Synchronicity Anyone?

Originally posted by Matrix777
For a few years now I have experienced what can only be described as events which are out of this world. Synchronistic events have occured and continue to occur so frequently that I actually begin to question my sanity. However, deep down I know that these experiences are far more than just a coincidence and they are certainly not a figment of my imagination.

Uhm... is it just coincidence that I found this thread....?

This joke was obvious. But in fact it isn't a joke. It is a question that I ask myself nearly on a daily basis: "Is it just coincidence that..."

And the less it is a joke when I remember the feeling that initiated right after I wrote "this joke was obvious". I feel this strange feeling very often. It's difficult to describe, but it's like as if you hear a jigsaw falling into place. (Jigsaw... Oh god.... ) And I felt it when I wanted to cite Edgar Alan Poe (after the "joke"-sentence) as following:

"All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream."

The reason why I wanted to cite those words of Poe I didn't understand until I remembered something I wrote last night.

Since a long time I tried to find the answer to the question, what synchronicities are. Where they come from. Their reason. Their aim. And if they're controllable.

Maybe I found the answer for myself, when I wrote last night:

[...] Finally we all will know it.

When we realize there's also no such thing like "death".

That life is just an everlasting chain of dreams.

The trick is to wake up and to know...

how to dream

Deep inside I feel it is mighty. Maybe it's god showing us that indeed he/she/it IS there.

Sometimes it shows a strange sense of humor.

And sometimes it's very disturbing.

The last synchronicity I can remember was yesterday's evening, when my girlfriend told me about a dream she had the night before. (one more dream... )

She told me she dreamt about us making a walk, and that after the walk I went to buy something in a shop. She remembered that when I returned, I carried a bag, and inside this bag there were really big blue beetles. After telling about the blue beetles she stopped talking and started to laugh. Then she said "Look!" and pointed her finger to the screen of her computer. On the screen there was an advert showing up, and in this advert was shown the picture of one of Germany's most famous cars: A Volkswagen-"beetle". But it wasn't the fact that it was just a "beetle" that made her laugh. It was the fact that it was a blue beetle.

Another thing... some weeks ago my girlfriend got ineterested once again in the Tsunami of 2004. That evening, she watched a lot of videos about this topic. The following day we heard in the radio, that there was another seaquake in the same region as in 2004...

But the most intriguing and quite disturbing synchronicity in recent time happened after I watched Roland Emmerichs "2012" several weeks ago:

Escpecially the scene where the giraffe and the other wild animals were carried to the arks by the helicopters was very impressive to me, as the whole scenery was when the Tsunamis arrived.

It was a sunday's evening that I saw this movie, and on monday morning on my way to work I was still thinking about it.

Watching how this unbelievable giant waves shook those "small" nutshells in which the last humans and animals found refuge was very shattering for me.

No two hours later after thinking about the giraffe and the other animals and people I sat right beside one of the people I take care for (I'm working with mentally handicapped people). He's an autist, and he was laying a jigsaw. I was impressed, how fast he was able to lay the pieces down. I took some time until I realized, what the topic of the jigsaw was.

First I saw a roof. Then I saw a giraffe that stretched it's neck out of a window in the roof.

And then I realized...

it was Noah's Ark.

...

You are sane and you are simply having psychic sensory perceptions.

reply to post by Astyanax


So my jigsaw-experience was just some kind of Pareidolia or apophenia?

Parts of me really would be glad if this was the case, because this would make things a lot easier.

But another part of me knows, that there is much more to this.

The question is - what is reality?

I mean it in the way - maybe it's more than we've ever imagined.

Maybe it's more shapeable than we allowed ourselves to imagine.

Shapeable by thoughts.

Of course the world as it is today has been shaped by human thoughts. All the machines surrounding us were born inside the heads of humans, and obviously they gave this planet a new face. Not a real pretty one...

But I'm talking about another way of shaping the world just by thoughts.

A more direct way.

A way that changes not just the world, but reality itself.

Maybe reality isn't as solid-state as we were taught.

Maybe our future isn't carved in stone.

Maybe it's still in our hands (in our minds....)

to choose another way of living.

