Patterns

[Aule]

Lately I've been perceiving strange patterns in my everyday life that I'm having a very difficult time ignoring. Little nuances in the way certain events occur, or the manner in which certain social situations unfold, seem to stick out in my mind and "speak" to me (I'm having a difficult time explaining this). I've been trying to rationalize these phenomena away as my mind merely constructing patterns during periods of boredom and mental intertia in order to occupy itself (which is probably the case). Still, even when I do manage to keep my mind focused for extended periods of time the patterns seem to only become more and more pronounced. Has aynone else ever experienced anything similar to this?

[Ahknaton]

I get this all the time. I've noticed little coincidences or "synchroncities" from time to time since I was in high school, but in the last couple of years they've started increasing (or I've started noticing them more). I used to write it off as meaningless coincidence, resulting from the sheer number of combinations of things in my life that could possibly correspond to each other, but now I'm not so sure. It's hard to think how you could objectively verify it one way or another. One theory I like is the idea of a "fractal" self-similar universe, with little recurring motifs and patterns playing themselves out over and over, in addition to the physical similarity of certain forms such as spirals, tree-like networks and other phenomena at different levels of scale.

I find that I pass through particularly "hot" periods where the number of synchronicities tends to be elevated for a time, which perhaps could be likened to passing through a part of the 4D universe "fractal" where the local structure/form has a particularly strong similarity to the whole, or to other recognisable parts. For example, a couple of weekends ago I went to a friend's wedding, and coincidences just kept popping up all over the place. For starters, the wedding was held just outside of Adelaide, and when I told my Dad I was going, it turned out that he was going to be in Adelaide a couple of days before then (last time he was there was about 20 years ago), so I went a few days early and spent some time with him. About 100 metres from the hotel was an old antique bookshop, which had a whole lot of books on a whole lot of topics that I've been interested in but couldn't find information on the net about (e.g. the prophecies of Edgar Cayce). Browsing along the bookshelfs, it was like following a trajectory of my interests over the last 2 years: Gurdjieff, the I Ching, alternative archeology and other stuff. It was like it was laid out for me. Kind of bizarre and disconcerting.

Another weird thing was that a lot of the shops on the street had the names of or correspondences to various people I've interacted with on various Internet forums (which has taken up way too much of my time over the last year or so). A few doors down was an Egyptian-themed cafe and knick-knack shop (closed down), done up in hieroglyphics. In the window there was an LP by a band called "The Fifth Dimension". There was a "Subrosa" security training centre, a "Horus" kebab shop, a Middle-Eastern take-away joint called "Jerusalem" with a gym shop next door with weight-lifting equipment (that made me laugh), a travel agent called "Star travel" and a cinema that was showing "Pirates of the Carribean 2". The street was named "Hindley Street" which is weird because I used to use a Myra Hindley avatar on another forum (I have a picture of her on my site too). Perhaps I was just layering my own interpretation on it, but it sort of "jumped out" at me.

Up at the wedding I had a really cool discussion with my friend (the groom) who I found out was into occult/New-Age stuff for years before I knew him. He lent me a whole lot of rare books he has and we had a bit of a discussion about Platonism, 2012, the Golden Mean spiral and stuff like that. I went out for dinner the night after the wedding with 4 friends (making 5 of us including myself), we were seated at table number 5, and my friends ordered a bottle of wine which had a stylised Golden Mean spiral on the label (the Golden Mean is mathematically related to the number 5). The label said "perfection in nature".

I got into reading about 2012 prophecies and stuff last year, especially books by Drunvalo Melchizedek. A lot of the content actually matched stuff I'd already kind of been thinking about, particularly with regard to Platonism and the forms. Drunvalo mentions a 14-year transition period leading up to 2012, from 1998. There is some weird stuff going on with letter box numbers of houses I've lived in related to that. I moved out of my parents house (number 12) in the year 1998, into a house with a letter box number of 98. I lived in a couple of other houses (all with numbers under 10) for periods of less than six months, until my first long-term flat, which was a number 161 (Golden Mean = 1.61). I'm currently living at a number 64 (the I Ching). When I was in the hotel in Adelaide I turned on the Bathurst 1000, and noticed that they have 161 laps. They had a tribute to Peter Brock, who drove the "number 5" car. His protege drives the number 888 car (look that one up for yourself ;)). When I do numerology, I also get a whole lot of weird shit happening.

