Welcome to The Mystical Underground

Marker 239 belongs on the Synchronicity Highway! I ran across it in Mysteries of the Unexplained. There’re a few places on the Internet, too, that recount this story. Here are the details…

Late in the summer of 1929, a new highway was opened in Germany. It connected the cities of Bremen and Bremerhaven. Within a year, more than 100 cars had crashed on the highway – all of them at kilometer marker 239, on a stretch of road that was ruler straight.

When survivors were questioned by the police, they described feeling “a tremendous thrill” as their cars reached the marker. They claimed that some great force seized their vehicles and pulled them off the road. On September 7, 1930, nine cars were wrecked at the marker.

Investigators, of course, were bewildered. But Carl Wehrs, a  local dowser, suggested that the mysterious force was a powerful magnetic current generated by an underground stream.  To test his theory, he used a divining rod and slowly walked toward marker 239. When he was about 12 feet away and directly opposite the marker, the rod flew out of his hands and he was spun around.

Convinced his theory was correct, Wehrs found a solution to the problem. He buried a copper box filled with small, star-shaped pieces of copper at the base of the stone marker. For a week, the box stayed where he’d buried it and during this time, there wasn’t a single accident.

Then the box was dug up  and the first three cars that passed the marker were wrecked. The box was quickly reburied and since then, there supposedly haven’t been any accidents at marker 239.

Local farmers believed that a devil was responsible for the accidents. They claimed that after it had been exorcised from the road, it entered their radios, which then produced nothing but static.

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I Googled whether marker 239 has been accident free since 1930 but couldn’t find anything. If anyone else knows, let us know!

This video is strangely compelling. It was caught on a home security camera in Southeast Michigan. 2:25 minutes into it, the orb appears to be drawing up water from a pond.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2XwwjCkJXw#t=10

One of the great fantasy and science fiction writers, Terry Pratchett, talks about what it’s like to live with a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. Except, the discussion is about much more than that. Worth your time. I found this on artist’s Lauren Raines’s site, where the big questions are always asked.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slZnfC-V1SY#t=43

Library at Skywalker Ranch

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 Let me tell you about Indiana Jones. Think of this as the wife’s perspective, okay?

In the late 1980s, we were sitting around a table with some editors  in New York and Risa asked Rob if he would be interested in doing some novelizations for a TV show. He said sure, and  did two novelizations of a TV show, Private Eye, that never went anywhere because by the time the books came out the show had been cancelled. But this connection led to an invite to adapt the script for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

 I was pregnant with Megan then. I remember we went to the theater to see the movie. When the novelization hit the NY Times Bestseller list,  Lucasfilm asked Rob to write some prequels. When Megan was about a year old, we flew out to California and spent some time at Skywalker Ranch.  In those days, you could simply drive into the ranch and right up to the house.

Megan doesn’t remember it, but she is probably one of the few babies who ever crawled across the floor of the library at Skywalker Ranch.

And what a library it was.  As a former librarian and newly published writer, I was struck by the books on the occult,  metaphysis and quantum physics. This library was so huge that it featured a spiral staircase, shelves  from floor to ceiling, with a moveable ladder that took you from one section to the other. Our guide during this visit was a woman named Lucy,  one of Lucas’s first employees, and, if I recall correctly, she was a big mystery reader.

We were supposed to go sailing on Lucas’s boat the next day, but the  weather didn’t cooperate and we spent the day in the library. This was in the days before cell phones, otherwise  I would have photos. Otherwise I would have photos of the Star Wars  display in an  exhibit case, or of Indy’s whip, or photos of the 2,000 acres that comprise Skywalker Ranch.

Some years later, when Megan had seen a couple of the Indiana Jones films, I mentioned that she had crawled around on the library floor at Skywalker Ranch.

“What?” she exclaimed. “Really? How come you guys never told me that? That’s stuff I should know. It’s, like, my personal history.”

I had never thought of it like that, but of course she’s right.

A few years ago, Rob was hired by Lucasfilms to write another book on Indy’s adventures. This time, though, Megan and I weren’t permitted to accompany him. This time, he had to go through multiple security checkpoints,  the place, he said, was like an armed camp.

He described something that I found intriguing – a storyboard that was “probably fifty feet long” that detailed every character, every plot point, every subplot, in Indy’s life.   One of my best tools in fiction writing is a storyboard.  Mine is never fifty feet long. It’s a black poster board that I tack to my office door. I choose different color post-its for each character point of view, so I can tell with just a glance at the storyboard whose POV should come up next.

