[John Freestone]

Originally Posted by moonrambler

I have problems with all the same things you mention here about inconsistency in results, and then wondering how much really is pure coincidence.

I'm very pleased to hear it, moonrambler. Life doesn't have to be boring without spookiness.

With the example you give about the mice, what's missing is something that is really very weird, weird enough that other people are a bit freaked by it and don't just pass it off as coincidence.

Yes. Those things are very much missing. In fact, the more an experiment in manifestation moves away from 'explainable as coincidence' towards 'absolutely certain to be magic(k)', the less evidence there seems to be, which is to be expected. I suggested to Steve Pavlina that he stop going on about 'manifesting' a million dollars (easy to explain in rational terms, in fact, especially if it's your business making money from doing naff all) and manifest just one single solitary dime, a physical coin, under laboratory conditions (very hard to fake, which is perhaps why no-one has won James Randi's million dollar reward yet, and probably never will).

I have no explanation why these things seem so random. I could be a complete skeptic and say it's because coincidences are bound to happen, and because of my intense curiosity about this subject, I might notice them more. Or, I could be more agnostic like I actually am, and get freaked when the coincidences seem really very weird, but still want to know why these events seem so random and uncontrollable.

I think it's exactly that: we all have a strong tendency to invent significance in random events. Getting excited about LoA just makes you more susceptible to the disease.

I told a story on the forum at some point about handing my girlfriend a birthday present while we were at her parents' house, and they had some wildlife show on the tv, and I had wrapped her gift in paper with hippos and other exotic animals on it, and at the exact moment she started to open it, a hippo appeared on the tv that looked exactly the same as the hippo on top of this present, and I mean exactly the same, it was so strange, I pointed at the tv and went "Look! Look!" and she looked and we were both kinda freaked out by that.

The first step is to let go of this emotional excitement. It can get quite obsessive, and the stress hormones pumping through your body reduce the clarity of your thinking. The dead fish, the chipmunks, chipmonkXXX, (somebody else's "synchronicity" of squirrels)...all these tales get told here with wide eyed wonder and, I'm sorry, very little psychological understanding, mathematical knowledge or even ordinary analysis of situations. Simple questions, like what the hell does it mean that the hippo on the tv looked exactly the same as the hippo on the wrapping paper? All I can say is that's either fancy wrapping paper or a crap tv. I could go on.

Furthermore, when you are obessessing about the mystical meanings of everything, you miss the psychological and realistic meanings. You invented the description 'stinking' to describe thoughts about your friend after finding the fish, I think, and if you analysed the situation you might have recognised that you were having perfectly acceptable, but negative, feelings about a relationship, and you might have concluded that you needed to exercise loving assertive behaviour. Instead, it seems, you felt guilty for feeling irritated sometimes with a friend, saw a fish, and made up a complete fantasy connection between the two, labelling your thoughts 'stinking'. I don't want to offend you, but most doctors would describe this - and most of the 'connections' manufacured and reported here on this site - as insane. Sorry if that offends you, but their text books describe these thinking styles and relate them to all sorts of other problems. It might not be a problem, but it can be. In some classic cases of psychosis the term 'over-inclusivity' is used to describe this thinking style where every event is interpreted as significant (adding to the patient's delusive beliefs - you know the kind of thing, the CIA are trying to kill them, they're Jesus Christ, etc.).

Trying to calculate odds of random events like that is kind of impossible though.

However, in order to shed light on these apparently weird 'synchronicities' in life, scientists have long since developed ways to test them in the laboratory. Now, while it has to be admitted that the clinical evidence concerning very strictly controlled situations does not translate perfectly back to the extreme complexity of human life, and therefore allows some possibility of the reality of synchronicity, it points very squarely towards the conclusion: random coincidences + imaginative human minds. The human brain, in case we forget, has as its number one function pattern recognition - ascertaining or making connections between events - and this has been shown to be so turbo-charged that we can't help seeing all sorts of shapes where there is absolutely random data.

The problem is actually the other way round - in ordinary human life there is so much data pouring in all the time that if we set up a kind of search filter by thinking 'mouse' or whatever, the chances are we'll spot a mouse. This kind of thing has been demonstrated endlessly and, as I said before, is ironically part of the LoA philosophy, but after that it comes to false conclusions, IMO. What's happening is that you're seeing mice all the damn time (relatively speaking, if you took note of everything over a long enough period), you just haven't a clue, because if we noticed everything that came to our minds we'd go nuts. But once you start collecting so-called 'evidence', you notice those random features of your experience that fit. Look what's happening here - I mentioned seeing a mouse on tv, and you're talking about hippos on tv. I just wrote "nuts" (and "insane") and someone mentioned squirrels earlier. Are these significant synchronicities? Psychology and mathematics tells us it is highly unlikely.

What are the odds her parents would have a wildlife show on, and one that would show hippos, and that I would use wildlife paper to wrap her present, and that she would open the present right at the moment a hippo would show up on tv, etc.

I don't know, but the point is that asking these questions rhetorically is useless. It only demonstrates your underlying assumption that it's "weird", and reinforces that impression further. When people conscientiously measure these 'odds', they find that they're not as slim as we like to think. Another interesting point is that so often these significant events, so called, are put forward as if they had messages from the universe for us, when they seem to be utterly useless most of the time, hence all the disappointment and frustration on this site. Did the hippos mean anything? Nope. Did you just waste a load of your life wondering what the message was, what the fish meant, and what to think about in the car in order to win the lottery? Yep.

Events like this can get more and more bizarre as you make the odds wider. Like, if her parents never watched tv, and none of us have any interest in wildlife, but they happened to have the tv on because there was a tornado warning. And they had on a soap opera, but there was an ad for the wildlife show. And the ad showed the hippo. And I never buy wrapping paper with wildlife on it, but happened to get some free in the mail. And then my friend got a card from her son with a hippo on front and it said "Hippo birthday to you!" And so on.

Sure, but that would be speculation. You don't know whether the events would have happened together if her parents had never watched tv, etc. You might as well go further and say it would be really bizarre if all that happened and someone in the room suddenly turned into a hippo. Yes, that would be really bizarre. It hasn't happened. And again you've overestimated the weirdness: I've seen endless hippo birthday cards for a start!

If those psychological processes aren't convincing enough, I've hardly scratched the surface yet.