Synchronicity & Déjà Vu

Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, and John Adams helped to edit and hone it. The Continental Congress approved the document on July 4, 1776. Both Jefferson and Adams died on July 4, 1826 - exactly 50 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

In 1858, Robert Fallon was shot dead by fellow poker players who accused him of cheating to win a $600 pot. None of the other players were willing to take the now unlucky $600, so they found a new player to take Fallon's place, who turned the $600 into $2,200 in winnings. At that point, the police arrived and demanded that the original $600 be given to Fallon's next of kin -- only to discover that the new player was Fallon's son, who had not seen his father in seven years.

In the 19th century, the famous horror writer Egdar Allan Poe wrote a book called 'The narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.' It was about four survivors of a shipwreck who were in an open boat for many days before they decided to kill and eat the cabin boy whose name was Richard Parker. Some years later, in 1884, the yawl, Mignonette, foundered, with only four survivors, who were in an open boat for many days. Eventually the three senior members of the crew killed and ate the cabin boy. The name of the cabin boy was Richard Parker.

In 1973, actor Anthony Hopkins agreed to appear in "The Girl From Petrovka", based on a novel by George Feifer. Unable to find a copy of the book anywhere in London, Hopkins was surprised to discover one lying on a bench in a train station. It turned out to be George Feifer's own annotated (personal) copy, which Feifer had lent to a friend, and which had been stolen from his friend's car.

Déjà Vu: A Review of the Déjà Vu Experience; Déjà Vu, Consciousness, Time & English Pubs; Top 10 Strange Phenomena of the Mind

Synchronicity: "There exists a type of phenomena, even more mysterious than telepathy or precognition, which has puzzled man since the dawn of mythology: the seeming accidental meeting of two unrelated causal chains in a coincidental event which appears both highly improbable and highly significant." - Arthur Koestler

The hymn "God Moves in a Mysterious Way His Wonders to Perform" was composed in 1799 by William Cowper of London. One evening he became so melancholy he decided to commit suicide. He hailed a taxicab and told the driver to take him to a Thames River bridge. But the fog was thick. After an hour of wandering aimlessly, the cab man said he gave up, he couldn't find the bloomin' bridge, and he didn't even know how to get his fare back home. Cowper stepped out only to realize that he was right in front of his own house. That's when he went indoors to write "God Moves..."

When Hart Crane was living in Brooklyn Heights, he decided to write a poem about the Brooklyn Bridge, which he could see from his window. It is the poem for which he is chiefly remembered. Only a year later did Crane discover that the address where he lived while writing The bridge was the address at which Washington Roebling, chief engineer on the bridge, had lived.

While the Allies were planning the Normandy invasion of June 6, 1944, the following code words were used (and were among the best kept secrets of the war); Utah and Omaha, the beaches where the American troops would land; Mulberry, the artificial harbor to be used after the landing; Neptune, the naval operations plan; Overlord, the entire invasion. On May 3, 1944, the first code word, Utah, appeared as an answer to the London Daily Telegraph crossword puzzle. On May 23, Omaha appeared in an answer to a Telegraph puzzle. On May 31, Mulberry appeared. And on June 2, four days before the invasion, Neptune and Overlord both appeared.
British Intelligence investigated this matter extensively. They found that the man who created the crosswords was innocent of espionage, had no knowledge of the invasion and was as puzzled as they were.

M. Deschamps, as a boy in Orleans, France, was presented with a piece of plum pudding by a guest of the family, M. de Fortgibu. Years later Deschamps, now a young man, ordered plum pudding in a Paris restaurant, only to find that the last piece had just been taken. The waiter discretely indicated the direction of the guilty patron who, it turned out, was none other than de Fortgibu. Many years later, at a dinner party where Deschamps was again offered plum pudding, he took the opportunity to recount the above events concerning de Fortgibu. Finishing his tale, and still eating his plum pudding, he remarked that all that was missing was de Fortgibu. Soon the door burst open and in came de Fortgibu himself, now a disoriented old man who had gotten the wrong address, and so had entered by mistake.

English novelist Dame Rebecca West was writing a story in which a girl finds a hedgehog in her garden. As West wrote this passage, she was interrupted by servants who informed her they had just found a hedgehog in the garden.
Another time she was researching a specific episode that took place during the Nuremburg war crimes trials: "I looked up the trials in the library and was horrified to find they are published in a form almost useless to the researcher. They are abstracts, and are catalogued under arbitrary headings. After hours of search I went along the line of shelves to an assistant librarian and said 'I can't find it, there's no clue, it may be in any of these volumes.' I put my hand on one volume and took it out and carelessly looked at it, and it was not only the right volume, but I had opened it at the right page."