I suspect that George R.R. Martin, the author whose books are now on HBO as Game of Thrones, must use a storyboard, too. In that series, seven different families are vying for the throne and there are a lot of characters, with multiple plot lines and intrigues.  The only feasible way of keeping so many characters straight is a storyboard – or a brain much larger and more organized than mine.

Now, more than 20 years after our visit to Skywalker Ranch, Megan is writing a novel. She knows about storyboards, but hasn’t used one yet. Instead, as a detail-oriented writer, she has written several extensive outlines. She wants to know where her story is headed. She’s in good company. Ken Follett, one of the best historical and thriller writers around, also writes extensive outlines.

Jerzy Kosinski, author of such classics as The Painted Bird and Being There  supposedly wrote the endings of his books first. I’ve never tried this, but it sounds like an excellent idea. If I do that, though, I first have to know what the trigger event is – the what if  that gets the ball rolling. It might be a mass beaching of dolphins and whales, a psychic vision, a murder, a haunting, a powerful synchronicity, a psychic vision…

But when you have an archetypal character like Indiana Jones, you’ve got to know your triggering event, the characters and their intrigues, the plot points and subplots, and where it’s all going to take you.   Your franchise depends on it.

Rob just finished another six-week meditation course at a local yoga studio. The last session is always a shamanic meditation, my personal favorite. There’s something about drums and rattles that transport me.  With each class, he creates a medicine wheel and we do breathing exercises and a short meditation for each of the four directions.

In his last session in May, he created a medicine wheel with Origami Peace Cranes that Adele Aldridge sent us. At the end of the class, he invited everyone to take home one of the peace cranes. In tonight’s final session he created a medicine wheel with avocados from the tree in our backyard.

This tree, which is now about 30 feet tall, languished for years without producing any fruit whatsoever.  We couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Then Rob remembered that a Puerto Rican guy in our former neighborhood said that when avocado trees don’t produce fruit, you just hit them with a bat. So four or five years ago, Rob hit the tree with a stick.

And suddenly, over the next year, it shot up in altitude and produced two avocados. The next year, it yielded a couple of dozen and the tree kept getting taller, like Jack’s beanstalk.This year, it produced 40 or 50 and we have had to pluck them before the squirrels get to them. If  you like avocados, these are beyond delicious.

The class begins with brief meditation in the four directions. First, the South. This direction is the home of the archetypal serpent, where we learn to shed the past and begin to detach from our wounds and personal stories. We learn to release heavy energy accumulated in our bodies.

In the West, we learn about the Jaguar, who teaches us about life, death and rebirth. We face fears and family shadows, and step across the bridge to learn to walk as warriors, without enemies.

 In the North, we meet the archetype Hummingbird and learn to taste knowledge directly, to manifest the impossible, and to receive ancestral knowledge.

In the final gathering we explore the East and the archetype of the Eagle, who demonstrates how to experience vision, destiny and the possibilities of becoming. We develop our vision of peace.

Then he begins a shamanic meditation with a tape by Sandra Ingerman, who was a student of Michael Harner, probably the best-known shaman in the West. I love this 18-minute meditation. Although Sandra’s voice is somewhat sharp, she uses drums and rattles, sounds that transport me. Sandra takes us into the Middle World, an alternative version of our world where mythological creatures are alive. In this place, I imagine myself in the breathtaking landscape of the Arenal Lodge in Costa Rica and have all sorts of fascinating inner experiences with beings that inhabit the lush plants and trees and flowers there.

The next place that Sandra takes us is into the Upper World, a higher spiritual realm. We can get there by riding on the back of a bird, leaping off a cliff, rising upward with smoke. You get the idea. The jumping off the cliff thing reminded me of author Carlos Castaneda, who seemed to jump off quite a few  in his apprenticeship with Don Juan. I didn’t jump off a cliff; I rode on the back of our dusky conure, Kali, who died in 2005, in the wake of Hurricane Wilma. 

I worried about riding on her since she was a small bird. But in this place, size wasn’t a problem. With this meditation, Sandra uses a Brazilian instrument – berimbau- that has a lovely sound, but isn’t quite as all encompassing for me as drums and rattles.

