Welcome to The Mystical Underground

Since 1944, nearly sixty films have been made or are scheduled for production through 2019 that are based on Marvel Comics characters and properties. Many of these films involve super heroes who have become as well-known as the actors who portray them. Super heroes, naturally, have supernatural abilities of one kind or another:  X-ray vision, the power of flight, healing powers, clairvoyance, telepathy, memory manipulation, animal communication, teleportation, invisibility, shape shifting, and precognition.

Jeffrey L. Kripal, author of Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal, theorizes that these illustrators and writers draw upon their personal paranormal experiences for some of their material. Take prolific comic book writer Doug Moench.

In the 1970s, he wrote and worked on Planet of the Apes for Marvel Comics. It was Marvel’s longest-lived series and featured original Ape stories as well as adaptations of the various movies. In 1975, it ran eleven issues that included color versions of the adaptation of the first two films, which Moench wrote.

On one particular day, Moench had just completed writing a scene for a Planet of the Apes comic book about a black-hooded gorilla named Brutus. “The scene involved Brutus invading the hero’s home, where he grabbed the man’s mate by the neck and held a gun to her head in order to manipulate the hero.”

Typical bad guy stuff. But what followed was anything but typical. Just as Moench completed writing the scene, he heard his wife calling for him from the other side of the house. Her voice sounded strange. He walked across the house and when he entered the living room, there stood a man in a black hood who had one arm around his wife’s neck and clutched a gun that he was holding to her head.

“It was exactly what I had written…it was so, so immediate in relation to the writing and such an exact duplicate of what I had written, that it became an instant altered state,” Moench told Kripal.

In the aftermath, the experience made it difficult for Moench to write. He was frightened that whatever he wrote might actually happen. “It really does make you wonder,” Moench said. “Are you seeing the future? Are you creating a reality? Should you give up writing forever after something like this happens? I don’t know.”

Moench didn’t give up writing, but as Kripal notes, the black-hooded intruder became his obsession for months, then years.

What’s intriguing about Moench’s experience is how quickly the real-life situation occurred after he had written the scene. Was the black-hooded intruder already in house when he began writing the scene? If it took him only a few minutes to write the scene, then the experience would qualify as clairvoyance rather than precognition. But if the scene took him several hours to write, then it’s likely it was an instance of precognition.

Kripal believes that the paranormal often needs the pop-cultural form to appear at all. “The truth needs the trick, the fact the fantasy. It is almost as if the left brain will not let the right brain speak (which it can’t anyway, since language is generally a left-brain function), so the right brain turns to image and story to say what it has to say (without saying it.).”

Perhaps, as writer and researcher Lynn McTaggart suggests in her book The Intention Experiment, the future “already exists in some nebulous state that we actualize in the present.” Or, as Moench asked, was he, through the act of writing the scene, creating a reality? Maybe so. Quantum physics tells us that subatomic particles exist in a state of potential until they are observed or thought about. If, as David 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 through intense focus, as during the creative process, visualization, meditation, and any number of other ways.

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Take a look at Adele’s comment. The image below pertains to what she said.

In Richard Tarnas’s wonderful book, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimation of a New World View, there’s a chapter called The Archetypal Cosmos, in which he talks about synchronicity and how it led Carl Jung to his interest in astrology.

“Over the years, many researchers have taken a special interest in the problem of coincidences, precisely because such events could be interpreted as evidence that the world possess more underlying unity, order, and meaning than the modern mind has assumed,” Tarnas writes. “…it represented a phenomenon that, simply put, should not have been occurring, at least not in a random, purposeless universe.”

Tarnas goes on to say that the “problem” with coincidences is that even though they are personally significant, they resist objective assessment. In other words, they can’t be tested scientifically, in a laboratory setting. It’s not as if a group of scientists or researchers can run tests on synchronicity that are replicable by other researchers. How do you “test” something that is personally significant but which eludes measurement by objective bystanders? Synchronicity, by its very nature and definition, is the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that can’t be explained by cause and effect and is meaningful to the observer – i.e., to you, the person who experiences it.

He notes that the existence of this deeper order and underlying unity could only be substantiated if the phenomenon was in some way “public and pervasive rather than private and exceptional” and only if the “archetypal patternings were more universally discernible and associated more widely with collective experience…” One area that seemed to fit this description was, as Tarnas puts it, “highly controversial” – astrology.

