Friday, June 30, 2017


It is not clear what the aims of your pollen analysis are. Are you interested in some estimate of all the species of flowers the bees are visiting just the species the bees are actively collecting pollen from. For the latter, just scopal pollen is appropriate and counts of a mnimum of 400-600 grains per bee should give you decent estimates. You don't need to destructively take whole legs or metasomal pollen loads unless you really intend to count all those thousands and thousands of grains per bee. You always will encounter some pollen species at very low levels in these counts. These could be minor pollen hosts but more likely are "contaminants" from plants visited just for nectar or even are from plants the bees haven't visited but are present on their host plants due to secondary transfer via other visitors. If you are not concerned with dietary pollen and want an indirect measure of what the bees are visiting, you have to sample pollen from wherever it occurs on the bees bodies and often deal with small amounts. Whole body washes with sonication will get just about everything but then you have to count a lot of grains to find the rare things if they are of interest On Friday, June 30, 2017> wrote: I would caution about using liquids to remove pollen grains. Bees will usually visit a wider variety of plants for nectar than for pollen, and consequently non-host pollens can often be found on the bee’s body. The best results are obtained when grains are removed directly from the scopa, greatly reducing the chance of sampling non-host pollens. Cheers, Tom From On 6/30/17 Obviously, the limb removal strategy would be partially destructive to the specimens and would limit the ability of future researchers to use these bees, but it would be beneficial for my current project. In my situation, what would you do? You don't specify what methodology you ARE using. Regardless, I would back up one step and ask the following: Have you shown, empirically, that - by not removing all the pollen grains on each specimen - you are failing to detect pollen sources you would have detected otherwise? That is, if you have no evidence that a less than perfect level of pollen removal results in such failure, then you have no demonstrable reason to engage in more difficult procedures that will impede your research. After all, if pollen ID is done not by examining every single pollen grain individually, but by taking a random subsample, then you already have a sampling protocol that will probably not be improved measurably by achieving 100% pollen removal (i.e., if there is some pollen source that is so rare that it cannot be detected by less than 100% removal, then it's very likely that you will fail to detect it ANYWAY, because its relative abundance will not go up by simply adding more total pollen grains). That being said, what I would do, if I were absolutely determined to achieve 100% removal at all costs, is to immerse each specimen in liquid in a small vial or cuvette or similar well-sealed capsule, and sonicate it to get all the pollen liberated into the liquid. The best technique for doing so might require a little trial and error (e.g., what type of container, what type of liquid). Then the problem becomes one only of how to deal with 600 or so small capsules with pollen grains in suspension. Peace, -- Doug Yanega Dept. of Entomology Entomology Research Museum Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314 skype: dyanega phone: (951) 827-4315 (disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's) http://cache.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82

Tuesday, June 27, 2017

Duck Soup: Reading Thoreau at 200

Duck Soup: Reading Thoreau at 200: One of the smaller ironies in my life has been teaching Henry David Thoreau at an Ivy League school for half a century. Asking young people...


Sunday, December 2, 2012 The Mental and Life-Curbing Antagonist So I'm driving along to work this week when my guides pop in with an amazing message about the struggles of life. When I unraveled this nugget, a huge revelation was made regarding the role of antagonism in our everyday perceptions. When you're faced with challenges, how often do you feel like someone is outside of you pushing for your demise, or that there is always someone (or some thing) looking to enact Murphy's Law at your personal expense? If you often feel that way, hopefully the following inspiration can help shine a light on the way OUT and into a much happier way of being. ____________________________________________________________________________ Here's what my spiritual team "downloaded" into me: The idea of a constant block of force – a counteractive agent – is purely a psychological condition. This stems from multiple factors; the two main contributors being a deep mass consciousness belief system adopted by humanity over time, the other being a representation of life through Hollywood and other entertainment providers. That is, in any drama or story, there is a protagonist and an antagonist. This supplies the framework which then gets projected onto the face of reality, for which one accepts as the “packaging” of existence. It’s a very old story of “hero versus villain,” which contributes to the mass consciousness factor. In the old times, mankind was always at the mercy of “demons” or “forces of darkness.” Catholicism played havoc with the notion of an angel on one shoulder, a devil on the other, and it was a constant battle between the two for the sanctity of one’s soul. Generation after generation. That’s a lot of belief and energy embedded in the human mass psychological structure. But it is only a thought, a projection, a hard-core opinion which unfortunately was received as a truth of existence. It’s not. The second component – entertainment – places the same motif within the framework of modernity. That is, as stated, every hero or protagonist must have his or her opposite in order to make the story or drama exceptional and exciting – to keep the interest of the viewer. The workings of Drama takes our plights and assigns them to a single person or organization; a simplistic approach taken out of necessity for the sake of time and storytelling. The more we watch and get wrapped up in such storylines, the more our own subconscious begins to supplant a loving, acceptable reality with what our other senses are telling us from the repetitive viewing of such dramatic structure: reality must actually be this way. What we forget is that Drama is symbolic and inspired by perceptions and thoughts of outside reality and not the creator of reality itself. This amnesia is not something we are reminded about, however, as it would really hurt the bottom line of businesses worldwide, who wish to make you think their commercial is what reality would be like if you bought their product! How easy it is for us to take entertainment’s depiction of reality and accept such a simple philosophy of protagonist/antagonist as being a fact of daily existence: my proactive life versus some force working against me. The fact of the matter is, life is always growing, expanding, changing, and there has never been (nor will there ever be) an antagonist always looking and hoping to get in the way and foil our deeds. That’s the truth – the reality which we must come to accept. The universe and Spirit, from which we are birthed, is One and does not battle against anything. It lives, loves, grows, and expands. Anything to the contrary is simply a perception – for life continues regardless of obstacles. Even “death” does not stop one from living and continuing on – it is simply a path and a journey which moves one into greater avenues of experience (in that case, death is a continuance of life’s AFFIRMATION – ironic, eh?). When we view our world – in particularly our own goals – how often do we see them as mountains and struggles? With obstacles we must overcome? Perhaps we place such challenges in our way not because they are real, but because we believe they MUST be there, in order to match our psychological framework we have accepted: the consistent presence of antagonism. This is not to say there will never be challenges or that there won’t be times when it appears things are conspiring against you. However, the phrase “conspiring against you” is a psychological one – a clear sign of the Phantom Menace. Perhaps – because Life is always expanding, growing, and Becoming more than it was before – such obstacles are not really obstacles, but CLUES that suggest the path to enlightenment, growth, and success, are not what you currently have in mind. Taken from that vantage point, the obstacles are not obstacles at all; rather, they are the purveyors of success – wayfarers who cry out “don’t tread here – it does not contain the positive outcome you desire. Our obstructionism is meant to help and guide, not hurt nor hinder.” The universe is a loving universe. It is LIFE AFFIRMING and LIFE GIVING. Is there anything antagonizing or stopping the universe? No. Whenever there’s an obstruction – such as a concrete sidewalk atop the petals of a dandelion – the dandelion still finds a way around and out of the cracks, alighting into the brilliance of the sun. That’s because it doesn’t know of a power trying to stop it; instead, it knows of a power that is helping it, as it directs it to find the crack in the cement and bloom skyward. The cement itself isn’t challenging the dandelion to a duel, saying “I’m going to keep you under until you die”; no, it is simply saying “The path you seek is not here. You belong and will grow better and much happier someplace else.” I assure you, the dandelion probably doesn’t take the blockage personally, which is what we are more apt to do when we feel there’s a fight happening with our “villain.” Part of the antagonist philosophy also makes us believe (on some subconscious level) that whoever is playing the antagonist is laughing and living things up at our expense; that the antagonist delights in a perverse mockery of our struggles. This contributes to taking losses so personally. However, this, too, is an illusion, as the universe (for which you are a child of) has no rival. The idea of a twisted maniac celebrating our demise is again a construction of artists and storytellers – not a truth of the universe; it is simply a philosophy which has grown into a belief system. In the old days, it would have seemed fitting, as tribes warred against other tribes – life was a series of struggles and clashes between what appeared to be (and oftentimes were) consistent rivals. But let’s face it – that was on a societal level. On the base of a single individual and his or her life, there isn’t an archrival or nemesis wholly designed or birthed to counter one’s every move. There is only the energy and drive of life and the universe – whose sole purpose is to expand and grow. Whatever obstacles or challenges we encounter, we must do our best to acknowledge NOT as an obstruction laid on the path of our journey by some entity hell-bent on destroying us. No. We must examine the challenges and determine – in the light of a loving and expanding universe – if the challenges are meant to steer us in a greater direction, or if we have placed them there as the result of our inner psychological NEED for the appearance of an antagonist. (If it’s in your belief system, you WILL create it). So – what’s stopping or blocking you? It isn’t anything outside of yourself. The universe (Spirit) is a loving and empowering force – the expansion of life and progress. Perhaps your nemesis is only an angle of your own inner perception. Perhaps obstacles – instead of being taken as the latest attempt by some Phantom Menace to derail your life – could be seen as a loving universe informing you “your best outcome will not be found here. Don’t dwell on me, just use me as a sign. I’m not here to destroy you, but rather empower you by showing you this is not the way.” In that light, perhaps we should THANK our obstacles and move on, versus putting on our boxing gloves or reaching for the latest psychological weapon of self-defense and go to war. If it’s not the greater universe, then it can only be yourself manifesting your own Phantom Menace. It’s only a psychological structure. Psychological structures can be changed. There’s a phrase we use in offering advice to others we see struggling with certain issues: “You need to give yourself PERMISSION.” That’s another clue of the inner Phantom Menace psychological structure. How often do we apply that to ourselves? No such nemesis really exists – it is simply our own thoughts. When we set a goal, we oftentimes try to imagine what obstacles we must overcome – which in some cases, is automatically INSERTING the Phantom Menace! Now, there’s nothing wrong with trying to determine where the most work might be needed for success, but more work does not mean “arch rival pounding against me.” How self-critical and judgmental can we be with ourselves, eh? When you were born into the world, there was not another being born at the same time whose sole life mission was to challenge and obstruct you at every turn. So don’t create that psychology for yourself. Better yet, obliterate such thinking from your consciousness. Life will feel much more expansive and certainly more inviting. Posted by Jeffrey Marks at 4:28 PM No comments: Labels: antagonism, antagonist, creating your own reality, heroes and villains, manifestation, manifesting, phantom menace, psychological structures, psychology, spirit guides, spiritual guides Wednesday, September 26, 2012 Information Processing and Retrieval How do you receive the information from spirit? This has been a recurring question over the years from those who have had private readings or watched mediumship being demonstrated on a public platform (whether the medium was myself or somebody else). It’s a question which I – being the left-brained analytical kind of guy – have given a lot of examination to. This post isn’t going to answer with the standard “It’s in the ‘clairs’ – clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience” – though those do play a part. My goal has always been to understand it from a larger perspective, to which the “clairs” then break it down. As with anything, this