How do you feel when coincidences, or odd patterns, keep happening?
Lets say one day, you keep noticing raspberry. Soda with raspberry. Raspberry Ice Cream bars. Raspberry Sobe water. Raspberry 7-up. You find an ancient packet of Raspberry Cool Aid in your mother’s (or grandmother’s) kitchen drawer. All in the same day. On another day, its hard to find raspberry anything.
Or maybe it is a number. 321, maybe. Its in a phone number someone gives you. Then its on a page in a catalogue you are ordering from. Its the price of your drink at the convenience store. And, as you are driving, you notice that number on a mailbox. An hour or two later its on a license plate.
Or, you wake up with a song in your head. Mr. Postman by Karen Carpenter (1975, and not played often—maybe you haven’t heard t in many, many years), lets say. You then hear it on he radio in the car at lunch. You see it on a CD album in the bargain bin at Wal Mart. Then, at night, some variety show has somebody singing it, maybe three or four of these occurrences in one day.
Or, two or three times in the same day, you meet or exchange information with someone named Barton.
Sometimes these things happen, and I think its just coincidence. But what do you think or feel about these occurrences?
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That my quick pick lotto max tickets are the same as I astral travel in time. Either some higher power doesn’t want me to be rich or I am not traveling through time but rather am living with multiple personalities my vote is that I am in the Matrix or a zoo. Edit The term multiple personalities disorder is now called delusional disorder.
Yeah, typical stuff. But this question is about coincidences.
Like if you see the number 1111 or 501 about six times in the same day
@Yellowdog You might like to read “The Celestine Prophecy” . One of the levels of consciousness is about noticing coincidences. You might get for free from your local library. Edit for my first answer is delusional dissociation disorder. How I feel? Psychotic confusion. That I am like Casandra. No one believed her stories as a punishment from the gods.
I always get books free from my local library—they usually hide the chip under the old card pocket,
I have definitely had many oddly coincidental occurrences in my life. I pick up on them, but give them little attention.
@Yellowdog . Does Christianity offer any explanations? Hopefully you know I’m genuinely curious. Not mocking, or being a dick (this time.)
Your opinion on this, as a theist, is interesting to me.
Other than a “glitch in the Matrix,” what do you attribute the coincidences to?
I am too skeptical to give such things credibility, but sometimes there are indeed some pretty odd coincidences….
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Since you asked, yes, I do believe there is more to it, but it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with Christianity. I also believe it is beyond human comprehension or perception. Some things are just already ‘there’ for us as we kind of ‘trip’ upon as we move through time. Like Murphey’s law, they are options or possibilities that ‘can’ happen, so they DO happen— and may involve certain reacurring numbers, flavors, persons, names,geographic locations, or other subjects.
Say, for instance, that the number 18 the song Sweet Home Alabama, or the name Robert happens to lie in your “path” that day. Well, it is going to be revealed to you anywhere it exists.
It kind of abstractly lies in your path as you move through time.
Like Mathematical possibilities, once we hit upon a topic, subject, number, etc etc it sort of jumps out and reveals itself to us by random possibility everywhere it exists
Sometimes it may have a purpose. For Theistic purposes, it is like how God reveals things in dreams sometimes, though dreams, like coincidences, are often just random and meaningless.
We probably have such things happen all the time and don’t even notice them but other times they are TOO obvious and get our attention, or even annoy us (say, if it happens to be a song you don’t like).
There is a theory that there are no such things as coincidences. Everything is planned and working according natural laws.
The reason we don’t see the as natural is because the human mind picks up on certain patterns and tries to order them together.
Well, I think that if you notice something twice in a day, in your mind it becomes a “pattern,” and you subconsciously start looking for things to continue the pattern. Coincidences are cool but they are nothing beyond that.
This is a phenomena known as confirmation bias. Your brain will remember the examples that reinforce the thing you’re paying attention to and ignore the hundreds of thousands of examples of other stuff you come across. Your brain will also bend examples to fit your hypothesis e.g. there may be a color that’s more purple than raspberry, but when you’re on the hunt for raspberry that’s what you’ll see. You’ll see this effect with horoscopes being written in a way that’s general enough such that all of them apply to everyone, but appear specific enough to feel like there is something supernatural going on.
