Recently I have been plagued by coincidences. I was talking on a train about someone I hadn’t seen for thirty years, and then met them coming out of the train toilet. Had I subconsciously seen them on a platform and not consciously registered it? I don’t know, but coincidences of that nature have been occurring recently with a strange frequency. I have never quite been able to get my head round the theory of synchronicity.
In about 1986 I was working in the trade department of the British High Commission in Lagos. I went to visit a Yoruba turkey farmer near Ijebu-Ode who wanted help with his meat processing and freezing machinery. I spent an extremely pleasant day with his family. He showed me the massive church he was building, with a cantilevered roof. He had ordered a mighty organ from Rushworth and Dreaper, one of the world’s last manufacturers of real pipe organs.
The following week I left on leave. Before actual holiday I was doing a tour for ten days around the UK, visiting companies who wanted advice on doing business with Nigeria. The Department of Trade and Industry organised the itineraries through regional offices. In Liverpool I was delighted to find I had been sheduled to visit Rushworth and Dreaper and witness the skills and craftsmanship that go into building a pipe organ (there are literally hundreds of unglamorous wooden and lead pipes packed behind the showcase guilded exterior ones – which sometimes are simply dummies. Each pipe is a first class musical instrument).
Rushworth and Dreaper were most impressed that I had visited their customer just a week before. It was quite a coincidence given that, as far as I or the High Commission knew, he was just a turkey farmer and nothing to do with organs. But not that big a coincidence.
My tour over, a fortnight later I took my wife and children on holiday to Hong Kong. We went on to one of the big junks that sail Hong Kong Harbour as floating restaurants in the evenings. It was very packed, and we shared a table with a pleasant English couple. We introduced each other. “I am a director of a little Liverpool company that makes pipe organs”, he said, “It’s called Rushworth and Dreaper”.
As I said, I have never got my head round synchronicity. In some way human consciousness must on occasion be able to shape events that, by laws we understand, ought to be outside such influence. I have no idea how, why or how often, and to express such an idea is to invite ridicule. But that is what I observe.
I love it. I searched for “Littlewood’s Law” on Wikipedia, and got the result:
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The page “Littlewood’s Law” does not exist.
Did you mean “Littlewood’s Law”?
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“Littlewood’s Law” somehow seems to exist and not exist simultaneously, at least on Wikipedia. Thanks for flagging that one up, Nextus!
Thanks Nextus, i was being playful – as much as im not very well read. But I did just read something about causes as meanings and meanings as causes. Makes me suspicious about this statement -> “There are of course many genuine “one-in-a-million” coincidences, but they don’t warp the rather humdrum nature of causality” <- but i accept it in a humdrum way.
Craig, try ‘My Big TOE’, the trilogy by Dr Tom Campbell.
But before you enter that big read, go to Tom’s website of the same name and click on the videos page.
I recommend that you start with the Monroe Institute keynote lecture, for background about how it all happened; then the whole set of Uni of Calgary lectures, starting with the theory trio, then the practical-applications trio.
But be warned: Tom is a marathon writer and lecturer. Takes some keeping up with. But well worth the effort. Pace yourself, and keep going.
I suspect he will be the next historic name in the sequence: Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Darwin, The Quantum Mechanics, Einstein, and Bohm.
In any case, his big Theory Of Everything seems to me to be more elegantly-spare, and more all-inclusive in the things it explains — including synchronicity — than anything else I know. Just wonderful!
Don’t leave out Sheldrake, particularly ‘The Science Delusion’; but anything by Rupert is worth a lot of time; as are his YouTube vids.
Campbell and Sheldrake are two of a whole list of names who’ve been creating a quiet paradigm-shift in the fundamental world-view of science in the past fifteen-to-twenty years, by finally facing up to the giant elephant that’s been sitting silently in the room with us for the past ninety years, since the implications of the double-slit experiments began to dawn on those doing them: the centrality of consciousness in the fundamental nature of things.
For my money, Tom Campbell has cracked that mystery.
This five-minute vid, from an enterprising cartoonist, puts the double-slit conundrum in clear and humorous terms. Just a little appetiser, before you get to work on Tom’s feast; and nicely accurate:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEzRdZGYNvA
And BTW Craig, what’s this about P Cruz? For god’s sake be content with the gorgeous creature you have already, and leave a bit of room for the rest of us, you greedy bugger.
An intrepid soul at my-big-toe’s forum wrote (not i)..
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To say that cutting edge science is moving in the way of MBT is nothing more than wishful thinking. Tom has developed a theory of consciousness that seems to ‘fit’ when looked at from any perspective. This is great and I believe would take positive steps, in the field of philosophy and psychology, not in science/everything.
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I found Campbell’s video slow and evangelical. But good on whatever keeps us running’
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These quantum computers could break the simulation metaphor.
Clark:
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‘Franz, “all is mind” is OK, so long as “mind” means the Universal mind. Otherwise, the universe devolves into a multitude of personal “universes”, and morality and free will become meaningless.
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‘There is little point in us campaigning on this blog against torture if that torture is merely the warped product of the victim’s mind.’
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Agreed Clark, that is what I meant.
Crab… on being playful. Play is the rubric, Crab, indeed. And so, let us do away with the bow-ties, the tight corsets and the chastity belts of linearity and let us roll in the sand and create circles, ellipses, eleven dimensions! Roll, roll onward towards the sea, the sea…