Theos-Talk Archives (February 2003 Message tt00030)

Dallas,

That's great stuff. When we can't see the underlying
cause of a coincidence it is easy to say it must be
"magical", "divine intervention", life changing and
the like. I believe these sorts of people just
couldn't be bothered thinking. I remember years ago a
friend came up to me and told me a story he had heard.
He said that a man in hospital was on some sort of
weighing table/device when he passed away. This device
recorded a drop in the man's weight of 5kg at the time
of his death. My friend concluded that it must have
been the man's soul escaping his body and going to
heaven. Firstly, unless someone here can confirm this
story, I think it sounds like a load of bollucks.
Secondly, it is rather presumptuous to conlcude that
the only mechanism whereby a man could loose so much
weight is via the soul escaping (if indeed a human can
biologically/physiologically can possibly lose that
amount of weight in an instant). I concluded that my
friend was desperate to believe in a soul going to
heaven because not two months before he had lost his
own father. Perhaps a desperate coincidence there. 

Another coincidence I absolutely love is when you sit
in a cafe/milk bar/pub/any such public venue and just
watch the flow of people through the door. I have
heard countless times shop keepers and the like
complain that they sit around for a while with nothing
to do then all of the sudden twenty people want
vegemite sandwiches. If any of you are sceptic about
this just go to any shop and ask (of course some
places are just so busy they don't have time to
realise any patterns - there was once I when was doing
some volunteer work for the Australian Conservation
Foundation, a bit of stock take in a shop they had,
and, being able to stay in the store all day, this
pattern was all too apparent.)

Of course we can sit here all day and scream that
there are underlying causes behind coincidences but
how do you convince people who do not want to believe?
An example is the familiar phenonmena among
synchronists of the recurrence of the number 23. Why
this number? Why not any other number? Just this last
week the number 23 has started popping up everwhere in
my own life but, I also noticed, so has the number 7.
Is it really a coincidence or have I just become aware
that the number 23 (and 7) are just really common
numbers in our society.

Scientists have tried to explain coincidences, most
commonly through the phenomenon of synchronicity.
Mansfield (1995) in "Synchronicity, Science and
Soul-Making" argued that the acausal nature of
synchronicity (and through inference to all
coincidental events) could be proven through quantum
physics. Indeterminism and all that who-ha; As above,
so below; quatum holograms etc etc etc. However, one
need not resort to quantum physics and all one needs
is a deck of playing cards. Shuffle them so that they
are sufficiently random and then lay them out one by
one, side by side. Choose a category, such as red and
black cards or the four suites (so long as it is
consistent) and the order in which these cards appear
will follow a power law distribution. When something
follows a power law it is fractal; a fractal is seen
the same "as above, so below". And here in lies the
causal nature of coincidences. Acausality could be
seen as Maya when we apply the notion to coincidences.
There is nothing acausal about it. Everything in the
universe has meaning, if not to me then to something
else, and ultimately we are all relative to the
absolute, interconnected, one.

Regards,
Mic


--- dalval14@earthlink.net wrote:
> Monday, February 03, 2003
> 
> Re: Coincidences
> 
> Dear Mic:
> 
> Coincidences in a universe of LAW ? Surely there
> are, but then they
> are ruled by the combined force of many, many
> actions and wills --
> also they produce waves -- like the ocean surface,
> and tides as you
> can guess, and now and then we have tsunamis.
> 
> WE can only guess at the complexity of earth
> movement at levels of 500
> miles or so below the earth's surface and the
> tectonic plates floating
> on them.. Earthquakes produce tsunamis sometimes
> hundreds and
> thousands of moles away. And there still
> unexplained SUPER WAVES that
> seem to flow through the vast oceans and
> occasionally whole ships
> founder and go down with almost no warning. One of
> my friends' sons
> as an officer on an ore freighter got caught in this
> kind of force.
> His ship went down without trace or warning.
> 
> Everything is interrelated, and in a UNIVERSE OF LAW
> there is no such
> thing as CHANCE or LUCK. We may not know or see the
> CAUSES, but that
> does not mean they are absent.
> 
> Man is however a sample of a free mind. He can
> create by thought
> (using mind-matter) and bring these into actions on
> this plane of
> matter. In dreams we handle "dream matter," and in
> "fancy or
> imagination" still another kind of matter is handled
> viewed and
> shaped. Perhaps our attention has never been drawn
> to these things,
> or they are explained away ( How ?)
> 
> But one important thing to consider is that all
> material constructs
> (molecules and crystals and solid or liquid or
> gaseous things, and
> living cells) have an ELECTRO-MAGNETIC counter part
> on the plane of
> the ASTRAL. The atoms and molecules aggregate along
> those (at that
> level of the very small) patterns and thus we get
> all kinds of "solid
> matter" things. If our physics took this into
> account (AND THEY ARE
> BEGINNING TO DO SO) there would be a revolution in
> fabricating and
> building, as well as altering things.
> 
> But the one idea that is all-important and that is
> that LAW RULES IN
> EVERYTHING. It always has and will continue to do
> so. Nature and the
> patterns of the world, and things in and on it, the
> universe (near and
> far) visible and invisible were laid so long ago we
> have forgotten,
> but we all rely on their exactitude for our
> existence. Why ?
> 
> See if that helps.
> 
> Dal
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mic Forster
> Sent: Sunday, February 02, 2003 11:58 PM
> To:
> Subject: coincidences - Dallas
> 
> Dear Dallas,
> 
> I was hoping you could help me out. Do you know of
> any
> good theosophical reference that discusses the
> causes
> of coincidences? Everything that I seem to read
> leads
> back to astrology and the "coincidental" effects
> planets and stars have on our lives.
> 
> Thanks for any help,
> Michael Forster
> 
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