Welcome to The Mystical Underground

I received an e-mail recently from Charles Fontaine, the Quebecois man who I wrote about here in the Quebec Encounters series here that later formed the heart of Aliens in the Backyard. Essentially, Charles has concluded that aliens are demons from the spirit world. His comments, which I’ve included in a slightly edited version below, compelled me (Rob) to consider the question of what lies at the root of the alien encounter experience, and about aliens, in general.

I think there is a connection between aliens and the spirit world. They seem to have access to it in ways we don’t comprehend. But I also think aliens are physical beings. Though some may have the ability to be both physical and non-physical.

I don’t know what aliens are or where they’re from, but I firmly believe they are not all the same—not physically, not mentally, and definitely not of the same intentions. They can’t all be lumped as either benevolent or evil. The same goes for humans, of course. And the same goes for human races and nationalities. Categorizing with specific attributes, whether positive or negative, only goes so far before such ideas start to unravel.

To say that all aliens are various forms of lower spirit beings – demons or Satan or fallen angels – then we are essentially saying there are no aliens. There are only lower, under-evolved demonic beings that appear as aliens.

It’s an interesting premise and the opposite of the ancient alien theme that implies all spirit beings and their revelations are cases of mistaken identity. It’s all aliens and no spirits. (I won’t even go into the skeptical/debunker perspective, which nullifies both possibilities!)

I think it’s much more complicated than either viewpoint – all aliens vs. all demons.

So here’s Charlie’s perspective. He makes references to people involved in his story, such as the pharmacist, the medium, and the ufologist (Jean Casault). Although I don’t agree with Charles, I think it’s worthwhile allowing him to express his thoughts and feelings, which are closely linked.

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Remember what the medium told me when I’ve asked: Why me? He said they (the spirits) were telling him to tell me that I should give myself time and I would understand,  because I’m well grounded to the earth.

They (aliens) were and are no good and here is how I’ve found out:

The third time that I met with the Pharmacist, I asked him: How did you find out that something related to aliens was going on with me and how could you point out exactly what was going on? How could you? He was amazed and confused for a moment and said: I thought that you had told me.

The same with the neighbors…. and the same with the medium with the dog’s left paw. All the strangers starting a discussion directly related to the subject.

Then there was the bang on the woodstove and the loud screaming coming out of the stove at 3:00 AM, and the black shadows.

Think of it this way: it is all the same, they want us to believe in different things such as, Bigfoot, Aliens, Vampires … you name them all… I believe they are all the same and Evil…SATAN

They possessed all the people coming to me. They used them to communicate with me. Tell me why the Pharmacist would not remember that he had asked the question directly?

They want us to believe they are good. Remember the medium had told me that they were good. But they talked through him to lie to me about their identity.

We (my wife and I) have lived through a horror movie. Why would they be connected with my visit to the graveyard?

Demons can make themselves appear in multiple images. They use people around their target to communicate. They probably took me to the book store so I would connect with you as well, because this is what they wanted.

I haven’t lost my senses. On the contrary, I realized as time went by that they are here to steal our souls.

Casault is wrong. He is saying that people such as me are cowards, and that we should not be afraid. The aliens are good. The problem is that Casault is saying openly that God does not exist. This is exactly the message that they – ALIENS (EVIL ONES) want us to tell throughout the community.

A couple of weeks ago, I dropped by Barnes and Noble to cruise the shelves and find out what new books were on the market. I usually make note of them and then check out the e-book version, which is always less expensive. But for some reason, on this particular day, I picked up The 5^th Wave by Rick Yancey and read the back cover:

They know how we think

They know how to kill us.

They’ve taken everything worth living for.

Now they’ve come to take the things worth dying for.

I opened the book to a quote by Stephen Hawking: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

Next page:

THE 1^ST WAVE: Lights Out

THE 2^ND WAVE: Surf’s Up

THE 3^RD WAVE: Pestilence

THE 4^TH WAVE: Silencer

Then I read the first page and knew I was going to love this book, that Rob would love it, that Megan would devour it. I was right. This book and its sequel- The Infinite Sea – went to the Florida Keys with us and after Megan got her hands on it, I never saw the hardcover again, so I downloaded the e-book and its sequel and Rob and I read it on our iPads.

