Synchronicity: A Field Guide
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@Sardonyx said
"I've been attempting to understand the role of projected meaning in synchronicities."
Something to think about: That language is redundant. There is no intrinsic meaning in anything. All meaning (on anything) is arbitrarily attached. I can't offhand think of any situation where that attachment wouldn't be a mirroring of the person who is attaching the meaning, i.e., a projection.
Attachment of meaning has enormous value in many situations. It can trip us up when done unconsciously, but not always. However, people seem to have an instinct (or assumption) that meaning is intrinsic, and that assumption is incorrect.
"A question of mine has been whether the meaning is projected onto a coincidence, or whether the entire synchronicity and it's seeming meaningfulness is a magical manifestation."
What would the difference be? (Your "or" presumes there is a difference.)
Of course the meaning is attached to a coincidence (which just means that two things happen at the same time). I know you have elsewhere identified "synchronicity" in terms of imbuing a coincidence with meaning. That's probably useful, so I find it interesting. In most situations, I've historically asserted that "synchronicity" is simply a synonym for "concidence," only means the co-occurrence of two things. There is only a psychological bond that links them in what seems a meaningful way, and that meaning is arbitrarily attached by the perceiver (or someone who accepts the statement of the perceiver).
"In one case, the coincidence takes priority and seems to beg to be given meaning after the fact; in which case, the meaning then supplied by the ego could then be the source of error (if there is any). In the second case, the entire synchronicity and its seeming meaning are a magical projection, and if the meaning can be said to be in error, then that error comes part in parcel with the coincidence, the whole thing arising within the self. The source of the error in this case (if there is one) must be deeper in the unconscious."
So, in one case it's a psychological phenomenon, and in the other case it's a psychological phenomenon?
It isn't the coincidence that does the begging, but the perceiver's psyche. - I don't really have a clue what you mean by "magical projection," though: You seem (to me) to be arbitrarily differentiating it just for the sake of differentiating it. (That is, you are attempting to distinguish a separate meaning. That means there is some duality you intuit would be useful and you're trying to use different words to express it. But you haven't defined it, and it isn't a phrase with a standard meaning or translation, so I don't know what you mean by those words.)
"But in the process, I ended up listing and categorizing types of synchronicities along with attempting to isolate the source of the seeming meaningfulness."
See above. It's always the same source.
"The effort has been to try to understand synchronicity and its possible relationship to dispersion and error in order to avoid them, but that is not to suggest that error is the primary characteristic of experiencing such synchronicities."
No, not error: They may be useful. (There is no issue of them being "right" vs. "wrong." They're never "right" is that means something intrinsic or innate of the events. It's only a matter of usefulness.)
Your categories all boil down to one thing: Pattern recognition. For survival purposes, we are hard-wired to find pattern repetitions, things that can neurologically be interpreted as the same thing for all sorts of rudimentary survival reasons (like, saying, following the same path to the pond to get water, repeating the same sounds to get a particular response, etc.). Notice that such patterns have no inherent meaning, but are simply repetitions that had a reward consequence. They are all prerational, preverbal, and at a lower (simpler) neurological level than even most things called instincts. (This occurs at about the same biological level as the mechanisms that keep the heart beating and keep breathing happening.) The very primitive parts of the brain discharge an electrical jolt when there is a discernible pattern, and we react to that as if it were some sort of insight. It is... specifically, it's a pattern recognition.
Attribution of meaning comes later, and from a quite different level of the brain.
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Seeming....
I think the distinction I've been trying to make is between extrinsic seeming meaning - applied after the fact, consciously, debatably - and intrinsic seeming meaning - coming with the fact, unconsciously originating, with a feeling of certainty of interpretation. The former I've been calling (inconsistently, not in the above post) coincidence, and the latter I've been calling synchronicity.
I had supposed the root of coincidence to be simple probability, with projected meaning, while I had supposed the root of synchronicity (by my distinction) as an event not created by simple probability but by some form of unconscious interaction with the universe. And you're right, if I had continued down this line of thought, I could have ended up suggesting something like "There is intrinsic meaning in synchronicity, but that too could simply be unconscious projection instead of conscious projection of meaning." However, this tangles itself in the meaning of intrinsic and attempts to say that there is an intrinsic meaning that is actually extrinsic but unconscious. It's still not intrinsic. It's just "felt." It's felt meaning, not intrinsic meaning.
I guess I could still bend language to say that coincidences don't come with felt meaning while synchronicities do come with felt meaning... hmmm... But how useful is that unless that's common speech...?
The felt meaning isn't right or wrong, it's useful or not. That's good. That makes way more sense than to assume synchronicities (my def) have their source in the HGA and to accuse the HGA of continuously presenting "incorrect" felt-meaning. ....As a side note, you can waste a lot of time and emotion on that....