Jung began to seriously study astrology in 1911 and at one point that year, wrote to Freud that his evenings were consumed by it. “I make horoscope calculations in order to find a clue to the core of psychological truth.Some remarkable things have turned up…”

Keep in mind that when Jung talks about horoscope calculations, he’s undoubtedly referring to the complicated math involved in creating a horoscope from scratch. In the days before computers and apps, this process used to take me – a math-challenged individual – several days. Then I would sometimes ask my dad, an accountant and math whiz, to check over my calculations. So I can almost envision Jung, hunched over a bunch of papers that are filled with mathematical scribblings.

According to Tarnas, Jung’s interest eventually developed into a major research focus for him and as he grew older, he “devoted himself with considerable passion to astrological research.”

I thought this particular fact was fascinating and quickly pulled out Deirdre Bair’s biography, Jung – nearly 900 pages long – and flipped to the index, looking for the word astrology. The entry is short – 7 mentions and a couple of footnotes. The mentions mostly refer to Jung’s research into marriage charts. But Bair’s book is different from Tarnas’s. She wrote a biography about Jung, the vast spectrum of who he was as a human being. Tarnas wrote about Jung’s ideas – namely synchronicity and astrology.

Tarnas started his journey as a skeptic who basically dismissed astrology as bogus. But he decided to take a deeper look because of some colleagues whose intellectual judgment he trusted and because he was influenced by what Jung had done. “Once I moved past the usual disparagements of the conventional accounts, I noticed that the history of astrology contained certain remarkable features.”

He found that in the historical periods when astrology flourished in the West- like the Italian Renaissance, the Elizabethan Age in England, the High Middle Ages and others – also happened to be eras “in which intellectual and cultural creativity was unusually luminous.” He was impressed that individuals like Goethe, Kepler, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Plato and Aristotle – and yes, Jung – supported the idea that astrology illustrated the underlying unity of humanity through the archetypal structures that are depicted.

“The archetypes associated with specific planetary alignments were equally apt to express themselves in the interior life of the psyche as in the external world of concrete events, and often both at once,” he writes.

And archetypes, as synchronicity often tells us, are the stuff that make up who we are as individuals within a collective. Archetypes are our connective tissue, our Indra’s net, our humanity. Pluck one string in Asia and a string in Chile responds. Pluck a string in Austria and a string in Brazil hums in response. I often wonder if Rupert Sheldrake’s theory about Morphic resonance applies to the archetypes depicted in astrology.

Morphic resonance says that a young kid in the 21^st century who hops on a bike and rides off into the sunset without taking a tumble can do so because he draws on the field of information that has accrued about bike riding since the inception of bicycles. With each successive generation, the task or the skill becomes easier because we tap into what has come before us. If Sheldrake is right, does that mean that the experiences, knowledge, and archetypal traits of, say a Virgo, are available to all Virgos? Does it mean the particular traits of that sign become more dominant or readily available to all Virgos?

It’s an interesting thought and takes me back to a conversation Rob and I had with an astrologer and psychic in the late 1980s. He had a pre-birth memory in which he was shown a couple of natal charts, either of which would satisfy whatever he needed to do in his next life. One of the charts was supposedly that of Prince Charles. The other was that of the soul he chose to be.He, like Charles, was a Scorpio, but his life – at least in terms of fame, celebrity, scandal – wasn’t anything like that off Prince Charles Charles.

Who knows what the truth is? It seems we humans are adept at piecing together bits of the truth but that the whole truth, as ephemeral as the secret of oceans and the cosmos, eludes us.

You might’ve heard that Harriet Tubman is one of the top contenders to be the first woman on U.S. paper currency – the $10 bill. She lived an amazing and heroic life and would be very worthy of the honor. But it’s not widely known that Tubman was psychic and used her abilities on the Underground Railroad transporting freed slaves to the North. She also later worked as a spy for the Union during the Civil War and it seems likely she used her mysterious abilities once again.

Harriet Tubman was born a slave in Maryland in the early 1820s and was nearly killed by an overseer who struck her in the forehead with a two-pound piece of lead after she refused to help him hold onto a boy slave who was trying to escape. Tubman died and came back and, in the aftermath, began experiencing visions of the future.  She was able to escape from slavery in 1849 and become a leading abolitionist before the American Civil War.

She returned to the South numerous times to rescue both family members and non-relatives from the plantation system. She helped hundreds of slaves escape and was never caught, a fact that she attributed to her precognitive abilities. She said she was able to see into the future to where the slave hunters would be searching for her. She was also able to see houses where the people would take in runaway slaves, feed them, and give them a place to sleep for the night.

