Welcome to The Mystical Underground

Back in the summer of 2009, Rob went trail biking – the kind of biking where you slam over obstacles like fallen trees. It had rained that day, which broke the stifling Florida heat and usually meant the trail was well packed. I reminded him to take his cell phone since we’d had some car issues, but he couldn’t find it.

Around 8 PM, I heard the front door open, shut, which was odd. He usually came in through the garage. I went out into the living room and he was sprawled on the couch, eyes squeezed shut. “I think I sprained my ankle,” he said, and lifted his injured foot onto the edge of the coffee table.

I took one look at his foot and knew this wasn’t a sprain. A bone on the outside of his foot was about the size of an apricot. “Uh, I think this is a fracture or a break. I’ll get some ice.”

So I got a bucket of ice, then headed to the internet to look for information on the bones in the feet. I figured the bone that was fractured or broken was the cuboid, on the forefoot, as it’s called. I wondered if there was a synchronicity connected to any of this.

Later on, I stacked up a bunch of books we’d been using as references and put them on Rob’s desk. A few minutes later, he called out: “You aren’t going to believe this. You know those books you just put on my desk? I picked up Jung’s autobiography, turned to chapter 10, and here’s how it starts: ‘In the beginning of 1944, I broke my foot…’”

Skip ahead seven years. On January 7, 2016, my friend Millie Gemondo and I traded readings, as we frequently do. The exchange really isn’t fair because I simply read the tarot cards and Millie is a psychic who has made a number of correct predictions for us over the year. During the exchange, Millie told me to warn Rob to be careful when he went biking. She saw him falling off the bike and said it could be serious. I remembered the broken foot from 2009, so I passed on her message to Rob.

“A synchro,” he said, and reminded me that six years ago, he had a vivid dream that on January 7 (no year given in the dream), he would fall from his mountain bike and die. A few days after that dream, he’d related it to a friend with intuitive abilities who told him he wouldn’t die, but would be paralyzed, and for him that would be like death.

Needless to say, Rob avoids mountain biking every January 7, even though it’s prime riding time in South Florida. He has continued that tradition ever since he had the dream. Several times, he has remembered his dream date with death at the last hour. His regular riding partner, worried that the dream might have been about him, now also avoids riding on January 7.

That story might sound silly to a non-believer, but why challenge such a dream? Instead, Rob acted on it. As he puts it, “I honor that day for life rather than death.”

This is how precognition works in its purest form, I think. A possible future is glimpsed and we can take action to change it.

Is there any question that this young woman won the audition or whatever this was?

Here’s a short excerpt from our upcoming book (Jan. ’17) Sensing the Future.
We include considerably more on Nostradamus, but this is an interesting and humorous tale.

One of the world’s most famous seers, Nostradamus was born Micel de Nostredame on December 14, 1503. His life story, as well as his prophecies, have been passed down over the centuries, and numerous books have been written about him. He was born into a prosperous family in St. Rémy, Provence in southern France, where his father was a notary. The family was originally Jewish, but converted to Catholicism to avoid persecution that was rampant in Europe in the 15^th and 16^th centuries. The French king Louis XII had ordered all Jews to be baptized or face dreadful consequences.

His ancestors were merchants and doctors, and a similar future awaited him. He excelled in his studies and after he received his doctorate at the Montpellier University, he changed his name to the Latin version, Nostradamus.  However, an incident from his youth foretold of the real direction Nostradamus’ life would take.

While attending a Catholic school in Avignon, he made his first prediction. Having seen two young pigs at the barnyard, a black and a white one, he said the white pig would be killed by a wolf, and the black one served for dinner. After the rector found out about the prediction, he ordered to have the black pig slaughtered and buried, and to serve the white pig for dinner immediately. The cook rushed to fulfill the order, but was told at the barnyard that the white pig had been snatched by a wolf that had entered the barn through the roof, and only the black pig was left. Unsure of what to do, the cook served the black pig for dinner.

While we were in Orlando recently, our daughter decided to put her GoPro to good use. She put the camera’s harness on her dog, Nika, then attached the GoPro to the harness. For five or ten minutes, Nika and Noah ran around the yard playing like they usually do. Noah outweighs Nika by more than sixty pounds and invariably takes her down. She then leaps up, boxing at him, and they tear around the yard some more. While they were doing this, we were watching it on Megan’s phone and cracking up.

