Religion and Ethics Forum
General Category => General Discussion => Topic started by: Sriram on December 31, 2015, 06:40:13 AM
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Hi everyone,
Here is an article of today from CNN about 'Synchronicity'.
http://us.cnn.com/2015/12/29/us/odd-coincidences-synchronicity-the-other-side/index.html
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Royce Burton was teaching history at a New Jersey university when he decided to tell his class about a frightening experience he had as a young man.
He was a Texas Ranger, patrolling the Rio Grande in 1940, when he got lost in a canyon after dark. He tried to climb out but lost his balance just as he neared the top of a cliff. Suddenly Joe, a fellow Ranger, appeared and hoisted him up to safety with his rifle strap. Burton thanked Joe for saving his life but lost contact with him after both men enlisted in the military during World War II.
Burton was in the middle of sharing his story when an elderly man appeared in the doorway. It was Joe, the fellow Ranger. He had tracked Burton down 25 years later and walked into his classroom at precisely the moment Burton was recounting his rescue.
"I'll have Joe finish the rest of the story," Burton said, without missing a beat as the astonished classroom witnessed the two men's reunion.
You could call Burton's story an amazing coincidence, but James Hollis calls it something else: "synchronicity" -- a meaningful coincidence.
Synchronicity is an odd term, but it's a familiar experience to many people. Someone dreams of a childhood friend he hasn't heard from in years and gets a phone call from that friend the next day. Another person loses his mother and hears her favorite song on the radio on the day of her funeral. Someone facing a terrible personal crisis is the accidental recipient of a book that seems written just for him or her.
"Everybody has stories like that," says Hollis, a Jungian analyst and author who knew Burton and shares his story in the book "Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives." "We live in a haunted world where invisible energies are constantly at work."
Hollis, the Jungian analyst, readily concedes some coincidences exist apart from synchronicity. But he says there are other odd coincidences that go beyond mathematical possibility. You just can't explain them away. He says these strange stories reveal "the spectral presence" of some kind of energy that deliberately infiltrates people's daily lives.
Try to explain why these coincidences occur, and few agree. Even Jung struggled to grasp the implication of synchronicity -- some say he had at least three different definitions of it, and his followers disagreed about its meaning.
Says Williams, the disbeliever: "I don't think anyone has had a bead on the absolute truth."
So what are we left with? Puzzling stories of falling babies, plum pudding and odd coincidences that can shape people's lives -- and even haunt them.
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Cheers.
Sriram
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I like this story about Jung in this article on it
And the one about the plum pudding below it is intriguing ;)
🌹
Because our scientific worldview is built on the concept of cause and effect, as a culture we tend to doubt and deny aspects of experience that aren’t measurable and verifiable. So often when events coincide in startling ways, the first words we hear or say are, “Oh, it’s just a coincidence.”
Some people might think of it in terms of the odds. If there is a one-in-a-million chance of that coincidence happening, why make such a big deal of it? After all, somebody has to win the lottery! This point of view has a certain validity: synchronicity is part and parcel of physical laws. It doesn’t defy the natural order of events; it simply raises more questions than can easily be answered by a cause-and-effect equation.
The concept that everything has a concrete cause is so entrenched in our modern Western mentality that it took considerable courage for Carl Jung to take on the subject of synchronicity. He didn’t discuss it in depth until the eighth decade of his life when, as he wrote in his preface to the I Ching, “The changing opinions of men scarcely impress me anymore.” A dramatic incident clarified his thinking on the matter. He had been looking for some way to break through to a patient who was super-rational, had rigid, stock answers for everything, and therefore was not doing well in therapy. He writes, “I was sitting opposite her one day with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab—a costly piece of jewelry. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned around and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the windowpane from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, whose gold-green color most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, ‘Here is your scarab.’ The experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance.” On the basis of his work with his patients, Jung said that synchronicity is more likely to occur when we are in a highly charged state of emotional and mental awareness—when, in his words, the “archetypes,” universal images or themes underlying human behavior, are activated.
