Synchronicity

[jpgrdnr]

I did UTSE and there a number of threads on Synchronicity.

Anyone ever read The Roots of Coincidence by Arthur Koestler?

I'm just curious as to this occurring, and wondering about the Jung link with archetypes.

I would agree that its just a right brain function of aesthetics and of intuition. A relearning of unknowns, that are already known.

Like discovering logic gates or binary numbers without ever having encountered such knowledge before.

 

[panic in paradise]

I like to think of synchronicity as common-sense, to the extent that all un relative activity becomes less apparent, and the perceiving ''sub conscious'' is allowed greater function then the knowing "higher mind"; which is under much dictation from the Ego.

Synchronicity is also Christ/Krishna/cosmic-consciousness; everything that can exist does and will; "Whoever has ears to hear about the infinities, let him hear"(Sophia of Jesus Christ).

 

[Foreigner]

I know the associative mind has something to do with it, but there are also circumstances under which I experience a lot more synchronicity. It's usually when I'm happy and abundance is flowing into my life. I swear that sometimes the universe talks to me through the world around.

 

[trees_please]

All the world is continuous patterns. patterns upon patterns. its up to the human brain to react and perceive them.

 

[RobotRipping]

i swear i experience (more occurrences of) synchronicity while tripping than any other time. It's like the weirdest shit has to happen while i trip. However it could just be that i over analyze things and am more aware. It's been a while since i read Jung and about archetypes. I think it has more to do with hyper awareness and realizing that things in this world are so intricately connected.

i once had this friend who told me about a terrible feeling she had out of no where before finding out that her grandmother died. Something like that. Maybe it's intuition as well. Once i was getting high in a car with a bunch of friends and just got a bad feeling and peeled out of there, only to see the cops coming in exactly where we were leaving. Maybe they weren't coming for us but i felt it was a strange coincidence.

 

[rangrz]

I think it's confirmation bias, over sensitive pattern recognition, and misunderstanding of probabilities.

 

[alasdairm]

^ i tend to agree that this is the explanation much of the time.

alasdair

 

[trees_please]

i think its a combination of hyper awareness and plain old salience..

 

[What 23]

I just wrote the word "Dead", and in a MMO game I began to play, as I was still thinking about writing/why I wrote it, I came upon a guy named "Reaper 2020", who invited me to be in a group with him (met the Reaper). He is the first person I have grouped and talked and played with in this game (Defiance). The server seems really... Dead, as well. Last night the servers were flooded. New game.

Dead when I wrote it had a meaning to me... I wondered that/if I was, and have been dead... Perhaps my entire known life. This is like a dream.

Another (meaning) has to do with an illness, that makes me ponder death.

 

[Foreigner]

^ I have stuff like that happen to me too. I'm thinking about something and then it appears 5 seconds later. There's more than confirmation bias happening some of the time, IMO.

 

[alasdairm]

^ given the vast numbers at play in our universe (and potentially other dimension), it's surprising to me that coincidences like that don't happen more often...

alasdair

 

[ebola?]

At its best, synchronicity is the experience of emergent 'creation', where what unfolds challenges the distinction between random happenstance and contrived design. At it's worse (that is, applied quite literally and overly specifically), synchronicity is precisely what rangrz described.

ebola

 

[RhythmSpring]

I actually think synchronicity is the rule, not the exception. Take it or leave it.

 

[Magickduck]

I have ALOT of this shit happen to me, i think its because at one point I accidently put a synchronicity spell on myself... trying to undo it and just let normal things happen as it gets confusing... i know i sound crazy but its hard not to be when this shit happens all the time..

example:
Last weekend, I went to a burn (a burningman precompression party). As soon as I got there, the person at the gate asked me if they could annoint me with the ashes from the effigy at last years burn. then i went inside, rolled a spliff, lit it and passed it to someone, they passed me one the exact same size back. Then the guy proceeded to ask me if I am a computer tech (which I am). I asked him how he knew, he said just a guess. Then he told me his job, linux administration, which is the same job as me. We talked about it for a sec, then this other guy came up (while the first guy was still there), told me he was a pieces, and his birthday. He had the exact same birthday as me. Then this other guy comes up while those two are still there, and tells me his name is ASDS (censored for anonymity). My name is also ASDS, the exact same nickname [ a very slight modification of my birthname] I go by. Then these 3 guys proceed to tell me these long metaphorical stories about God.

So I had a complete cosmic mirror echo thing, guy with my job, guy with my bday, guy with my name, tell me about God.

And theres no way any of these guys were messing with me, as I didn't know them, was in a random city, no one knew me, and I had just gotton there.

Sometimes this drives me crazy, I thought i was telepathic for a bit, sometimes these synchronicities reveal things to me and its legit, other times its delusion of fucked up shit happening and it got all dark (i hope its delusion). I think what it is is just an echo of my MIND, not nessicarily the future.

