• Philosophy and Spirituality
    Welcome Guest
    Posting Rules Bluelight Rules
    Threads of Note Socialize
  • P&S Moderators: Xorkoth | Madness

Unlikely Occurrences

mtu mwendawazimu

Bluelight Crew
Joined
Aug 8, 2018
Messages
17,258
Ever since i was young, i have experienced very "unlikely occurrences". Whether it be as simple as hitting a golf ball with a baseball bat, bouncing off a tree ~50 yards away, then hitting me in the face, or something like throwing a bouncy ball at the walls of my room and having it land in the same exact spot three times in a row. I know these examples may sound trivial, but they carried with me all my life:

Hitting black on roulette 8 times in a row.
Extreme instances of deja vu, like and entire evening with someone from the dinner to the sex.
Knowing exactly when to buy/sell penny stocks, just based off "hunches".

I have a couple questions:

1). What unlikely occurrences have you encountered?
2). Do you feel like this is caused by some outside force, or is it simply that a mathematical formula is at play?
3). Do you think unlikely occurrences happen to you more or less often than the average person?

Thanks :)
 
1) I have encountered many! ;) I was born with a rare genetic mutation affecting 1 in 5000 people that causes gradual loss of vision, usually beginning in teenage years, sometimes culminating in total blindness. I have also been lucky enough to bear witness to a small part of the seemingly unfathomably unlikely transition of a physically feeble, hairless species of primate to the apex predator of the planet and a species that can reshape the entire ecosystem to it's will, by a means never before seen in billions of years of evolution of life on Earth. By the good fortune of being born into a first world nation (itself about a 1/8 shot, even disregarding all the other stuff), and the good fortune of being born into circumstances which evidently have not yet lead to me becoming homeless or experiencing desperate poverty, I have the unlikely experience of never needing to worry (so far) about having enough food, and living in a society in which that is almost a given. I have access to the internet (not a sure thing in itself - just under a 1 in 2 shot chance of this happening in my lifetime), and as such really do live on the knife edge of technological innovation within the known universe, with front row seats to witness a species lumbering lopsidedly, haltingly, but still quite deliberately towards a post-scarcity economy.

2) Not really sure what you mean by this. It is of course simple maths, for all the good fortune myself everyone who is alive today has had to be able to witness and experience these amazing things, there are countless billions more who did not have this same good fortune. From a smaller perspective too, for everything that's gone well in my life there are a bunch of people who have experienced crushing misfortune, repeatedly, and through no fault of their own. I don't consider myself to have been chosen by god, or have supernatural powers, if that's what you're getting at... :\

3) I'd say based on the fact that the entire modern world looks pretty unlikely and that I live in a pretty modern part of even that, then probably unlikely occurrences happen more often to me than to the average person.
 
Take a healthy interest in pareidolia to weed out a lot of these that seem on first glance to me to be natural neurological pattern-completion attempts.

Now, if you change penny stocks to grand stocks, I'd be more inclined to take an interest in what else has happened.
 
I often experience something that I refer to as synchronicity, like when somebody says an obscure word just as I'm reading it.

It could be just a coincidence, but I consider it as a sign that I'm "in tune with the universe"! :D
 
Life is long. We take note of unusual occurrences, because they're unusual.

1) Unusual stuff has happened to me. I hit a golf ball once and it went about 100 metres, hit a rock and flew back to where I was standing, landing beside me... and I've played less than ten rounds of golf. But, most of the time unusual things don't happen. There are seven billion people on the planet. Not every single person is going to experience the same number of weird shit. Some will experience very little strange occurrences. Others, like yourself, might experience a higher rate than "normal".

2) Personally I don't believe God (or some other force) chooses particular people to be special, nor do I think particular people are in tune with the universe. Sometimes fate is cruel. Sometimes it is weird. There are so many people, so we get variations of everything.

3) About the same, I guess.
 
I tend to agree. Unusual occurrences stand out because they're unusual. Additionally, the more we look for them, the more we see them, because humans are pattern-matching machines, and we're really good at it. Have you ever witnessed people obsessed with signs? In the past there have been some posters in this forum who have gotten really out there. Like "OMG I was driving and I saw a license plate ahead of me that ended in 4013, which if you add the numbers is 8, and my birthday is in month 8, August, and right after I saw that someone said 8 syllables in a row on the radio and then said the number 8 in the next commercial! This means I'm in tune with the universe!" Of course, this is an extreme example, but it illustrates how expectation bias colors these things. A little bit of a less extreme example is if you were driving and in front of you was a license plate that has your birth year on it, or maybe the number on it was a number someone just said on the radio. It feels special, but it's just a coincidence... what about the countless other 99.9% of the time a license plate is in front of you that doesn't have any special meaning in the moment?

