Welcome to The Mystical Underground

Our daughter is presently house-hunting in Orlando for a new place to live. Last week, she found what she thought was the perfect place, ideal neighborhood, three bedrooms, two bathrooms, pet friendly, with a fenced backyard where her dog can run and play.

The woman told Megan she selects renters based on who has the highest credit rating. Since Megan hasn’t found a roommate yet, we agreed to co-sign on the lease and submitted our applications for a credit and background check. We felt she had a good shot at this and she was supposed to find out around the time we were going to Orlando help her out with her second Wine Walk.

This event happens ever second Thursday in Orlando. Artists come from all over Central Florida and exhibit their wares. People who attend – anywhere from 300-700- buy a $10 ticket to the wine walk. It entitles them to free drinks along the wine walk route, where all these artists have their exhibits. This time, Megan was invited to set up on the front porch of a dog bakery, where she has painted pet portraits for the owners. It’s an ideal spot with a built in audience.

The day before, though, we’d found out that Megan had come in second in the credit rating so she hadn’t gotten the house. It struck us as odd that an owner would judge a tenant worthy based only on a credit rating. What about how you feel about the prospective tenant? What kind of impression did the person make on you? Megan and the owner had gotten along so well that she ended up commissioning two pet Christmas ornaments from her. At any rate, during the day leading up to the wine walk that evening, we spent most of our time house-hunting on Zillow and other sites.

The wine walk went great and we were hopeful:

This morning before we left, Megan said she’d gotten an email from the owner of another house that interested her and was going to see the place that afternoon. The location was better, the rent – with a roommate – would be what she’s paying now, and even though it had only one bathroom, there were three bedrooms and a large yard

Now, here’s the synchro. This house had become available just today. Back in November, the woman rented the place to a fireman and a paramedic. Even though she really liked the two young women who had seen the place before the two men, the guys had the highest credit scores of the prospective tenants. They were supposed to move into the house in January, but the paramedic changed his mind and the deal fell through the very day she emailed Megan.

The woman laughed when Megan told her what had happened with the first house. “I should’ve selected the two women, but instead I went with the highest credit rating. Then the deal falls through. I’ll never again go strictly on credit rating.

As Megan was leaving, someone pulled up in front of the house to inquire about it. The owner told them she was pretty sure she’d just found the right tenant. I take this as a confirmation synchro that the house is the right one for her. Now we’ll wait and see what unfolds.

These are great anagrams. I noticed this list on a FB synchronicity site a few hours after I’d stumbled on what I call a counter-anagram. That would be when the re-arranged word reflects opposite characteristics, rather than similar ones.

I was working on a chapter of Sensing the Future, our upcoming book, when I noticed that two names of paranormal researchers were anagrams. However, one of them is a strong advocate and defender of the reality of psi phenomenon and the other is a skeptic-debunker. They are Dean Radin and James Randi:  Radin/Randi. I’m not sure they would accept that one in the Anagram Society, but I have to chuckle over the magician Randi realizing that his name, with a minor shuffle, becomes Radin and visa versa.

On the night after Thanksgiving, Megan had some of her friends over, all twentysomethings. They love card and board games, and this evening they were playing something called Word Whimsy, 2 the game of outrageous answers.

Rob had fallen asleep and I was working in my office when Megan suddenly rushed in, excited. “Mom, you’ve got to see this synchro.”

“See it where?”

“These cards that came up.”

Synchro is the magic word around this house, so of course I got up and hurried after her into the dining room. “Here was the question/issue.” Megan points at the top card, a red card with a message that reads: If we were all children, this would frighten us.

Megan’s friends are snickering and giggling as she gestures at the 4 cards beneath the main card. And yes, this is somewhat ribald, folks, so if you’re easily offended, don’t look any farther. But if you want a good laugh, here are the words:

Boner

Cock

Balls

Weiner

And here’s the pic to prove it:

This sure has the trickster’s handprints all over it!

That’s the name of a song by Elvis Costello. I hadn’t heard it in many years. In fact, I don’t think I’d heard any Elvis Costello songs for a very long time. But a couple of days after the Paris terrorist attacks, I heard ‘What’s so Funny…’ on the radio and realized it fit well as an answer to terrorism.

Later, as I headed to the gym, I decided to create ‘Elvis Costello Radio’ on Pandora on my iPhone. I did so and plugged in my earbuds. Oddly enough, in the hour I was at the gym, I only heard one Elvis C song before the Pandora program switched to other songs that supposedly fit well in style and ‘era’ to Elvis C. The song I did hear was  ‘Allison – My Aim is True.’