Then, as the finale, Rob takes us into the Lower World, where there are spirit guides, power animals, where we can connect with loved ones. In this place, I connected with one of my favorite fictional characters, Mira Morales,  a psychic and bookstore owner who lives on the fictional island of Tango Key. Mira has crept into my dreams and meditations before. This time, she sat with me and talked about the new Tango Key novel I’m writing. I often wonder if she actually exists in some parallel reality. That’s how real these “visitations” are. She gave me some pointers on plot and motives.

When we returned to the normal world, the class ended with the H’oponpono mantra, a Hawaiian shamanic mantra—I’m sorry, please forgive me, I love you, thank you. Finally, the class came to an end with three OMs.  Then Rob invited the students to take home an avocado. I snapped my photo just before the avocados were snatched up and whisked away.

 We often talk about art imitating life. But in some of the scariest movies ever made, life has imitated art in bizarre, synchronistic ways.  Take The Exorcist.

 Entertainment Weekly  and Maxim voted this movie as the scariest horror film of all time. The Exorcist graphically portrays an epic struggle between human lives and demonic forces.The film debuted in 1973 as an adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s best-selling novel and became a occult classic, an icon of popular culture.

 Peculiar events plagued the cast and crew throughout the production of the movie, including the death of two cast members. At least six people associated with The Exorcist died either during production or prior to the release of the movie. Jack McGowan died of flu complications a little over a month before the movie’s release. McGowan portrayed Burke Dennings, the life of the party, who tells a prominent senator, “There seems to be an alien pubic hair in my gin.” Dennings also dies in the movie at the hands of the possessed Regan. (Linda Blair).

 Vasiliki Maliaros was 90 years old when she died of natural causes not long after she finished filming her role as Father Karras’ mother. During production of the film, a night watchman for the set and the set refrigeration technician also passed away.

Linda Blair, who played Regan, lost her grandfather during the filming. Max Von Sydow, who played Father Merrin, was in good health at the beginning of the production but suffered from a series of unexplained illnesses during the shoot. His brother died during the filming.

On several occasions, lights that had been rigged to the ceilings of sets fell without explanation and, fortunately, never hurt anyone. Delays were also caused when props were regularly shipped or delivered to incorrect locations or simply disappeared from sets.

The film took a major blow when an unexplained fire destroyed all of the interior sets of the MacNeill residence, except Regan’s bedroom. That delayed filming for six weeks of the last scenes in Iraq in which a small statue of the demon, Pazuzu, would be discovered.

 Ellen Burstyn accepted the role of Regan’s mom only after producers agreed to eliminate her character’s scripted line, “I believe in the devil!” She might’ve thought that some sort of demons were at work on the set when she was injured filming the scene in which Regan throws her across the bedroom with superhuman strength. In reality, Ellen Burstyn was yanked by a harness, but she landed on her coccyx, resulting in a permanent spinal injury.

 Astonishingly, snow fell on the indoor set of the demon-inhabited bedroom. Although it was explainable, it was startling. In order to provide the effect of visible breath, the set was refrigerated and cooled by four air conditioners. Temperatures often plunged below freezing and on one occasion when the air was saturated with moisture, the cast and crew arrived to find a layer of snow covering the set.

In the scene where Father Karras discovers that Regan’s demon is speaking English in reverse, a white banner is visible above a door that reads: “TASUKETE” in stark red letters. Translated from Japanese, it shouts: “HELP!” The banner was part of an unrelated project in Keating Hall on Fordham University’s Bronx campus where the scene was filmed.

An amazing musical prodigy who is autistic and blind. This seems a fitting post for today, my dad’s birthday. He would have been 100. Buddy, as our daughter Megan called him, loved music. He would have been spellbound by this young man.

I’m beginning to think that the dog park is a synchronistic reflection of the larger world, an immediate picture of a collective mind. Here’s why.

On October 1, the first day of the government shutdown here in the U.S., I took Noah and Nika to the park by myself because Rob was finishing up something he was writing. When Noah is with Nika, his wild side emerges. He does stuff he wouldn’t ordinarily do if it was just us and him. But Nika is his X factor, her little voice whispering, Let’s go get us some squirrels.

 As soon as they were out of the car, they were tugging and straining at their leashes so hard that I had two choices – be dragged face down across concrete or let them go. I released their leashes and they took off at the speed of light.  I kept walking toward the gate, the dog park, and eventually they both circled around and joined me.

We were there for perhaps five minutes before a man arrived with his pit bull and a puppy of another breed.  The pit immediately went for a white German shepherd – or the shepherd went for the pit, depending on whose story is true – and suddenly the park was a cacophony of barking, snarling, the kinds of sounds that dogs make when they are genuinely pissed off.

