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Waves o' synchronicity

 
 
Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero
01:35 / 07.04.02
A while back, I read the first bit of Neil Gaiman's Books of Magic series, during which young Tim Hunter meets John Constantine. Somebody was telling Tim about Constantine, and the description was something like "...a man who rides synchronicity like a wave".

I thought that was a neat idea. I wondered if it were possible to actually be that subtle with magick, to the point where it's just a matter a little bit of subconcious will here and over there and everything falls into place perfectly. Many would argue that people are actually doing this all the time, but do not realize it and therefore don't make a concerned effort to apply any extra will to it. Would it require a sort of expanded awarness, like the way you feel after satori? To be able to see that big a picture and nudge this little thing here and oh, hey, look at that, I won a free boat. Kinda like seeing thirty moves ahead in a chess game. I knew a guy who could do this. It was really scary (if you're into chess). He said that he couldn't play checkers anymore because it wouldn't take longer than four moves and he would just announce his victory. He saw ahead from that point to the end of the game. He would eventually play it out, playing both sides of the table, showing how his opponents moves were all predetermined.

It's not this easy with chess, but he says if he ever gets high and tries to play chess, whenever he looks at the board he sees every move of every piece. I thought on that. I ended up trying to develop a sort of Zen chess, with the aid of lots of ganja. It had it's ups and downs...like in the Illuminatus! trilogy, not knowing what your next move is makes it pretty hard for your opponent, but it's not that easy to stay concentrated on the game. It was a step ahead, though, because there were one or two games where I smashed an experienced player without really trying. I figured I was on the right track. I got back into meditation.

Recently, I've been having a weird run of luck. Just the other day, I was at my local bookstore, and I was thinking of maybe buying another skateboard to replace my old one. Too bad there's no skateshop anywhere near me, I lamented, before walking, at whim, past a skateshop right next door to the bookstore. It was a new shop that had opened only last month. Neat!

This sort of thing has been happening a lot lately. It's not like "I wish that coin would land heads-up oh hey look at that it's heads". It's the kind of stuff I vaguely remember thinking about, in a "maybe this ought to be different" kind of way, and then forgetting about. But it happens a lot.

Am I finally getting it? I think it merits looking into. Or maybe I smoke too much dope.
 
 
Utopia
01:59 / 07.04.02
coughcough*pothead*coughcough

actually, i'd love to hear a serious response to this. any references for this sort of thing? i doubt that if i typed "riding a wave of synchronicity" into google i'd find what i'm looking for...hmm, i think i'll try it.
 
 
Utopia
03:07 / 07.04.02
the top five (you guys really don't need the links):

Edgewater Professional Executive and Personal Coaching - Why Hire ...
... Do you desire a more intentional lifestyle rather than riding
the wave of synchronicity
and going with the flow? ...
www.edgewatercoaching.com/why_hire_a_coach.html

"RIDING THE WAVE OF CHAOS"
... the key to riding the wave of chaos is not to ... in and, as you say, riding it, going with it, not ... will let you know through synchronicity which things you need ...
www.bashar.org/about/riding.htm

corporate group and team business coaching at ebedo
... Confidence, Leadership, Creating Self-generators, Intrapreneurialism, Riding the Wave (the fine art of change ... Mastering Synchronicity - the Art of Ease How ...
www.ebedo.com/corporate.html

Wave, Particle, and the Psychic Ultra-Violet (ooh)
... Wave, Particle, and the Psychic Ultra ... in the film experience. Is synchronicity a key to unlocking the ... only a movie. When Danny is riding around the hotel on his ...
www.angelfire.com/co/1x137/ts7.html

Dancing in the Flames
... a large, chocolate-coloured woman riding majestic on the crest of ... the momentum of the wave that will bring Sophia ... An intirguing synchronicity: Anne had a brief ...
www.dhushara.com/book/proph/dg/darkg.htm
 
 
FinderWolf
21:34 / 07.04.02
I've had several periods of strong, very cool synchronicity in my life, but there seems to be a point where I feel like the events are working up to something really big and really exciting, i.e. the end result of a goal or event I've really been trying to make happen. And it seems like they build up to that big event but yet, the big event doesn't happen. I still enjoy them, but I'm wondering why I have this sense that something bigger will happen and then it hasn't. Could it be like with a sigil, that the Powers That Be feel how much I want this event to happen and that's why I don't get it? you know, the whole notion of 'not being attached to the outcome'?
 
