(We added those glasses!)
A few months ago, we e-mailed a query letter to the editor of Psychology Today suggesting an article about synchronicity. We would explore some of the leading edge research on the subject, including the studies of Bernard Beitman, MD, who has suggested a new interdisciplinary field called Coincidence Studies. A couple of hours later, we noticed that we’d received a visit from Psychology Today. (The visitor’s ISP was linked to a media company which owns the magazine.) After that, nothing. No response, favorable or otherwise. Not even a form letter rejection.
So it was interesting when, barely into July, we happened to spy the August issue of Psychology Today on the newsstand with the cover story SIXTH SENSE: Premonitions, Deja Vu, Coincidences, Near-Death Experiences. As we perused the article, the author quickly assured us that all of these ‘anomalous experiences’ were simply tricks of the mind.
“We often explain such experiences using concepts related to spirits, luck, witchcraft, psychic powers, life energy, or more terrestrial (and extra terrestrial) entities. Such explanations are often more appealing, or at least more intuitive, than blaming an odd experience on a trick of the mind.”
We were also told that these experiences “may be associated with stressful circumstances, personal pathologies, or cognitive deficits.” In other words, if you experience something psychic, you might be stressed, mentally ill or just dumb!
Author Matthew Hutson, a former editor of Psychology Today, makes it clear in the first few paragraphs that this mainstream science journal was not going to dabble in any unorthodox explanations of such ‘outlier phenomena’ as synchronicity. In fact, the article avoids the term. What we call synchros, Hutson refers to as apophenia – the ability to recognize patterns. Even though he says this ability is helpful for our survival, he warns that sometimes it gets away from us.
He uses the example of Mark David Chapman who, before killing John Lennon, noted 50 connections between Holden Caulfield’s time in New York City in The Catcher in the Rye and his own life. Hutson suggests that overactive dopamine transmissions help us find meaningful coincidences in things. It’s also called schizophrenia.
Thankfully, he concedes that these experiences also might be ‘healthy inventions’ of the brain, which is often busy searching for patterns. What sends some people into mental illness can lead others to be creative and insightful.
But he quickly returns to mental dysfunction when he notes there is a significant correlation between belief in the paranormal and in conspiracies. “A key trait that predicts a belief in conspiracy theories is paranoia.”
The article continues with a lot of generalizing about ‘magical thinking’ and the usual attempts by mainstream science to explain away telepathy, precognition, and remote viewing, as well as near-death experiences, and spirit contact. It’s nothing new, just more of the same rigid thinking on these subjects that mainstream science has generated decade after decade while ignoring hundreds of studies to the contrary by so-called ‘fringe’ scientists. If there’s any crack in the dam here, it’s a grudging recognition that noticing patterns, i.e. synchros, might be a healthy pre-occupation.
Hutson, though, seems most comfortable writing about pathologies related to paranormal beliefs and struggles a bit in presenting the concept that exploring psychic experiences has a healthy psychological benefit for many people.
“People high in sensation-seeking–those who search for novelty and exciting stimuli–also report more paranormal beliefs and experiences. Perhaps they’re drawn to the idea of a world inhabited by mysterious forces. So, being a pattern-finding sensation-seeker means you’re more likely to experience odd coincidences in the first place, and then more likely to entertain unconventional explanations for them. A one-two punch.”
When he refers to coincidence, Hutson turns a bit cynical. “Research shows that we find coincidences involving ourselves much more surprising than identical coincidences involving others, because we feel we’re somehow special. (Yes, I know, you really are special.)”
Bottom line: when it comes to dealing with anomalous experiences, Hutson assures us it’s all in our heads, tricks of the brain. Think you’ve seen a ghost? Think again. “Once you have it in your head that you might see or hear something, your brain is often happy to oblige by presenting a hallucination, especially when you’re tired or scared.” That may be true, but is that always the case, 100% of the time? Hutson implies over and over that it is, which places him squarely in the rear guard of psychic exploration. It’s hard to investigate a subject fairly if you don’t believe it exists.
While pursuing these experiences might be healthy in small doses, Hutson concludes that two thirds of the population is either misguided or mentally challenged when it comes to understanding the source of such phenomena, and some of us are downright crazy.
