banner  
 
 
home books e-books audio books recent titles with blogs
   
   
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Strange encounters; Synchronicity perhaps?

Posted on 07 April 2015, 12:35

Perhaps you have been travelling in a foreign country and been very surprised to meet an acquaintance in the strangest of places. Such a queer coincidence! Statisticians sometimes assure us that the odds against chance that you should have such a meeting are not as high as you think. But for my part, when I think about such encounters, there is something is puzzling, intriguing about them.

For example, here’s a fairly straightforward story: my wife Gertrud and I were paying a short visit to Alingsås in Sweden. There was a friend who lived there whom we would have particularly liked to have visited, but we absolutely didn’t have time. So little time that we took a short cut through a little side alley, only to meet that friend. We hadn’t used that alley before… neither had the friend. But there she was in front of us. We might try to explain the encounter, by saying that we were somehow linked together telepathically, and that both parties were unconsciously prompted to simultaneously take that by-way. That would seem possible.

But such an explanation doesn’t quite fit the time when my wife and I were in Princes St. Edinburgh. We went into a camera shop to buy film, and there in the shop, was a film maker from the village of Coalgate in Canterbury New Zealand, just two kilometers from our village of Hororata. He had just arrived with a film team from Brazil where they had been making a documentary on hunger. “Fancy meeting this way”, we said. Then we moved on. Later we knocked on the door of a friend of a friend, who was kindly having us to stay overnight.  She opened the door, apologising because she was in the middle of a conversation on the phone. Then she said, ”Come to think of it, I am in the middle of a phone conversation with a Swede, and here I have a Swede called Gertrud standing at my door. “Do come in Gertrud. Why don’t you two talk to each other?” And there in that house in Edinburgh the two Swedes talked..and they knew each other!

As an explanation, something other than telepathy seems needed. Two strange encounters in the one day. But to compound the strangeness: A month or so later I met the film maker back in Coalgate NZ. “Strange meeting you like that in Scotland,” I said. ”Yes indeed” he replied, “but there was more. After our meeting, I and my team split, and went our separate ways. Eleven days later I was in the Piccadilly Underground Station, where trains seem to go every two minutes. I tried to board a train, but my way was blocked by my team alighting at the very door where I was trying to board.”

Telepathy? Or what?  But the more there are such coincidences, the less likely that they are happening by chance.

Here is another case history from Sweden. We were at my in-laws in Bie, near Katrineholm, south of Stockholm. We had told them that we wanted to take the train from Katrineholm taking more than eighteen hours to get to Kiruna north of the Arctic Circle. The telephone rang, and it was an invitation to coffee next door. It was from a man (Herr Norman) who it turned out was a train driver, his beat being between Narvik in the north of Norway through our destination Kiruna to as far south as Gällivare. Soon he was showing us slides of what we would be seeing.

If that coincidence was remarkable, there was more to come. Ten days or so later, we were tourists in Gothenburg/Göteborg, more than 25 hours in the train south from Kiruna. We decided to go on a tourist boat and see the harbour. We sat down…next to Fru Norman, the train-driver’s wife. How in the world?

I have told these stories many times, and if you have heard them before, I do apologise. But it is stories like these that prompt seemingly outrageous explanations.

Here is such an explanation: Near the beginning of my forthcoming book, Into the Wider Dream, you can read the following quotation:

“We, (that invisible entity that operates within us) have dreamed this world. We have dreamed it as enduring, mysterious, visible, omnipresent in space and stable in time. But we have consented to tenuous and eternal intervals of its architecture that we might know that it is false. “ [from Other Inquisitions by the Argentinian philosopher Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986.)]

The philosophical term, “Borgesian conundrum” is named after him and has been defined as the ontological question of “whether the writer writes the story, or it writes him.”

How is it that we find the train-driver Herr Norman next door to us when we decide to travel to Kiruna? Or that we find his wife Fru Norman, next to us in the tourist boat so very far away in Gothenburg? Who wrote the script prescribing these situations? No doubt Fru and Herr Norman were surprised at these coincidences, but Gertrud and I were the connecting links. We saw the synchronicities. Did we write the script, or did it write us? Are we in some sense dreaming these strange situations, or we were being dreamed?