She became known as the Moses of her people and the most famous ‘conductor’ on the Underground Railroad, an elaborate secret network of safe houses organized for that purpose. In early 1858, Tubman had a vision that she would meet abolitionist John Brown, who advocated the use of violence to disrupt and destroy the institution of slavery. In April of that year, she was introduced to him. Tubman shared his goals and tolerated his methods. When Brown began recruiting supporters for an attack on slaveholders at Harper’s Ferry, he called on ‘General Tubman’ for help. After Brown was executed, Tubman praised him as a martyr.

When the Civil War broke out, Tubman worked for the Union Army as a cook and nurse. But because of her background and unique abilities, she quickly became an armed scout and spy. In fact, Harriet Tubman was probably America’s first psychic spy when she guided the Combahee River Raid, which liberated more than 700 slaves in South Carolina.

Can’t wait to see her on the $10 bill!

This video of a non-believer getting a reading is really impressive. The reader knew nothing about the man who sat in the chair. It’s clear from the 14-minute reading that the man was deeply touched by what he heard about his dead friend…or from his dead friend, who doesn’t seem so dead at all.

Donna Smith-Moncrieffe, director of Metaphysics Research (www.medium7.com) conducted a series of non-believer experiments under controlled conditions. In this particular video, the sitter (Chad) experiences a life changing moment.

The study’s findings with 88 sitters (clients) and 10 mediums and a review of  up to date literature on the afterlife can be found in the book: Medium7: Evidence of the Afterlife and Predictions, Donna Smith-Moncrieffe.

If we can rule out fraud, this reading can only be one of two things: a case of true mediumship or a case of very impressive telepathy. Or possibly, a combination of the two.

When our daughter was in elementary school, one of her good friends was Jennifer, who lived in our neighborhood. Jen’s older sister, Melissa, used to babysit Megan. Now everyone is grown up, Melissa is married and lives in Manhattan, but she and her husband, Jon, drop by whenever they’re in town and we sit around and gab about weird stuff. In between, she sends us the synchronicities she experiences and they’re invariably good ones.

This one involves spirit communication, specifically with Melissa’s grandmother, who died last summer. It happened on August 30, 2015. The date is important. She wrote us about it the next day, on August 31.

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Yesterday, Jon was supposed to have done the laundry. But when I woke up that morning (August 30) and went downstairs to brush my teeth, I saw that our cat, Starr, had vomited on every bath mat in there. I cleaned it up and was going to wake up Jon and asked him to get the laundry done first thing this morning rather than later because Starr likes to sleep on the mats in there and I didn’t want her to feel upset that her normal routine was disturbed. But instead, I got the urge to bake an orange chiffon cake. I had been thinking of making it all week and figured I would give it a go at some point, but yesterday decided it had to be this morning.

So instead of waking Jon, I just went to work on the cake. I figured the laundry could be done any time. As I was prepping the ingredients for the cake, which is pretty complicated to make, I was talking to Papa (her grandfather) on the phone. He’s in a rehab facility after a stint in the hospital for a very severe infection. He told me that back in the day, orange chiffon cake was something Nana liked to make. I didn’t know that.

Shortly after 11 a.m., a box truck crashed into the entryway of the laundry area in our building. If I had awakened Jon, he would have been walking on the street or would have been right inside the laundry at the time of the crash. While that may be some sort of synchro in and of itself, here’s the awesome part.  I think Nana was watching out for him.  She passed away exactly one year ago on the 30th – so it was the anniversary of her death.

I texted some friends who live across the street and asked if they had heard or seen anything concerning the truck. When I checked my phone this morning as I am writing this email, to double check the time of morning it had happened, I noticed I sent my text out at 11:11 a.m. That (and the chiffon cake!) just gave me a little cement in my theory that Nana had something to do with protecting Jon.

Mercury, the trickster planet, rules the signs of Gemini and Virgo and governs communication, travel, contracts, moving parts, your conscious awareness, and the intellect, among other things. Three times a year, it turns retrograde for about three weeks and daily life tends to get, well, fairly screwed up. Here’s the kind of thing I mean.

During the last retrograde, which occurred between May 19 and June 10, in Gemini, our washing machine broke down. It simply stopped spinning. Now, the common wisdom for these retrograde periods consists of a list of DO NOTs and among them is DON’T buy appliances, electronics, or any other high ticket item, especially one with moving parts. But there was no way I was going to do laundry in the swimming pool and pounding clothing against rocks. So I called a repair service. The verdict? The motherboard in the washing machine was shot and it would cost nearly as much to replace it as it would to buy a new washing machine.

We chose a machine from Lowe’s and when the email confirmation came through, realized we had ordered a dryer, not a washing machine. We cancelled that order and ordered the washing machine. The night before the delivery, we got a call about when the dryer would be delivered the next day. I called and explained the situation and was told the washing machine wouldn’t be delivered for another week.

