Welcome to The Mystical Underground

My new book on meditation, The Jewel in the Lotus: Meditation for Busy Minds, is out as an e-book, and will be coming out in print in a few weeks. Here’s an excerpt, a spiel about non-attachment.

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Non-Attachment

Maybe you’ve heard about meditation teachers who say visualization is just another way of thinking, that it’s not true meditation. I’ve heard that, too, many times. Those same teachers might tell you to focus on letting go of attachments and seeking a state of nothingness. If you try that, you might find yourself floating in a void during your meditation. That can be pleasant, but it’s actually another form of visualization—visualizing nothing.

Buddhists are great promoters of non-attachment. It’s one of the central themes of the religion. That’s fine if your focus is on detaching yourself from obsessive behavior related to people or things. But how far do you take that concept? Being non-attached to your children, for example, is probably a bad idea, one that could cause you to lose your children. In other words, there’s a fine line between being non-attached and uncaring.

Some Buddhists say that happiness is not a viable goal of meditation, that happiness is a passing condition and an attachment. But so is unhappiness, and it seems there are plenty of unhappy Buddhists, weary of the world and all of its everyday attachments. As a result, casual observers tend to profile the Zen crowd as meditators who look on the world with a scowl and a sense of disgust about anything that hints of attachments. Insiders, however, will tell you that they are not unhappy. It’s just that they don’t ignore painful matters. In fact, they feel the way to deal with pain and difficulties is by focusing on such issues rather than running away from them.

My perspective is that it’s better to meditate on what you want, imagining that you already have it, than to focus on what’s lacking in your life. That only attracts more of the same. Sure, being preoccupied with material goods can drag us down and divert us from our spiritual quest. But having a dream, seeking abundance and other positive goals through visualization and affirmations should never be considered detrimental.

Wealth and prosperity are states of mind that are usually augured by money. Yes, money allows us to accumulate stuff, and possessing more objects is not a sure-fire pathway to inner peace and happiness. Certainly, there are people with lots of money who are unhappy, and there are people who misuse money and look only to possessions for meaning in their lives.

Of course, there are plenty of people without money who are bitterly unhappy. But happiness comes from within, not from the size of your bank account or the number of toys in your possession. Abundance is more than financial security. It’s about living in the present moment and experiencing life to its fullest. After all, we are here in the physical world to feel and experience. If we think of ourselves essentially as spirits engaged in physical existence, then we can engage in life with a renewed interest and learn from our experiences, all the while knowing that it’s transitory and our true home is the spirit realm.

I’m all for releasing attachments, such as negative emotional patterns that hold us back. But there’s also value in pursuing goals through directed meditations. They not only provide structure that many beginning meditators need, but they work.

However, before we move into the directed meditations, let’s briefly explore a meditation about true non-attachment. Our typical idea of non-attachment might be giving away all your possessions, leaving your home and family, maybe keeping a robe, sandals and a begging bowl. This is possible, though not prudent, especially in the Western World. True non-attachment, while impossible in the physical world, can be explored in meditation. Here’s how:

Letting Go

Move into a comfortable position and take a few deep breaths. Scan your body, relaxing as you go. Settle in, slowing your breath.

Now start to let go of your identity. Begin with your name. Let it go. Imagine not having a name, or any role. Let go of all of your titles and roles: ie. mother, father, son, daughter, your career or job title, your qualifications, your history. Let it all go.

Let go of your religion, your race and nationality. Let go of your language. Let go of your gender. Let go of your body. How does it feel to be neither male or female. No name, gender, role, title, race, nationality, language. No body, merely a spark of awareness, exploring the unknown, touching upon the unknowable.

How do you feel? You’re free, peaceful, immortal and eternal. You’re connecting to your original self, linked to your creator, merging with higher awareness.

M-E-D-I-T-A-T-E

That’s true non-attachment. It’s worth exploring those ideas and feelings so you can face any fears of the unknown, of losing all that you are. In doing so, you connect with your deeper, eternal self, where you recognize that your physical life is but a blip. Yet, it’s an important one where you face challenges and opportunities to expand your awareness.

