Synchronicity: The Art of
Coincidence
An
Interview with Dr. Kirby Surprise
The experience of meaningful coincidences is universal. They are reported by people of every culture, every belief system, and time period. Traditionally these synchronistic events are made acceptable by ascribing them to outside supernatural forces such as divinities, or in modern times, impersonal archetypal influences.
Dr. Kirby Surprise demonstrates that synchronistic events, based on the
activity of the mind, are actually caused by the person who perceives them, and
reflect many levels of their consciousness.
His research reveals that what we believe and the way we look for
patterns in the world generates synchronistic events that mirror our own
assumptions. By decoding the science of synchronicity, Dr. Kirby uncovered how
we actually create events and how we co‐create
our reality.
A licensed psychologist who makes his living assessing, diagnosing and
treating delusions and thought disorders, Dr. Kirby Surprise is certainly
qualified to untangle the web of reflected meanings and false assumptions about
synchronistic events.
His groundbreaking new book is titled Synchronicity: The Art of Coincidence, Change, and
Unlocking Your Mind (New Page Books, 2012).
New Dawn recently spoke to Dr. Surprise.
NEW DAWN (ND): Dr. Surprise, doesn’t
it seem strange for someone named Surprise to be writing a book on
coincidences?
DR. KIRBY SURPRISE (KS): Yes, Surprise is
actually my family name, and I am a licensed psychologist. It’s definitely a
meaningful coincidence that I wound up writing a book on synchronicity. Having
a name like Surprise is probably one of the reasons the book seems to have had
a charmed life in the publication process. The name and the book itself are
their own synchronistic event.
ND: What exactly are
synchronistic events?
KS: Synchronistic events
(SE) are coincidences in which a meaning or message seems to be conveyed by the
events to the observer. They happen when the inner and outer worlds become
synchronised. Here’s an example from the book that helped fuel my own
fascination with SE:
One cool
autumn day I was sitting in my car waiting to pick up a friend. I was listening
to the radio to pass the time. During a commercial break an ad for the movie
Carrie was played. The movie is about a teenager who discovers she has the
ability to move objects at a distance. I started having fantasies about what it
would actually be like to experience moving an object this way. I had seen the
film; during its climax, Carrie uses her power to crush her family’s home. I
looked across the street and saw an old cottage. Focusing on the house, I
fantasised about what being able to move an object that large would be like. I
was remembering a National Inquirer headline
about a house that supposedly was turned over on its side by some psychic
force. I was wondering what effect such a power would have on a person, how it
might feel to move a house.
As I stared at
the house the entire cottage shuddered violently. The house started to move. It
rolled over onto its side. The roof was now facing me. I was astonished and
felt panicky. I stared at the overturned house and wondered, could I have
really done this? I wondered if this was just a vivid dream. I decided I was
awake and the event was real.
“OK,” I said
to myself. “If I just did that, then I want to see the house crushed like in
the movie.”
As I stared,
awestruck, the house again began to shudder. The roof started to collapse
inward as if the centre of the house were slowly imploding. Beams burst through
walls and windows shattered as the house began to tear itself apart. A moment
later, I saw a flash of yellow paint above the house, then the largest
bulldozer I’d ever seen climbed lazily over the centre of the house, crushing
the structure into rubble in a few moments. It then started to load the debris
into waiting dump trucks. The house had obscured the demolition equipment from
sight. With the radio on and windows up, I couldn’t hear the tractor engine. My
fantasy had come to pass, my wish fulfilled through a series of synchronistic
events.
ND: You’re claiming that
not only are these events real, but that we all create them every day. But
isn’t it possible that we are just interpreting what we experience wrong, that
synchronistic events are a trick of the mind?