We probably would’ve reviewed this article even if we hadn’t queried the journal on the same subject with a different approach. But that gave us an added incentive. We saw a pattern, a connection, one that even extended to Hutson’s own work. He published a book this year about coincidence and the paranormal, and called it: The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking. Hmm, sounds like the mainstream science response to The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity.
Or maybe we’re just seeing things.
Bravo, Marcus! So very, very well said!
This is a very typical mainstream popular science publication’s take on mystical experience. It is to be expected, because that is where dominant science and academia is at. It is stuck in a delusion that mind is an emergent property of the brain, and that it is confined to the head. This is false. The way we experience is greatly influenced by the brain and our genetic evolution, but it is not confined by it.
If the article was academically sound, it would describe its finding as ‘problematic’, not in absolute and definitive terms. That is because there is now enough evidence from parapsychology and studies of comparative spiritual experience to place mainstream materialist science in doubt.
In the greater scheme of things, this is merely a path that human beings have chosen to explore. It’s part of the journey into separation and back. And back it will come, but not quite yet for many stuck in the materialist delusion. I was once there myself, so I am not one to judge it.
The article obviously does have valid points. there is a healthy expression of skepticism: the honest, impersonal questioning of things. For example, it is true that an obsession with conspiracies is inherently delusional. It has nothing to do with the truth of what it means to be human at the deepest level. And it is possible to become obsessed with finding hidden meaning in things. These are just attempts by the most to achieve the illusion of control where it feels its own powerlessness. In the end there is a more profound spirituality found in just being here, and it is unnecessary to attach belief to things. But it is also true that most of us will go through a period of being ‘believers’. Belief by its very nature does not know. It merely thinks. That’s why the mind gets disturbed, scared and angry when it encounters beliefs which contradict it. That goes for skeptics and ‘believers’ alike.
Here is the important point for me. As soon as you set yourself up in opposition to an opposing belief structure, you lose serenity, peace of mind, and the sense of ‘love’. You cannot experience love and judgment at the same time. So even if you are right and the skeptics are wrong, you are a ‘loser’ as soon as you battle them at the level of mind. You go into separation. Therefore it is better just to acknowledge whatever judgments you have about the opposing belief, acknowledge your own projections, and return to a state of peace. Just let them be. ‘God’ does not judge skeptics. Neither should we.
Hi! I realize this is somewhat off-topic but I needed to ask.
Does running a well-established blog like yours require a massive amount
work? I’m brand new to operating a blog however I do write in my diary everyday. I’d like to start a blog so I can easily share my experience and views online. Please let me know if you have any kind of suggestions or tips for new aspiring blog owners. Thankyou!
well, i, too, am here later in the day and have read every single comment – some several times each – and rather than reiterating the basic comment here, i will be as succinct as possible here – my comment to hutson: PULEEEZZEEEE…..it THAT old story the best you have?
and about “seeing” things…the big word that starts with a P kept popping up in my mind’s eye as i read…just sayin’….
OLD story, OLD paradigm.
Rob and Trish,
I am late in the day to look at your posting. I see a ton of responses but have to add my own. My first reaction was that what you wrote was a bit of a syncro for me personally because a few days ago I responded to a woman’s request for dreams for her PhD project. She is a therapist and says she wants to write something to help her patients with their dreams.
I wrote back telling her of my interest in prophetic dreams because when I was working on my own PhD, 30+ years ago, I discovered that I had had dreams that were about the future. One dream in particular is what arrested my attention because at the time I was recording my dreams in my journal, along with what ever was happening during my “awake” time, I was doing my best to analyze them according to what ever method I had read by the “experts” on dreams and psychology. I discovered that all this analyzing was often a waste of time. Some dreams were quite literal and I was analyzing the truth out of them. Of course I had no way of knowing at the time of the dream. I would not have discovered that some dreams are symbolic and some dreams are prophetic and some dreams are God knows what, if I had not written them down.
Anyway, I wrote to this woman exactly what I want to add to this discussion brought on by that absurd article in PSYCHOLOGY TODAY. It was while I was working on my degree in “Art and the Personal Symbolic Process” that I discovered this prophetic function of some dreams. At the time I interacted with quite a few psychologists while working on my degree and was eager to discuss my discovery about some of my dreams. To my shock, every time I told them my dream and what happened in reality two and a half years after the dream, the psychologists ALL took the attitude that my dream was not prophetic. They insisted that I did not see something happening before it happened, and they had a variety of explanations of why this could not be so. They used the usual mumbo jumbo of what they had read about dreams and various ways my mind was distorting my experience.
