so i go to the library yesterday..
i get a calvin and hobbs book and "Futurama Conquers The Universe"
i had a deep feeling that some sort of syncromystic happenings would happen with this book..
so im reading it today and they quote a phrase in it that i dont understand..
it was deliberately asking me to look it up..
and i knew this was what i was looking for..
"Deus ex machina" is the word
a verry interesting topic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina
so..
i send this link to only one of my online friends..
she then freak out claiming im going to poop myself..
i was totally expecting that haha..
she then sends me a screen shot of her personalised google main page..
and guess what?
the google word of the day today?
Deus ex machina!!
WTFF??
i read something in a book and told the one phrase to one of my friends and it was there google word of the day..
did i create that with my mind?
is my brain predicting google?
or just the universe?

see..
http://dictionary.reference.com/wordofthed...2008/04/02.html

Welcome aboard. You may wish to Google coincidence.

look..
i knew something strange would happen getting this book..
and so it leads me to look up a phrase the very day that it's the dictionary.com word of the day..
i sent the link to just the right person..
and im sure this relates to the song im writing that i haven't started yet..
just the right info has been finding me alot laitly..
personally i find this to be a sign..
i just watched the episode of Lost that bares the same name..
in the episode he asked for a sign..
right then my phone rang..
no one was there..
but im telling you this was some mystic stuff here..

OK. If you had taken my advice, then you would have seen that coincidence intersects with synchronicity, which you brought up in the OP. Thought you might be interested. My bad.

only the enlightened realize that "god" is really just the spirit of chance
and that is why he/she/it/whatever is in everything and is everywhere, everytime, and every possibility

first of all please do not mix capital and small letters in a title. It's very annoying and very childish. Secondly. There is such a thing called coincidence. Nothing supernatural to it.

My freind who got me into playing counter-strike went by the online handle of "deus ex machina", which was fitting since the guy could toatally dominate in that game.

After reading previous posts of the OP, I think a lot more than this 'mix of capital and small letter types' in a title should be done.

if you think that you can create these concidences in your mind you will - i can sort of do it -

trust me start to think about them and they will happen alot more even write a list of the things that happen

the more you write down and notice the more it will happen

if your going to do it reply in like a week and tell me

its all in the subconscious every one around you is just shadows in there own universe , that is the only way for parrallel universes 2 work

And how many times have you googled something and it hasn't been chosen as "word of the day"? Probably thousands of times.

Statistically, a 1-in-a-million occurance happens to everyone at least once a month.

I don't think he searched 33,333.3 times a day to get that to happen lolz... 1,000,000/30days, which ends up being 1 event about every 3 seconds... silly

come on people atleast think when you speak. And this is when there is only one link, imagine the statistics of a 3 or 4 or 5 link chain, of things that have never happened to you before in the first place.

As for synchro, you have to have it happen to you to know what it's about. These are not random like coincidence, which statistically have to occur sometime... But they have meaning, not arbitray after the fact meaning, that could turn a coincidence into a "synchronicity."

London: by the way once it starts, you are in for a fun ride if you want to be. The synchros ramp up and come in waves or clusters.

To those who want to say it's stupid to think this way, an experiment where all data in the same category as the so called coincidence is all recorded as to get a frequency of the "weird" event as opposed to the non events. An easy experiment could deal with looking at the clock at weird times. You know how people say the see 9:11 or 11:11 all the time, but how often do they see 12:43? Record all times you look at the clock for one week, not forgetting a single time.

Of course you would rather waste other peoples time rather than your own by offering up nothing of discussion value!

EDIT: I didn't say this earlier, but synchronicities have changed my life, much more than anything has ever changed me. It's like this path you can follow, without following it. A path that has no linear value to it. When you look back you are amazed at how far you've come and what lessons you have drawn.

I wish I could explain this in a way that makes nay sayers see what I mean, but even if every word I write is interpretted correctly and then they make an effort to see it, they could still miss it. You can read trip reports all day long for years, then try the substance in question, and it is nothing you ever expected. And so I don't expect anyone to believe this stuff unless it happens to them, and it does happen to them to show them what they want, which is an easy to predict world with some coincidence, and so they are led to people, and info/ideas that match the thought pattern.

synchronicity is akin to gravity.
your thought patterns are akin to position in the universe.
and your mass akin to how strong a focus you have.
certain planets/comets/asteroids will come "flying" at you,
as ideas/thoughts/people/info comes flying at you in this case.


this is atleast my view of it...

-muddy

Don't you think a 1-in-a-million occurance happening every month is a stretch?

