Coincidence?

is there an online version?

 

If you really care about coincidences, and I guess if you really care about life. And if you really care about me, but that's not what I meant .

I don't think there is an online version but it's worth hunting down and not obscure or hard to find or anything. If you watch it, watch it a few times.

 

Words of wisdom.

Now let it be.

 

to be honest i think that mr. writer really has the wrong idea. this doesn't have much to do with LSD at all. i just posted it here because there are some very intelligent people that browse these forums.

i have been over the edge, and back. and well i know what it feels like. not to mention i have only done lsd once in the last 6 months, and i don't smoke pot.

 

None of what you said excludes you from what I said

You should still be watchful for those kinds of thoughts and resist them. (in my opinion)

 

I think you have the 'wrong idea' with respect to your 'must stop drug use and seek mental help'. That might be the case if you start creating strange/elaborate/megalomaniac/disruptive schemes to adress your noticing of coincidence, or believe th ecoincidences are true.

But I think generally considering coincidence is a very fun pursuit that can help you understand what is meaningful to you and how you relate things in your life. If you stop and think about the coincidences you notice and think of as 'more than chance', they all connect meaningful aspects of your life. These connections are reflections of your inner self.

We can use coincidences to motivate ourselves, or to simply remind us of what is important (the things we care about, almost by definition, are more likely to enter our minds) and they give us tangible relationships in the world to consider.

I say this simply because I don't believe in things happening 'for a reason' unless they are direct actions of people, but I still like to read deeply into things. Our lives are like stories that could be read by other people and so coincidences can serve to have a sort of 'dramatic irony'.

mm yeh i think that Irony best describes the true nature of coincidences that we notice.

Irony refers to situations that have extra perceivable meaning, without any implication that this meaning has a causal relationship to the actual situation. Humour is irony. humour is generally based on things going wrongly/differently from what is expected.
Irony can elicit any emotion depending on the perspective taken. But everything that is ironic can be funny to some perspective, and everything in existance can be ironic to some perspective.

Thus the whole of existance is all a big joke

and to be a higher being is to bring yourself to a perspective that understands: the irony that exists in every facet of your life.

 

Nothing happens forh no reason. Since you got that idea from the movie, I would recomend you and actually every psychonaut to watch The Celestine Prophecy. Watch it and you will have better picture what are the coincidences.

 

I wish I could like The Celestine Prophecy. I don't. I think it's full of the kind of cheesey too-new-agey-ness that sometimes turns people off of these concepts. I agree with the basic message but I think the book was badly written and the movie isn't very good. It reminds me of what the main character in Fight Club went through before Tyler Durden showed up, or "Serenity Now!"

There's good and true stuff to be gained from it, but I think it can also leave a bad taste in people's mouths. I've found real life to be a lot more chaotic and complex than The Celestine Prophecy implies.... I don't know, I just wouldn't reccomend it.

 

C.G. Jung wrote a book on this called Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, i would suggest taking a look at it

 

so you basically have a 'coincidences are just coincidences' viewpoint. it's good to hear from both sides

i'm pretty interested in this though, i'd like to find out more about synchronicity and decide what i think about it.

thanks for the book suggestion. i love jung, i had no idea that he wrote a book about synchonicity. i will definitely look into that.

edit: and as for what my coincidences are, i'd rather not go into specific detail. but lets just say that they are events that happened which matched an outer event to an inner state, where the events exceeded all rational possibility.

i do see where you are coming from though mr. writer, in a website about the book it was written that carl jung thinks that: "he seems to have associated synchronicity with the erupting of archetypal material into consciousness"

seems pretty damn descriptive of doing psychadelics to me

 

"like the forest fight for sunlight
it takes root in every tree
they are pulled up by the magnet
beleiving their free"
- Peter Gabriel :cheers2:

 

a book by jung on something that i am curious about is just too good to pass up. i bought it today, read the first few pages so far. very interesting.

i'll look into the other movies and stuff that everyone mentioned eventually as well.

 

Have you read Autobiography Of A Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda?
I feel that he really explains what is perceived to be coincidence is all about and why we see them in so many different lights. His teacher Yukteswar takes it to an entirely higher level, but verges on purely esoteric, as he even mentions in the first page how his books are written for very few people to understand.

