Welcome to The Mystical Underground

Last night before I went to bed, I realized I hadn’t experienced a synchronicity for awhile and thought how I would like to begin the next morning with a synchro.

My usual routine each morning is to take my iPad out into the kitchen and, as I eat breakfast, use it to pick up email, read a couple of blogs, and take a look at the news on Huffington Post.  My first stop is usually Mike Perry’s blog and then I eventually make my way to Huffington Post.

So this morning’s post on Mike’s blog is about how a married couple were unknowingly photographed together on a beach in the U.K. eleven years before they met and got married. Aimee Maiden, 25,  and Nick Wheeler, 26, were going through old family photos before they got married and were astounded to find a 1994 photo  of themselves as kids, playing on the same beach.

Aimee grew up in the seaside village of Mousehole, Cornwall, and visited the beach regularly and Nick just happened to be there on vacation. The two spent the day just a few yards apart on the beach building sand castles, but their families were strangers and never spoke.

Nick moved to Cornwall a year later but didn’t meet Aimee until they were at the same sixth form college in Truro and fell in love.  They didn’t have any idea they’d met before until they were going through old holidays photos at Nick’s grandparents’ house. Aimee was shocked to see herself as a little girl in the background.

She said: “The photo was taken by Nick’s grandad. Nick is sitting front right in the boat with his sister and two cousins and his family, his mum, uncle and nan are to the right and behind them.”

After college, they moved in together and Nick joined the army and Aimee trained as a teacher.  They recently got married at a church in Mousehole that’s just a minute’s walk from the beach where the photo was taken twenty years ago.

After I read the story, I told Rob about it, then clicked on Huffington Post and found the same story: The Bride Photobombed Her Groom in Childhood Photo 11 Years Before They Met.

“Maybe Mike got his story from the Huffington Post,” Rob said.

“Or Huffington Post got the story from Mike’s blog,” I said.

I went back to Mike’s blog and clicked on the credit for the photo, which took me to Kent Online, where the original story had appeared. It had gone up on July 31. Mike’s story had gone up at 6:00 a.m. on August 2, the day that I read it, so it’s unlikely that either source got the story from each other, and that both got it from Kent Online. It’s simply one of those stories that seizes your attention because of the odds involved.

And for me, it’s definitely a synchronicity. Within a few minutes, I found the same story in two different sources that are regular stops for me in the morning.

I read a fascinating story about a man who – while on a flight to Japan – supposedly had passed through a portal from a parallel Earth and discovered that his home country, Taured, did not exist in this version of reality.

The story was published in a book by Colin Wilson, who I consider a very reputable author about mysticism and the paranormal. So I decided to e-mail him and ask about the story. Then it occurred to me that he might no longer be alive. I wasn’t certain. Had I heard that he died? I got up from my desk to get a glass of water and for the next couple of minutes, Colin Wilson was neither dead nor alive. When I sat back down, I knew his fate was about to be decided. I Googled his name and instantly saw that he had died Dec. 5, 2013 at the age of 82.

Wilson was a prolific British writer, not only writing about mysticism, but also true crime and fiction. He was recognized as a philosopher while still in his 20s after the publication of The Outsider.  His best asset as a writer ironically was also a detriment of sorts. Colin Wilson wrote long. Not long-handed, not long-winded, just very long. Any subject he tackled was dealt with in minute detail. So much so that it was difficult to pick up one of his books and read it from cover to cover. In fact, one of his books was actually called, The Mammoth Book of the Supernatural.  In that tome, Wilson combs through the entire history of the supernatural in the Western world. While he was recognized for his intellect and his willingness to probe deeply into a subject, his expansive style served to limit his popularity.

So I didn’t have a chance to e-mail Wilson and ask about the strange story of the man from Taured. But here it is. Read it and wonder.

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One day in 1954, a man flew into Tokyo, but upon landing at the Tokyo International Airport, his seemingly normal trip took a very drastic turn for the weird. When he handed over his passport to be stamped, the man was interrogated as to the whereabouts of his origins. It wasn’t a case of racial profiling: While his passport looked authentic, it listed a country no one had ever heard of called Taured.