For the second winter, we have a boarder with us, a woman I’ll call Carlie. She’s a groom, a part-time resident here, who travels with her boss, ‘Amber,’ a wealthy young woman who rides really expensive horses. It’s her lifestyle, and her life. She competes with some of the world’s best jumpers who winter here and perform at the Horse Show, a stadium and grounds about two minutes from us.

Carlie takes care of the horses, cleans up after them, makes vet and farrier appointments, and saddles the horses so her young boss can ride up to four horses a day. Carlie leaves the house at 6 a.m., returns at 5 p.m. for dinner, then leaves at 7 p.m. for night check. She’s usually in bed between 9:30-10. She does that six days a week.

This evening she was excited about watching Downton Abbey with us. But first she was being taken out to dinner by the mother of her boss-rider. The mother is the mistress of a fantastic 8,000-acre estate with an enormous mansion on it. The family no longer resides in the mansion, which is now a popular tourist attraction. The name itself is synonymous with great wealth, and the family is the American version of aristocracy.

So maybe you see the synchronicity here. Carlie was anxious to watch the well-known drama about the posh lifestyle of British aristocracy in the early part of the twentieth century. But, meanwhile, she was on her way to dining with one of the heads of a famous American household. It turns out that her dinner and evening events ran right through the TV show. But hey, she was living the real thing—American style.

The interesting twist is that a century ago, the mistress of a great house would never be seen taking a groom to dinner. Besides that, I noticed that Carlie went to dinner in jeans and a T-shirt, totally acceptable in even the top restaurants here. Times have changed in some way, but not so much in others. To Trish and I, Carlie seems to live a life ‘in service,’ just like the servants on the ‘first floor’ of Downton Abbey. But she loves it, and that’s what counts.

Ian R  asks this question: Does anyone have synchronistic messages from friends or family who have passed away?

Well, we’ve heard some stories. In fact, we gathered them together in Synchronicity and the Other Side: Meaningful Connections with the Afterlife (Adams Media, 2011). But maybe if we’d heard Ian’s own story about his friend, we would’ve included it. Especially because of the name and nickname of Ian’s friend.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Ian began by saying that he was convinced that his father was repeatedly contacting him over the past two years. He was doing so through the medium of music. There’s a popular song from 1988 that Ian associates with his father. He has been hearing it again and again. He even saw someone on the street performing the song. He also noted that he doesn’t listen regularly to the radio limiting his expose to music.

“The first time I affirmed a request to hear from him, I literally picked up the phone to call a company, was transferred to the other side of the world to a customer service centre, and was placed on hold. The song playing whilst I sat waiting was the song from 1988. Subsequently, I have had the same synch with other friends and family here in Prague. And on one occasion sat down with some ‘informed’ parties at a a cafe, to hear a street performer singing it live .”

Then Ian went on to talk about his late friend.

“The other day I thought about one of my closest friends who sadly died in his early 30s. I wondered why I had never had any messages from him. His name was Darren. As I finished that thought, I was entering a park with my dog. I turned a corner, and there in huge letters (5ft by 5ft) was the name ‘Daz’ spray-painted on the wall. Daz was Darren’s nickname.”

So, besides the synchro for Ian  with his deceased friend, there’s the oddity that we know another Darren, who visits here frequently, who has the exact same nickname—Daz. Is this a common nickname for people named Darren? we wonder. If not, then it’s really a peculiar synchro.

This video was taken by participants in a recent workshop with Dr. Stephen Greer. It’s quite interesting. At first, we wondered if the twin lights seen in the video were lights from boats. But they seem to be well above the water. Greer is known for being able to “conjure” UFOs. But his week-long workshops are pricey -$2500 that doesn’t include food, lodging, or transportation. For that price, I would like a guarantee: yes, you are definitely going to see UFOs!

In a time when the daily news cycle brings such horrific stories – not just daily, but hourly- it’s uplifting and encouraging to run across a story about human kindness. This story also illustrates the power of the Internet to connect and empower people in an immediate way that changes lives.

James Robertson, 56, a guy from Detroit – the city that’s famous for its cars- can’t afford a car on the $10.55 an hour he earns at Schain Mold & Engineering. So he walks 21 miles to his factory job every morning and then walks 21 miles home after work. He leaves at eight a.m. and doesn’t get home till four a.m. He relies on public transportation, rides from good Samaritans, and his feet. He has been doing this for a decade, since his 1988 Honda quit on him, and has a perfect attendance at work.