By the time it was delivered, we were two weeks into the retrograde and I had been using our neighbor’s washing machine.

Today, September 17, Mercury turns retrograde in Libra and won’t turn direct again until October 9. So, I began preparing myself for the list of DO NOTS. In addition to the DO NOTs above, these include: do not sign contracts, make travel plans or, if possible, don’t travel great distances at all because your itinerary may change without warning. Do not submit manuscripts, make deals, hire new employees.

Yesterday, when Mercury was slowing down, I got a taste of what this retro may be like for me. I needed a mouse for my laptop, so I headed over to the closest outlet, a Walgreen’s. It was pouring rain and I darted into the store, found a wireless mouse, rather than one with a retractable cord. I bought it because I didn’t feel like driving around in the rain, looking for what I wanted. As I ran back out to the car, I realized I hadn’t seen anything on the box that indicated I could use the mouse on a Mac. So once I was in the car, I opened the box and looked at the directions. Not for use on a Mac. I went back inside, returned it, got my refund. Then I headed over to a small ATT store to buy my mouse.

Now it was pouring buckets. And, uh-oh, the store was no longer there. So I headed to Publix. Hurray! They had a mouse with a retractable cord. All of this suggested that the retrograde might involve inconveniences like this, where you’re running around like the proverbial dog chasing its tail.

While I was running inside Publix, however, I received an email from an editor about the deadline for a project that, as far as I knew, hadn’t been negotiated yet. This email suggests that the retrograde might entail missing communications rather than MIScommunications.

By the time I got home – with my retractable cord mouse! – I’d heard from our agent that we’d received an offer on our book about precognition.

So yesterday, I had a glimpse of the texture of this Mercury retrograde. Inconveniences? Fine. But what I also understood was that projects that seemed to have stalled or been forgotten, may come roaring back once again!

Mercury retro affects everyone. But if you’re a Gemini or a Virgo, ruled by Mercury, or a Libra,  the sign in which Mercury turns retrograde, it’s up close and personal. To find out which areas of your life will be  most affected, go here for a free birth chart and look for where Libra is in your chart – the 7th symbol in this little chart.

And do share your retro stories! We are going to be traveling during this retro and even though the plans were made long before the retro started, we’ll see what unfolds.

Here it is, folks. The emblem for American politics for the presidential run in 2016. Donald Trump’s hair

Seriously?

This is the best the Republicans can do? Trump? The blowhard who is beating the supposed front runner – Jeb Bush – in all the polls? The dude with the strange hair whose foreign policy seems to consist of building a fence across the southern border of the country and nuking Iran? The racist who refers to Mexican immigrants as thieves and rapists? The guy who is on wife #3 and yet apparently hates women?

I make deals, plenty of deals, he yells at a recent rally. And the Iran deal is a very bad deal.

Gag.

American politics, more than a year away from the 2016 presidential election, is a carnival of mutants, with 16 or 17 candidates on the Repub side (I’ve lost the exact count). On the other side, Hilary is the supposed front runner for Democrats even though she’s losing in several recent polls to Bernie Sanders – a supposed outlier independent senator from Vermont,

The mainstream media refuses to take Bernie seriously and never mind that he draws larger crowds than Hilary everywhere he goes. (That’s a significant link!) Never mind that his populist message resonates. He couldn’t possibly win the nomination, could he? His role, after all, was supposed to be that of the outlier who pushes Hilary farther to the left. But oh, guess what. He has an incredible momentum all his own.

And then there’s the media manipulation in the Republican debates about who can appear in the real debates and who will be assigned to the “kid’s table.” Fox News started this format with the first Repub debate and CNN is continuing it – with some bending of the rules – for the second debate on September 16. Tonight.

Really? Why not let all 16 or 17 candidates duke it out in real time? Let people see the racism and misogynistic truth about the Republicans. Let them see how these bozos still hope to overturn ObamaCare and rip health coverage away from the millions who are already benefiting from it. And do they have a plan for these people once affordable health care is torn away from them? Well, yes. DIE.

Then there are the real extremes among the Repub candidates- like Senator Ted Cruz, who bears an eerie physical resemblance to Joseph McCarthy, and Mike Huckabee – who supported the wacko Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. Isn’t that like a law in the 60s that forbade the marriage between a black and a white? And oh, guess what. Even though she broke the law as an elected official, she was released from jail with Huckabee at her side.

Seriously?

Who are these guys? What retro era did they crawl out of?