I went through a stage where I was really into the whole 2012 Mayan calendar thing... doing a lot of psychedelics, hanging out with a lot of people in the same mindset. This was back in 2006-2007. I was really into the idea of synchronicity, and I started to expect to see signs, and I started to see far more of them. But really what was happening was that I was hyper-focusing on coincidences and noticing far more of them. It made me feel special and powerful and I liked that. I looked at the clock at 11:11 quite often during that time... I took it as a sign, when in fact, I expected to look at the clock at 11:11. Maybe I knew when it was 11, and internally I knew about when it would be 11:11. Sometimes I looked at 11:12, or 11:10. I sort of forgot about those times. Same thing when I was a super stoner... I often looked at the clock right at 4:20. But it was because I wanted an excuse to smoke weed at 4:20, and I thought about that often.

I have also had some really intense occurrences that almost defy explanation... a friend of mine and I have, on at least a half dozen occasions, gone to call each other (and calling is separated by months), and each picked up the phone and dialed the number and then suddenly been connected, no rings... one of us pressed send a split second before the other, and the one who pressed it second actually answered before it audibly rang, while thinking they can actually made the call. Pretty crazy and it's never happened with anyone else. Some others, too. But then, I would guess just about everyone has some freak chance occurrences happen that are virtually impossible, because anything is possible, however unlikely.

Basically, I think it's exciting to believe that there is some force orchestrating this stuff, but I think the real explanation is more mundane. Still, I will say that when I believed in synchronicity in a magical way, it was exciting and fulfilling. I still find it exciting, in that I get to observe a really cool coincidence. :)
 
Basically, I think it's exciting to believe that there is some force orchestrating this stuff, but I think the real explanation is more mundane. Still, I will say that when I believed in synchronicity in a magical way, it was exciting and fulfilling. I still find it exciting, in that I get to observe a really cool coincidence. :)

Yeah, co-incidences and weird events are fun... I perceive them symbolically, sometimes, like dreams.
 
What I find interesting about synchronicity is that it only seems to happen when I'm doing the right thing and my life is in order.

For instance... if I'm sitting around drinking beer and watching porn or whatever, I'm aware of everything that's going on around me but I never experience any cosmic coincidences.

Last night I was writing a sympathy card to someone who had recently lost a family member, and 4 or 5 times I heard a word spoken on TV just as I was about to write it.

I don't claim to understand all the workings of the universe and it could all very well just be random luck, but I'd like to think that there's someone or something looking out for us that maybe we're just not meant to comprehend in this realm that we call reality/life.

Peace, Love and Faith,
Dreamflyer
 
Totally forgot i made this thread.

What was said about uncommon occurrences being evident because of their uniqueness seems pretty accurate. But like dreamflyer is saying, and Shadowmeister used to believe, i find myself wanting to believe as well. My logical side is saying no, but my heart (sp?) is saying yes.

I'm not religious in any way, but when i was a kid i used to pray to god about having girls like me, and not failing a class, etc. Point being, although i don't buy into things that i haven't experienced, i also feel like i have a strange and unique connection to things. Maybe it's arrogance, maybe it's loneliness, but it sure isn't logical (to me).

And as dreamflyer pointed out, this typically is noticed when things are running smoothly.
 
I had a tumor on my back, between the skin/fat and muscle layers, since about 2003, at least. The last night I worked as I got back into town from running my route I got into a bit of traffic. Where I stopped the car ahead had a license plate of 02MURZ. The cyst was removed about 10 hours later.
 
I had a tumor on my back, between the skin/fat and muscle layers, since about 2003, at least. The last night I worked as I got back into town from running my route I got into a bit of traffic. Where I stopped the car ahead had a license plate of 02MURZ. The cyst was removed about 10 hours later.

I seriously do not see any connection there. Did the number plate mean something?

madness said:
1). What unlikely occurrences have you encountered?

A few. But, I am an absolute reactive sceptic and cynic.

Consider the amount of things happening simultaenously in any present moment. There are literally infinite permutations of cause-and-effect all around you; and of course sometimes random things will coincide to the observer. How many times did you throw a ball and it didn't bounce back to you? How many times have you lost at roulette? We are pattern seekers- we see patterns as significant regardless of whether they are or not. There is no man of the moon, or face on Mars.

I guarantte you that of the 7 billion people alive, I bet that at least 12 million JUST blinked at the same time. No-one could observe this though, so we don't see how amazing this is.

2). Do you feel like this is caused by some outside force, or is it simply that a mathematical formula is at play?