Before Jung, Austrian biologist Paul Kammerer documented another type of coincidence that he called seriality, in which things repeat themselves across time. He wrote of a case involving a Mr. Deschamps who, as a boy in Orleans, France, was presented with a piece of plum pudding by a guest of the family, Mr. de Fortgibu. Years later, Mr. Deschamps, now a young man, ordered plum pudding in a Paris restaurant, only to find that the last piece had just been taken—by Mr. de Fortgibu, who was sitting across the room. Many years later, at a dinner party where Mr. Deschamps was again offered plum pudding, he regaled his guests with the story and remarked that all that was missing was Mr. de Fortgibu. Soon the door burst open and in came Mr. de Fortgibu himself, now a disoriented old man who had gotten the wrong address and had entered by mistake.
When we talk about synchronicity within the book, we base it on Jung’s definition—
Synchronicity is the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that cannot be explained by cause and effect and that is meaningful to the observer.
—And we include in our discussions Kammerer’s recognition of seriality as a form of meaningful coincidence, which, while not considered by Jung, is encountered in such events as the significant repetition of songs, numbers, and phrases.
http://www.flowpower.com/understanding_synchronicity.htm
:)
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Sriram and Rose,
Don't take any of it too seriously! The human mind loves to romanticise its existence, and stories like this (and religious stories) are much more romantic than believing that the universe/life is nothing more than the result of the properties of matter. :)
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Sriram and Rose
".... believing that the universe/life is nothing more than the result of the properties of matter."
Don't take this too seriously, it's only a belief of the dead playing with the dead. Unless you become as a little child again ....... ;)
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Sriram,
But he says there are other odd coincidences that go beyond mathematical possibility. You just can't explain them away. He says these strange stories reveal "the spectral presence" of some kind of energy that deliberately infiltrates people's daily lives.
Oh dear. What on earth would "go beyond mathematical possibility" even mean?
Fantastically unlikely things happen all the time - randomly deal out a standard pack of playing cards and the chances of the sequence you get is 52! (52 factorial, or one in 80658175170943878571660636856403766975289505440883277824000000000000, an astonishingly huge number}.
Sometimes we find things in our lives that we then retro-fit to these co-incidences, and then we fool ourselves that there must be some kind of ghost in the machine at work. When you dream about Aunt Nellie and she calls you the very next day, the more pertinent fact is to ask how many times you dreamed of people who did not call the next day.
CNN or not, there's some really poor thinking in the article.
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Sriram and Rose
".... believing that the universe/life is nothing more than the result of the properties of matter."
Don't take this too seriously, it's only a belief of the dead playing with the dead. Unless you become as a little child again ....... ;)
When I became a man, I put away the childish illusions that had been fed me by my parents and culture, and began to reason for myself.
It was like being born again! :)
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When I became a man, I put away the childish illusions that had been fed me by my parents and culture, and began to reason for myself.
It was like being born again! :)
Wow, it took that long?! I suppose that's nothing compared to the time it takes to put away the adult illusions fed to us by the reasoning rationalists to keep us more robot like. :)
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"synchronicity" -- a meaningful coincidence.
But how can you get the "meaning" out of the coincidence? What does it mean that Joe walked in just as Burton was retelling the story? What does it mean that de Fortgibu may appear to be entangled with Deschamps desire for plum pudding?
How do you get from events to something "meaningful"? If there are any unknown agents at work causing this, their activities seem irrational.
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But how can you get the "meaning" out of the coincidence? What does it mean that Joe walked in just as Burton was retelling the story? What does it mean that de Fortgibu may appear to be entangled with Deschamps desire for plum pudding?
How do you get from events to something "meaningful"? If there are any unknown agents at work causing this, their activities seem irrational.
Or something has a sense of humour ;)
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Wow, it took that long?! I suppose that's nothing compared to the time it takes to put away the adult illusions fed to us by the reasoning rationalists to keep us more robot like. :)
It is unwise to adopt the opinions of anybody if you are able to work things out for yourself.
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Hi everyone,
To begin with, it is important that we stop labeling everything non material (or non sensory) as something supernatural or related to religion and God. This misconception is the root of many problems.
Lots of things can and probably do exist that we cannot sense with our normal senses and which are difficult to imagine or fit into our so called 'logic'.
Dark Energy and Dark Matter are believed to exist all around us but which we can only know through some odd occurrences and not in our day to day life. Even the normal magnetic field of the earth cannot be sensed in our day to day lives though it is all around us. Only through some special means can we identify it.
Similarly, certain other fields and forces (such as the biofield for example) can and do exist that pervade everywhere and connect all living beings. Science just hasn't got there yet. That is all.