I discovered that people who makes these assumptions and conclusions about other people’s dreams are not doing it based on their own research on dreams but on what someone else has written about them. If I have an experience no one else can erase that experience or call it something it wasn’t. I think there ARE people hallucinating or what ever you want to call it. But there are also times when we have these events happen that are real.
I have a relative who is a psychologist who labels my experiences as magical thinking. She means this, to mean that I am a bit woo-woo. One time I tried to open up the subject and her mind by telling her a dream I had had about her. It was very personal and not something she would want me to know about. When I first had the dream I did the usual of trying to understand the dream by taking what her stand would be. Her belief system is that ALL dreams are about the dreamer and never about the person dreamed. I told the dream to another family member in an effort to understand my dream. I learned that what I had dreamed was a fact – not something I could passably have known about. From then on I put all dreams on a “wait and see” list.
The attitude of this article in PSYCHOLOGY TODAY and the attitude of the psychologists I encountered who think I am distorting my reality in some way, makes me think they simply never had such an experience, can not imagine such a thing, and therefore feel they have to say that it is not possible to be able (at least in one’s unconscious) to see what has not yet happened. Maybe this scares them.
And what about the whole subject of your material being stolen. I was told a long time ago not to send queries of articles to magazines because if they like the idea they will hire someone on staff to do it, cutting you out. “The 7 laws of Magical Thinking.” Puleeze!
Fascinating, Adele. Thanks so much for including this.
Interesting suggestion: if we crazies are capable of “creating manifestations” of the things that are in and on our minds, shouldn’t we be appearing on all the global talent shows as Magicians?? That way, we could be making tons of money with these “imaginary” talents that we possess to manifest tangible creations just by thinking of them. Ho hum. What IS it, I wonder, that these scientific skeptics fear so much? Likewise the fundamental Christian folks who deny psi gifts and perceptions and label them “tools of the devil”. Such nonsense. And oh, so tiresome.
Yeah…I think he totally ripped your title. What a narrow-minded douche. I really liked Nicholas Carroll’s comment…he called it perfectly. For me synchros are on the rise…with good benefits. Maybe this is why the idea of them is trying to be explained away as a mental illness. The forces that be want us to be kept down with their thumbs over us.
I suppose, being an atheist, Hutson has no alternative but to reach the conclusions he has. He is also giving their regular magazine subscribers what they expect and want to read or hear – much as we probably do! Personally I’m happy with my own paranoia
It made me smile when the synopsis for his book says he “… shows that all of us … engage in magical thinking all the time – and that we can use it to our advantage.” And that’s even though it’s a load of old codswallop.
These folks can no longer sit back and say everyone who experiences synchronicity and related psi phenomena are mentally ill in one way or another. There are just too many of us and they know we’re not all insane. So they are saying it’s okay, it may even be a healthy preoccupation in moderate doses. But that’s as far as the go. Ultimately it’s all meaningless, they insist, because believe the mind does not extend beyond the body.
I promise I won’t keep going on about this, but I do want to make one further comment. Again, from a logical, reasonable point of view, this flock of ravens may very well have been driven far south of their usual habitat as a result of the horrific storms that have just happened in the Northeast; the floods, the power outages; the indescribable destruction created by those storms, including the unprecedented heat, both real temps and heat indices in the triple digits. So, the birds may have flown beyond their natural borders and into our state, seeking possible refuge yet finding only worse conditions in terms of heat. Be that as it may, and probably is, the fact remains that there was a valid synchronicity, just as Trish said. I did not “create” those ravens in my imagination, and I did not write the words in John Connolly’s novel. They manifested in my reality simultaneously, and THAT is synchronicity!!
