This picture is from a movie, The Bagdad 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 I knew she was especially interested in plants. I had pictures of some unusual 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 picture of the pi model with the colored streaks on it .  I had only recently had the experience I describe under the picture next to this one of the pi model with my name on it.  I had no reason to send the pi picture to her, I'd  not mentioned it but  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 Bagdad Cafe, I should 'rush out' and  rent a copy. When I got the email, she gave no clews about why she wanted me to 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' and soul making because  I'd recently read. it.  She had a  more than casual in interest in synchronicity herself.)

 During the lunch  Ms. Mansfield had mentioned that Bagdad 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  thee one with the twist of light caused her write to me to suggest I 'rush out' and rent a copy of the film.  

When the 'bow twist' appeared in the film I was awed because to me  it was so close to the  twisted bow of colored streaks on the pi model.  I'd never seen anything like it anywhere.  It was a truly delightful surprise to see the 'twists' appear in the sky. But there were many other factors in the movie that were significant kinds of 'coincidence', of a certain kind.

The odd thing about this situation is that I vividly remembered having read the review of the movie. I remembered thinking the plot was especially uninteresting , almost  repulsive. So as a result I didn't n see  the movie when it was new in theaters. This kind of 'coincidence' requires precise timing of many details that relate to an individuals life.

The woman  could not have known how coincidentally'the entire movie would affect me even from the beginning scene. The entire movie was filled with the kind of 'personalized event', some scene from my life was duplicated in the movie.  The movie begins with a woman and her German husband. They 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 two other characters, a  husband and his screeching 'harpie' wife.  Her shrill voice and her fault finding had driven him away, He didn't vanish however; he  remained nearby and kept a distant watch over her, gently chiding her doings from afar,  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 requiren she be the 'man' in their situation. Her husband was not much help.

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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. When these events happened I had no name for them, the word 'coincidence' did not occur to me.

1.There's the pi picture I sent for no reason meshing with her having recently observed a somewhat similar twist in a move, suggested by the wife of quantum physicist Victor Mansfield.

2. That event was preceded by another perfectly timed event When I first saw the picture with that twist of colored streaks I chanced to be reading such that the page numbers also were unusually significant. I was reading page 31 and turned to page 32 of Morris Berman's Reenchantment of the World and read the words 'white at the center' in an experiement that was described on those pages.

3. The incident in which I sent a picture of the pi model to my attorney, no reason for doing that, but he sent it off immediately to someone else  that was writing a book about pi. That was just as precisely timed. I felt very strange and had no name for that kind of event. The word coincidence did not occur to me.

4. Then there was the polyploid foxglove that generated so much new thought in my mind. The ideas that came from the  foxglove, which  had three completely different tiers of bloom on each stalk were almost impossible to describe. They wafted into my thought as I looked at it and noticed aspects of it, almost entranced by the way it had grown unnoticed after I planted the seedling. And I'd almost mowed the seedling down that spring but I paused a minute and a thought occurred into my mind: "Dig it up and plant it in your flower box." Immediately I obeyed that impulse.

 There were many more events that had flowed behind these, a steady stream that linked them together. These  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  that do not seem related to each other until suddenly a 'closing event' happens and that string is complete. Then a 'burst of neatly assembled memories'  bonds them together and they are 'presented' at extremely rapid speeds in the mind. It has to be the tiniest increment in a second, yet each  event is clearly presented separately, linearly.

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, not just motivated 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 square dance 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 square dance formation was the result. This works with any legitimate square dance 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'.

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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 which was 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 seeming 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's quite complex  was revealed.  I knew immediately that what was revealed couldn't be noticed by anyone but me because certain details in my life are totally specific to me and nobody other than me. The pattern produced details that were uniquely mine.

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.

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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', or 'numinous'  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.