But that wouldn’t be the end of Elvis Costello for the day. That evening, Trish and I decided to watch an episode of the television series, Minority Report, which is based on the Stephen Spielberg movie of the same name. We’d been looking forward to this new series this fall because we’re working on a book about precognition and that’s what Minority Report is about – specifically three ‘precogs’ who detect crimes before they happen. In the TV series, however, the program has been shut down. I guess solving murders before they happened raised some irritating civil rights issues. So ten years have passed and one of the male precogs starts working freelance with a female police detective.

Unfortunately, we haven’t found the series too interesting. I guess we’re not in the proper demographic since the detective and her female buddy are both in their 20s and seem – to us – way too young for the roles they’re playing. But maybe in 2065 the detectives are young and hot. We watched the third episode that night, hoping it would get better, but basically watching it because it deals with precognition.

So in this episode the suspected killer at the climax is about to kill a young woman named Allison and as he aims his gun at her forehead, we hear – yes – Elvis Costello singing ‘Allison – My Aim is True.’ Fortunately for Allison, the would-be killer is interrupted before he fires. You don’t need to know anything more about that episode…or any of the others, for that matter.

For me, the sequence of events were an Elvis Costello synchronicity and a precognition – an unconscious one. So I experienced a precognition that involved a television series about precognition, which we were watching because of our book in the works is on precognition.

I don’t think we’re going to use this story in the book, though, probably because it’s one of those stories that’s really only of interest to the person who experienced it. That’s what I realized after read what I wrote here. But now I’ve already written it…so here it is.

Before we start this post, there are several questions we would like you to answer. Please don’t Google anything yet. Just mark the appropriate response.

1) Have you heard of The Mandela Effect

Yes

No

2) Nelson Mandela died in Johannesburg in 2013.

Yes

No

3) Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s.

Yes

No

4) Do you know who Fiona Broome is?

Yes

No

Rob and I first heard about the Mandela Effect from Sharee Geo, who co-costs a radio show on Truth Frequency Radio, with her husband Chris. Rob and I were recently guests on their show and before our scheduled appearance, she emailed us suggestions about what we might discuss:

Synchronicity and Meditation are both hot topics on the show. However, we’ve gone even a little further lately with ideas about a holographic reality that uses synchronicity to reinforce reality, along with phenomena like the Mandela effect – The idea that something has happened to our “timeline” sometime in the past that is now changing small things in our present reality/timeline.

Rob and I have experienced things like she was suggesting, but weren’t aware that it actually had a name, so I started Googling it. Nelson Mandela is one of my uncontested heros, so yes, this interested me. This article, from a website called Odyssey, explains it as a conspiracy theory  about how people often remember events that didn’t happen in the way they remember. Another website calls the Mandela Effect a theory about parallel universes.  This theory makes more sense to me than any conspiracy.

The phrase first appeared online in 2010, when blogger Fiona Bloom described an experience she’d had at a Dragon Con conference. She realized that other people had a memory completely different from hers about when Nelson Mandela had died. She believed – remembered – that he died in prison in the 1980s. She remembered the news clips of his funeral, the mourning in the country, rioting in the cities, even Winnie Mandela’s speech. Then she discovered he was actually alive

Fiona went on to discover other widely held alternative memories that include Star Trek episodes that never existed, and the death of Billy Graham. Then, in 2012, another blogger, Reece, who also happened to be a physicist, described a similar dichotomy about the spelling of the old cartoon The Barenstein Bears. That’s the spelling I remember. But these days, the spelling is The Barenstain Bears. And Reece the physicist provides a theory of the universe that would account for this.

I propose that the universe is a 4-dimensional complex manifold. If you don’t se habla math jargon, that means I propose the 3 space dimensions and the 1 time dimensions are actually in themselves complex, meaning they take values of the form a+ib, part “real” and part “imaginary”. Within this 4D manifold, there are sixteen hexadectants (like quadrants, but 16 of them), corresponding to whether we consider only the real or imaginary part of each of the four dimensions. In our particular hexadectant, the three space dimensions are real, and the time dimension is imaginary.

I honestly have no idea what any of that means except that he seems to be talking about a four-dimensional universe that sounds more like string theory- with multiples realities sandwiched alongside ours. But to keep things simple, let’s call them parallel universes, similar to the idea put forth in the 2011 independent movie Another Earth.