 
..
22:30 / 07.04.02
Hey Johnny, I just wanna say I can identify...



For me "riding the wave of synchronicity" is what a magickal life has become, and it continues to become -- that is as I continue to expand my awareness (through meditation and smoking lots o' dope no doubt) my subconscious mind picks out more and more information from my environment for my conscious mind to ponder, or marvel at. Does that make any sense? Damn I'm stoned too, I should be out outside walking, looking, sniffing, touching, tasting, and listening around, not trying to communicate.

Or thoughts (or bits of songs, or pictures, or whatever) will pop into my head at times when they coincide with something in the external environment that I failed to notice, or just cause me to think about something related. Maybe you saw the skateshop next door, but it didn't register consciously until you were inside the bookstore?

Oh, and I've noticed that I'm more in tune when I'm not trying to make anything in particular happen, or not trying to look for synchronicties. I hypothesize that it's the unconscious mind's job to pick things out, and consciously trying for anything just gets in the way and messes things up.
 
 
Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero
14:19 / 08.04.02
Damn, I was stoned. Still, thanks for replying. I still think about this all the time. The good mojo is still going, so I'm just gonna sit around for a while.

Seriously, though, I go through a hundred of ideas like these throughout the course of the day. I'm surprised one made it's way to the board.

tm: Well, see, that's what the dope is good for. You're really not in the mood to do much of anything beyond thinking and watching.
 
 
cusm
17:32 / 08.04.02
The one problem with chess playing while high:

I see the webwork of all possible moves stretching off into infinity... All things are predetermined, I know how you'll sacrifice your queen 15 moves down the line, and how I will eventually force mate. I understand the subtle meaning of chess, how the combating of duality represents the eternal struggle of polarities. Enlightment is found in the ebb and flow of pieces, the battle of wills embodied. Crap. Whose move was it again? What was I doing a minute ago? When did that piece get there?
 
 
—| x |—
23:33 / 08.04.02
"Clickity-click, barba-papa trick!"

[snaps fingers]
 
 
Yagg
06:18 / 09.04.02
It reminds me of surfing. You can't really make it happen, you have to "catch a wave." Then you ride it as far as you can. Sooner or later it always seems to crash on the beach. I don't think anyone can stay synchronized forever. Then you have to swim out and catch another one. Sometimes that takes awhile, but eventually you get going again. Sounds way too pat, I know, but this model seems to fit my experiences with such things.
 
 
FinderWolf
12:58 / 09.04.02
This makes sense. That's a good way of putting it.
 
 
enough
20:43 / 10.04.02
Ride the snake...ride the snake
 
 
ciarconn
13:32 / 11.04.02
I always thought that when my "magick level" is OK, and my mind is clear, I hook up on synchronicity and everything works fine.

I remember some refferences from Castaneda on that. Basically on the same idea: accumulating power leads to a synchornization with the universe, having power leads to "things falling in place"

The problem I find is that this luck/synch thing seems to stay inside the previous patterns of one's life, the real change has to be pushed by stronger/more active magick.

John Constantine... jeez... if I must be thruthfull, I bought the comic because it felt like real magic, and I stoped buying it because sometimes it felt too real. I see him as one of my archetypes to fulfill; he can use old, ritual magic, but handles reality, without need of rituals. Might try to contact his toughtform one of this days, just to share a smoke.
 
 
Lionheart
00:10 / 18.04.02
I started laughing when I saw this thread because I had the exact same idea a while ago. I wrote an email about it to a friend.

Here's the email...

Just a thought....

Synchronicity is a flow of information and we are in it. We are not stuck though we are not aware, we do not notice this flow. Our perceptions remain focused on only certain parts of the stream thereby our perception does not see the flow.

Tum. Tum.

Actually, off a message board...

(Posted by a guy who calls himself "Silver Surfer")..

