Synchronicities

Do they really happen?  I first learned about the concept from Masks of the Illuminati which implied a higher purpose to synchronous events.  There are two concepts surrounding synchronicity.

Firstly, there is the simple definition that they are causally unrelated events that have meaning in common, and would unlikely to happen by mere chance.

Secondly, there is the spiritual inference that synchronicity implies some higher power at work, some grand plan or meaning.

I've started surrounding myself with love and nurturing friends, and out of the blue my cousin calls me.  She is an adorable 19 year old that I've always gotten along with well.  We talk, and it turns out she's at a very similar point in her life.  She's wise beyond her years.  I never would've had the wisdom to acknowledge what she knows is true about life.  She's not yet happy, and is still struggling with finding herself, learning to love and respect herself.  But to understand that this is the path she must travel and complete is an amazing insight for one so young.  I envy her that.  I only learned it much much later, myself.  So we talked, and I love her, she's adorable.

Is that synchronicity?  I was at the drugstore today, and the pharmacist who I've talked to in the past mentioned that 2009 ended really slowly, but 2010 became a big upstroke, and I mentioned how it was the same with me.  Then she mentioned synchronicities, and of course, I had already started thinking of them since my cousin called.  One website I read mentioned that when you let love and spirituality into your life, synchronicities happen and life becomes better.    Here 2010 is, and it's coming true...

Or is it?  The atheist's scientific response:  The human mind is conditioned to seek out patterns - in essence it's a pattern recognition machine.  With the millions of events that occur every day, and the billions that occur over the course of your life, many causally unrelated events will have similar meaning.  Statistically, there is a high likelihood that any week out of the year will contain several coincidental causally unrelated, but meaning related events that occur.  The brain is hard-wired to recognize this kind of pattern.

Yes, when we live with a more positive outlook, we are more attuned to positive, loving things.  When this is part of our perception, we will tend to recognize events and patterns in alignment with that attitude.  Would these events, patterns, opportunities have been there if we were depressed with a negative outlook?  If causally unrelated to our actions, yes, they would have been.  Would we have recognized them and seen the pattern?  Most likely not.  So it is our attunement to positive, loving events and the glowing attitude that suffuses us that allows our pattern recognition software to identify these patterns.

Some people report that synchronicities occur and then keep happening - assigning meaning and an "unseen hand," to the string of synchronicities.  Two mechanisms are at work.  Just like you get better at finding Waldo after flipping through 10 pages of Where's Waldo puzzles, your brain gets better at identifying synchronicities after several have occurred.  So the probability that you will detect synchronicities increase the more synchronicities that you experience.  Note that the probability that they occur does not increase, just the probability that you detect them.  The second mechanism is one of population statistics.  For every person that reports a string of five synchronicities, there may be 100 people who report only two synchronicities, 20 people who report only three, and 10 people who report only four synchronicities. That one person you know who has had a string of synchronicities is lucky.  That one person has also only experienced two in a row before - maybe last month.  Or only three in a row before - last year.  It's just that we recognize the outlier that is five events in a row and want to assign special meaning to it.

Thus, however wonderful they are to experience and to live through, synchronicities are not magical or special - they are simply statistically expected.  That is not to say that one shouldn't grab onto the experience of multiple synchronicities and love and enjoy the wonderment of them for all one's worth.  You should always grab life and try and squeeze as much joy and elation out of it as possible.