The more you start to look for them, the more you'll notice. Exactly the same amount will continue to actually happen.

We're all the evolutionary, biological, psychological and social products of an immense series of vastly unlikely occurrences.

All around us, unpredictable and chaotic events occur simultaneously to one another. In the midst of it, our brains search for meaning and pattern in the noise.

Of course, just occasionally, among the chaotic events, a coincidence occurs which seems impossible. Well, if it's impossible, yet it happened, it must be supernatural, right?

No. It just means it wasn't impossible, just unlikely.

A lottery winner may say, "but the odds against me winning were millions to one - I must be blessed!"; yet someone had to win. Are all lottery winners blessed, every week?

how does this prove anything.

it is only one possibility. Everyone knows that we see more of what we notice. Now suppose you believe what we are saying is true. These concepts (synchro, and noticed coincidence) are not theories oposed to each other. They exist side by side and both exist. Like I said before though, you want to blieve in some 3-d simple world that in my mind just does not exist. I will be led more and more this way, and you will see more and more proof that ALL coincidence is simply that coincidence. Ironically it is synchro that led you to believe that.

Now using the oposite of what you are saying which is:
"things that are noticed have more meaning."
I could say "things going unnoticed have no meaning."
and this could be you IMO.

this is why I brought up an experiment, so you high and mighty "un-pychologically biased" (lol) types could try it out for yourselves.

mabey you will?

To most the universe is nothing but a vast region of randomness. To a few even in the randomness there is structure.

I ask you to go away and use your imagination to write a essay a couple hundred words long. Try your hardest to use as much creativity as you can then over the next few days keep your eyes open for coincidences between it and events that happen.

You will find they crop up.

Look at a cell under a microscope. It has a brain (the nucleus) and it breaths, eats and excretes (cell metabolism). Take a step up to the human body and you find it mirrors this layout. Take a step up to a nation and again it has a brain (government) it takes in resources to grow and survive and gives out waste.

There are hidden structure and connections behind all things in the universe. Its called Choas Theory. Patterns repeat themselves which is why your coincidences crop up. Reality is all intertwined with the hidden connections.

Um, no.

The reason being, that with no given rationale, no evidence presented, and very little thought given to any kind of methodology, you seem to be proposing that people who don't buy your particular brand of fatalism should write down what time it is every time they look at the clock.

Why do you think I'd end up with anything more than a list of four digit numbers?

Re: we 'high and mighty "un-psychologically biased" types', I'm afraid you've got it the wrong way around. I am sceptical of your implied ideas about synchronicity, for the very reason that I know I, and all other humans, are susceptible to cognitive biases of various sorts; whereas those who claim amazing odds for apparently meaningful coincidences seem blissfully unaware of their neurological design flaw.

EDIT: nevermind
sorry if you took what I said in a rude way.

I am only implying that you have the same design flaw.

You want a more linear pattern to this chaos?
where some others would like meaning (where none may be)?

but in my case I know of the brain, I know some of it's tricks, and I do fight it.

and of course everything you have said is right.

But that still does not prove me wrong.

And I am sitting here trying to think of a way to prove it right, just have not thought of anything yet...
sitting here I have thought of a few flaws with the time test, like subconcious programming, and set scheduals

by the way some of those numbers would be 3 digits

If synchro is true and we do not pay attention to our surroundings how do you propose we notice it?

Or put another way we can never know truth, because we flavor everything based on us.

It's a cool story, nonetheless! Coincedences, sychronistic happenings, oddities, whatever...they are very interesting. Our brains obviously crave pattern. Crave sense out of disorder. So on and so forth.

I've had those 'deep feelings' about things too. But, the only ones I can recall are the ones that panned out.

I'm just wondering how many other times you've 'had deep feelings of a synchromystic happenings' but as nothing of the sort happened, you've dismissed them all.

It's sort of like a compulsive gambler (sorry for the stretch of analogy here)....A compulsive gambler hardly ever remembers all the times they lost at a particular card game, but can recall in great detail how they won.

Of course, there could be much more to it than just that. Believe what you want!

I... dammit.



Okay, fair enough - you're trying to think of a way to show that the concept of synchronicity has some merit (or, more accurately, to test whether it has or not), and you spotted some of the problems with your clock test.

I'm also struggling to come up with a reasonable protocol - my suspicion is that in fact the very idea is unfalsifiable, which would render it a 'faith' issue more akin to religion - two rival and indistinguishable interpretations of the same events.