"A word about those conicidences, I was once able to get the things flowing to such a high degree I was able to control them, I thought 'Lights out' and some one next to me says 'hasnt it just got dark all of a sudden'..."

Now let's see what Robert Anton Wilson wrote about the Dao/Tao on his website.

"The wind is part of the process
The rain is part of the process
-- Ezra Pound, Canto 74
Pound, beaten by rain and wind in his outdoor cage at Pisa, remembers a bit from Kung-fu-tse, who also knew hard times. I think a lot these days about Dao, the ideogram Ez translates as "the process," and which most Americans still spell old-style as Tao. More traditional renderings turn Dao into a capitalized abstraction such as "the Way" or "the Path," and anybody trying to understand them feels like their brain has just turned to oatmeal.

Although too ignorant of Chinese to trust my own judgement, I have always preferred Ez's rendering of Dao as "process" on the basis of Ernest Fenollosa's claim that ideograms render "noun and verb as one -- things in motion, motion in things." That fits the world of modern physics, of perception psychology and of what little I think I know of Chinese. You can imagine my delight when Daniel Coyle, a friend who recently [1999] earned a Ph.D. in Chinese studies, assured me that Pound got it right."

(Taken from... http://www.rawilson.com/prethought.shtml under the headline "I Seem to be a Verb"...)

Boom, boom. (<- this and the "Tum. Tum" thing are references to the Eagles' "Hotel California". Before the lyrics begin to be sung, the bass drum does a double beat or whatever one may call it.)

So, let us now analyze these two pieces of information. Bring them together and let's see what we can derive from them...

Maybe, when one notices synchronicities one is actually noticing the process. Everything is moving. The rock you just saw isn't the rock from a second ago. It has changed and yet you still see it as the original rock in your mind, in your perception. Now, let's apply this a tad bit differently to the "23" synchronicity thingie. You see your mind's percpetion of 23 as just one number and yet you see it in many forms all over the place. In other words you see both the illusion of the verb as a noun as well as the actual verb.

So, now let's say that you've been hit by a barrage of synchronicities. Now, by thinking of the "noun", of the illusion, the maya, you are affecting the process... In Your Favor!

Hell, even if my idea about synchronicity being related to the process in that way is wrong, one can still use synchronicity to affect "reality".

And now, pardon me for saying this but...

COOLNESS!



-=Leo=-
 
 
mixmage
22:47 / 18.04.02
Maybe this is thredrot, but I'd like to play with Yagg's surfing analogy... "waves" in the title, n'all.

When I wuz learning to bodyboard, I spent quite a while out the back - waiting for my wave and philosophising. Waves come in sets, waves of waves... then there's calm. When the first one comes you watch it rise as it approaches... feel it lift you up and drop you as it passes beneath, jacking up behing you to crash on the beach. [Kinda like what Hunterwolf said. Maybe...]
When "your" wave approaches, you gotta turn and start paddling so that you can keep up with the peak when it passes [Ciarconn: accumulating power leads to a synchornization with the universe, having power leads to "things falling in place"] then drop in onto the face of the wave... you can either let it push you straight into land in pretty showers of white foam... or you can pull in, get an edge and... synchronise.

... as for "lust for result" getting in the way... the "result" isn't a >noun<... it's a ...[Cusm: I'm more in tune when I'm not trying to make anything in particular happen]... just the intent to keep on riding waves.
 
 
Lionheart
17:01 / 19.04.02
I don't understand the last paragraph.
 
 
Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero
17:19 / 19.04.02
I think when he/she says that lust isn't a noun, he/she's saying that the "lust" is really the act of riding the wave, where thought and action are one because you can't really seperate the two and still stay afloat. At least, I never could when surfing.

Or whatever. 4-20 is around the corner, so you know...
 
 
FinderWolf
01:53 / 21.04.02
What happens on 4/20??
 
 
mixmage
18:38 / 21.04.02
heh... my poor knowledge of code made a word invisible - or it just got lost along the way. Zenarchist got it, tho [surfer!]... lust for result is only an issue if you set out to achieve a product - surfing, like the Dao, is a process... the result of which is "to surf"... a >verb<, so to speak.
 
 
Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero
19:27 / 21.04.02
What happens on 4/20??

