Coincidences

[kensuguro]

because we're a bunch of monkeys? lol.

[garyb]

no, we're men.

that monkey! that monkey!......

[astroman]

which monkey ? the perky one or those enjoying beach life ?

[Cochise]

Plucky monkey the first one!

Considering all you've said combined with my own thoughts:

The kind of coincidence I was referring to is an event "going in resonance" with another event I have in memory, cause they are joined by something. The workings of course is the same as for ideas association.

Sometimes the correlation of two or more events of this kind brings considerations that the single events shouldn't have triggered.

If some of these considerations are deeper than others and come from events involving natural phenomenon, or wild animals, I can think about kind of a greater logic ruling the events, or about a projection of my own thoughts on this events; but the greatest part of the the coincidences involves highly interconnected and organized humans. If I can anyway assume any sort of connection between the people involved in the different events forming a 'coincidence', then I tend to look at the brought considerations like at a sort of message, or induced idea. The connection between the people often is not required, though...

Maybe I should have to talk about it with a shrink; or with a detective...cause this happens very often to me, especially during some periods

[Cochise]

Sorry i was editing while you were posting...

[astroman]

...Situation you think you know exactly what will happen in the next second ...

yeah, me riding the bike down into the subterrean parking garage, it just had started to rain...
telling myself ...shouldn't go as fast as usual, might be slippery... and wooosh - not as fast wasn't slow enough
I even managed to hit the saw-style concrete with my ellbow - nice abrasure to entertain me the following week
though I almost watched it before it happened, I couldn't do anything against it
you bet I'm much slower downways now...

cheers, Tom

[Shroomz~>]

It's plausible that everything is everything & everywhere all at the same time. Given that theory, it's possible that the de-ja-vu phenomena actually derives from our link with everything & some sort of universal memory which is part of what makes us what we are. In other words, not past lives as normally spoken of or have thought to know of, but the past or other things & places that we are or have been. Ok, maybe now I'm waffling.

[garyb]

Shroomz, you've nearly hit it on the head.

the future is full of possibilities, but they're all here too, by the definition of space. time is merely a measurement of space like any other dimension.

[alfonso]

there's more going on in the universe than we know. period.

how do you know?



because if you know it's not true and if you don't know you can't say it.

because i know there are things i don't know. because my grandfather who invented many of the products you are in contact with everyday didn't know some things.

it's possible to know that you don't know. who knows the whole future?

Nobody....the future doesn't exist so it can't be known. It can only be imagined, but even so it's not the future, it's actually a part of the present happening in some areas of your brain.
Rather than "building the future" we can try to "modify the present", which changes yes, but we only can live as such, as present.
Regarding knowing that we don't know there is nothing to argue basically, except for the fact that I'd use the word "presume", but I wanted to point out the confusion that happens very often between reality and imagination, where some people can't just live with the idea of not knowing but actually want's to say what we don't know, which is funny somehow.

Similarly coincidences only exist in the mind, when two events are classified as such. A relation is a mental phenomenon.

[alfonso]

Shroomz, you've nearly hit it on the head.

the future is full of possibilities, but they're all here too, by the definition of space. time is merely a measurement of space like any other dimension.

Space is a measurement too.

[Shroomz~>]

time is merely a measurement of space like any other dimension.

Seems to me that they're the same thing looked at from different perspectives.

[garyb]

"dimension" means "a measurement of spatial extent".

time is a measurement of space just like depth or width. ALL the space is here whether you have sense organs to "see" it or not.

[kensuguro]

well, for me, whether it be with buddhism /hindu (or whatever else culture that points to the third eye) with the third eye, or through mathematical and understanding through physics and prgramming, any measurable thing can be taken as any axis... and when you change the axis and the comparison makes sense, it always gives you a new perspective on things. Especially true with statistics!! The key is in the creativity to choose whch variable to use as the axis.

But going back to coincidences and concept linkings providing new views.... it's always good to keep an "eye" out for new possibilities. There's nothing more deadly than saying no to a concept or viewpoint that you don't know about. If you look carefully, there are always links that lead to a paradigm shift. If there isn't, you haven't looked enough... or maybe just haven't been getting out too much. Now if that sort of intellectual curiosity could be conceptually linked to the "third eye" concpet, then we all surely have it, and need to develope it! That's coming from an all beer drinking, burger eating asian. lol.... who's wife just "coincidentally" (and with flair and debonaire, and all other adjectives relating to graciousness) exited out the front door from a fit.. hehe. now that's a coincidence. Oh marriage, it's much more than us primates can comprehend.