The mystery man claimed his country was located between France and Spain, but when he was asked to point it out on a map, he pointed to the Principality of Andorra. Insisting he had never heard of Andorra and that Taured had existed for 1,000 years, he claimed that he was in Japan on business, something he had been doing for the past five years. His passport seemed to back up his story, as it was covered in previous customs and visa stamps, and he carried with him legal currency from several European countries. He even had a driver’s license issued by the mysterious country and a checkbook containing checks from an unknown bank.

After more interrogation and confusion for both parties, the traveler was sent to a nearby hotel until an official decision could be reached. There, two immigration officials stood outside the hotel door until morning. It was then that they discovered the mystery man had vanished. That was puzzling since the only possible exit was a window with no ledgge 15 stories above a busy street. The Tokyo police department conducted an extensive search, but came up empty-handed. Hopefully, if he really was from a parallel Earth, he was able to find a way back to the comforts of his home in Taured.

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It certainly would’ve been interesting to find out where Colin Wilson heard about this story, and if he was confident that it really happened. As far as I’ve been able to determine, the events have never been independently documented.

When the weather is good – not too hot and no rain – the dog park becomes a social gathering for people who have at least one thing in common – a love of dogs.  We sit under trees that provide ample shade and the conversations take some unusual turns. Sometimes, they veer into the terrain of synchronicity.

Yesterday, we arrived later than usual, around 6 p.m., and Rob got out into the field with an orange ball and the walking stick he brings to the park to hits balls to  Noah. There were two other dogs vying for the ball – Tootsie, a poodle/golden retriever mix – and a German shepherd that shadowed Tootsie and Noah whenever they were racing for the ball.

At one point, both dogs were right in front of Rob as he was trying to hit the ball and when he swung, the German shepherd leaped up. There was a resounding CRACK as the stick hit both the ball and the shepherd. The shepherd emitted this horrible whimpering and ran away. His owner rushed over, we all converged on the shepherd, trying to see where he was injured. A heated discussion ensued. Rob told the owner it was an accident, he wasn’t trying to hit the shepherd. The shepherd had a small cut over his eye. We all felt terrible, but the owner got a bit nasty. He said he would now have to take the dog to the vet and needed Rob’s name and information.

Everyone there – except the owner – had seen what had happened. One of the women, a retired nurse, looked at the cut and said it wasn’t serious. The owner left in a huff with his dog.

As we approached the shaded area with the benches,  a young woman I’d seen before but didn’t know,  said, “It was definitely an accident. These things happen for a reason.”

Karin, who owns an Alaskan Husky, Cody, remarked, ” I’ve been telling her that you and Rob write books on synchronicity, Trish.”

“I absolutely believe in synchronicity,” the woman said. “Today at the Hippocrates Center in West Palm Beach, I attended a workshop with a ‘happiness’ coach and synchronicities were happening all over the place. Meaningful coincidence, right?”

“Right,” I replied.

Mike, who owns Bogie, a cute Boxer, sort of rolled his eyes. “Hey, shit happens. It’s random.”

The young woman smiled and shook her head. “Nothing’s random.”

“So do you have some synchronicity stories?” I asked her.

“I sure do. Here’s a good one. A few years ago, my dad started telling us he was going to win the lottery. He talked about what we would do with the money, how we could help other people…” From the way she talked about her father and his desire to win the lottery, it was obvious than in his mind, it had already happened.

“So did he win?” asked Mike.

“Yeah, he did -$167 million!”

After income tax and New York state taxes, he walked away with $67 million.

The stunned silence in the group was breathtaking.”Wow, I love stories like this,” I said. “Has the money changed them?”

“Not really. They bought an Italian restaurant and a house and that’s about it.” They’ve donated money each year to good causes and have made sure that their kids would be provided for.

Mike remarked that her dad had just gotten lucky. After all, millions of people buy lottery tickets every week and don’t win. But he was missing the point. For the young woman’s dad, winning the lottery had already happened in his mind, within himself emotionally. His powerful desire and his belief drew that possibility to him. On a quantum level, the particle of potential called I win the lottery collapsed into a wave in physical reality and became his reality.

I later texted Karen and asked her and young woman’s name, that her lottery story was one of the best synchros I’ve heard in awhile. Karin replied that her name was Joy. “And the conversation began because of a   CRACK of the bat!”