When Norman Mailer began his novel Barbary Shore there was no Russian spy in it. As he worked on it, a Russian spy became a minor character. As the work progressed, the spy became the dominant character. After the novel was finished, the Immigration Service arrested a man who lived one flight below Mailer in the same building. He was Colonel Rudolf Abel, named as the top Russian spy in the United States at that time.

Nagasaki is mentioned in conjunction with Uranium in a book published in 1939.

Novelist William Burroughs, while living in Tangier in 1958, had a conversation with a Captain Clark, who mentioned that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. That day, Captain Clark had his first serious accident. In the evening, while thinking about this, Burroughs flipped on the radio and heard a bulletin about a crash of an airliner. The flight number was 23 and the pilot was also a Captain Clark.

A publisher, Jeffery Simmons, of W.H. Allen & Co., after 25 years in publishing, finally found himself for the first time in the position of having to destroy his entire stock of a book by pulping it - selling the books for their value as mere wood pulp. He did not know where to find a paper mill to buy the books, so he went upstairs to ask the production manager. Though the production manager did not know either, a young boy from the warehouse happened by that moment and, hearing the conversation, volunteered the name of the Phillips Mills, with which he was familiar because it was located near his home. Using the production manager's phone, Simmons asked the secretary to obtain that firm's phone number. She answered, "Their representative is here". Simmons at first thought she was joking, but the representative had, indeed, walked in just a few minutes before. He was an old man whose business rounds took him by the publishing company almost daily, though he had not previously stopped there. He had entered that day on an impulse and, after conducting the day's business, did not return again.

One of the authors of a book called Synchronicity, Science, Myth and the Trickster (Combs & Holland) was on the way to pick up a book, The Psychology of Consciousness, by Robert Ornstein, previously loaned to a friend. As he started out of the door of his office, a colleague engaged him in a conversation about an article in the magazine Human Nature, a magazine edited by Robert Ornstein that has since gone out of business. He commented to his colleague that he was, in fact, at that moment on his way to pick up a book written by Ornstein. His attention was then caught by a package that moments before had arrived in the mail. It was from the offices of Human Nature magazine. Upon opening it, he found enclosed a copy of The Psychology of Consciousness, a gift copy for subscribing to the magazine!
Another: One of the authors of the above book called Synchronicity, Science, Myth and the Trickster was talking with a friend about Rupert Sheldrake's theories, discussing possible relationships to Bohm's notion of the implicate order. He happened to have a written transcript of a conversation between Sheldrake and David Bohm, which he loaned to this friend. The latter read it while listening to the local public radio station. The station happened to be airing one of a series of interviews titled Physics & Beyond, and he found himself listening to an interview with David Bohm in which he was talking about Sheldrake's theory!
And another: One of the authors of the above book was driving across town. He noticed that the car radio was playing an old popular song about "bad, bad, Leroy Brown", who among other things is said to be "meaner than a junkyard dog". The phrase stuck in his mind. He imagined that there must be actually such dogs living out their lives in junkyards, growing older and meaner by the day. These reflections were cut off abruptly as he switched stations. Instantly, he heard an advertisement for a local junkyard billing itself as the "home of the junkyard dog". He happened to look up and notice that he was passing a large junkyard. The sign read "Home of the Junkyard Dog".

Wolfgang Pauli, one of the inner circle of scientists who founded quantum physics, was acutely aware of improbable and creative coincidences in his own life. He was well known among the physicists of Europe for what was humorously called the "Pauli Effect". His presence alone was sufficient to cause complex scientific equipment to misfire.
Pauli visualized much of subatomic activity in terms of mirrors and their reflections, becoming virtually obsessed with mirrors. A friend wrote to him, teasing him about his "mirror complex". But Pauli wrote back, recalling the legend of Perseus and the Medusa. In the legend, Perseus was only able to slay the Medusa (read nuclear physics), whose appearance was so hideous as to turn men to stone, by looking at her reflection in his shield. At about this time Pauli received a paper from a former student, turned biologist, concerning a certain light sensitive fungus, mykes (the Greek word for mushroom). Shortly afterward, Pauli was reading a philosophical essay dedicated to Carl Jung, "about, of all things, the significance of the Perseus legend. It appears that after the Medusa venture, Perseus founded the town of Mykenea, which owes its name to a Greek pun. For on that site Perseus dug up a mushroom; but he had to dig so deep that a brook sprung up from the earth which quenched his thirst. So they called the town Mykene after that mushroom". It was said that Pauli roared with laughter upon reading this.

Mythologist Joseph Campbell was at his home, a 14th floor apartment in New York City, while reading about the praying mantis, which plays the part of the Hero in Bushman mythology. He sat near a rarely opened window that faced 6th Avenue: "I was reading about the praying mantis - the hero - and suddenly felt an impulse to open the window ... I opened the window and looked out to the right and there was a praying mantis walking up the building. He was there, right on the rim of my window! He was this big [showing the size]; he looked at me and his face looked just like a Bushman's face. This gave me the creeps!"