After the Detroit Free Press did a story on Robertson, it hit the Internet in a major way and within 24 hours, Robertson’s life was transformed. From the Huffington Post:

“Evan Leedy, a student at Detroit’s Wayne State University, set up a GoFundMe account to help raise money to buy Robertson a car. It began with a simple goal of $5,000 and skyrocketed to over $200,000 from thousands of people after Robertson’s story was picked up my media outlets around the world.” As of the evening of February 3, while I’m writing this, the total has reached nearly $300,000.

Robertson can now afford a luxury car, if he wants one But he told the Detroit Free Press that he’s a Ford fan. “I remember the Taurus. They look comfortable, nothing fancy. They’re simple on the outside, strong on the inside — like me.”

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This story made my month! It certainly rocks the prevalent stereotype of black inner city residents as lazy slackers collecting welfare checks.

I clearly remember the moment six years ago. Rob had gone to a yoga class and I was sitting outside in January sunlight, when the weather in Florida is usually at its best and was doing my usual fretting about where we would go now. In this marriage, I’m the fretter and Rob is the copasetic guy, the Don’t worry, it’s all okay guy.

 I was trying to figure out where we were supposed to be going as writers. Or, at any rate, where I was supposed to be going. I was finishing up a novel called Esperanza, which sold four or five months later, but at that moment outside in the sunlight, I thought about synchronicity. It had intrigued me ever since I was a freshman in college and read Jung’s intro to the Richard Wilhelm edition of the I Ching. That intro was written in 1949 and was the first time Jung had mentioned synchronicity publicly.

To me, synchronicity seemed to be the evidence of a divine intelligence afoot in the world, but I wasn’t at all sure what that meant. I really felt a need to explore it. After all, on my first date with Rob years before I’d asked him if he’d heard of synchronicity. This was in the early 80s, before the Internet, PCs, iPad, iPhones, any of the new stuff. It wasn’t like he could run off and Google the word. To my utter shock, he knew the word and what it meant.

So when he got home from yoga that day in January 2009 and came outside, I said, “I think we should start a blog on synchronicity.”

He looked at me like I was nuts and laughed. “Yeah, right.” He turned to go back inside the house.

“Why not?” I hurried after him, really irritated by his triple earth sign natal chart that screamed, Prove it to me, prove it, prove this is worth my time and effort. “We’ve been living it for nearly thirty years.”

“Well, yeah, there’s that,” his body said.

And on February 4, 2009, we launched this blog. I did an astrological chart for the date and time and it looked good. I figured that Facebook had launched on that date, different year, but still… The promise of that chart has seen fruition. Four books on synchronicity, dozens of radio shows, and many new friends also interested in what synchronicity is and how it operates in our lives. Lots of people using synchros to improve their lives, understand their lives.

Here was our first post.

Thanks to everyone who has visited and contributed over the years and added to our collective knowledge of synchronicity!

A man driving home from work in California took this video. Very strange. Is it a satellite ejecting something? Or is it a UFO ejecting something? Or is it something else entirely??

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DE1xcYXTZJI

Lake Michigan is known as a place of strange and mysterious activity, ranging from ghost ships and ghosts to UFOs. Twenty-one years ago, 911 operators at Holland, Michigan were flooded with UFO reports from around Lake Michigan and police officers who were dispatched to investigate. Some sources said 300 witnesses, including several police officers, saw the lights. Mysterious objects also showed up on radar. There have been so many sightings of strange objects over Lake Michigan that the Federal Aviation Administration created a special lake reporting service to catalog the sightings.

We’ve written about mysterious happening on  a sailboat, a personal experience told to us by Kathy Doore. Now we have a story from the air, above Lake Michigan. Jules, a scientist from Montreal, was flying home from Chicago in 2005 and was meditating as the commercial jet flew over Lake Michigan. After a few minutes, he was overcome by a strange sensation.

“I got the feeling that the upper part of my cranium was split open. Having done meditation  before, I knew what to expect, and this was not the type of feeling that I was used to. Although the feeling didn’t hurt me in any way, I was aware of it as long as I maintained the meditation.” He also had the impression of expanded hearing capabilities. “I could hear everything throughout the plane.” Upon landing in Montreal he noticed that the face of a passenger behind him was rather strange, like he was afraid of something. “He was looking above my head, while I was half-standing, waiting my turn to exit the plane.”
 