KS: Many SE are based
solely on the way we interpret events around us. SE can seem like miracles,
violating the laws of time and space. You are the actual miracle. You have
billions of sensory neurons pointed out into the environment. Each neuron is
literally a digital biological computer operating like a binary circuit sending
signals to the brain. Your brain is the known universe’s most powerful
supercomputer. Your brain has a hundred billion neurons, each as powerful as a
small desktop computer, each networked to as many as two hundred thousand
others.
One of the
things you’re doing with all that computing power is taking trillions of bits
of digital sensory information, and constructing, in areas of memory, the
universe as you are experiencing it as you read these words. You, the conscious
executive functioning in the frontal lobes, is about the size of a walnut. You
have no direct contact with the outside world. You experience a neurological
representation of the world constructed for you on a stage of the brain’s
memory. You are, in effect, your own “Matrix” computer.
The automated
systems of the brain that construct this reality for you make vast changes to
the information before you experience the data as the reality around you. The
brain evolved to match patterns. It looks over vast rivers of sensory
information, and memory, to find the patterns you, the executive function, has
been interested in.
We evolved as
grassland hunters. Our task was to look out over the miles of waving patterns
in the savannah, and see through the camouflage of other creatures. We survived
by looking at all that data, and deleting the patterns that had no meaning, and
completing the partial patterns that meant dinner, or predator. We do this
because there is millions of times more information in the environment than we
could consciously process.
So, the brain
evolved automated systems to do the editing for us. The brain deletes most of
the sensory data from the reality you’re experiencing right now. Patterns you
have looked for in the past get enhanced, missing pieces added, until patterns
with some meaning emerge.
Consider this:
the typical reader reads only the first three or four letters of each word in a
sentence. The brain deletes the rest of the word, and then fills in the meaning
by using the context of the sentence and subject matter. This speeds up pattern
recognition while reading. As you read, you have been hallucinating parts of
this very sentence. So, when you say we are “just” interpreting events, you’re
describing a miraculously complex process.
SE do not
appear as “tricks of the mind.” They partially result from the automated
systems of the brain searching out and enhancing patterns in your environment.
The patterns are always there, but unless they have some emotional relevance to
you, what psychologists call “Emotional Valence,” they are deleted and no
memory of them is created. SE often appear because you have been consciously,
or unconsciously, thinking about something, and the automated pattern
recognition systems in your bio-supercomputer highlight matching patterns in
the environment for you.
Even more
amazingly, you are also altering the randomness of events in the external world
as well based on your thoughts and emotions. You are not just altering sensory
data, you actually change the probabilities in the outside world as well.
ND: So, you’re saying that
we create our own reality?
KS: Only in the sense that
I believe some well meaning people often mistake our brain’s creation and
editing of our neurological representation of reality for creating objective
external reality. Clearly, none of us creates actual reality. We do have some
influence over the randomness of events around us though. We create SE that
mirror our thoughts and emotions. This happens with all thought processes,
conscious, unconscious and transpersonal. We don’t create or change the
physical matter and energy around us, but we do influence the relationships
between events to create SE.
ND: How much influence do
we have over the events around us?
KS: Research is telling us
that we do change the randomness of events around us by around 3-5%. The best
experimental designs are called “Double Blind Experiments.” In this design the
subjects have been randomly selected, and subjects don’t know what the experiment
is actually about. The person performing the experiment does not know what the
expected outcome of the experiment is either. The experimenter and subjects are
both “Blind” to the expected outcome. The core problem this method is meant to
help eliminate is a basic, hard-to-swallow, scientific fact: the expectations
of the researcher change the outcome of the events in the experiment just by
the act of observation and expectation.
The estimation
of SE influence being 3-5% comes from Dr. J.B. Rhine. He was a psychologist and
researcher. Back in the 1930s a man came to his office with a strange claim. He
said he was a gambler, and he could control dice rolls with his mind. Not all
the time, but enough so that it was a noticeable effect that turned the odds in
his favour. Rather than dismiss this claim, Rhine did what a good scientist
does. He said “show me.”
