Welcome to The Mystical Underground

Our daughter, Megan, is writing a novel. She has outlined it, written 30 pages that she sent us, and today  experienced a synchronicity that perfectly illustrates one of the secrets in our book 7 Secrets of Synchronicity.  The fourth secret, The Creative, is that creativity lies at the heart of synchronicity.  At the beginning of that chapter, we use a quote by physicists and author F David Peat: “The space between…is the space that lies between the observer and the observed; it is the space of the creative act that brings a poem or a painting to life.”

Or a novel.

In her novel, the protagonist, Riley Phoenix, 22, lives in a second story one-bedroom flat with lousy plumbing, in a neighborhood that isn’t very safe, and there’s no security whatsoever in the building – no cameras, no concierge, no security people. But she’s perfectly happy living by herself in this place.  Okay, that’s the setup for the synchro.

This weekend Megan drove over to Florida’s west coast to see a friend with whom she went to high school. Renie had recently moved and Megan hadn’t ever been to her place. So she got there, they went out on the town, and this morning, Megan bolted awake and realized she was in her character’s apartment.  Renie lives in a one-bedroom flat, on the second story of a building, in a not very safe area of town, and the building has no security whatsoever. And oh, Renie’s flat has terrible plumbing.

“It wasn’t like I walked into Renie’ place last night and thought, Wow, this is where Riley lives. It just hit me out of the blue this morning.  So I walked around, taking pictures of the place so I can now fill in the details of Riley’s flat.”

When she called to tell us the synchro, we told her it was a positive sign for her book and her creative process. She agreed, but added, “It’s because I have absolutely no resistance to writing this novel. I know I can do it.”

Pretty cool, huh?

Remember Bo Derek in the movie 10?

She played the quintessential woman that every man  desires. That face, that body, that presence. But it turns out that Bo is much more than her PR. She was featured in the Palm Beach Post at the beginning of polo season, 56 years old and still a 10, a horse breeder and activist, the natural to toss the first ball at the 10^th anniversary opening game at the International Polo Club.

The synchro for us in this story was  horses. We were  putting together a proposal for a bookazine on famous horses through history. Our town has quite a prolific history on horses, specifically those used in polo. Thanks in  large part to John Goodman,   the multimillionaire founder of the International Polo Club, Wellington is what, back in the sixties, we would call a Ta-ta community.

Ta-Ta is another name for lah-de-dah,  as in, Huh? Seriously?

But here’s the thing. We were writing about polo, about how it’s the game of kings, and this story about Bo Derek, the ’10 of 10s’ –royalty! – turns up in the fluff section of our local newspaper. You can tell that the interviewer was a bit overwhelmed at interviewing the perfect ’10.’ The questions were sort of silly, like, well, what does she admire about horses? Her response, though, was spot on: They have a sense of the game and they do learn and know what the goal is, the way they’ll fight off another horse and hold the line. It’s wonderful to see.”

 So these types of stories are the oddball synchros happening in our corner of the world. Nothing earth-shattering here, nothing that shakes us up or weirds us out too much. These synchros are perhaps, most of all, a trickster sort of entertainment, especially when the horse bookazine didn’t pan out – despite the fluff and the synchro!

In my daily perusal of statcounter, I discovered something I had never heard of called URLpulse. The hit came from Ottawa, Canada, home of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who have shown an interest in our blog since we first wrote bout the Quebec encounters.  So I clicked on this link and learned a whole bunch of statistics about blogs and websites.

URL pulse uses a particular algorhythm to  arrive at the conclusions they present on their website – how many daily and monthly hits your website or blog receives, from which countries, some of the key words, all sorts of weird tidbits. We use one such site like this that tracks book sales on Amazon, using an algorhythm. The tally isn’t always exact – it’s sometimes way off. But it was accurate enough to tell me that when my publisher lowered the ebook price  of Esperanza to $2.99, it made a substantial difference in my ebook sales – hundreds in a single month. When they jacked the price up again to $11.99, sales fell sharply.