Just for the record, I remember this cartoon as The Berenstein Bears. Here’s the You Tube video about the Bears. In the course of this video, the narrator notes how he went back into cartoon archives and found that the spelling changed some tine between April and August 5, 2001. In other words, the spelling changed anywhere from three weeks to five months before 9-11, when the world did change.

Interestingly, Rob and I experienced something like this when we were house hunting in early 1999. My dad was living with us then, my mother was in an Alzheimer’s unit, and we were looking for a house large enough to accommodate the four of us. At the time, we lived in a 3-bedroom house in Boynton Beach. Megan was sleeping in the living room because she had turned her bedroom over to my dad, and Rob’s office was in the hallway.

One of the places we looked at was in Jupiter, Florida about 25 miles north of where we live now. The house and the property, about two acres, were terrific. We loved the place. It had two master bedrooms, one on each side of the pool, with a wide open kitchen that opened to a spacious family room with a great fireplace. We recalled that the owner was a pilot. But it was too expensive.

Six or eight months later, on another house-hunting Sunday, we ran across the house again and eagerly went by for a look. Same address, but the house and property were totally different. It wasn’t the same house. We asked the Realtor about it, if any changes had been made to the place in the last six months, if the zoning had changed, the addresses. Nope, nope. Nope.

In Robert Moss’s book, The Boy Who Died and Came Back, he describes a number of similar experiences he has had over the years. He’s aware of a number of parallel selves- the Robert Moss who continues to write thrillers, a Robert Moss who is living with Australian Aborgines, a Moss who is a shaman. The idea here is that’s if the Multiple Worlds theory of quantum physics is true, then for ever decision we make, the path we didn’t choose shoots off on its own and we live it out. And sometimes, the lives bleed into what we call our present reality.

Is it possible that the Mandela Effect is tangible evidence of these parallel lives? I find the idea tantalizing!

iStockPhoto.com

In writing Sensing the Future, our book on precognition, I’m confirming what I already suspected: that our concept of time and our approach to science are subject to revision.

In my research, I always go to a book’s index first and scan the listings under P, looking for precognition. Most of the time, if it’s there at all, it’s as a footnote on a particular page. It seems that many scientists are uncomfortable with the term precognition but not with the word premonition. Rupert Sheldrake is a notable exception.

In The Sense of Being Stared At, he has several chapters on precognition. He admits that precognition is the most puzzling of all psychic phenomena. “How could we possibly sense something that has not yet occurred?… It raises deep questions about freedom and determinism. If we know something is going to happen, does that mean the future is fixed? And if the future is fixed, does that mean free will is an illusion?”

It’s challenging to write about precognition without delving into this question. But Sheldrake does a masterful job of explaining that the old paradigm of a mechanistic universe has been turned on its head through recent discoveries in quantum physics. Through attention and intention, he says, “our minds stretch out into the world beyond our bodies…Even the relatively determined near future is predictable only in terms of probabilities.” Take weather forecasts, for instance. Or economic forecasts. Or the forecasts that insurers use. “Indeterminacy lies at the heart of quantum physics. Predictions are possible only in terms of probability. My intentions affect the future.”

Interestingly, his thoughts are echoed in the Seth material, more than 6,000 pages that were channeled by author Jane Roberts and resulted in more than 20 books on the nature of reality. Seth described himself as an “energy personality essence no longer focused in physical existence,” and the basis of his material is that we create our own realities through our intentions, expectations, beliefs – through our consciousness. He stated that every earthly event played out in all its probable states and that we are interconnected with these multidimensional/parallel universes. We just aren’t tuned in yet to that fact.

In this scenario, then, there would be a world in which the terrorists never crashed planes into the World Trade Center, where Al Gore had won the presidency, where the tragedies in Paris never happened. There would be a world where you married your childhood sweetheart and lived happily ever after. This idea, the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics, has been around since 1957, but has gained traction in recent years.

Every consciousness, according to Seth, “is dependent on upon every other. The strength of one adds to the strength of all. The weakness of one weakens the whole. The energy of one recreates the whole. The striving of one increases the potentiality of everything that is, and this creates responsibility upon every consciousness.” In other words, folks, we’re all in this together.

Seth also noted that precognition occurs in evolution so that a species can prepare itself now for changes that will be necessary in the future. Is that why so many people had precognitions about 9-11? About the Boston Marathon bombings? About other man-made and natural disasters?

“The fact is that each of you create your own physical reality: and en masse you create both the glories and the terrors that exist within your earthly experience.”

So, I’m discovering that Sensing the Future is a book in which quantum physics and metaphysics run for awhile on parallel tracks and then blend seamlessly together.