They took six
pairs of dice; the gambler’s task was to have more dice come up with the number
six than could be expected by chance. They tossed the dice. Again, and again,
and again. It works. The amount of change over random hovered at about 3-5%
above chance. The effect was real. Rhine spent decades doing rigorous
experiments on the ability of subjects to change random events. He was having
people produce SE on demand. The research, reproduced and confirmed by peers,
states the odds are millions to one in favour of us being the cause of this
effect.
Rhine
concluded events could be changed in the direction of the subject’s desire and
attention. These random events included series of coin tosses, die throws, the
position objects landed in when dropped in a random manner, the values of
randomly generated electrical currents, and the rate of particle release from a
radioactive source, among others. In each instance, he found that the
probability of these physical events was changed by the psychological
expectation and attention of the observers, even though no physical force was
detected.
Rhine’s work
went beyond proof of personal causation. He found emotional states, such as
interest or boredom, affected the subjects’ ability to influence SE. Boredom
and anxiety decreased the ability to change the randomness of events in their
desired direction. Focused attention and positive expectation increased the occurrence
of the targeted events. He found alcohol or caffeine lowered or raised scores
respectively. He found emotions and personal physiological states can
facilitate or inhibit SE. My book shows people that not only do they do this
all the time, but that very complex ideas and emotions can be reflected by SE
as well.
ND: If this is the way our
reality works, then why aren’t more people aware of doing this?
KS: There is a measure of
self-awareness called “The Mirror Test” developed by biopsychologist Gordon
Gallup. Animals are shown their own reflection in a mirror. If they recognise
the reflection in the glass as their own, it is taken as an indication it is a
self-aware being. Humans, some great apes, elephants, and dolphins generally
recognise their own reflections; a few birds do as well. Interestingly, some
birds and dogs that can’t initially recognise their own reflections can be
trained to do so.
Synchronicity
is a form of mirror test. People see in the mirror of events around them the
image of their own inner life. They see what they think, feel and believe. They
even see their fantasies about what causes these reflections. Everyone has
experienced meaningful coincidences. They are explained by supernatural and
religious beliefs, archetypal influences, or more exotic personal mythologies.
SE mirrors these beliefs back to the observer. SE often are mistaken for
confirmations of the objective reality of personal beliefs. Most people are
looking into the mirror of SE every day. They don’t realise the images they see
are their own thoughts.
You have an
amazing ability. Your thoughts and feelings, your memories and experiences, are
reproduced in the events around you as coincidences. The world presents you
with meaningful coincidences based on your inner life. Everyone creates their
own SE, constantly. The ability is innate to the way our brains process
information into meaning. This seemingly magical ability goes largely
unnoticed, unexplained and misunderstood, until it presents itself in
spectacular form, simply because people never question the everyday SE in their
mirror.
ND: In the book you state
religion has nothing to do with spirituality. What did you mean by that?
KS: Many religious
doctrines were created to keep people under control and to maintain civil
order. You can spot them pretty easily: they consist mainly of behavioural
instructions and commands. Jared Diamond describes in Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human
Societies the evolution of the concept of a single, all-powerful
God. When we lived in tribal groups without fixed laws, we generally had social
communities of about 60 people. We can’t keep track of everyone in larger
groups. This makes it impossible to make good pattern matches about everyone,
so we break up into smaller groups. We answered this problem by creating a
social technology that allowed many more people to live together. Tribal groups
came under the law of a single king, whose authority came from the Gods we
created and the punishments imposed on heretics.
Alternately, some
spiritual doctrines don’t focus on behaviour; they focus on achieving states of
consciousness. They change the frame of reference to creating experiences of
connectedness. Christian Gnosticism, Islamic Sufism, Zen Buddhism, and the
shamanism of our ancestors, often focused on creating states of ecstatic union.
In these states of consciousness, the practitioner experiences existence
without boundaries. The subject/object relationship we experience as
separateness ceases to exist. You become one with everything. SE demonstrates
this connectedness. This connection is not something you earn; it is what you
already are. SEs are not something you learn to create, you learn to recognise
you are already creating them.