Granted, I enjoy Dystopian novels, but The 5^th Wave is probably the best novel – Dystopian or otherwise – I’ve read in the last 20 years. The story is riveting and the structure and pacing of the story are impeccable. It’s the kind of story that sticks with you even when you aren’t reading it. You can’t help but think, What if? As one writer friend put it, The 5^th Wave is a sophisticated version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It’s actually a lot more than that.

In essence, an alien race takes over the planet by implanting the consciousness of their individual citizens into the bodies of human fetuses. The alien consciousness lies dormant in humans until the early teens and then co-exists with the human until the 1^st wave occurs – lights out.

But it’s not just the electrical power grid that goes down. Nothing electrical or mechanical works- cars, iPads, cell phones, computers, planes, boats, nada. Back to the Dark Ages. This part of the story is told through the perspective of 16-year-old Cassie, who loses her entire family – except for her younger brother, Sam, who is eventually taken away in a bus by military types to Wright Patterson Air Force base. She’s a compelling, complex character.

Another perspective in the story is that of Evan Walker, who looks human but isn’t. He rescues Cassie at one point and falls in love with her, definitely not a component of the alien agenda. Walker may be one of the most intriguing characters in the novel.

Then there’s the perspective of Ben Parrish, a high school kid on whom Cassie had a crush when the world was normal. He is inducted into the 5^th wave army at Wright Patterson, where children as young as five are trained to kill the “intruders.”

To say more than this would give away some essential plot elements that are so deftly crafted you anxiously turn pages just to find out what happens. As Megan remarked when she finished the book, “This story is a mind trip. The author leads you in one direction and suddenly you realize the direction is something else entirely.”

Yancey has done his homework – or has experienced something himself. He knows about the importance of owls in abduction scenarios. He knows about utter terror of the unknown. He understands the human psyche, the human soul.

As a writer, I came away from this novel with a deep appreciation for how important it is for a novelist to write the story as you envision it. Yes, an agent and editor can help to fine-tune the idea, can urge you to dig deeper within yourself to find the elements that transform the book from ordinary to extraordinary.

But in the end, a story is between you, the writer, and the characters you create. If you try to force the characters to do something that isn’t in their nature to do, they resist, dig in their heels, and your story falls apart. At no point in The 5^th Wave does the story fall apart. You, the reader, have questions and all of them aren’t answered in the first book. But enough of the questions are answered so that you buy the sequel.

Not surprisingly, The 5^th Wave has already been optioned as a film. I can’t wait to see how this shakes out as a movie. It’s an epic fated for the big screen.

ow I’m halfway through The Infinite Sea.

As authors, we’re surrounded by books. So it’s not too surprising that some of our synchros relate to the world of literature. Fiction and non-fiction. However, it’s a bit unusual to experience two such synchronicities within a couple of hours, which is what happened to me (Rob) today.

Last night we went to dinner with a couple that I met in my yoga class. Dwayne is a graphic artist and Rose works for pharmaceutical company. She’s politically active, volunteering for campaigns and liberal causes. She also likes to read political biographies and passes them onto us when she and Dwayne are done with them. That works for us, since the books she gives us usually are not ones we would pick up on our own. Such was the case last night when after dinner she handed us A Fighting Chance, by Elizabeth Warren.

Warren is the senior senator from Massachusetts, and one of the most progressive members of Congress. Trish is always saying that she would love to see Warren take on Hilary Clinton in a Democratic primary fight in the 2016 presidential campaign. Considering the timing of her biography, it could happen.

I like Sen. Warren as well, but wonder if she might be more effective as a senator. Once in the presidency, there seems to be little time for pursuing innovative ideas. Pressure comes from all sides and such ideas are watered down, ie. the Affordable Care Act, which was a compromise, actually originally a Republican concept to keep private enterprise at the center of health care.

All that said, I was curious about Warren’s book, but hadn’t cracked it open yet this afternoon, even though it was on the kitchen table within reach. I pointed at the book and commented to Trish that Elizabeth Warren was a smarty pants, a phrase that she said she’d never heard me use to describe anyone. I wasn’t sure why I said it, except I know Warren is very bright.

