In 7 Secrets of Synchronicity, the 5th secret is Clusters: Synchronicity manifests itself in clusters of numbers, names, objects, words, symbols.
Quite often, people who see the same numbers, like 11:11, over and over feel they’re being stalked by the numbers, hunted, pursued. That’s how writer William Burroughs felt after numerous synchronicities with the number 23.
In Tangiers in the early 1960s, the author of Naked Lunch knew a Captain Clark who ran a ferry from Tangiers to Spain. Clark boasted that he’d been running the ferry for twenty-three years without an accident and on the same day of the boast, the ferry sank, killing Clark and everyone on board. That same evening Burroughs was mulling over this tragedy and happened to turn on the radio. He heard about the crash of a New York-Miami airplane piloted by a Captain Clark. The flight number was 23.
The synchronicity shocked Burroughs and he began compiling a list of coincidences involving the number 23. In 1965, his friend and fellow author Robert Anton Wilson also started compiling a list about the number. One of the personal oddities Burroughs found concerned his daughters, who were born August 23 and February 23. In 1977, he wrote about this weirdness for the Fortean Times. It appeared in issue 23.
Now let’s take a look at literature. Shakespeare was born on April 23, 1564 and died on April 23, 1616. His first folio was published in 1623,
Hollywood also has its share of 23s. Take the X Files production company, Ten-Thirteen. The numbers 10 and 13 add up to 23. The show’s creator, Chris Carter, was born on 10/13. In one and the number 1013 appeared on the side of the silo. In another episode, Muldur went to the apartment of. Recently deceased man and the number 23 was on the door.
Remember the TV show Lost? It built on layers of synchronicity and there were many oddities that involved 23:
Oceanic Flight 815 – 8+15=23
The flight departed from gate 23
Jack’s seat on the plane was 23 A
Hurley stayed in a Sydney hotel on floor 23
The reward for turning Kate in was $23,000
Even if the repetition of 23 was intentional, it was the sort of weirdness that would have interested Burroughs and Wilson. They saw 23 as a death number. Maybe they were right. The twenty-third psalm is a popular reading at funerals. Burroughs discovered that the bootlegger Dutch Schultz had Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll assassinated on 23rd Street in New York when Coll was 23 years old. Schultz himself was assassinated on October 23. Wilson dug deeper and discovered that the man convicted of shooting Schultz served 23 years before being paroled. Wilson noted that in the telegraphers’ code, 23 means means “bust” or “break the line.” Hexagram 23 in The I Ching is called Splitting Apart.
And all these examples are just starters.
If you experience synchronicity clusters with the number 23, it doesn’t mean you’re going to die, that you’re cursed or anything else of that nature. But it could indicate that you’re going through a major transformative period in your life and that there’s a path ahead that you haven’t recognized yet.
P.S. A few hours after I’d written this post and put it on the dashboard, our daughter Megan texted. She’s traveling in Colorado and said they’d stopped for gas in a town that had just 23 residents. I asked her how she knew that and she said their server had told her. So it looks as if this #23 is gearing up to become a cluster. Stay tuned!