is an ongoing process, a continuous journey, and no doubt perceptions will change as new information is brought to light. Here’s what I have learned so far. Though this may sound simple (which it is), there’s still a lot to it. Intuition is the process for which messages come into the context of one’s consciousness. By paying attention to the inner sensations brought about by intuition, one can become “in tune” with energies and information not perceived outside in the objective world, nor rationalized by the logical mind. Historically, the mind has been where most confusion and inner struggle has been fought when it comes to spiritual communication. It is a losing battle. On some level, the desire to receive clear messages from the Other Side speaks to the brain being able to decode the packets of information sent by those in spirit. Though this is a true statement, the error is in perceiving the mind as having the primary functionality within this process. In reality, the mind is not the one in charge; rather, it is subordinate to the intuitive self. Indeed, the mind does unravel the images, sounds, and feelings which are piped through the intuitive self, but it is not in the focus of the mind where these ingredients originate. Intuition goes much further than the brain and encompasses the aura and subtle bodies – something quite outside the scope of the physical matter lodged inside our skulls. When approaching readings, one needs to “get out of the head” for it is “in the head” where he or she most likely spends the bulk of one’s time navigating the jungles of time and space in the here and now objective world. Thus, normal everyday “in the head” focus must, to a certain degree, be abandoned in order to “tune in” to other energies. The shift is to move out of reliance on the brain and onto the reliance of the intuitive self. Intuition requires an entirely different set of faculties to be engaged than simply thinking and wandering around inside the mind. Intuition connects you with the environment; it reaches out into the subtle vibrations and energies coursing around and through you. And when one can focus their awareness into their intuition, the door to these other realities can be cracked open and engaged. “What does my intuition tell me?” is an excellent way to move your mind out of its role of supremacy and into an act of service. “What does my intuition tell me?” moves your awareness off your physical senses and onto the many senses inherent within the complexity of the intuitive self. “What does my intuition tell me?” drives your observation off the chatter of the physical mind and into the eternal abode of cosmic consciousness. It is incredibly difficult to rationalize psychic occurrences because they originate from intuition – a form of perception and communication not well understood by anyone in the 21st century. We may discover that we can never pin it down or understand it from a left-brained perspective, for the simple fact that it may be inherently much greater than what logic can comprehend. The brain loves to use logic like a microscope so as to have a better understanding of things – for if we have a better understanding we can have better odds at controlling whatever it is we are examining. Unfortunately, intuition may be much larger than what the left-brain can comprehend, thus the notion of control is too far out of reach. Nay, it may be completely impossible. But just because we do not understand it does not mean it isn’t real or that it doesn’t have value. What we do know is that information outside the normal channels of perception happens – this has been documented time and again. We know it’s not coming from the jello inside our heads, but from sources outside coming in or by us going outside the body to bring the information back – again, leaving the physical brain behind. As psychics and mediums, we recognize intuition as being much larger than our minds, though we must trust our minds to be able to process it to the best of our abilities so that our normal consciousness can gain some sort of comprehension. But it all starts with intuition. And not the brain. Posted by Jeffrey Marks at 7:46 PM No comments: Labels: clairaudience, clairsentience, clairvoyance, consciousness, ESP, intuition, intuition development, mediumship, mediumship development, psychic development, spirit communication, spiritualism, talking to the dead Friday, July 27, 2012 Communicating with Spirits, Part 2 The Greater Picture, The Larger Act of Awareness Two weeks ago I talked about how, when we take into account 7 billion people on the planet, and how many of those people right now are receiving information from the deceased friends and relatives in spirit, as well as spirit guides, demonstrates that spirit communication is a natural and normal part of our existence in the physical world. So what does this all mean in the bigger picture? By the very nature of these interactions, spirits are demonstrating that they desire to communicate with us; that we are not alone and we do not need to fall prey to the limited visions of material existence. Their messages, unanimously, all speak to the same meaning: we as spirits are here, we love you, and we can help you – provided that it doesn’t derail you from your own purposes being alive on the earth. This is in sharp contrast to what we have been told traditionally from fearful ideologies. The point to all this is simple: Spirits are co-existing with us. Granted, while our focus is here in the material world, theirs is focused in the spiritual. Nevertheless, they interpenetrate this realm all the time, based on the statistics of people interacting and encountering them. And chances are likely, we interpenetrate their realm, too, if given the proper belief system, knowledge, and conditions. It is not “foreign” nor is it “wrong” or “against nature.” It is actually part of nature’s design. We co-exist with many dimensions – this is a scientific fact. Are we supposed to be communicating between the “veils”? Actually … Yes. In fact, it’s vitally important that we do. We are here to experience the breadth of our souls, and part of that magnificence is our ability to transcend the physicality of what we are experiencing in the material world. In order to learn our lessons, as well as help others learn theirs, we are given the capabilities to engage in this communication to bring forth the guidance and information we sometimes cannot get from the observable, material world. Especially in a world where love is in lack – it is spirit’s greatest goal to show us that no such lack exists; that the universe is primarily a loving universe, and through love – positivity – we will prevail through our lessons and continue to heighten our souls to our greatest possibilities and potentials. After all, we were spirit first, and then human … Not the other way around. The spirits will not harm us; nor will they take over our lives. On the contrary, they are wanting to help us live better, happier lives ourselves, fulfilled in the knowledge that the greater we become at being a loving, creative spiritual expression, the more it benefits others and combines to create healing and success to so many people, transforming the earthly experience to be a grand state of livelihood in comparison to what it has been in the past. Historically, such communication was seen to have dire consequences by various superstitious ideologies – repudiation, ridicule, and ultimate death as a “witch.” So long as the facts remain of people’s own personal experiences with receiving communications (no matter how sparse) from deceased loved ones or angels, then it cannot be denied that such forces are indeed interacting with us, and that we have the ability to receive and understand their communications, given proper conditions. In addition, so long as traditional books refer to “prophets” or other types of religious people receiving “inspiration” or other angelic visitations (and many of these people were considered “normal” people having a divine experience), then the notion of conversing with “the devil” must be tossed aside as rickety architecture of fear. Again, spirit isn’t trying to control us or our reality (that would take up too much time and energy and deny the purpose of their own existence), they simply want to help us – as no doubt, we would want to help our loved ones once we have traversed the bridge of death and realized communication back to earth was possible. It is time to wash away those belief systems and ways of thinking that deny this. It is time to ignore and toss out belief systems that say “It isn’t natural.” Nonsense -- utter nonsense. It is natural; it is normal -- It was meant-to-be. Tell yourself – remind yourself often – that you communicate easily with spirit; that it was meant to be from the beginning of humanity’s emergence into the physical realm; it is a part of our core being and heritage. Don’t ask of yourself “Why cannot I communicate?” Instead you should be asking “How could I not communicate? It was meant to be!” Again we are spirit first and then human. It’s all about where we choose to place our focus, and hence our energy, creating an environment that makes communication conducive and expectant. When it comes to linking with spirit, all you have to do is ask and then BE AWARE. Trust your senses (which is sometimes easier said than done, I know). When the time is RIGHT, when the energy and conditions are appropriate, spirit will be there with the messages they wish to convey. It is what they have been doing for centuries. No doubt, we will be doing the same thing when we hit the Other Side – reaching back and sending messages to our loved ones still on earth. It’s going on all over the place RIGHT NOW across this planet. Accept it and embrace it. Become a part of it. Posted by Jeffrey Marks at 7:25 PM 3 comments: Labels: Jeffrey Marks, mediums, mediumship, mediumship development, psychic, psychic development, raising vibration, spirit communication, spirits Tuesday, July 3, 2012 Communicating with Spirits - It's Natural! Part 1 There is a belief system out there – maybe it’s one you’ve had or you know of someone who has it – that says “if spirits are real, isn’t it unnatural for them to be interacting with us?” In other words, if there is a spirit realm and an earth realm, doesn’t it stand to reason that because they are separate places of existence that one should not be able to effectively interact with the other? Almost like some kind of rule that says if you live in environment “A” you should not be able to communicate with environment “B”? It’s a belief system that has been passed down to us through the generations. On one hand, we ask for God or angels or some other heavenly beings to impress the earthly environment to help us out when we pray, but on the other hand, we also hear “talking to spirits is not right.” In the past (and even today) it is sometimes viewed as witchcraft or leaving one’s self open to communing with Satan if one wishes to “talk to dead people.” Here, we get the usual sound-bites “You’re not talking to a deceased person – it’s the devil in disguise.” What I find interesting is that those who usually make that declaration hardly have the qualitative knowledge to know such things, as they lack any experience or breadth of study in spirit communication since their own belief system keeps them totally isolated and sterilized from it. Nevertheless, to say that because one is living in environment “A” and should not be allowed to communicate with someone in environment “B” is like saying you can’t have two people in two different rooms of a house talk to each through an open doorway or some other intercom system … or even through the wall itself. When we really take a closer look at it, living environments are for the expression and expansion of experience, but that doesn’t negate the ability to communicate with others in different rooms. In fact, as I hope to demonstrate through this first of two posts, it is not only common, it is natural for communication to take place – and quite possibly, was meant to happen. Let’s face it, when looking through the annals of history -- with stories of divine intervention, ghosts, portents revealed by deceased relatives (and these are by sane, normal, rational people) -- it is clear that spirits interpenetrate the physical realm all the time. Quite frankly, this functionality has been a part of reality since the beginning and is considered a natural part of existence in many indigenous cultures. We must recall that we are spirits having a human experience. Due to a bit of effort (intention), we have brought our awareness into this physical dimension, yet our home is really the spiritual realm. We condition our awareness to be present in this earthly domain for the purposes it yields, in terms of growth and expansion. Yet this does not negate that we still have parts of our soul in connection to our homeland, and are therefore co-existent with that original dimension. This grants us continued access to it; the functionality needed to engage in cross-dimensional communication. When we incarnate into the earthly sphere, we have asked several of our friends left in spirit to help us along in our intentions for being here. These helpers are spirit guides, angels, whatever you would like to call them. That we have asked them to assist goes to show that they have the ability to interpenetrate into this realm in order to do their requested tasks – otherwise, our requests for their help would be useless. In “testing” these helpers (as many of us who are on this type of spiritual path have done), they have demonstrated that they 1) Can communicate via the mind with verification occurring in the objective world outside imagination; 2) Can orchestrate physical events that work in sending a message; 3) Can protect us from harm by either mental instruction or actual physical intervention. This demonstrates the ability that spirit is meant to be able to interpenetrate – it is not “abnormal” or otherwise “illegal.” Let’s face it, if they weren’t meant to, they wouldn’t be able to, nor would we ask for their assistance to interpenetrate on our behalf. On some level, we know this interaction is capable of occurring – and that it is all