This picture is from a movie, The Baghdad Cafe which I saw several years after it came out. I had not seen it when it came out although I had read the reviews and decided it was not a movie I would appreciate. The incident that caused me to see it happened when I wrote to a woman who was a taxonomist and was interested in plants. I had pictures of some foxgloves that had bloomed in my yard in 1989 and afterward every year. I had been told the plant was a natural polyploid so I asked if she would be interested in seeing them. I was ready to mail my letter with pictures of the foxglove in it when an unexpected (and unexamined) impulse caused me to reach for a copy of the pi model with the colored streaks on it . I had no reason to send the pi picture to her, it had not been mentioned and it just happened to be laying nearby when I reached for the foxglove pictures.
She wrote back very soon and suggested that if I'd not seen the movie Baghdad Cafe, I should 'rush out' and view a copy. When I got the email, she gave no clews about why she wanted me to I see it.
She wrote that she had recently had lunch with Victor Mansfield, and his wife. I knew that Victor Mansfield is a well known quantum physicist who had written a book about 'synchronicity'. She had at that time an interest in synchronicity herself. During the lunch Ms. Mansfield had mentioned that Baghdad Cafe was her favorite movie of all time although her husband did not have the same opinion of the film. The remark from Ms. Mansfield was enough to trigger an interest in my correspondent so she had watched the film herself soon afterwards. Then...within a very short time she got the pictures from me and one of them, the one with the twist of light, caused her write to me to suggest I 'rush out' and view the film.
In retrospect. the odd thing about this situation is that I vividly remembered having read the review of the movie. The plot seemed so especially uninteresting it aroused a repulsion in me and as a result I didn't finish reading the review or see the movie.
When the 'bow twist' appeared in the film I was awed and delighted because to me, it was very much 'like' the bow on the pi model and I'd never seen anything like it anywhere. However the odd thing is that the woman could not have known how 'coincidentally' the entire movie would affect me from the beginning scene. The movie was filled with the kind of 'event' that was familiar to me in a personal way because I'd experienced something similar myself. A woman and her German husband are quarreling on a very hot day and she ends up leaving the car to hitchhike. (I had hitchhiked 18 miles one hot summer day when an argument arose that caused me to decide anything was better than staying in the car with the other side of the argument.) As she struggles along, dragging a suitcase, quite suddenly the sky is filled with the two white 'bow twists'. It looked like a section of a ribbon, twisted at the center , closely resembling the puzzling 'accident' in my picture.
Needless to write, I was surprised to see a repeat of a the 'bow twist' in the film. They appear several times in the film .
One other theme that was very significant in the movie was of the husband whose screeching 'harpie' wife had driven him away. He didn't vanish however; he kept a distant watch over her, chiding her doings from afar in a somewhat parental way. He keeps close by after he leaves, murmuring to himself about her shenanigans, shaking his head somewhat as though he is amused, not angry or outraged, just quietly and gently observant. Her nerve wracking screeching seemed to me to have been appropriate in their life because his low key way of living seemed to require it of her. Her husband was not much help.
There are other coincidental 'events' that I could relate that are relevant to this one. It's easier to describe these incidents individually, each stands alone. There's the pi picture and how it was timed so precisely with a book I chanced to be reading such that the page numbers also were unusually significant. The incident in which I sent a picture of the pi model to my attorney who sent it off immediately to someone else was just as precisely timed. But to me the ideas that came from the foxglove that had three completely different tiers of bloom on each stalk were almost impossible to describe. Three 'events' that were complete in themselves suddenly bloom into a unified bouquet of 'coincidence' that cannot be dismissed easily as 'accidents'. I have experienced long strings of events do not seem related to each other until suddenly a 'closing event' happens and that string is complete. Then a 'burst of assembled memories' bonds them together and they are 'presented' at extremely rapid speeds in the mind. It has to be the tiniest increment of a second, yet each event is clearly presented.
The 'twist of colored streaks' was not like anything I'd ever seen, It seemed to me to suggest the twist point on a moebius band with a 180 degree twist in it. This oddity had come to my attention when I was about 9 years old, through an impulse that caused me to make my first one after I read a simple definition of the moebius band. I had thought I discovered the concept of the 'moebius twist' before I happened to come across the term in a book about mathematics. I had believed I discovered the idea that a moebius band joins not only the opposite ends of an object but the opposite side so that a single surface is the result.