We all know there’s a lot of strange stuff on the Internet. For example, there are people saying that the aircraft from the missing Malaysian Flight 370 was the same one shot down over the Ukraine and the dead people were already dead before the plane was downed. That’s a stretch. Let’s see if the black box proves that bizarre Internet-based conspiracy. I have my doubts.

But let’s get to the Beatles. John and George are dead, right? Hey, not so fast. According to a man writing under the name James Richards, there’s an alternate reality in which the Beatles are all living and performing together.

He knows because he’s been there…and he’s got proof. Here’s his story.

Richards claims he was chasing his dog through Del Puerto Canyon in California on September 9, 2009 when he tripped in a rabbit hole and knocked himself unconscious. Upon waking up, he found himself in a room next to an unrecognizable machine with a man who introduced himself as Jonas. According to the strange man, while on a work-related trip for a dimensional travel agency, he had used the machine to transport the unconscious Richards to a parallel Earth in order to help him.

So the two compared notes about their worlds and the talk turned to pop culture, and it turned out that The Beatles existed in both worlds. Except, to Richards’s surprise, in this parallel Earth, The Beatles were all alive and had produced music that didn’t exist in our world.

To prove it, Richards brought back a souvenir cassette tape entitled Everyday Chemistry that was composed of Beatles songs never released in our dimension. Cassette? Don’t they have digital recordings yet in that alternate Earth? That question aside, guess what, Richards uploaded these unknown Beatle song to his website.

Have a listen. The old fellows still sound pretty good. I wonder where can I get a ticket to their next concert.

During our recent trip to Minneapolis, we went out one evening to meet some of Rob’s friends and took a brief detour through historic Milwaukee Avenue in the Seward neighborhood.

The homes along this wide avenue were built between 1884 and 1890 by William Ragan, a Minneapolis real estate speculator.  The homes were intended for low-income families, who were mostly Scandinavian immigrants, and were constructed on small, narrow lots that have virtually no front yards and tiny side yards. The road was originally platted as an alley and since it bisects 22^nd and 23^rd Avenues, it was originally called – get this – 22 1/2 Avenue! Below is a photo from the Minneapolis Historical Society.

The street kept it’s ½ designation until 1906, when petitioners asked the Minneapolis City Council to change the name to Woodland Avenue. They said the ½ made them feel like they lived in an alley. But instead of changing the name to Woodland, the council changed it to Milwaukee Avenue, perhaps because of its proximity to the Milwaukee Short Line Railroad.

The houses were built from brick veneer on timber frames. They were neglected during the Great Depression and WWII and by the end of the war, had deteriorated badly. In 1959, the city listed the houses on Milwaukee Avenue as such, a designation that meant they had no indoor plumbing or were severely battered. In 1970, the city planned to demolish the houses and raze the neighborhood.

However, many of the residents were seasoned protestors from the Vietnam War era  and they formed the Seward West Project Area Committee (PAC) in an attempt to save it. They argued that the houses had significant historic value and should be preserved. But the city contended that it would cost more to refurbish the houses than to build new ones.

So these former Vietnam protestors pulled a slick one. They secretly submitted an application to the National Registry of Historic Places for the Milwaukee Avenue district. It  was approved by the U.S. Secretary of the Interior on May 2, 1974.  It meant the city couldn’t alter or destroy the houses using federal funds without a public hearing.

Even so, nine of the Milwaukee Avenue houses had to be destroyed because they were in such terrible condition and a tenth was moved elsewhere. The rest of the houses got big makeovers – indoor plumbing, new basements, improved woodwork and porches. A pedestrian mall was built down the avenue to replace the street. No cars are allowed – just bikes and pedestrians.

As Rob and I were walking, some residents were sitting out on their front porches and others were involved in a community project – laying down mulch around the many trees on the avenue. This beautiful avenue is a striking example of what can happen when a group of people who are passionate about something can bring about change.

The RSS feed in my mail comes from Apple and consists of tidbits of information about new products. I clicked the most recent feed today and found an amazing story  and trailer for a documentary, Alive Inside of Us.    The film, which has now been released – a limited release – explores the power of music to restore memory in patients with Alzheimer’s.

Patients in an Alzheimer’s facility were fitted with earphones connected to iPods (the reason Apple carried this feed). Most of these patients are very elderly – 80s and 90s, and are in advanced stages of Alzheimer’s. The iPods held music from the patients’ earlier lives and their transformation is stunning.

