brain
July 2008 
Synchronicity and a Unified Theory of Conciousness
Bill
Here's a conversation to consider, something that could become very significant over the next 20 or so years - the role of what we will call "Synchronicity" in non-ordinary mind experiences and social mind experiences. Jeff Mishlove is starting to talk about this in his zaadz blog here:
http://jeff.zaadz.com/blog/2006/3/the_sixth_sense_is_not_a_sense
What is "synchronicity"? It's 'meaningful coincidence'. What is "meaningful coincidence"? Well, that's the big question. Is the coincidence meaningful because we impose meaning on it, or is it meaningful because somehow it reflects some hidden domain of information flow? Is it the invisible hand of the quantum soup in action, or a function of the brain's unmapped abilities to extract meaning out of noise?
The friend who invited me here, Jordan Gruber of www.enlightenment.com , and I have been discussing the synchronicity model for many years. Long ago in one of our conversations we invented the model of "sychronicity bending" to explain why so many strikingly odd and unusual coincidences occur around people who are doing ritual and meditative practices to induce spiritual experiences or to celebrate 'sacred' principles.
The idea is, that if you concentrate the mind, and especially a group of minds, in a certain way or group of ways, you create an effect that looks as if it works like a lens, to bend sychronicity, that is, to bend meaningful coincidences, and make them more likely to happen.
This attempts to explain _why_ odd events tend to happen around meditators and groups of meditators, and it also explains something else very important - why are these odd coincidences that happen during meditations or spiritual disciplines so 'wierd'?
Take as an example of a wierd event - a group is meditating, and at a critical point in the meditation an electric bulb burns out with an especially loud 'pop'. (many meditation practicioners will have seen this kind of thing happening relatively often.) It seems crystal clear to everyone involved that this is a meaningful event, but it's weird, just what does it mean exactly?
The idea of "synchronicity bending" attempts to explain something about this. The mental effort makes it more likely that _some_ kind of meaningful coincidence will occur, and that we will stimulated to see meaning in it, but the event itself is created out of the background noise, guaranteeing that it's meaning will be ambiguous and in some way a little bizarre.
This led Jordan and I into further conversations about the idea of the "Conservation of Synchronicity" - the idea that there is only so much synchronicity possible at any given moment, such that you have to save up synchronicity to 'make' any big coincidence to occur. But that's another story...
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Hi, Bill! I’m so glad to meet you, and glad to see we both know Jordan (before Zaadz) and both love the subject of synchronicity! I’ve got a page on the topic of
href=”http://realityshifters.com/pages/articles/synchronicity.html”>
synchronicity at my web site
Your blog entry here has me thinking about a really excellent book I just finished reading called “The Synchronized Universe.” The author, Claude Swanson, is a physicist with a lifelong fascination for esoteric metaphysical phenomena… and he’s got a web site where you can learn more about his work and order his book at
href=”http://www.synchronizeduniverse.com/”>
Synchronized Universe
The reason I mention this book is that Claude Swanson has a fascinating theory to explain synchronicities in terms of what he calls the Synchronized Universe Model (SUM), which describes how consciousness influences the physical world. This theory explains that all particles in the universe undergo tiny orbits around their central, average locations… and that each particle has a fundamental frequency, which is proportional to its mass. The synchronized universe model predicts that particles that are not in “synch” will be invisible and will not interact with visible particles, but will appear as “noise,” while particles that are in synch can interact across distances of time and space. When people meditate, they gain the benefit of attaining a state of conscious coherence of frequency, which enables adepts such as yogis to demonstrate psychokinetic powers as all the cells in their body act together in unison to achieve a desired result.
I've always enjoyed that Jung story, the one about the beetle, that you quoted in your Reality Shifters entry.
Both because it's a classic synchronicity story, and because it classically illustrates one of the biggest problems with synchronicity.
Which is, how do you tell an actual, distinctively and measurably ofdd coincidence from “selective perception”?
The selective perception idea goes like this - we remember more intensely events which give us a reward. It's often used to explain gambling addictions - the gambler vividly remembers the one time he wins, and forgets all the other times he loses - the one time he wins is remembered as larger than life, with a special vividness, such that he can tell the story of his big win over and over, and it becomes the model by which he judges the impulse to gamble, despite the fact that over the long term the gambling costs him far more than the times he has won.
I'm not saying that synchronicity is only in the brain, but that there are these brain problems that have to be looked at.
And even if we end up, at the end of things, deciding that it _is_ all in the brain, that doesn't mean we aren't dealing with something extremely important. How we find meaning is an important question.
Taking that Jung story as an example - how do we explain why and how Jung and his client, sitting in a room talking about dreams, “cause” a beetle to start tapping on the window?
It's a very peculiar kind of a question. Almost all humans can _feel_ it's an important question, but we can't expect a strictly materialist skeptic to recognize that there is a real question there.
The universe is infinitely potential - which means that within certian parameters of the workings of the universe - laws of physics, certain 'random chance' events can and do occur. Within this 'almost infinite' probability of events occuring is the possibility of something to occur that will be meaningfull to the viewer. Synchronicity is when events occur that are significant & meaningfull to the experiencer. Now humans have a vast capactiy to find meaning in anything - we humans abhor chaos and meaninglessness.
With our minds we can start to' bend' an influence the world around us - thus increasing the probability of synchronistic events to occur.
The book Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World - explains the experiments done in Princeton which show that the mind can alter the probablity of the physical world - in a slight statistically demonstratable amount.
check out http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/
Hello Bill,
We're surrounded by chaos. It's seemingly random without any structure. We feel victimized by this chaos.
But looking at it in a different way it becomes possible to see structure in chaos; lots of structure. Life appears to be one big network of connection and synchronicity. Overcoming the seeming chaos is appearing to be the goal of the plan of creation.
The separate incidents of chaos on our life paths appear to be well-measured challenges. It are unpleasant gifts to the illusive structure of our ego and of familiarities with which we have been identifying ourselves, but they can help us in manifesting more of our hidden soul treasures and in becoming who we really are.
Birth is a situation of chaos to the ego and it's painful. Most likely we will resist it as long as possible. That's why it hurts so much.
All incidents in life are a kind of birth experiences. Birth to a new reality of consciousness can be a very successful and happy event. Birth challenges - to overcome the relative narrow minded ones who we thought we were - can also die in the bud as a result of our resistance. Then we'll have to wait for a new period of pregnancy and for the next best moment to come out of the womb.
We are all vulnerable to special kinds of darkness and we are all connected to a certain level of light. That's what we bring with us - demons and angels - when we start meditating or celebrating sacred principles in a group of people.
The darkness / light ratio of the group and of the room ( the room has its own energy status based on its darkness / light history ) will result in a certain kind of chemistry.
Because of focussing positive energy ( inviting light forces by a group ceremony; a ritual which may have strong energy connections with the same kind of rituals in the past because of using the same prayers ) and because of the alarm which is given to the forces of darkness as a reaction to this ( the hegemony of their realm is seriously threatened by a group effort ), the chemistry of such an event will be odd and weird and might be explosive. Darkness will resist. It will disturb the group relations by acting upon the individual weaknesses of the members of the group ( their tendencies towards fear, superstition, weariness, ego tripping, backbiting, lying, lust, annoyance, quarreling, causing physical discomforts, … ). Darkness succeeds in its intention when the light group is falling apart. Darkness also succeeds in its role of tough sparring mate in the plan of creation when the light group is overcoming all attacks and is growing stronger.
Kind regards