As Trish walked away, I reached for the book and opened it at random, turning to page 213. Here’s the first thing I read: I have two master’s degrees. I’m smart. A smarty pants, I thought. Synchronicity.

Well sort of. Actually, when I looked at the context of the comment, I realized that Warren wasn’t talking about herself, but was referring to someone else who had approached her. Still, it was another example of the library angel coming into play. You’re looking for a smarty pants. Well, here’s one. It just wasn’t a direct reference to Warren.

I moved on to my office and went back to work on a novel, one that I’ve been writing and re-writing for several years. I’m in the third version of the story, and this time it feels right. A while later, I got up from my desk, walked into the family room, which doubles as our library since the walls are covered with bookcases. My back was bothering me from some yard work I’d done so I went into a common yoga pose, a standing forward bend, letting my upper body hang, in order to stretch out my lower back.

As I hung there, a book on the bottom shelf of the nearest bookcase caught my attention. The title on the spine was upside down, so it took a moment to figure out what it said. It was just one word: DOMINION. I’d never noticed that book, even though it has the exact same title as my novel. I picked it off the shelf, and realized it was non-fiction. The sub-title is: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy. Definitely one of Trish’s books, I thought.

So again I opened it at random and jabbed my index finger at the page on the right. Here’s what I pointed at: “Dominica wouldn’t have any business as a member of this political organization.”

Wow! That too is a synchro. Dominica is the name of the antagonist in Trish’s last three novels: Esperanza, Ghost Key, and Apparition. Since a script of Ghost Key is now circulating, I hope that little synchro was a nudge in the right direction.

If you want to read more about the library angel, type that phrase into the search box at the right, and three or more stories will appear.

I think we come into life with an agenda, a checkist, if you will, of things we would like to achieve, experience, and do during our time on the planet in this life.

Some of us choose to work on personal issues – the evolution of our creativity, our spirituality, our ability to nurture and be nurtured, our craft. Other people choose to be born into this time and space to usher in monumental change. To help bring about a paradigm shift.

Russel Brand may be one of the latter. After seeing him on MSNBC with Lawrence O’Donnell, and hearing that he has teamed up with Naomi Klein, another revolutionary, I intend to buy his new book, Revolution. Brand’s premise is whether we should “ditch capitalism and save the planet or ditch the planet and save capitalism.” Why? Think about this for a moment: The combined wealth of the 300 wealthiest Americans is greater than that of the poorest 85 million.

That’s a depressing – and empowering – statistic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV4LAzwykY4

One evening in 1885, French author Guy de Maupassant was experiencing what many writers do at some point in their careers – writer’s block.  He was working on a short story that refused to come together.

Suddenly, a figure appeared in the doorway of his office, strolled across the room, and sat down across from him. The writer was astonished that anyone had gotten into his study and even more shocked when the intruder proceeded to dictate what he’d written so far on the story. And right then, Guy de Maupassant realized the intruder was a doppelganger – his own double.

When the double vanished, Maupassant continued writing the story as it had been dictated – the tale of an invisible, evil spirit that lives within a man, yet independent from him. The story, The Horla,  is thought to be a harbinger of Maupassant’s subsequent madness and death.

Maupassant’s experience was unusual in that not many Doppelgangers provide information, much less dictate an entire short story!

Doppelgangers – doubles – have been reported for centuries throughout a variety of cultures, and probably date back to pagan times. In some cultures, the doppelganger was thought to be a manifestation of the soul.  Among ancient Egyptians, a ka was a spirit double. In Norse mythology, a vardøger  is a kind of ghostly double who, when seen, is performing its counterpart’s actions in advance. But could some Doppelgangers be astral projections?

A colleague of Harvard professor William James, a fellow professor, confided in James that one evening in late 1883 or early 1884, he tried an experiment in astral projection. The man apparently felt comfortable telling James about the experiment, but wanted to remain otherwise anonymous for fear that his more conservative colleagues would find the experiment frivolous.

Apparently the professor had been seeing a female friend quite often, “A,” and they shared an interest in the possibility of astral bodies. So on the particular evening of his experiment, he sat in the dark by an open window that faced her house, which lay about half a mile. The professor told James that he tried as hard as he could to “wish” himself in A’s presence. This state of wishing” lasted for about ten minutes. But he reported that nothing unusual had happened.