So then what?
You say...? You say, this is a power of my unconscious self. It can do this to me, for me, with me, whatever...
Then you attempt to train it to provide more useful experiences? ...or... I guess you could attempt to reject such nonsense altogether... or....
Once you realize that your unconscious has the power to create such experiences, what do you do with it? It can make you crazy for a while, that's for sure.
Purify it somehow? Focus it...? What do you do? Just analyze yourself all day long? It gets old.
I guess what I'm saying is that so far my experiences with it are not very useful at all except for self-analysis. Is there a more useful aim?
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There comes a point - very far down the spiritual road, long after the full awakening of Adepthood - when one gains the capacity to look at things as they are, without imposing projections on them - which also means, without imposing attributing meaning to them.
One doesn't lose the capacity to employ meaning, but it has then become a tool, wielded at choice.
In the meantime, there are many layers of outgrowing the need for specific projections (or specific categories of projections). These don't need to be rushed (though one can usually benefit from increased capacity to witness them - to be mindful of them happening).
We speak of reality that we can "see with our own eyes," but what we literally see with our own eyes has no coherence until it is interpreted by our brains. It triggers our imagination to compose a whole image from the neurological elements, and the brain does pattern completion etc. What the brain registers (i.e., what we think we are seeing with our own eyes) is a fiction, but a tremendously useful one. The Master usually has nothing to gain from dismantling that function and outgrowing that unconscious composition.
Or, in a day-to-day sense, Stop signs on the roads don't cause cars to stop. The drivers cause the cars to stop, because the driver responds to the convention (a variety of imagined reality) that cars stop at stop signs. We often do this unconsciously, but it makes no difference if we do it consciously - it is a fiction of which we can be fully cognizant and still elect to use it.
This is pretty much how the mature Master sees the world and its workings. (There really isn't any difference between suspension of belief and suspension of disbelief.)
So, along the way - for a LONG way - all of these phenomena are enormously valuable.
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@Jim Eshelman said
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So, along the way - for a LONG way - all of these phenomena are enormously valuable."Follow the white rabbit!
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Jim Eshelman:
"which also means, without imposing attributing meaning to them."
This point and the subsequent explanation reminds me something that the philosopher Slavoj Zizek used to say about the meaning. Here´s this article talking about it, in a lacanian optic, which maybe made it necessary to know something about Lacan system, but... Anyway, I find that it can be useful in one or other way: www.lacan.com/zizek-signifier.htm
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I've been thinking about the ramifications of the concept that there is no intrinisic meaning to experiences of synchronicity - synchronicity being the term that best describes what I would consider my own spiritual experiences of the past several years.
Man, I have followed the white rabbit. If you've been around here for a few years, you know. And, yes, there is both pride and humiliation in that fact - pride because I had the balls the follow it, humiliation in the fact that I tried to involve so many in my private fantasies made public, causing much trouble both here and on the home front.
At present, I don't think it's quite so accurate to say that these experiences were sent to me by my HGA. Instead, I'd say that my experiences were the result of my own psychological repressions creating a drama in which I've participated as the main actor as they have worked themselves out, my HGA helping me navigate my (psychologically necessary?) experiences as they arose.
I feel like I'm finally able to view experiences such as these with more objectivity. The "Field Guide" is a representation of that. As my brain fires in response to the pattern recognitions (as Jim puts it), I'm much more able to say, "That was the Frazier," or "That was the Disguise and the Foil together," without reacting like a moonstruck loony and thinking that chasing this or that particular rabbit is of the utmost importance in my life. Maybe all my cute little names can be reduced to one basic function, but identifying consistent experiences and labelling them makes me feel much more in control of my response to them. If the terms are helpful for anyone else, I hope its for that reason.
I guess the most profound insight that I'm walking away with is that these experiences really were generated by my own psychology and my own need to understand. I have fought and blamed and cursed my HGA for "sending" so many confusing signals for so long. It's very helpful to be able to imagine the source of those experiences as residing in a less-whole part of myself, with my HGA being the guide through them all, in spite of my cursing.
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Sardonyx:
"I guess the most profound insight that I'm walking away with is that these experiences really were generated by my own psychology and my own need to understand. I have fought and blamed and cursed my HGA for "sending" so many confusing signals for so long. It's very helpful to be able to imagine the source of those experiences as residing in a less-whole part of myself, with my HGA being the guide through them all, in spite of my cursing."
And don´t forget to read Philip K Dick! Among other things, he´s a pretty good author for “cure with the illness” any necessity of understanding. I find the constant paranoia and changes in the essence of reality in his novels a good aid or reference to deal with rigids or absolute intellectual meanings or representations (like for example your HGA). Most of him is like a subtle text saying “don´t believe anything”, or something similar..