There's a thread on this in the Conversation.
 
 
FinderWolf
16:46 / 22.04.02
OK.........I just looked through The Conversation, and don't see a topic heading labeled "4-20". Can you tell me what heading this thread is under? Or provide a link? Thanks.
 
 
Trijhaos
17:40 / 22.04.02
Here ya go

Happy 420!
 
 
Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero
18:07 / 22.04.02
Sorry about that. I was hesistant to just write "I'm going to smoke a lot of marijauna, as I have been the past few days preparing for the weekend holiday, which would explain my garbled response, and this thread's existence too, as a matter of fact". Didn't seem proper for the magikal forum.
 
 
mixmage
22:52 / 22.04.02
Trying to work magic without surfing the waves o' synchronicity is just a flat day at the reef. what to do?
skin up!
 
 
Slim
01:49 / 23.04.02
Since I skipped over some of the posts, pardon me if I repeat something:

If you guys are using a surfing analogy, what happens when you fall off the wave and into the trough (I think that's the term I'm looking for)? How would you get out and back on the wave of synchronicity?

And Johnny, no amount of synchronicity is going to make you the better MarioKart racer.
 
 
01
04:13 / 23.04.02
It's my birthday. Synchronicity city. Always seems to happen alot around this time, I don't know why. Yesterday it was Dolly Parton songs and the name Gibson. The chess analogy is awesome. This deal with implanting thoughts in other people's minds is interesting as well.

Last night I was at a strip club. There was this really hot stripper standing by the bar. She was amazing. I wanted her to come over and talk to me so in my mind I willed her to do so. She did. I was shocked. The act itself was the equivialant to letting out a mental kiai! like in karate. I yelled it my mind, "COME OVER HERE!". A split second later, she started on her way over. I'd never experienced anything like that before. Now, either one of two things happened:

a. I really did "call" her over, and she in turn "heard" me.
b. Subconciously I could tell that she was in fact going to come over anyway, and set up this mental projection scenario in my mind to make it appear like I called her over.

Anyways it struck me as really odd.

However, I know for a fact that I've implanted thoughts in my girlfriends mind while she's been sleeping (yes, she knows I go to see peelers, and no she doesn't care. It's my birthday lay off..) There's been times whilst falling asleep that I've suddnely felt anxious whilst. When this has happened her breathing rate then sharply accelerates. Feeling bad for tensing her out, I'll then make a decision to relax, and the second I do, she lets out a sigh of relief and her breathing goes back to normal.

Grant Morrison is right when he says he believes that we are nothing more than biological machines that recycle memetic material. I believe also that time is one entity.
 
 
mixmage
02:38 / 24.04.02
what if you fall off?

really good surfers try to rollercoaster the face to get up enough momentum to steam up and over at the end of the ride [you'll know it with practice], landing back at the back and ready to select ya next wave.

Unlucky ones go over with the falls, get held down under the reef and never come back [ooOOOoooh].

otherwise, wait until the calm between sets to paddle out again - or risk taking a beating as you paddle out into the same set... or look for the channel, or learn to duck-dive...

... one night I was lying in bed, unable to sleep due to puzzling my life out. Just as I reach the conclusion - "because I don't like people", my betrothed rolls over, fast asleep and face to face and says

"well... that's your problem"... without ever waking up.

was I thinking too loud?
 
 
Lionheart
17:34 / 27.04.02
Slim: Synchronicity is more like a flow, a stream, a current.

You're thinking of sine waves. Well, actual waves in the ocean don't have a trough or wjhatever it's called. They have the top of the wave and the equilibrium from which the waves arise. If you're under the equilibrium then you're in the water.
 
 
Sebastian
17:58 / 29.05.02
(I was willing to left the second version of this thread as it was, so I am injecting this with the following)

There was a woman in my life, well, there still is, who we will call "M" (but not from Mary, please), being the relation with her what I wish to subject to the Distinguished Board of Magi at Barbelith, within this topic of synchronicities. The magi will excuse the sometimes overtly fatuous literary style in the lines that follow, while bearing in mind that he who writes also abhors it, and is always striving to favor a more conversational one.