right. Now, this interpenetration is not 24/7 for each individual, for we are here in the flesh for a reason and they are simply here to assist – not to live their lives focused in this world, nor doing our personal bidding. (If they were to be so focused, they would have incarnated themselves and given us a chain to hold them with). This does not mean they do not spend chunks of time interacting or that they are not meant to have the ability to interact – or that we are not meant to have the same interaction back into their realm with them. When you factor in the notion that everyone has at least 1 or 2 spirit helpers (and usually quite a few more), and that when people are aware of them, greater communication commences … this becomes a loud roar that signals spirit having the right and ability to interpenetrate naturally and organically into the environment. Though I may not be getting messages from my spirit helpers at this very moment (it isn’t necessary), that doesn’t mean spirit isn’t acting on somebody else’s benefit right now. On a planet with 7 billion people, guaranteed, millions of spirits are right now sending thoughts, messages, and doing work to orchestrate their alliance with people living here. And these are just the spirit guides! But imagine that interaction happening right now … All over the planet … Now, let’s take into account those friends and relatives who have died -- another level of spiritual “populace” in conjunction with guides and angels. Many people often feel their lost loved ones nearby after they have passed. Many claim to talk to them in dreams or receive psychic communication from them. Moreover, in many cases, these deceased loved ones have demonstrated interpenetration by apporting objects and also making complex events happen in the objective “out-there” world to the benefit of people still here. Now, add that to the work being done by people’s spirit guides and helpers across the planet at this very moment … Millions of people are getting messages from their lost loved ones in so many different ways … Millions are getting inspiration and messages from their spirit guides, too. Cross-dimensional communication and interpenetration is happening all the time. Spirit is interacting with us constantly. Naturally. It is not paranormal, it is normal. This is all supposed to be happening. It is a natural part of existence and reality. Part Two: The Greater Picture, The Larger Act of Awareness Posted by Jeffrey Marks at 9:21 PM No comments: Labels: angels, ghosts, medium, mediumship, mediumship demonstration, spirit communication, spirit guides, spirit helpers Saturday, May 19, 2012 Training, Books, and Presentations … Welcome to Spring! It’s been awhile since I last posted and several of you have been wondering “What’s happened?” The simple answer: Busting my a--, heh heh. As always, I am working on developing my mediumship abilities. Part of that work was taking some amazing training with internationally renowned medium Lisa Williams. The bestselling author and host of the former television show Life Among the Dead really put me back to square one with examining, redefining, and then re-igniting the mediumship flame. It started as a four-week online course complete with homework that really took me back to the nuts-and-bolts of communicating with the Other Side and how that communication takes place. At the end of the four weeks, I and my fellow classmates from around the world (about 40 of us) all gathered together in Los Angeles for a full weekend intensive with Lisa. The finale of the course was doing two separate one-on-one readings for members of the general public who she had invited. Throughout the weekend, Lisa was taking notes on each of us – grading us like a proper instructor – and then had the general public grade us as well! Can you say “Pressure”? (Fortunately, I PASSED!) To say the weekend was intense would be an understatement. First off, to be accepted into the course, we had to submit an application and hope our credentials as practicing mediums were enough to be accepted. When I arrived in L.A., I was excited, but when class officially got started – I was terrified! Here I was, sitting in a room filled with other practicing mediums who had already proven themselves simply through the application process and I was going to be graded by one of the top mediums in the business. I know I was not the only one feeling like a fish out of water, but there’s always a part of you that says “Really? Me? Do I really belong here?” As the weekend progressed, this fear diminished, but I have no shame in admitting – I had a couple panic attacks at the beginning! By the time Sunday came and we were scheduled to do the readings with the public, everyone had bonded as a group and our initial fears had subsided. We all were going through the proverbial boot-camp together … and surviving. Lisa was incredible – not only as an instructor, but as a down-to-earth human being in addition to being a medium. She understood and honored our fears and doubts (and moments of lunacy) that we all experience in doing this work, especially within the intensity of the environment we were training in. Indeed, one of the great take-aways from that weekend was the realization that everyone – all 40 students and our instructor – never competed or felt that we needed to ultimately prove ourselves to one another. There wasn’t one of us that felt we had to “outdo” or “outperform” a fellow medium for the sake of our personal ego. In the end, the course simply wasn’t another workshop, it was a literal journey of discovery. Lisa’s compassion and authenticity continues to carry forward in many different ways for each of her students -- and I am delighted to return to Los Angeles come October to get more training. I am also excited to see that many of my fellow mediums from this original class will be returning as well! It will be a grand family reunion! Back here at home, I have taken what I’ve learned and acted on it – booking more public demonstrations and private home groups, with more to come in the next several months. Class Picture3DSCF3421-1 But … I am not done yet. I have also begun putting together the marketing and promotion for my next book The Afterlife Interviews, Volume I, due out this August. The book is the culmination of nearly 2 years of research where I conducted fourteen separate readings and asked the spirits who came through for my clients the same fifty-two questions about the nature of the Other Side. The result is a huge well-rounded portrait of what the afterlife is like from those who reside there. This has been such a huge project that it equally deserves a huge marketing and promotional effort, which is another reason why I have been so silent in my blog. The Afterlife Interviews is going to be nationwide (and potentially international), so it requires a lot of focus and attention leading up to its launch. All this right on the heels of my first book Your Magical Soul receiving a silver medal in the 2012 Nautilus Awards in the Science and Cosmology category (previous Nautilus winners include Gregg Braden, Caroline Myss, and Deepak Chopra) as well as being one out of three finalists for the Body/Mind/Spirit category for the Benjamin Franklin award. 9781936492077-PerfectFACEROCK.indd Along with the continuation of the Explorers of Consciousness radio show and the NW Mediumship Association, other classes (and gasp) regular day-job, I am one busy cookie! And then on the heels of The Afterlife Interviews will be my first fiction novel, The Resurrection of Osiris. Whew! To make all of this happen, I have had to push “pause” on doing individual one-on-one readings and paranormal investigations. However, if people are interested in receiving a one-on-one reading, I am creating a waiting list which I will jump on as soon as time opens up. So if you’ve been wondering why I’ve been silent in the blogosphere, this is it! Training, books, presentations … With more to come! ‘Til next time! Posted by Jeffrey Marks at 8:25 AM No comments: Thursday, March 29, 2012 A Tool for Developing Energy Awareness As many of you know, I am always on the look-out for stretching my senses. After all, I can only get better in my work as a medium by becoming more aware and being present with whatever might be floating around in the environment. How do you do that, you might ask? A fun little gadget from yester-year is actually playing a tremendous part. Remember those plasma balls that came out back in the 1980’s? They contain a coil which shoots arcs of electricity out to the globe’s surface. When you touch the ball, the arcs amp up and coalesce at the point where you touched the glass. What makes them interesting is that they shoot huge amounts of electromagnetic frequency beyond the globe’s casing – we discovered this while doing an experiment during a Washington State Ghost Society investigation. Using an EMF detector, we found that the energy of the plasma ball can be directed by someone touching the glass and then raising their other arm. In other words, a person can act as a conduit for the ball’s energy and “throw it” in various directions which the EMF detector is able to measure. One evening while talking about this with WSGS president, Dave King, we decided to see how sensitive the human detector could be. We turned the ball on and hovered our hands over it. It was very easy to feel the pulsing of the field at just a few inches from the surface. Then we stepped back several feet and raised our hands toward the device. Slowly, we walked toward it. Amazingly, I was able to detect the field at a whopping 5 to 7 feet away! Intrigued by these results, I went and bought one for myself to try at home. First, I held my palms out, facing the plasma ball at a distance of about 12 feet away – then slowly walked toward it. This was all about being more sensitive to outside energy, so I paid really close attention to what I was feeling inside and outside my body. What ended up happening was that I felt a subtle tingling on my palms. It is so very slight, but noticeable. Then, as I get closer, I could feel “pressure” on my hands and my abdomen. By the time I was three feet away, the focus of the energy coursing through my body was so intense, my hands felt like they were being pricked by hundreds of needles. It was absolutely amazing! In continuing to practice this exercise, I have extended my range of awareness with the ball’s energy another 2 to 3 feet, so now I can feel it at 10 or 11 feet away. I have also done the same experiment with the ball turned “off,” just to make sure I wasn’t messing with my own mind. Eyes opened or closed, with enough focus, I could feel that energy field at a great distance. Will this help in my work as a medium? Only time will tell. But it does reveal that with enough awareness and focus, energy fields can be detected by the human organism – and what is Spirit if not another form of energy? Already they do affect my physical body in the course of a link. If I can become even more sensitive to their energy, I potentially can become even more aware of the detailed messages they wish to convey. It’s all about becoming the best conduit I can be. If you are interested in working on your own sensitivities to energy, I highly recommend the plasma ball. It demonstrates – once again – that energy can exist beyond what you see and that you can tune into it! ‘Til next time, Posted by Jeffrey Marks at 7:41 PM 2 comments: Labels: mediumship; psychic development; mediumship development; raising vibration; expanding the aura; aura; meditation; intention Thursday, March 8, 2012 The Face, Love, and Strength of a Spirit Guide A couple of weeks ago I found myself shaking a fist and really giving my guides the third degree. I felt they had challenged me one too many times with a result I truly didn’t care for. Oftentimes, we don’t understand why our guides move us in certain directions or allow certain things to happen; but it is always in retrospect that we gain the perspective of truth about such enigmatic circumstances and then forgive, engrain the lesson, and move on. Part of that process for me a few weeks ago was to declare to my spiritual advisors that they were going to have to do something pretty extraordinary to convince me of their strength, love, and sincerity for what I had gone through. I didn’t tell them what they had to do, just that they needed to do something pretty impressive to convince me they really cared. (Yes, it was one of those dark times which tests your faith). The answer came through the night of Development Circle, a few hours after I had made my demand. We were doing an exercise called “Transfiguration.” In this exercise, you pair up with a partner and stare at each other in extremely low light while opening up to spirit. The objective is that spirit will come over your partner and begin to change his or her facial features to where you can somewhat see the face of the spirit objectively. We were doing the exercise twice, and had already completed the first round with great success and were excited for the second session. For about ten minutes, each of us sat with our partner in silence and just looked at the other’s face. One set of partners sat in a completely different room, as we have a member who uses Skype on the computer to participate in the circle, since she lives in Portland, Oregon. Immediately, my partner appeared as one of my lead guides, who I have seen objectively on many occasions, the first time when I was 15-years-old. He appears as a medicine man from an aboriginal tribe, with face makeup and jewelry. His bright eyes gleamed back at me during the session, and he smiled widely, expressing his love and telling me clairaudiently how proud he was of my development. He expressed that it was okay for me to have been angry at what had happened earlier and had anticipated the outburst, and that the lesson was being learned (and truth be told, I had already been given insight to the lesson a day beforehand). Then my partner’s face darkened, but lit back up with the face of another one of my guides, with curly hair, high cheek bones, and British accent (again, clairaudient). I was surprised they had showed up to be the spirits my partner became. The real shocker was