These common fields can influence our lives and connect seemingly unconnected people and events together. Synchronicity, telepathy, sudden cures of illnesses and so on can happen through such common fields. It is natural and not supernatural.
It'll probably take a few more generations for all this to come out of the 'woo' category that it has been relegated to by our science folks.
Cheers.
Sriram
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Hi Sriram,
If there is scientific evidence for the existence of something as yet unknown, then science will eventually find the explanation for it.
If there is no scientific evidence for a claimed phenomena, then that phenomena can only be imaginary.
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LJ
Are you assuming cos we don't know of it NOW, it doesn't exist??
WELL ??!?! THAT opens a nice BIG bag of worms eh, considering what we've learned to understand over the millenia ??? Those things we either never knew about or knew of but didn't 'get' ???
Nick
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LJ
Are you assuming cos we don't know of it NOW, it doesn't exist??
WELL ??!?! THAT opens a nice BIG bag of worms eh, considering what we've learned to understand over the millenia ??? Those things we either never knew about or knew of but didn't 'get' ???
Nick
Precisely, Nick. I'm afraid that Len and a few others sometimes make this kind of illogical statement.
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But think of all the coincidences that don't happen. I've lost count of how many times I've ordered plum pudding and nothing interesting has happened at all.
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Sriram,
To begin with, it is important that we stop labeling everything non material (or non sensory) as something supernatural or related to religion and God. This misconception is the root of many problems.
Lots of things can and probably do exist that we cannot sense with our normal senses and which are difficult to imagine or fit into our so called 'logic'.
Dark Energy and Dark Matter are believed to exist all around us but which we can only know through some odd occurrences and not in our day to day life. Even the normal magnetic field of the earth cannot be sensed in our day to day lives though it is all around us. Only through some special means can we identify it.
Similarly, certain other fields and forces (such as the biofield for example) can and do exist that pervade everywhere and connect all living beings. Science just hasn't got there yet. That is all.
These common fields can influence our lives and connect seemingly unconnected people and events together. Synchronicity, telepathy, sudden cures of illnesses and so on can happen through such common fields. It is natural and not supernatural.
It'll probably take a few more generations for all this to come out of the 'woo' category that it has been relegated to by our science folks.
Here’s where you’ve gone wrong. First, you correctly note that “science” doesn’t know everything – nothing startling there as science makes no such claim, which is why people continue to do it.
Second though you posit a phenomenon – the “biosphere” – and claim that it exists, only science hasn’t caught up with it yet. How would you know that it exists? What data have you gathered? What experiments have you undertaken? What falsifiability test if there? What peer review has occurred?
See, here’s the thing: you can’t just claim as fact stuff you personally know but science hasn’t got around to yet. Either scientists have looked at the claim and found it wanting, or there’s not enough evidence so there’s nothing to investigate using the tools of science. At best all you have is a speculation or a conjecture, but that’s all you have. Just pointing at things that weren’t known before and are known now as some sort of guarantee that other conjectures will necessarily be proven in due course is poor reasoning.
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trippy,
Are you assuming cos we don't know of it NOW, it doesn't exist??
WELL ??!?! THAT opens a nice BIG bag of worms eh, considering what we've learned to understand over the millenia ??? Those things we either never knew about or knew of but didn't 'get' ???
That's not what Len said. Try reading his post again.
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Hope.
Precisely, Nick. I'm afraid that Len and a few others sometimes make this kind of illogical statement.
Wrong - read my last two posts and Len's post properly to see why. Something isn't a fact just because someone thinks it's a fact. Facts need validating with methods to be facts at all, and if not with the methods of science then with methods of some kind at least.
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LJ
Are you assuming cos we don't know of it NOW, it doesn't exist??
Of course not ... I'm not stupid! When science finds evidence for something we didn't previously know about, it will try to find out what that 'something' is.
My beef is with people who claim something exists without the slightest scientifically testable evidence for it. They seem to think that 'feelings' are evidence.
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trippy,
That's not what Len said. Try reading his post again.
It's a common fault of believers. They read things that aren't there and then criticise them. Whether it's deliberate or just carelessness I leave you to decide. ;)
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It's a common fault of believers. They read things that aren't there and then criticise them. Whether it's deliberate or just carelessness I leave you to decide. ;)
If I had a fiver for every time I've seen that ...