 

I keep having the same problem...

 

any examples at all from anyone?

 

Bill, in my post I was refering to truly delusional megalomanical thoughts. I totally agree with using or seeing coincidences as tool-like for a deeper understanding of things, as long as one is aware that not all understanding are directly translatable to everyday life.

 

interesting. what do you mean by not all understanding are directly translated to everyday life?

so say that i experience a coincidence, use it as a tool for understanding, the knowledge gained points me a direction in life. should i not follow the direction and simply learn what i can and continue on like nothing had happened, but with greater knowledge?

to know something and not encorperate it into your life seems quite contradictory to my beleifs.

"The possession of Knowledge, unless accompanied by a manifestation and expression in Action, is like the hoarding of precious metals, a vain and foolish thing. Knowledge, like Wealth, is intended for Use. The Law of Use is Universal, and he who violates it suffers by reason of his conflict with natural forces." - The Kybalion

i guess i have sort of come to beleive that there are meaningful coincidences, but i am not quite sure what that means exactly. does it mean that one should learn from the events, and encorperate the knowledge into life? does it mean that one should blindly follow the direction the events are pointing them?

 

The number one failure of the human mind is the inability to see how deeply programmed reality is. It is so finely tuned and exact, that it appears to be chaotic. The ultimate paradox? The greatest illusion. Thus you have people like Mckenna on psychedelics, saying that he was told 'not to give in to astonishment'. Which is absolute, because to allow the leap in awareness which results from seemingly cosmically explosive discovery to overwhelm you, you are giving in to only a fragment of reality, no matter how large it initially feels to be.
We are made to discover, but the problem is that consciousness in our present, perceptibly isolated form, fights control more as if it were the most suffocating presence, in fact being controlled is worse than death for many people. Thus, you have America's illusion of freedom, when in reality it is extremley oppresive and completley inhumane. The difference is that this control, or this programming, is impossible to break free from, but we spend our lives running away from it until we drop dead. The approach we should be taking, is one of acceptance, one of merging with the One. The membrane which we are in the most illusive, intangible dimension is still just taking a baby step into our comprehension, but we are getting very close to breaking through the veil of maya and discovering that we are, without a shadow of a doubt, composed entirely of an absolute one presence.
Our greatest challenge is to stop fighting it, but of course to discover it, we have to fight it by attempting to tackle an understanding. This is what I consider proof of programming, and the brain in my opinion is the machine of Nature. Made to process and experience itself, at first as isolated dumb monkeys fighting the hand of God from interferring with their lives, and eventually as an evolved state of Self awareness merging into Self acceptance.
Coincidences are not so, but neither are they the opposite. They are blips in a biological programming as it unfolds, much like I feel deja vu, dreaming, and psychedelic drugs are. The viruses that become the cure. Inject the flu and your body becomes immune. Stop fighting the program and you become eternity.

 

Relayer you just went up to being my favorite poster here. Of course free will is an illusion, otherwise EVERYTHING is an illusion.. every living thing believes that it has its own perception and therefore free will; the paradox is that our perceptions teach us biology and mapping of genetics... so on and so on. BIOLOGY MEANS THAT WE ARE MADE OF MATTER, WE ACT AS A RESULT OF THE WAY WE ARE CONSTRUCTED. Another way to say this is that our mind tells us we can make decisions, BUT it also tells us that we have a mind made of matter that makes decisions based on the way it was constructed. So our perceptions tell us that we have free will, yet we do not because of the way our mind is made our decisions can be mapped out in any given situation, like the reactions of any given phenotype of tree to sunlight temperature.. so on and so on. The same phenotype reacts the same way in the same environment. Before I continue to elaborate, lets here more thoughts.

PS - If you ignore the "coincidences" you ignore the truth. Don't be a "dumb monkey" realize the truth.

 

Have you perhaps been using a lot of ketamine/dissociatives recently?

I know that chronic use of dissociatives can make people see coincidences and connect ideas together that they wouldn't normally. An example of this would be John Lilly (researcher), who came to believe he was communicating with aliens and that they were telling him to do things, under a heavy ketamine addiction.

From erowid: