Welcome to The Mystical Underground

Sometimes, laughter really is the best medicine. The cartoon came from Adele Aldridge.

And the next  piece on Socrates was sent by Nancy McMoneagle:

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Keep this in mind the next time you are about to repeat a rumor or spread gossip.

In ancient Greece (469 – 399 BC), Socrates was widely lauded for his wisdom. One day an acquaintance ran up to him excitedly and said, “Socrates, do you know what I just heard about Diogenes?”

“Wait a moment,” Socrates replied, “Before you tell me I’d like you to pass a little test. It’s called the Triple Filter Test.”

“Triple filter?” asked the acquaintance.

“That’s right,” Socrates continued, “Before you talk to me about Diogenes let’s take a moment to filter what you’re going to say. The first filter is Truth. Have you made
absolutely sure that what you are about to tell me is true?”

“No,” the man said, “Actually I just heard about it.”

“All right,” said Socrates, “So you don’t really know if it’s true or not. Now let’s try the second filter, the filter of Goodness. Is what you are about to tell me about Diogenes something good?”

“No, on the contrary…”

“So,” Socrates continued, “You want to tell me something about Diogenes that may be bad, even though you’re not certain it’s true?”

The man shrugged, a little embarrassed. Socrates continued, “You may still pass the test though, because there is a third filter, the filter of Usefulness. Is what you want to tell me about Diogenes going to be useful to me?”

“No, not really.”

“Well,” concluded Socrates, “If what you want to tell me is neither True nor Good nor even Useful, why tell it to me or anyone at all?”

The man was bewildered and ashamed. This is an example of why Socrates was a great philosopher and held in such high esteem.

It also explains why Socrates never found out that Diogenes was banging his wife.

                                                                from realMyst

Ever since I found a game for my iPad called The Room, I’ve been on a search for other games that are comparable. The Room is really a game about synchronicity – where clues and hints guide you toward some new discovery. I’ve found two possible contenders, although neither of these games has the three-dimensional, tactile satisfaction of  The Room

The Lost City – at just 99 cents – isn’t just a bargain, it’s fun. The world you enter is beautifully rendered, deftly layered. The deeper I went into these layers, the more I discovered about myself. It was like an excavation of my own psyche, but within the parameters of the game. I was forced to think outside my comfort zone.

I know this probably sounds silly for an iPad game. But as I was playing around in this world, I was thinking that it’s the same format Dan Brown used in The DaVinci Code, where the main character, played by Tom Hanks in the movie, was forced to solve riddles and puzzles that revealed the next layer of the mystery, and the next and the next until he arrived at the truth: Christ had impregnated Mary Magdalene and that bloodline survived to the present day.

This game lacks the stunning, three dimensional graphics of The Room. But I love the Indiana Jones feel of the game, the length is more satisfying, and I still haven’t solved the last several clues. So, stumped as I am, I looked for other games by the same developers and ran across The Secrets of the Grisly Manor.

This one has so many puzzles and twists and turns that you really have to remain vigilant and take notes. It helps if you have an eidetic memory, which I don’t. I admit to using my iPhone to snap photos of a clue in one frame so that I could use them in another frame. No synchros here, just  one foot in front of the other.

So my brief foray into iPad games has yielded a couple of insights that I can apply to my fiction.  Plant your clues and your puzzles, but don’t over-explain. When you can, cut to the chase. Every story, like every game, is predicated on a quest – for truth, love, revenge, knowledge, spiritual wisdom, or the key ingredient in your grandfather’s invention!

In fact, after I solved Grisly Manor,I embarked on another search for games and found realMyst, the Myst video game from 20 years ago now beautifully rendered for the iPad.  In many ways, it’s better than The Room, visually stunning, complex, and it even has a story.  It’s pricier than other games – $6.99 – but it instills such a spirit of adventure for exploration that it’s worth  the extra few dollars.

In between my searches, I dropped by Whitley Strieber’s Unknown Country   and watched a video from the International Space Station of objects zipping across the continent in what seemed like seconds.  On Strieber’s site, these objects are called Fastwalkers. The word hit me. It’s now the title of my new novel, which doesn’t have anything to do with UFOs. But the world resonates. It fits the story. So,four games, about $10 of entertainment, and new creative insights. A good deal all around for the early part  of 2013.

I’ve been reading several UFO-related books and one of them is quite compelling. A.D.: After Disclosure, by Richard M. Dolan and Bryce Zabel. It  uses a what if premise  and takes us through the first hour, day, month, and year after disclosure occurs. How will disclosure change governments? Religions? Cultures? You and me?

The authors speculate that the event which will trigger disclosure  could be a mass sighting. But we’ve had those before – the Phoenix Lights (1997), the Hudson Valley  sightings (1980s), Gulfport, Florida (late 80s, early 90s) Moscow (1990), Mexico City (1991), Belgium, Stephenville, Texas (2008) Norway (1980s). Some of these mass sightings had excellent video and photographs  and received, as the authors note, at least some press coverage.

