In 2008
My ex-husband called me one day to ask if I knew the address of someone we'd bought our home from because he'd lost the deed and he was selling the property. I didn't it have it I thought a copy of the paper work might be in his attorney's records. I looked for the phone number of his attorney but couldn't find it. There were others who had the same name so I called one of them to see if this was a relative. Turned out it was a son, and after I explained what I wanted he gave me his father's address and phone number.
A few days later I realized I'd left my cane in our local Costco store so I looked in the yellow pages for a number to see if someone had found it. The advertisement had several phone numbers on it, so I picked one and dialed. When someone answered I said: "My name is Bxxxx Exxxxxxxn. I've left a cane in my shopping cart..." I was ready to say my cane had my name on it but a voice interrupted me: "This is the tire installation department. Is this the Bxxxx Exxxxxxx that called me a few days ago looking for my dad's phone number? I'm his son, I work in this department. You called me at home then but now I'm at work."
What are the odds against my selecting one phone number from several choices and that this could happen?
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This is a very different kind of 'co-incidence', but it's still a 'coincidence'.
I walked into my work location one day in Final Assembly at Boeing and CJT my boss at the time remarked as I sat down: "Ah, there she is, "She who must be obeyed." Everyone that heard him laughed, but I replied: "Oh, you've seen Babe In The City", which I'd recently seen myself. Its the sequel to Babe a movie I'd liked very much. A character in the movie had said something about the farmers wife that she was, "She who must be obeyed." . I'd never heard that anywhere before.
CJT looked puzzled. "I don't know what you're talking about. That's a quotation from SHE, by H. Rider Haggard. He's my favorite author next to C. S. Lewis and Tolkien." I had not read anything by those authors. He's usually talkative and interestingly well informed on about anything that was interesting to me, so he gave more information about Haggard, Lewis, Tolkien and another author, Charles Williams, each of whom I knew nothing or very little about.
The next day CJT came in with his copy of the book by Haggard and handed it to me in such a way as to make me feel inclined, perhaps obligated to read it. I read it, finding it unlike any that I could remember having read. Its about an immortal female. Ayesha is known to be 'she who must be obeyed' because she rules in her jungle realm and to disobey her is known to result in horror upon horror when she pronounces her judgments. She has no mercy. She lives through ages, not dying, waiting for her lover Kallikrates to return to her.
The idea of a female that lived through the ages was new to me, but I'd been influenced by My First Two Thousand Years which is about Cartophiles, a man who had lived through two thousands of years. That's probably what caused me to feel inclined to read SHE who waited two thousand years for the return of her Kallikrates. He does turn up in a body that lives in modern times as Leo Vincey but he does not recognize her, needless to say. She recognizes him of course because she murdered him long ago in a rage because he didn't return her love. He loved and was loved by another woman. It's an amazing story, the ending is surprising, but sequels deal with that problem.
As a result of reading that book, he inspired me to read other books about Ayesha and Leo. I thought they were quite unusual and interesting But I had no interest in Lewis. I'd tried to read the Lord of the Rings and never found it interesting. I walked out of the movie when it came out because it was not interesting. I watched it later and was completely unmoved by anything it it or the sequels. We often chatted about the authors and their unusual books.
One day CJT brought a book by Charles Williams obviously expecting me to read it, then when I'd finished that one, he brought others. Charles Williams' stories produced a different response in my body; it was as I read them that the word 'eerie' and 'weird' and even 'woo woo' began to have a real experience based feeling. Two in particular affected me almost as strongly as I'd felt when I first read Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke which I'd read in the early 1950's. I'd felt that book in my body! No other book ever has affected me the way Childhood's End did. Williams books created in me a feeling that was unusual but it reminded me very much of how I'd felt often during the years, 1984 and 1989 and at times even today when a certain kind of event happens.
That 'kind of event' usually is made significant because it affects me strongly, or in some degree above 'normal'. I notice them now, but in that 5 years span of time, I didn't know what was affecting me or why reading words affected my body. One such event happened when I riffled through the book War In Heaven that he'd brought in, and this happened after I'd read it once. I noticed this, which I'd not noticed when I read it:
"When Mr. Batesby had spoken that morning it had seemed as if two streams of things actual events and his own meditations had flowed gently together; as if not he but Life were solving the problem in the natural process of the world. He reminded himself now that such a simplicity was unlikely; explanations did not lucidly arise from mere accidents and present themselves as all but an ordered whole."
The paragraph is a precise description of the process I have experienced since 1984 and during the years between 1984 and 1989 especially. It seemed to me that what I was trying to understand and to explain to myself was in the natural process of every day life, explaining itself to me, in fragments but somehow assembling into meaning and context as events accrued.
