This is an example of a kind of synchronicity that’s difficult dismiss as an ‘accidental event’ .
June 23, 1995
I work in the Boeing Commercial Aircraft Division in Final Assembly. That’s where the cigar shaped body enters the building at one end and as the body moves through the building all the parts are added so that a finished airplane leaves the building. It’s somewhat like seeing the metamorphosis process at work.
The crew that I support always gathers for a heads-up meeting first thing in the morning which I attend so I can be aware of problems they are dealing with.
A variety of conversation is always going on. I was reading the morning newspaper waiting until the supervisor came. I was reading an article about a new order for 737's that Boeing had received when my attention shifted quite unexpectedly. I heard what someone was saying although until that moment I had heard nothing because I was engrossed in reading the newspaper story about Boeing's new order. At just that point I was reading: "seven-thirty-sevens". I had already read 'seven' and was looking at the numbers 'three and sevens, when I heard someone in the room say: "What about that big order for the 'triple 7's?".
I noticed a slight reaction in my body, the impeccable timing and my own thought: "3 sevens" is another way to say ‘triple 7’s’! All this happened so rapidly and I thought to myself that what I heard when my attention was shifted so unexpectedly was literally an ‘echo’ of what I was reading. I had heard an ‘echo’ of something quite private. What I was looking at was precisely repeated but it happened only because what someone was saying had emerged from a background that had been ‘tuned out’.
At that point I hadn't heard about a 777 order so the first association that formed in my mind was that he was referencing what I was reading about, which was a new order for 737's, probably the new generation 737X. My second association formed rapidly so that I, watching the formation of associations in my mind realized that the context was different. He was not talking about the article I was reading at all. I cannot make it clear enough that this occurred in a 'flash', a few seconds of time and that everything going on in my mind was as visible to me as what was going on in the room.
That has not always been a statement I could honestly make.
Seeing all this subtle nuance occurring within my mind, I grasped the difference between the two contexts, mine and the other, BUT I could also see that the timing was impeccable; precision that was quite perfect and matched what I read with what someone was talking about. Behind all of this I wondered to myself about what had turned up the volume so to speak so that I ‘heard’ at just that point what was being said?
Returning to the moment, I thought to myself: " Is that a coincidence or not?” At that point I’m planning to write all of this down as soon as I can so I don’t forget it. In my mind I write: “It just happened that by some strange coincidence…” Then my attention returned to the newspaper at precisely that point.
What I saw first was these words: 'By some strange coincidence....'. They were not the beginning of the article that contained them and the words had nothing to do with the article I'd been reading. They were the beginning of a paragraph embedded in an article, but my eyes had just picked up that part of the article. What I noticed was that the words repeated exactly the same words a part of my mind had generated in its ruminations about writing down the details of the co-incidence I'd just experienced.
This second coincidence had a distinct effect on my body. I shivered and felt ‘strange’ because I had experienced another exact echo of my thought within a very short span of time.
The difference was that this time the words were not spoken by somebody physically present. They were written in the daily newspaper but they were exactly what I had ‘thought’, as though ‘echoed back’.
By 1995 I’ve become familiar with this kind of ‘repetition/reflection’, where my thought and what's happening in front of me merge and mesh into a different kind of 'event'. Although this particular incident had several unique attributes that I’d not experienced in the past, I had experienced this kind of even for more than 10 years.
I began to read another article after I underlined the words I'd just read, so I would remember them. After a time the conversation in the room impinged on me again when I heard one of the men ask if anyone else was scheduled to go to ZODIAK'. 'Zodiac?' The article I was reading now was about the Zodiac killer. This makes me shiver.
"What ARE they talking about?" I asked myself, glancing up to see who was speaking. I realized the mechanic was looking at the white board upon which the daily training schedules appear. There was a class named 'ZODIAK'’.
Well, Zodiak, Zodiac, 737s, 777s; that's a bit much, so I tweak myself back to the newspaper story and tell myself this is just another day, don't get confused. It is possible to feel severe disorientation when this kind of event happens, I've been there.
I went back to the story which was about how the ZODIAC killer had left a trail of clues behind. There was a consistent pattern in the notes he left. He had used an inverted cross and written 3 7's in this pattern.
The chatter in the room was full of talk about 777 orders, 737x orders, and
about a class that was named ZODIAK, while I read an article about the
Zodiac killer, who marked his crime by inscribing 777 at the scene.