Yet, the next day, A reported that during the previous evening, while she’d been having dinner with someone, she’d seen the professor through the door. She told her companion about it. But the professor’s projection retreated and was never seen by A’s friend. She was convinced about the reality of the event.

We’ve written about Doppelgangers before  and about some of the famous people who have experienced them.  But every time I run across another story, I’m newly intrigued. Our blogging friend Mike Perry has experienced Doppelgangers several times.  Has anyone else?

I came across this on Laure Raines’ blog, Threads of the Spiderwoman, which is like visiting an artist’s rendition of Joseph Campbell:

Mercury, the trickster planet that rules Gemini and Virgo, turned retrograde on Saturday, October 4, in Scorpio and has traveled back into Libra, where it will turn direct on October 25. This planet turns retrograde three times a year and is supposedly a time for review, revision, and reconsideration. For writers, it’s a wonderful time to revise, rewrite, re-plot. For daily life, it can be frustrating.

Mercury rules travel and communication – including electronic transfers, the purchase of electronics of any kind- contracts, both verbal and written. The general advice is that it isn’t wise to schedule travel during a retro, to buy expensive electronics, to sign contracts, to make irrevocable decisions about relationships.

So, here’s how our retrograde has panned out. In one electronic snafu, $1800 was mistakenly transferred to a credit card we don’t even use. In another electronic bank withdrawal, we were charged for $500 we didn’t withdraw and had to file a dispute over an ATM withdrawal. In this case, I learned that when you go to a bank and punch in an amount that goes over your daily withdrawal amount – $500 for our account – and then cancel the withdrawal, the money goes into a “bank receptacle.” Your account is charged for the withdrawal – until the bank “balances” their books.

The $1800 eventually found its way back to our account, as did the $500, but only after hours spent on the phone and at the bank.

During the retrograde, we took a five-day trip to the Florida keys, to stay at my agent’s home on Sugarloaf Key. Here’s the view:

He had told me to pick up the key from his neighbor. Given the snafus earlier in the week, I was concerned that the neighbor might not be home and that if he wasn’t, I didn’t even have a cell number for him. My bad. I should have gotten a number. I voiced my concern at one point during the drive to Sugarloaf and Megan sort of rolled her eyes. “Mom, the fact that you believe in these retro snafus may be why they happen.”

Okay, I accept that. I accept that our beliefs create our reality. But I also know how astrology works. Just as our beliefs can’t influence the tides during a full moon, I don’t think our beliefs alone can negate the influence of a Mercury retrograde. We can mitigate the effects, but one way or another, we are forced to slow down, reconsider, revise, review.

So we arrive on Sugarloaf. I run next door to ask Joe the neighbor for the key to the house. Joe isn’t home. I hear a small dog barking inside. I knock and knock. No Joe. No phone number. I walk back to Al’s place and inform Rob and Megan that Joe isn’t home. We unload the car and settle in on the porch. It’s late afternoon, 95 and humid. We wait. We break open the cooler, snacks. I call Al’s assistant, ask if he has a number for Joe. He doesn’t. Al is on his way back from France and his assistant has no way to contact him.

We walk down to the water, dip our feet into the coolness. Megan hears a car pull in next door, so I run over there again. A young man stands at the top of the stairs. “Are you Joe?” I ask.

“Nope. I’m Andy.”

Great. I introduce myself, explain the situation,  ask Andy if he has Joe’s phone number. He does, but I can tell he is hesitant about giving it to me. He’s one of Joe’s tenants and has dropped by to leave off his rent check. I explain some more. He gives me the number and I call Joe and reach voice mail. Within minutes, Joe calls me back. I explain who I am.

“Oh, wow, Al called me and I totally forgot. I meant to put the keys under the mat. Are you at the house?”

“Yes.”

“I’m in Key West. I’ll be there in about forty minutes.”

Near dark, Joe arrives. We finally get into the house after a two-hour wait.

Fast forward. We reserve a boat for Sunday and are supposed to split the price with 3 of Megan’s friends. But Saturday evening, two of the friends back out. We learn there is a $200 cancellation fee for a boat that will cost us $250 plus gas to rent. Sunday morning, we – the MacGregors and Miguel – decide to go ahead with the rental, for a smaller boat, which is less expensive.