But those are just my thoughts. ;-)

reply to post by misfitoy


Star for you, as you describe it, it's exactly like I experience and feel it! I also think those strange experiences are like bread crumbs to guide me on my way.

Thanks for your words, I couldn't say it better!

Originally posted by Etcetera007
That's what makes it so hard, as not having anything to really believe in as a safety-net can really make you hopeless. However, for those that do believe in it, my examples above may give you something. Nonetheless, I felt the need to post here and say that, at the very least, if only for a moment or two, when I came across that post, I smiled. It clearly does not solve a single issue of mine on a reality scale, but, then again, if I had a gut feeling that I should post this, then maybe there's a reason behind it that I can't see.

[edit on 21-1-2010 by Etcetera007]

Although we've never met, and although I don't know the nature of the things that burden you, I can say that I know the feeling of being unable to believe in something, escpecially in something good in this world.

More than once there I feared that I would get lost in the fog of life forever. But it didn't happen. With time passing by, I realized that I won't find my way through the fog if I kept my eyes wide open. I realized that I had to close my eyes. And to trust on something deep inside of me.

I realized there is some kind of "autopilot" that would lead me safe through all turbulences.

You spoke about something that made you smile. I guess, many of us who experienced synchronicities saw things that made them laugh.

For me, it's a hint, that there's something benevolent around us (and inside of us, it's everywhere...), with a great sense of humor.

I believe it's not interested in watching us fail.

I think it will help us.

And it does...

Again, skepticism abound and I'm not saying any of this stuff proves some sort of other-worldliness...but yet another example of this just happened.

For some reason, I thought of rubber band balls last night. I have no clue why. I've never been interested in them. And then today, I notice my dad watching TV and it's "Ripley's Believe it or Not"...a show that I don't watch, on a channel that I don't watch. What is the story that I see them advertise? Bouncing the world's largest rubber band ball.

Seriously, this stuff drives you nuts. I really wish there would be some kind of proof of it meaning something, instead of just random speculation that can't be backed up.

Originally posted by Peloquin
The question is - what is reality?

one of my heroes, the inimitable Albert Einstein, answered that question best (so far & imo):

"Reality is an illusion, albeit a persistent one."

But those are just my thoughts. ;-)

and guess what?


thoughts are things!

( so make yours count! )








[edit on 1/23/2010 by queenannie38]

At first I thought my thinking of a random topic and the person next to me speaking of said topic righ after I thought it or visa versa was just a coincidence. But when I accepted the fact that it couldn't be becuase it happened to frequently, I decided to use my mind to express m feelings with my family instead of having to explain it. It only works with open people and not ignorant ones. But it works All. The. Time.

reply to post by Peloquin

So my jigsaw-experience was just some kind of pareidolia or apophenia?

Here is how you told it:

Not two hours later after thinking about the giraffe and the other animals and people (in the 'ark' scene in 2012), I sat right beside one of the people I take care of, (who was) was laying a jigsaw... It took some time until I realized what the topic of the jigsaw was... it was Noah's Ark.

If we take a dispassionate view, we see that neither event is at all unlikely. You'd recently seen the movie. The scene you mention is a very powerful one, so it is not unexpected that you should have been thinking about it. Noah's Ark is a common trope in American culture: it is both a popular theme for children's jigsaw puzzles and, not coincidentally, the inspiration of that scene in the movie. So: two quite likely events happening, not in quick succession, but separated by a gap of two hours. Why is there reason to suspect anything more than chance?

Indeed, not one 'synchronicistic' event described in this thread is so unlikely that it demands any explanation beyond chance. Look:

Sometimes I think of a friend out of the blue and they end up calling that day.

Thoughts don't come out of the blue. They are triggered by various cues from the outside world. How unlikely is it that a friend, with whom doubtless one shares certain interests and traits, heard the same news, watched the same TV programme, heard the same song on the radio, read the same page or blog post on the internet, remembered that this time last year you and she were doing something memorable, or just looked up at the same moon, even, and thought of you just as were thinking of her?

Just earlier tonight I was looking at previous works of James Cameron and saw he did True Lies with the Governator and I thought about always getting the title confused with Total Recall and I went to turn on the TV. Lo and behold True Lies was on.