“In several of the American cases, there were behind-the-scenes pressures to prevent mass panic. Frequently, the Federal Aviation Administration  (FAA) was on-the-spot, charged with stonewalling pubic inquiries with absurd explanations that were intended to prevent further press inquiry.”

However, this is now 2013 and millions of people worldwide have  Smart phones with high definition video and camera capabilities. As the authors point out, the steady growth of technology is “one great inexorable force, relentlessly pushing us all into the future, into the light of truth.”

But when you consider that the secrecy about UFOs and ETs has existed at least since Roswell in 1947, it may take more than thousands of high def videos and photos of UFOs for disclosure to reach a tipping point. Dolan and  Zabel speculate about the existence of a group that is actually in charge of the UFO secrecy. They call this cabal the Breakaway Group. Thanks to worldwide assets, this group isn’t beholden to any political or military authorities. “…it’s likely that the Breakaway Group answers not so much to the president of the United States as it does to private, internationally based individuals and groups.”

Why would these secret-keepers, these UFO/ET power brokers, surrender their silence?  They probably wouldn’t do it willingly, but circumstances may prompt them to do so.

There are sections in the book where the authors speculate about who these aliens are, what they want, how they think and it makes for fascinating reading.  They also mention the possibility that perhaps these beings aren’t aliens at all but are inter-dimensional travelers or perhaps even time travelers – us from the future?

There’s a fascinating section in the book about how both news and entertainment will change after disclosure. In fact, one of the authors, Bryce Zabel, has created five prime time network series, and I wonder if he worked out a possible series in the writing of A.D. this book. “…imagine a new show called Above and Beyond. In this series, almost anything goes, but its stock in trade is an aerial point of view, seeing the world below from a POV of a flying saucer. This series would be a vehicle to take audiences into previously classified labs.”

Reality shows, newscasts, both print and digital newspapers will be scrambling for new programming.  And late-night comedians will have a whole new spectrum of material for jokes.  The authors also explore the impact on art, publishing, the economy, technology, medicine.

It’s a fascinating read.

The second book, Nigel Kerner’s Grey Aliens and the Harvesting of Souls, has a strange but not implausible premise: the Grays are bioengineered, don’t have souls, and are abducting humans to create hybrids that will have souls.  In other words, their mission is, well, spiritual. Sort of.  It parallels what one abductee said: “They don’t grok us.” They don’t understand our emotional attachments to each other, to pets, to anything.

Kerrner’s premise is couched in a dense, complex cosmology he has worked out about the nature of reality, the universe, and a supreme being. I started stumbling with this book when I read this line:

“If abortions are freely available and are carried out, then soon the natural balance of debt-engendered reincarnation will be upset; in time, no soul will be able to come through to the exact conditions required for a particular karma to be expedited.”

Huh? Really? Where’s free will in this picture? This idea felt intuitively wrong to me, so I wrote my friend Carol Bowman and asked her what she thought of that quote. Carol’s written two books on children’s past lives –Children’s Past Lives and Return from Heaven – and has an active past-life regression practice. I figured she could shed some light on this.

Her response:

“It seems that some souls aren’t even that involved with the forming fetus in the early stages of pregnancy.   And it seems that each soul coming in responds to the abortion differently.  If you have a copy of Return From Heaven I have a chapter on that called U-turn in the Womb.  Also, if the mother communicates with the soul of the unborn child and explains why she is aborting, the incoming soul can make other plans:  come later or go somewhere else.

“The whole concept of “debt-engendered” reincarnation is old school, as far as I’m concerned.  It sounds like the old punitive concept of reincarnation.  Who is this guy?”

I didn’t finish Kerner’s book. But I’m off now to finished A.D.: After Disclosure.

our Schrodinger’s cat, Simba

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I happened to stop by the blog for the Monroe Institute the other day and found a great article on synchronicity and manifestation. They had gotten the article from a site called conscious creation.

The gist of the synchro is  simple and astounding. A couple had lost their cat. They spent six months searching for it, then finally went to their local animal shelter to adopt a new pet. While they were there, another couple brought in a cat they had just found and…yes, you guessed it! – it was the first couple’s lost cat.

Powerful synchro, we can all agree on that, right?  Well, the author of the post doesn’t stop there.

“… there’s also more to learn here about how everything was and wasn’t lining up,” wrote Kristen.  “The article shares that the couple was heartbroken and looked for their cat every day, so just imagine the sad, not connected, not-having vibe that might have been there, perhaps coupled with feelings of guilt as well. And after six months of working through these feelings, they shifted their vibe. Maybe they thought that so much time had passed that it was unlikely they’d see their beloved cat again. Maybe they decided that even if it wasn’t their lost cat, they really wanted to have a cat in their lives again. Maybe they thought that they’d done all they could and perhaps it was just time to move on, knowing other cats in the shelter also needed good homes.