Fantastic. We’re off into the blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico, four of us in 17-foot long boat. Unbelievable weather, incredible views, even an island visit where we can walk ashore. Here’s a shot as we’re approaching:

After we left the island, we went in search of Looe Key, a great snorkeling spot over the coral reefs. En route, somewhere in the shallows, there’s a sickening screech, the engine dies,  and the boat refuses to start.

I call the guy who rented us the boat, reach voice mail. Miguel and Rob keep trying to restart the engine. It finally catches. We snorkel through a coral reef that is stunning, then head for Looe Key, where the coral reefs and snorkeling are supposed to be even better.

But a mile from Looe Key, the water is suddenly infested with Portuguese Man of War. These beautiful, alien-looking creatures have toxic stings that paralyze their prey – fish and plankton. For humans, the painful sting isn’t fatal. But I suspect if you’re attacked and stung by dozens of these suckers simultaneously – and that’s how thick they were in the water – it might be a different story. Was it mating season? A migration? We didn’t know and sped back to the island where we could walk ashore.

Man of War- under Megan’s feet, those strange blobs in the water, a luminous pink:

We get lost on our return to the channel where we are  supposed to meet the boat’s owner. With the phone GPS on now, Megan guides us to the right channel, the right canal, and we make it in with five minutes to spare before we have to pay a hefty overtime rate. Relief. Then the boat is pulled out of the water and oh guess what? One of the engine’s propeller blades is bent and cracked and it will cost $400 to repair.

So, our final tally for a boat excursion that was fantastic? About $700. But, all things considered, we didn’t pay for lodging. I figure it’s the total cost of the vacation in paradise. Megan, embracing it:

Rob, embracing it:

Megan and Miguel, enjoying it:

Megan’s dog, Nika, navigating:

During this same period:

I landed an astrology project and wrote the editor about signing a contract under a Mercury retro. Yes, I know, it sounds nuts. But in the past, any contract I have signed under a retro has turned out to be a major hassle. To my surprise, the editor said he would release the advance money and I could sign after the retro, if Al was okay with it. He was.

Five attempts were made to hack one of our email accounts, but the attempts were, fortunately, blocked.

I lost my watch – and found it.

Rob lost a pair of glasses and didn’t find them.

Despite all this, we had a fantastic time!

Go figure. Ha-ha, Trickster.

Today, we went to a local science museum for the opening day of an Egyptian afterlife exhibit. This intriguing exhibit has been seen by more than 4.5 million people worldwide since it first came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2004.

According to the Palm Beach Post, the exhibit was revamped in 2010 and now has more than 200 new artifacts, some of which are at least 5,000 years old and came from several British museums. The updated exhibit was most recently in Taipei, Taiwan, where nearly a million and a half people waited up to six hours to see it.

I’m happy to say that we didn’t have to wait at all. Rob, Lynn and Bruce Gernon and I breezed right in. The celebrity of the exhibit is a 3,000-year-old mummy believed to be the son of Ramses II, the Egyptian pharaoh known as Ramses the Great. Now here’s the interesting thing about Ramses. Museums that have housed the mummy all claim to have had “some sort of unexplained phenomena,” as the Post put it.

In Taipei, sixty seconds after the mummy was placed at its location, an earthquake hit Taipei that knocked out all the lights in the museum- except the one shining down on Ramses’ son. The young woman who was telling visitors about the mummy mentioned this story, so I asked her if anything had happened since the mummy had arrived at the science museum.

She lowered her voice and said, “Actually, yes, there have been some strange reports.” The night after the exhibit had arrived, two employees had returned to the museum after hours and were gathering up their belongings when they heard moaning. “The museum was closed, okay? No visitors were here, no employees except them.”

“What’d they do?” I asked.

“One of them said, ‘Do you hear that? I think the moaning is coming from the exhibit. The moment he said that word, moaning, the sound stopped.”

“Has anything else happened?” Lynn asked.

“Some visitors have reported that the mummy’s eyes move.”

By then, Lynn and I had our phones out, with our Ghost Radar apps up and running. Anomalies kept appearing on the screen and every so often a word appeared on her screen or mine that seemed connected to what we were doing. Pretty soon, a couple more employees came over to take a look at our apps and wanted to know what it was called and was it a free download? We were probably the oddest group of visitors today!