I would like to know if this guy would lock me up in the loon bin when I can 99% of the time accuratley predict whose texzting me or calling me on the phone before even looking?! Just two days ago while having lunch at my Mothers and in the presence of my twins ,my Mothers phone starting ringing. I said that’s Mmie and she isn’t stopping here on her way home. My mother had not answered or looked at the phone prior to me saying that. Sure enough when she answered that was who it was and it was the exact message. After the call my mother and the twins all looked at me and said how did you know? I said thats called telepathy and I keep telling you I’m psychic! I think they are starting to believe because the twins witnessed it again later in the day when I accuratley predicted a neighbor calling 🙂 So Huston call me crazy but I do have witnesses!
Absolutely double YIKES! Googling “ravens as symbols” brings many different responses. In some cultures thay are considered wonderful omens; in some cultures they are considered evil. But here is John Connolly’s words (his story takes place in the state of Maine) that I was reading when the ravens began to scream in tandem outside my backdoor in the ancient FL oak tree:
“THE RAVENS WERE MOTIONLESS. MANY OF THEIR FAR-NORTHERN BRETHREN HAD HEADED SOUTH TO ESCAPE THE WORST OF THE WINTER, BUT NOT THESE BIRDS. THEY WERE HUGE, YET SLEEK, THEIR EYES BRIGHT WITH AN ALIEN INTELLIGENCE. THEY WERE LARGER THAN THE USUQAL RAVENS, AND PERHAPS, TOO, THEY BROUGHT WITH THEM A SENSE OF DISCOMFORT, THESE HUNCHED BEINGS, THESE PATIENT, TREACHEROUS
SCOUTS. THEY WERE PERCHED DEEPLY AMONG THE BRANCHES OF AN ANCIENT OAK, AN ORGANISM APPROACHING THE END OF ITS DAYS, ITS LEAVES FALLING EARLIER EACH YEAR. iT WAS ALONE OF ITS KIND, AND SOON IT WOULD BE GONE. bUT THE RAVENS HAD COME TO IT, FOR THE RAVENS LIKED DYING THINGS. THE SMALLER BIRDS FLED THEIR COMPANY AND REGARDED THE INTRUDERS WARILY FROM THE COVER OF EVERGREEN FOLIAGE. They HAD SILENCED THE WOODS BEHIND THEM. THEY RADIATED THREAT; THE STILLNESS OF THEM; THEIR CLAWS CURLED UPON THE BRANCHES; THE BLADE-LIKE SHARPNESS OF THEIR BEAKS. THEY WERE STALKERS, WATCHERS, WAITING FOR THE HUNT TO BEGIN. IT WAS UNUSUAL TO SEE SO MANY TOGETHER, FOR RAVENS ARE NOT SOCIAL BIRDS; A PAIR, YES, BUT NOT LIKE THIS, NOT WITHOUT FOOD IN SIGHT. YOU WANT THEM TO MOVE, YOU WANT THEM TO LEAVE. tHESE WERE MOST UNCOMMON BIRDS. DARKNESS WAS APPROACHING, AND STILL THEY WAITED.”
OK, There are several synchros here. If T and R look at their caller ID on their phone, they will see the time I phoned them and will note it wasn’t yet dark, but was twilight.
I don’t easily frighten; have been a legitimate ghost hunter whose services have been used by my town’s newspaper on more than one occasion. I am NOT easily frightened. Those ravens in my yard last night didn’t scare me. Their presence didn’t alarm me. They prompted me to understand the significance of true synchronicity. My sitting room has such extremely high energies that nothing dark can intrude there. SOMETHING, but not something “fearful”, caused my door-shade to suddenly zoom up by itself, and when I left it alone, then the ravens begin their chorus of shrieks and screams and I went to look. I am not exaggerating, but as Connolly wrote in his book, my other little birds had gone totally silent. I SAW them, the little ordinary birds that we feed, and I SAW our squirrels, but even the bluejays that were close by were silent. Only the ravens were noisy, and the noise was unholy. So as far as I’m concerned, the author of that PT article is a foolish, uninformed person. This experience was as real as it gets.
These were definitely ravens, not the fish-eating blackbirds. I assume, from a practical aspect, that the ravens may be congregating in FL due to some unnatural weather anomaly of which we may not yet be aware. When the single raven appeared in my FRONT yard tree right outside our bay window, a pair of gorgeous doves appeared in our yard on the ground, almost simultaneously. Now, we DO have these lovely grey doves here, but these were the first this year, and their appearance preceded by just a couple of days, an entire flock of cooing doves that has taken up residence in our yard and that we are feeding. The single raven hasn’t returned to the front yard tree. It was right up against the glass of our bay window, and was eerie. Like Scarabnight, I compared crows, blackbirds, and ravens photos. These were definitely ravens. (More to follow)
Once again, a fabulously informing post, not to mention very interesting!