A few years ago in Texas, a state highway motorcycle policeman named Allen Falby was injured in an accident. Alfred Smith, a businessman, stopped his car to see if he could be of assistance and found Falby bleeding severely from one leg. Using his tie as a tourniquet, Smith stopped the bleeding, thus saving Falby's life. Five years later the men met again. This time it was Smith who was badly hurt. Falby was the first to arrive at the accident, and as fate would have it, he found Smith bleeding from one leg. Only after Falby had applied a tourniquet to stop the bleeding did he recognize the businessman. Later, he was heard to comment jokingly, "One good tourniquet deserves another".

Perhaps no novelist in history has been as concerned with synchronicity as James Joyce. Samuel Beckett wrote "to Joyce reality was a paradigm, an illustration of a perhaps unstatable rule... It is not a perception of order or of love; more humble than either of these, it is a perception of coincidence." Over a hundred synchronicities appear in Joyce's Ulysses. When Joyce feared that he might die without finishing Finnegan's Wake, he selected James Stephens to complete it, not on literary grounds per se, but because Stephens had been born on the same day as Joyce (February 2, 1882) and in the same city (Dublin), and also because Stephens had the same first name as Joyce (James), and had a last name which differed only by one letter from the first name of Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's self-caricature in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses.

8/10/11: Laughing Buddha: A friend forwarded an email to me today called "Feng Shui for Prosperity: What’s In Your Money Corner?". One of the things the article said is that it is good feng shui to have a laughing buddha in one's southeast prosperity corner. I replied: "Thanks - already I have a prosperity corner - it worked well for a long time - now I'm going to add a laughing Buddha to it." - I cc'ed the reply to my wife, so she would know that we needed to get a laughing buddha.
At this time, my wife and daughter were visiting San Francisco for a few days; staying at a friend's house in the city. They were out and about all this day, being tourists. In Chinatown, my wife purchased a laughing buddha, with the intention of giving it to their host as a thank you gift. Later that evening, they came back to the house - my wife checked her email and realized she was going to have to get her host something else for a gift.

7/21/11: Macondo Curse and Crying in the Womb: This afternoon, I began reading "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marqeuz; finished the first chapter and then we went to dinner. Three and a half pages before the end of the first chapter, there is this: "Aureliano, the first human being to be born in Macondo, would be six years old in March. He was silent and withdrawn. He had wept in his mother's womb and had been born with his eyes open. As they were cutting the umbilical chord, he moved his head from side to side, taking in the things in the room and examining the faces of the people with a fearless curiosity."
I remarked to my wife that I recalled that Macondo was the name of the BP oil well site of last year's Gulf oil disaster.
Shortly after we returned from dinner, we decided to watch the movie: "Like Water For Chocolate". The movie didn't grab me and we watched only the first few minutes - but in those first few minutes, the future heroine is born. At one minute and 54 seconds into the movie, the heroine narrates: "My mother used to say that I am as sensitive to onions as my Great-Aunt Tita was. She even cried inside her mother's womb, whenever my Great-Grandmother chopped onions."
I am embarassed to have to report that after watching just the first few minutes of the aformentioned movie, we ended up watching the entirety of a very B grade movie called "Skinwalkers" which is about a werewolf curse. Here is the Macondo section of the Gulf oil spill page. There are two links that have been there for over a year, including BP Macondo oil well: Fictional ancient curse becoming reality, 6/27/10.
Apparently, the word 'macondo' in Haitian means 'the Devil's food' and is a curse.

6/5/11 Rosetta Stone: Last week, the wife asked me to examine the RosettaStone Spanish lessons. Today, it is still on the list of things to do as I haven't gotten to it yet. Someone just sent me this link: DNA Rosetta Stone in Starchild Skull, 6/4/11. Here's what wikipedia has to say.- SB

On July 17, 2010, we were inspired to Search the occult connections of Sirius and created a section for it on the Occult page of this website. [Now it has its own page.]
Came across the link: Pentagon Attack and other Isis (Sirius) Rituals, 9/9/6: An eighth of the way down the page, it talks about the 5 pointed Columbine flower. Just after the picture it says: “Another way of connecting the pentagram and pentagon with the dove is by the close proximity of the star signs for the Columba (the dove) and Canis Major (Sirius) constellations in the heavens.”
A couple of days before, we didn’t answer a call that didn’t leave a message, but as the call was coming in, the phone identified it as being from Collumbine Just. Completely unrelated, the day before that, we were contacted by a woman named Columba G. – left a 3rd voicemail, playing phone tag with her, today.
On the evening of July 17th, we went out and saw the movie "Cyrus".
Upon returning home: did a Search ‘Sirius and the Occult’ and came across a site headlined by "Miley Cyrus: Mind Controlled Disney Slave from Sirius", 4/28/8