If there’s a synchronicity in all of this, I think it lies in the paradigm shift this planet is going through. The old just isn’t going out with a whimper. It’s fighting hard to remain relevant and the stakes are huge. For the most part, Republicans are climate-change deniers; advocate war over diplomacy; love babies until they’re born and then, well, sorry, you’re on your own; dislike women and Latinos and anyone else who isn’t an aging white male; seek to defund Planned Parenthood, a woman’s health organization; and are locked in some early 19^th century idea of how the world works and why.

Listen up, aging white guy politicos. You know who you are – Boehner, Cruz, Huckabee, Trump, Bush (not another one!), Chris Christie, Lindsey Graham, etc etc. Here are some statistics that should be quite sobering for you about the face of the electorate not too far down the road.  Or about the plight of the planet now and in the very near future.

You Repubs have your minority candidates – Ben Carson, the neurosurgeon who believes that the Affordable Care Act is “the worst thing that has happened since slavery,” and Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett Packard who bankrupted the company. Hey, great. But I’m clueless about why any minority of any color or gender would choose to be associated with the Republican party.

My dog would do a better job of running this country than any of you.

If we are going to evolve as individuals of a collective humanity, of a species on a planet with resources stretched to the limit, then a new paradigm will be born. But it’s apparent that birth won’t be easy, that it may be breech, that it may require extraordinary measures.

I don’t think I can stomach watching the Repub presidential debates tonight. But if any of you are that brave, let us know what you think about what they said.

We first posted this synchro when our blog was about a week old. It remains one of my personal favorites, an eerie precognitive synchro involving numbers.

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Wolfgang Pauli, a physicist and Nobel laureate, was an early supporter of Jung’s theory on synchronicity and investigated the phenomenon as well. He had a rather striking experience with a set of numbers. Pauli was confounded by one of the unsolved mysteries of modern physics, the value of the fine structure constant, which involves the number 137. As author and physicist F. David Peats explained, “…while the other fundamental constants of nature are all immensely small or enormously large, this fine structure constant 1/137 turns out to be a human-sized number. This number…and its place in the scale of the universe particularly puzzled Pauli.”

When Pauli was admitted to the hospital at the age of 58 for a routine operation and learned he would be in room 137, he supposedly said, “I will never get out of here.”

And he was right. He died shortly afterward.

When it comes to communication with living things that are not human, many of us tend to become skeptical. Do animal communicators really hold conversations with dogs, cats and even wild creatures? Or, are they saying how an animal might respond…if they could think like a human?

Let’s take that a step further. How about communication with plants? Is that possible? In his non-fiction book, Travels, Michael Crichton talks about communicating with a cactus during a New Age workshop. At first, the cactus wouldn’t say a thing, but finally after days Crichton describes his conversation with the somewhat sickly looking plant that wasn’t getting enough sunshine.

Let’s take it another step. How about communicating with a tree that provides a precognitive message? That story follows. It comes from a beautifully written book called, Partnering with Nature: The Wild Path to Reconnecting with the Earth, by Catriona MacGregor (yes, one of the clan).

She describes arriving home from the office in Oregon late one evening. It was already dark on a moonless night. She was carrying a bag of groceries as she walked carefully up the unlit stone path to her house. “As I turned the corner to walk through the dark, empty lot next to my house, I saw a soft, glowing light. A golden-white light illuminated the lot warmly, like the delicate rays of the first morning sun.”

To her surprise, the strange light seemed to be emanating from a large tree in the lot. “I searched around for a more plausible source of the light, yet I could find none.” After going inside and putting her groceries down, she returned for another look. She expected to see only darkness. “Instead, the tree illuminated the lot and surrounding buildings as brightly as if the moon had come to rest gently on the soft grass.” A deep sense of peace, beauty and joy enveloped her.

“…I knew that the light was the fire of the tree’s divine spirit—the tree’s very soul. There are no words to describe that which is known as intimately as a lover and yet remains unfathomable.”

The next day, she returned home earlier than usual. “When the empty lot next to our house came into view, I was stunned. What I saw was not the beautiful tree that I had communed with less than a day before. Instead, I saw a ghastly two-foot stump surrounded by tiny clumps of wood arbitrarily spewed around the lot….My sadness was immeasurable. Yet, I also recognized the miracle that had occurred. The tree, knowing of its impending demise, shone forth its inner light, sharing its everlasting soul with the rest of the world as if to say: Behold, I am more than bark and limbs and leaves and roots. I am eternal beauty and wonder. Celebrate and honor what I am and recognize that we are one and the same, as this marvel exists within yourself as well.”

Beautiful story, a precognitive tree.

This video is absolutely amazing. Thanks to Lauren Raines for posting the link on her website.