Thursday, January 05, 2006

Still More Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum

The Story Thus Far:

Back on December 13, Kathleen Callon posed a question here about the relationship between synchronicity and "coincidences" in our lives. I replied with a post on December 22, and Kat, gracious as always, thanked me and posted my reply on her blog. Greensmile commented on my post as well, and I responded on December 29 with a follow-on post further discussing synchronicities. To illustrate the second posting, I chose a picture of the Horsehead Nebula that I had been using as desktop wallpaper for several months, well, ever since September 18, when I bought a new computer to replace my dying Hewlitt-Packard.

Well, funny thing. It turns out that Greensmile had independently selected the same picture of the Horsehead Nebula as the background for the planned redesign of his blog . And Summersun, from the UK, had just downloaded the Horsehead Nebula picture and posted it to another journal before going to Kat's blog and seeing her re-post of my original synchronicity discussion. Intrigued, she followed the link back here to Water Dissolves Water, and saw the second synchronicity posting, along with the same Horsehead Nebula picture she had just posted to another journal.

All of this can easily be explained by realizing that the famous Hubble photographic of the Horsehead Nebula is a very beautiful, and hence very popular, picture, and that it should not be surprising that bloggers as diverse as Kat, Greensmile, Summersun and I should all have downloaded the picture at some point, and since we're bloggers, gone on and also uploaded it somewhere else as well.

But can there be more to it than that? Quantum entanglement theory holds that some objects may be influencing the behavior of other objects, such that any measurement of one object instantaneously influences the behavior of the other object, despite physical separation of the objects. Einstein objected to this theory on the basis that the instantaneous transfer of information from one object to the other would have to travel faster than the speed of light, and he famously dismissed entanglement as "spooky action at a distance." However, quantum mechanics has been highly successful in conducting experiments suggesting that entanglement does in fact occur, although the mechanism for the transfer of the information still is not understood.

If atoms are capable of somehow instantaneously transferring information across space, could not the human brain also be capable of the same thing? Could what is commonly referred to as "ESP" not be a supernatural phenomena at all but simply a manifestation of quantum entanglement, or "spooky action" if you prefer that term?

If clairvoyance is simply a matter of quantum mechanics, why can't we all use our minds like psychics and overcome the physical barriers of space and time? I propose that the answer is because the intuitive receptive mind in all of us is over-ridden by the abstract conceptualization of the thinking mind, and we are not conscious of the information available to us by spooky action. By quieting the conscious mind using techniques such as zazen, we are more attuned to this information, but as soon as we have even the first smidgen of "awareness" of this information, it becomes abstracted by the thinking mind and, poof!, it's gone. In other words, we can plainly see it all of the time, but as soon as we realize that we're seeing it, we're simultaneously blinded to it.

Then again, maybe it's just a pretty picture.

2 comments:

GreenSmile said...

With 6 billion of us on earth , I expect a few coincidences.

"Wow, you wear 9 1/2 wide shoes!? Me too!" [cue Twilight Zone theme]...

(Or we could just settle for "great minds think alike" ;?)

To judge by the very detailed and deliberate instructions asking proper crediting and citation of each image, I'd guess the astronomy website from which I downloaded was expecting quite a few of us to copy the images.

Kathleen Callon said...

Here we go with "coincidences" again. This is from an old post:

"Sometimes something strange happens when I let go of preoccupied or conscious thought, and it usually happens when I am doing routine physical activity. It probably happens with most of us... We leave our thoughts only to have an epiphany or a vision then come to us. A realization pops into our consciousness and though we think we know the thought comes from within ourselves, we also get the uncomfortable feeling that we may have just received a timely and almost celestine message. This feeling is analogous to our confused reaction when we are thinking of someone we have not spoken to in a long while and we know, as the phone rings and as we then pick it up, that the the lost friend or relative we had been thinking of is on the other end of the line.

This has happened to me many times, and using the example the phone call, I feel some Godly created energy travels to me faster than the speed of sound, and assumedly slower than the speed of light. It would be an interesting experiment if the world became consciously aware of recording this phenomenon. If we all took notes and wrote down times, perhaps we could discover how quickly these energized messages flow. If the speed of light is considered the universe's speed limit and there are so many parts of the visible and invisible spectrum, in which wavelength do these messages travel? Can they be intercepted or deciphered? Can we determine the location(s) of their source?"