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Hi everyone,
To begin with, it is important that we stop labeling everything non material (or non sensory) as something supernatural or related to religion and God. This misconception is the root of many problems.
What should we label it then?
Lots of things can and probably do exist that we cannot sense with our normal senses and which are difficult to imagine or fit into our so called 'logic'.
Of course, but if they are real, we can build instruments to helps detect them. If you can't detect something through your senses or technological enhancements to those senses, what's the point of pretending it is real?
Also, no need to put "logic" in scare quotes.
Dark Energy and Dark Matter are believed to exist all around us but which we can only know through some odd occurrences and not in our day to day life. Even the normal magnetic field of the earth cannot be sensed in our day to day lives though it is all around us. Only through some special means can we identify it.
But we can detect these phenomena.
Similarly, certain other fields and forces (such as the biofield for example) can and do exist that pervade everywhere and connect all living beings. Science just hasn't got there yet. That is all.
But we can't detect these phenomena.
It'll probably take a few more generations for all this to come out of the 'woo' category that it has been relegated to by our science folks.
Nope. some things will be forever woo, on the grounds that they are imaginary.
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Hi Sriram,
If there is scientific evidence for the existence of something as yet unknown, then science will eventually find the explanation for it.
If there is no scientific evidence for a claimed phenomena, then that phenomena can only be imaginary.
Try Jim Al-Khalili's lecture, on "Ted", about how Robins know how to fly south.
I think this is a marvelous example of the strength of science, compared to the silly religious approach to life.
I think this short lecture of good old Jim the, I think now, the ex President, of the BHA, it underlines the comment of yours in this post of yours.
ippy
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Try Jim Al-Khalili's lecture, on "Ted", about how Robins know how to fly south.
I think this is a marvelous example of the strength of science, compared to the silly religious approach to life.
I think this short lecture of good old Jim the, I think now, the ex President, of the BHA, it underlines the comment of yours in this post of yours.
ippy
I thought robins didn't migrate.
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The British birds don't but the European robins do.
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Mostly females, apparently. Southern Spain and Portugal are preferred destinations.
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The British birds don't but the European robins do.
Never say this board is not educational.
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It's been an education to me a good many times ;)
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Try Jim Al-Khalili's lecture, on "Ted", about how Robins know how to fly south.
I think this is a marvelous example of the strength of science, compared to the silly religious approach to life.
I think this short lecture of good old Jim the, I think now, the ex President, of the BHA, it underlines the comment of yours in this post of yours.
ippy
Very interesting, Ippy, but it has my old brain reeling! If I can summon the energy I'll look at some more of his stuff.
Thank you.
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Mostly females, apparently. Southern Spain and Portugal are preferred destinations.
At least one of them appears in my garden in autumn and stays until late winter.
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Well there you go - our man in Spain confirms it.
Hope it's been a good start to the new year for you and Hugh, Len - may it be a good one for the both of you and many more after it :)
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Well there you go - our man in Spain confirms it.
Well, I can't verify that they come from Scandinavia, but trust ornithologists to have confirmed it by ringing or something like that.
Hope it's been a good start to the new year for you and Hugh, Len - may it be a good one for the both of you and many more after it :)
Thank you mate ... right back at you! :)
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Well, I can't verify that they come from Scandinavia, but trust ornithologists to have confirmed it by ringing or something like that.
Thank you mate ... right back at you! :)
Yes, robins are both sedentary and migratory. Ditto with starlings. Sometimes, usually in October, you can get falls of European(mainly Scandinavian) robins on the East coast of the UK. More than once I've counted circa a hundred robins at Spurn in one day, when the conditions are right. Plenty of our species are both sedentary and migratory, such as song thrushes and blackbirds. The highest count of blackbirds at Spurn in one day numbered in the hundreds. They then tend to disperse, some wintering in the UK and some moving to the warmer parts of Europe. For instance, in Lesvos,(in the news recently because of the sad movement of a different type of migrant) robins are abundant in winter, but only a very localised breeder during summer.
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Yes, robins are both sedentary and migratory. Ditto with starlings. Sometimes, usually in October, you can get falls of European(mainly Scandinavian) robins on the East coast of the UK. More than once I've counted circa a hundred robins at Spurn in one day, when the conditions are right. Plenty of our species are both sedentary and migratory, such as song thrushes and blackbirds. The highest count of blackbirds at Spurn in one day numbered in the hundreds. They then tend to disperse, some wintering in the UK and some moving to the warmer parts of Europe. For instance, in Lesvos,(in the news recently because of the sad movement of a different type of migrant) robins are abundant in winter, but only a very localised breeder during summer.
