique arrived at the school in early December and stayed for two days.

Mack’s background in child psychiatry was apparently a powerful asset. He met with twelve of the children, interviewed the headmaster,  and met with most of the teachers. Each child they interviewed told a similar story, “that at 10:15 on that Friday morning, a large spacecraft and several smaller ones, from which one of more ‘strange beings’ had emerged, were seen hovering just above the ground or had ‘landed’ in their schoolyard.” At one point, Mack played devil’s advocate  with one of the kids and suggested the possibility that she had made up the story and gotten the other kids to tell the teachers this story as a prank.  Her reply was that she could understand how an adult might think that, but “that’s not what happened.”

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Fast forward. Mack died in 2004. But in 2007, Dominique Callimanopulos and filmmaker Randall Nickerson began production of a non-commercial, edited video program presenting John Mack’s interviews with the schoolchildren and faculty. A year later, Randall Nickerson left for Africa to cull additional information about the Ariel sightings. He stayed for nine months and interviewed many of the now-adult witnesses.  Click here for his findings.

Today, we received an email from Anne, a production assistant for “Ariel Phenomenon,” a documentary that’s being made about the sightings. She provided us with an update about the film and a link to the movie trailer. The trailer runs about five minutes and it’s fantastic.

From Anne:

I am working with Randall (Nickerson) on this film and would like to post an update for your readers. There is a website for the film now which is www.arielphenomenon.com and also a Facebook page “Ariel School Documentary” and Twitter account @arielschoolfilm for people to follow. The film website has an exclusive trailer for the film. We are also conducting a fundraiser through the film website to raise much needed funds to finish the final interviews and complete the film this year. Can you please share this important information with your readers? People are welcome to contact me at arielschoolfilm@gmail.com with any questions. Thank you for your help and support! Anne Krzanowski Production Assistant, “Ariel Phenomenon”