My mother had Alzheimer’s for about seven years, so I found this powerful clip especially moving.  What a difference this might have made for her. The film won’t be shown in Florida until September – and then, in only two cities, Winter Park and Sarasota. It’s on my MUST SEE list.

Rob is now teaching meditation twice a week at a local yoga studio. I don’t make the morning classes – way too early for me – but I usually make the evening classes, especially when it’s a shamanic meditation.

It took Rob about fifteen minutes to set up this evening before class because he had to make a medicine wheel. And since we have such a bumper crop of mangos, the wheel was made of – yes, mangos!

The class was divided into three parts.  In the first part, he played a Sandra Ingerman CD. Right from the start of the CD, there’s music – rattles and drums. The monotony of the rhythm is strangely compelling for me. I immediately find myself drifting into an alpha state, then into theta. Ingerman provides brief explanations for what each direction means and the animal associated with it.  The one irritating thing with the CD is that she started whistling – calling the spirits of each direction. That first whistle snapped me out of my relaxed state so quickly that I thought an alarm had gone off outside.

In the second part of the class, Rob takes us through a guided meditation for each of the four directions. We move around on the mat so we are facing the direction we’re working on. Bringing your body into alignment with the direction you’re addressing is particularly  effective. It’s as if the energy contained within that direction  becomes more focused.

The third part of the meditation was short and actually part of a larger meditation that we didn’t do because of lack of time.  We lay with our heads to the south and Rob asked us to create our own definition of what the south means, a rather advanced shamanic technique. I was so relaxed at this point that I got lost.

I would love a class where we do this with each of the four directions.  He addresses this in his meditation book, The Jewel in the Lotus: Meditation for Busy Minds, and a lot of the material for tonight’s class came from the book. It will be published this fall.

If you’d like to do the medicine wheel meditation on your own, put on a CD with rattles and drum music on it, then you can follow these guidelines, excerpted from Rob’s book. He uses the tradition of the Q’ero Indians from Peru, an indigenous tribe descended from the Incas:

The South

In the Q’ero tradition, the journey begins in the South, which is considered the home of the Serpent. That’s where you heal old wounds and traumas by learning to shed the past, like the Serpent sheds its skin. Understand that you can let go of emotional wounds and old personal stories.

If you have recurring memories of incidents in which you were hurt or offended and still feel anger rage, that’s where you begin. You might immediately recognize the anger and toxic energy that you are carrying related to certain matters from the past.

Take at least fifteen minutes to allow one or more such memories to surface. If nothing occurs to you, don’t force it. Don’t look for troubling matters from the past. Let them surface on their own.

If your mind strays, imagine a snake meandering slowly past you.  Or visualize it curled several times forming a spiral, turning inward, a symbol of wholeness, of the inward journey. You have no fear of the serpent, because it will do you no harm.  You’ll know that you’ve completed your journey to the South when, in your daily life, you are reminded of an unpleasant incident and you don’t react in the usual manner.

The West

The journey moves to the West, where you encounter the Jaguar, who teaches you about life, death, and rebirth. Visualize the Jaguar. See its glowing eyes. Notice its power and agility.

The West is about moving ahead and embracing what’s new, what’s coming into your life. It’s about moving beyond fear, anger, guilt, and shame. You learn to face fears and overcome them. You let go of relationships that no longer serve you. You cross a bridge from your old ways to your new life. Old, outmoded relationships fall away. You can now speak your truth without fear.

You move ahead with power, as a peaceful warrior. You no longer need to engage in battles within or outside of you. Instead, you are able to support yourself as you ask and receive what you desire so that you can leap into the person that you are becoming and journey into your creativity and your journey of love.

The North

In the North, you meet the Hummingbird and engage ancient wisdom and knowledge. We learn to manifest the impossible, and to receive help from ancestors. In doing so, we reconnect with nature.

You step outside of linear time. You can influence past events as well present and future ones as you become a co-creator of reality. You step inside the person you are becoming. You act with power and love. You release all the roles that you’ve identified with so that you have nothing left to defend. With your new knowledge you move through the world with freedom, flowing with ease, close to nature.

The East

Finally, in the East you encounter the archetype of the Eagle as you summon your destiny, and more. It’s about the big picture. In essence, you dream the world into being. It’s the way of the visionary who sees all the possibilities. It’s about developing your vision of peace.

