Synchronicity... ??

Rodent's Reviews: Delivering The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly In Film

Rodent's Reviews: PART DEUX!

Rodent's 1950-Present Sci-Fi And Futuristic Fantasy Movies

I Am Rick Cottontree

11-05-13

You're a Wizard, Harry!!

__________________

Originally Posted by Iroquois

Resident Evil: Retribution was my one-pointer

Nostromo87

BANNED

11-05-13

rodent and me

The Rodent

I Am Rick Cottontree

11-05-13

Just happened between Sexy Celebrity and I.

He told me a tale about a book he and a friend of his had Synchronicity with. The book was written by Dominick Dunne.

JayDee wrote a Poltergeist review the other day which got me reading up on it again on the web and I had been reading about Dominique Dunne, the actress who played the teenaged daughter in Poltergeist.

The Rodent

I Am Rick Cottontree

11-05-13

This universe is one great big pile of weirdness.

Sexy Celebrity

Registered User

11-06-13

I'd hate to be a synchronicity party pooper, but before you all get mondo bedazzled by it, don't forget that, something going on underneath us or not, this damn universe is also the home of many horrors, wars, killings, disease, accidents, you name it. Synchronicity exists, but life still sucks.

The Rodent

I Am Rick Cottontree

11-06-13

I remember an old family story of my Brother Greg when he was younger, was always experimenting with silly traps, chemistry sets etc.

One day apparently, he was in the shed with a Bunsen Burner and some tar he nicked off the side of the road. He was melting the tar down in an old tobacco tin.
God knows what he was going to do with it.

Apparently it caught fire and his natural instinct was to stand up and kick it away...

... just as Mark came round the corner wearing some brand new clothes. He'd come round specifically to show my Brother his new threads...

"Hey Greg! Look at my new..." Splosh!!!

Would that count as Synchronicity?

Sexy Celebrity

Registered User

11-06-13

I really wouldn't call that a synchronicity, Rodent. Funny timing, yes.

To me, a synchronicity is something much more blatant. Shocking. TOO WEIRD. The kind of thing that gives you chills. A strange coincidence that seems unreal.

Sexy Celebrity

Registered User

11-06-13

Originally Posted by nostromo87

hey, you're right about all the horrors that go on

things can be pretty sh!tty, but they can be good too at times

i don't really know anything about this stuff or believe very strongly in it, just sharing a few things that blew my mind and seemed to apply to the topic

It's fine.

I just worry that people will think synchronicities could be regarded as signs that everything is going to work out okay or something and then they don't work out okay. Take your synchronicities however you want, but if you get too New Agey about it, suddenly you might find yourself believing, "The Universe is Love" and all sorts of other cozy, comforting nonsense. I used to have a more naive, Pollyanna-ish view about life this way, which is why I warn others to not think that way.

I also don't believe in free will. I believe I said this already in this thread, and you repped it. Look up Sam Harris and free will and you will begin to start understanding the universe as I see it.

Sexy Celebrity

Registered User

11-06-13

Now here are three random pictures.

I am posting these with the hope that one of you will find a synchronicity based on something from something here. If you don't, it's okay. Don't try to force a synchronicity. Just let it happen. It might turn out to be a synchronicity for someone else.

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APieceofMind

Registered User

11-06-13

Originally Posted by The Rodent

Synchronicity... an concept by Carl Jung says that things are not just coincidence but are interweaved through some sort of pattern.
Everything is connected.

The other night, I was surfing the new and came across the film Chopper and ended up reading the synopsis etc on Wiki.

Turns out, the real Chopper Read died 3 weeks ago. Probably coincidence but this has happened to me a number of times.

A massive example is when I lived in Scotland and I knew a guy called Keith... he was head chef at the club my parents frequented.

I moved back to England when I left school and started working in a factory.
After about a year had passed, one morning I was going in to work and there was this guy who stopped me and asked where **factory name omitted** was... it was Keith... and he had now started working at the same place as I was.

We worked together for about 2 years, then I changed jobs. My new job was working with Keith's flatmate. Weird.

Anyway, after another 2 years, I moved home and ended up in a new part of town working as a head barman in a pub.
I'd been there for 6 months and one morning, I went in to work and low-and-behold... Keith was in the pub. I asked what he was there for so early in the morning. Turns out he was now working in our kitchen.

About a year back, me, now living in yet another part of town right by the town centre... I saw Keith again at the town centre bus stop. It's a big place. Keith now lives just down the road from me and works at the bus stop so yet again, I see him every day.

15 years and 700 miles and we still keep running in to each other.

I have 3 other friends from Scotland who live nearby too. Only found this out a few months back. Went to school with them then suddenly we're back together again with no idea that we were all going to end up seeing each other again.

Synchronicity? Or just plain coincidence.

Anyone else got any examples similar?

Keith's a stalker, run man, ruuuun!

The Rodent

I Am Rick Cottontree

11-06-13

And again.

Movie Questions someone was asking about a film with little people.

Someone said Gulliver's Travels...

GT has just started on Film4.

Weeeeiiiiirrrrrddddd.