Curious about the range of the wireless signal, Rob went inside the house with Nika following him, and Megan and I watched her journey outside, on her phone. Then a cool thing happened. As Nika trotted back through the kitchen, she paused in the doorway, peering out into the yard, and one of us yelled, “Squirrel!”

Later that evening, while Megan and Rob were trying to figure out the right music for this video, I was sitting outside with the dogs and suddenly thought, Born to be Wild. I ran inside and blurted the title. Megan and Rob looked up, surprised. “That’s exactly what I just said to dad!”

So, there’s a bit of a synchro here, after all!

Grove Park Inn, Asheville, NC

From November 21-22, my daughter and I attended a two-day Abraham-Hicks conference in Asheville, North Carolina. It’s something we’ve wanted to do for a long time and this year, it was held at the Grove Park Inn rather than the Biltmore because it has a much larger conference room.

Megan and I got there early – but not early enough. Our seats the first day were to the left of the stage, where Esther Hicks does her thing and various participants occupy the “hot seat” and converse one-on-one with the group of souls that calls themselves Abraham.

This was the third conference I’ve attended with Megan, but the only time the conference has spanned two days. It made a difference. More on that in a moment. When Megan and I were seated, I was curious about how many people had attended. So I counted the number of rows in our section, the number of seats in each row, and then counted the sections. I estimated that nearly a thousand people had attended. I heard later it was a lower number, in the 400s, but I have my doubts.

At any rate, the workshop began with Esther talking briefly to the group, then asking the audience what they wanted to discuss, that nothing was off limits. Hands shot up throughout the conference room. Many of the people selected for the hot seat are repeats, which comes out in their discourse with Abraham. One of my favorites was an enthusiastic young man ho is the pitching coordinator for the Houston Astros baseball team. His job is to select the best pitchers for his team and his passion for what he does was certainly conveyed. He was concerned about how he could make the best selections.

Abraham’s advice was interesting. He shouldn’t read the applicant resumes, just glance at their names. And at night, as he was falling asleep, he should request a dream in which the best applicants are revealed to him. This young man had a great sense of humor and engaged with Abraham/Esther in a way that left the crowd in stitches. He was so upbeat and positive that I could feel myself being swept up in his joy.

All of the conversations that workshop participants bring to the hot seat are invariably personal. One man who looked sort of goofy in his torn jeans and wool hat sat down in the hot seat and said something to the effect of, “Okay, I’m a writer and I’m worried that what I’ve written is going to be criticized and ripped apart by critics even though I know it’s a fabulous novel.”

“That’s not a good belief,” Abraham noted, and asked what the book was called.

It was entitled, Being a Bisexual Christian in a Bipolar World. He laughed and the crowd burst into explosive laughter. Yeah, okay. Esther rolled her eyes and replied, “You’re right. They’re going to nail you up.”

Abraham gave him some solid advice about writing and he left the stage a happy camper.

There are many similarities between the Abraham-Hicks material and the Seth material, more than 20 books channeled by author and mystic Jane Roberts. But both tenets are founded on the notion that we create our own realities through our beliefs, emotions, thoughts, that our worlds are created from the inside out.

The difference is that the Abraham material is focused on how to and that Seth provided the philosophical foundation for this belief system. Abraham’s venue is about finding a way to feel good about whatever you’re doing. It’s about appreciation for everything that works in your life and turning your thoughts toward the positive rather than the negative. As Seth said, You get what you concentrate on…there is no other main rule. And that’s pretty much what Abraham says, too.

It sounds simplistic, and yet, if I hadn’t discovered the Seth material in 1973, I might still be teaching Spanish to hormonal seventh graders. I might have 40 manuscripts stacked on my closet floor that had never seen publication. In 1984, the year I sold my first novel, I decided it would be great to travel to Elmira, New York, where Jane and her husband Rob lived, and attend one of her ESP classes. Then I opened up Fate magazine one day and discovered she had died. I immediately regretted not having taken the initiative to have gone to Elmira earlier. So when Megan discovered the Abraham-Hicks material and I read the books, I decided I wouldn’t make the same mistake and would attend at least one of the workshops.