I repeat the sequence in my mind, thinking that’s the only way I will be able to retain in my mind what happened. I jot down some details on the newspaper, making tangible notes. The 737 airplane, the 777 (3-7’s) airplane; a class about a program named Zodiac, a killer who calls himself Zodiac whose signature is an inverted cross upon which he wrote 3 7’s.
All of these fragments aligned in my mind as strangely important, but what is the real meaning of such a cluster of coincidence?
To make it clear how I view this kind of convergence, before I give my interpretation of the purpose behind them: There is a re-iteration of what I had just read, it was an 'echo' of sorts, a kind of restatement and to be even more redundant, a replay of my mental content happened in the re-iteration of words in the exterior world, by real people but also a newspaper I just happened to be reading had ‘re-spoken’ my thought to me.
Two strands of unrelated events used the same words while I merely observed what was in the room and what was 'in my thought'. This is a pattern I have experienced, but it’s never happened at work that a 'bundle' of events happened in a very brief span of time.. This was a first of it’s kind event at work, but not the first time I’d experienced the ‘two strands of context’ in a few minutes.
What’s the big deal? Well it’s hard to ignore this kind of re-iteration when it happens in a few minutes of Time. It’s hard to believe there’s no reason for it happening. I have to wonder. Why? For what purpose?
The actual word content in my private mental world was re-generated and re-played back to me from the exterior world, not once but several times in a few minutes. It takes a lot longer to write this down or read it than the time span in which it happened. This is a kind of re-iteration that would seem unlikely or even impossible to happen once or twice.
Especially the Zodiac/Zodiak content. The Zodiak/Zodiac incident looped the other events into a bouquet of coincidences that would certainly get my attention. I could recite quite a number of similar incidents, but this particular one surprised me because it happened at work
Later other events happened so that it became obvious to me that a pattern I had noticed in my personal life was ‘replaying’ at work but, in a different situation. All contexts were different but it’s the same pattern! (If this reads as too much to accept, I recommend reading Ira Progoffs' book, The Dynamics of Hope in which he describes a process of life that in 1995 I was only somewhat aware of from my own experiences as having stages, states of mind, patterns that repeat. There are other books that can help survive the confusions that the body feels when the mind is processing new information, Maurice Nicolls' Living Time and Integration of the Life was a life saver. I had read much of Emanuel Swedenborg's writings, which I'm not advising anyone else to do until after reading Robert Monroe's 3 books in the proper sequence. I had read much that was 'backing up' my understanding, whether I recognized it or not. I had become aware that reading words in a book, whether I understood them or not, seemed to make it possible to experience new understanding when I read or listened to someone. Words getting connected to experiences seemed to produce something I could talk about or at least think about in a different way.
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A change was entering the Final Assembly building where I worked, and the new airplane was just part of it. The Internet, computer technology, 'dot com' wealth was incredible, and in my workplace a program that was supposed to eliminate the inventory tax of 8% that Boeing had to pay to Renton had been initiated. That required making drastic changes that worked towards standardizing processes and a primary goal of keeping the mechanics on the plane. That was stated very specifically, the mechanics were to have what they needed, when they needed it, so they would not have to leave the plane, 8 hours work for 8 hours pay. This process began with taking inventory of every item, handling every item and deciding whether it was necessary or could be ‘thrown out’. There was to be a place for everything, and nothing that wasn't used was to be 5 S-ed, or gotten rid of. And small daily receivals replaced large batches, which in my thinking created much more traffic and lots of packing material waste.
There was also re-focus on the business plan towards raising the price of stock rather than building a product, this meant putting out news of layoffs, downsizing, etc. There were bonuses to be awarded to the higher ups, when the price of stock reached certain thresholds.
Quite a number of changes emerged somewhat gradually but by 1995 when this happened there was a distinct sense in my thinking that these changes in my workplace were going on in other corporations also because my daughter worked for Borden's Corporation and she told me they were doing the same things.
'Downsizing’ emerged also somewhat gradually. The stock market looks happily upon anything that seems to promote corporate profitability and for some years the stock market responded to all the 'downsizing news'. That changed slowly, when I noticed the 'market' responded not to the new news, but to the effect of the news as though it had already happened! That was puzzling.