when the session was over and we all got back together to share our experiences. I held off on revealing who I had seen – because everyone was talking about seeing the same aborigine male with the painted face! Even Penny, our member from Portland, mentioned seeing him during the session. Wow! My spirit guide really came through on my demands. He appeared to 7 out of 8 members of my Development Circle, all within the same round and across literally hundreds of miles. It was unmistakable and truly amazing. Sometimes we might take our guides for granted, or are completely unaware of just how much they do care about us, and what they are willing to do to make themselves known. It was an incredible moment of humility and gratitude to realize the amount of energy, intent, and orchestration to make it all happen; to appear to each member at the same time, with one member being geographically far away – all to say “We are here, we love you, and are proud of you.” I cannot tell you how many times my guides have proven themselves to me (and on occasion, to others as well) -- and not by doing simple things, but by doing stuff that is truly remarkable. It just goes to show that we are loved, cared for, and guided to truly realize what it is great in the universe and inside ourselves by incredible helpers who reside in the land of eternity, unbound by Time and Space. Their love is unlimited – especially after putting up with me for so many decades arguing and disagreeing with them. (The score to date in who wins the arguments: Jeffrey=0. Guides=10000. Go figure). Never doubt your Spirit Guides. They won’t let you down and they do truly care about you. Feel free to challenge them – Just be prepared for the response. It will oftentimes astound you. ‘Til next time, (If you’re interested in meeting your own Spirit Guide and are also interested in mediumship, be sure to come to the next NW Mediumship Association gathering in April. See Events tab for details). Posted by Jeffrey Marks at 7:43 PM 1 comment: Labels: medium; mediumship; spirit guides; spirit helpers; readings; platform; mediumship demonstration Saturday, February 11, 2012 The Busting of the Ego and a Return to the Platform Spirit introduced me to platform work back in 2003. What is platform work, you ask? This is when the medium plucks people from the audience and gives them a reading. If you’ve seen John Edward or James Van Praagh do a “gallery”-style performance, that’s what it is. When I first began doing them, I was always terrified that nothing would happen. I would get panic attacks and worry that people would find me a fool. Fortunately, this ultimately wasn’t the case and excellent information did come through, but the more I did them, the more difficult they became, and I was doing them on a monthly basis. Finally, unwilling to take the anxiety attacks anymore and struggling to get information from the Other Side, I stepped down from platform demonstrations in 2007 and re-morphed my public services into private home settings, which didn’t necessarily have me connect with the deceased, but allowed me to simply be “psychic” (which is oftentimes easier than being mediumistic). The new groups helped. I would still get anxious, but most of the time that anxiety would disappear after the first or second reading; and the crowd was considerably smaller. I continued to bring through messages from spirit, but it wasn’t as overwhelming, and I could jump out of being a medium and work strictly on a psychic level if I chose to. But that’s what happens when you’re green. For the last few years I have pounded the pavement in trying to develop, learn more, and define my mediumship. I have devoured scores of books on mediums and mediumship, as well as taken (finally) some actual courses which were able to give me much needed direction and explanation. This work has broken down a lot of barriers I didn’t know I had. The main obstacle, of course, was my EGO. This has been the hardest to tackle, but looking back now on all the anxiety and stress before a service, this has been the culprit. When one worries about whether or not spirit will come through, what they are really worried about is looking foolish – which I was concerned about. Well, that isn’t looking out for spirit and spirit’s inspiration, that’s looking out for number one – the ego. “What if I’m wrong? What if I’m wrong? How will I look?” Yes, that is a natural thought, but if one clings to it as consistently as I did, then it becomes a HUGE distraction and disruption to the process of communicating with spirit. Even more so, if you’re also worried about how the sitter is going to respond to the information you bring through (“Will the information make me look like a fool”), that too is a distraction that will block the flow from spirit. Pretty much what it all boiled down to wasn’t a lack of trust from spirit; it was more about how I was going to appear to my audience. It wasn’t until I finally started to let go of ME and simply watch out for what was being brought through did my readings really take off. Do I give stellar readings every time now? No, nobody ever does, but the quality of my readings and how I feel going into them has certainly changed. Case in point: I did my first platform in over 5 years on February 4th at the Venus Moon in Renton. There was close to 40 people in the audience – the largest group to date (before then, my largest audience was 30). Before, when I had no real formal training and was “fending for myself” I would have been freaking out hours before the event started. But on this night, I was completely calm and relaxed. Not even that, I was excited! I knew, so long as I got out of my own way and gave my mind over to spirit, everything would be fine. And it was! I connected with 8 or 9 different people in the audience, with excellent information from spirit – including names, personal characteristics of the deceased, information surrounding how they passed, and much more, lasting for just over an hour in the demonstration. The only distraction I had was an ongoing fire or medical emergency, as ambulances and fire trucks were screaming by the building with sirens blaring. Nevertheless, I remained committed to being a vessel for spirit and spirit came through. When it was over, a part of me felt a bit cheated. My mind was so used to viewing platform demonstrations as being stressful and frightening, yet that night it was the exact opposite. Part of me had been waiting for the sense of “work” which the spectre of fear used to bring, but it never came. I had zero fear, and spirit came through without problems. A member of my development circle who attended said I was “inspiring.” What a gift! (And she stood up and made a connection herself, which was equally a joy to witness!) I would love to have compared that demonstration with my last platform in ’07. I bet they would have been light-years apart in terms of quality and style. So now I am committed to returning to the platform. Spirit has amazing messages to give and they are inspiring me to give them. I am always curious these days to hear what incredible details a person’s relative comes through with that is so unique and expressive that it screams “I’m really here!” When it comes to doing the work of spirit, there is no room for the ego. As I heard a few years ago (and what has led me on my quest to dissolving it), the word EGO stands for Edging God Out. That is so right. As a medium, I am here to serve spirit, not myself. As a medium, spirit’s messages serve the client, and I can’t be the judge of what that information is, I can only deliver it with as much compassion and love as I can. There are a lot of messages out there. I look forward to bringing them to the platform as I continue my work and my development throughout the year. Hope to see you there! Posted by Jeffrey Marks at 1:04 PM 2 comments: Labels: medium; mediumship; spirit guides; spirit helpers; readings; platform; mediumship demonstration Saturday, January 28, 2012 Raising Your Vibration and Expanding the Aura So what does it mean to “raise your vibration” and “expand your aura”? It’s something we hear about a lot when it comes to psychic and mediumship development; yet when you ask people “how do you do it”, you really don’t get a straight answer. I had a friend ask me this question and few weeks ago. After I pondered the response, I wrote it down and said to myself: Other people have got to be asking this same question. So I decided to blog about it! Okay … Here goes: Believe it or not, the process of raising vibration and expanding the aura is a natural by-product of meditation. Our left-brains like to parcel things out into bite-size bits so we can look at them individually, therefore it is easy to perceive them as separate events when they are the natural growth process of letting go and quieting the mind and body. Typically, we think of meditation as slowing down and being still, which is counterintuitive to “speeding up and raising vibration and expansion.” In terms of shutting off the monkey mind, the idea of slowing down and being quiet is an accurate description. But what happens when we shut down the monkey mind is that it allows the rest of our consciousness to be free. When we run around in our heads with the left-brain, we actually keep our auras very close to our body; in other words, we are wrapped up in ourselves because we are so busy processing in our heads. At that point, we don’t acknowledge much beyond our beings because that’s not where our focus is. But when we let go of the chattering head, it allows our consciousness to become more receptive, and it is at that moment – when we begin to open up – that the aura starts to expand. Of course, a little intention helps, but letting go and quieting the chattering mind releases the restraints on the aura and it will begin to grow naturally. This is why “meditation” and “sitting for spirit” (two phrases which really mean the same thing, at least to me) is so important in wanting to become more attuned and aware. The other aspect of this – raising vibration – happens in a similar fashion. Now, you might think that in raising vibration you should feel something vastly different from your “normal” vibration -- like you’re sitting there and all of a sudden you should feel like you have a rocket pack strapped to your back. Sorry to say, this doesn’t happen. But when you reach a good meditative state and with enough awareness, you can actually feel a rapid pulsation go up and down the core of your body through your chakras that is about double the speed of your heart rate, and you will also notice your breathing is smooth and equal, in terms of time spent inhaling and time spent exhaling. This pulsation, now that I think about it, does extend to your skin, too, as I have felt a buzzing sensation across my epidermis during these moments of awareness. However, if you don’t feel this rapid pulsation, that doesn’t mean you haven’t raised your vibration, it just means that you haven’t got an awareness of it just yet. That may take time. You might not have fine-tuned your sensitivity of discerning the different energies/feelings surrounding the body yet. That’s okay. With enough practice, you’ll get there. And you won’t feel it every time you meditate, but you will from time-to-time. If, after sitting in meditation, you feel more open, relaxed, and as if you are no longer confined to the sense of a “box around your being,” then you have raised your vibration. In changing your state from being “frenetic, chatty, running around in a maze” to being “relaxed, open, peaceful, freeing” you have changed your vibration. Changing your state of mind and feeling of your body is a changing of vibration and frequency. Sometimes, it can be as simple as thinking more positive, uplifting thoughts. If those thoughts create more positive feelings, then you have raised your vibration (and most likely expanded your aura, too). And, of course, you can go in with intent while meditating: “Lift higher, lift higher, lift higher” or “raise vibration, raise vibration, raise vibration.” Once you make the intent, you have to then let go and let it happen – don’t chase after it like you’re chasing a butterfly. That just confounds things. Let it happen naturally, because it really does happen naturally on its own. Like I said, if you feel lighter and more freer after the meditation, you have successfully raised your vibration. If you feel you have more energy after meditation, you have raised your vibration. If you feel more balanced instead of lopsided and heavy, you have raised your vibration. Also, don’t think that the level of vibration of which you are wishing to reach is so distant from your normal vibration; it’s not like you are traversing a football field – it is subtle and slight. The trick is learning to know when you are in it and becoming sensitive to the information that gets transmitted in that zone. It’s really not a huge gap. Plus, when you reach that state, that doesn’t necessarily mean an individual spirit communicator is going to step right in and start delivering information. You can raise vibration and be in the space of spirit – you can feel their presence, you know they are there – but you may not get anything more. That’s fine. A spirit communicator may not wish to communicate, for they feel there is really nothing of great importance to convey at the moment. What’s important is that you are in the space. When the time is right and when a message is necessary to give, a communicator will come in. And with practice, you will be able to “fine-tune” your vibration – stay in it with consistency – and raise it even a little higher. This, so we all believe, will allow either more or “different” information to come from spirit. The trick is shutting off the left-brain and your ego because the two LOVE to run things; they love to control, identify, and create definition based on your personal beliefs and biases. Yes, we must identify the information which comes to us through the vibration and aura, but our left-brains and egos also try to imbue stuff with our own personal meaning. As mediums, it’s not our job to determine what something means; our job is simply to deliver the information as we get it. We don’t always have to