The Abraham message, like that of Seth, is powerful and positive. I’ve read a lot of channeled books over the years and many of them – most of them – are trite and silly. But neither Abraham nor Seth fall in that category. This point was driven home during the Sunday workshop, when a young man in the row in front of us was selected for the hot seat.

I had noticed this man that morning when Megan and I sat in our great seats in the middle of the room, seats she’d chosen because she’d arrived well before I had. He looked…well, kind of lost, his dark eyes haunted. I pegged his age at about thirty. When he went up to the hot seat, the first thing he said was, “I can’t sleep. I talked to you about this the last time I was here. My problem hadn’t gotten any better. It’s gotten worse.”

It turned out this man lived on “an island” with his parents and absolutely hated his life there. Every tine Abraham said something positive about his life, he countered with something negative. The island didn‘t have the shoes he needed with the proper width, the island didn’t have this or that. He told his parents he had a job interview in Asheville so they would pay for his ticket. He admitted that he was suicidal.

Abraham spent 25 minutes with his guy, talking him through why he felt as he did and how he could change what he felt. But this young man was so resistant, so entrenched in his negativity, that Megan and I could feel the collective energy in the room bottoming out. Finally, Abraham ushered him off the stage and even then, the man hung around, trying to talk privately to Esther.

Abraham/Esther apparently sensed the collective depression of energy in the room and when hands shot up, she chose the pitching coordinator again. Twice in one workshop. The crowd applauded. We understood he was the right person for the hot seat after this depressing foray into the island dude’s problems. The pitching guy asked, “So how can I find my soul mate?”

Abraham: “You can have both professional and personal happiness. You don’t have to deny yourself one to have the other.”

Pitching dude: Wow, this is so cool. Can I just hang out here in the hot seat for awhile?

This got a good laugh from the crowd and Abraham, rolling Esther’s eyes, said, “Yeah, sure.”

And then Abraham wound up the conference and the pitching dude jut sat there grinning, happy, pleased.

Lunch was served both days after the conference and we met some interesting people. It’s weird and refreshing to be sitting in a huge eating area and overhear people talking about law of attraction and Seth and creating your own reality. This is NOT normal lunch conversation in my world.

I came away from this conference with some of my beliefs utterly intact and other beliefs in flux. Why, for instance, do some of us choose catastrophic illnesses or abject poverty as our baseline contrast? Why do some of us choose unhappiness over happiness? We humans are complex beings connected at some fundamental level so that what affects me affects you and so on through the more than 7 billion souls on the planet.

I don’t know if Esther Hicks is fully in trance the entire duration of the workshop. But does it really matter? She’s channeling something, translating something from a nonphysical realm that is important, significant in how we live our lives. And when Megan and I left the conference, we were feeling very good about where we are in our lives and how we live our lives and perhaps that’s the real takeaway.

Abraham-Hicks has knowledge and insights that are helpful in our navigation of life. But the skeptic in me, the left-brain Gemini, is always humming along in the background, murmuring, Show me. Prove it to me. Maybe it’s not about showing or proving so much as it is about trusting the process.

We come into physical life because this is where we can grow and evolve. And whatever helps in this process is valuable. So I say try an Abraham-Hicks conference, see how it fits you, how you feel. Some of my friends are turned off by it and find the workshops bizarre. Others are uplifted.

Precognitive experiences can be startling and dramatic, particularly when they’re about a tragic event. Other times they are more of a nudge from the unconscious mind rather than a full-blown scene from a disaster movie. But precognition invariably begs the question: is the future set in stone like yesterday’s headlines?

If you dream that a large-scale disaster is imminent—the crash of a jetliner, for instance—chances are you’re not going to be able to do anything about it. Even if you know the airline, the flight number and the time of the event, it’s unlikely that the airline will ground a plane on the basis of your dream. However, if you’ve got a ticket for that flight, you can change flights or cancel your plans. In other words, you may not be able to prevent a future disaster, but you can alter your involvement in it.

In 1950, Life Magazine featured a story about a church fire in Beatrice, Nebaska that proved to be a stunning example of unconscious precognition and extraordinary synchronicity. A church choir was due to practice at 7:20 PM on March 1. There were fifteen people in the choir and all of them, for perfectly legitimate reasons, were late for practice.