You sound like a bit of a bird-watcher, ekim! (in the nicest way, of course!) :)
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Dear Leonard,
Enki, don't confuse him with ekim, two totally different birds :o :o
Gonnagle.
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Dear Leonard,
Enki, don't confuse him with ekim, two totally different birds :o :o
Gonnagle.
:D :D :D
Blimey, I hadn't even noticed! Sorry, enki.
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Dear Leonard,
Enki, don't confuse him with ekim, two totally different birds :o :o
Gonnagle.
I couldn't think of a more agreeable person to be confused with. I'm flattered. ;D
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I thought robins didn't migrate.
I take it you haven't gone for Jim's lecture?
ippy
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Very interesting, Ippy, but it has my old brain reeling! If I can summon the energy I'll look at some more of his stuff.
Thank you.
Yes Len, it's refreshing to hear something that's both weird and backed up by evidence, unlike a lot of the stuff that's posted on this forum.
ipy
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Try Jim Al-Khalili's lecture, on "Ted", about how Robins know how to fly south.
I think this is a marvelous example of the strength of science, compared to the silly religious approach to life.
I think this short lecture of good old Jim the, I think now, the ex President, of the BHA, it underlines the comment of yours in this post of yours.
ippy
You can have both science and religion Ippy.
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You can have both science and religion ippy
The science is always welcome Vlad and there's always, The Brothers Grimm, the stories of Hans Christian Anderson and Roald Dahl too? Why would I want the religion?
Ippy
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Sriram,
Here’s where you’ve gone wrong. First, you correctly note that “science” doesn’t know everything – nothing startling there as science makes no such claim, which is why people continue to do it.
Second though you posit a phenomenon – the “biosphere” – and claim that it exists, only science hasn’t caught up with it yet. How would you know that it exists? What data have you gathered? What experiments have you undertaken? What falsifiability test if there? What peer review has occurred?
See, here’s the thing: you can’t just claim as fact stuff you personally know but science hasn’t got around to yet. Either scientists have looked at the claim and found it wanting, or there’s not enough evidence so there’s nothing to investigate using the tools of science. At best all you have is a speculation or a conjecture, but that’s all you have. Just pointing at things that weren’t known before and are known now as some sort of guarantee that other conjectures will necessarily be proven in due course is poor reasoning.
Yes....it is conjecture. Perhaps even an hypothesis. Nothing wrong with that.
Dark Matter and Dark Energy are conjectures. There is no positive evidence for either of them. These are concepts only meant to fill the gaps....and to explain certain other phenomena such as.... our calculations of the mass of the universe...and receding galaxies. Nothing wrong with that either.
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Sriram,
Yes....it is conjecture. Perhaps even an hypothesis. Nothing wrong with that.
Dark Matter and Dark Energy are conjectures. There is no positive evidence for either of them. These are concepts only meant to fill the gaps....and to explain certain other phenomena such as.... our calculations of the mass of the universe...and receding galaxies. Nothing wrong with that either.
But you implied that, just as there are phenomena that weren't known before and are known now, so the various phenomena in which you choose to believe as conjectures must be "out there" too, only science hasn't got around yet to validating them.
That's not how it works though - when someone posits a conjecture that appears to have explanatory power (the Higgs-Boson for example) then the tools of science are used to find it. When they do, the conjecture becomes a fact and when there are enough facts that hang together to create an explanatory model they become a theory. Simply claiming a "biosphere" that those scamps in the lab coats just haven't had time to get around to finding yet is poor thinking.
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Wasn't the discovery of dark matter based on the mathematics of the total mass of the universe not adding up correctly without taking the dark matter theory into consideration and as blue says and Cern, that very minor research project, was set up for the purpose of finding the Higgs Boson thingamy jig has something to do detecting and proving the dark matter theory.
I would imagine the finding of the Higgs Boson would be evidence, perhaps a little bit more evidence than the evidence we have for proving we have fairies at the bottom of our gardens, idea?
(Sorry about the technical terms but sometimes these things can't be broken down any further into everyday language).
ippy.