The other mummy that intrigued us was that of a young girl who was supposedly between four and eight when she died. But the mummy was so small – maybe two feet long – that we were confused about her supposed age. The girl’s mummy recently had a CT scan at a local children’s hospital to determine her cause of death. That will be revealed on October 16. When we used our ghost radar apps around the container in which she lay, our screens really lit up.

The mummies were laid out in a room that supposedly resembled a burial chamber. They are inside plastic cases that are regulated for temperature and humidity in order to preserve the mummies. And they travel in these cases I asked the young woman who had told us about the male mummy if the images on the walls were the original ones. She said the images had been replicated by archeologists – a daunting task that certainly looks like it could have taken decades to do!

We even saw pets and animals that had been preserved. Here, a falcon:

Here, an alligator or crocodile and cow’s eyes…Not sure why those would be preserved.

It was a fascinating exhibit and somehow, when you see something as old as these mummies and artifacts, you can’t help but feel a sense of wonderment and awe. And I’m sure some of the employees will be downloading the Ghost Radar app to use after dark, when the museum is empty of visitors.

our mailbox, tropical storm Isaac, 2012

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Most of South Florida sits about six feet above sea level, on a porous limestone plateau. There are no hills. The area is as flat as an envelope and crisscrossed by more than 2,000 miles of regional canals and levees that are intended to prevent flooding in surrounding neighborhoods.

“Imagine Swiss cheese, and you’ll have a pretty good idea what the rock under southern Florida looks like,” says Glenn Landers, a senior engineer at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.  This means that during high tides – or when the water management district releases more water into the canals – water seeps into yards, roads, beneath buildings. In Miami, this seepage at high tide has already become a big problem.

 From a recent piece in the New York Times:

The sunny-day flooding was happening again. During high tide one recent afternoon, Eliseo Toussaint looked out the window of his Alton Road laundromat and watched bottle-green saltwater seep from the gutters, fill the street and block the entrance to his front door.

“This never used to happen,” Mr. Toussaint said. “I’ve owned this place eight years, and now it’s all the time.”

Down the block at an electronics store it is even worse. Jankel Aleman, a salesman, keeps plastic bags and rubber bands handy to wrap around his feet when he trudges from his car to the store through ever-rising waters.

Alton Road runs right through the heart of trendy South Beach, the Art Deco district where a lot of the original Miami Vice TV show was filmed.

Regardless of whether you believe that climate change is man-made, part of a natural cycle, or some combination of both, it appears that South Florida may be ground zero for the rising oceans. The National Climate Assessment, a scientific report recently issued on global warming and climate change, pinpointed Miami as one of the most vulnerable cities.

“The theme of the report is that climate change is not a future thing, it’s a ‘happening-now’ thing,” said Leonard Berry, a contributing author of the new report and director of the Florida Center for Environmental Studies at Florida Atlantic University. “Alton Road is one of the now things.”

Our area of Wellington lies fifteen miles or so inland from the Atlantic and is between thirteen and fifteen feet above sea level.  So, okay, if the seas rise three or four feet, the town will still be high and dry right? Not necessarily. In August 2012, we got a taste of what can happen when the canals fail to do what they were designed to do.

When Hurricane Isaac impacted South Florida, is was just a tropical storm and never made landfall. But it dumped 15 to 20  inches of rain in Palm Beach County in about a 24 hour period and that proved to be too much too fast for drainage canals and pumps. Entire neighborhoods flooded.

I remember that when I drove to the gym that morning, the rain was minimal. We were told the storm had moved on. When I left the gym an hour later, the rain pounded my car, visibility had shrunk to maybe two inches, and I later learned that a band of thunderstorms had stalled just off the coast. When I turned into our neighborhood, water rose to halfway up the doors. I drove up on the sidewalk and through yards, but the water overwhelmed my car, a Mazda 3, and it stalled.

as the water began to recede

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I called Rob and told him what had happened. He advised me to try to start the car and if it wouldn’t start, I should just leave it where it was and hoof it back to the house. I kept turning the key in the ignition and eventually, the engine caught and I was able to make it into our driveway and on into the garage, where the overwhelmed engine promptly died.