Didn’t this phenomena used to be called the VW Beetle effect? Where, if you bought one you suddenly saw them everywhere.
Many years ago I had an odd experience. For about two months it seems like every time I said hello to somebody or picked up the phone I heard about some catastrophe. The first two weeks I think I heard stories of 10 unrelated people where someone had died or got in a horrible accident or other terrible thing. The phenomenon seemed to continue for weeks. It got to where I was afraid to pick up the phone or say hello to anybody. I knew I wasn’t making it up.
Then one day I noticed that I wasn’t hearing about people dying anymore. It couldn’t have been confirmation bias. It was just an odd series of unrelated events that happened to come together for a period of time.
I am not joking now but that should be the secret among our people. It means that you have “that” special power. A type of unconscious stage ESP that relate to future prediction. I have a feeling that such a thing shouldn’t be purposely dug too deep and that there’s a price to pay for the ‘phenomenon’. I am not surprised that most people won’t understand or will even laugh at this explanation but that is because they’re just mundane, regular people not gifted with this type of unstudied ‘ability’.
@snowberry “For about two months it seems like every time I said hello to somebody or picked up the phone I heard about some catastrophe.”
How many times do you say hello to someone or pick up the phone in a day? What qualifies as a catastrophe? There are literally hundreds of tragic stories every day in the news. According to one stat I found online, on average over 150,000 people die worldwide every day. That’s more than the number of people who died in the Hiroshima Atomic bomb… every day. If your “antenna is up” so-to-speak it’s not hard to find tragedy. And if you’re not looking for it, it’s all-too-easy to grow numb to such stories—I certainly don’t feel like an atomic bomb as detonated every day.
I sometimes experience this kind of phenomenon. I often look at my watch at exactly ten minutes past ten, day after day again and again just by chance but you would expect chance to spread the times out more evenly.
I also notice it occasionally with dreams, especially dreams I have in the early morning just before waking. Something inconsequential happens during the day and I am struck by how it resembles something in my dream. I have noticed correlations a few times, never anything of any significance.
This is what Carl Jung called synchronicity. It is beyond explanation but I don’t dismiss it out of hand.
@gorillapaws I was NOT talking about watching the TV or listening to the news and seeing and hearing catastrophes there. I am well aware that there are catastrophes and disasters and murders and crime- awful stuff happens all the time all over the world and every day. But news is impersonal. It’s rare that you actually know the people involved.
These were people I knew, or were acquaintances. And no I was not used to hearing multiple stories of dire things happening to my friends on a daily basis. Even now years later it doesn’t happen. But for that period of time it did.
Even though I did not experience these events except by hearing about it from people I knew, it felt personal-and unsettling. That’s not the same thing as hearing about it in the news.
As I said previously and believed at the time, it was a random series of events that happened to come together. It felt pretty scary and wrong, but I knew it was random, and sometimes stuff just happens.
In other words it didn’t mean anything then and it still doesn’t, unless somebody wants to make a story up about it.
But that’s what the news media is for! And that’s a topic for another question! :D
Thanks for the great discussion!
I am not talking about noticing something like VW Beetles or Jettas—that’s a game people play on road trips. I’m talking about when the same number keeps popping up (412)—maybe three or four or even eight times in a day, or a fairly unusual song is heard from different sources two or more times in one day.
I’m not talking about meeting two or more people named George—I’m referring to meeting two or more people with the last name Fiser in one day, in different places.
I read once that reoccurring patterns are messages of importance to the person that has this phenomenon happening frequently.
Such as the raspberry pattern…perhaps in the past this was tacked to the brain pattern to a particular event and so this person is automatically reminded of it through their memories.
Numbers as well has meaning to the person .Either it was an old address etc or one will come into play such as visiting a friend who has these numbers displayed..so that connection is important with that person. I believe that our super conscious thoughts are leading each of us on our life journey. If one has upon waking in the early hours of the day a idea or sometimes a song pop in to our head, then that is the solution to whatever you are grappling with.Recently I had the song “I can see clearly now” by Johnny Nash come into mind upon waking one fine early morning. So to me it was a signal that everything is understood and will be better ( like sunshine as in the song).So everyone….
” Have a bright bright sunshiny day.”
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