“Vibrationally, they released their ‘struggle to find’, and their resistance to NOT having their cat, and stepped into the vibe of HAVING a cat, even if it wasn’t their previously lost pet, but a cat they wanted, nonetheless. Whatever their motivation, when they were lined up with having a cat again, the perfect cat appeared for them!”

She expanded this thought with some personal examples, then wrote: “Resistance, either to your current circumstances or undesired potential circumstances, splits focus between what you want and what you don’t want, but can also be part of the path of shifting energy from where it is to where you want it to be, like being led along step by step. The feeling of knowing that you’re ready to move forward is an indication that your energy is now freed up from old resistance and attachments (positive or negative) and focused, no matter what all of the circumstances might look like to the rational mind at the time. Shift your energy and probabilities shift around to meet your new choices, often in ways that you wouldn’t have been able to predict from your old perspective!”

This struck me as parallel to the Hicks/Abraham teachings, as well the material in the Seth books by Jane Roberts. The Abraham teachings talk a lot about bringing yourself into alignment with what you want.  Seth’s foundation is you get what you concentrate on.

In both belief systems, when we hold on to old hurts, grievances, grudges, we get more of the same because that’s where our emotional focus lies. When we withdraw our attention from the negative, we are essentially disempowering it and eventually it simply falls out of our experience. This is especially true if we are turning our emotional focus toward what we love and appreciate about our lives.

My problem with this is that it always has sounded too simplistic.  And yet. It also resonates intuitively and has panned out for me at certain times in my life. The simplest example is the manifestation of a parking space when you need one. A more complex application is meeting your soul mate, landing your dream job, living your bliss.

Kary Mullis, Nobel-prize winner in chemistry in 1993, wrote a wonderful memoir,   Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, where he discusses some of these ideas. In one personal story, he talks specifically about Schrödinger’s cat, a thought experiment. Here are the scientific specifics.   The theory is actually posing a question (from Wikipedia): “when does a quantum system stop existing as a superposition of states and become one or the other?”

In practical terms, let’s say you’ve applied to colleges and grad schools. Your top choice is Harvard. One afternoon, you receive a letter from Harvard. In the world of Kerry Mullis  (and Seth and Abraham) until you open that envelope, everything is possible. You are accepted and you aren’t, the cat is both alive and dead. Which path do you want more than anything else in the universe? When you open that envelope, you discover what you desire at the most profound levels of your being.

In 1950, Albert Einstein wrote to Schrödinger about how he “sees that one cannot get around the assumption of reality, if only one is honest. Most of them (other physicists) simply do not see what sort of risky game they are playing with reality—reality as something independent of what is experimentally established. Their interpretation is, however, refuted most elegantly by your system of radioactive atom + amplifier + charge of gunpowder + cat in a box, in which the psi-function of the system contains both the cat alive and blown to bits. Nobody really doubts that the presence or absence of the cat is something independent of the act of observation.^”

As Mullis wrote in his book, “things can be immediately and intimately connected to each other even though they are light years apart.”

And isn’t that how synchronicity speaks to us?

It’s not enough for me to set my intentions for the year. It can’t be just  an intellectual exercise. I have to back my intentions with powerful emotions, profound desires, I have to come into alignment vibrationally with what I want. Prosperity, health, and happiness are not abstract concepts. They are vibrational realities. As Jimi Hendrix sang in Purple Haze,  “Excuse me, while I kiss the sky.”

And now, I’m off to kiss that sky.

yoga studio in Costa Rica

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About once a week I take a yoga class at a studio about ten minutes away. It’s a studio where I teach a 6-week meditation course 3 or 4 times a year. Often times, the teacher begins the class by suggesting that we set an intention for the class.

Sometimes my intention is just to make it through the class without too much trouble. I usually take advanced vinyasa flow classes and typically the other students are 20-25 years younger than me. Other times, I focus on a project I’m working on and getting through a block. But on one recent morning–the morning after I’d paid a bunch of holiday bills –I said to myself ‘Bring in money, bring it in soon.’ Not exactly a spiritual intention, by any means, but a practical one.

The class with this particular teacher was as challenging as usual with a lot of tricky arm balance poses and twisting postures that require a flexible spine. When the class was over, I reminded everyone of my upcoming meditation course and headed for the door.

As I put on my shoes, one of the students tapped me on the shoulder and handed me an envelope with my name on it. “What’s this?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s a Christmas card from some of the students. I noticed you hadn’t picked it up.” I thanked her and walked out my car with my mid-January Christmas card. I slid behind the wheel and opened the envelope to find $30 in cash, a total surprise.

Then I remembered the intention I’d set for the class and laughed. That certainly was a quick response from the Universe. Cash handed to me before I’d even left the studio. Not quite the quantity I was thinking of, but I decided  to look at it as symbolic. After all, it had seemingly manifested out of thin air.