A bunch of owners moved forward to separate the dogs. The pit’s’ human snapped a leash on him and then lounged against the fence, as if just daring the unleashed dogs to come around. He and the owner of the white shepherd started yelling at each other – You’re dog is just as aggressive as mine, your dog is a schmuck…. Then Cody, an Alaskan husky who belongs to Karin, tried to mitigate the disagreements as he usually does, but got ticked off by something and went after the pit. I left. Too much doggy and human aggression.

Two days later Rob and I took Noah and Nika to the park. The pit and his owner were there again, but we had just missed a confrontation between him Karin. Apparently the pit’s owner, let’s call him Joe, had shown a video to some other dog owner that supposedly proved that Karin was carrying a gun and that when she reached into her bag the other day, it was to withdraw her weapon.  

When I heard this, I burst out laughing. Karin with a gun? Karin, a gun-toting’ Annie Oakley? Hardly. This woman can’t stand confrontation of any kind. She, like most of us, goes to the dog park because it’s usually peaceful, her dog has fun, it’s a social event.

Well, Karin went over to Joe to set him straight, and when Joe got into her face, she called the cops. We arrived about ten minutes after that happened. Cassie quickly herded us to the far end of the park and brought us up to speed on what was going on. The cop arrived a while later, obviously not in any mood to deal with dog stuff. He spoke to Karin, then to Joe, then to Karin and some other people. He was the same cop who had pulled into our driveway one morning in June after a neighbor and Rob had a confrontation over Nika barking at his dog.

As we watched all of this unfold, it occurred to me that the dog park drama bore eerie parallels to what is happening in the larger world, where Democrats and Republicans bark at each other, point fingers at each other, blame, blame, blame. And the government shutdown wasn’t resolved until the 11th hour, on October 16.

Joe told the cop he wouldn’t ever come back to this dog park. The cop told Karin that he thought Joe was a wacko, but that he couldn’t really do anything because Joe was a city resident and the park is open to all city residents.

In other words, an impasse just like Congress dabbled in for nearly three weeks.

Have you ever wondered what part of the body is associated with synchronicity? Strange question, right? After all, synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, and the physical body seem like two separate subjects.

Synchronicity is related to non-physical realms—to the inner reality—while our bodies seem part and parcel with physical reality. Yet, the body is also associated with an invisible energy system, known as chakras. Seven chakras span the body from the tailbone to the crown of the head, and they are related to meridian system of energy.

In the meditation course I teach at a yoga studio, several of my meditations focus on chakras, and in one of them I talk about synchronicity in relationship to the sixth chakra or ajna chakra, located on the brow between the eyes. It’s also known as the third eye chakra.

Each chakra is associated with a particular frequency or vibration, color and sound. They are said to appear as spinning vortices of energy. In fact, chakra is a Sanskrit word meaning ‘wheel’ or spinning wheel. A chakra meditation is about tuning the chakras. It’s like getting the wheels of your car aligned. It brings you more into balance, brings more energy and balance into your life to heal yourself, if necessary.

Regarding the sixth chakra, an attunement can enhance your intuitive powers, and even attract synchronicity. So let’s look more closely at this idea. The third eye chakra is not only related to your higher mental and intuitive abilities, it’s also associated with the pituitary gland, and is responsible for providing an interface between the inner and out worlds. So it could be said that the pituitary gland transmits synchronicity from the inner realms into everyday reality.

It actually might be a bit more complicated. According to Indian scholar H. H. Mahatapaswi Shri Kumarswamiji, the pituitary gland of the sixth chakra and the pineal gland of the seventh chakra must join their essence in order to open the Third Eye. The pituitary gland is called the “seat of the mind” with the frontal lobe regulating emotional thoughts, such as poetry and music, and the anterior lobe regulating concrete thought and intellectual concepts. On the other hand, the pineal gland is known as the “seat of illumination, intuition and cosmic consciousness.” The pineal gland is to the pituitary gland what intuition is to reason.

Furthermore, a healthy sixth chakra can ensure that you’re on the right path in your life and constantly finding support and valuable information through synchronicity and psychic experiences. Blockages of the brow chakra relate to delusions and fantasies. (Skeptical readers might find this post is an example!)

Sure, it’s a far out idea to attribute synchronicity to a pea-sized endocrine gland, but there has always been a veil of mystery around the functioning of the pituitary and pineal glands. But no stranger than synchronicity itself.