understand it – because 9 times out of 10, we’ll get the meaning wrong when the recipient knows exactly what is being transmitted. Admittedly, I think this is the hardest part of development. I’ve heard and learned to categorize the EGO as “(E)dging (G)od (O)ut.” We must learn to ignore our personal biases and the brain’s need to label things and just pay attention to what is popping into our consciousness from spirit and then deliver only that. Spirit will, if they can, imbue the impressions with their own meaning so you don’t have to. But we cannot judge what they are giving us; we can only deliver it to the recipient. Have a great week! Posted by Jeffrey Marks at 2:37 PM 2 comments: Labels: mediumship; psychic development; mediumship development; raising vibration; expanding the aura; aura; meditation; intention Tuesday, January 10, 2012 2012 - A Paradigm Shift? For decades we have been hearing this talk of a paradigm shift in consciousness; that a big sweeping revolution is going to cross the globe and affect everybody energetically, consciously, spiritually – at least that’s how I have interpreted this conversation – and people will all of a sudden wake up, as if night has suddenly turned into day. And with the onset of the Mayan “prophecy” this year, this notion has become closely wedded with the December 21st date and become the focal point for when this shift will occur. Unfortunately, I think those people who are holding out on this event are going to wake up on December 22nd very disappointed. On a planet with 7 billion people, 7 billion minds, and 7 billion different points of view (and growing), in order for this type of paradigm shift to occur, it would require something so incredibly powerful and miraculous, it would be beyond our comprehension. Judging by our march through history as a species, shifts in consciousness do not happen overnight – they are quite gradual and filled with plenty of upheaval. The closest example that we can relate to is the Renaissance, and in no way did that shift from ideology-based wisdom to free thinking and science occur within the course of a single generation, it took several generations with a backdrop of events stretching back millenniums -- and it still hasn’t shifted the whole planet even today. There are still large numbers of people who have entangled themselves with archaic old-world belief systems and dogma; they are firmly entrenched in them; and as the planet becomes more and more populated, the larger those populations will also become – the more people you have to deal with. We have this idea that a paradigm shift is going to radically change how people will think, act, and at last, world-peace will prevail (or at least be closer at hand). It’s a beautiful thought, until we realize mass consciousness cannot make that leap overnight – with a real good possibility that it will NEVER make a decisive shift in that direction for the very reason of why people incarnate on earth in the first place: to be the fullest expression of universal consciousness and LEARN LESSONS to become all that we can be, as a being of consciousness. Think about what it would be like if we all started to think and believe in the same way, it would become far too limiting for people’s paths and inhibit their free god-given ability to learn the lessons they have chosen to incarnate to learn in the fashion they feel they need to learn them. Some people NEED DRAMA in order to learn their lessons. That’s their choice. In other words, a world without all the different points-of-view which we currently have may actually be a world with Less Creative Expression for a soul to learn in. If mass consciousness were to all of a sudden align itself in one particular direction like atoms in a laser beam, think how that would actually inhibit spiritual growth and expression versus having all of these other oftentimes contradictory points-of-view. Ultimately, what we are hoping for in a paradigm shift is a change in thinking because we believe it will lead to a change in behaviors – to be more loving rather than destructive and divisive. But we all know, we cannot make other people think differently … We can’t go into a person’s mind and switch their gears for them. We can only inspire them. They have to make that mental consciousness shift themselves – we call it Free Will. We CAN force them to change behavior through intimidation – we see that all the time – but even then, though behavior might be different, the thoughts might still be the same old thoughts someone has always had. We cannot change how other people think, we can only change how WE think and WE behave. In this sense, the only kind of paradigm shift that will occur will not come from something outside people’s consciousness sweeping in and giving them a huge all-of-a-sudden “aha” moment, it will be something they experience and come up with inside themselves. The only way a true paradigm shift will occur is if we can apply the wisdom of Gandhi: Be the change you want to see in the world. About the only outside influence that could quickly change the way we treat each other on planet earth would be something catastrophic – something that forces us to unite. I’m thinking a planet-destroying asteroid, alien invasion, or pandemic plague. Outside of that, spirit, consciousness, needs the varying viewpoints and philosophies in order to allow the growth of souls to become all that is possible. Our challenge is to learn to embrace these differences with unconditional love and understand that everything in the universe is not here by chance or coincidence; the universe works with mathematical precision, therefore, what we see in today’s world is supposed to be happening. If we believe that the main goal or lesson in life is to learn how to love, how can we learn that lesson? Only by encountering those things which will challenge us to find that kernel, that gem, and expand from it. That is going to require these challenges we face. We may not agree with what others may think and are doing, but that is because that is not our path, it is theirs, and they are simply learning their individual lessons and becoming all that the nature of spirit can be from that unique perspective. And, yes, we often cross the line in trying to force a shift upon one another to move in different directions – this is the game-plan in learning our life-lessons. You can’t learn them from sitting on a couch; you have to engage. My prediction for the future: We will continue to evolve. Evolution is a constant. But it occurs in baby-steps. I don’t think anything is going to come sweeping in and kick that evolution into overdrive in such a way that we go from 10 mph to 120, in terms of consciousness expansion across the globe. Can we reach universal peace and brotherhood on earth? Yes, but it won’t come easily nor swiftly. Some say the reason there are so many people on the earth at this time is because of this massive, quick, evolutionary leap. I don’t. I think it’s because we have made it a biological imperative to have a family, as it has been for millennia, and so we consciously and spiritually ask and welcome more souls to come in, in order to fulfill this imperative and “standard life design.” Standard life design: get married and have children. It has nothing to do with paradigm shifting consciousness. Especially when it appears everything is quite unorganized and chaotic. Watching the news, I don’t see a movement toward consciousness shifting any time soon. I see life engaging and going on as it has been for centuries. Riots are not new. Civil wars are not new. Overthrowing and trompling dictators is not new. Ghadafi could have been the reincarnated Louis XVI for all we know. We are doing the same things we have always done. The notion of paradigm shifting into a new form of higher consciousness is a holdover from biblical times and Revelations – “We’re right on the cusp of it. The end is nigh!” They thought that back in the 900s at the turn of that millennium, then the late 16 & 1700s when Newton had an apple knock his noggin; they thought that back in the 1800s with the advent of materialist science; around the same time, the spiritualists were advocating it when the Fox Sisters became famous and parapsychology was birthed; they thought it again in the 1930s when ESP became all the rage thanks to J.B. Rhine’s scientific research; then again in the 60s with flower power; and in the 80s with the New Age movement; and when we switched the clocks 12 years ago. It’s always been with us. It’s a social, societal, mental habit, but not necessarily a realistic outcome to expect. There are reasons why we engage in this habit … which I don’t have time to talk about here. Nevertheless, it does have to do with our recognition of our eternal consciousness and connection to all things and trying to grasp at that omnipotence within this current environment of time and space, multidimensionality, and multiple probabilities. It ain’t easy, folks … And you know what, we make it that way on purpose. A paradigm shift will not occur TO other people without their choosing; it will occur only within the individual who desires it – and it requires no special date on the calendar to do so. So those that are espousing a paradigm shift will either experience one for themselves and not see it happen with their neighbor – because the neighbor is too caught up with paying the bills and seeing the kids off to school – or they will start to see their neighbor acting differently and will think “That’s weird. What’s up with them?” and not notice any abnormal changes within themselves. It won’t be this big switch from night to day without any form of conscious choice. Posted by Jeffrey Marks at 6:46 PM 1 comment: Labels: 2012; Mayan prophecy; doomsday; end of the world; apocalypse; paradigm shift; consciousness shift Newer Posts Older Posts Home Subscribe to: Posts (Atom) Me with internationally renowned medium Lisa Williams in 2012! (Modeling my first book) Get the Amazon.com International Bestseller! Finalist - 2013 USA Best Book Awards Get the Amazon.com International Bestseller! Finalist - 2013 USA Best Book Awards What is the Other Side REALLY like? Fourteen separate readings, asking the same fifty-two questions: One amazing combined portrait of the hereafter! 2012 NAUTILUS BOOK AWARDS WINNER & BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AWARDS FINALIST! 2012 NAUTILUS BOOK AWARDS WINNER & BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AWARDS FINALIST! Just click the image to learn more! View the 2 minute Afterlife Interviews promo video! 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my12hats: What's On My Nightstand?

my12hats: What's On My Nightstand?: Confession time: the title of this blog is deceptive. The truth is that my nightstand is currently covered in clean, folded towels that some...

Friday, June 23, 2017

Interesting reads blog Jeff maysh


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Crime story


Find Your Under The Radar Luxury How can you top a vacation in the lap of luxury? We'll show you how to find a taste of adventure by exploring amazing, luxurious places that remain off-the-radar—for now. On Friday, Nov. 13, 1970, Michael Thevis slipped into his office early for an important meeting. With balding hair and a tidy goatee, the 38-year-old business owner looked like any other executive working in downtown Atlanta. His company headquarters spanned an entire city block of historic Marietta Street and commanded annual profits of $25 million—more than Hewlett-Packard or Hershey Foods. But Thevis wasn’t in computers or chocolate. He was in America’s hottest new commodity: pornography. He liked to boast that 99 percent of America’s adult magazines and films flowed through his sprawling warehouse, where 300 workers arrived every day. In his factory, Thevis manufactured a new machine that was taking the sex industry by storm. It was like a jukebox for porn, with an 8mm projector that played a 15-second loop of erotic film. Thevis leased them to adult bookstores, where the lustful and the curious locked themselves in a private booth and kept the action rolling by feeding it quarters. During the sexual revolution of the 1970s, the peep machine racket would earn an estimated $2 billion. In the conservative Deep South, Mafia-like firms battled for its obscene profits, as Atlanta became America’s murder capital. At around 8 a.m., just before his staff arrived, Thevis welcomed onto the property his friend and former partner, Kenneth Hanna. Their meeting took place in the warehouse, where they chatted among stacks of magazines like Weekend with the Boss and Young Humpers, and boxes full of rubber penises and vaginas. A year earlier, Hanna had quit Thevis’ company, Cine-matics, to join a rival peep machine maker in New York, called Red Vought. With Thevis expanding his business nationwide, Hanna perhaps expected to hear about a business opportunity. Instead, Thevis pulled out a pistol and shot him three times in the chest. Hanna’s knees buckled and he dropped to the floor. Somehow still alive, he begged for his life as blood gurgled in his throat, but Thevis raised the gun and put a fourth bullet into his head. The meeting was over. Thevis had heard cops in Florida had recently seized a Red Vought truck full of unlicensed copies of his own erotic films. Hanna was ripping off both his hardware and his software, and that just wouldn’t do. Thevis wrapped the body in padded blankets used for transporting peep machines. He dragged him to Hanna’s gold-colored Cadillac, and dumped his rival in the trunk. But as it slammed shut, Thevis realized the car keys were in the dead man’s pocket. Surrounded by blood, he’d locked himself out of the car, and the morning shift was about to clock in. But Thevis knew what to do. He would call a man who would become his accomplice in this and so much more. The slaying was just part of a campaign of murder, arson, and extortion that Thevis used to seize control of the country’s pornography market. Earning hundreds of millions of dollars in coins, Thevis built a hotel-sized mansion, where he liked to tower over a model city of Atlanta carved from ivory. He filled his palace with Chinese antiques, French Provincial furniture, and painted