This synchronicity comes from Terry Crowley, a writer we met at the Tallahassee Writer’s Conference last spring. We’ve posted a couple of her synchros before. This one is about how some decisions/situations haunt us for years and then some synchro happens that clears it up! I’m not sure where this falls in the scheme of synchronicity – helpful synchro? Resolution synchro? I think it’s a meld of both.

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One morning, on the way home from running errands, Terry was pondering relationships and thought of an old friend she hadn’t heard from in years. “I didn’t magically hear from her; that’s not the synchro. What I was thinking about was a situation that happened between us.

“I had a meeting I was in charge of and had to attend, but my friend wanted me to be in her wedding.  I decided to change the date of the meeting so I could attend the wedding, but then she changed the date of the wedding to the same date of the meeting again! I was now between a rock and a hard place. I decided I had to decline her invitation and attend the meeting instead.”

For years, Terry beat herself up about this decision. She finally decided to look at O Magazine, which she never had time to do these days. “One of my favorite columnists is Martha Beck, so I turned immediately to her article Right This Ways! (plural “s”), which talks about how some social decisions are just impossible to make, but she provides some ideas on how to make those decisions. Beck described the EXACT scenario I faced 43 years ago!! The exact decision that I have been periodically beating myself up about for all of those years. To make matters worse, I later found out that several of the attendees at the meeting were mad because they had to miss another wedding they wanted to attend, too!

“Thankfully,  I can now let this no-win scenario go. I tried to do the my best for my friend. The circumstance was out of my control, even though I did my best to control it, and much to the chagrin of others. This was a happy synchro to have had because I can now stop second-guessing myself the next time this pops into my head. The article also made me realize how much I have been thinking about this decision from so long ago!”

Signs & symbols surround us and many of them hold messages that we should heed. Guidelines. Insights. Hints about the future that may transpire.

In October when we were in Asheville, we went into a shop where Megan decorated a ceramic plate that was a tribute to and a gift for her roommate, Erin. I don’t recall what it said, but do remember that it was a nice tribute to their friendship. The plate was to be delivered once it was fired.

A few weeks later Rob and I were visiting Megan and noticed the ceramic plate from Asheville on the counter. It was broken and chipped. A tube of super glue sat beside it. “What happened?” Rob asked.

“Oh, Erin put it in the dishwasher and it broke when we took it out,” Megan replied. “I’m going to fix it with super glue.”

Later that evening, Rob remarked, “That’s not a good sign, Trish, about her continuing to live here.”

“Oh, c’mon,” I said, “They’ve already agreed that she’ll sign a new contract on December 2. It’s fine. The broken plate is a fluke.”

Erin, after all, is a woman Megan has known for a decade, since she was 16 and she and Erin were interning at Dolphins Plus in Key Largo. They maintained a friendship over the years and when Megan moved to Orlando, she and Megan reconnected. In late 2014, Erin’s parents bought a great little house on an acre of land that backed up a lake, and Erin asked Megan to live with her. Nika, Megan’s dog, had a great yard to run around in and chase squirrels and Megan had her art room filled with paintings. An ideal setup. The house was close to Megan’s dog walking clients and her Paint Nite venues. She has been really happy in this house.

But Rob kept referring back to the broken plate, how it was like a symbol from a dream that you’re supposed to pay attention to. We had both been reading Robert Moss’s book, The Boy Who Died and Came Back, and I felt we were unduly influenced by it. I mean, c’mon, sometimes events are just stuff that happens, right?

Shortly before Thanksgiving, Megan and I returned from a trip to Asheville, North Carolina, where we attended an Abraham-Hicks two-day conference. The conference was wonderful, the trip was great, but as soon as we walked into Megan’s place in Orlando, there was that plate still on the counter chipped and broken, still not repaired. That night when Erin got home from work, she seemed strangely preoccupied, uneasy, and I felt that maybe she resented my presence there as Megan’s mom. She said she was just stressed from work. I felt otherwise.

I kept obsessing about the broken plate, that broken tribute to a friendship.Fast forward to November 30. Megan had arrived back in Orlando after the Thanksgiving holidays and had gone out and bought a Christmas tree for the house. Our neighbor had given us some Christmas ornaments that I passed on to Megan and I’d found some Christmas lights on sale that I passed on to her.

But when she walked in the house that evening, Erin informed Megan that her brother had gotten a job in Orlando and wanted to live in the house and Megan would have to move out. All this, despite the fact that they had discussed the renewed contract and living together for another four or five years. She had known this since before Thanksgiving- when I’d felt her unease.