James Cameron has just released what promises to be one of the most celebrated movies of all time. Naturally, he's all over the news. Naturally, his old movies are all over the TV. At a time like this, is it really so unlikely that one should think about an old movie of his and then see the same movie on TV?

i was having a whinge to my partner about our broken laptop screen (you have to keep tilting it to get it to work) and less then 5 mins after i get off the phone to him a message pops up on the screen 'do you need to renew your warranty' when i was just asking him whether we picked 12 or 24 months.

Sounds like the pesky machine has reached the end of its design life... and warranty period. That's not synchronicity, that's built-in obsolescence.

I once didn't trust my instincts about directions to a place where I thought this one particular road was right, but Mapquest had told me otherwise, so I trusted that. I wound up driving for an hour trying to find my destination and getting nowhere. Out of the blue, I decided to pull over at a convenient store to ask for directions (something I never, EVER do; this was the first time) and lo and behold, not 10 seconds after I ask, someone else comes in to the place and asks directions to the same place. Turns out I was right about that road.

Two people stop at a local store to ask directions to the same place at the same time. Not a very big deal. The poster doesn't say where he or she was going; if it was a big public event, like an outdoor rock concert or some such, then the chances of such a thing happening rise to a near-certainty. The Mapquest error, too, raises the chances of it happening, because other people, too, would be following its directions, getting lost... and probably ending up outside the same store. This one isn't even a coincidence.

I hadn't talked to a friend of mine in basically four years outside of a hello and some small talk every couple of months, but when I was talking to her a few weeks ago, I received the gut feeling again. The thought that came into my mind was, and I quote, "this feels like a moment where two people say they love each other". What's the next words out of her mouth? "Lol I love you".

Two people in conversation having similar thoughts at the same time. Again, it's not even a coincidence. The most shocking thing about this anecdote is that apparently some people say 'lol' out loud. Now that really makes my blood freeze.

This past Sunday, I was talking to the soul friend again, and I had the sudden urge to say to him "It's weird that on TV shows and in movies, the name Jenkins is never really assigned to a woman. It's inherently manly or something. Nobody ever thinks of a woman when they hear that name." The next night on How I Met Your Mother, the episode literally revolved around the characters hearing the name Jenkins and assuming it was a man, but it turns out to be a woman.

'Had the urge to say' but didn't say it. So no synchronistic event actually occurred. Still, at least this correspondence is reasonably far-fetched. But odd coincidences are observed from time to time, especially by people who are self-primed to spot them, as seems to be the case with this particular poster. Even a coincidence of the phrase

life's breadcrumbs

appears significant to him or her. Again in this example, a mere thought (how many of these do we have an hour, a day, a week?) prefigures something glimpsed in the media. No real-world occurrence takes place at all, in either case. Maybe the poster is clairvoyant, but in a particularly random and inutile way...

11:11
12:12

The human body has its own clock. Unless you mess with it by fooling with your sleep patterns or mealtimes, it keeps rough but nonetheless reasonably accurate time. So it's a simple matter for someone who takes these things seriously (e.g. a conspiracy theorist) to program himself to start glancing at clocks at about a specific time, without even noticing it. He only notices what he's doing when he hits the jackpot. 'Bingo, there it is again--eleven-eleven! More evidence of The Conspiracy!'

This, dear Queen Annie, if you are still paying attention, is what I meant when I said that we are all self-deceivers. We create a positive bias towards the effect we are looking for without even realizing it. Good scientific experiments, as you know, are designed with great care in order to eliminate this effect.

A few days ago I changed one of my passwords to a website I log into frequently, to something different and for some reason, I instinctively chose “Matrix888” I should point out that I don’t change my passwords regularly, so this was fairly unusual for me. Ok… Matrix888 and Matrix777 (OP's handle in this thread)

Could it possibly, just possibly be that the poster may have seen the OP's handle before? How many people on ATS have a handle with the words 'Matrix' in it, anyway?

I thought of rubber band balls last night. I have no clue why. I've never been interested in them. And then today, I notice my dad watching TV and it's "Ripley's Believe it or Not"...a show that I don't watch, on a channel that I don't watch. What is the story that I see them advertise? Bouncing the world's largest rubber band ball.

In this case, at least, synchronicity seems to be a lot of balls.

