Incidence of Synchronicity in your Life...

[squirrels]

Have you guys ever had synchronicity in your life? By "synchronicity", I mean things that have just happened by seemingly pure chance, yet they have some special meaning to you, or they seem to be steering you in a specific direction or confirming/denying a possible course of action?

I'm not one to believe in "fate" and usually write certain things off to random coincidence. But lately a lot of things have been happening...from songs playing in weird venues at coincidental times...to plans being made and coincidentally broken to prevent certain things from happening...to profound deviations in natural events...that all seem to be leading me toward the same end.

I've written it off...and written it off...but even *I* can only ignore so much. And already it's brought me face-to-face with some hard truths I've been ignoring and rationalizing away for some time...yanked me WAY out of my comfort zone and still has me reeling a little.

How long is it right to deny that "God" or "fate" or "universal consciousness" is steering certain events? At some point, you have to look at the odds and say, "HOW likely is it that THIS would happen, AND this...AND this...AND that??"

 

[user43770]

I like to think that the women I've passed up intercourse with had herpes. Does that count?

Joking aside, I chalk everything up to random occurrences. I don't like the idea that my life is already mapped out and I'm just following the lines like a Fidelity Investments commercial.

 

[r0cky]

Yes. Here's one:
When I heard about the power of positive thinking more than a year ago, one of my visualizations was being a ladies man and having a great social life. Things that I didnt have back then. Well a series of events happened and I ended up signing up for a bootcamp, which was free for me because I offered to be the main instructor's driver and gave him a place to stay for the week ( I wouldnt have been able to afford the bootcamp). In the bootcamp I meet 4 guys that wanted to sarge consistenly. We've been going out at least 2 up to 5 times a week sarging for the past year.

This is huge because of two things:
A. I always have a wing. Which is important when I dont want to go out. We push each other to go out, and encourage each other when the going gets tough.

B. Had I not met those guys, I would've quit pick up a long time ago, and would not have evolved into the person I am today. I would be stuck in my old habits with no choice of girls and a lonely social life.

When I think back about how hard it is to meet even one good wing, let alone four, I recognize that this is much more than a coincidence. It proves me how powerful your thoughts are.

 

[Serialized3]

I had an instructor back in undergrad who was a true gem of a woman. She traveled the world absorbing the cultures and religions of a huge diverse sample of non-western beliefs. She eventually ended up writing a book about it called "The Power of Flow" which kind of related Jungian synchronicity with some spiritual commonalities that she'd interpreted from these cultures she spent time with.

Now, I never got around to entirely finishing the book, but I never like to fully immerse myself in any one other person's philosophy, be it Aristotle, Confucius, or Black Elk. For instance, to me, "synchronicity" is just a human (non-metaphysical) phenomena where we assign meaning to things. But what I got from her book, as well as what she and I discussed, was beyond this idea of assigning meaning, and is a cornerstone of my belief system.

Basically, the premise of her book is that we have a path in life that is basically laid out upon us. Now, the kicker is that we also have free will, so we can choose to go along this path or not. But the idea is that if we are living right, being open, and positive (in "flow" as she says), then our path becomes clearer to us and things just kind of work themselves out. Conversely, if we are not living right, (being negative, stubborn, obtuse, etc.) then we are straying from our paths and things just become more difficult for us.

Now, I know this sounds a bit fruity, but I have found in my life that when I am being positive and open things just kind of fall into place for me (women, jobs, and hell, even material objects and money) and when I'm the opposite, things lock up and I kind of just get caught up in quicksand. It may sound crazy but my lucky number (fairly rare three digit #) just happens to pop up when I am doing things right, and it kind of my sign from the universe, or God, or the Great Spirit or whatever that I'm following my path.

Her site: http://www.flowpower.com/

 

[Rogue]

squirrels:
Have you guys ever had synchronicity in your life? By "synchronicity", I mean things that have just happened by seemingly pure chance, yet they have some special meaning to you, or they seem to be steering you in a specific direction or confirming/denying a possible course of action?