the ceiling like the Sistine Chapel with scenes from erotic Greek myths. Yet at home the king of hardcore was a Puritan who didn’t even allow a Playboy in the house, lest his young children see it. During the eight years after he shot Hanna, Thevis racked up over 100 arrests, escaped from prison, and was finally re-captured by the FBI while on the run with a lover. A court heard that he had commissioned a paperweight made from the shattered bones of a second murdered rival, and the judge sentenced him to life in prison. In 1983, as Thevis appealed his sentence in court, theatergoers in America were captivated by another violent kingpin, Tony Montana, and the tabloids started to call Thevis “the Scarface of Sex.” When he died behind bars in 2013 at the age of 81, Thevis left behind a legend, and a secret cache of memoirs. In September of last year I visited “the house that porn built,” the 30-room palatial mansion where the Thevis family agreed to reveal his personal diaries and letters. These documents tell the inside story of America’s most dangerous startup, the lawless birth of the modern sex industry, and a parable of greed. * * * Michael George Thevis was born in Raleigh, North Carolina on Feb 25, 1932, and raised by his grandparents after his parents separated. “My family were Greek immigrants that didn’t have two nickels to rub together,” Thevis wrote in his memoirs. “When the rest of the kids would be playing or going out for the team, I’d be working my butt off.” Even as a child, “Mike” had a hunger for the good things in life, and earned an early conviction for attempted robbery. That made the devoted altar boy reconsider his plans for the priesthood, and he decided to seek his fortune in the nearest major metropolis. One day in 1950, he hitched a ride on the back of an orange truck to Atlanta. The city was everything he had hoped for, full of ambition and opportunity. Young and slim, with thick black hair, he studied for his high-school diploma while working nights at a newsstand for $50 a week. At 19, he fell in love with Joan, 16, who worked in a nearby store. They married in 1951 and moved into a cramped apartment in the shadow of the United States Penitentiary in Atlanta. He was too poor to afford antifreeze for his car. “I could remember sitting on the curb and crying because it was so cold and the motor was frozen, and I couldn’t get to my job,” he recalled. Yet Thevis promised his young bride he would be a millionaire before he was 30, and she believed him. In letters from the Thevis archive, a family friend named Arlene Tate wrote, “Thevis had an hypnotic effect on people... people were drawn to him... he had an evil glint in his eye.” Soon, Thevis convinced his boss to open another newsstand with him as manager. By 1955 he had three of his own. In the 1950s, America was still reserved, even uncomfortable about sex—a nation where on television married couples slept in different beds. Since the Civil War, obscene publications were illegal, yet when Thevis stocked risqué magazines like The Dude and Gent, they changed his fortunes. “I was doing inventory one day and I noticed that 90 percent of my profits were coming from 10 percent of my inventory—girlie magazines,” he wrote. “I had several arrests... for obscenity charges, with the first arrest for Playboy magazine. It seems ludicrous now, but I can assure the reader that it was considered a serious crime in the 1950s Bible Belt South.” Handout Thevis at his first newsstand, 1955. Thevis capitalized on the American male’s insatiable hunger for illicit thrills. In 1960, he published a guide to America’s nudist colonies. “It must have sold a zillion copies,” he recalled, “and didn’t even have any pictures.” He launched a distribution company, Peachtree News, and filled its office with writers pecking away at typewriters. They churned out cheap paperbacks with sex scenes on every page, including A Teacher Confesses to Sex in the Classroom. Thevis spent the profits on his growing family: He and Joan now had two young children at home, Mike Jr., and Christina. It was on a business trip to New York in 1967 when Thevis first saw a peep show machine. They had been around since the ’40s, showing cartoons at carnivals, until a former jukebox distributor, Martin Hodas, introduced them to Times Square. The machines were clunky and insecure, but Thevis watched customers fighting to use them. He decided he could make improvements. Back in Atlanta he hired a local locksmith named Roger Underhill to help make his own prototype. A bald ex-con with a genius IQ, Underhill had been caught hacking telephones with an illegal “blue box” machine, and claimed to have worked undercover for what would become the Drug Enforcement Administration. There was something brilliant, yet utterly dangerous about him. By 1969, they had engineered the perfect, profitable, theft-proof machine, and sold them nationwide, 48 on each tractor-trailer. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court under liberal Chief Justice Earl Warren unanimously overturned a Georgia law forbidding the possession of obscene materials, making it legal to own pornography—however it was still illegal to produce or sell it. “The country at that time was so wide-open, it was like opening the West,” Thevis recalled. He told bookstore owners: “I’ll put in eight of my peep machines, and you’ll make at least $1,000 a week off them, and we’ll split 50-50.” Soon Thevis couldn’t make enough machines to satisfy demand. “It was a gold mine,” he recalled. By the time he was 37, Thevis was a millionaire. His two corporations, Automatic Enterprises and Cine-matics, were now manufacturing 50 machines a week. He rewarded Underhill by making him a minor partner in the business. Thevis would telephone the factory at 1 a.m. and beg Underhill to go home, but they were both hooked on profit. The two men spent any free time together watching river races, climbing cliffs, riding dirt bikes, and picnicking with their young families. By now Thevis had five children, including twins Tony and Stephanie, and his youngest, Jason. One day, Tony got food stuck in his throat and started to choke. It was Underhill who grabbed him and popped it out. *** By the end of the 1960s, more than 6,000 Cine-matics machines were operating across America. Thevis had acquired the Marietta Street building, where the peep machines now rolled off a production line. Underhill redesigned the machines with a meter inside to check the integrity of bookstore owners, and reduce “skimming.” As the money rolled in, a constant fight with the law ensued. Thevis was regularly arrested for interstate distribution of pornography, but his powerful First Amendment lawyers and America’s confusing stance on pornography helped him avoid prison time. “About this time, I formed the American Publishers and Distributors Association (APDA) and served as the association’s first president, opened offices in Washington, D.C., and lobbied for laws favorable to the newly formed pornography industry,” he wrote. Known by employees as “Mr. T,” Thevis became a director of his church’s lay board and wrote generous checks to local charities. His corporations joined the Better Business Bureau. He pumped his profits into 200 “straight” corporations, including gift shops, bookstores, candy shops, and a mail-order cheese and fruit club. Thevis snipped the ribbon at the opening of his restaurant, the Saddle and Stirrup. He launched a furniture company, a trucking company, and invested in real estate. With designer suits and powerful motorcycles, Thevis was unrecognizable as the penniless newsstand owner unable to buy antifreeze for his car. The young man who married Joan had vanished. “As happens to many couples, we grew apart,” Thevis confessed, “We had love for each other, but were no longer in love.” There were screaming matches. Joan, a humble housewife, had grown to hate her extravagant husband and would order him to leave, but they both knew she was financially dependent on him. Handout Michael and Joan Thevis, pictured at Coney Island, 1960s. Thevis put on a brave public face. The couple even attended dance classes, instructed by Jeanette Evans, a deeply religious, stunning brunette. As they danced, Thevis learned that Jeanette had also escaped a childhood on a hardscrabble farm to “make it” in Atlanta. It was the aspiring real-estate agent’s dream to earn enough in commission to join the “One Million Dollar Club.” Joan quit the dance classes. Her husband bought the dance school. Thevis recalled, “I fell in love with Jeanette Evans.” * * * From women to money, nothing was ever enough for Thevis. Now a millionaire, he desired complete control over the pornography industry and to be known as its figurehead. Thevis had no interest in sex: Pornography was purely business, a stock in trade. “There are other people in the country as big in pornography as he is,” one Thevis associate said. “But nobody’s heard of them because they don’t go around telling everyone how big they are.” Cleveland’s Reuben Sturman, for example, ran a larger operation in the Midwest. But Thevis demanded the limelight, and his boasting soon attracted unwanted attention. The Intelligence Division of the Atlanta Police Department leaked to the press a 56-page investigation into Cine-matics. It claimed that Thevis was backed by Mafia money: “The fact… is exemplified by a conversation overheard at a pornography convention in Las Vegas in 1969. Thevis was bragging about owning 90 percent of the sex-film vending machines in the United States. Robert DiBernardo, a member of the Sam DeCavalcante LCN [La Cosa Nostra] family, said: ‘Don’t forget, Mike, you manage the machines. The family is in charge.’” Thevis’ second son, Tony, told me that “Didi” DiBernardo gifted the Thevis kids a pony. Mafia rumors intensified when federal agents raided a Brooklyn warehouse in 1969 and seized $550,000 worth of hardcore pornography. The warehouse was financed by Joseph Colombo, the boss of the Colombo crime family. Discovered in the raid was a note that read: “Mike says don’t ship [any] more films until further [notice].” Thevis protested he had nothing to do with the Mafia, but thought it didn’t hurt that people believed he did. “Sometimes when I’d roll into town, that reputation had preceded me. I’d go into some adult store where the guy didn’t know me, and make my offer. I’d say, ‘My truck is gonna roll in here in two days and unload eight machines and you’re gonna use them.’ He’d look at me and say, ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ And I’d say, ‘I’m Mike Thevis from Atlanta.’ And he’d say, ‘Yes, sir, Mr. Thevis. You send those machines right over.’ I never said I was with the Mafia. It was the press that did it, not me.” Rival peep machine manufacturers emerged, included those run by Leon and Mike Sokolic, Art Sanders, and Bill Walters. Before now, the most Thevis had ever done to intimidate a rival was let off a stink bomb at a store in Baltimore. Not all competitors rolled over so easily. Nat Bailen, who manufactured a peep show machine for cartoons, started to sell his units to sex-shop owners who used them for porn. In 1970, a customer named Harry Mooney in Michigan asked to lease 50 machines from Thevis—an order so large he couldn’t meet it in time. Instead, Mooney bought his machines outright from Nat Bailen. As he would do so often, Thevis turned to Underhill. Handout Rogert Underhill. “Something,” Thevis told him, “has to be done with Bailen.” On April 26, 1970, Underhill drove from Atlanta to Louisville in his yellow station wagon, where he met a paid accomplice, Clifford “Sam” Wilson. In the dead of night, they broke into Bailen’s factory, carrying burglary tools and five-gallon containers of gasoline. They built a bonfire using his furniture and paperwork. When Wilson found some paint cans, he told Underhill, “Let’s really screw this guy,” and poured paint over the desks and carpets. There were four-foot-tall flames licking at the windows by the time the goons fled. Reeking of gasoline, Underhill found a pay phone at the Kentucky Turnpike, and called Thevis at the Central Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. “Veni vidi vici,” Underhill said—I came, I saw, I conquered. There were times when Underhill encouraged the darker side of Thevis. Other times, it was Thevis who seemed to bring out the worst in Underhill. It didn’t take long for the two men to progress from stink bombs to arson to murder. Then came that Friday the 13th in November 1970, when Thevis found himself alone in his warehouse with Ken Hanna’s dead body locked inside the Cadillac. He picked up the telephone and dialed Underhill. When Underhill arrived at Marietta Street, he found a gruesome scene, with Hanna’s blood all over the floor. He used his lock-pulling tool and a screwdriver to pop the trunk, then fished the keys off the corpse. He drove the Cadillac to the airport and dumped it in a parking lot. Next, he purchased a blowtorch from Sears and melted the pistol, the Cadillac lock, and the screwdriver into a molten ball of metal. At a quiet spot where he and Thevis liked to watch the river races, Underhill tossed the evidence into the Chattahoochee River. Thevis hadn’t planned to involve Underhill in the murder until the mishap with the keys. But now, as the metal blob sank to the bottom, the two men had become more than friends and partners. They were bonded by a dark secret, and in time it would set them on a collision course. * * * The king of pornography lavished his girlfriend Jeanette with $120,000 in cash, statuettes from Greece, and dinner rings. She wore his diamond pendant around her neck, and believed that one day she would become Mrs. Thevis. Once, she ordered the wedding dress and told her mother to prepare for the big day. Thevis even made it to the courthouse steps with the divorce papers, only to turn back. Being divorced would make him look bad in the eyes of a jury, he believed, as the threat of prosecution loomed. Joan Thevis was more than aware of his long-term affair with Jeanette, and at home tensions were growing. Thevis recalled of Joan, “I was her boyfriend, her father, her husband, and her lover. I was everything to that woman and, as the years went by, that proved to be the problem.” There