I like your bag-of-beetles example, Peloquin; it was picturesque and somewhat in keeping with the examples of synchronicity Jung reported (one of them actually involved a beetle):

A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream, I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer Cetonia aurata, which, contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt the urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since.

Synchronicity is an artifact of the personal landscape of connections each of us constructs, inhabits and takes for the whole of reality. That is, if you like, meaningful in itself-- but it has no actual significance. Indeed, the whole point about synchronicity, as Jung saw it, is that its coincidences are significant to the observer but meaningless in causal or logical terms.

[edit on 24/1/10 by Astyanax]

Originally posted by Astyanax
reply to post by Peloquin

 

So my jigsaw-experience was just some kind of pareidolia or apophenia?

Here is how you told it:

Not two hours later after thinking about the giraffe and the other animals and people (in the 'ark' scene in 2012), I sat right beside one of the people I take care of, (who was) was laying a jigsaw... It took some time until I realized what the topic of the jigsaw was... it was Noah's Ark.

If we take a dispassionate view, we see that neither event is at all unlikely. You'd recently seen the movie. The scene you mention is a very powerful one, so it is not unexpected that you should have been thinking about it. Noah's Ark is a common trope in American culture: it is both a popular theme for children's jigsaw puzzles and, not coincidentally, the inspiration of that scene in the movie. So: two quite likely events happening, not in quick succession, but separated by a gap of two hours. Why is there reason to suspect anything more than chance?

Hi Astyanax,

thanks for your reply! I appreciate your sense of logic, because I'm not interested in deceiving myself. I prefer to know, more than to believe, because believing means trusting in something you can't really be sure of, and I don't like to get disappointed. I'm more like doubting Thomas who had to lay his hands on Jesus wounds to be able to believe.

Probably most of my alleged synchronicities are just coincidences. And maybe you're right when you write:

Synchronicity is an artifact of the personal landscape of connections each of us constructs, inhabits and takes for the whole of reality. That is, if you like, meaningful in itself-- but it has no actual significance. Indeed, the whole point about synchronicity, as Jung saw it, is that its coincidences are significant to the observer but meaningless in causal or logical terms.

I have no difficulties to agree with you, that my "jigsaw"-experience is meaningless in causal or logical terms. There is absolutely no logic in it, because there is no causal chain. But therein lies the problem:

Though there is no obvious connection between the events, they seem to be connected anyhow.

Depending on the (incomplete, as I see now) information I gave you, your conclusion is totally correct.

But when I give you some more details, you maybe get what I mean:

1. - It was sunday evening that I watched "2012"

2. - As I watched the movie and the animal-evacuation scene with the giraffe showed up, the first thing I thought about was Noahs Ark, because especially the picture with the giraffe reminded me on a childbook I read about Noahs Ark.

3. - the whole morning after I was thinking about the movie, and I also thought about Noah and if the great flood really has happened and his ark has really been built.

4. A bit different from the US, Germany (where I'm living) is a more secular country, and religious topics are rather seldom used in educational situations.

So in conclusion... having watched the movie "2012" wherein the analogy to Noahs Ark is part of one of the movie's keyscenes, having thought about Noahs Ark the whole morning after and then to witness someone laying a jigsaw with Noahs Ark as the topic just a few hours later is quite a bit unlikely, isn't it?

I have no idea what to think about it.

But my mind tell's me there's probably more to this than just coincidence.

It's a matter of probability.

I just returned from a walk. During my walk I realized, the main question isn't the specific meaning of this synchronicity (of course I hope so, because if this synchronicity had a particular meaning, then it could be the one that I should build my own personal ark, and this thought is a bit - uncomfortable).

The really interesting question is: Is it possible that my thoughts about the movie and Noahs Ark got any resonance, that played out as described?

As I questioned in my previous posts: Is there the possibility, that we're capable of shaping the (objective!) reality around us just by thoughts?

I know this may sound a bit crazy. But at this point, two things come into my mind:

Once someone said: "Energy follows attraction."

And another one said: If your faith is as big as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain "Move from here to there," and it will move.

During my walk (and in memory of Jesus words) I had the thought, that there's probably more to faith than just blind trust in something that can't really be backed up by scientific proof, as some sceptics may see it.