The Eagle guides you fully into the role and responsibility of co-creator. You take all that you have learned and bring it back into your everyday world. See the Eagle gliding overhead, soaring. Imagine that you are soaring with it.

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At the end of the class, everyone selected mangos to take home with them.

Happy meditating!

One day during our recent trip to Minnesota, Rob, his friend Rabbit, and I drove across a bridge that spanned the Mississippi, and entered Wisconsin.  The plan was that we would follow the Mississippi to a town large enough for a restaurant where we could have lunch.

The western part of the Wisconsin is rural, with mile after mile of forests and tall bluffs on one side, and the river on the other side. There wasn’t much traffic and we pretty much moved along at our own pace and drank in the dramatic views.  I don’t recall any synchros, just a beautiful flow of events.

Some of the towns we went through would hardly qualify as towns. They were more like settlements – a few old wooden houses, an antique store and maybe a gas station or small market. I invariably wonder about the lives of the people who live in such small places. What did the kids do during the summers? How far away were their schools?

Rabbit had mentioned a spot that he thought we would enjoy – Maiden Rock, a bluff that is historic primarily because of the legend associated with it. The place is also part of a park and he figured that if the park was open, we could hike out to Maiden Rock.

There seem to be various versions of the Legend of Maiden Rock. Rabbit told us one version, which is also here, but with some significant differences. In the version Rabbit told us, a young Dakota woman, Winona, was in love with a Sioux but her father, Chief Red Wing,  intended to marry her to a brave in the Dakota tribe. Rather than marrying a man she didn’t love, she leaped to her death from the bluff. Another version of the legend, though, doesn’t even mention the Dakotas.

Regardless of which version is true, the different versions agree on the  basics: a young woman’s father was going to marry her off to a man she didn’t love, so she jumped off the bluff- and is now forever remembered in some variation of the legend.

“Can we do Maiden Rock after we eat?” I asked. I was hungry when we’d crossed the bridge and was growing hungrier with every mile that unfolded.

“Sure,” Rabbit replied. “Stockholm is the place to eat. Otherwise, we’ll be doing greasy spoons or eating bar food.”

We pulled off the road to the Maiden Rock overview of the Mississippi. That photo above is from the overview.  The bluff was supposedly on the other side of the road, a formidable outcropping of stone and rock that was probably two hundred feet upward.

From there, we drove on into Stockholm, Wisconsin. As of the 2010 census, the population of this charming town (settlement) was  a resounding 66! The town was settled in 1854 by Swedish immigrants and that ancestry is evident in the faces and countenances of the people with whom we interacted in the shops.

We had a fantastic brunch at a local café, met a friendly dog, and got directions to the Maiden Rock Park from a local. Go up the road to the end of the cornfield, then hang a left and go all the way to the dead end. Nothing too complicated. We arrived at the entrance of the park, the only car within miles, got out, and started walking.

This is Tully, settling in with a bone, in her little home between two shops. She was so friendly I thought she might follow us back to Florida.

Entrance to Maiden Rock Park

The hilly landscape was stunning, breathtakingly green, and we were the only humans in there. I could feel the presence of the past in these woods. As we followed a narrow path that twisted up and down hills, I could easily envision the suicidal young woman tearing along the path to the bluff.

After a mile or two, my ankle started bothering me. I wasn’t wearing the proper shoes for this kind of hiking, and told Rob and Rabbit to go on ahead.

I stood there, snapping photos that I emailed to myself or texted to our daughter, but nothing went through. I didn’t have a cell signal. No means of communication is a Gemini’s worst nightmare.  And while I stood there in what felt like a primeval forest, the wind blew through the trees, strumming the branches, breathing through the leaves. The sound it made was eerie, like something from another world.

Immediately, my imagination slammed into action and spun a number of what if scenarios:

What if something happened to either Rabbit or Rob? I wouldn’t be able to call 911; I would have to get out of the park and walk three or four miles to Stockholm for help.

What if  a wolf suddenly appeared on the path?

What if a UFO landed and an alien walked out?

What if the suicidal woman from so long ago suddenly materialized, racing past me toward her doom?

I wouldn’t be able to call, email, or text anyone. I freaked myself out and spun around and started back toward where we’d left the car.