On URLpulse.co, your website or blog’s net worth is calculated according to how many hits you receive. Guess who number 1 is in the US and worldwide? Google. Each month, more than 64 billion pages are viewed, it receives more than one billion monthly visits, it has more than 9 million external links, and it’s estimate worth is $1.39 billion.

Facebook is number 2 in the U.S and worldwide. Monthly pages views: over 61 billion, with monthly visits at nearly 2 billion, with more than 13 million external links. Estimated worth? $1.29 billion.

Yahoo comes in at number 4 in US and worldwide with more than 17 billion monthly pages views, more than 2 billion monthly visits, worth $1.86 billion.

At this point, I wondered about number 3. Amazon? Nope, they come in at number 5 in U.S., 111 worldwide, with more than 11 billion monthly page views and more than 400 million monthly visits.Estimated worth? $304.45 million.

The iTunes website? It ranks 22 in the U.S., 26 worldwide.

At this point, I got curious about our industry – writers, publishers, agents.  Random House, one of the largest publishers with multiple imprints, is ranked at 5,829 in the U.S., 21,339 worldwide, with more than 2 million pages views a month, less than a million monthly visits, and its estimated worth is slightly more than half a million bucks.

Well, okay, how about JK Rowling and Stephen King? Rowling comes in at over 59,000 in the U.S., over 155,000 worldwide. Monthly page views number over 400,000 a month, with monthly visits at slightly over 165,000. The estimated worth of the site is $119,801.56.

This is where I began to think that maybe these algorhythms don’t work well. Rowling is the first billionaire author, her books have sold millions. Then I took a look at stephenking.com. It’s ranked at 17,177 in the U.S., 82,333 worldwide, with over a million pageviews a month, less than 200,000 monthly visits, with an estimated worth of $136,603.33. Really? That’s it for the great Stephen King?

I encourage you to check your own website or blog. Not every single one is listed, but we found ours – not the blog, but the website. Our website  is fairly static; we add stuff when the occasion arises. The blog, on the other hand, is a nearly daily endeavor. So these statistics apparently include the website and the blog and, according to our statcounter, they aren’t very accurate:

Our monthly visits run between eight to ten thousand. These include unique and repeat visitors. I’m not sure about the page views; the above figure seems too high, but I’ll have to keep closer track in the future. What really made me laugh about all this is the value placed on each visitor – less than a quarter. C’mon, the knowledge, information and insight that visitors and commenters provide are incalculable. Where do those attributes enter into algorhythms?

On February 12, President Obama gave his State of the Union address – which was great.  And Marco Rubio, a rising star in the Republican party, a senator from Florida, gave the Republican rebuttal, and it was a lie from start to finish.

The Republicans are struggling to rebrand and repackage themselves. Right now, it’s a party that cares only about the rich, that seeks to take women’s health back to the 1950s, that seeks to turn Medicare into a voucher system, to privatize Social Security, to redefine rape, to…well, you get the general idea. Rubio’s rebuttal, as one anchor put it, “was tinker-toys, a kid’s presentation of a philosophy at the 9^th grade level.”

First, Rubio said that Obama believed government was the answer to everything, that the free enterprise system was to blame for our economic woes, that higher taxes would solve our problems. He then went on to explain how he and his family had benefited from government programs – through education loans, Medicare for his parents,   and the lure of the American dream that anyone, anywhere, could achieve their full potential.

When I watched Rubio, my jaw dropped at the multitude of lies. He’s a member of the party that, under George W Bush, started two wars; created Homeland Security and the TSA, two huge government agencies whose number of employees is a government secret; under whose watch 9-11 happened; under whose watch we had the financial meltdown of 2008. Bush was a disaster for this country and for much of the world.  But Rubio seems to have forgotten all that. In Rubio’s world, Obamacare is the terrible  disaster that will bankrupt businesses, that robs people of the health care they now have, and just how are we going to pay for it all, anyway? Why should anyone be guaranteed health care?

Well, Marco, the Pentagon budget could pay for universal health care.

