Welcome to The Mystical Underground

Our friend Gabe Carson from Minneapolis sent us a synchro about pi, or π, which is the ratio of the circumference of any circle to its diameter.  Pi equal approximately to 3.14, but it’s decimal representation never ends and never repeats.

Gabe entered the mystery of pi while at work after a friend sent him a Facebook image of a musician wearing a Pi t-shirt. She asked him if he thought the t-shirt was from an xkcd comic.

So Gabe Googled xkcd pi and found a comic about pi by xkcd, but not the one referenced on the t-shirt.

He chuckled at the comic, and suddenly thought about the web site for ‘Dinosaur Comics,’ which he hadn’t visited in months. So he Googled “dinosaur comics,” and clicked through to the homepage. He came to the current comic and was astonished to see that it was about pi. Beyond that synchro, the comic also implies what pi may reveal about the universe.

A little more researching and Gabe discovered the comic that is on the t-shirt. The graphic image itself reveals another synchronicity–amirror image of pi or I should say ‘pie.’ Enjoy.

Right outside the window of my home office stands a huge ficus tree. It’s trunk is so thick that it would take three, maybe four adults, to wrap their arms around it. So I have a room with a view of a tree. Until recently, it never occurred to me that the tree, likewise, has a view of me sitting at my desk.

It’s branches shoot up 50 feet or more and spread horizontally over the yard on that side of the house. Every year or so, the branches start hanging over the roof and that can allow insects access to the roof or create potential storm hazard. When Hurricane Wilma hit us a few years back, our roof was covered with huge ficus branches.

So recently it was time for me to get out the ladder and chain saw and cut back on some of those lower hanging branches. I leaned the ladder firmly against the tree, but it wobbled as I neared the top of it. I didn’t want to call Trish to hold it while I felled branches above her, so I climbed up into the large limbs and went to work.

After struggling with the chainsaw and finding it difficult to cut the smaller branches with it,  I retreated and switched to a machete. Surprisingly, it was far more effective in cutting both small and medium-sized branches that the chain saw.

I cleared away the branches I’d cut and saw that I still had a few more to trim, but I ended up putting it off for a couple of weeks. So a few days ago, I raised the ladder again to tackle the task. But to my surprise I was unable to find the machete. I usually keep it wedged in one side of my workbench, but it was nowhere to be found.

I thought that possibly I’d left it in the tree or on the ground and it was buried in leaves. I checked the tree and raked the leaves. No machete. A couple of days passed in which I made several more fruitless searches. Finally, I walked out to the tree, looked around for the umpteenth time, then turned to the tree.

“Look,” I said, “I’m not trying to cut you down. All I want to do is trim your branches. So where’s the machete?” I stood there a moment longer, then turned toward the house and miraculously there it was! The blade, partially covered in leaves, was sticking out from behind an old windsurfer that lay against the house.

I picked it up and turned in astonishment to the tree. I really felt as if the big ficus had somehow communicated with me. “I’ll talk to you more often,” I said, and walked away, machete in hand.

Thanksgiving is one of those American holidays that I love. It’s like Christmas. You spend the day with people you love, give thanks for the quality of your life, and eat well. It’s also a holiday connected to important memories, odd memories.

During some point in my four years at college in upstate New York,   it became too expensive to fly home to Florida for just a few days, so I went to Montclair, New Jersey, with  Carolyn Sayre – Cookie, to most of us. She was probably six feet tall in her bare feet, with a towering intellect and an electric presence.  I’d known her for a couple of years and even when she was a freshman,  she indulged the mystical side of her personality. She thought she would probably major in religious studies – at the time, I recall, she was into Buddhism.

I’d never been to Montclair before. I’m not even sure if, at that point, I’d ever been to New Jersey. But Montclair was impressive. Huge homes on huge properties, wide, tree-lined streets where everyone seemed to drive exotic cars. I don’t remember ever seeing someone who wasn’t white. That bothered me. But I must admit I loved driving into Manhattan with Cookie behind the wheel of her convertible Packard.

The Sayre home was a sprawling mansion that immediately told me I was way out of my league, that I should probably prepare myself for meals tended by servants, lots of rules and regulations about what we could and could not do, and a no-no to midnight raids on the fridge. Was I ever wrong.

There were hardly any rules at all. Cookie’s parents were all about live and let live, which certainly suited a couple of budding hippies who had started joining protests against the Vietnam War.  Even though we had a formal Thanksgiving dinner, tended by servants, nothing else about this family was formal.

Cookie’s father was a corporate attorney who had made a ton of money doing whatever corporate lawyer types do. Her mother was a knockout with the most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen. I have no idea whether she worked or what. She was a total mystery to me. It turned out that the house had a fantastic library and I spent most of the  Thanksgiving holiday in there. One of the books I found was A Psychiatrist Looks at ESP by Berthold Schwarz.

In the Sixties, there wasn’t much published about psychic phenomena. But I was captivated by Schwarz’s book  and astounded that he mentioned Cookie’s father William Sayre,  who had been involved in one of his ESP experiments. Schwarz’s book was a cornerstone for me. After all, if a genuine MD shrink was investigating the stuff that fascinated me,  I couldn’t be all that nuts, right?

I remember talking to Cookie’s dad about the book, about his experiences, and I could tell he knew it wasn’t supposed to fit into his life as  a corporate attorney. But he was such a genuine man,  that he talked freely about his experiences.

So here’s the synchro.  Fast- forward twenty plus years. Rob and I were doing a story for OMNI and called on Schwarz as a professional source. He invited us  to his condo in Vero Beach, just a few hours north of us. I knew his name was familiar for some reason, but couldn’t place it until he opened the door – and I recognized him from his photo in that book decades before.

“Do you  know William Sayre?” I blurted at some point shortly after we’d stepped inside his home.

His eyes widened. “Knew him, yes. He died a few years back. What a wonderful man, very psychic. What’s your connection?”

For the next few years, we visited Schwarz now and then and kept abreast of his research. He was definitely a guy who was way ahead of his contemporaries, and every Thanksgiving, I think of those few days at Cookie’s house when I discovered Schwarz’s book, never knowing that  decades later, I would meet him or that he would regress an abductee we met and brought to him. Always, Schwarz was curious, inquisitive, and if you’d  experienced high strangeness in your life, he was there to help you interpret it.

That’s part of the beauty of synchronicity, the way it brings the past into the future, or the future into the past, and it all comes together in the present. So today, on Thanksgiving when we commemorate whatever the pilgrims did, I pay homage to synchronicity, that unifying force that so often brings our lives full circle.

Many of us probably remember our parents telling us to watch out who we hung around with. If you spent time with trouble-makers, you were likely to get in trouble yourself.

It makes sense. But what about this? If you spend time with obese people, chances are better than average that you will become obese yourself. Sounds like silly speculation, right. Something that you might’ve read in The Secret. Like attracts like.

But guess what? That was the finding of  mainstream Harvard scientists whose research results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Obesity, they report, is socially contagious. “We find that a person’s chances of becoming obese increase by 57% if they have a friend who becomes obese, 40% if they have a sibling who becomes obese, and 37% if a spouse becomes obese,” say researchers Nicholas Christakis, MD, PhD, and James Fowler, PhD.

Mutual friends more than triple the risk to each other,” note Christakis and Fowler. “If one of the two [mutual friends] becomes obese, the chance for the other to follow suit goes up 171%.”

Yikes! This report came out in 2007. So I was wondering if this theory has been discounted in the past four years. Turns out there was a new report that came out in a journal called Obesity that confirms the early study that obesity is socially contagious.

So now we need some research to find out if hanging out with skinny people has a similar contagious effect.