There is something about legends and the forest primeval that speaks to you on a visceral level. In these places, you can sense the past gathering around you like shadows. You know that with just a small shift in your perceptions, you may be able to draw that past around you tightly, like a cocoon. And then you simply walk out into it.

Is that, perhaps, how time travel might be accomplished?

I didn’t stick around to find out. Next time, though, I will!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NPzLBSBzPI&feature=kp

I remember the days when American TV programming was pretty bad. Thirty minute sitcoms with canned laughter. Thirty-minute cop shows with big plot flaws. Shows like Rin-Tin-Tin and Lassie, Flipper, The Naked City, Highway Patrol, The Donna Reed Show, Marcus Welby, M.D., Leave It to Beaver, The Twilight Zone, One Step Beyond, I Love Lucy.

Some of these shows were good – Lucy was genuinely, hysterically funny at times. And Lucille Ball was always such a treat to watch. Twilight Zone and One Step Beyond were my personal favorites. I watched these shows and all the others in Spanish. I don’t recall the Spanish translation for Twilight Zone, but One Step Beyond was called Un Paso al Mas Alla. We were living in Venezuela at the time and compared to Venezuelan TV, these American dubbed shows were a delight and a conduit to the place we traveled to every summer, our other home, the U.S.

On Sundays nights, I remember, TV was a family thing. We used to have grilled cheese sandwiches and some other side dish and gather where the TV was and watch Twilight Zone or One Step Beyond. Or was it Tales of the South Pacific that we watched? This is where memory becomes tricky terrain. I think it might have been Tales,  based on the Pulitzer-Prize winning book by James Michener. But it could have been Twilight Zone. My interests certainly would be more with Zone that with Pacific, although I recall that’s Gardner McKay starred in this series and it stirred my hunger for foreign travel.

But other than Zone or Beyond, there just weren’t that many shows that sparked your imagination, that introduced new ideas, new what if scenarios. Then in the Sixties, when I was in college, Star Trek became the equivalent of Zone and Beyond. We zipped around the universe on the Enterprise with Kirk and Spock and got to play with the ideas that were introduced.

From 1993-2002, we had The X-Files, where Mulder and Scully were FBI agents who investigated sightings, possible abductions, all the high strangeness of the encounter and UFO phenomena. Since then, we’ve had The 4400, about that number of people who vanished and then returned. We’ve had V, Under the Dome, 137, The Medium, Lost… shows that have pushed the envelope in terms of ideas, shows that prompt us to ask What if?

Last week, we watched the first episode of an HBO series called The Leftovers. It’s about what happens to the people left behind when two percent of the world’s population – now more than 7 billion – vanishes.

Very soon now, CBS will air its first episode of Extant, a Spielberg production for CBS – starring Halle Berry. It’s about a female astronaut who lived for 13 months solo on the space station but – uh-oh –  returns home pregnant.

The second season of Under the Dome, based on Stephen King’s book by the same name, focuses more closely on  how people in a small American town are impacted when a transparent dome slams down over their community, cutting them off from the rest of the world. It’s Lord of the Flies on steroids.

The point is that television as entertainment has morphed into TV as a cultural vehicle that prompts us to ask ourselves important questions. What do we really know about the nature of reality? Who are we in the greater scheme of things? Is our reality malleable, subject to change according to our beliefs about what is possible?

Hey, are we living in The Matrix?

I’ve read several of Dean Radin’s books on parapsychology, and especially enjoyed his most recent offering: SUPERNORMAL: Science, Yoga, ad the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities as I mentioned in an earlier post. This last one is more accessible and entertaining (except for hard-core skeptics) with far less detailed explanations of experiments. In other words, more on meditation and less on meta-analysis of data.

However, I was a bit disappointed that Radin failed to mention synchronicity once in Supernormal, and I wondered if he didn’t find any deeper meaning in coincidences. It was particularly surprising because he even writes about UFOs—a topic usually seen as outside of psychic research—and discusses their possible link to the paranormal…or rather the supernormal.

So I was intrigued when Lauren Raine sent this You Tube video of Radin talking about synchronicity. She forwarded it from her friend, Fahrusha’s blog. In it, Radin carries on at length about a synchronicity he experienced, and he did so for good reason. It’s quite a mind-blowing tale. Take a look and see for yourself.