But I guess that depends on the actual nature of the claimed phenomenon. What sorts of events to you tend to consider synchronicity, muddyfrog? Could you propose a reasonable definition?

Oh, Nuke, I have to rise to the defense of my buddy Carl Jung. Like any number of straightforward things, newagers get ahold of something commonsensical like synchronicity, and suddenly it's a barrel of cuckoo crap.

First the word, it is intentionally coined to be similar in root meaning with coincidence ("occuring together") - synchronicity ("at the same timedness"). And the definition is clear enough: a meaningful [ acausal relationship between two or more events close in time ].

The stuff in square brackets? That's the definition of coincidence. So right away, we see that you cannot "make" synchronicities, because that would be a causal relationship between the events, not an acausal relationship. And no, Jung did not mean hidden cause, higher cause, preternatural cause, nor supernatural cause... he wrote and meant acausal.

Oh well, in that case it's just our mind making the connection to create some meaning. No sugar, Sherlock. Carl was a psychoanalyst, people paid him to study what things people's minds found meaningful. Coincidences are one such thing.

Long story short, there are two scenarios. One is just junk. You see a license plate with 1252, then when you go to lunch, you look at the clock and it's 12:52, then the restaurant tab has the serial number 0001252.

Carl does not recommend running down to the bookie's shop and playing 1252 (although if you play the numbers anyway, you gotta admit 1252 is as good a 4-digit number as any other, and if it hits, then you'll have a nice story to tell your chums.)

The other kind is usefully meaningful, in the same sense that some dreams are usefully meaningful. Thoughts can make themselves felt by the vividness, recurrence, lucidity, even the goriness of dreams. So, too, they can make themselves felt by seizing on patterns in the things that happen in your life, directing your attention (not merely your ability to detect) to patterns encountered in waking life.

He gives the example from his clinical practice of a patient who dreamt of an Egyptian style piece of scarab jewelry. She encountered a living example of the European cousin of the species involved the next day. Coincidence? Absolutely. But an opportunity for her mind to direct her attention to that dream, which is what her mind did, and which ended up being a turning point for her on the road to recovery. Synchronicity.

Psychotherapy is typically a long process. Coincidences of all kinds are bound to happen during its course. Jung is teaching his fellow therapists to be attentive to this, to learn what they can from what their patient finds meaningful, and to follow up on those events that offer some leverage for therapeutic progress.

What's wrong with that?

Alright good carl jung. I love his work.

Now what you are saying is exactly what I meant by synchro (I shorten words as I cannot spell )

anyway, Jung states many of his own examples, such as psychoanalyzing a patient who dreams of scarab beatles. As the patient was speaking of the dream a blue scarab beatle flew into his window. These beatles should have been nowhere near there and have never been seen there before. They are not native to his place of work...

You see Jung believed in the collective unconscious, which is where I charge these events take place. The collective unconscious being all knowledge of all people connected, even through time. So that we all have these similar archetypes and such. Jung saw the beatle as an example of this. If we are all connected in this way than people should be able to be unconsciously drown to other people for purpose of experiencing similar paths that they each chose. Something like that is my praposed mechanism. Similar vibes brought together like a magnet with the collective unconscious as the backdrop for the magnetism to take place.

Carl Jung did say acausal, but are you sure he didn't mean it in a 3-D relationship way. Because if he said casual it would be me setting my watch with someone else so that we are synchronized. Me causing it to happen, but I don't think I am causing these things to happen. And I think we may be both putting words in his mouth, but I am gonna go read some to find out.

Now a personal example:

I had started meditating and one day I had a crazy meditation with
A ) lost time (1.5 hours, felt like 5 minutes)
B ) lost control of body/body controlled it's arms
C ) body controls it's mouth; says "hi god."
D ) white light (looked a little redish as if coming through my eyelids)
E ) the most blissful body high imaginable, energy surging up my spine
F ) left with the feeling I just learned/forgot everything there is to know in the universe
G ) arms, head, neck all really heavy and tired when I was "let go"



Ok that was just a preface to say what happed later that night. I have felt the energy before but my body never said hi god all by itself so I decided hmm mabey there is some higher power? I'll ask it something before I go to sleep as I have heard that is a good place to communicate with such things. So I ask should I go to the ARMY? the dream does not matter for this story (way off topic) so in the next days all these people start randomly talking to me about the ARMY. People never just talk to me in the first place (people I don't know I mean) and in the second all on the topic of the ARMY, and even on the topic of whether people should join or not. After the 5th or so person in three days I jsut had to smile to myself... Did my question work?

this continued up to the day a recruiter saw me and came right to me (nothing weird about that lol) well except the fact there were a million other people there (durham tech. comm. college) and he only spoke to me and left after going inside the building for 2 minutes. I am a skinny guy at that 120 6'2"...