I have heard
people ask if someone was “enlightened,” as if it were a possession that
enhanced their value. Enlightenment is the recognition of your essential unity
and connection with existence. You don’t have to earn it, you are it.
Spirituality is connectedness. The stock and trade of most religion is having
people trade that natural connection for a code of behaviour.
ND: You’re saying that we
all see a reality created by the meanings we look for, and that we do this
naturally and unconsciously?
KS: Absolutely. All of us
have known decent, rational, people who have what we would consider extreme
religious, political or philosophical views. You may wonder, “How could they
possibly believe that?” It’s because beliefs are patterns of thought that
become reflected in the world around us. People mistake their reflected SE for
confirmation of their version of the nature of reality, when in fact they have
just come to believe what they think.
As a
psychologist, I see people replaying the patterns of past traumas and
relationships in their lives over and over. The unconscious recreates these
patterns in our lives as a way of trying to process them. SE work the same way.
Researchers have commented that one of the most consistent types of SE patterns
that manifest around people are reflections of either traumatic or spiritual
experiences. The commonality in both is the emotional valence around the events
that seems to directly drive the SE.
ND: What are the
implications for the way people experience their spiritual life?
KS: Most of us live in what
Joseph Campbell would call a “Personal Mythology.” A Christian looks for help
from Jesus, and SE appear that seem to be from their deity. Muslims look for
Allah, and find the pattern of their thoughts reflected back to them. Pagans
look for the mother Goddess, and are answered by however they believe their
deity to be. I love to study mythology, what Campbell would call “Other
people’s Religion.” I have several dictionaries of Gods and Goddesses. They
contain descriptions of thousands of Deities, all of which were the centre of
people’s spiritual life and belief, and all, but for a very few, are now
considered mere myths of our ancestors.
What has
endured are the shamanic and mystical traditions, most of which have a
strikingly similar teaching: there is only one being, one consciousness, and we
are it. Again, as Campbell would say, “You are, in your deepest identity, God.”
The implication here is that when you create SE, you are not altering an
external environment. You are seeing a demonstration that your thoughts are not
separate from the environment. You are experiencing an aspect of yourself that
is not limited to the cause and effect of time and space. There is much more to
you than meets the eye, you are connected to everything.
ND: You claim that modern
science and String theory support the idea that we are all navigating in many
realities at once – can you say more about that?
KS: I am offering an
explanatory fiction of SE that fits the facts of String theory, as we now
understand them. I have read, I believe in your magazine, articles by people
who have come to understand that the Planes of consciousness described by our
traditional mystics are actually the newly speculated on dimensions of reality
String theory has given us. This is a great step forward, to realise that all
matter and dimensions have their own flavours of consciousness.
In String
theory our universe has 11 dimensions, all particles being extensions of
dimensions linked to other dimensions in various patterns. But beyond even
that, it appears our universe is projected onto what’s being called a
“Membrane.” It’s as if we exist as Flatlanders on the surface of a thin bubble
in what is being called M space. We are not the only bubble universe out there.
The separation between membranes is probably as small as the smallest quantum
state. This means a virtually infinite number of alternate physical universes
in the space around you right now. It used to be a joke when someone said Elvis
is performing on stage in Vegas in a parallel probability. It’s not a joke
anymore; it’s the standard model of physics.
In the book
I’m saying we don’t just live in one probability. We don’t jump from one to
another, we live in an almost infinite range of them simultaneously. I believe
our experience of the passage of time itself is the result of our movement, at
the speed of light, as described in the Special and General theory, through
these probability membranes. Our trajectory through these probabilities is
altered by our thoughts and emotions because, as our not so ignorant mystics
have told us, thought and emotion are dimensions that underlie the physical
reality.