When we get enough of these coincidences, we are forced at least to admit that there is something “fishy” about what we think is reality.
Synchronicities like these raise more questions than answers. Sometimes when we have such experiences, we feel wonder, and also a certain satisfaction as if we were living out the will of God, and that things were proceeding along the right path. Such feelings have certainly drawn me on and on, throughout the years. I have had the feeling of plumbing spiritual depths, feelings of being at one with the universe. But really, did Fru Norman have to travel all that way down from Katrineholm to Göteborg just to give us a religious experience? What do we mean by the Will of God? Come to that, What do we mean by the will of God? They are questions that I cannot answer directly.

Then people have bad things happening to them. Unspeakably bad things can happen to the best of people. Is everything the will of God?

To try and think about all this, we need to decide which picture we have of God and also of the world, and the universe.

In my blog “No man is an island,” I was pointing out that reality consists of a spiritual-physical continuum, where all is entangled with all else. Unless there were such a continuum, there could be no afterlife, no psychic phenomena of so many kinds, there could be no prayer. But all these things are real, and we note that prayer sometimes works, that mind can influence matter, that Placebo pills often work.

God is in all through all and above all. The universe, All-that-is, is what it is, with things occurring within it that we could label Good or Bad. Love is what is creative and binds together, and the opposite is neither.

David Bohm and like minded physicists have it that the spiritual dreams the physical. Rupert Sheldrake, Bohm’s friend, makes a good case for the physical affecting the spiritual, in the shape of memory fields.

With such considerations, we still cannot quite decide whether Borges writes his story or is written by his story… there may well be a bit of both.

Reality is Spiritual (or Mental) and also Physical. They interact and constitute one dynamic whole, in which we participate. Synchronicities demonstrate this, they demonstrate a mental component in what happens in the physical, indeed that the physical IS also mental, despite appearances. The physical is mental in a certain form, for indeed all is Mind.

The problem therefore in thinking about Synchronicity is to find a meaningful way of talking about what is going on, without trying to fathom out paths of cause and effect. Jung’s wrote that synchronicity was acausal, non-causal. We need to describe what is going on in terms other than that of cause and effect.

That I think is part of the point of Borge’s words that we have been considering.

Michael Cocks edits the journal, The Ground of Faith.
Afterlife Teaching From Stephen the Martyr by Michael Cocks is published by White Crow Books and available from Amazon and other bookstores.
His forthcoming book, Into the Wider Dream: Synchronicity in the Witness Box is published by White Crow Books.


Comments

I recently started a blog on my life synchs, its rollingsynchronicity.blogspot.com, but what really drew me into read this was the white crow. Crow’s are a big part of my life.

Enjoyed the read.

Crow

Crow, Sun 24 Jan, 17:40

My husband Glenn and I were drawn to an interesting building when we stayed in Hawaii recently, celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary. It was called the Rock Island Café and included a shop and cafe dedicated to American memorabilia. After a bit of browsing and chatting with staff, we decided it would be as good a place as any for dinner.
Seated at a booth and awaiting our order, we decided to entertain ourselves with some Trivial Pursuit cards left as a courtesy for customers.
Glenn and I have one particular association with the game that originates back about twenty-five years when we were playing with another couple. I was about to answer what could be the winning question when our friend, Chris, crowed that I could not possibly know the answer to this one. The question was about the person who had made the announcement about Woodstock being declared a disaster area and my instant answer of “Arlo Guthrie” left me both cowering and giggling, the recipient of a three-way “bashing.”
For the next twenty-five years “Arlo Guthrie” would be something of a running joke: Glenn and I producing the name every time either of us revealed unexpected knowledge or an inability to answer a question.
Our pizza was about to arrive so I quickly asked Glenn the next question on the Trivial Pursuit card, “Who was the person who declared Woodstock a disaster area?” He thought I was making it up – but I wasn’t. 
This synchronicity confirms what I already know: the universe has a wonderful sense of humour.

Donna Lowe, Sun 26 Apr, 05:56


Add your comment

Name

Email

Your comment

Notify me of follow-up comments?

Please enter the word you see in the image below:


Please note that all comments are read and approved before they appear on the website

 
translate this page
feature
“Life After Death – The Communicator” by Paul Beard – If the telephone rings, naturally the caller is expected to identify himself. In post-mortem communication, necessitating something far more complex than a telephone, it is not enough to seek the speakers identity. One needs to estimate also as far as is possible his present status and stature. This involves a number of factors, overlapping and hard to keep separate, each bringing its own kind of difficulty. Four such factors can readily be named. Read here
© White Crow Books | About us | Contact us | Privacy policy | Author submissions | Trade orders