I had learned about the 'moebius concept' while I struggled to learn challenge level square-dancing. I had been 'driven', by curiosity that was not satisfied with the response I got from someone about why square-dancing is based on mirror image concepts. In a mirror I see my 'reflection' directly across from me. But in the square-dance set, my counterpart, i.e. my 'reflection' is not directly across from me; her partner is directly across from me. It is possible to locate your correct position in a square if your 'counterpart/reflection' is in the right place, so I had begun to try to keep track of my correct location by tracking my 'reflection during the dance.
One day an impulse entered my mind to draw half of a squaredance set on one end of a transparent band, facing the end, then duplicate that drawing on the other end of the band. When the two ends were butted together, that produced a typical mirror image. But when the impulse directed me to twist one end of the band a 180 degree turn, then butt the ends together, a real squaredance formation was the result. This works with any legitimate squaredance formation, so I was surprised to realize my curiosity had really not accepted a superficial definition of 'mirror image'. I had been 'driven', and I mean this literally not symbolically to look further into the idea of 'mirror image'.
Since 1985 I've worked for the company that used the pi symbol as it's Pride In Excellence awards program logo. The pi model pictured on my home page is located inside the security gates. I was quite surprised to see it the first day I went for orientation, 2-11-85. I was not especially interested in pi until 1989 or thereabouts at which time I read Petr Beckmann's book, The History Of Pi.
I had an experience then that I can only describe as the third major mindquake I've had since 1984. This particular 'mindquake' produced memories from my earliest past in a way that almost floored me, literally when I realized the implications. I 'saw' the experience, memories abstracted from my past that were, strung together and displayed in a flash of time, so that I could see a hidden vein of activity that had begun when I was a very young girl. This string being assembled and displayed as a unit, a single unit in a flash of time revealed the hidden vein of activity in my every day life to a future event, a long flow of events that collapsed suddenly into that mindquake.
The overall idea had the effect of linking to my apparent random choice to read the copyright statement at the end of the book, The History Of Pi by Petr Beckmann, just before turning back to the first page of decimals. I rarely glance at copyright statements but this one brought forth a shorter, string of memories associated with what I read: "The first 10,000 decimals of 100,265 decimals calculated in July 1961..." . Thought, about an 'odd number', 100,265 was generated in my mind, according to a pattern I had noticed earlier in life, such that a kind of 'dialogue' between two parts of my mind, with me as the observer of both parts, emerged.
It was a long string of events that led to being able to understand what this' mindquake' was really about, in this surprising 'mindquake', a finalizing event.
It exposed this continuing link hidden in my past quite suddenly, I was stunned when it happened, because it linked back to my earliest memories as well as to certain specific incidents that involved my response to a sudden 'impulse' that I experienced as a 'thought', apparently of my own. I don't believe it was 'self generated thought' at this point, because I had become aware of some 'other', thought generating entity within my mind by then. It was not easy to experience such a variety of 'thought generating' entities within my mind. some seemingly to be 'body generated', others that obviously were not. I had never experienced 'thought' such as I began to experience early in the 1980's. and by 1985 I had begun to realize some thought emerging in my mind was not my own.
After that explosion of information about my life, I was very interested in pi. I'll write about it later but at this point I will write that it was an event that suddenly exposed a hidden vein of activity that I thought had begun in the 1980's. Now it was obvious it began when I was very, very young. The impulse itself, was the important thing to become aware of, and it was at this point that I could see the distinct operation of this one impulse within my own mind. This 'event' revealed that my 'work' in this endeavor had really begun when I was born and was carried along hidden from me, throughout my life.
I was completely surprised by that 'pi' mindquake. A pattern that wouldn't be noticed by anyone but me because certain specific details in my life are totally specific to me and nobody other than me.
Later, almost two years later, I had became aware of how Carl Sagan's book Contact had affected me. and how closely the plot in the book aligned with a pattern that was at work in my actual real world life. I'd read the book feeling 'odd' at times but I'd not noticed the several references to pi even after re-reading the book. The movie of Contact didn't have any mention of pi in it but the book has several references to it, none of which registered when I first read the book in 1985.
By 1989 I taken several pictures at various times of the pi model that you see under Hello Out There except that they didn't have the 'bow' of color streaks, pure white at the center on them. This 'twist' showed up at a certain point and it is an astonishing kind of coincidence in which precise timing is evident to me.
One day in 1995 I picked up some pictures I'd had developed then I went to a drive-in for lunch. There were some pictures of the pi model I'd taken at a recent open house in the packet. I noticed the streaks of color on some of them, thinking it was quite different than a rainbow arrangement of colors. I'd never seen anything like this 'flaw', which I thought was due to either the film or my camera. It seemed to me this was a segment of ribbon forming a bow of color streaks that was pure white at the center. It seemed to me to have the suggestion of a twist at the pure white center. It was pretty but I could not explain where the image on pi came from.