My thinking was affected very much by a book I'd read when I was still in Auburn, the fabrication division about Lean Manufacturing and that term began to be a real 'buzz word' in Final Assembly. The book I'd read was about business processes in Japan but it had been written several years previously and it had nothing to do with they way they built automobiles. Their suppliers were all within 40 minutes, so they didn't have to maintain inventory, they could order what they needed just when it was to be used. It seemed to me the same process could not work in America but when I was in Auburn, (1989-1993) Boeing was sending supervisors to Japan to learn how they operated.
The big difference seemed to me a real problem because their suppliers were not globally spread out, as Boeing had announced was their plan. Boeing had decided to become a ‘world class company’ but somehow that translated automatically in the proletarian mind, of which I am one, into ‘third world class’. Obviously they were planning to use cheap labor in third world class countries. Outsourcing began, and expanded.
I want to emphasize this: This was the beginning of a change of content, in a pattern that I'd experienced in the past. As time passed and events similar to this one happened, I recognized that a pattern I’d experienced in my private life was repeating, using different content This 'new content' was using something that was really happening, a new 'generation' was literally represented by the new airplane, the New Generation 737X. It was a new airplane, just ready to enter Final Assembly.
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Every airplane has a number and this one had something different in it’s number. YA001 had a vowel in it. This adding a ‘vowel’ was a new thing, there had been no vowels in the numbers of the 737 until that point. They were PT101, PT 102, PY222, etc.
When I got the first paperwork that had YA001 on it, I read it immediately as YAHOO 1. We have to say the number many times a day, and it’s not easy to say Y, ay, zero, zero one but that’s was not the reason why my mind processed the letters and numbers in YA001 as 'yahoo 1'. The word 'yahoo' was everywhere in my life at that point in time. The word ‘yahoo’ emerged spontaneously because I had recently had two things happen that cause the word ‘yahoo’ to be foremost in my mind.
1. I had read Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death, in which he described the ‘excremental vision’ of Jonathan Swift in Gullivers Travels. The “yahoos’ in that book are filthy creatures. But he had also traced it back to Martin Luther’s vision which he’d gotten while he was ‘on the privy in the tower’! I was shocked when I read that Martin Luther had conceived, or received his most revolutionary idea, which led to Protestantism, while he was on the toilet! That was news to me! The ‘anal retentive pattern’ i.e., ‘filthy lucre, capitalism, Protestantism, and a habit that’s well known in psychiatric texts of being 'up tight' seems to be connected to toilet training, and all of this had actually begun on the toilet!
My ex-husband had a habit of murmuring to himself…”those yahoos….” , with a certain look on his face, a somewhat rueful smile always accompanied the words, when he was looking at something. That had been a word he used somewhat repetitiously.
When the airplane left Final Assembly it was known as YAHOO 1, for reasons having to do with my having just read about the ‘excremental vision’ and other enlightening (to me!!) ideas in Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death, The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History. It had much to do with reading about the ‘encodement’ of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, a book I’d read when I was younger, not suspecting the ‘inner meaning’ of the story, which was a commentary about certain ‘anal characteristics’.
Anyway one word, ‘yahoo’ came at me from several sources so that when I handled or talked about paper work that had YA001 on it, (which is very frequently done) I could not read or SAY ‘y aye zero zero one’, it was ‘YAHOO 1 to me. Eventually everyone knew the plane as YAHOO 1 and when it left there was a large collage labeled, ‘Assembling YAHOO 1.’
When each of the separate events happened, I felt a spark of shock in my body, it’s a bit of a painful feeling to experience the thinking part of me as it recoiled from thinking about the possible significance. This morning’s events are somewhat new to me, but only because I’m at work, not at home, in my sewing room with the television on almost unnoticed, or shopping or attending a squaredance or a squaredance lesson. It’s happened in my ‘non-work’ life in the past but not at work.
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But the real shocking connection to that information in Norman O. Brown's book as well as the situations in my changing work place was that in 1989 I’d had a ‘vision’ while I was trying to rest, in a toilet cubicle! I was shocked literally to read that the birth place of Protestantism had been 'the privy in the tower' when Martin Luther, who was troubled with constipation much of his early life, received his revelation.