Erin’s argument? He’s my brother, what can I say? Well, the only thing to say here is that Erin’s parents own the house.

My dad bought me my first property, a one bedroom condo in Vero Beach, back in the day when 15 grand was a lot of money. He never tried to control what I did with that place, who I invited there, who I lived with, nothing. It was mine. My rent went to him. When I sold the place, I kept the profit and used it for a down payment on another condo, in Fort Lauderdale. In other words there were never strings attached.

Rob recognized the sign and Megan and I refused to acknowledge.

I don’t know if the friendship is as broken as the plate.But the living arrangement is broken. The big question now is: what’s next? We’ve found a one bedroom-place that may work, in the same general area in Orlando. We’ll see what signs and symbols have to say and proceed from there. Never again will I dismiss a sign as some random event. As Robert Hopcke said in his book by the same name, There Are No Accidents. We do not live in a random universe. The only question is simple: Are we paying attention?

If there’s no trickery involved in this video – and it doesn’t look like there is – then this 9-year-old girl is astonishing!

If I were going to have my dreams analyzed by a psychiatrist, I would choose Bernard Beitman, a visiting professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia. Never mind that he claims he is no expert in dreams. He’s a Jungian, who also happens to be the first psychiatrist since Jung to embark on a serious study of synchronicity. His book, Connecting with Coincidence, will be published in March 2016, by the same folks who published Chicken Soup of the Soul.

Dr. Beitman also blogs for Psychology Today, where this particular article appeared.

Beitman believes that coincidences can be useful to psychotherapists in their treatment of patients. As he develops his coincidence studies, he looks to the usefulness of coincidences. “I analyze the role people play in creating their own coincidences. While shaping this previously abstract, philosophical topic into a more solid science, magic is not lost on me. In fact, it is that transcendental feeling created by coincidences that started my quest. I suppose this is the case to a certain degree in all scientific exploration,” he writes.

When Beitman was in his late twenties, he felt like a kid who had found his way into a “strange new land that it seemed few people had visited.” Sound familiar? You bet. Many of us who experience synchronicity have felt this very thing. Bernard writes that he felt like he’d wandered into the “Coincidence Forest,” where magic resonated. “I ran back through the tunnel to tell other people what I saw. Most of them did not know what I was talking about.”

Years ago, I recall saying this very thing to my former college roommate. “Don’t you ever wonder how it all fits together?” I asked.

She was a family court judge at the time, a woman who determined whether you would get custody of your children, how your joint assets would be split in the divorce, that kind of meaty, fundamental stuff. And she replied, “Sure. I wonder. But I don’t obsess about it, Trish.”

And yes, maybe there is some obsession in here about synchronicity. It’s such a strange but familiar phenomenon that when it happens repeatedly in your life, aren’t you compelled to figure it out? Or, at the least, to figure out what it means for you?

When Beitman was younger, he woke up choking one night. He later found out that it happened at the exact time that his father was choking to death in his home thousands of miles away.  His name for this type of synchroncity is simulpathity – feeling another’s distress at a distance. It’s synchronicity and empathy slamming together at the same moment. Mothers often experience this kind of thing with their children. Identical twins experience it, as we wrote about here. But any of us can experience it with people we love.

For Jung, this journey started with the scarab beetle that appeared on the window of his office just as a patient was relating a dream about such a beetle. He opened the window, a beautiful symbolic gesture that enabled his patient to make the connection between her dreams and the real world.

As Beitman says: “Jung saw a need for ‘human understanding’ to break through his patient’s resistance to his treatment. Though it isn’t clear what ‘human understanding’ meant to Jung in this case, we can infer that it contrasts with the excessive rationality that Jung says characterized the patient.   It is clear that he sees the coincidence as a way of achieving his therapeutic goal.”

In his study of coincidence, Beitman has found that its creation “favors the prepared mind.” In other words are you open and receptive to meaningful coincidence?

Jung, says Beitman, was a conduit for the scarab coincidence. “Had he not opened the window and let the beetle in, the connection might never have been made between the woman’s inner and outer worlds. The scarab beetle also had significance for Jung. It had appeared previously as a symbol in his own visions. Perhaps this added to his instrumental role in creating the coincidence.”

What Beitman hopes to do with his book and with Coincidence Studies is to illustrate how meaningful coincidence is an actual force that enables us to live more creative, happy, and loving lives.

Sounds good to me. I cant wait to read his book!

HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL OUR FRIENDS IN THE U.S. !!