What if, if it isn't so much different from something, that - in other contexts - is called magic (and I'm not talking about tricksters...).

What if, if there's a kind of mechanism to shape reality, that has yet to be discovered (or maybe rediscovered)?

Maybe we're already practicing it, just in an unconscious way.

Another interesting question is: Could those synchronicites be some kind of answer to our thoughts?

The answer to the question of who's the sender of this "answer" certainly depends on the faith someone has chosen.

But for someone who made several times the experience that there was just silence when he called for god, the idea that god could answer after all is very attractive.

Maybe, actually I want to believe.

That there's a god and any sense in this world.

[edit on 24/1/10 by Peloquin]

Originally posted by Astyanax
By the way, there is no such thing as 'too much scepticism'. It is not a herb you add to pasta sauce.

I don't know. Mental sauce needs balance. I'm highly skeptical.

Scepticism simply means evaluating every piece of information you receive against what you already know of the world and what you know is likely, and assigning it a certain probability.

Humans are notorious poor judges of probability at least on finer levels. Secondly, I cannot be fully certain I know what I already know assuming it is correct; I could be mistaken. Much of what I know has to come from personal learning and thus is subject to sampling error and uncontrolled testing. Some things are clearly distinict in likelyhood: sun rising vs. winning lottery.

Dogmatic refusal to believe something, against compelling evidence that it is true, is not scepticism but superstition. It is important not to confuse the two. I do not.

Dogmatic refusal is dogmatic refusal. But, where was compelling evidence presented? Whom does it compell?

*Ontologically speaking it would be impossible, since all events have causes.

An obviously moot assertion. There was either a first uncaused cause, causes go infinitely far back in time, or causation is but an illusory perspective of some possibly unifying higher order. Did I forget any main categories?

Hi, Peloquin. Thanks for a civilized and reasoned reply. I have a response for you to consider.

Originally posted by Peloquin
Though there is no obvious connection between the events, they seem to be connected anyhow.

They are indeed connected. They are connected through the story, the meme if you like, of Noah's Ark.

Inside your brain (and mine), a great deal of unconscious processing is taking place. Some of this is completely automatic, such as constructing an intelligible world out of the sensory inputs we receive, maintaining our balance and so on; other unconscious processes are more sophisticated, such as making guesses and judgements about the world around us, which we do by combining sensory information with what we know already, 'proposing' courses of action in response to these guesses and judgements by giving them relative emotional weight, and so on. These more sophisticated (but still unconsious) processes constantly come up against situations which require a more difficult choice or a more sophisticated response than any unconscious subroutine can provide: these decisions get referred to consciousness.* Edit: The common name for these referred decisions is 'thoughts'.

Now, remember, you're getting this stuff tossed at you by the unconscious processing machinery of your brain--that is, you are having thoughts--all the time; they are part of what you're conscious of. And most of them make perfect sense and are perfectly relevant, stuff you want and need to be thinking about. But every now and then, perhaps there's a connection made between data, odd and meaningless, that the automatic subroutine processing the data mistakes for significant and tosses into consciousness, where it appears as a thought. Perhaps, in this way, some unconscious subroutine in your brain made the connection between the two symbolic representations of Noah's Ark** and deemed it worthy of referral to consciousness, the arbitrating authority. Presto, a synchronicistic event occurred!

I merely speculate, of course; but it doesn't seem too far-fetched a speculation.

As I questioned in my previous posts: Is there the possibility, that we're capable of shaping the (objective!) reality around us just by thoughts?

If we were so capable, why would we invent so many tools, so many weapons, so many devices for carrying things and people about?

You will have divined from my earlier remarks that I am a thoroughgoing materialist, and I don't believe that thoughts have physical energy or exert force.

What if, if there's a kind of mechanism to shape reality, that has yet to be discovered (or maybe rediscovered)?

I believe we would have to admit that everything we think we know about the world and how it works is wrong. And I'm not just talking about discarding all human knowledge. Oh, no--we'd have to begin the purge with what our distant animal ancestors--marine worms and suchlike--'knew' about the world around them. Natural selection incorporated this knowledge into their genes, shaping the traits and instincts that adapted them to life on Earth and allowed them to succeed in the reproductive competition. We have inherited much of this 'knowledge' of the material world--not only in our brains, but also in the design of our bodies.