What makes that a 'kind of coincidence'? It describes something to me, that I couldn't describe myself. The words seem to be aimed directly at me because a mechanism of mind 're-directs' the content towards me, it creates 'self reference'. Its 'like' an echo of content but a new personal meaning emerges, automatically. This is important, it took thousands of events to happen and those events brought the word 'echo' to me, literally. That's what I mean when I write that the 'thing' described its self TO me. and why I believe this is an information generating process, relating to F. David Peat's intepretation of 'synchronicity' as an 'interactive force'. There's an element of 'force' at work, a kind of compulsive fascination and obsessive thinking are required.
There's a symptom that many individuals experience: 'thought broadcasting'. Another is 'ideas of reference'. Ideas of reference is another name for meaningful coincidence. Thought broadcasting seems to me to be the other side of the same psychological coin.
I want to make a point about a function of mind that can be thought about as the 'abstract sense', or the 'abstracting sense', that's a better choice. This quotation was 'abstracted' from embedded-ness in a book. What selected it? It's a kind of mental highlighter. There's a double-ness in what this quotation 'says'. Read the paragraph through ignoring the underlined words. Then read only the underlined words that have been abstracted out, by my having underlined them. That kind of 'abstraction' is difficult to pinpoint unless it happens so often.
What seems impossible becomes possible when it happens every day.
Every day life had made me feel 'woozy' for several years after my first mindquake in 1984, but by 1989 when the second and third ones happened, I had become somewhat accustomed to the way my body felt when something new, unexpected and incomprehensible happened in my every day life. An ordinary situation made my body feel 'dizzy'. I could use words like 'oceanic', numinous but dizzy is what I felt until a body of experiences accumulated so then at times I felt a strong sense of familiarity. Sometime when I read an entire book I had the feeling the words were already in my body, they seemed so familiar. It had to happen many times before I could recognize that. An example is that I read The Silent Language by Edward Hall, then somehow another book came to my attention almost immediately. It was The Hidden Dimension also by the same author. The words in the title were just words, until I realized they described something real, to me, at just that point. An example that ought to clarify this, is that I noticed the name of a chapter in a book that had a 'hint' that there's a secret about the insane' was Perhaps an Intention. Could some intention other than Thornton Wilder's have selected the name of that chapter? I'd read the book several times over a span of decades without noticing the name of the chapter could mean what it did to me then. In that chapter there's a conversation that was a clew to me, who had such a long trail of experiences that caused me to become aware of how my mind had 'selected' that hint, that there's a secret, just around the corner, out of sight about the insane.
That became a common experience eventually, reading a book just because I'd already read one by that same author. It happened when I read one book by William Glasser, Mental Health or Mental Illness, then his Reality Therapy. They were books my psychiatrist had in his office, I'd noticed the first one and asked what it was about. He offered it to me to read. I couldn't make sense of any ideas in it but when I returned it he told me he had another book by Glasser, so I borrowed it. Same problem, the words seemed to fall into a black hole. It happened when I read The Fourth Way by Ouspensky, then just happened to notice In Search Of The Miraculous and then Tertium Organum which just happened to come to my attention at a point when certain other events happened, that caused me to really think in a different way. about threeness. I was experiencing 'threeness' in a way I could not have understood then, the idea had to grow.
Reading a book that seemed familiar already was one aspect but there was another attribute that took some years to really notice. When I read "Listening With The Third Ear" by Theodore Reik especially the title was just words. Eventually I began to believe a new 'third ear/eye' combination was being brought to my attention, the words told me what I was doing! This was truly unexpected. The amazing feeling of being told what was happening in the title of a book as well as a content told me what I was actually doing grew from feeling the sense of familiarity. In The Bond Of Power by Joseph Chilton Pearce, he mentioned the 'insight realm', and the 'postulate arrived full blown in the mind' but they were just words I would never have thought described my mindquake, or where it had originated. The first book was often followed by another by the same author, and that's the only reason I could think explained why I selected, the next one. There were several authors whose books came to my attention that way. )The precise timing was not apparent for quite a long period of time. It was never a choice I made, my body seemed to have taken control of my life then. I watched and listened without much curiosity for a few years, between 1984 and about 1987.
CJT and I got along well in many ways because we had a deep interest in movies, books and he seemed to me to be quite an amazingly involved person in his relationship to his family. He'd had a religious experience that he'd mentioned to me. It had caused him to change radically some habits that he had. He was often extremely difficult for me to be around, he was so energy filled at times, filled with religious zeal and attempts to get me to 'accept Jesus as my saviour'. He was always moving faster than anyone I'd ever known. I've never had relationships with a man who was so easy to talk to that way and I can't remember the exact situation that brought it about but I read several of his Charles Williams books. In fact he gave them to me because he was no longer so interested in them, and some of them he'd never understood when he read them. It was only after I read books that generated the same kind's of 'unreality' that I'd experienced that I could begin to try to use words that had been abstracted out, as though another eye within my body knew where to find them and my body went to where the words were written, spoken or thought in some ordinary every day circumstances.