I have had many others, but I hardly notice anymore, I only decide whether to follow or not. It can be a fun ride. For me they are never Isolated events, and have a lot of meaning for what I need to do in life. It's my own personal learning process with out me really looking for anything. I also get coincidences like everyone else, but those never create a path, or bring me to other people who i can benefit from.



Heres the dream because now I decided it does matter somewhat. So I was in a military complex and was in a lecture of sorts. THis ends blah blah blah...
... then I am walking still in this complex and see Bush, But I can tell it's only a symbol, and I decide it's god or a god or something powerful, anyway it says "do you want to die?" as it points to a sand pit(Iraq?)I say "no" it says then follow me, and Bush god thing leads me through a hole in the wall where no one can see us. I wake up.

Well I joined the ARMY despite the dream, and then I was put through the hole in the wall 2 months into basic training lol. I was discharged with a
pre-existing medical condition(cholesteatoma). And this will sound crazy, but, did I do that to myself? And would I have died if I said yes?

by the way I am no new ager lol, this is just me. I think most of them make up the most crazy stuff just to see who might listen and pay hehe... no offence if you like that kind of thing.

EDIT hehe now there is a coincidence, I didn't know you wrote about the scarab beatle too eight bits... Now I feel silly, I should have read your whole post. By the way which one of us is remembering the story wrong? I bet it's me lol. Which book is it again?

-Muddy

It's an essay entitled "Synchronicity, An Acausal Connecting Principle." It originally appeared in 1952 along with another essay by the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, but the Jung essay has appeared separately in several places since then.

I didn't notice that our two accounts of the beetle incident were all that different, but just to be sure, here's Jung's (from paragraph 843 of the R.F.C Hull translation into English; I have added a paragraph break to improve readability):

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 that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an 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, and that the dream of the patient has remained unique in my experience.

paragraph 845 goes on to explain how this affected his patient in the therapeutic sense, and reviews the symbolism of the scarab in ancient Egypt. Jung invokes the collective unconscious to explain the parallelism between mythological symbology and dream symbols in general, with the note that the woman was unaware of the mythological significance of scarab beetles in Egypt.

Jung also wrote about the incident the year before in an article entitled "On Synchronicity," based on a lecture he gave. It differs from the above in disambiguating "golden scarab" - what she dreamt about was getting a piece of jewelery as a gift. He also elaborates on what happened after he caught the beetle:

... I handed the beetle to my patient with the words "Here is your scarab."

The detail is important, I think, because the woman did not "encounter the beetle by chance," nor develop an impression of its meaning by herself. Rather, Jung found the beetle, appreciated its possible significance, and used it to further her therapy.

I'd like to write about the collective unconscious in some post sooner or later, but it is a BIG subject, and way off topic in this thread .

I did enjoy both your dream and meditation report, BTW. Thanks for posting those.

Always a welcome disagreement, eight bits


Absolutely nothing, or very little, in the terms you explain the concept. It is, as you say, a commonsensical formulation of 'coincidence in which an individual finds subjective meaning', and a phenomenon of possible therapeutic use.

For me, the problem with synchronicity comes from its modern usage. I know I can be guilty of, as you say, assuming that if it's being touted as a newage idea then it's probably nonsense, but I think something different is apparent in this particular thread.

Notwithstanding the more recent debates around what Jung might have meant by 'causally unrelated' (was he using the term 'causality' in a special way? e.g. Storm, 1999) and exactly how he considered psi and synchronicity to be related phenomena, the term 'synchronicity' has been hijacked in recent years by people who don't care so much what Jung actually meant, and care rather more about what they would like the term to mean. And they would like it to mean precisely the opposite of your given definition, eight bits - a sort of fatalism, or at least a supernaturally 'caused' coincidence.

Synchronicity these days is often discussed in far less conservative terms - the relationship with psi, the relationship of the concept with other pseudo-Jungian edifices such as the 'collective unconscious' (again, perfectly translatable after Jung's own discussion into conservative and commonsensical terms, but often misused to imply some sort of akashic wonderland we can all tap into).