was soon a third woman in his life. Joan had hired a fiery 18-year-old hostess, Patricia McLean, at the Saddle and Stirrup. Despite her fabulous figure and long red hair, it was her business acumen that attracted Thevis. “I knew that Pat McLean was brilliant and aggressive,” he wrote, “as well as a workaholic. At my urgings, and through my tutelage, she rose to the occasion until she was finally made president of my largest company”—later called Global Industries. Pat and Joan worked side-by-side at the office on Marietta Street, which was by then populated by headstrong women. “I learned early that women, for the most part, make the best executives,” Thevis wrote. “Not only did I find them more loyal, but harder working and more determined than most males.” Handout Thevis in 1967, with twins Tony and Stephanie. In January 1971, Underhill begged Thevis to buy him out, and he did. Underhill was convinced their enterprise was doomed as rumors of murders were circulating Atlanta’s sex trade—Hanna’s body was eventually discovered at the airport—and Thevis was gleefully avoiding paying tax on his machine’s profits. Soon everyone knew the feds were building a case against Cine-matics. “He decided that he wanted out of the business, because he was afraid of being arrested,” wrote Thevis. When no arrests followed, it appeared that Underhill had made a mistake in selling out, as Thevis’ profits soared. Underhill could not let go of his relationship with Thevis, and agreed to work for him for a pitiful $50 a week. “Basically, Roger was just a very jealous person,” Thevis recalled, “he always wanted to spend every minute of every day with me.” As the majority stakeholder, Thevis became increasingly protective over his business. Every day he bugged a different phone in his offices, and gave his employees lie-detector tests to check their loyalty. Next, the man who wouldn’t allow Playboy in his house installed members of his family in high-ranking positions. In 1971, he hired his nephew, Mann Chandler, 24, as chief of manufacturing for peep machines. Chandler’s new models used movie cartridges, which automatically cleaned the film, added a layer of wax, and reduced breakdowns. “I took it from old wooden cabinets that fell apart to metal cabinets, from spring-loaded to solid state,” he told me. Chandler was also wary of Underhill. “He had one of the most treacherous smiles I’ve ever seen on a human being,” he told me. “When he smiled at me, I took four steps back.” Meanwhile, the law was closing in on Thevis. He was convicted on charges of transportation of obscene materials in 1971 and sentenced to five years with a $1,000 fine. Thanks to some legal gymnastics and an expensive appeal, he avoided prison with a suspended sentence. To remain a free man, Thevis realized he needed to step away from his pornography business. Announcing his “retirement,” he said: “I rode the boom to its crest, and I made a lot of money. I’m not sorry for it.” Later in 1971, he handed over the reins to Bernard and Noel Bloom in Los Angeles, and Mel Friedman in Atlanta. He also gave Patricia McLean the power of attorney and control of his businesses, estimated to be worth as much as $12 million. “I don’t want to be remembered as Atlanta’s own pornography kingpin,” he said. Thevis had achieved the riches he craved, and the notoriety. But there was still something missing. He desired the credibility and respect of a real businessman. It was widely believed that Thevis still controlled his empire from afar, and his effect on the pornography industry was indelible. Up to 75 new film loops were shot every week just for the peep machine market. Adult filmmaking became a profession, creating the first “porn stars,” as America entered the Golden Age of Pornography. In 1972, Deep Throat broke all records by earning $25 million at the box office, yet adult theaters earned less than a quarter of the income of peep machines. As porn grew, so did the backlash against it. America’s new conservative Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, cracked down on obscenity once again. Thevis became a target of America’s moral outrage. “My family has taken a lot of abuse from cranks and idiots calling and telling us we’re going to hell,” Thevis told Newsweek. “I get dirty notes in my mailbox telling me I’m a dirty so and so because I’m so obscene.” Thevis drew up plans for his imposing 30-room mansion, the Lion’s Gate Estate, designed in the style of the British Tudors. It was one of the largest private residences built in 1972. The day it was finished, Thevis stood on the driveway and proudly told a family friend: “The quarters from my machines paid every quarter of it.” There, he regularly spent over $10,000 on flowers, more than the average American’s annual salary. Leon Sokolic, a peep show operator and Thevis acquaintance, told me he once saw a million dollars in cash just sitting on a table. Tony Thevis Thevis' Atlanta home. Thevis turned over his estate and swimming pool to visitors from orphanages, wrote checks to the Little League, and bankrolled performances by the Atlanta Symphony and Metropolitan Opera. “I could be this city’s best goodwill ambassador if they only knew it,” Thevis told reporters. He rebranded himself as a music producer, boasting that he had a “sixth sense” for the mixing deck. One time Sokolic walked past the lounge and saw Evel Knievel hanging out. Next, he financed and produced kung fu flicks and low-budget movies. Though Thevis had never bothered to visit a porn shoot, he became a regular on his movie sets. In 1973, while filming The Last Stop, Thevis clashed with a dwarf actor who went on a violent drinking binge. Speaking to a newspaper in Redlands, California, Thevis said: “The little rascal got a brick and started breaking windows.” An Atlanta-based film critic who saw his movie Poor Pretty Eddie, starring Shelley Winters, wrote: “Upon leaving the theater, I quite honestly felt nauseous.” He quickly lost $10 million. * * * It was the first week in August 1973 when the high-speed life of Michael Thevis first spun out of control. It was a Sunday afternoon, and Joan was at Underhill’s house chatting with his wife. Their husbands were out riding their motorcycles, and when they didn’t return, Joan went out to look for them. On Riverside Drive, near the Chattahoochee River, a car had forced her husband off the road—a terrible accident. Paramedics found Thevis at the bottom of a 50-foot embankment, and Joan drove behind the ambulance all the way to the hospital. For two and half months, he would remain there, recovering from major internal injuries and a broken back. The hospital bed provided Thevis an alibi to arrange a shocking new murder, it was alleged. Just before midnight on Sept. 13, 1973, Jimmy Mayes left his adult bookstore, Metro Books, and stepped onto Atlanta’s swinging Peachtree Street. Mayes was a former employee of Thevis who had learned how to make peep machines at the Cine-matics warehouse. Three miles away, he opened his own bookstore and—unwisely—installed his own machines. As Mayes walked through the bustling red-light district, Midtown throbbed with pimps, drug dealers, and hippies. When he sat in his truck and switched on the ignition, a dynamite blast lit up the street and blew his body through the roof. After police and the coroner had cleared away the wreckage, Underhill, who had organized the pipe bomb, scooped up parts of Mayes’s wristwatch, skin, and bones. He took the evidence to Thevis in hospital, where they talked about turning them into a paperweight—Underhill’s idea. Underhill was now desperate to impress Thevis, but when his former partner refused to let him back into Cine-matics, he became aggressive. Underhill demanded to be paid more for his previous ownership, but again Thevis refused. One day, Thevis boasted that he had spent his end of the profits by building his super-mansion. “He really got bent out of shape over that one,” Thevis recalled. “He was very incensed.” Even from his wheelchair, “retired” Thevis was expanding his vast network of money-spinning machines, and vowed to destroy anyone who stood in his path. * * * Paul King looked too young to be an FBI agent, but that was part of his success. He had joined the bureau during its October 1969 hiring frenzy, at age 23, becoming one of its gung-ho “Ten-one-sixty-nine” agents, short for October 1, 1969. They were known for aggressive tactics and Friday night house parties. As a rookie in Kansas City, King liked to station himself outside banks waiting for robbers. Before he was 25, he had shot and killed his first bandit. The baby-faced agent transferred to Atlanta in 1974, where he posed as a Georgia Tech student to arrest the boss of a “numbers” racket. King, who preferred to drive his Mustang instead of FBI station wagons, got a thrill from closing down complicated criminal enterprises. When he heard on the streets about the Mayes murder, he jumped at the chance to work on a case involving pornography. Slowly, methodically, he started to build his case. “I was always attracted to something like that where you pit your brain against somebody else,” he told me on the telephone. Meanwhile, Underhill, in his desperation to keep up with Thevis’ millions, turned to burglary and theft. One day, cops questioned his wife after her car bottomed-out under the weight of whatever was in the back. “They opened the trunk, and here was all these gold coins,” Thevis recalled. In 1974, Underhill was convicted of possessing millions of dollars of stolen gold coins and antique firearms. When he was sent to prison, King saw an opportunity. “I was tasked with interviewing Roger to see if he would talk about Thevis’ operation,” he said. Underhill declined. David Herman/Frederic Lewis/Hulton Archive/Getty A family looks through the open door of a peep show and adult bookstore in Times Square as they walk past, New York, New York, 1970s. Later in December 1974, the FBI brought pornography and arson charges against Thevis. He held a press conference in his mansion, bouncing his son Jason on his lap. “I want people to think better of Mike Thevis,” he told reporters. He offered to donate his $5 million estate to the city of Atlanta for use as a school. He promised to spend $3.3 million on restoring a famous theater on Peachtree Street. Every tactic failed. Thevis was convicted of the transportation of obscene materials and conspiracy to commit arson at Bailen’s warehouse. The testimony of arsonist Clifford Wilson convinced a judge to send Thevis to the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, for eight years. His lover, Jeanette, the devoted Christian, could no longer continue a relationship with a man found guilty of these crimes. “It was about that time that Pat and I became serious with each other,” Thevis wrote of McLean. “Out of need, I had feelings for her. Out of compassion, she had feelings for me.” That winter, Joan and Patricia arrived together in the prison visitors’ room. “For most men it would have been a moment of supreme awkwardness,” wrote the Atlanta Constitution. “For Mike Thevis, it was a rare moment of joy. Walking toward him in the crowded prison waiting room were two women: one his wife of 26 years and the mother of his five children, the other his girlfriend and lover, 22 years younger than he.” “I kissed them both hello,” Thevis recalled. * * * On June 10, 1976, Paul King raided the Cine-matics warehouse. FBI agents seized thousands of reels of pornographic film, including Hard Thumpers, Real Strokers, and The American Sex Scene Vol. 5. Inside Thevis’ office, agents broke open the safe where they found a to-do list. “The first thing on the list,” said King, “was kill Roger.” King and the FBI figured out that Thevis was telling the truth about one thing: He wasn’t involved in the Mafia. “I met a lot of fairly high-level organized crime people in my day, and I never met one that liked him. He drew too much attention on the pornography business and he was too flamboyant,” King said. “He was not a made man.” King told me that Thevis tried to hire various inmates to kill Underhill in different prisons, but each time, Underhill fought for his life and survived. He added that the FBI even recorded this conversation between Underhill and Thevis on prison pay phones: “Are you trying to kill me, Mike?” “Well, Roger, you gotta do what you gotta do.” King said that it was Underhill’s parents who convinced their son to co-operate with the FBI, after they heard about the murder attempts in prison. “That’s what started my relationship with him,” King said. Underhill agreed to be interviewed for a week. “I had been hearing on the grapevine that Roger was attempting to make a deal as a government witness against me [in exchange for] early release. He did and was set free,” Thevis recalled. “He was bitter about a number of things... he accused me of having an affair with his wife. He was very upset about that, as rightly he should be.” Thevis had unwittingly driven Underhill into the arms of the FBI. “He knew so much about Thevis’ operation that Thevis was trying to shut him up for good,” King said, “If he hadn’t tried to have Roger killed while he was in jail, Roger was so loyal he probably would have never testified against Thevis.” The FBI sent Underhill to visit Thevis in prison, wearing a wire. Agents had also bugged the walls in the visitors’ room. “How are you doing, Sultan?” said Underhill, referencing a Reader’s Digest headline that had recently called Thevis “the Sultan of Smut.” “First of all,” said Thevis, “there’s a lot of things happening around these places, and your atrocious puns, you know, your sophomoric, feeble-minded philosophizing, if you are here to negotiate, let’s negotiate.” Underhill confessed that he had spoken to the FBI. “What did you take the polygraph on?” asked Thevis. “They asked me if I killed Jimmy Mayes. And they asked me if I killed Ken Hanna and if I put his body in the car and I said… no, no, no, no.” “How did you do?” Thevis asked. “I didn’t tell any lies, and they said I passed the test with flying colors,” Underhill said. Moments later, Thevis asked, “Well... What’d you tell ’em when they asked you if I did it?” “I said yes,” Underhill replied. “You wouldn’t want me to lie.” “No wonder you