The minister and his family were late because they were doing the laundry, another person had car trouble, someone else was finishing homework. Due to a flaw in the church’s heating system, the church exploded at 7:25 PM. The odds of all 15 choir members missing the opening of practice were later calculated at one in a million.

Unconscious precognitions could also have played a role in why so many passengers cancelled or didn’t show for flights that crashed into the World Trade Center. According to American Airlines records, one hundred and sixty-four reservations were made for flight 11 departing from Boston on September 11, 2001. Sixty-five people canceled their reservations prior to departure, and an additional seventeen were no shows. Similarly, one hundred and sixteen reservations were made on flight 77 that left from Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C. that same day. Fifty-four people cancelled their reservations, and three more were no shows.

Some people who worked at the World Trade Center were delayed and late for work, others decided to stay home. Tardiness and absenteeism in the WTC probably weren’t anything unusual, but some people actively sensed the dangers on that day.

A notable example is the case of a Wall Street executive who twice sensed danger at the World Trade Center. One morning in 1993, Barrett Naylor stepped off a train in New York’s Grand Central Station, and had a strong feeling that he should turn around and go home. He listened to his inner voice and avoided the bombing of the WTC. Naylor experienced a similar premonition eight years later. On Sept. 11, 2001, his inner voice again urged him to go home, and he did. Naylor says he regrets not sharing that message with others because it might have saved lives.

Such incidents, when a precognition of disaster was consciously avoided, show that individuals can alter their futures. But if the future is open-ended, what are we actually seeing/feeling when we experience precognition? When you have a reading with a psychic and predictions are made about future events, what is the psychic actually seeing? A probability or a done deal?

Michael Talbot, in his classic book The Holographic Universe, has one of the best answers to this thorny question. In private correspondence with physicist David Bohm, the famous theoretical physicist, the two men discussed Bohm’s most controversial theory. Beneath the stuff of our daily lives, said Bohm, there’s an implicate order that unifies and connects everything. It’s a kind of primal soup out of which everything unfolds, even space and time.

“When people dream of accidents correctly and do not take the plane or ship, it is not the actual future that they were seeing. It was merely something in the present which is implicate and moving toward making that future. In fact, the future they saw differed from the actual future because they altered it. Therefore I think it’s more plausible to say, if these phenomena exist, there’s an anticipation of the future in the implicate order in the present.”

I updated my phone for Christmas – to an iPhone 6s. The deal was too good to pass up. I got a $150 rebate on my iPhone5 and for $36 a month – no interest – the phone is mine. I can pay it off within 6 months without a penalty. It has 64 gigs of memory – instead of the 16 gigs that my iPhone5s had. The screen is large enough so that I can now see a full astrology chart on the screen without having to enlarge it. I don’t have to delete photos and apps to free up space. One of the apps that came with the operating system is called NEWS. It enables you to tailor news to your interests from many different sources.

So I was delighted when a story came up from the Daily Mail  about NASA’s code name for UFOs – a different kind of SANTA CLAUS! This story comes from a former employee at NASA who claims the agency has known for decades about UFOs and tried to hide what they know from the public. And that they have threatened employees with their pensions/retirement benefits if they ever go public with what they know

None of this is surprising; conspiracies continually swirl about what the government knows/doesn’t know about UFOs. But I am nonetheless intrigued by these periodic leaks and always wonder what is genuine and what is disinformation.

I poked around on You Tube until I found a video of the ex-employee talking about it all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z82XdTaYqFI

Whenever someone like David Bowie dies, there are invariably synchros.

On January 10, two days after his 69^th birthday, David Bowie passed away from cancer. The morning of the 11^th, I received an email from our friend Melissa, whose synchros we have used before.

“At 2:45 AM Jon woke me up. “Melissa wake up. David Bowie died.” I haven’t wept like that since they found Kurt Cobain’s body when I was about 14. David Bowie was one of the greats. One of my favorites. His words were so simple, beautiful, and true. I even borrowed from him for my wedding vows. He was inspirational and exciting and the world will miss him. We listened to his music for about an hour before I fell back to sleep. I woke up almost forgetting but then was reminded once I got online. Sadness and devastation take hold, and I didn’t even know him.