I had with me a book which I resumed reading as I ate my lunch. The book was The Re-enchantment of the World by Morris Berman. I finished the page where I'd left off reading, turned to the next page which just happened to be page 32. Obviously page 31 was the preceding page, but I didn't think of this as any kind of coincidence until recently. The first two numbers in pi are 31 and 32 is the year I was born, but this is fact and not faulty logic or psychotic reasoning, it is a fact.
On page 32 was a diagram which I didn't look at until after I'd read the two pages which explained what the diagram was about. Then I looked at the diagram. It was an experiment that Isaac Newton had done to prove whether light is simple or complex. When I looked at the diagram I noticed the effect of the experiment was described as splitting light into its components, resulting in 'pure white light at the center'.
I looked at my picture again, thinking the diagram produced a result that seemed quite amazingly similar to the image on my picture. The twist in the 'flaw' on my picture was described by the description of this experiment. I have experienced such precise timing many times in the past but the surprise I felt at this one was powerful.
What impeccable timing! How can a circumstance like that happen even once, seeing an image in a picture then finding a decent description of it in a book I chance to be reading?
This incident required the participation of Morris Berman, whose book was published in 1984, 11 years previous to the day I got the pictures. The feeling of surprise at such a precisely timed coincidence is nearly indescribable.
It's the timing of when they emerge that produces a 'shock' of varying magnitude that affects my body. It may be some authors describe this 'shock' differently, using words like being filled with 'awe' or 'wonder', but it feels more like a jolt of electricity to me. When I read that page the first time in 1995, I noticed the page number was 32 and that's my birth year. But I didn't think about 31 being the first two numbers of pi until last week. They firmly tie the knot of "no chance this is chance" in my opinion.
The picture of the woman looking at two white bow twists, pure white at the center shocked me when I saw it, it was a delight filled shock and I realized I I wouldn't have seen the film if a string of coincidences had not caused me to rent it. The 'coincidence' was not merely seeing the bow twist in the film that is shaped 'like' the bow on my pi picture or that its pure white at the center like that twist.
A long string of circumstances unlikely to have randomly happened brought it to me. The string really began when I read Petr Beckmann's book, The History of Pi in 1989 or thereabouts and had the mindquake. Quite suddenly I saw a hidden pattern in the decimals that I knew immediately could not have been made visible to anyone but me. The personal element was that specific. However I'm going to begin writing about events at the end of the pi string then work backwards towards the beginning 'event'. It was a big one, at least to me.
In 1998 I'd written to someone who has a site about synchronicity, but who also is interested in plants. I'd written to the site owner to ask if I could send some pictures of a unique foxglove flower I've had every year since 1989. When I sent pictures of my foxglove I enclosed a picture of the pi model with the twist of color streaks on it. She wrote back almost immediately to suggest that I rent the movie if I'd not seen it.
Some context setting is in order at this point: I remembered having read the review of the movie when it came out and thought it wasn't anything I would be interested in. I have read movie reviews since I was a teenager and that's 42 years ago! I'm going to be 70 years old 1-2-02.
It's the precise timing that brings about a 'shocking' recognition of the apparently well staged fitting together of 'events' like getting the picture at just the point I'm reading the right page in Morris Berman's book. The ones that are marked by mind-bogglingly impeccable timing are the most important kind, I believe. They imply so much, especially defining the 'inter- connectedness of all things' in that particular individual's life.
One of the main themes of the person I wrote to is 'meaningful coincidence' and this recent major coincidence was fresh in my mind still when I impulsively enclosed the seemingly irrelevant picture of pi with the twist on it. And she wrote back to me almost immediately to tell me that if I'd not seen the movie because she had just had lunch with Victor Mansfield and his wife, who mentioned the movie: The Bagdad Cafe. She she wrote that I ought to rush out to rent it if I had not seen it so I did rent it. The first scenes in the movie were significant to me in a particular extremely personal way because I had lived several 'scenes' myself, that I saw in the movie. I watched the buxom woman and the man basically re-enact a scene very similar to a memory from my past. I had experienced the situation of being so upset with the driver of the car I was in, that I'd hiked 18 miles on one hot sunny day rather than remain in the situation long enough to be driven home. The angry woman cannot tolerate her companion's deliberately irritating and provoking presence so she walks away pulling some luggage, into the hot desert. I had felt the same way myself.
The woman is hitch hiking when she sees the two bow twists in the sky. I felt an electrical shock when they appeared on the screen. I knew that was why the person has suggested I see the film. However she couldn't have known about all of the other 'significant points' where the film re-iterated in pictorial form something I'd experienced, particularly the husband who remains in the background always watching his wife's doings.