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Yes, the hypothesis of dark matter accounts for some gravitational effects, for example, in large galaxies, which cannot be accounted for in terms of observed matter. A famous example is gravitational lensing, i.e. the bending of light as it moves towards an observer. Various things can explain this, for example, black holes, but dark matter is implicated here as well. There is nothing unscientific going on here clearly, and no doubt, further research is going on.
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You can have both science and religion ippy
The science is always welcome Vlad and there's always, The Brothers Grimm, the stories of Hans Christian Anderson and Roald Dahl too? Why would I want the religion?
Ippy
Because ,like Everest Ippy.....It's there.
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Some of my wife's family emigrated to Australia in the late forties, my brother emigrated there in the sixties, just after I had met my now wife, to the same town and my brother found that my wife's family over there were his patients at the group surgery he had joined and then they found they lived about ten minutes away from each other.
I heard a radio programme a few years back now about coincidences; where this milkman doing his rounds one morning and as he passed a public phone box it started to ring, he answered it and it was someone for him from the Dairy's office with a query about his pay and had dialed his works number by mistake and it happened to be the box he was passing.
Makes the hairs on my neck stand up even now, thinking about it.
I had some dealings with the law courts too many years ago, nothing criminal, I used a firm of solicitors my sister was working for at the time, they gave me another solicitor because it would have been unethical so they said to use the solicitor my sister was working for, and blow me the secretary of that other solicitor was working back to back with my adversaries secretary, I had no choice I had to go elsewhere.
In a city as large as London what would be the odds be on that happening?
ippy
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Because ,like Everest Ippy.....It's there.
Everest does actually exist, nobody made it up.
ippy
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Sriram,
But you implied that, just as there are phenomena that weren't known before and are known now, so the various phenomena in which you choose to believe as conjectures must be "out there" too, only science hasn't got around yet to validating them.
That's not how it works though - when someone posits a conjecture that appears to have explanatory power (the Higgs-Boson for example) then the tools of science are used to find it. When they do, the conjecture becomes a fact and when there are enough facts that hang together to create an explanatory model they become a theory. Simply claiming a "biosphere" that those scamps in the lab coats just haven't had time to get around to finding yet is poor thinking.
Blue,
Its not that something 'must be out there '. The 'must' is wrong and the 'out there' is wrong too.
You assume that its a belief... like believing in Noah's Ark or Adam and Eve. And that based entirely on blind faith in some ancient legend, such phenomena are being imagined as fact. This is not true. Secondly its not about anything supernatural or 'out there'. Its about something 'right here' and very very natural.
Many experiences in our lives such as Synchronicity, ESP, sudden cures etc...and even simple observations such as the interconnected ecological system, emergent properties of organisms.... which defy explanations......make the existence of a common biofield imperative.
As I keep repeating...its nothing supernatural 'out there'. Its like the earths magnetic field which we can't feel or sense in any way but which none the less exists as an important part of our lives.
I have no idea what this interconnecting biofield is or what it is made of ....but that it exists can be deduced through many indirect experiences.
Now the question of why such a common bioield cannot be seen or sensed. The simple answer is that many things that even science proposes cannot be sensed or identified directly.....such as Dark Matter, Dark Energy and so on. And these are said to exist all around us too. Mere mathematics cannot be the reason for accepting something as true or as 'proved'....and the absence of mathematical formulations cannot be taken as proof of the nonexistence of something.
So....the fact that the biofield cannot be sensed directly cannot be a reason for its outright dismissal. There are enough reasons to accept it as a valid hypothesis. Its just that such phenomena have traditionally been associated with religion and God which make them a strict 'No..No'... in scientific circles. This is obviously wrong and is a major impediment to gaining knowledge of our world.
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Hollis, the Jungian analyst, readily concedes some coincidences exist apart from synchronicity. But he says there are other odd coincidences that go beyond mathematical possibility.
It's amazing, because I was only this morning listening to Tim Minchin comment that 'to assume that your one-in-a-million event is a miracle is to seriously underestimate the number of things that there are.'
I'm sure that has to mean something, right...?
O.
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It's amazing, because I was only this morning listening to Tim Minchin comment that 'to assume that your one-in-a-million event is a miracle is to seriously underestimate the number of things that there are.'
I'm sure that has to mean something, right...?
O.
Now that's a coincidence. I was just about to say that! Can you remove yourself from my quantum entanglement please?!