A few years later, Jules flew over Lake Michigan again, this time with his wife on a flight from California, and he suggest they try meditating. He didn’t give her any information about his previous experience so as not to influence or deter her. He recalls: “It wasn’t long before she started to move frantically in her seat, trying to find a brochure in the pouch in front of her, putting down her small table, making noise, and so forth. This forced me out of my meditation.” But before doing so, he again noticed the open skull sensation, though not as noticeable as the previous time.  “Looking at my wife, I asked what was going on, since she is more experienced than me on the field of meditation. She answered by swiping her thumbnail across her forehead, indicating that she too felt as if her upper-cranium was split open.

At first, Jules didn’t link the experiences to UFO. But after hearing about the well known sighting at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport and watching documentaries about UFO sightings over Lake Michigan and the possibility of an underwater UFO base, he began to change his mind. He suspected that during his meditations over the lake, he had encountered a force related to UFOs.
 
“In itself, it might seem like nonsense,” Jules admits. But then something else very strange happened to him after he recently borrowed about ten books on UFOs from the Montreal public library. He put one particular book into the bottom of his handbag, the one he was most interested in reading because he had read other books by the same author. He later realized that he had held the book in such a way so that he didn’t notice the image on the bottom half of the cover. At least, not until he was ready to read it.

When he saw it, he instantly recognized the synchronicity. The cover image was identical to his experience that he had already attributed to UFO contact.

In this very young new year, it seems that every time I turn on the news or read something on the Internet, the news is, well, bad.  So here’s an energetic flash mob dance in NYC that chases away the bad stuff.

There’s a new docu-drama TV series in the making, called The Unexplained, which focuses on unusual mysterious experiences. It will be a combination of interviews with experiencers and actors performing the experiences. We were contacted by the casting director because of an article I wrote about Connie Cannon’s childhood alien abductions. They wanted to interview Connie in Los Angeles for the show, but her health issues prevent her from traveling.

Connie has Parkinson’s and thinks her neurological condition is related to her contact experiences. Here is what she wrote about that.

“Just as an aside, and relative to something I’ve mentioned to you in the past, I wonder how many experiencers develop neurological diseases and symptoms. As an RN, I certainly understand that EVERY patient who has a neurological disorder is NOT an experiencer (via encounters/abductions, etc.), but I’ve run across several folks in my acquaintance who have had sucn encounters and DO have neurological ailments such as MS, Parkinson’s, brain tumors, (both benign and malignant), and other brain/nervous system diseases.

“I’d really like to do a study on that just to see how widespread it is among us, and approximate the percentage of known experiencers who have developed such disorders. Please thank Nicole for me, and give her my regrets.” C

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After Connie bowed out, I contacted Charles Fontaine, whose experiences were detailed in our book, Aliens in the Backyard. I asked him if he would be interested in being interviewed in Los Angeles in front of a camera, and he said he was interested in pursuing the matter. Then he wrote this:

“Very weird for me to hear about Connie’s condition… Parkinson’s. Did I tell you that my mother-in-law is in a nursing home because she also has Parkinson’s? Do not ask me the technical name of her Parkinson but it is supposedly the worse type. The shaking is inside the body, not on the outside. This type is said to be the deadliest, because it acts directly on vital organs.

I guess I told you before that my in-law is an experiencer. She told me about some encounters more than 26 years ago that happened when they were living on a country road 5 miles away from here.

Not more than a year after our own experience that took place on March 2011, my wife picked up her mother at the nursing home for dinner with us on a Saturday evening. She had a hard time eating and holding her fork and then she said: ‘Damn Parkinson’s I know the reason I got it, it’s because of them!’

‘Who do you mean by them?’ I asked.

She said: ‘The UFO’s near the house. They are the reason why I got this.’

My wife discretely made a sign to me not to say a thing about our own experience a year earlier.

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So there it is, an unusual synchronicity. Connie wonders how many other experiencers have contracted neurological disorders and within a few hours I received a story about another case. And the woman is certain it was ‘them.’ They were the reason she got Parkinson’s.