The twists are not identical to the twist on my pi picture, but they were close enough to see a likeness between the two objects and they are both white at the center.
The timing was what I thought was quite amazing for several reasons. The person I'd sent the picture to had told me in her note that she'd recently had lunch with a Victor Mansfield and his wife. Who is Victor Mansfield? Mr. Mansfield has written a book about synchronicity and had been in town for a lecture. He is a quantum physicist. During the lunch Ms. Mansfield mentioned that her favorite movie of all time was The Bagdad Cafe. It didn't seem to have impressed her husband she told me, but the mention by Ms. Mansfield somehow prompted the person to go view the movie herself.
She soon received the picture of pi with the bow twist, white at the center from me. Anyway this picture generated in her thought the association that the astonishing 'twist' in the sky was enough 'like' my image to relate it to the bow twist on my pi picture and to identify this as a coincidence that I ought to know about.
Now to reach further back on this string to the first time I saw that picture and before I saw The Bagh dad Cafe.
Think about the implications of the perfect timing before I describe another event on this string: I had gotten a picture that matched precisely with a description of its 'flaw' in a book I was reading at the precise moment I got the picture. I send a picture to someone who has just had lunch with a man whose wife mentions her favorite movie and it has a twist in it quite similar to the one in the picture she's gotten. And by chance the book also had the perfect page numbers, 31 and 32, they 'refer' to pi and I precisely. It is not unreasonable to believe this 'names' me.
This is an older incident on the pi string. It happened only because of some circumstances that brought me into contact with the legal processes about which we joke so casually. I went through the most amazing court scene over a three year period. I had several attorneys represent me, the last one of whom is on this string of pi coincidences. I was a babe in the woods about what I thought in regard to the law when I went in, but when I came out I was...outraged and horrified.
I got involved in a civil suit over a real estate transaction in 1994. Briefly: I wanted to buy a house with 5 acres on a beautiful river and to do that I put my place up for sale. It really is relevant to what happened next on this string, so that's why I'm writing about it. I got involved so deeply that the case went to the state supreme court. During the long process, I began to read about the law and learned to my astonishment something about the 'precedent system' that I would never have thought about if I'd not gotten involved in this civil action.
It is this: The pattern that governs the legal process is the same one that governs most religions and western science. One pattern, 'searching the scriptures of the past' governs almost every aspect of life on this planet. The legal process depends on prior judgment, precedents almost exclusively, yet two attorneys often cite the same case, each having a completely opposing interpretation of what the ruling judge meant. Rashoman reality rules in courts.
Now back to the pi string: One day I wrote a check to the appeals attorney I had retained and as I put it into the envelope my eye went to some pictures I'd just been looking at. My hand reached for the top picture and I put it in the envelope along with my check, without any comment about the picture. It was a picture of the pi model. It was just a plain picture of the pi model. It may seem I'm always having a pi picture near by, but believe me that is not the case. It was very unusual this time that it was so handy. Anyway nothing was said by either of us about it until a year or so had passed.
I was on the phone to the attorney when he asked if I remembered sending him a picture of a pi statue. He told me he'd sent it off right away to a friend of his who was writing a book about pi. The book was about ready to be published and the author wanted to have his picture taken with the statue. So, David Blatner's book, Joy of Pi, at least the first American edition has a picture of the author near the pi statue.
It is important to understand that I didn't decide to send a picture to that attorney. I could not have known that my attorney knew David Blatner; he had never mentioned him. We had not talked about anything other than the real estate transaction. Some 'intent' other than my own seemed to 'know' the picture was laying nearby, and the hand that reached for it was not governed by any conscious motive of mine. It was not my habit at that point to do such things for no reason but that habit was emerging. I saw myself do things that I had not decided to do or thought about. .
I do not know what kind of 'whim' caused me to send the picture with the 'twist' on it to the person, except that my original intents in sending the flower pictures were to supply pictorial evidence to support something I was going to write about later. I had thought it might relate to her interest in 'species complexes' and an idea I hoped to be able to explain about 'synchronicity' as a self generating language. It generates it's own 'story', using events like this string.
Any experience that produces information has to involve some kind of language, a kind of transmitting voice and some kind of 'word'. If it produces 'meaning' from what is in front of me now, or what has been at some time in the past, or what will be in the future, it's talking to me, nobody but me.