passed,” Thevis said. Moments later, Underhill tried to cover the FBI’s SK-9 microphone hidden in his shoe. Thevis said Underhill then threatened to testify against him and sue him in a civil case unless Thevis paid him a million dollars. “Despite what we’re saying in bitterness, and you’re not going to believe this, but I’m going to say it to you anyway,” Thevis told Underhill. “I still love the shit out of you, but I know that we fell out.” “Then what do you want to have me killed for, Mike?” Underhill asked. On April 2, 1978, marshals transported Thevis from his cell in Springfield, Missouri, to face a civil trial in Louisville for the Bailen arson. With Patricia McLean watching from the gallery, a jury ordered Thevis to pay $687,000 in damages for burning down the warehouse. During the seven-day trial, Agent King flew to the local jail in Floyd County and warned officers that Thevis was an escape risk. However, the Courier-Journal reported that Thevis received unusual privileges including “unlimited telephone calls, at least one unsupervised trip outside the jail, and sexual relations at the jail with his girlfriend, Patricia McLean.” Deputies at the jail later admitted to taking $50 and $100 “tips” from their millionaire prisoner. A newspaper even reported that deputies watched through one-way mirrors as the couple had sex. “That week,” Thevis recalled, “several things happened to put me in a deep state of depression and really create a very moribundus attitude. One, my wife of some 26 years finally divorced me... I had since formed some attachment to a young female associate [Patricia] who was working in my real-estate companies. That had a very unsettling effect on me.” Next, he was denied parole and indicted under RICO statutes in Florida. With Underhill poised to testify, two murder trials would follow. Thevis sprang into action. He signed his divorce papers, and pulled in his attorneys to finalize a trust for his wife and children, paying Joan $12,000 a month and the children $18,000. He signed papers that transferred his entire business holdings to a trusted assistant. He also told another inmate, Louis Knight, that he was going to escape and flee the country with a girlfriend. On April 28, at 4 p.m., guards led Thevis into the chief deputy’s office to use the telephone, which he liked to do for several hours each day. When the deputy returned at 10 p.m. to take him back to his cell, the office was empty. * * * It was later discovered that Thevis had paid off his jailors with cash and cigars, and it was alleged they let him escape. “Money talks to some people and Thevis had a lot of it,” said King. Patricia McLean was arrested and accused of providing Thevis with money and aiding his escape. “She was hard as nails. She wouldn’t talk to me,” King told me. “She came very close to telling me to go screw myself once. But then she caught herself and kept her mouth shut because she knew I’d probably put her in jail.” Patricia told a court she knew nothing about the escape, and threatened to kill herself if she ever took the stand again. She was acquitted by a federal jury. The FBI added Thevis to their 10 Most Wanted list, and distributed wanted posters across the United States. Underhill was sent into hiding. Meanwhile, Thevis was cruising along a freeway in Atlanta behind the wheel of a beautiful 1979 Chevrolet Caprice Classic. Sitting in the passenger seat of the maroon and silver car was Jeanette Evans. If Patricia McLean was involved in the escape, she got cold feet about joining Thevis on the run. But he always had a Plan B. Jeanette knew it was a crime to harbor an escapee, but she was not just in love with Thevis, she was possessed by him. On his command, she flew to Atlanta and joined Thevis on what he called “my flight for freedom.” Handout Thevis with Patricia McLean in prison. Posing as “Arby J. Evans” and “Sally Green,” they crisscrossed America, from St. Louis to South Carolina. For months the lovebirds drove between Colorado, New Mexico, and Connecticut, where they planned to buy a house. Inside the car, Thevis had a “fuzzbuster” radar detector to spot cops, a salt-and-pepper wig, five handguns, $550,000 in cash, and $1 million in jewelry. Jeanette had put her house up for sale, and they had airline timetables and a motorist’s map of Britain. Jeanette booked Thevis a $1,400 hair transplant for October 26, and evidence showed that he bought her a ring. Their plan was to travel the world then retire quietly in a small Connecticut town. “We had decided to be married in the next few days, as soon as was humanly possible,” Thevis recalled. When they visited a mall in Spartanburg, South Carolina, to buy Jeanette a dress, his satchel split open and $100,000 in cash tumbled to the floor. By now he had acquired a printed copy of Underhill’s 300-page interview with the FBI. He read it carefully and made angry notes in the margin. The transcript conjured violent vignettes of murder and mayhem: The opening of a Cadillac’s trunk with Hanna’s corpse inside; Underhill’s face, illuminated by the blow torch as he melted the evidence; Jimmy Mayes’ truck in mid-air, lifted by the force of a bomb; ivory bones stained with blood. If Underhill projected these scenes in the minds of a jury, Thevis would spend the rest of his life in prison. Then, Underhill took the opportunity of the escape to sue Thevis for $8.3 million, knowing he’d win. Somewhere on the East Coast, Thevis’ mind turned from romance to revenge. He’d be damned if Underhill was going to steal his fortune like that. Jeanette canceled the hair transplant. They pointed their Chevy toward Atlanta. Paul King recalled a social event where he crossed paths with a well-known Mafia family. The wife asked King if he was the case agent looking for Thevis. “We’ll do anything we can to get him arrested,” she told him. “We have no respect for what he does.” In late August, five months after his escape, Jeanette asked her cousin, a police officer named Bart Hood, for help. In Charleston, Hood obtained for Thevis a 1978 Mercury Marquis and a South Carolina driver’s license. The fake identity was so effective that when he sped into Atlanta, a cop wrote ‘C.M. Feagin’ a ticket. Jeanette and Bart then allegedly contacted another cousin, Dennis Bradley. They asked if he could manufacture a silencer for a .30-06 rifle. This would transform the long-range gun into a silent killing weapon. Thevis was going hunting. Roger Underhill was preparing to record his testimony on videotape, before disappearing forever into the federal Witness Relocation Program. Against King’s wishes, he wanted to tie up some loose ends, and drove from his hiding place out of state, back to Atlanta. There, Thevis and Hood were tracking him like dogs; when Thevis spotted Underhill’s wife behind the wheel of a car, he wrote down the license plate, and his policeman friend traced it. They stalked various addresses where they hoped Underhill was hiding. On Oct. 24, 1978, Jeanette visited a local real-estate broker’s office in Atlanta, and asked for information about a property. It was unusual for Jeanette, who specialized in residential sales, to be interested in an undeveloped tract of land on Riverside Drive. When the broker pulled the local tax records he told her the owner was Mr. Roger Underhill. Later that night, someone drove to the property and crashed into the gate, destroying it. The next day, Underhill arrived at 11:35 a.m. and met Isaac Galanti, a local grocer who was interested in purchasing the land. The two men were strolling across the fields when a gunshot exploded. Shotgun pellets tore through Galanti’s head, ripping out his teeth and tongue. As a second gunshot echoed around the field, Underhill collapsed, five pellets lodged in his head and chest. About 25 minutes later, Underhill’s wife, Irene Williams, arrived at the property. At first she thought she saw bags of trash in the field. When she realized one “trash bag” was her husband, she ran off screaming. She drove to a neighbor’s house and raised the alarm. FBI and police officers raced to the scene, where they found Galanti dead, and Underhill breathing heavily. He held on as medics worked on him. At the hospital, King held Underhill’s hand and asked: “Do you know who did this? If you do, squeeze once. If you don’t, squeeze twice.” Underhill squeezed once. “Was it Mike?” asked King. Underhill squeezed King’s hand once more, and then he was dead. FBI Michael Thevis' FBI Wanted Poster Sixteen days later, on Nov. 9, 1978, at 1 p.m., a man calling himself “Arby Evans” strolled into a bank in Bloomfield, Connecticut. When he tried to withdraw $30,000, a suspicious manager called the local police, who summoned the FBI. Inside the office of the bank’s president, FBI Agent Richard Foster and the chief of the Bloomfield Police Department sat face-to-face with Michael Thevis. He had changed his mind about the money, he said. He’d just like to leave. Then he looked out of the window, and saw more agents talking to Jeanette, who was waiting in the car. When they escorted Jeanette inside, she was frantic. “I’m sorry that I had to involve you, as my sister,” Thevis said, with a knowing look. Jeanette had told the agents she was his wife. Everyone looked at each other. Then Agent Foster unfurled a flier of the FBI’s “10 Most Wanted.” He looked at Thevis, and back at the flier. “When I first heard that Mike had been caught in Connecticut with a woman, more than a dozen names flashed through my mind,” King told a reporter, “and I still didn’t pick the right one.” King had built a thick criminal case on the former newsstand owner, and told me that the FBI knew of other murders. “He had a competitor from the Tampa area,” King said. “The guy came up to see him, from what I’ve heard, with Roger. Got him up on the pretext of doing business with him to expand his pornography business. Got him up to the house and just killed him… just shot him.” Neighbors of Thevis heard the gunshots but were too afraid to talk, he said. “We didn’t prosecute him for the Tampa guy. You can only pile on so much. He’s not gonna get any more time.” Tony Thevis told me this account must be “pure fiction”—the Lion’s Gate Estate sits on 18 acres, and they had no neighbors. Either way, the pornographer was perhaps doomed from the first day of his dramatic trial, when the court was asked to lead the jury in prayer. In his deposition, Thevis boasted when speaking about his porn business: “No one could compete with our machines,” he said. Thevis referred to himself as “the chief” and “the Supreme Leader,” while claiming that he was the victim of a government on a morality binge. When recordings from Underhill’s shoe microphone were played to the court, government attorneys claimed that his comment about Underhill’s polygraph (“No wonder you passed”) confirmed his involvement in the slayings of Mayes and Hanna. Thevis denied all of the charges, every act of violence, even after Underhill’s neighbor testified that he saw Thevis at the double-murder scene. “As to Mr. Underhill,” Thevis said, “my position with his testimony is that he is a liar; always has been, always will be.” A top psychiatrist confirmed what many suspected about Underhill, that he was “mentally unbalanced” and paranoid. Meanwhile, Thevis diagnosed King with “tunnel vision” and “myopic lunacy.” He claimed King told him he “would make the directorship [of the FBI] off my back.” The jury reviewed more than 1,000 cartons of evidence and testimony from 300 witnesses. Perhaps their hardest decision concerned the then-born-again Christian Jeanette Evans. Her family and friends wrote emotional letters to the court begging for leniency. “It would seem she acted first and thought later in a matter of the heart,” a co-worker wrote. Thevis agreed. “Her only crime was loving me,” he wrote, “it seems you always hurt the ones you love most.” On Oct. 21, 1979, the jurors returned their verdict, as tears flowed in the courtroom. Thevis and his two co-defendants, Jeannette Evans and Bart Hood, were convicted of conspiring to murder Roger Underhill to prevent his testimony on racketeering charges against Thevis. All three were sentenced to life in prison. No longer a baby-faced agent, King left the trial with graying hair and a gray moustache. When he marched down the courtroom steps, the jurors formed a line outside to applaud him. * * * According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Jeanette Evans was released in 1992. That year, Paul King retired from the FBI after 23 years of service. On the fifth and 10th anniversaries of the trial, he flew to Atlanta to celebrate with members of the jury. In retirement he set up a private agency, West River Group, and helped the FBI seize assets from another great American villain, Bernie Madoff. During the ’90s, the Thevis mansion became the home of Whitney Houston, until Tony Thevis, a successful real-estate agent, bought it back with his stepfather and restored it to its former glory. The last peephole that Michael Thevis ever looked through was in his cell door at the United States Penitentiary in Atlanta. There, prisoner 00105-123 kept a secret hamster he named Scooter. “He’s very cute,” Thevis wrote in a letter to his daughter. Now bald with paunch, Thevis watched from behind bars as pornography became regulated, legitimized, and unionized. His peep show machine eventually died and was quickly forgotten. Ribbons of film became magnetic VHS tape, then pixels. There are now fewer adult bookstores and sex shops in Atlanta—though Wal-Mart and CVS carry some vibrators. The lustful and the curious still pay to watch strangers act out their secret desires, but they peer into their own box of lights, in the comfort of their homes. A few years ago, Thevis welcomed to the visitors’ room his nephew Mann Chandler. The former peep machine engineer told me that Uncle Mike gave him one final piece of advice. “Son, make as much money as you can, but don’t go over the line,” he said, “I went over the line.” Before he died of heart and respiratory failure in 2013, Thevis would look out over the barbed wire fence, and see the cramped apartment where he and Joan once lived, back when they were broke. Back when he dreamed of making a million dollars. Back before Roger Underhill. Back when he was happy.