“However, there were clusters of synchros surrounding his death, and I think rightly so. After all, he’s one of the stars now.  If these aren’t synchros, the timeline is certainly interesting nonetheless. Here’s what I’ve noticed:

– 69th birthday on Friday, 1/8/2016

– Released ‘Blackstar’ 47th album on 1/8/2016

– Currently has an Off Broadway show in NYC called ‘Lazarus’ – I think the title speaks loudly here. I also believe he knew he was dying while writing the musical and album…

– Died Sunday, 1/10/2016. A tribute concert at Carnegie Hall was announced BEFORE he died and tickets are to go on sale (pre-planned) today, 1/11/2016 at 11:00 AM – I think that synchro archetype 11:11, and ‘1s’ is popping in here.”

I first became aware of David Bowie when I went to see The Man Who Fell to Earth, a 1976 movie based on the novel of the same name by Walter Tevis, one of my favorite authors of all time. Bowie played the protagonist, Thomas Jerome Newton, a “humanoid alien” (according to IMDB), who comes to earth in search of water for his dying planet. It’s much more than that, of course, and is emotionally wrenching at many points, particularly when it comes to Newton’s loneliness and isolation that Bowie portrays brilliantly.

From the NY Times review of the book: “”Beautiful science fiction . . . The story of an extraterrestrial visitor from another planet is designed mainly to say something about life on this one.”

I had read the book before seeing the movie and forever afterward, Bowie was that “humanoid alien” who had fallen to Earth. His music, the words, his presence: none of it belonged in this dimension. To me, he was always from elsewhere.

A few days after Bowie died, I got an email from our blogging friend Daz in Australia about synchros related to Bowie:

Did you see my latest post about the Minnesota Vikings kicker Blair Walsh, who shared the same birth-date as David Bowie and became an anti-hero by missing an easy kick for his team on the day Bowie passed away?

Weird, or what?

Take a look at Daz’s post. It’s intriguing and certainly ties in with the Bowie death synchros.

I know you’re supposed to say RIP at times like this, but I suspect that Bowie is doing anything but. I imagine him zipping around some distant star system, busy with new music, new ideas, new insights. If we’re fortunate, he’ll decide to fall to Earth again at some point in the future.

Last year, we sold a book on precognition – Sensing the Future – and are nearly done with the first draft. Tonight I was trying to remember when I last had a precognitive experience of any kind. There have been a few about small things, mostly through impulses or remembered snippets of dreams. But nothing to include in the book or even blog a about.

Then I remembered that in October, during one of Rob’s meditation classes, I set an intention before the class. I asked to receive information about when my novel would sell. It had just started making the rounds with publishers that month. Toward the end of the class, when I tend to be in a really relaxed and receptive state, a date and several words popped into my head: around new moon, November 11. I knew that new moon would be in Scorpio, my rising sign, and felt hopeful.

New moons are always about new beginnings, new chapters, doorways opening. Opportunities often come out of nowhere. And when one falls in your sun or moon sign or in the sign of your ascendant, the opportunities that manifest themselves are usually really good ones. Two weeks after a new moon, there’s a full moon, the time of harvest and completion. We often receive news on or around the time of a full moon.

On November 11, I kept waiting for the phone to ring or for my agent to email me that the novel had sold. Instead, I received an email from my friend Nancy Pickard, suggesting that I write a short story for Ellery Queen magazine. So I did. I wrote about it here.

I submitted it, then felt annoyed that my apparent precognition had the sale of my novel hadn’t panned out, and wondered what the impression I’d gotten in meditation was really about. For the next few days, I remained hopeful since the new moon energy can manifest itself for a few days on either side of the actual date. But by November 14 or so, I started wondering what that impression I’d gotten during meditation was really about.

On the evening of December 9, about 36 hours before the new moon in Sagittarius, I received an email from the editor at Ellery Queen saying she would like to buy the story. What I learned from this is that my original impression was about a new moon sale, but not necessarily my novel. The November 11 date was important because that was when Nancy had suggested I write the short story that the magazine bought shortly before December’s new moon. But back in October when I’d had the impression, I didn’t have any intention of writing a short story. And because I’d specifically asked for information about when the novel would sell, it never occurred to me that the new moon hint might pertain to something else.