[braincell]

Our brains are biologically trained to detect patterns for hunting, gathering food, and avoidance of predators. This pattern recognition can be experienced more clearly when hallucinating. That doesn't mean hallucinations are real or even useful. Pattern recognition though has something to do with advanced human intelligence. If you can filter out the garbage it's good but otherwise it's a hindrance and leads to stupid decisions. An example of garbage patterns are astrological signs around which myths are born. Just because we love patterns, doesn't mean they are significant. Because we want to arrange things in a meaningful way, it seems to have some truth. What a waste of time! That is all bullshit to me. Please don't buy all this mythological brainwashing. It's false knowledge.

[kensuguro]

yup, that's why I brought up the relation to mathematical axis swapping. It can be called whatever, but at the base level, it is what is happening in the brain, at the cognitive level... or should I say... at the level of a "braincell".

But I do agree that people can call it whatever they want, whether it be spiritual or not. Even if I understand things because I've seen similarities in different cultures, I can say "becuase it says so in the bible", or "the that's what I saw in nirvana", or "because I learned it in cog sci class". It's all the same, it's just we all need different rationals to be able to take in that notion and make it a part of our value system. As long as we can take in new notions and idea, all if fine. It's when we stop it, that is the problem. Ignorance is bliss? Nah, ignorance is the lack of Google. lol. (hey Google, give me some advert dollars for that!)

Whether it's spiritual or not, though, I do think that the sort of circular nature, and the fractal, infinite nature of this relationship lends itself to a kind of primitive admiration. I wouldn't say it's just limited to anything mathematical / scientific / theoretical, just on paper sort of thing. But in a kinesthesic way, there is a sense of awesomeness. And whether that is whatever spirituality is, I don't know, but it is something very special.

Oh, conversely, I remember when I was on a... uh... "perfectly legal" hallucinogen, commonly referred to as shrooms (legal at the time in Japan), I remembered while the thing put me through the paces of patterns... "hey, I know that"... "I already know that".... "I already thought that through".. all in all, ending up with a feeling of "well, why the heck did I just get a review of what I already know". Maybe I already do think in extreme patterns. I did end up with a 2 week frenzy of loving everything and everyone who came in my sight tho. The world was just so full of love! (except, in reality, it was just me. lol) I thought, if only everyone else in the world could feel the same way. But then, I realized after the frenzy, that the world would fall apart if eveyrone was on shrooms. lol. funny memories. (remember, I consumed the LEGAL kind of shrooms)

[Tau]

Remembering Tom's bike accident,

There seems to be a cool process in our nervous system in order to overcome a problem we are only too familiar with: latency!
Yes, latency. What's the delay between a sensory input (touch, light, sound) and its perception by us? It has been measured, but I don't have the figure. In a way, we live in the past, since we perceive sensory stimulus msecs or nanosecs after they happened.

Now, picture this: someone opened a guy's head, stuck some electrodes into his brain, then pricked his finger with a needle. The guy was asked to say something (like ow!) as soon as he felt it. So he did, and they measured the delay, but also took note of the exact part of the brain that was activated when the pricking occured. So then, instead of using the needle, they would just activate those neurons directly inside the brain, which would feel exactly the same as sticking the needle. The individual was asked again to speak as soon as he felt the sting of the needle. The measured delay between stimulus and response was exactly the same, even though there was a considerable length of the neural pathway between the finger and the brain which would certainly take some time to trasmit the instructions to the brain cortex. This was unexpected.

The brain informed the person that he was pricked at that time - and this related only to the time of the activation of the brain tissue and NOT to the actual "event of being pricked" (which was completely non-existant in the second time). The conclusion they came to was that the brain actually scans the future for very near-coming events, and feeds that information back to the consciousness to cover for the latency in sensory system, and actually create a present moment.