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It's amazing, because I was only this morning listening to Tim Minchin comment that 'to assume that your one-in-a-million event is a miracle is to seriously underestimate the number of things that there are.'
I'm sure that has to mean something, right...?
O.
Who said anything about a 'miracle'?! What's a miracle anyway....could you define please?!
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ippy,
In a city as large as London what would be the odds be on that happening?
Not outlandish, especially given the proximity of many law firms to each other around the law courts.
The point though is that you're essaying here a variant of the lottery winner's fallacy: the lottery winner thinks, "Wow, I won against 14 million-to-one odds, that's remarkable" whereas Camelot calculates the odds of someone winning as pretty much one, only they don't care who that winner will be so all they think is, "so what?".
Similarly, had you thought over breakfast, "I wonder what the chances of running into the other secretary are today", the odds would be fairly long. What actually happened though was that you wondered at it only after the event. You could just as well have bumped into your uncle Fred who emigrated to Canada 30 years ago, found a fifty pound note on the street, or spotted a ring in the grass that your wife had dropped the previous summer. Very uncommon things happen all the time - try dealing a deck of cards and calculating the odds against the sequence that you get for example - but the danger is to assume that there was some special design or purpose beforehand when in fact what we tend to do is to retro-fit significance to the event.
Or to put it the other way, when you saw the other secretary you were the lottery winner and the universe was Camelot.
That incidentally is why the OP is so daft: the odds against the sequence of a randomly dealt deck of cards is 52!, yet any kid can deal a set of cards and produce a sequence of the same improbability perfectly within any normal mathematical expectation.
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Sriram and Rose,
Don't take any of it too seriously! The human mind loves to romanticise its existence, and stories like this (and religious stories) are much more romantic than believing that the universe/life is nothing more than the result of the properties of matter. :)
Hi Len
My best friend's name is Martin. I've just met a beautiful Italian waitress called Martina (I think she studied drama in Italy). I'm wondering whether this is a 'sign' that she should become one of my best "friends" too :)
(she's about 35 years younger than I am)
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ippy,
Not outlandish, especially given the proximity of many law firms to each other around the law courts.
The point though is that you're essaying here a variant of the lottery winner's fallacy: the lottery winner thinks, "Wow, I won against 14 million-to-one odds, that's remarkable" whereas Camelot calculates the odds of someone winning as pretty much one, only they don't care who that winner will be so all they think is, "so what?".
Similarly, had you thought over breakfast, "I wonder what the chances of running into the other secretary are today", the odds would be fairly long. What actually happened though was that you wondered at it only after the event. You could just as well have bumped into your uncle Fred who emigrated to Canada 30 years ago, found a fifty pound note on the street, or spotted a ring in the grass that your wife had dropped the previous summer. Very uncommon things happen all the time - try dealing a deck of cards and calculating the odds against the sequence that you get for example - but the danger is to assume that there was some special design or purpose beforehand when in fact what we tend to do is to retro-fit significance to the event.
Or to put it the other way, when you saw the other secretary you were the lottery winner and the universe was Camelot.
That incidentally is why the OP is so daft: the odds against the sequence of a randomly dealt deck of cards is 52!, yet any kid can deal a set of cards and produce a sequence of the same improbability perfectly within any normal mathematical expe
I omitted to say that the other secretary was best friends with my opponents, do you reckon that you could factor that in and if you did would you need one of those CIA's Cray computers to sort out the odds.
What about my bro teaming up with my wife's family in Oz, whatever next.
The milkman was something I heard on good old BBC Radio 4, so it must be true.
I did hear about a mathematical formula that can be used to recognise random patterns, apparently during WW2 the powers that be placed a grid over a map of London, the registered each V1 strike and this revealed to them a random pattern that fitted the theory they had about the guidance system used by the V1s.
As you probably can see how my comprehensive knowledge of anything mathematical, enabled me to fully understand this now useless info, wot i eard, anyway it was something like that, Radio 4 again.
ippy
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Hi Len
My best friend's name is Martin. I've just met a beautiful Italian waitress called Martina (I think she studied drama in Italy). I'm wondering whether this is a 'sign' that she should become one of my best "friends" too :)
(she's about 35 years younger than I am)
I'm sure it is, Dicky! But tread carefully ... remember this is a Leap Year!