I wonder about anyone in the psychological sciences who can ignore the work of Carl Jung and I think “Pattern Finding Sensation Seeker” would make a great t-shirt.
It amazes me how rigid ego types can use just words, not experiences, to create their world. A trick of the mind, that’s what all extra-sensory experience is? Is sensory experience also a trick of the mind? How can we tell the difference?
I want to know what Mind is, as it’s playing tricks on me. But it seems that we should be content with accepting the “authority” of self-appointed experts, and suspect our own experience, intuition, insight and dare I say it, dreams.
On whose authority? is a question I like to ask, so I checked out Wikipedia’s article on apophenia. I didn’t have to read far before, with a chill, I realized the kind of person who posited this concept.
Here’s Wiki:
Apophenia is the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.
The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad,[1] who defined it as the “unmotivated seeing of connections” accompanied by a “specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness”, but it has come to represent the human tendency to seek patterns in random nature in general, as with gambling, paranormal phenomena and religion.
(Klaus Conrad (June 19, 1905 in Reichenberg – 5 May 1961 in Göttingen) was a German neurologist and psychiatrist with important contributions to neuropsychology and psychopathology. He joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in 1940.[1] He was best known as a professor of psychiatry and neurology, and director of the University Psychiatric Hospital in Göttingen from 1958 until his death.)
Thanks for the references, Adelita. Apophenia, indeed
Well, in response to this…..Last night (July 4, 2012), I attempted to phone T & R because I had just experienced one of the most profound syncronicities I’ve ever had, and although I had written them an email THREE TIMES about it before trying to call them, each of the emails vanished into cyber-space, so I decided to phone them instead. My fingers got tired of typing and then having the material disappear.
I suppose I must be among the schizos and the crazies, because here is the experience: Day before yesterday I bought the July 1, 2012 release of the paperback edition of the new novel by John Connolly, THE BURNING SOUL. I read his suspense-thriller books as they are released. Last night hubby and son went to downtown fireworks and I was home alone, settled into my sitting room chair with my new book to read. The room has only a glass storm door to the outside, (no wood door), because many plants in there need sunlight, but there is a three-layered heat-blocking shade on the door that I pull down at night for privacy. It was pulled down. It has never, in many years, sprung back up on its own. NEVER.
I opened the book to page one and began to read. Suddenly the door shade went slamming back up into its top and the noise scared the beejeebies out of me, but I thought, “OK. Not a problem” and was too lazy to get up and pull it back down. Continued to begin reading. Second paragraph on page one and continuing onto page two in the book describes “a flock of large black ravens sitting silently among the branches in an old oak tree”; described them as being “ominous, alien beings”, etc.
At the exact moment I was reading about those evil ravens, (it was still light outside here; darkness hadn’t yet fallen), there was the most loud shrieking, screeching, screaming bird-noise in my backyard. I got up to look, and on the branches of the enormous old water-OAK tree that hangs over our fence from our neighbors’ yard, there was a flock of probably two dozen BIG black ravens, all of them screaming.
I was stunned. My mind inadvertently pictured scenes from Hitchcock’s old movie THE BIRDS because that’s exactly what it was like. I just stood there, and in a few moments, as if they were One bird instead of so many, they all ceased their ear-piercing shrieks at once, suddenly, and flew off together into the sky. They didn’t come back.
I was so astonished by this synchronicity, and was trembling from it because only once have we had ravens here, and that was last week and was only one raven, an experience which I had shared with Trish and Rob. In my email to them immediately following the incident last night, I had copied the paragraphs from Connolly’s book so they would see the synchro, but as said, the email kept vanishing from my computer and I decided to call them because my hand was too tired to type it a fourth time. (They weren’t home to receive my call and I didn’t leave a message.)