Your mind is playing tricks on you.

The human brain is wired to seek out patterns, even if no pattern actually exists. The brain is wired towards belief rather than disbelief, because, evolutionarily speaking, it's safer to believe in a false pattern than to ignore a real threat. You're projecting your own wishful thinking for there be synchronicity and your mind fills in all the blanks to find the disparate associations.

Ever see the video of the moonwalking bear?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNSgmm9FX2s

I've written it off...and written it off...but even *I* can only ignore so much. And already it's brought me face-to-face with some hard truths I've been ignoring and rationalizing away for some time...yanked me WAY out of my comfort zone and still has me reeling a little.

I would venture to say you see the patterns because of your emotional state. Your emotional composition draws you to draw the associations.

How long is it right to deny that "God" or "fate" or "universal consciousness" is steering certain events? At some point, you have to look at the odds and say, "HOW likely is it that THIS would happen, AND this...AND this...AND that??"

No amount of coincidences add up to causation. Correlation is not causation. For causation there is science.

It's like the game of bridge. There are six billion possibilities. It's like being dealt a hand and arguing the odds were so improbable of being dealt the hand that you couldn't have been dealt the hand by coincidence.

The most common explanations given to account for the Forer Effect are in terms of hope, wishful thinking, vanity and the tendency to try to make sense out of experience, though Forer's own explanation was in terms of human gullibility. People tend to accept claims about themselves in proportion to their desire that the claims be true rather than in proportion to the empirical accuracy of the claims as measured by some non-subjective standard. We tend to accept questionable, even false statements about ourselves, if we deem them positive or flattering enough. We will often give very liberal interpretations to vague or inconsistent claims about ourselves in order to make sense out of the claims. Subjects who seek counseling from psychics, mediums, fortune tellers, mind readers, graphologists, etc., will often ignore false or questionable claims and, in many cases, by their own words or actions, will provide most of the information they erroneously attribute to a pseudoscientific counselor. Many such subjects often feel their counselors have provided them with profound and personal information. Such subjective validation, however, is of little scientific value.

Psychologist Barry Beyerstein believes that "hope and uncertainty evoke powerful psychological processes that keep all occult and pseudoscientific character readers in business." We are constantly trying "to make sense out of the barrage of disconnected information we face daily" and "we become so good at filling in to make a reasonable scenario out of disjointed input that we sometimes make sense out of nonsense." We will often fill in the blanks and provide a coherent picture of what we hear and see, even though a careful examination of the evidence would reveal that the data is vague, confusing, obscure, inconsistent and even unintelligible. Psychic mediums, for example, will often ask so many disconnected and ambiguous questions in rapid succession that they give the impression of having access to personal knowledge about their subjects. In fact, the psychic need not have any insights into the subject's personal life; for, the subject will willingly and unknowingly provide all the associations and validations needed.

http://www.skepdic.com/forer.html

 

[WhitePimp]

I've cheated death/severe injury quite a few times due to last minute changes in plans. I also got fired earlier this year and within a week got the opportunity to get a much better job that I had interviewed for MONTHS before I got fired and was sure I wasn't going to get. If I didn't get fired I wold not have had time to go to the second interviews/orientations and such that was required of me. These are just a few, but I have many many more instances of eerie coincidences. I have a knack for thinking about someone I haven't seen in ages, and them suddenly contacting me on facebook within a few days.

I don't attribute these to anything more than coincidence, but it's an interesting thought to think of something all-powerful 'hooking me up' with amazing opportunities. It makes me much more humble about them.

 

[Black Dog]

Have you guys ever had synchronicity in your life? By "synchronicity", I mean things that have just happened by seemingly pure chance, yet they have some special meaning to you, or they seem to be steering you in a specific direction or confirming/denying a possible course of action?