I'd thought of this event as the second 'mindquake', the first one happened in 1984. That moment in the toilet cubicle in Auburn had so much content in it I would have to write a book about it. After it happened I had to admit that my personal life situations were being used, but that's not something I can briefly explain now. The point is that because it happened when I was 'on the John' literally, I had thought I could never talk about it, or describe it. When I read that it had happened in the same place Martin Luther had his revelations I laughed for some time. That 'toilet' event had literally happened to someone else, but I had not known about Luther, who was really plagued all his life with constipation and 'bowel problems' as I found out later.
. That ‘vision’ began with one of the few colorful images I’ve ever had occur into my mind, but there was movement and masses of ‘thought content’ in it which I will try to describe somewhat:
I was very tired, exhausted, worn out, almost devastatingly weary. All of those. I sat down, took off my shoe and put it behind me so the knob didn’t press into my back, sighed then closed my eyes. Someone in the next cubicle lit a cigarette and sighed also. Within a few minutes I was somewhat relaxed but not dozing.
A sudden image came into my mind. I recognized it was my own hand with my silver lower bridgework in the palm. Another hand reached in, picked up the dental bridgework and turned it over, laid it down, then again picked it up and laid it down several times rapidly.
Then a thought occurred: “Chew on it some more. Turn it over, chew on it some more, turn it over, chew on it some more.” Then: “Think about it some more, think about the whole thing, think about the implications of the whole thing.”
An inner process, visible to me, operated as the thought words occurred into my mind: Many memories of experiences I’d had since 1984 were retrieved, masses of them, strings of memories were assembled neatly and orderly in a movie like fashion. I ‘knew’ as one does when a movie is finished, the ‘story’ in those memories. I remembered the 1984 event, that was brought back and many events after 1984 some at work at Boeing. I had many memories retrieved, somehow visible independently but in a flash of time.
Also the way I had been fascinated with two books, The Bridge Of San Luis Rey and Childhoods End was retrieved, with their history. I was made aware, reminded is a good word to use that my I had observed a subtle activity in my mind when I read a fragment in Childhood's End. I had noticed a faint sense of some other within me, that was poised, waiting, expecting while I re-read the book. I had read a sentence in the chapter Last Generation, omitting a word, then noticed I'd omitted it and wondered why I noticed and why I'd omitted that one word!
Than later my mind had formed a sentence from the two books assembling the two fragments into a complete statement. Then the sentence occurred into my mind and I knew I had not formed the sentence. In fact I had noticed how my mind created it.
How that happened in in this link: My central idea.
I had noticed how the complete sentence had appeared spontaneously into my mind at odd times and that had happened before 1980!!! I had pinpointed 1984 as the point of 'radical change' when the first mindquake happened, but this 'toilet event' went back further than 1984, it exposed a mini mindquake in 1982 and linked back to a sentence that formed spontaneously over a span of decades, in my mind!! That had caused me to wonder to myself what had caused it to be formed, then to occur without my efforts but it was a minor curiosity then. I was barely aware that I’d wondered to myself but not said anything aloud to anyone else about this strangeness. Many memories of how confused I’d been in 1984, and how gradually within a few years (1987-1988) I had become aware of certain mental content and activities in my mind that seemed to have a direct relationship with what was outside of my body, the word ‘coincidence’ did not occur to me but the precise timing was so unusual I had to wonder how such events could happen once, then again, and again.
I’d found out the ‘symptoms’ I’d read on a medical chart of mine were what C. G. Jung had named ‘meaningful coincidence’ or synchronicity’. And I had recently read Synchronicity, The Bridge Between Mind and Matter by F. David Peat, feeling somehow that the words in the book were strangely familiar to me, as though they were already present somehow in my thought. He had describe it as an interactive force, but I’d thought it was more like an information generating process. By 1989, I was having problems with so many changes that I believed were the results of a hysterectomy in 1979 and a terrible blow on the head in an automobile accident in 1981. I had been admitted to a hospital so that medication could be monitored, and that was the first exposure I'd had to psychiatric terms, reading a medical chart with certain words on it that puzzled then angered me.
Reading what was written on that medical chart had surprised me because I realized that nothing I’d said was on it, so nobody that read it would know anything I’d said. It seemed the counselor had recognized patterns that were familiar to her while I'd been drowsily talking to her. Nobody that read that chart would read anything I'd said, she wrote what seemed to me a very strange set of words that somehow seemed to arise in her mind when she listened to me. Only one term was familiar to me then, 'ideas of reference' because I'd recently heard someone I knew fairly well use it. She told me it was a symptom of schizophrenia, and that it seemed to her someone else knew what she was thinking all the time.