But how can so many other people 'know' what their part in my private unspoken 'thought world' is? I knew nothing about quantum physics when I first read what Paul Davies wrote in Other Worlds: that the past is determined by what is going to happen in the future. I have had moments of 'foresight' but I didn't realize it until the 'foreseen event' scrolled into my 'now'. They were nothing monumentally important, but I was puzzled about how I 'knew already' that 'this' was going to happen.
My belief that any definition of 'meaningful coincidence' must relate it to 'an interactive force', in the sense that F. David Peat wrote about it is drawn from my experience of it as an information generating force. If the definition doesn't link it to a process that is essentially one that 'identifies' the individual specifically, as well as an information generating communication process, the definition is not adequate.
My participation was at first 'drawn from me' by a real motor that powered me into doing things that ordinarily I would never have done. It was not a motor in the sense I had known about motors, but I really did name it as a 'drive' that powered me. It was a particular 'effect' on me by this 'drive' that caused me to be able to recognize where it came from. It reversed the content of most of my habits into their exact opposite. And I knew someone very well whose habits were the exact opposite content of my 'normal' habits.
This participation of the 'other people' in my 'unspeakable' life, happened so many times that I was expecting to be able to talk to every one of those individuals about their participation in my private, unarticulated experiences. That was the truly baffling thing, finding out that I could not find one person that remembered what I had.
The precise timing of these events is what is important. I think of them as implying something, so specific, that this is not a 'random thing', it is well planned and was perfectly executed by every participant in the 'event'.
When I saw the 'twist' in The Bagdad Cafe myself I was not as surprised as I would have been if this kind of 'coincidence' were only occasional. There were other scenes in the film that were equally 'coincidental', particularly the scenes that showed the husband of the owner of the cafe, lurking about, clucking his tongue, chidingly over his wife's doings. The fact that this woman screams all the time and is extremely difficult to listen to because she screeches, is 'coincidental'. The husband leaves but he watches from a distance, and is always 'seeing' the scene.
This kind of 'general theme' is difficult to describe and its more difficult to prove they have a real 'factual basis', serving to 'echo' a detail from my life, repeating back so to speak something about myself, to me, identifying me precisely.
The precise timing in other events, like the one where the person I had sent the picture to, had lunch with a couple, she hears a movie title mentioned is not as powerful to me as the one in which I got the picture then almost immediately read a description of a 'twist' on it. That kind happens too frequently for me to feel 'overwhelmed' any more.
When I didn't know it was a kind of 'conversation' coming at me and when I didn't realize 'it' was trying to prove 'it's' real existence to me, by making it evident I could not be causing these events to happen, I felt very confused, at first and for several years after it began to be noticeable.
It's always been happening, that is what is really surprising. It just requires a certain 'heightened attention' turned towards some ordinary detail, and the 'reflected back' to me, with that 'literal sense' added to it. I can give many examples of this kind.
For a few years I was on the edge of 'losing it' every day, because I felt so strange. I had no idea this was part of a process someone else had made an attempt to describe: F. David Peat's book about synchronicity defines it as an 'interactive force'. So would I, except that I had not read F. David Peat's book until I'd been 'on the edge' for 5 years, since July 31, 1984. By then I had read enough about the 'literal sense' in Emanuel Swedenborg's writings to believe he also experienced this 'force' in his time, although he actually wrote about a process of 'regeneration' rather than 'individuation' the way Jung did. I had not read anything that Jung wrote either.
It was F. David Peat's book that seemed to me to have been pulled word by word from a band of thought scrolling through my mind. I had the same 'sense of reading words on a page' that were already within my mind, when I read Wholeness and The Implicate Order by David Bohm. When he described taking things out of their ordinary context and 'relevating' them to a different context, he described something very familiar to me. He had to 'coin' new words to describe what he meant, as did Teilhard de Chardin and many other authors whose books I read between 1984 and 1989.
Billions of words seem to me to have been pulled out in a similar way, as I read books that I would ordinarily have never chosen to read. I felt a sense of 'knowing already' each word, after a time but not immediately. The word 're-generated' makes sense to me in several contexts. By 1989 I had gotten a good grasp of how, what was being 'told' to me, was being 'told'.
Coincidences of the 'general kind' are very difficult to write about, although I wasn't as aware of that then as I am now. I had noticed an astonishing number of 'coincidences of the general kind' on that site, the first time I read it.
Moving backwards from 1998 to the year 1993, on the pi string, I spotted a book and bought it because the cover had some interesting number puzzles on it. The Magic Numbers of Dr. Matrix by Martin Gardner. I had never heard of this author but the cover enticed me to buy it, then I began to read it. That is when I had one of the most remarkable events I've ever had that involved with someone else. It forced me to accept the reality of another world's interface with my life. I will describe it soon.