Annnyyywwwwaaaaayyyyyy, there is no question that this was NOT a figment of my imagination. Ravens are not indigenous to this beach community. Last week when I had the different synchronicity involving a single raven, it was so weird I went on a search for ravens as symbols, etc. But last night…..a full page in a novel about these ravens silently watching from the branches of an old oak tree, and they suddenly appear with screeching ferocity in my backyard, sitting in the branches of an ancient oak tree? Oh yeah.
The author of that article should have been HERE. Then let him write about hallucinations and insanity!!!!! I went so far as to walk next door and asked my neighbors if they had seen and heard all those ravens, and yes, they had, and they had been as surprised as I was. Real deal, guys. Shivers and chills, no kidding. And why did my door shade go zooming up just before the ravens started their screeching chorus? Another part of this synchro is that Connolly’s intro was a quote from Poe. I hope the ravens don’t return.
Math, I Googled ‘Ravens in Florida,’ since I questioned whether they were in the state and wondered if you were seeing fish crows, which are the closest to ravens in Florida,. Here’s what came up, oddly enough – a post from Wiccan blog.
The other morning I walked out on my patio to water my plants, just like I do every morning, when I looked down over the balcony and saw a big black bird sitting on the ground by the parking lot. I looked at him for a sec and then he flew up onto my roommate’s car. I felt kinda drawn to him and couldn’t stop watching him and then he cawed and the word raven kept repeating in my head. I’ve never seen a raven before, just heard about them in novels and such. I went back inside to get more water but when I came back out, he was gone. Since then, I looked up ravens versus crows online and I’m pretty sure what I saw and heard was a raven. I read that it’s pretty rare to see them outside of the more northern, mountainous, rural areas and Florida is none of those. I’ve been having trouble finding any decent symbolism on ravens…any suggestions? I don’t have specific deities as I figured that the ones that were right for me would inform me when the time was right. I’m wondering if I’m not reading too much into this though. What do you all think?
Scarabnight
A further thought. If Hutson read your comment, he would probably think that it was a perfect example of what he was writing about. You saw large black birds and interpreted them as ravens, because you were reading about ravens. He would say that in all likelihood they were crows, since ravens aren’t native to Florida and most people can’t distinguish one from another anyhow.
However, Hutson would be missing the point. Just as you read about a flock of loud ravens, either ravens or the closest thing to them in Florida appeared and set off a racket in your backyard. Even in the famous scarab beetle story by Jung, which set off his journey into synchronicity, the beetle that tapped on his window as the patient talked about her dream of a scarab beetle, wasn’t a scarab beetle, but the closest beetle to one in his region. Your synchro was impressive and legit.
Furthermore, I just noticed that the Wicca lady who commented on ravens in Florida calls herself Scarabnight. Yikes! Also, as you have told us, you are a Wiccan. Double yikes!
Wow here we go again, and my first question is ” what are they afraid of?”
I get so frustrated, I have been in therapy and was NOT diagnosed as schizophrenic yet I continue to see, hear, smell and feel “ghosts”. Science just refuses to believe what is in front of their eyes!
I think the author stole your book idea. It is just too similar! Pretty daring!!
Apophenia? Wow, that must be really sad to live with such a narrow-minded, uninspired viewpoint of existence. Notice how they put the hot chick on the cover for consumer appeal? I guess Psychology Today (trendy publication that it is) disavows the miracle of synchronicity for the baser human psychology that ‘sex sells’. Hm, that must be ‘Apophenia’ herself on the cover of their summer swimsuit issue. 🙂
You got it, Dale. Following the Sixth Sense article, PT gives us: From Promise to Promiscuity, the psychology of affairs, a titillating topic no doubt.
Adding those glasses to the cover model gives her ‘spex appeal’! LOL
Sometimes people have problems even with experimentally proven things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW6Mq352f0E
True!
People in the power structure do seem threatened by people who believe in a spiritual force that is transcendent, and want us to accept our subjugation to the point of labeling anything outside of the norm as a “mental illness.” I think the strict scientific-materialists are the mentally ill ones. They have created a world that is in the process of breaking down. The financial institutions, the religious institutions, the governmental institutions…it’s all breaking down. You can’t suppress spirituality. It always breaks through, like a blade of grass through a concrete sidewalk.
Well put, Nicholas. You see the big picture, beyond the details of the article.