 

[alasdairm]

Last weekend, I went to a burn (a burningman precompression party). As soon as I got there, the person at the gate asked me if they could annoint me with the ashes from the effigy at last years burn.

your were at a burningman party - that's hardly a coincidence!

then i went inside, rolled a spliff, lit it and passed it to someone, they passed me one the exact same size back.

there's hardly a large spectrum of different spliff sizes going round an event like that. just about any spliff somebody passes you is going to be between about 1 inch and 3.5 inches...

Then the guy proceeded to ask me if I am a computer tech (which I am). I asked him how he knew, he said just a guess. Then he told me his job, linux administration, which is the same job as me.

linux admin is a reasonably common job in tech. especially if there's a lot of tech where you were. in the sf bay area, every other person is a linux sysadmin...

We talked about it for a sec, then this other guy came up (while the first guy was still there), told me he was a pieces, and his birthday. He had the exact same birthday as me.

there are about 19,000,000 people on earth with your birthday. you're going to run into one of them once in a while. the chances of you running into somebody who shares your birthday are higher than most people realise.

Then this other guy comes up while those two are still there, and tells me his name is ASDS (censored for anonymity). My name is also ASDS, the exact same nickname [ a very slight modification of my birthname] I go by.

without knowing the specific name, it's hard to know how common that is.

you think something mystical is going on. i see a bunch of pretty mundane coincidences... when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

alasdair

 

[Foreigner]

^ You really chalk a sequence like that up to pure coincidence? Maybe if just one thing happened then ok, but so many things in sequence? I can't believe that.

 

[Magickduck]

not to mention this shit happens to me all the time...alsadar, perhaps you are overly analytical/logical. I used to be a devout athiest and logical thinker until I was about 15. It is all perspective, but once you open your mind to the possibilities, it allows them to happen. hence the 'faith of a mustard seed can move a mountain' of christianity..

 

[alasdairm]

^ You really chalk a sequence like that up to pure coincidence? Maybe if just one thing happened then ok, but so many things in sequence? I can't believe that.

but each individual coincidence was completely unrelated: one was about burningman; one about a spliff; one about his birthday; one about his job; one about his name.

the one about burningman was tenuous at best. the one about the spliff was, to me, clutching at straws desperately. the one about his birthday was a lot less impressive when you actually think about the numbers; etc.

again, you (plural) think something mystical is going on. i see a bunch of pretty mundane coincidences.

alasdair

 

[What 23]

but each individual coincidence was completely unrelated

alasdair

^
|
v

Then these 3 guys proceed to tell me these long metaphorical stories about God.

Not unrelated. Granted the type of event he was at... This might not seem out of the ordinary. Still, I believe he was in something. We are all "in something" that we can't really fully perceive. I tend to go with Rhythmspring in his saying, that it is the rule rather than the exception. Although I do leave room for certain chaos, I still think on levels it's all been allocated.

A girl I love posted a picture of Bugs Bunny holding a carrot, with a heart around them within a day, or two, of me buying a carrot for the first time in nearly a year, and having eaten parsnips for the very first time, feasting on them those days. Parsnips are in the carrot family, and taste like them, to me (but different), and smell as well like them (to me, but different). I didn't tell her this. We don't talk, conventionally. The carrot had been in the fridge those couple of days before that, but because of her posting that image, I ate the carrot, as sort of an ode to love, order, and these things that make me say "huh... wow. cool. what's up with that?", on varying levels. The awe, the mystery.

A list can go on. Her pictures seem taken from my head. Like I am making all of this. Not that I am. Unless I change the definition of me.

We are all living (and dying) in a circle, to some degree. In the same. This stuff is bound to happen.

 

[rangrz]

You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!

It's really easy to make a big deal out of co-incidents after the fact. However, all sorts of things happen on a regular basis that are extremely improbable.

Want to see something REALLY improbable happen?

Grab a deck of cards, shuffle it, and draw them out one by one and note down the exact sequence of suit and value of the cards drawn.

Congratulations: You've just witnessed an event that happens 1 time out of 80658175170943878571660636856403766975289505440883277824000000000000 times.

As for your birthday

Consider a party attended by thirty people: what are the chances that two of them have the same birthday? One in twelve, or, roughly 8% (30/365)? After all, it's a 1 in 365 chance someone will share your birthday, and by the lottery analogy above, there's 30 shots at winning.

No, the odds are significantly better than that. In fact, there is a 70.6% probability. This is known as the "birthday problem". The apparently miraculous breaking of odds is attributed to the fact that the question is "what is the chance that any two people have the same birthday?", whereas most people following common sense tend to translate the question as "what is the chance that someone will have the same birthday as me?". So while you get 30 shots at this 1 in 365 lottery, so does everyone else. More specifically, every possible pairings of two individuals in the group of 30 has a shot at this 1 in 365 chance. Regardless, the answer is very non-intuitive and is a good display of how people don't do well at guessing probabilities. Once the problem is known, however, calculating the real odds is just a simple case of exploiting the correct mathematics.