That was frightening because I knew someone that believed I had ‘gone off the deep end’ and I was terrified when I read that chart for many reasons, none of which I could have explained to anyone. . I became furious that nothing I’d said had been recorded. It seemed obvious the counselor had recognized some pattern that was familiar to her, but I was shocked and surprised to read ‘symptoms’ like ‘ideas of reference, magical thinking, thought broadcasting, racing thought’ without any reference to anything I’d said.
I remembered having felt drowsy when I remarked to her that it seemed to me I had ‘lived in advance’ for instance. She asked no questions about what that meant and I’m not sure I could have answered her in 1986 when that happened. I was in a psychiatric ward because my psychiatrist had suggested he could monitor medication and I could rest. I’d never been exposed to psychiatric ideas or the kind of group therapy that I experienced then. I had several experiences in the week I was there, that were strange, to say the least. But the reason I made that remark was that talk shows and some newly popular books were beginning to address circumstances in my life that I had not talked about. Mommy Dearest by Christina Crawford had opened a hidden aspect of Joan Crawford’s life. People were beginning to come ‘out of the closet’ about incest, and most amazing of all, cigarette smoking was beginning to be talked about…. negatively! That was almost unbelievable because of my history of problems with cigarette smoke.
What I read was information about m that I would not ordinarily have know about except that I asked to read what the counselor was writing. So much came into my mind in that package that I cannot begin to write it interestingly.
This strangely reflected back eventually, in my thought, to a point in Time when YVHV became YAHWEH. My mind and what I’d read in the past as well as what I reading at the time, and what I was physically doing blended after this incident happened, unexpectedly and much to my surprise in a form I’d become somewhat familiar with.
Arthur Koestler uses different words in his non-fictional book, The Roots of Coincidence but he writes about the same idea: "There exists a type of phenomenon even more mysterious than telepathy or precognition which has puzzled man since the dawn of mythology: the seemingly accidental meeting of two unrelated causal chains in a coincidental event which appears both highly improbable and highly significant."
I have the feeling I have been targeted, identified, even spoken to by the ‘re-iterations’ because they were directed towards me but not by any conscious part of me. There was some ‘attention’ at work, but was it ‘me’? I was obviously not imagining anything, but imagination of some kind was at work, working with words and events that ‘it’ seemed to know about, before they happened. .
I think about what has happened: I had been engrossed in reading but suddenly the words being spoken by someone in the room were brought forth as though highlighted and they were exactly what I was reading, It feels like the ‘highlighted events’ had been a kind of ‘word’ that was spoken to me. It comes at me as a kind of conversation that I know nobody hears but me.
That is why I have come to believe ‘synchronicity’ the way Jung understood it is not complete. It’s difficult to think of this as a way to ‘speak’ to an individual, to identify an individual by ‘describing some detail of that individual’s life at the precise moment’. But after enough similar experiences, and many others that are almost impossible to describe, (masses of thought that occur in a flash of Time, but which has to be ‘discovered’ as though it happened in a remote galaxy) it does become reasonable. The word ‘unconscious’ does not apply because the contents of this ‘influx’ was visible, but could not be related to when it happened, although it was remembered, obviously by the observing part of mind that ‘saw/heard’ the ‘influx’. The word ‘vision’ doesn’t seem adequate either. Swedenborg’s term, ‘influx’ does make sense.
It had been F. David Peat book, Synchronicity, The Bridge Between Mind and Matter that had brought the word ‘synchronicity’ into my mind, and also formed a connection between certain ‘symptoms’ of ‘delusional associations’ and a process of human ‘individuation’.
The synchronistic ‘word’ is usually not formed in such a few minutes of time, this is a unique event, but that is what makes me feel ‘strange’ even now that I’m familiar with observing what’s going on in my mind as well as what’s outside of my body.
Its when they converge, forming one ‘world’, that I feel uncomfortable. In the beginning the ‘world floor’ seemed to be suddenly JELLO However: ‘What you get used to gets to be normal.”! Eventually; hopefully.
I can write this ‘word’ down very likely and hope that at some point, it will make sense to someone other than me.