In those terms, Tom's brain knew what was coming and tried to warn him, only not in time. Maybe just in time to avoid someting worse, I don't know, but the thing is, many decisions in the world happen in nanoseconds, and they are happening all of the time. And as such, we are, much more often than we perceive, scanning from different possible futures the ones that would please us most. Since most of this is unconscious, maybe some of what we call coincidences is the result of this process.

Anyway, about coincidences, I believe there's really a lot we don't know. I have read with pleasure some of the ideas here, like time travel, greater designs, unknown causes and interferences, fractal nestings, some great stuff (hey maybe I just made some of those up), but this is way too vast to be discussing in general terms - it is an issue that reflects our picture of the whole thing, and there's really so much to say...

So i just wanted to point out our own selves are generators of reality, and therefore coincidence. Not the only one, but certainly a major player.

Wishing you all very pleasant days, and happy happy thoughts

T

P.S. to Ken, thanks for your serene and well thought words. You have approached this question very elegantly.
P.P.S: Did anybody mention telepathy already?

[garyb]

Tau, i agree with everything you said....except the conclusion. it's true that as far as we can see, we ARE creating reality...but we don't see much of what is real, do we?

since time is a dimension, and a dimension is a line which is made up of points in opposite directions with each point on that line connected to all the others, it's pretty obvious that we look a lot different than we seem to in the phenomenal world we know(three dimensions and one point always moving to the next point along the fourth dimension). in four dimensions, you'd soon find us all the same creature, individuals like leaves on a vine, rooted in the earth which is part of a larger mass.(sorry, but i get a kick out of repeating this stuff...) of course, some fifty dimensions have been postulated and proven through mathmatics, making the picture a little fuzzier(the past moving into infinite possible futures), but it's pretty clear that the universe is in it's wholeness and fullness thereof, and there ain't much really happenin(nothing happens). as conciousness(es), we are so stupidly limited in what we perceive that we even get worked up about what ain't happening, and we suffer and struggle. the phenomenological world is dangerous and fun, but not really....

[Tau]

I was looking through the web to see if I could find a page with the experience above I could link to. But I didn't, yet.

I did find an interesting article, and I'd like to quote 2 paragraphs of it. I hope there's no copyright issues, but I'll paste the link so those interested can check it out. It's a 2001 paper, called "Time perception: Brain time or event time?", by Alan Johnston and Shinya Nishida, under the auspices of the Department of Psychology and Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience of University College London and the Human and Information Science Laboratory, Kanagawa, Japan.

"Brain time theories can take two forms. In the explicit form, relative time may be encoded by ‘metaneurons’ that are sensitive to the time course of neural processing in the brain. It is difficult to see the advantage of this approach. Problems of temporal perception are simply passed to higher level processes, in which distributed neural events remote from the input, and therefore subject to various kinds of temporal delay, are substituted for the events themselves.

The alternative, implicit form of brain time theory is more daunting, however. If our perception of the time of an event is coded implicitly, as the time at which a perceptual state of the brain is established — tantamount to the time at which we become aware of the contents of the event — then the medium of temporal sensory experience is no longer physical, as it is for the other five senses, it is conscious experience itself. In this theory, to make temporal judgments — for example whether colour changes before motion direction — we have to compare two microcon-scious experiences occurring in different parts of the brain. There is a clear fundamental difficulty with this. The implicit brain time theory requires a perceptual mechanism that is outside the neural substrate. Intriguingly, this mechanism could provide a unique function for consciousness: the encoding of temporal relations in distributed brain areas, something that would be difficult, or perhaps impossible, to simulate in an artificial system. To propose this mechanism, however, would be to advocate breaking the link between neural activity and perceptual experience on which all current perceptual theory is based."

This is quite nice! You can find the link here http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_o ... 49851e616f

Edited to fix a very long link - you may have to manually copy those 3 lines to the browser...

[Tau]

To gary,

sorry, i had written that whole lot already...

It's true we are misinformed. kindly put

take a look at this: http://geogdata.csun.edu/~voltaire/ann/lunar_fun.html

I believe we are still not at the "matrix" point, and that's where I was pointing at

T

(edit: corrected the last sentece, as it sounded wrong...)

[garyb]

sorry, i edited and added.

those moon photos make me wonder just how dumb we really are....something not quite right....