There is no outside force intervening in the chain of causality simply to . . . . what? Return a golf ball you had hit- for what reason? Is it more likely that an unknown outside force temporarily susperseded the rules of physics to return a ball to you OR did you simply randomly hit it at the right velocity at the right trajectory for it to return? I wonder, when the ball bounces off the tree and, say, hits another tree rather than returning to you; does that tree count itself significant? After all, what are the chances of you intentionally doing that?

Its all up to chance and luck

3). Do you think unlikely occurrences happen to you more or less often than the average person?

No idea, tbh. Before I really examined what coincidence is, I tended to believe in it and experience it a lot- especially during periods when I was heavily smoking DMT and taking ketamine. Anyway, I asked myself- what about the countless, infintite, overwhelming number of non-synchronous events constantly occurring? There is randomness and chaos here, and the brain evolved to try and make sense of that. Sometimes it gets it wrong.

I had one experience about 3 years ago that involved a sequence of physically impossible events (voices/noises without any source, physical contanct on my shoulders- this was about 2am wondering the local fields- I could expand, it was creepy as fuck), which seemed to continue for a couple of months later, with Miss Swilow also experiencing some weirdness. We are both sceptics but I have no explanation for what happened.

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of synchronicity, but we are in a universe that appears deterministic; all physical occurences/objects could have a timline traced back to the inception of our universe- a coincidence would have to be eningeeered intp the system from the beginning- you cannot have a cause without a chain of prior effects. This would suggest the universe has been waiting for you to hit a golf back into your face. How probable is that?

I guess I am ranting about synchronicity here, which is slightly different to what you are saying. But, in a potentially infifinte universe, the unlikely is actually the inevitable.
 
I seriously do not see any connection there. Did the number plate mean something?

02MURZ. It took me a second to figure what I thought it was supposed to say, but I read "zero tumors".

I had a tumor on my back that was a source of insecurity, which I noticed around age 21, and am now 36. I had never read a license-plate that was supposed to relay an idea of loss of tumors that were there, and read it this-close to having the surgery to have it removed (less than 12 hours, and there were some other things).

Unlikely, though? I don't know.
 
Last edited:
^Think about the sequence of events that lead to that though. Not only all the decisions required by the driver of the vehicle to purchase the plates (also, the decision making process before that), and then timing their day to intersect you; and all the traffic too- think of the chain of causality required to ensure that you saw this message at that time. It is not just one 'event' that you are talking about.

It is way more likely that the number-plate (Aussie idiom I guess) had significance to the driver. You're just vampiring up all their meaningfullness ;)
 
swilow you can't bend physics in your favor?

Really though I think that I have some "magical thinking", as the DSM puts it - the belief that thoughts and actions can influence events. Good vibes on steroids. Though I do not consider myself to be a superstitious person, I do have this fleeting thought that I have extraordinary powers. I always liked certain parts of Matilda.

I guess I made this thread in one of those fleeting moments.
 
Synchronicity happens on such a frequent basis it's unsettling in its own right. That being said;

I once dreamed of a man, of whom I shared a slice of pizza with in a public cafeteria, and his face was on the first page of reddit as a missing person. This, by far, is the most unreal dream I have ever had.
 
Intention and manifestation are real, but they don't work the way that most new age people are describing it.

I find the scientific attempts to explain it away really laughable. Material reductionists should stick to what they're good at: analysis of the material world. They have no business trying to explain metaphysics.

You know when an intersectional event has happened. You can feel it in your core. It's not rational or linear. It feels like magic and that's because it is.
 
agreed with the first part.

laughing with you on the second part.

i would say that's partly true on the third part. there are many degrees to an experience. one moves you and another moves through you in addition to other ones. knowing the difference between false and real ones is a good place to start. i could be wrong.
 
Intention and manifestation are real, but they don't work the way that most new age people are describing it.

I find the scientific attempts to explain it away really laughable. Material reductionists should stick to what they're good at: analysis of the material world. They have no business trying to explain metaphysics.

You know when an intersectional event has happened. You can feel it in your core. It's not rational or linear. It feels like magic and that's because it is.

I agree with parts one and three, I don't have enough time to follow all the various headings in science so I can't contribute due to ignorance.

I want another word for magic just because it has so much baggage. I'm tempted to exchange magic for "peak experiences" simply because there is always an event at the core of these moments. It doesn't explain the moment but it doesn't attempt to either. Magic has a sense of being a specific practice and these events are not cultivatable following any specific practice, they are much more prone to exist where there is both energy and will. This makes it seem like there is a linear element but I think just openness is all it really is.
 
Top