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I'm sure it is, Dicky! But tread carefully ... remember this is a Leap Year!
Well, I don't think I'll be doing much leaping at my age, much though the spirit might be willing :).
By the way, re the reference to "Lallies" on the Christian forum, one of my close friends has the surname "Lally". But one has to remind oneself - as another friend of mine once said - "of all the coincidences which don't happen"
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Well, I don't think I'll be doing much leaping at my age, much though the spirit might be willing :).
Deleted as inappropriate. :-[
By the way, re the reference to "Lallies" on the Christian forum, one of my close friends has the surname "Lally". But one has to remind oneself - as another friend of mine once said - "of all the coincidences which don't happen"
Indeed! They outnumber the ones that do, enormously! :)
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Well, I don't think I'll be doing much leaping at my age, much though the spirit might be willing :).
By the way, re the reference to "Lallies" on the Christian forum, one of my close friends has the surname "Lally". But one has to remind oneself - as another friend of mine once said - "of all the coincidences which don't happen"
Just to note one of my close friends also has the surname Lally.
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Just to note one of my close friends also has the surname Lally.
Also to note that Lallies is Polari for legs.
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Also to note that Lallies is Polari for legs.
That's how this all started.
http://www.religionethics.co.uk/index.php?topic=10333.7975
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That's how this all started.
http://www.religionethics.co.uk/index.php?topic=10333.7975
oic. Hadn't read that on t'other thread.
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I was posting elsewhere a video taken in Kelvingrove Art Gallery today where there is an organ recital and the organist played Life on Mars, as I was doing that Pointless was on the TV with a round called songs with Life in the title and as I pressed Send they read out Life on Mars.
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I like this story about Jung in this article on it
And the one about the plum pudding below it is intriguing ;)
🌹
:)
That doesn't sound like synchronicity to me but I would have to look it up to make sure about the elements that constitute synchronicity.
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Hi everyone,
Here is an article of today from CNN about 'Synchronicity'.
http://us.cnn.com/2015/12/29/us/odd-coincidences-synchronicity-the-other-side/index.html
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Royce Burton was teaching history at a New Jersey university when he decided to tell his class about a frightening experience he had as a young man.
He was a Texas Ranger, patrolling the Rio Grande in 1940, when he got lost in a canyon after dark. He tried to climb out but lost his balance just as he neared the top of a cliff. Suddenly Joe, a fellow Ranger, appeared and hoisted him up to safety with his rifle strap. Burton thanked Joe for saving his life but lost contact with him after both men enlisted in the military during World War II.
Burton was in the middle of sharing his story when an elderly man appeared in the doorway. It was Joe, the fellow Ranger. He had tracked Burton down 25 years later and walked into his classroom at precisely the moment Burton was recounting his rescue.
"I'll have Joe finish the rest of the story," Burton said, without missing a beat as the astonished classroom witnessed the two men's reunion.
You could call Burton's story an amazing coincidence, but James Hollis calls it something else: "synchronicity" -- a meaningful coincidence.
Synchronicity is an odd term, but it's a familiar experience to many people. Someone dreams of a childhood friend he hasn't heard from in years and gets a phone call from that friend the next day. Another person loses his mother and hears her favorite song on the radio on the day of her funeral. Someone facing a terrible personal crisis is the accidental recipient of a book that seems written just for him or her.
"Everybody has stories like that," says Hollis, a Jungian analyst and author who knew Burton and shares his story in the book "Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives." "We live in a haunted world where invisible energies are constantly at work."
Hollis, the Jungian analyst, readily concedes some coincidences exist apart from synchronicity. But he says there are other odd coincidences that go beyond mathematical possibility. You just can't explain them away. He says these strange stories reveal "the spectral presence" of some kind of energy that deliberately infiltrates people's daily lives.
Try to explain why these coincidences occur, and few agree. Even Jung struggled to grasp the implication of synchronicity -- some say he had at least three different definitions of it, and his followers disagreed about its meaning.
Says Williams, the disbeliever: "I don't think anyone has had a bead on the absolute truth."
So what are we left with? Puzzling stories of falling babies, plum pudding and odd coincidences that can shape people's lives -- and even haunt them.
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Cheers.
Sriram
I'm not sure that that is synchronicity as Jung defined it just coincidence due to the fact that there are billions of people in the world and the odds are therefore increased for these things.