I'm not one to believe in "fate" and usually write certain things off to random coincidence. But lately a lot of things have been happening...from songs playing in weird venues at coincidental times...to plans being made and coincidentally broken to prevent certain things from happening...to profound deviations in natural events...that all seem to be leading me toward the same end.

I've written it off...and written it off...but even *I* can only ignore so much. And already it's brought me face-to-face with some hard truths I've been ignoring and rationalizing away for some time...yanked me WAY out of my comfort zone and still has me reeling a little.

How long is it right to deny that "God" or "fate" or "universal consciousness" is steering certain events? At some point, you have to look at the odds and say, "HOW likely is it that THIS would happen, AND this...AND this...AND that??"

I believe that the doors of your perception are simply expanding; years ago songs could be playing on the radio, relevant to your life but you didn't give it a second though; however now as you get older you're noticing subtle things like this?

Call it God, fate, destiny, Karma, Allah, Chi, holy spirit, The Force, the suitcase from Pulp Fiction; I think it's simply some mechanism in the brain that is trying to tell you something. Call it you "soul" at work maybe that's what it is. I don't think science is far enough that it can explain your phenomenom Squirrels

 

[DJ Logic]

Some things are beyond random and cannot be explained by science (yet). Just today I was thinking about a friend from high school. I found some old pictures and was thumbing through them. Five minutes later I open my Facebook and *bam* friend request from this chick I haven't talked to in ages. Stuff like this happens to me a lot and sometimes it freaks me out!

Many times I am thinking of a word or phrase, and at that exact moment the word appears, either on a billboard, on TV, or in someone's conversation. I could understand this happening randomly, but for me it happens every day, multiple times. My mind is not "looking for patterns", I just find myself surrounded by an unusually high rate of coincidences.

What does it mean? I try not to ponder too much and take it as a sign that I am on my path, exactly where I am supposed to be. I am curious what prompted this post though squirrels. You are the poster boy for disenfranchisement here at SoSuave so this is a surprising twist coming from you

 

[Rogue]

In the words of mathematician John Allen Paulos, the problem is people suffer from innumeracy, people are mathematically illiterate. He covers all this in his book Innumeracy: mathematical illiteracy and its consequences. Lucky for us, an article from Psychology Today explains synchronicity:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200407/the-power-coincidence

To pull two quotes:

For those with a highly empirical bent, a coincidence is happenstance, a simultaneous collision of two events that has no special significance and obeys the laws of probability. "In reality, the most astonishingly incredible coincidence imaginable would be the complete absence of all coincidence," says John Allen Paulos, professor of mathematics at Temple University in Philadelphia, and best-selling author of Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences. "Believing in the significance of oddities is self-aggrandizing," he adds. "It says, 'Look how important I am.' People find it dispiriting to hear, 'It just happened, and it doesn't mean anything.'"

Indeed, coincidences help prod science along. "They are a true paradox," says MIT cognitive scientist Josh Tenenbaum. "On the one hand they seem to be the source of our greatest irrationalities—seeing causal connections when science tells us they aren't there. On the other hand, some of our greatest feats of scientific discovery depend on coincidences."

According to Tenenbaum, we could not learn language and syntax without the ability to notice strange coincidences. "Consider the challenge in learning just a single word," says Tenenbaum. "Every word is in a sense an infinite object. It's not just a name for an individual thing, it refers to an infinite set of things." Take the word "dog"—to understand that simple word you have to understand the name (Rover), the type (say, a black Labrador), all dogs, all mammals, all animals, all Labradors, all black Labradors (or black poodles, or black Great Danes), all running things, all furry things. "Yet even children under 5 can be given just a few relevant examples of dog and learn to use it," marvels Tenenbaum. Even more remarkable is that between the ages of 1 and 5, children are learning at least five new words a day.