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Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
@Jim Eshelman said
"I know you have elsewhere identified "synchronicity" in terms of imbuing a coincidence with meaning. That's probably useful, so I find it interesting."
I'm pretty sure that's how Jung intended the term to be defined when he first described the concept.
"Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated or unlikely to occur together by chance and that are observed to occur together in a meaningful manner (source)."
I've been fascinated with synchronicity ever since I first read about it years ago. To me, I would definitely agree that it is a deeper coincidence; the synchronistic event would seem to be particularly dealing with what one might call one's "destiny" or "karma," or what Jung might call "individuation." I suspect they may lend each one of us personal insight into the reciprocal relations between our developing egos and the evolving dynamics of archtypal unconsciousness.
Love is the law, love under will.
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I would like to mention here that syncroncity, coincidence and meaning have a underlaying connection that I have not seen directly mentioned, and that connection is memory.
The ability to recall, and remember things is core to our ability to place meaning upon events, and to use that meaning as a stepping stone for a greater event like a personal epiphany.
As an example, I had a group of young kids sitting outside at a picnic table. The kids were talking about animals and what animals they liked. my son wasn't sure which he liked better dragons or hawks. As he was talking about how great he though hawks were, one flew overhead as called out.
This reinforced his belief that he has an affinity with hawks, even though he has had numerous hawk encounters.
I have discovered that if I go looking, I will find.
Always,
Probably because I don't stop looking till I find.When we study the occult, or start looking into our world we are flooded with symbolic language, language that communicates to us, that this thing, this symbol is representation of that, something else, and that understanding symbolic language will helps see the fabric of reality with better clarity.
It is a creative process, unfolding and remembering becomes key to successful living, and by successful living I am going to clarify that as healthy choices, positive relationships and remembering.
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I wish I can give a good explanation for this very frequent happening that i tend to experience as well. I think synchronicities are caused by ourselves but of a different state of being, maybe one more immaterial in nature. It seems that it's not error but a surfacing or leak. It's something that leaks through this realm partaining to an internal aspect of our individual thoughts or emotions. In fact, I experienced one yesterday...
I was downtown in San francisco days ago, making a friend and yodeled an old scottish tune 'aiken drum'. Yes, i yodel for strangers like a total goofnut. Then last night I rode the public transit train to downtown again. As i was exiting the station the very uncommon 'aiken drum' tune played over the intercom. How strange!
Often my synchronicities come as 'themes of the day'. A few years ago i had a watermelon-themed day. I was eating watermelon then looked out the window into the yard at a wooden cut-out in the garden of a boy eating a watermelon. I decided to bring in the cut-out and repaint it because it was faded. as i was sitting at the kitchen table eating watermelon, painting the boy eating a watermelon.. from the tv i heard 'Watermelon!!' from a game show program.
Another themed day was my serpent day. I caught a garter snake in the yard to feed to my kingsnake at home. I put it in a container then again on the gameshow network was a sudden 'Snake!' answer. This time the show was Lingo. Family Feud was the prior^. Later on I stopped at a yard sale and on the ground dead-center of this person's yard was a magic card. I picked it up and flipped it over ' The serpent'. The image was of a serpent style sea monster. I asked the people holding the sale if they recognized the card or had any more and they had no idea where the card came from. -
Yeah... crazy, ain't it?
Lately, I've stopped trying to understand it so much. It's more like an evolving* relationship *with "reality."
My main mental image of it is of being in a small above-ground pool. I move, I make a wave go out, it hits the wall, and then it comes back. Of course, then I think about things like... there are at least three levels of "I" to ponder for the origination of the wave, and there are at least three levels of "I" that receive the wave back. And what's represented by the pool wall? Everyone else? And all the versions of their "I"?
Probably... er, something like that...
Then my head explodes. Too many variables. lol...
And then it just is what it is and does what it does. And I can't predict what will happen next... so... I just decide "I" am in a relationship with the experience itself.
If that makes any sense....
Don't let me confuse you about anything. Like I said, it's too much for me to figure out.
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Awww... Thanks, The Editor!
How appropriate that it demonstrates Jim's teaching here that all meaning is projected...!
@Jim Eshelman said
"There is no intrinsic meaning in anything. All meaning (on anything) is arbitrarily attached. I can't offhand think of any situation where that attachment wouldn't be a mirroring of the person who is attaching the meaning, i.e., a projection.
. . .
It is... specifically, it's a pattern recognition.
Attribution of meaning comes later, and from a quite different level of the brain."
@Bereshith said
"Thanks.
That's right where I am with this. "