The rain didn’t cease. It kept coming down. We watched the water pouring up through the drains, and out in the street and into our yards. At one point, our mailbox looked like an isolated island. The water crept up our driveway and the front yard and sidewalk. It drew closer and closer to the house and our garage. If the water flooded our garage, if it reached the front door, it wouldn’t have to rise more than a quarter of an inch to get into the house.

When you are witness to an excess of any element, you realize just how powerless you are when pitted against nature. I kept thinking of the flooding of New Orleans when the levees broke in the aftermath of Katrina. I imagined Rob and I and our animals on the roof of our house. I completely freaked myself out.

We were stranded in our house for two days- but not on the roof! By the time we were finally able to drive out in our SUV, the canals across the street and behind our neighborhood were still washing across the road. The water management district, which was supposed to prevent this kind of flooding, had failed monumentally. And part of the reason is due to our governor, Rick Scott. After he took office in 2010, he pushed for deep spending cuts in the water management district. As a result, more than $100 million was cut from the agency designed to prevent flooding from Orlando to the keys.

Here’s part of the trickster’s message. You want to live here?  Ok, fine. Your car engine is now ruined. But it’s  going to cost you $1,000 for a replacement engine with 4,000 miles on it. Your insurance will cover the rest. Oh gee, what a deal.

Now it’s hurricane season again. No hurricane has made landfall since Wilma in 2005, and I’m hoping we will be lucky again this year. But the bottom line is that we are in the midst of climate change. And yet, Republican senator Marco Rubio – whose area includes Miami Beach- challenges the science and balks at any government fixes. He’s in good company. Our current governor, Rick Scott, and former governor Jeb Bush, a potential Republican presidential candidate for 2016,  also deny that 7 billion plus souls on the planet leave any carbon footprint.

Maybe it’s time to head for the mountains.

Or to stay put and collectively visualize something far better.

On October 6, 2014, a Nobel prize in medicine was awarded to John O’Keefe, May-Brit Moser, and Edvard I Moser for their discovery of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain. This inner GPS makes it possible for us to orient ourselves in space, to navigate from one location to another.

The grid cells that constitute this inner GPS are located in the hippocampus and may also be located in the anterior cingulate part of the brain, which plays an important role in human emotion. Could this inner GPS help in other ways? Dr. Bernard Beitman, who has written a book on coincidences- not published yet – Connecting with Coincidence, thinks so.

In an article in Epoch Times, the Yale-educated psychiatrist, now teaching at the University of Virginia, said that “the emotional aspect of grid cell mapping could make particular locations more highly charged in our brain-based map. Like the maps used in GPS navigation, these maps could then help us find pathways to emotionally important people, things, and situations.”

Beitman says the connection to emotions is speculative, but his research has made it clear to him that some people are able to map their location in relation to emotionally significant people or places. He had such an experience himself when he was eight and his dog, Snapper, was lost. Beitman went out looking for his dog and made a wrong turn in a familiar neighborhood – and found his dog.

In his book, Beitman speculates about how the physical existence of human consciousness may be mapped and theorizes there may be a conduit of information that he calls the psychesphere. I emailed him and asked if he could explain what this is.

“We are fish-like, immersed in the ethereal waters of the psychesphere. Currents move through it. Some currents passing through us contain information about who we are, where we have been and where we’re going. Tunnels, the only word I can think of that expresses the connection that occurs, open and close, extend and shorten. Through these tunnels, places and objects at a distance can be known. This out-of-awareness medium carries vibrating patterns of energy – information in the same way that air the conducts sound. These patterns can engage similar patters with which to resonate, amplifying the lifespan of the original pattern.”

He noted that researcher Frederick Myers called the energy-information sphere the subliminal self – that part of each of us below the threshold of awareness. It has layers or strata. “They are strata…not of immovable rock, but of imperfectly miscible fluids of various densities and subject to currents and ebullitions which often bring to the surface a stream or bubble from a strata far below.”

This energy-information sphere sounds a lot like what physicist David Bohm called the implicate or enfolded order, a kind of primal soup that births everything in the universe. Bohm believed that even time unfolds from the implicate order. He referred to our external reality as the explicate order. Synchronicity, then, is where the implicate and the explicate, the inner and the outer, coincide.