rigorousintuition.ca

It's just about a word.

Sitting at work, hungover and daydreaming, I started to think about the need to withdraw.......which led me to think of the word recluse and then to debate internally whether 'reclusion' was a word. I was sure I had never heard or read it but it seemed plausible.

That night when I went home I watched Papillon on DVD, which I had not seen before and had purchased from a bargain bin a few weeks before. In this movie when the main character is sentenced to solitary confinement the prison barracks has RECLUSION painted in large red letters over the front gate.

I know it's not earth shattering but it seemed pretty cool to get an answer this way.

I think that counts. In fact I think most synchronicity events are not the astonishing, mind blowing types of events that are typically used as illustrations. The following is a simple but serviceable defintion.

wikipedia wrote:Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events that are causally unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner. To count as synchronicity, the events should be unlikely to occur together by chance.

The fact that the following is included in the wiki article and I have been somewhat immersed in all things lewis carroll recently as a result of the Alice's Annex thread probably does not constitute a synchronicity but it does illustrate why wiki is worth reading.

One of Jung's favourite quotes on synchronicity was from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, in which the White Queen says to Alice: "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards".

What did you think of Papillon? I've never read the novel and I don't think I've ever made it through the entire film without falling asleep. It's not that it's not a great and engaging bit of celluloid, but something about that film just puts my brain irresistably to sleep.

That's pretty cool--sounds to me like synchronicity. It used to happen to me a lot when typing on my laptop while listening to NPR. As, or immediately after, I typed a word (not common words or articles or pronouns), the broadcaster would say it. (Used to because I can't listen with the computer on right now; too much static.)

I thought Papillon was a great film--I saw it a couple of months ago when on a Steve McQueen binge and I love films about prison breaks. McQueen was underrated as an actor.

Featuring Woodrow Parfrey, father of you know who:

I love synchronicity threads. Just last night I wondered aloud to my husband if Teddy Pendergrass was still alive.

sunny wrote:I love synchronicity threads. Just last night I wondered aloud to my husband if Teddy Pendergrass was still alive.

sunny, keep your mouth shut about Willie Nelson.....

What if you dream about John Denver the night before he dies? Does that count? Cause I did. On a sliding scale it was either a psychic event, a synchronicity, or a really astounding coincidence. John Denver was never in my dreams before and hasn't been since.

RIP to both him and Teddy Pendergrass.

Heck yeah it counts. Some of the best ones seem so utterly insignificant and "mere," but you can't shake the feeling that there was something to 'em more than just randomness.

Here's a little one I enjoyed yesterday - when I got back to work from lunch, my coworker Kelly stopped me to tell me that in my absence, my iPod had played a song that she had a different version of. It took her awhile to find it on her mp3 player, but then the song started and she looked at me expectantly, waiting for me to recognize it ... but I didn't.

"You will when the vocals start," she said, and then sang the first line - which I did recognize - it was a version of "Dub Be Good to Me."

I said "Oh, yeah - the version I have has totally different music, that's why I didn't know what it was - my version has a bassline stolen from a Clash song, that's why I like it."

I went back to my desk and tried to see which version had played on my ipod - but didn't see it in the recently played tracks, and decided to forget it. So I went back to the main menu and hit "Shuffle Songs."

And the bassline from the Clash's "Guns of Brixton" kicked in - it was a version of the song we'd just been talking about.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpAUU75ajUQ

"You're a freak," Kelly said, laughing.

(Here is a coincidence where we can know exactly what the odds really were - not even one in a million, just 4 out of 5,251, or 1 in 1,312. But I reckon that anybody who thinks synchronicity is a matter of "mere improbability doesn't get it, anyway.)

I enjoyed Papillon. Old school and compelling.

Yeah, movies are pretty good for synchronicity. At my old apartment we had some kind of pirate satellite channels on the TV. Two of them being movie channels. It seemed if my flatmate and I discussed a film within 24 hours it would be broadcast.

Do you think synchronicity is a developable skill? Could be bit more useful than just seeing your old favourites on the telly.

Do you think synchronicity is a developable skill?

That's an excellent question. I think without a doubt one can develope an awareness of it. It stands to reason that I have missed some fascinating synchronicities in my life, as has everyone else, which is a thought that bothers me. I don't know if it is something one can conjure into existence though. Maybe. There might be others here that would have something to say about that.

It does seem sometimes that synchronicities really don't have any obvious meaning attached to them or in fact just seem meaningless, but I think even in those instances one might say the meaning is that there is no meaning, even when it seems there ought to be meaning.

More often than not though synchronicities serve as a wake up call for me. I take it to mean, "pay attention to this" and often it seems that what I am being pointed toward is a possible path I might take. That is to say, I seem to experience synchronicities at crossroads when there are choices available to me and my life is in flux. I suppose I could create synchronicities by purposely putting myself in those circumstances but somehow I don't think it works that way.

I love reading these synchronous moments in here, and until I dig into my jeweled bag of select synchronicities one of which to write up for you, here’s an experience ProfessorPan wrote in January, 2008. I haven’t forgotten it. The Original.