Simply put, M and I met 12 years ago right at the start of our careers, and although we were unable to develop any, just about any kind of consistent relationship at all -be it as friends, colleagues, lovers, fellows, neighbors, whatever-, the whole thing was plagued with powerful, unsettling, and to myself enigmatic and very suggestive synchronistic occurrences, but suggestive of what I am afraid still remains to be explored. There were also two distinct occasions that could be categorized as fairly telekinetic experiences, and telekinetic being a term I despise anyway.

The first time I saw her, I immediately became mildly entranced by the teasing fact that I couldn't make up if I was actually recognizing her amidst other unknown students, while I felt sort of a pang in my being that was at the same time pleasurable and promissory of something not formulated, neither erotic nor romantic, a pang with which I was not yet familiar at all, and which eventually turned out to be a herald of what was to come. And "What Was to Come" was a profuse concoction made of dreams, and actually too many dreams I am afraid, all portraying intense and vivid approaches to each other, distinguished by strikingly heightened sensory perceptions, there were also "random" encounters during waking life, some of them freakingly parallel to experiences in dreams, weird phone calls, intruding thoughts announcing her verifiable physical proximity, more intruding thoughts announcing her unverifiable proximity, mis-encounters, things said, things unsaid, and so forth.

The above written, it suffices to add that at some point in spacetime, while I was emotionally exasperated by the fact that any term of consistent mundane relation appeared to be incapable of evolving, I seemed to have gotten a grip on the synchronistic pattern gauge, and was able to reduce its sterile intrusions to minor and insignificant blurbs of experience. Of course, by this time I had been literally thrown to what would become my full magickal life, and I was also able to take responsibility of other aspects of experience.

Now, the questions for which I would like to have your thoughts are, Are these synchronicities constitutionally prefigured, sort of an existing predisposition between individuals, or do individuals actually fuel them with their desires and obssessions, or are they a combination of both? What do you think?

What could be magickally derived of such synchronistic patterns occuring between two individuals, and how do you think it could be explored?

Is there any model you find comfortable with for explaining synchronicities like these, be it magickal, genetic, psychical, physical, matematical, pheromonical, extraterrestrial, or whatever?
 
 
Bear
12:41 / 30.05.02
11:11

For the past few days I've been catching the time at 11:11, I open up Barbelith a second ago and how many messages have I posted - 1111

Well not anymore
 
 
Knight's Move
14:16 / 30.05.02
Myself and an old friend have also being discussing this a lot basically after I introduced everyone to RAW.

After we started looking we began to see synchronicity everywhere, even my parents keep spotting it, without the recourse to drugs. Basically you can either go for an Eco Foucault's Pendulum everything is connected, so everything does tie into everything else, so you can control anything by controlling something else. Or that the more you've read about synchronicity, the more you are going to find it because you reconstruct your way of looking at the world so that certain things become obvious and everything that doesn't fit with it you subconciously ignore (like being able to hear your name mentioned across a room at a party).

This old friend rejected all forms of ritualised magic (whilst looking into them avidly) as they get in the way of his brain directly controlling the reality around him. He appreciated the middle man thing but wanted to be able to do it directly. If this world really is created by our minds surely with strong enough belief we can control what is around us?

Actually, just yesterday I was thinking about magi(c)(k)al methods and the requirement to focus the will and came to the conclusion that my will is very strong but almost impossible for me to focus at the moment so I was considering a way to use that and just direct my will outwards so that rather than getting one specific powerful effect in front of me I got a generalised control over my entire world.

A quite good book for the living randomly lovers amongst you is the not-sequel to Diceman by Luke Reinhart called Wim in which a young boy seeks enlightenment and lives randomly, completely confusing everyone. As a man who tries to live his life by whim, and whose life goes better when I actually do, I quite appreciated it. My life seems to be typified by a preponderance of extreme swings of luck: the only question I could answer on one of my finals came up, last year I went mad during exam term. One moment I'm so out of cash I owe everyone money and am forced to make my own pasta, next I'm sent a grand in the post and everyone owes me money. Actually money seems to flow through me constantly turning up at the right moment. But that's something else...

Sorry that got a bit large and confused - take a guess why...
 
  
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