I’m not crazy about everything Obama does- I dislike the drone business,  that Gitmo is still open for business, and I don’t understand why we can’t end Afghanistan today rather than in 2014. I don’t understand why Obama hammers away about how great our military is and will continue to be. On the other hand, he  may be the most transformative and smartest president we’ve had in decades, with a unique background that effectively embraces a global humanity – and not just a community of  aging, rich white men.

Obama understands that as a country we can’t ignore the vulnerable, sick, and aging in our society. He understands that an affordable college education is intrinsic to our success and continued prosperity as a nation. He understands the need for a balance between government and private enterprise. He understands, as the Republicans do NOT, that equal rights must be extended to gays in society, in the military, across the board.

The synchro? Rob and I happened to have lunch today with Don, his off-road biking buddy, and Craig, Don’s brother-in-law. A spur of the moment thing.  I try not to have political discussions with people  I’ve just  met. I become obnoxious and intolerant of views that disenfranchise the many. Yet, Craig and I ended up having a civil and interesting conversation he initiated about politics, life, and all the rest of it.

He sounded reasonable on some issues – like unions. As a retired firefighter, he understands the importance of unions, which are supported by Democrats, not Republicans. He says he belongs to no political party, is disgusted with both parties, doesn’t understand why we are the world cop. OK, keep talking, Craig. Then he went through this long, convoluted thing about how he’s for equal rights for everyone but that he has a problem with the, well, legal marriage for gays.  I’m thinking, Huh?

“Really? It boils down to semantics for you?” I asked. “You think they should have all the rights as a heterosexual spouse in terms of property, death benefits, all of that, but that they shouldn’t be married?”

“Marriage,” Craig said, folding his hands together on the table, “is between one man and one woman. It’s in the Bible.”

At this point, I excused myself and said I needed to go next door to pick up a few groceries.

That’s how I felt during Rubio’s rebuttal, like I should excuse myself and find something else to do. The Republican Party, as it exists right now, is a dying paradigm. You can’t dismiss most of the electorate – women, Hispanics, gays, people of color, the poor and elderly, the vulnerable and disenfranchised – and win any election in this country. Even Rubio, whose parents are Cuban immigrants, who represents the rapidly expanding Hispanic electorate, can’t save this party, as it exists now, with a platform that benefits the few at the expense of the many.

A talisman is something which allegedly holds certain magical properties that protect us from harm, provide good luck, or communicate something we need to know. Or all of the above. I suppose we might call it a superstition. But when a particular pattern related to this talisman recurs again and again, we call it synchronicity: the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that is meaningful to the observer and that can’t be explained by cause and effect.

A talisman can be anything – an animal, a song, a book, a phrase, an object. My talisman is Frog. When a live frog appears in our home, it’s a signal that something big is coming. Whether the event is positive, negative or something in between seems to depend on the frog’s health, the room in which it’s found, and whether we can free it without hurting it.

For our friend Mike Perry of the UK,  white feathers are a talisman that usually indicate spirit communication and a positive affirmation that the soul lives on.  For our daughter, a dragonfly means communication and good luck. For other people, it might be the traditional rabbit’s foot, a ladybug, a shamrock. In fact, here are 50 good luck signs.

This evening, we received a neat story from David Wilson of Crossroad Press about his talisman. (Or is it talismen??)

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It was a normal day, nothing special going on.

I stopped to get my dry-cleaning, and as I got out of the car, I found a shiny, face-up 1983 penny right beside my car.  I’m not really superstitious, but sometimes…  anyway, I picked it up.

That same day:

I got an unexpected check for $900.

I got an e-mail from Clive Barker offering crazy-good help on a writing project.  He now is offering us some of his books.

I met the trustee of the estate of a dear, departed friend, Hugh Cave,  and became the publisher for all of that great man’s works.

I collect lucky pennies now and hand them out.  If I find one face down, I turn it.  If I have a penny, I place it face up where it can be found…

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…by you or me!

In the aftermath of our appearance on Coast to Coast AM, we received a number of fascinating emails – and a few phone calls. We’ll be posting about some of these stories periodically.