PPan wrote:

Many years ago....

I was heading to a nearby college bar with a friend, talking about synchronicity (he had never heard of the word). We had a long, interesting conversation and we swapped examples.

After we arrived at the bar, we had to wait in a line to get in. A young woman walked past me, holding a book in her hands—one of those Time/Life “Mysteries of the Unknown”-type books. I knew as she walked by that she was carrying MY copy of the book. The wear-and-tear along the spine, the ripped dust-jacket—there was no mistaking it. It was my book.

I introduced myself and told her that I didn’t know her, but that she was carrying my book. “Oh, Laura loaned it to me.”

We deduced the identity of Laura, and I dimly recalled loaning the book to her many months before.

“Here,” the woman said. “Take it—it’s yours.”

I thanked her for believing me. After all, many people would have just kept the book. She smiled and left.

My friend had been watching. “Now THAT was a synchronicity,” he said.

I laughed and opened the book at random. There, staring at us, was a photo of Carl Jung. Beneath his photo, the caption mentioned that he had coined the word “synchronicity.”

I’ve had lots of powerful synchronicities in my life, but that one remains iconic, and it’s the example I always trot out when the subject comes up.

I’ll be back later with one of my stories, and some questions, too.

Allegro wrote:I’ll be back later with one of my stories, and some questions, too.

I look forward to this. (I love your avatar.)

sunny wrote:I love synchronicity threads. Just last night I wondered aloud to my husband if Teddy Pendergrass was still alive.

now that's obscure and certainly invokes synchronicity

edit: i'm one of those cafeteria christians, I suppose, but i have a strong abiding belief in a creator--and i believe that the creator's word is about us every day, and that we merely need to establish a connection (or awareness) to appreciate that fact.

i also believe that synchronicity is a natural aspect of "reality" that proves the unity of all universes existing simultaneously through time and space. as humanity matures (assuming that it is, indeed, happening), more of these sorts of indications will become apparent.

so there.

IanEye wrote:

sunny wrote:I love synchronicity threads. Just last night I wondered aloud to my husband if Teddy Pendergrass was still alive.

sunny, keep your mouth shut about Willie Nelson.....

I promise to never speak his name again. Unless it's to wish him a bumper pot crop.

freemason9 wrote:

sunny wrote:I love synchronicity threads. Just last night I wondered aloud to my husband if Teddy Pendergrass was still alive.

now that's obscure and certainly invokes synchronicity

edit: i'm one of those cafeteria christians, I suppose, but i have a strong abiding belief in a creator--and i believe that the creator's word is about us every day, and that we merely need to establish a connection (or awareness) to appreciate that fact.

i also believe that synchronicity is a natural aspect of "reality" that proves the unity of all universes existing simultaneously through time and space. as humanity matures (assuming that it is, indeed, happening), more of these sorts of indications will become apparent.

so there.

I like this! So there..

Ok. Here's mine. I've thought of posting this here before and not worked up the motivation, but it's a slow day at work, the supervisor is out, and it's almost exactly 3 years after it occurred, so I figure "What the hell?".

Sometime in the early morning (not sure exactly what time, but pre-dawn), I woke out of a dream. In the dream, I was sitting in an apartment on a couch, having a conversation with Robert Anton Wilson. I know he's not a favorite of everyone here, but he was pretty influential for me when I first started really breaking free of my early childhood conditioning from growing up in the LDS church (Mormon's, for those that don't recognize the official name), and I've always found myself to be very much in sync with his take on things. We were sitting there, passing a bong back and forth, and having what I knew was a very interesting and important conversation (though I can't for the life of me remember what about). As an aside, there was also a heavy undertone of paranoia, where I realized, in the way you do in dreams, that we were being watched and recorded from the other side of a one-way mirror by some spooky individuals.

In any case, when I woke out of this dream, it really stuck with me. Most mornings, my dreams fade fairly quickly, but this one didn't. Also, I almost NEVER dream about artists or celebrities of any kind, regardless of how much I enjoy their work, and I just couldn't stop trying to remember what it was we were talking about with each other.

That afternoon I ended up going by a bookstore that’s down the street from where I work, and decided to see if they had any RAW that I hadn’t read before. They did, but money was a little tight, so I decided to let it go.

Later that day I heard from a friend of mine (whom I have not spoken with in quite some time, but who lurks here pretty regularly, or at least used to), who happens to share my same first name- not an incredibly rare name, but rare enough that he is the only friend I’ve ever had that shared it- and who is one of the few people I know personally that shares an interest in RAW, that Robert had passed away early that morning, Jan. 11th, at 4:50 a.m. Roughly the time I was having that dream. At this point, I decided that I should go back and pick up that book after all, which ended up dealing quite a bit with the topic of synchronicity, and which, in the process of reading, I experienced several synchronous moments.

So, there you have it. Perhaps not the most mind-bogglingly insane sync ever, but definitely my favorite personal one.

[Edited, out of hyper-obsessiveness, to limit uses of the phrase "In any case" to one, and on further edit, to remove a transitional phrase that made absolutely no sense.]