[moonrambler]

I like these discussions, personally. I think it's a good idea to shine some light at problems areas of LoA, because certainly IM results are inconsistent. If it exists, then we can get better at it. If it doesn't exist, then we can still achieve the personal development aspects of the process. We also can look at this existentially and say we are imparting our own meaning to these random and insignificant events.

Originally Posted by John Freestone

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.

Or we can look at a situation and choose to see how we can work it to our advantage. This is common PD advice, often used in courses on selling. I'm sure you're familiar with the principle -- if you're selling life insurance and you come across a community where nobody has ever bought any life insurance, you can say, "Well, I'll skip this place -- nobody here will ever buy any insurance!" Or you can say, "What a great opportunity! Nobody here has any life insurance and I'm going to make a fortune!"

Why did the platoon of chipmunks show up all of a sudden swarming all over the place? Well, the likely answer is that they were siblings who were born not too long ago and just busted loose from the nest, all full of wide-eyed wonder and energy, crawling up drainpipes and under the deck and everywhere else. I can completely flip out and call an exterminator, or I can spend some time live trapping them and moving them to a park, where they maybe will have a chance at survival since there's a group of them, or else they will be hawk bait. Whatever. In the meantime, my diabetic cat is finally interested in something besides her supper dish.

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'.

Or I had a good reason for feeling guilty, because I ride this guy's ass all the time about one thing or another thing or another thing, and I should just shut the hell up and be good to him, because he's a good friend. And now last night we had a wonderful time together without any bickering, because I could catch myself whenever I wanted to give him a hard time about something, which he doesn't deserve.

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.

Are you saying you believe there are significant synchronicities then?

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.

I didn't wonder anything about what message the hippo event was sending. It just was funny. I didn't wonder what the fish meant -- I thought of an idea immediately. These events also didn't qualify as Jung's definition of synchronicity, with three related events that are not cause/effect based. Sometimes I do like to wonder if these weird coincidences are signs, or if they are a message from the universe, especially as they get more and more weird and when they do qualify as an actual "synchronicity." Is that a waste of time? Perhaps. But in that case, you are just as likely wasting your time doing all this discussion on this forum.