Sexy Celebrity

Registered User

11-06-13

Originally Posted by nostromo87

just want to say there are so many factors that can play into why an accident might occur... and it can be the simplest most mundane decision that causes something awful to happen

say you're driving home at night and decide to take a different route home... on this different and unfamiliar route, maybe the lights are dim and you're paying attention to road signs, and you hit and kill a pedestrian walking home.

why did that person die? it could be for the most mundane reason ever, that you decided to take a different route home than usual. had you gone your normal way that person never would have crossed your path. and then there's also their side of the equation... if they had left wherever they were coming from a minute earlier or a minute later, the accident would never have happened. basically we're all walking balls of chaos

that person had a possible future ahead of them as far as the 'natural order' may be concerned, but it was knocked off course by the chaotic ball of energy that is you. if anything i'd say freewill is there in some capacity and is probably what throws a wrench in the 'natural order' of things. my example is a blatant one, but even more mundane normal decisions can change the course of things that happen

anyways, that's just how i see it

Sexy Celebrity

Registered User

11-06-13

Watch the video.

Sexy Celebrity

Registered User

11-06-13

I think it's true. That's all I feel like saying. Read his book.

Sexy Celebrity

Registered User

11-07-13

He has an agenda to put an end to religion in the world.

But -- besides that -- I still think what he says about free will makes sense and is true.

Nostromo87

BANNED

11-07-13

i'm skeptical. and even moreso when he's selling a product.

i'd like to see how Harris' followers respond to this critique on his book, Free Will, from an Amazon review:
it is lacking in many essential ways, particularly in the matter of evidence for his claims. Harris states there is no free will, that it is an illusion, but offers no proof for his assertion. In fact, on Pages 13, 38, 39, and 40, he states that the sources of our intentions, desires, actions, and wants are unknown, a mystery, inscrutable or obscure. He therefore seems to be asserting that because we do not know the sources for our thoughts and actions, it necessarily follows that we do not have free will. Such a leap in logic is not proof. He cites some well known experiments, such as the Libet, all of which are inconclusive, and does not provide the reader with strong scientific evidence to back up his assertions.

Sexy Celebrity

Registered User

11-07-13

To me, it seems completely obvious now -- one that I shockingly can't believe nobody else has really picked up on before. Although I used to always feel like this was true, but I never had the idea explained to me well enough to where I became completely convinced of it. Sam Harris did that for me.

Our brains and our minds function on automatic. When we come up with thoughts -- any kind of thought -- WE are not making them up consciously. They arrive at our consciousness and feel like we've made them, but they are actually thought up unconsciously. We're like calculators -- unconsciously, we calculate our next thought, our next action, whatever. When we think it, it's the answer coming up to the screen of the calculator. Because of this, we don't have free will, because we're not in control of these calculations, which have been going on all of our lives. We are who we are because of these calculations, which we've had no control of.

Even if you got supernatural about it and said the calculations was our soul, we are still not in control of our soul's calculations. It is all running automatically. We can't consciously choose what we'll calculate.

That doesn't mean we're all going to act chaotic and disordered, although some forms of life can be that way because of either a damaged brain or they're just not intelligent enough. No form of life has free will. We are just as out of control as animals. The only difference is that we're smarter than animals, more developed.

Your thoughts are not under your control. If you suddenly get a song in your head, for instance, that's something that randomly happened to you and you're stuck with it until your mind either thinks, "Stop thinking about that song!" and you move on or whatever. Our mind is a conscious experience of things that are happening unconsciously -- the processes of our brain.

Sexy Celebrity

Registered User

11-07-13

It makes total sense. We cannot get outside of our heads. Our choices are determined and affected by whatever's going on with our head in the moment and whatever our brain/mind knows and contains inside it. This is all what shapes our perceptions of the world. We have to gain knowledge to grow our mind. If you don't know certain things, you won't do certain things. You won't think certain things.

Any other explanation requires us to escape our brain and that's just supernatural nonsense.

Sexy Celebrity

Registered User

11-07-13

Originally Posted by nostromo87

so you're saying if we choose to try and expand our minds, learn new things, it's not a conscious decision? but rather something that was programmed into our brain and into our cells so we had no control over it?

No. It's not like something like that is programmed into the brain and into our cells. First of all, don't even think about cells. I'm saying that we have to learn things -- have things put into our brain -- to alter our brain and alter how we're going to respond. Like, now you know this business about no free will and Sam Harris. You mind has been changed because of this. Now you have this information in your head and it will affect you in the future. Even if all it does is make you disagree with the findings.

Things from your past right now are affecting how you feel about the information. You are unconsciously programmed, based on everything you know and have experienced, to disagree with it. Basically, you have no free will and can't help that you disagree with Sam Harris, because your mind has been built so far to behave that way.

where's the scientific proof? not talking about pseudo-intellectual / pseudo-philosophical / possible agenda-driven reasoning... but proof!

The proof is in the book Sam Harris wrote. And if that's not enough proof for you, that's you. I'm convinced. If you can't be, too bad. I know that may seem kind of sloppy to just say understand what he's saying in the book and accept it, but I believe it, even if there's not yet a lot of scientific proof.

i don't trust this guy. it's as simple as that. perhaps that was pre-programmed into my mind

Your mind's computations came out so that you don't believe him, don't trust him, so yes, it was.

Sexy Celebrity