You see, much of what we 'know' about reality isn't stored where our conscious minds can get at it. It's encoded into our bodies and into our behaviour--it is literally embodied in us, in the form of an eye or an elbow joint or a digestive tract or a nest-building reflex or a capacity for language. All these adaptations to a material world that follows the laws of physics and causality would have to be abandoned, for their purpose would vanish.

Besides, this knowledge of a material, causal world in which wishes don't come true exists in other animals, too, not only in us. If thoughts could shape reality, would bees work so hard to gather honey? Would orcas and dolphins still hunt? Would dogs still be as susceptible to the olfactory attractions of bitches? Surely not. Evolution would have found that reality-shaping mechanism and used it. We would be living in a world where magic worked, and thermodynamics did not.

So on balance, no, I don't think such a mechanism exists to be discovered.

For someone who made several times the experience that there was just silence when he called for god, the idea that god could answer after all is very attractive.

Maybe, actually I want to believe.

That there's a god and any sense in this world.

Ah, now, that is a different problem altogether.

I believe there is much sense in this world. It's mysteries are easily enough explained, provided you do not expect too much from the explanations, which are not of the kind that will justify suffering and evil, or comfort anyone for the waste and random absurdity of life. But the truth, as Santayana said, can be loved despite its cruelty, and it sets free those who love it.

As for God, I echo Laplace's famous reply on the subject to Napoleon.


*You'll be wanting a source for that. I give you Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works, which I put down a few minutes before logging on here. See Chapter 2, Aladdin's Lamp.

**Not such an uncommon trope in German culture, either. Was not Dr. Friedrich Parrot the first climber in modern times to ascend Ararat?

[edit on 24/1/10 by Astyanax]

Happens a lot, but gave me a bit of a laugh an hour or so ago

For the first time in ages, I decided to go to You Tube, seeing ATS was a bit stagnant

As you do, I clicked something in the side-bar on YouTube. Then, clicked another side-bar and there were a load of videos about Area 51, including one described as 'frantic call' about a pilot. I listened to that briefly but decided to click a short one of a man described as 'discharged' who was speaking to Art Bell I think, about aliens and the need for the government to relocate half the population. The man sounded almost incoherent with panic and fear

Then, still on YouTube, I decided to listen to some favourite Goa Trance, which I did for approx. one hour

Clicked back into ATS and refreshed the page

and there was a thread at least a year old, which I'd never seen before --- about Area 51, Art Bell and the panicked voice I'd listened to such a short time earlier !

I went to the last post in this old thread to check the date ... and saw someone had raised it from the dead about 15 minutes earlier ! No one else had posted in that thread for about a year !

Originally posted by EnlightenUp

Originally posted by Astyanax
Scepticism simply means evaluating every piece of information you receive against what you already know of the world and what you know is likely, and assigning it a certain probability.

Humans are notorious poor judges of probability at least on finer levels. Secondly, I cannot be fully certain I know what I already know assuming it is correct; I could be mistaken. Much of what I know has to come from personal learning and thus is subject to sampling error and uncontrolled testing. Some things are clearly distinict in likelyhood: sun rising vs. winning lottery.

All true. Yet this is precisely how your mind works. If you make decisions, you make them by weighing relative probabilities. If you act, your action is based on what you believe you know despite the uncertainty and possibility of error. Some of what you know comes from personal learning--but that learning shapes the behavioural expression of instincts that are themselves the distillate of tried and tested knowledge gained by your ancestors, human and animal (as I observed in my reply to Peloquin immediately preceding). But yes, sampling error and uncontrolled testing abound. The thing is, you're not a dumb scientific experiment; you're a creature that learns, and learning from experience eliminates errors of this kind over time.

Nature is unforgiving, but if she rewarded every mistake with the ultimate penalty there would be no life on Earth. There is room to make mistakes and learn from them, and human brains are evolved devices for doing just that.

Originally posted by Astyanax
All events have causes.

An obviously moot assertion. There was either a first uncaused cause, causes go infinitely far back in time, or causation is but an illusory perspective of some possibly unifying higher order. Did I forget any main categories?