And that’s the tricky thing with precognitions. We don’t always have the full details when we sense the future and our left brains immediately intercede and start trying to connect the dots about what it may possibly mean.

So, here are the new moon dates for 2016, pegged to eastern time. If you’re going to pitch ideas, launch a website, submit manuscripts, do anything new, on or around the time of the new moon is when you should do it. The exceptions are new moon during Mercury retrogrades and solar eclipses. Full moon follow new moons two weeks later and are about culmination, completion, and often bring news.

February 8 – new moon in Aquarius, 9:39 a.m.

March 8 – new moon, 8:54 p.m. in Pisces, total solar eclipse 8:57 p.m.

April 7 – new moon in Aries, 7:24 a.m.

May 6- new moon in Taurus, 3:30 p.m.

June 4 – new moon in Gemini, 11:00 p.m.

July 4- new moon in Cancer, 7:01 a.m.

August 2- new moon in Leo, 4:45 p.m.

September 1 – new moon in Virgo, 5:03 a.m., solar eclipse 5:07 a.m.

September 30 – new moon in Libra, 8:11 p.m.

October 30 – new moon in Scorpio, 1:38 p.m.

November 29 – new moon in Sagittarius, 7:18 a.m.

December 29 – new moon in Capricorn, 1:53 a.m.

Eclipses tend to bring things up close and personal and are sometimes stressful because we have to move and decide quickly. Solar eclipses concern outer events and often bring double the opportunities of a regular new moon. Sometimes with a solar eclipse, though, you have to give up something before the opportunities flow in. A solar eclipse is followed about two weeks later (depending on your time zone) by a lunar eclipse, which occurs during a full moon and concerns inner states, emotions, buried stuff, news, relationships.

The solar eclipse on March 8 is followed by a lunar eclipse in Libra on March 23. The solar eclipse in Virgo on September 1 is followed by a lunar eclipse in Pisces on September 16.

We received a strange letter the other day from a man in prison in New Mexico. He read The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity and said how much he liked it. He also said that the concepts have changed him as a person. I’ll take him at his word.

In his hand-written letter that was stamped in red as ‘Inmate correspondence’ and included his inmate number, the writer – Sixto Castillo – spelled out the seven secrets, then said he has discovered an eighth one.

Okay, but the most interesting part of his letter was this sentence: “I believe the true value of the coincidence has to do with the 7 chakras. This concept has come to me through an entity named – or I call her – Connie. She has opened a door to a vast region that is new, of an old concept, which is or has to do with cycles.”

I’m not sure what all that means, but it’s interesting that he cited the name Connie, and we have a regular here on the blog – Connie J. Cannon. So I wrote Connie and sent her the above lines from the letter, since I found those comments somewhat mysterious.

Connie, for her part, had an interesting reply.

+++

“I’ve had some dreams recently in which I am somehow ‘connecting’ with a male who is familiar to me, but whom I don’t overtly know. In these dreams, we are conversing about spiritual matters. In the dream before I woke this morning, he was standing on one side of a door, leaning against the door frame, and I was close to him but was standing on the other side of the door. I’ve been trying to remember our discussions, however they have buried themselves in my mind. I do recall that this man has VERY blue eye and is tall. He is attempting to get me to do something and I am telling him I cannot.”

Connie also noted a number of synchronicities, regarding names and numbers, including the fact that she lives a few miles from the Castillo, a Spanish fort in St. Augustine, Florida. I’ll let Connie expand on these synchros, if she likes.

She wrote back a few minutes later and said that when she wrote about her dreams, she had overlooked the point that she and Sixto both made reference to a door or doorway. Sixto wrote that Connie “has opened a door to a vast region that is new…” Connie, meanwhile, noted that the man she dreamed about was “leaning agains a door frame.” She was on one side, he was on the other.

I’m going to write Sixto, knowing of course that prison authorities will read the letter, and tell him about Connie and find out more about his ‘Connie,’ and ask what the eighth secret is that he has discovered. Interestingly, some mystics speak of an eighth chakra, as well, an energy center of divine love, of spiritual compassion and selflessness.

I’ll also ask him where he found a copy of The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity. The prison librarian might have some mystical leanings!