Children make these cognitive leaps by noticing coincidences—Labradors and poodles and other dogs bark, pant with their tongues on hot days and, in cities at least, appear on leashes led by humans. Tenenbaum has demonstrated that we can generalize meaningfully from just a few examples of a novel word. In one study, 25 adults were shown sets of photographs (animals, vegetables, vehicles), and presented with a "novel" non-English word (such as "blick") as the name for the object. They were asked to point out instances of "blick" in additional photographs. Tenenbaum found that after seeing an object (such as a Dalmatian) with the name "blick" only once, adults were able to infer that the word either referred to all Dalmatians or all dogs. If they were shown three Dalmatians as three examples of "blick," they were much more likely to infer that "blick" referred only to Dalmatians. A pilot study found that even 4-year-old children could generalize properly if presented "blick" three times.

"Coincidences drive so many of the inferences our minds make," says Tenenbaum. "Our neural circuitry is set up to notice these anomalies and use them to drive new learning. There is an old saying that neurons that fire together wire together. So you could say that coincidence operates at the level of the synapse, whenever neurons fire at the same time." If our minds are primed to find coincidences, it's not surprising that we sometimes see connections where they don't exist.

 

[r0cky]

Nice discussion guys. My view on all of this is this:
Religion -> debunked by science. Science -> debunked by spirituality.

But this is impossible to believe unless you have at least some spiritual practice in your life.

 

[Gaucho]

Science is an odd topic, given it is an evolutionary process and as such dynamic.

My belief is humans are not nearly as smart as we think we are. We have the ability to social network better than most and the ability to think 'outside the box' to use tools for example. Humans IMHO are also innately greedy and is why capitalism has allowed us to 'advance' so raplidly in the West, of which the East is now following, of course, this quality is fine when contained to the minority (the West), but just like the fallacy of composition, when everybody becomes greedy (the East and the BRICS), it will bring itself down like a house of cards. Go to a football game and stand up, it is a great viewpoint, but when everyone around you stands up, it doesn't work. But we are seriously deficient in many other senses and our small minds are probably closed in the conext of the Universe, we just cannot grasp half of what is 'real'. Like you can't teach a dog to speak English fluently, our brains are probably limited in many ways. Ask a scientist to actually explain dimensions we cannot see and string theory and they themselves can't really grasp what they are talking about.

The other problem I have with science, is it uses assumptions based on earthly 'evidence' at the time and then extrapolates it out. It is no better than economic theory making as many assumptions as it likes in order to validate a 'model'.

 

[Die Hard]

And already it's brought me face-to-face with some hard truths I've been ignoring and rationalizing away for some time...

Could you expand on this? What truths do you mean?

The meaning of synchronicity is all in your head. There is nothing steering these events, it just seems that way to you. When people suddenly start noticing a lot of sychronicity in their lives, it means their mindset is suddenly more calibrated to pick up on it. Usually this happens when people feel kinda "lost" in life, when they're unsure of where they belong and who they are, feeling like they're spectators to their own life instead of taking part in it. In times like these, the mind is calibrated to look for order, predictability, direction, something to cling on, consistency etc. in life. Hence, they suddenly notice all kinds of manifestations of synchronicity...

As a result, some people suddenly start believing there's a God or some other bullsh!t force that's steering events, which is NOT the right answer to their life situation! On the contrary, it means they're only slipping away fúrther in the wrong direction, their minds becoming more and more dominated by the concept of external 'locus of control'.

In many cases, this is simply a continuation of what their parents brought upon them. Yes, your parents as well, Squirrels... But I don't have the time and energy to explain it all. Get yourself familiar with the theory behind concepts as 'locus of control', 'attributional style', 'learned helplessness' etc. If you wanna fix what's broken, you first need to find out what's broken and how that happened. The above concepts should allow you to do so. You just need to realize that the way those concepts apply to your particular personality, is based in your youth and the way you were raised by your parents, the way the relationship between you and them developed etc.

It's about time you start digging, Squirrels. If you have the courage to face whatever you dig up, that is! If not...well, you can always keep looking for 'synchronicity', 'forces that steer events' and other bullsh!t that leads your mind away from the real issues.

Seriously though, look for a good therapist who can help you with this, so your mind doesn't spin out of control.