Synchronicity takes the appearance of a connection
between what goes on in our lives and the world 'out here'. Synchronicity
is a happening of personal significance that defies coincidence or
probability. A synchronous event in my life may involve you, and one in
your life may involve me, although my event would not necessarily be of
significance to you, and yours would not necessarily be of significance to
me.
Synchronicity seems to be nothing more than
coincidence at first glance. It is certainly true that if we buy a new car, we see the
same make and model everywhere. Our reticular activating system provides
this service for us. Those cars were there all along; we simply had no
reason to be specifically aware of them. It is true that somewhere in a
world as large as ours, two men with the same name, leading remarkably
parallel lives, may buy two identical cars with coincidentally identical
keys and drive off with the wrong cars to the same address in distant
cities to wives named Mary, the same number of kids, and a dog named
'Bob'. Incredible things
do happen. If we see the world as fundamentally objective to ourselves, it
must be coincidence. Synchronicity cannot take place in a classical
universe.
Conversely, in a manner of speaking, coincidence cannot
happen in a quantum reality. Given that our moment to moment lives are
derived from infinite resources, given the role a conscious observer plays
in the 'entanglement' of elements of its history, nothing of the overall
structure to our lives is purely random.
Synchronicity can be a chain of events that connect
with some important theme taking place in our lives. It can pair off with what is generally termed
paranormal experience, specifically precognition, clairvoyance, and mental
telepathy in showing the structure of our lives as rising above the
general arrow or sequential flow of time. Synchronous events are intensely
personal associations between events and current thoughts, ideas and
issues of critical importance. We commonly believe we attract such events into our experience,
the origin of the 'knock on wood' strategy to forestall worrisome
possibilities. In reality they simply reflect who we are as individuals. Synchronous events don’t do anything
dynamic. They don't serve a purpose. They are the structure of
our lives noticed on a conscious level.
Synchronous events are associative, or space-like, in
nature. Precognitive dreams are sequential, temporal in nature, but they,
too,
expose the subjective nature of our lives. When we say that the
foundation to reality is quantum in nature, we are saying that all
possibilities, all possible moments, coexist. We resonate strongly with
the world as it appears to us in our conscious immanent Now. It is built
of our resonations, our entanglements. It's as if we inhabit a
rainbow. Some of the colors of the rainbow echo our values. We find them meaningful and significant.
We make them our own by virtue of our conscious focus. We share the rainbow
with others. We share our deepest values with some who resonate with us
and share our common world. Others we do not see at all. In any case, our
world within the rainbow is unique even as our perspective as a photon of light
renders us and our rainbow and all others a unified field.
Synchronicity shows the multidimensionality of our
lives. Not every personal experience
is, or can be, shared with all others, because others are manifesting
possibilities that we ourselves are not. In such cases, we do not share
our historical worlds in common. We resonate with a space-time version of
other human beings who do agree upon a common social and cultural history.
Precognition is assumed to be a view of a future that
is objective to each of us and shared by all. It wasn’t likely before the
advent of quantum mechanics and hints of a multidimensional world that one
could envision a plane crashing in my experience, but not in yours. We
would not, if those differing events occurred, be citizens of the same
history, even though an accommodating version of you may share my world
and an equally accommodating version of me will share yours. Within the
concept of quantum superposition lurks the implication that history, on
the scale of individuals, society, nations, races, and species, exist in
unlimited variations. We cannot imagine the scope and depth of
histories of humanity upon planet Earth that are not our own.
Paranormal experience for those who have not
experienced such has always been too anecdotal to
trust. Mental
telepathy, as an example, has always been considered as communication or transmission of
information from one isolated brain and mind to another, although no such
connection exists in a Newtonian reality. Many of us have experienced
incidents in which we have shared a simultaneous dream or thought with a
spouse, family member, or friend. These incidents startle us, but they
don’t occur often enough to alarm us. We keep them more or less to
ourselves for fear of ridicule, or for fear that acknowledging their
existence will intensify their unsettling activity.
These phenomena are considered suspect even by those
willing to give experiencers a fair hearing. They can too easily be
coincidental and dramatized byproducts of overactive imaginations, or
‘unconscious’ perceptions picked up from our environment. We are often
influenced by suggestion which can reach hypnotic proportions in some. And, most importantly,
these phenomena cannot be
consciously and willfully replicated in a laboratory setting. The part of
ourselves we term the ego seldom has control over the deeper, more
emotionally reactive elements of the psyche. Conscious presence initially
sets the controls of our lives, but our lives quickly reach a level of
complexity within which we are largely along for the ride.
Consider the nature of credible as opposed to
incredible experience. If someone blatantly lies and tells us that they
went to the grocery store and bought bread yesterday, we have no reason to
doubt their statement. The lie has no relevance to us at all. If we see a UFO that defies conventional
explanation, nobody free of ulterior motives will believe our experience without substantial
evidence and maybe not even then, because the truth would be traumatic. A possible lie involving a loaf of bread
has no impact upon our world-view, but we will not lightly overturn the
world we know on the basis of a fantastic claim. Lies are easy to dismiss.
Truths can be hard to assimilate. Some truths may be impossible to
assimilate once the foundation to our lives we have set in place becomes
too massive to reconsider and rebuild from the ground up.
A report of an oddball experience is bad enough.
Interpreting a socially non-sanctioned experience is asking for trouble.
UFOs are not necessarily aliens and ghosts are not necessarily dead
people. Ten percent of the population hear voices, hallucinations are
common to several forms of pathology, and there is such a thing as the
pathological liar. Fantastic claims can be taken with a grain of salt, but
it pays to hear them out to avoid the possibility of dismissing something
that was, after all, important and pertinent to our lives.
Pareidolia is a type of illusion or misperception
involving a vague or obscure stimulus being perceived as something clear
and distinct. For example, in the discolorations of a burnt pancake, one
sees the face of Mother Teresa. Apophenia is the spontaneous perception of
connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena, usually more
typical of a psychotic break 'where one may see evidence of two witches
and unquestioningly wonder what demon put them there', as one description
puts it. Even so, who would logically accept the idea that
social consensus determines reality, or serves as a rational boundary? Our
authorities are as fallible as the rest of us, and beliefs change from one
era to another. We no longer take our ill to priests and we don’t burn
witches. And many of us are aware of personal experiences that would not
be considered possible in the world that cultural consensus considers
'objective'.