Whilst I'm certainly guilty in this thread of cavalier use of the term, I think it's clear that what's being discussed in this thread, from the OP onwards, is a little different to your definition of synchronicity:







Etc. So this is the newagey, mystical, nonrandom, noncoincidental, causal version of 'synchronicity' being discussed, rather than the original Jungian conceptualisation, is it not? This is in particular why I asked muddyfrog to supply a definition as a first step towards testing what he seemed to consider a statistically anomalous phenomenon, rather than to assume we were all on the same page.

Sorry to labour the point - I'm quite interested in Jung's thought (I trained for a little while under a Jung-flavoured psychologist, and had a hell of a time trying to get my head around some of those concepts!), though slightly ambivalent too.

I guess we just have to disagree. I think the reason may be that I BELIEVE that mind, unconscious, and collective unconscious have a lot of effect on this 3D world we live in. It is a belief I have, so I think that may be where we aren't on the same page. As I was reading a collection of Carl Jung's work just now I realized that I don't think he meant a connected collective unconsious, only connected in that we all share it. That it is the same for us based on humanities past, but not connected like a telephone line that I could call you on.

Thanks for helping me explore my thoughts, nucular.
and eight bits for reminding me that I really like Carl Jung.

I think I am getting way off topic though.

Synchronicity, Synchronicity, Synchronicity... I guess either way you look at it, synchro still has value. The way I meant it, or the way Carl Jung meant it. I didn't find what he said about synchro yet, but what I have been reading about the mind shows what he thinks about synchro quite well.

By the way I just had a Carl Jung synchro. I flipped open the book to some page around 300, and it landed on "introverted intuitive." I read the description he gave of that group of people, and that is what I am. I am pretty darn sure.

-Muddy

Yes, that's my understanding too, pretty much. A sort of psychic architecture we all have, but which isn't 'networked', so to speak.


Heh, cool. It kind of reminds me of the 'library angel' phenomenon (probably just another label for synchronicity in a particular context), in which 'unseen forces' seem to guide one to find the right information in the right book. My dad had quite an impressive little experience in this vein some time in the '70s, which involved noticing a book in a bookshop from outside the shop, going inside and opening it, to find on the very page he opened it a photograph he'd been vaguely looking for for years. Maybe not as archetypally resonant as finding a scarab during therapy after dreaming of one, but he still talks about it!

Muddyfrog, I sense we have ended up fairly close together. Thank you also, Nucular, for that link, you swim in deep pools. I think Jung's actual problem was that there was nothing to explain in Rhine, but I do not think less of Jung for believing in 1952 that there was.

Google has cameras on you and is using you to get marketing ideas. LOL

The fact that you just pointed that out I find childish and annoying. Grow up plz. He can type how he likes geez. Who Cares!

Have you seen the movie The Number 23 ? It deals with this. lol

WOW I cant believe you brought that up LOL. That reminds me of when I saw the movie something strange happened to my husband and I while we were watching it.

We were sitting on the couch watching the movie I had rented, and my husbands yells WTF is that?! and I am like what? looking at the movie. He is like NO OUTSIDE! and I looked outside and I saw a air craft of some sort with triangle all green lights and it looked like it was about to crash and we watched it go down behind the house next door. So we ran outside but didnt hear a crash or anything. Then we waited about 10 minutes, and we saw a flair go off so we thought maybe a air craft crashed, and I called the police. The police then callled me back and said they wouldnt normally do anything but another police officer saw it too and he said it was strange and so they sent out a helecopter for about 2 hours searching for a possible downed craft. But they found nothing. The police officer said his fellow officer was glad I called in because he thought he was going crazy! The next morning they looked more and still found nothing. Guess it was a UFO cause the police officer said air craft doesnt have all green lights on it.

No lie, I have the police report number and card still on my fridge.

If you are looking for soemthing you will see it. Millions of small coincidences go past unheeded every day. when we are hoping, as you were, for there to be some connection we will inevitably evetually find one. When something seems so striking it is impossibble to ignore and we think wow, isn't that incredible, but the odds are these incredible seeming events will happen to someone somewhere. It is often nice and perhaps comforting to lay importance on them. In the cases where you are simple more aware of a type of event perhaps psychologically ther is some significance to it that casues a certain thing be it a number or whatever to imprint intself on your mind and therefore noted. Jsut as someone who has just discovered theya re pregnant will often seem to see more pregnant women around then usual. It is often awareness rather than reality that is altered in these cases.
THere are also as i siad the astounding coincidences that wil arise eventually through sheer chance but we live in a world of so many many variables that sooner or later a few of them are going to come together in a way that imples some kind of destiny and as humans we are prone to latch onto thsi as evidence fo soemthing more.