I’d like to preface this by saying that I’m always surprised when someone who is a complete stranger tracks down our phone number and calls. We have caller ID and usually don’t answer calls from numbers we don’t recognize. Our feeling is that if you have something to say that necessitates a call, then please leave a message and we’ll get back to you.

Not too long ago, a call from an unrecognized number came through and because the area code was from the city in Florida where our daughter, Megan, went to college, I answered it. I figured maybe she had lost her cell phone! But it wasn’t Megan calling.

The woman on the other end had written a book that involved synchronicity and wanted us to review it. Usually, we’re happy to help out other writers. But I was irritated by the call, by this woman’s pushiness, by her intrusion into that time of day when I enjoy my coffee and drop by other blogs. In the end, I sent her book to a friend to review and it got lost in the shuffle of daily life and was never reviewed.

One of the emails we received after Coast to Coast was from a guy named Tom, who has filmed a documentary called 933 skills that involves synchronicity/ETs, UFOs. Before you click on the link, please read  the rest of the post.

We received three emails from Tom within a 24-hour period, asking if we had watched his film. I explained that we were recovering from sleep deprivation – the show was from 2-5 AM EST – and no, we hadn’t watched it yet, but would.  So yesterday, I did.

There are three segments to this film, which add up to about half an hour. First, the numbers intrigued me – 933. A new one. What could it possibly address? I wondered, and clicked on part one- the clip to the far right on  the You Tube link.  I nearly stopped watching within the first minute or so because of the way Obama is depicted, but hey, okay, a difference of opinion and all that. I’m glad I kept watching.

Tom’s documentary involves a sighting on October 12, 1992, of a “a green ball of fire” that was witnessed by thousands of people in the northeastern U.S.  He delves into this event and the number 933 in the same way our Australian blogging friend, Daz, dives into synchronicities. Both men drill through layers of stuff, of connections within connections, labyrinths within labyrinths,  until your head spins. But the bottom line is always satisfying and provides insights into synchronicity.

I sent the You Tube link to mathaddict (Connie Cannon in Aliens in the Backyard). She’s the best numerologist I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing and  I figured she would have something to say about it. She did: Here I go again….the 933 on this guy’s moniker is 9+3+3 = 15 = 6. Any  questions, Bueller? This is the number, as we all know by now, of anything  relative to UFOs/ETs and such.

When I sent her remark to Tom, he asked, “Who’s Bueller?”

I think Bueller refers to a line in the 1986 movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off , a comedy starring Matthew Broderick. The important thing here, though, is that Connie identified, numerologically, the substance of Tom’s documentary.

After I watched part one, I was interested enough to click on part two. I happened to glance at the numbers of views it had received and yes, there it was, the number 933. Not 930 or 9,300 or 93. But 933, the very number Tom  talks about in the film. At this point, I asked myself what I usually do when confronted with this sort of thing, Who’s orchestrating this  stuff, anyway?

 There are no easy answers to that question. The WHO seems to depend on our individual belief systems – philosophical, spiritual, scientific, academic, medical, whatever. But for me, it usually goes back to physicist David Bohm. He believed in an underlying order in the universe that he called the implicate or enfolded order. It’s a kind of primal soup that births everything – even time.  The explicate order is our external reality – i.e. , for instance, Tom’s film. Synchronicity is what lives and breathes at the border between the implicate  and the explicate, the internal and the external realities.

The 933 views was an obvious synchro, a confirmation that I should watch parts 2 and 3. So I did. And Tom may be on to something here.

Each of us has a different way of experiencing, interpreting, using and  living with synchronicity. I couldn’t do a film like Tom’s; I can’t write about synchros in the way that Daz does. After a certain level of drilling, frustration sets in and I walk away. Yet I’m grateful for people like Tom and Daz who possess the patience and  perseverance to go for the absolute bottom line: what is this this thing called synchronicity, anyway? Who are we in the greater scheme of things?  And hey, hello, what’s going on? So take a look at Tom’s film. It provides much fodder for thought.