The number of my name (according to the Pythagorean system) is 2012, and using the pyramidal system of David Lane's Wotanist Gematria I get the numbers 88, 14 and 38 (capstone number = 7). You can also get 2012 from David Lane's birth year of 1938 by adding 88 and subtracting 14. I worked all this out AFTER I had already become interested in this stuff. I wonder if I somehow "back-manifested" it? I used to think numerology was B.S. but I'm starting to entertain the idea that it may be a means of distilling synchroncities from your life. I used to be a pretty "rational" person, but I have a hard time dismissing this stuff sometimes.

Another couple just from the last week: I was looking into esoteric meanings of "88" the other day (other than "Heil Hitler). Someone sent me a funny video of some sitcom from Israel, and one of the guys was wearing an "88" sports jacket. I went out that night, and the bouncer of the club had the number 88 on his tag. Also, yesterday crypto posted about how she can't go back to Haiti because someone might kill her. I kind of mused that one day she would make "aaliyah" back to her homeland and become some kind of vodou Queen (of the Damned). Today, like clockwork, she posts an Aaliyah music video on the "YouTube" thread. Not gobsmacking coincidences, but these things just happen over and over, like the drip drip drip of a tap. Little things, almost every day. I could go on about this stuff for pages and pages, but this post is long enough as it is...

[Jimbo Gomez]

If you went with five friends, there were six of you on that table Ahk.

[Ahknaton]

If you went with five friends, there were six of you on that table Ahk.
Actually, I made a mistake there. I went with 4 friends, there were 5 of us at the table including myself. I don't blame you for being a bit skeptical about this kind of mumbo jumbo though. If I were in your position, and I wouldn't expect you to accept that any of it means anything. I personally was very contemptuous about this kind of "esoteric" stuff before I got into it. I still treat it all as a "grand hypothesis" rather than something I'm ready to commit to "believing" in.

[Aule]

Over the past two weeks I've heard the restaurant "Olive Garden" mentioned a total of twenty-five times by eight different people (I started counting after the fifth time). I finally went there last wednesday with a girl from work, whose favorite restaurant happens to be Olive Garden. Since then I haven't heard it mentioned once. This probably sounds insane to most people, but sometimes I get the feeling the someone or something really wanted me to go to Olive Garden.

I've also seem to have a "special" relationship with the numbers 14 and 25 and I regularly see what I guess you could call "life synchroncities" between myself and a certain person I know, such that our jobs, relationship status, family structure, personal taste, and even mood seem to be either completely the same or entireky the opposite of each another. There doesn't appear to be any in between. I've also noticed patterns in relation to astrology (and the planets in one's natal chart in particular) that have led me to seriously question it's validity. I used to think it was all BS, but now I'm not so sure. A ton of other things have been popping up as of late, but half of them I end up forgetting soon after I've "experienced" them. However, the impression that something odd has happened (an almost deja-vu feeling) persists for sometime afterwards.

[Ahknaton]

Over the past two weeks I've heard the restaurant "Olive Garden" mentioned a total of twenty-five times by eight different people (I started counting after the fifth time). I finally went there last wednesday with a girl from work, whose favorite restaurant happens to be Olive Garden. Since then I haven't heard it mentioned once. This probably sounds insane to most people, but sometimes I get the feeling the someone or something really wanted me to go to Olive Garden.
Did you meet anyone there?
I've also seem to have a "special" relationship with the numbers 14 and 25 and I regularly see what I guess you could call "life synchroncities" between myself and a certain person I know, such that our jobs, relationship status, family structure, personal taste, and even mood seem to be either completely the same or entireky the opposite of each another.
14 is a big number for me too. When I flew to Adelaide I was seated in seat 14A, and my "sequence number" (the order they print the boarding passes, which is printed on the card) was 23 (23-skidoo!). Perhaps I only noticed it because I've started noticing 14s. Other numbers that crop up all the time are 74 and 109, on tram/train line numbers, tax numbers etc etc. I also notice that combinations of these happen fairly often, such as 88 (74 + 14) but I tend to discount any coincidences if it takes too much mathematical manipulation to arrive at them.
I've also noticed patterns in relation to astrology (and the planets in one's natal chart in particular) that have led me to seriously question it's validity. I used to think it was all BS, but now I'm not so sure. A ton of other things have been popping up as of late, but half of them I end up forgetting soon after I've "experienced" them. However, the impression that something odd has happened (an almost deja-vu feeling) persists for sometime afterwards.
When Julian did my natal chart (he fairly successfully predicted what it would be too) he told me that I had a "strong Mercury" and that it represented good communication skills. Coincidentally, the ISP I host my site on is called "Quicksilver".