Whether this
explanation proves to be accurate or not, it is useful. If you believe it, it
allows you to navigate probability just a bit, 3-5%, by choosing your thoughts
and emotions, to create SE. The problem with explaining SE has always been a
kind of “flat earth” thinking that mandated something to “cause” SE. It appears
as if the entire structure of the universe would have to be altered to create
SE. With an infinite number of probability membranes being travelled through,
you do not alter anything: your mental patterns move you through probabilities
in which events around you reflect your internal processes. You are already a
multidimensional being.
ND: If I wanted to try to
prove to myself that my thoughts are being mirrored in the environment around
me, exactly how would I go about it?
KS: The best way, as
self-serving as it sounds, is to first read the book so that you have a safe
context to start with. SE are so responsive that people sometimes get trapped
in the house of mirrors of their own thoughts. The book was created to ground
people and give them a working context. It also contains a series of exercises
that starts at the creation of simple SE, and progresses to creating more
complex full personal mythologies. The easiest way to create SE is to simply
regularly think about them, then look out into the world as if it is a single,
responsive being trying to communicate with you through SE. Expect a response
SE, and eventually they will appear. Just don’t forget you are seeing your
thoughts mirrored in external events.
ND: What advice do you have
for people who are experiencing synchronistic events and might be scared or
confused by them?
KS: Relax. SE are not
dangerous. The meanings they convey are just thoughts, and only have the
reality you chose to give them. They are not even paranormal. They are
extremely normal. Everyone is creating SE. You were born creating SE, you have
been doing it all your life. SE are part of the natural survival skills you
evolved to help you through your life. The best way to use them is as a form of
communication with other parts of yourself, to teach yourself connectedness.
Choose the patterns you want to look for and expect them to appear as SE. If
you become scared or anxious, ask yourself why you are choosing to scare
yourself, then move on to creating something fun with SE. Because SE are driven
by the attention you put into them, any pattern of SE you don’t want can be
extinguished by either looking for a different pattern, or ignoring them until
they fade away. If you signal the brain you’re not interested in them, it will
gradually stop presenting them.
Please visit Dr. Surprise’s website at http://howsynchronicityworks.com
for his blog and contact information.
The above article appeared in New
Dawn No. 132 (May-June 2012).
© New Dawn Magazine and the
respective author.
From New Dawn @ http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/synchronicity-the-art-of-coincidence-an-interview-with-dr-kirby-surprise
For more information about psi and psychic abilities see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/psi
Help This Unique Independent Site
Survive
Donate any amount and receive at least one New Illuminati
eBook!
Just click in the jar -
Xtra Images by R. Ayana @ http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4120/4830109289_6c380b3fc7_b.jpg
http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5011/5404249811_9c4ec0b479_b.jpg
http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4075/4830109305_ea422b9516_b.jpg
http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4075/4830109305_ea422b9516_b.jpg
For further
enlightening information enter a word or phrase into the search box @ New Illuminati or click on any label/tag at the
bottom of the page @ http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com
And see
New Illuminati – http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com
New Illuminati on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/the.new.illuminati
New Illuminati Youtube
Channel - http://www.youtube.com/user/newilluminati/feed
The Her(m)etic Hermit -
http://hermetic.blog.com
The Prince of Centraxis - http://centraxis.blogspot.com
(Be Aware! This link leads
to implicate & xplicit concepts & images!)
This
site is published under Creative Commons Fair Use Copyright (unless an
individual item is declared otherwise by copyright holder) – reproduction for non-profit use is permitted & encouraged, if you give attribution to the work
& author - and please include a (preferably active) link to the original
along with this notice. Feel free to make non-commercial hard (printed) or
software copies or mirror sites - you never know how long something will stay
glued to the web – but remember attribution! If you like what you see, please
send a small but heartfelt donation or leave a comment – and thanks for reading
this far…
Live
long and prosper!
From the
New Illuminati – http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com
No comments:
Post a Comment
Add your perspective to the conscious collective