Image: Maldives, island paradise, by daniel pozo
Sometimes it seems that ripples from the future influence the present.
I once had a vivid lucid dream where I walked through a particular tree. Years later I got a job in a building very close to that tree, and my office is straight through that particular tree in the exact direction I walked in the dream. Years after I took the job in that office, I went away on vacation to Hawaii with someone I intended to marry. When I returned, that tree was cut down. Now I walk through that tree every day on the way to lunch and back.
There is no way I or anyone else could have known, years before, where I would work, where my office would be or that this tree would be cut down due to disease.
Another strange coincidence has now attached itself to that dream, as if what I call "a quantum strange loop" is acting as a bridge between waking and sleeping, life and death.
I dedicated a blog post about my strange tree dream on Oct 21st to a friend of mine who killed herself. When a friend told me she'd committed suicide, I did not wish to know the manner. I assumed until yesterday that she took her life with a gun, but I just found out yesterday Jan 27, 2010, that she lept to her death.
Coincidence or Precognition?
On July 25, 2009, three months before she died, I posted a song called "What Have I Done" about leaping. (Click the link for the lyrics.) I was thinking of myself when I wrote it, that love requires a leap of faith. I was expressing a fear of commitment that has kept me single my entire life. Now the song has a new meaning. I don't think she ever heard it, but if she did, "What have I done" becomes even more self-referential.
My rational mind tells me, as my friend once seemed to do, "ignore conspiracy theories" and "don't be superstitious". I assume my song and the method of my friend's death are just strange coincidence. Like this one.
Magical thinking--though we may fight it--is a part of each of us. If I help create the world by what I choose to see, my brain says to me, I should fill my thoughts and time with positive things, like nice vacations in the Maldives or things nice equally.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Coincidence or Precognition?
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12 comments:
Many years ago, I had a dream about this girl. Her face sort of stuck with me for a while. It wasn't long after that we met online and dated for seven years.
Nice stories J and Xeno.
This is my story and the only one I can describe in my life that I know for certain is "precognition." The others are kind of, maybe, dreamy sort of possibilities ... or likelihoods or whatever.
My story is quite simple. I merely saw in mind's eye, in clear black and white (for some reason it wasn't color) a radar trap about 5 minutes before approaching the place where the trap was. I had never previously seen a trap at that spot; in fact, I was on a road that I didn't even travel very much going to a new job at the time. And, the trap was at a place around a bend where I couldn't have subconsciously have visualized or imagined ahead of time. But, the image came into my head unlike other images before or since. And, it was crystal clear.
Of course, I slowed down 'cause I was speeding before I got to the cop with the radar.
If it's not repeatable, it's coincidence.
In a system with multiple changing variables there can be a rare or even a one time system state where one can see, through a window of opportunity, something not ordinarily visible. The arrow of time and entropy also give situations where the non-repeatable is non-coincidental. This banana can be blended into a shake, but only once.
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"If it’s not repeatable, it’s coincidence." Sounds like someone is quoting scripture.
You know, during the Medieval Ages the Enlightenment replaced the Church with man who can, supposedly, reason. And, the Scientific Revolution replaced sacred scripture, presumably.
But, I guess, no thought that scientific literature would only end up being a substitute for sacred scripture.
Try to convenience me what i EXPERIENCED was not what i said it was.
It is a interesting statement to test. It seems that if it is true then there could be no such thing as a once in a lifetime opportunity, which when acted upon would have a non-coincidental result. Therefore, I don't buy it.
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I don't know who you're talking to Xeno. Nonetheless, I know, as no one else, what happened to me, because I experienced it - no one else has. I can't imagine how anyone it could duplicated or reproduced it in the cold environment of a lab. To test whether it was "precognition" all other variables that may interfere with the one tested variable would have to be removed. How would you do that in my example? But, this is exactly what Rhine did at Duke with Zener cards. He reduced everything down to the simplest of circumstances, removing all variables. Over time he tested for various paranormal traits several thousand times and after meta-analyzes etc. he got positive results. But, still even if he didn't get any positive results or whatever, it really has nothing to do with my experience. The only way someone could invalidate my experience is by saying I'm nuts ... and I'll not go there. We all know ... never mind.
I was saying that the statement by Sciencerules "If it’s not repeatable, it’s coincidence." is an interesting one to test. I'm not a dualist. I think that while there may be undiscovered physical forces at work, there are not spiritual or supernatural forces at work. Even when ruling out the supernatural, however, I still believe that complex dynamic systems have non-coincidental one-time states. My action may only cause a particular reaction once because the exact conditions only exist once.
Ok. No argument here with this: "complex dynamic systems have non-coincidental one-time states." i.e. if you insert "may" before have.
I don't consider myself a [Cartesian?] "dualist" either, but still what we could consider "spiritual or supernatural forces" may be something like other-dimensional phenomena. Or, the notion of spirituality lies everywhere in all places at all times isn't dualist, but animist, toward which I tend.
Simpler example: The digits of Pi are not coincidental, but the sequence does not repeat. The repeatability of Pi depends on your frame of reference. Every time I calculate Pi, I will get the same series of numbers, but if I'm watching the numbers appear as Pi is calculated for me for the first time, and I have never seen Pi before, perhaps my brain will subconsciously work out the formula and tell me the next number in the series. This would not be pre-cognition, but it would seem to me to be so. It also might not be repeatable because my subconscious mind might wander off to other things and forget the formula it had worked out. With regard to my tree dream, I tend to believe that the future did influence the past, but via an as yet undiscovered physical mechanism.
Sure, if you can work out pi by some unconscious mental mechanism, it would seem to your conscious mind as if it was precognition. I think this happens all the time, and probably what a lot people use this method. I had a relative who, in fact, did just this. That is, she would read events, but particularly with people. She was able tell a lot about their past and future. She just said she was "sensitive." You're talking about working out unconsciously or subconsciously a mathematical formula; well, she worked out a method below the conscious level (although she knew to some extent she was doing it - she told me so) a certain formula about people. But, it was a flexible formula and adjusted for each personality (ha!) - well kind'a. We didn't quite know how it worked. But, of course, it dealt with reading cues in the environment, personality etc.
But, there's all kinds of people. People like Black Elk, though, I don't think he had a unconscious mechanism that worked out formulas. It may have been for him truly precognition.
My mother once had a vivid dream of her aunt, with whom she communicated by mail about 2 or 3 times per year (never by phone) and who at the time lived over 1,000 miles away (in another country). [This is all true.] They liked each other and were good friends, but they just didn't communicate that often. So, they didn't really know what the other was doing, certainly not on any regular basis. In the dream (actually my mother was just dozing off late at night, so it wasn't a dream per se) her aunt's deceased husband appeared, dressed in black, and spoke to my mother in French saying that "his wife was in trouble." Actually, he used a term of endearment when he mentioned "wife," as he had done when alive. (He had been dead for at least 10 years at the time.) As soon as he delivered the message, he vanished. My mother immediately, well, the next day, wrote and sent a letter to my aunt. But was too late. Someone killed her by poisoning. So, we discovered a month or so later.
I have had a lot of precognition in my dreams, but for me it's just where the dreams take place. For instance, a dream that I had two years ago involving me riding on a ski lift that I'd never seen and the background was the view of a mountain that turned out to be the view from my friend's window, which I had never seen before. I do suspect unknown physics.
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