'Causes go infinitely far back in time' will do. Time itself does not extend backward to infinity, but to a fixed point. Still, you will say, there must have been a First Event. What caused it? Who knows--perhaps it caused itself. If I had known I was going to meet a philosopher I would have said 'all events but one have causes'.

This is a true story, happened just last week. Talk about synchronicity...

On a Wednesday, after lunch, a friend and I decide we will go see the new movie "Book of Eli" starring Denzel Washington at 5:10pm (after work).

At about 3:00pm I get a random phone call. It's a girl I gave my phone number to on a match book 3 years ago. She never called me until today because she dropped the matchbook into a jar and forgot about it. Today she needed to light a cigarette, saw the number and decided to call it (she doesn't know why).

I ask what her name is. She says her name is Solara. It's an unusual name. I've never in my entire life known anyone who has that name "Solara".

After figuring out where we met, and laughing about why she never called me, I tell her I need to get back to work, say goodbye, and hang up the phone. Random call, whatever, right?

2 hours later I'm at the movie theater, watching "Book of Eli". About 20 minutes into the movie the lead female character/actress is introduced. Guess what that character's name is? You guessed it: Solara.

Can you believe it?!? What are the frickin' odds of that happening? My entire life (late 30's) I've never met anyone named Solara, and within a 2 hour time span, I get a random call from a chick I gave my number to at a bar 3 years before, and she just-so-happens to call me back after over a 1000 days just hours before I go and see a movie that has a lead female character with the name "Solara"!!!

I'm still tripping out about it, I have no idea what it means, if anything.



[edit on 24-1-2010 by harrytuttle]

Originally posted by Astyanax
Hi, Peloquin. Thanks for a civilized and reasoned reply. I have a response for you to consider.

Hi Astyanax! The fact that you describe my reply as civilized and reasoned let's me reach the conclusion, that the replies you usually get are rather rarely civilized and reasoned. If this was true, this would be sad. I prefer constructive and respectful discussions, because first of a all I want to be treated respectful too, and second I don't want to die stupid, and I know that I'm never always right, and that sometimes truth can be found where we expect to find it the least.

So thankyou for your civilized and reasoned reply, filled with heavy arguments that give me a lot to think about. It will take some time for me to answer, because english isn't my first language, and the quite interesting topic we're talking about is even in my first language (german) difficult to handle.

But the way our discussion took is very interesting for me, because right now I'm passing an education that prepares me to work especially with mentally handicapped people, and so the question how minds work is also interesting for me in career terms.

By the way, the man who was laying the jigsaw is an autist. I'm always wondering what he may think. He never tells.

Perception...

I have to leave now. Good day or good night (here it's 10 P.M.), see you then

The book "The Celestine Prophecy" which spent 165 weeks on the NY Times best seller list.. is all about synchronicity...

reply to post by Peloquin

I'm delighted that you found my thoughts on this subject interesting, Peloquin. I have edited my post above in an attempt to make what I'm saying a little easier to understand. The edited portions are shown in bold type. I hope this is useful.

Originally posted by queenannie38

Originally posted by Peloquin
The question is - what is reality?

one of my heroes, the inimitable Albert Einstein, answered that question best (so far & imo):

"Reality is an illusion, albeit a persistent one."

But those are just my thoughts. ;-)

and guess what?

thoughts are things!

( so make yours count! )

[edit on 1/23/2010 by queenannie38]

And to add to that and in also relating back to the OP. The reality is we co-create it in every moment in time and space whether percieved as good or bad. Life the Universe and everything in it is simply meanlingless and in essence neutral of itself. It is we who put the constructs and parameters of definitions of beliefs on to it.
We all have belief definitions that we have evolved with since our birth. These are shaped by society, genetic make-up and our upbringing and combine to make them malleable or concrete keypoints on how we live in every moment of time and space.
The way we can turn around or change these BD's is through the focusing on conscious thought processes and how we spend our moments giving our undivided attention to them etc. You either spend your waking time thinking(Cause) of either negative or Positive situations then either of these will be the effect and eventually will be the scenarios in quantum superpositions that will reveal it self in that alternate reality and hence the synchronistic life outcomes etc
THOUGHT(Cause)= WORD(Process)= ACTION/S(Effect)

[edit on 24-1-2010 by Epsillion70]