[Ahknaton]

An interesting thing I read about numbers a while ago: if you take a random sample of numbers from all over the place, representing any old thing: heights, weights, dollar values of different goods etc, and draw a histogram based on the number that start with 1, 2, 3 etc, you will find that a disproportionate amount start with 1 (around about 30% I think) and hardly any with 9. The idea is, since the units we used for measurement are arbitrary (kilograms versus pounds, for e.g.) the distribution that the frequency of "first numbers" follows has to be such that you get the same distribution no matter what units you use.

If all numbers had equal 10% chance of being first, then if you changed your unit of measurement in order to double your numbers, you'd get a different distribution, since all the 5, 6, 7, 8s and 9s would become 1s (e.g. 67 * 2 = 134), and the 1-4s would lie in the range of 1 to 9. The only profile that satisfies the "units don't matter" criteria is one with a disproportionate number of 1s, and so on down to 9. Most people naively believe that each number has a 10% chance of being 1st, and when they "cook the books" (e.g. when making a bogus tax return) they tend to produce an "unnatural" distribution. People make bad random number generators. They use this trick to pick up cases of possible fraud. I wonder if there are some other counter-intuitive number properties out there that account for some "creepy" coincidences, or numbers cropping up more often than you might intuitively think they might?

[Jimbo Gomez]

An interesting thing I read about numbers a while ago: if you take a random sample of numbers from all over the place, representing any old thing: heights, weights, dollar values of different goods etc, and draw a histogram based on the number that start with 1, 2, 3 etc, you will find that a disproportionate amount start with 1 (around about 30% I think) and hardly any with 9. The idea is, since the units we used for measurement are arbitrary (kilograms versus pounds, for e.g.) the distribution that the frequency of "first numbers" follows has to be such that you get the same distribution no matter what units you use.

If all numbers had equal 10% chance of being first, then if you changed your unit of measurement in order to double your numbers, you'd get a different distribution, since all the 5, 6, 7, 8s and 9s would become 1s (e.g. 67 * 2 = 134), and the 1-4s would lie in the range of 1 to 9. The profile that satisfies this criteria is one with a disproportionate number of 1s, and so on down to 9. Most people naively believe that each number has a 10% chance of being 1st, and when they "cook the books" (e.g. when making a bogus tax return) they tend to produce an "unnatural" distribution. People make bad random number generators. They use this trick to pick up cases of possible fraud.


What you say here is not esotheric. It also shows up in damage claims, and there is a mathematical formula based on it which insurors use as a quck check to see which claims are more likely to be fraudulent.

[Aule]

Did you meet anyone there?

No. It was mid-afternoon so the place was fairly empty. The only people in our section of the restaurant were a table of middle-aged women celebrating their elderly mother's 84th birthday. She seemed disturbed for some reason and kept asking them to take her home. I think she was just tired and a bit overwhelmed. They left right after the waitress brought our food.

[Sandee]

I'm not sure what to make of it but I have noticed a trend. Everything meaningful seems to happen to me on Wednesdays; afterall Wednesday is the day I was born. I'd have brushed it off had the coincidences not been so obvious.

Actually, this thread gave me the idea for the "Day you were born?" thread (http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=15520) that I started in the Lounge.

For instance, I got confirmation for admission to college on a Wednesday. My entry exam was scheduled for a Wednesday. Another personal event happened to me yesterday (Wednesday - already past midnight here). This is one of many examples.