Pure, Uncut Conjecture: The Mechanics of Synchronicity
Unsubstantiated claims about the nature of reality and the ways in which higher-dimensional beings use synchronicity to manipulate the actions of lower-dimensional beings.
My wife is currently taking the Hellier journey and experiencing the characteristic storm of synchronicities that come with watching the show and, being that I work out of my living room now, have the sort of situation that allows me to put the show on in the background while I work and retrace my steps through that series.
It got me thinking.
Like it always does.
Personally, I think it's one of the most important pieces of paranormal documentary ever. It's right up there with Keel's Mothman Prophecies, Vallee's Passport To Magonia, and Harpur's Daemonic Reality. Whether they know it or not (of course they know), the Hellier gang have managed to capture the moving parts of the universe and the way that the forces out in the higher dimensions directly interact with this one by putting the focus of the series on high strangeness.
There's a section in the first episode of season 2 where Connor Randall is talking about the unusual coincidences that popped up in his life in the wake of season 1. Connor remarks that synchronicities seem to be a sort of cosmic map in the sense that they connect seemingly random occasions in order to indicate to you that you're on the right path. There's a moment in season 1 when Greg says something to this effect, as well, and it sparked a bit of inspiration in me to consider how this works on a higher level than what we're used to perceiving.
Anyone whose done any amount of work with extra-dimensional intelligences, spirits, angels, etcetera will tell you that the beings that exist higher up on the cosmic food chain communicate in ways that to us down here in Assiah seems like nonsense, or that it's vague or broad and that the higher you move up the chain and get closer to God the more nebulous it all becomes. My own frustrations with working with spirit stem from this quality, in that you can never get a clear answer. Sometimes I just want these beings to speak english right into my ear instead of presenting me with a series of visions and expecting me to sort it all out and translate these symbols into concrete human language.
I've also posted in the past about how I kind of hate how easily magicians and new age types gravitate to concepts of Quantum Theory and use their own vague understanding of it all tp explain how all this crazy occult and paranormal shit works. So I'm about to do just that and demonstrate to you, dear reader, exactly why I don't care for it. Spoiler: It's because I'm just some dude watching a documentary about cave goblins and not a researcher of theoretical physics.
The Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment is the best way I can think of to explain the idea of probability. As it would happen, it was also the best way that Edwin Schrodinger could, too! See, everything -- EVERYTHING -- exists in a state of possibility until it is observed in some way. This observation cements it in reality. Say, you close up a cat in a box with a contained radioactive isotope. The box is purely hypothetical. You can't measure the contents in any way until you open it and look inside. If you look in the box, the isotope is released and the cat dies. Way to go, asshole.
Without observing it, it exists in an extremely over-simplified quantum state of alive and dead, simultaneously. Physicists hip to quantum theory call this super position. It's the binary of alive and dead and everything in between. When we interact with anything, particles, waves, information, this spectrum of possibility collapses to a single point in spacetime, thereby making it an objective feature of reality. It bears a lot in common with the kabbalistic process of creation, in fact. Our path through life, minute to minute, is made by these observations of possibility. The way in which we make our way from birth to death is by way of interaction with the information of the universe. It's a fractal series of observations and interactions with particles, waves, and and information as everything we do goes from infinite to finite. But the observer is always us. We are the ones observing and therefore collapsing probability to a single point in spacetime. Our consciousness operates the machinery.
But what if some outside intelligence had a means of manipulating probability on your behalf?
Let's say that you're being observed by a higher-dimensional being. We're separated by onion-layers of perception. Being that we're trapped in the third dimension, without the sensory equipment to meaningfully perceive of a fourth or fifth dimension, this could be happening all the time. Like in HP Lovecraft's From Beyond or Edwin Abbot's Flatland. We can perceive the dimensions which are lower than us -- a single point of one-dimensional space, the planar two-dimensional space, and the z-axis of Cartesian three-dimensional space -- but anything existing above us is incomprehensible. So consider an invisible hand which may need to reach out to you from time to time. It's not constrained by the same boundaries of spacetime that we are and can see ahead since time, sometimes referred to as the fourth dimension, is something that it has direct control over. As well as being invisible to us, their means of communicating is as equally ineffable. They can't just speak english to you or whatever language may be your first and most reliable. Spacetime doesn't exist for them in the same way that it does for us. But still, they (pick your poison: angels, spirits, demons, etc.) need to get a message to you in a way they can most easily communicate and that you are most likely to understand by their criteria. This is why we most commonly perceive the divine and it's associated forces by way of the symbols that they place around the world that we live in. The closer you get to God, the less definite communication and ideas become and so God has to communicate downward to us by way of many orders of angels and spirits, passing the message along. At a certain point, however, that line of communication needs to reach our brain and the higher-dimensional angelic language isn't going to get it done and thus, a cosmic game of charades has to be played in order to get the point across. They have to throw you the symbols and hope that you're paying attention and have the presence of mind to recognize the symbols for what they are. Synchronicity is not only a way of passing those symbols to you, but tying them together in a way that makes them more meaningful and obvious.
A thing may happen to you, a symbol may pass into your conscious field, and you pass it off as just another one of life's occasions. But what if three related things happen to you quickly? They happen to you in such a way which strikes you as odd or coincidental. Let's say you read a book and there's a character in it with the name of someone you haven't spoken to in a long time. Then you're driving around and a song comes on with that name also featured prominently in the lyrics. The car in front of you suddenly hits the brakes and you also jam on yours, nearly rear-ending them. You look at the license plate. It's a vanity plate bearing the name from the lyrics and the book. You, a mystic, are likely going to give it some real thought and draw some conclusions about the meaning of this series of coincidences. You contact this person and they respond by telling you that they were just thinking of you and have something important that you need to know. Get it?
To be clear, something in the order of being above you caused these things to happen by directly applying whatever force is available to them at their level of the cosmos to impact probability on our level. It's a butterfly effect, put into motion by an intelligence far greater than our own, meant to chain events together in a way that our lower intelligences will find meaningful. It put that book in your hand, that song in your playlist and timed it for that moment, and that car in front of you so that you would bridge the gap and make that phone call or send that email or whatever.
What about the high-strangeness that accompanies these synchronicities?
Glad you asked.
I've posted before about the nature of the universe being like a membrane stretched taut over the surface of the cosmos. When we, as magicians, exert our will over that membrane in order to make magical stuff happen, we have to take care to do it gently. It's why we go through all the preliminary rituals and evocations/invocations of higher powers. It's like gingerly pressing your hand into the membrane and feeling the universe react by conforming to its shape. When you just as gently remove your hand, the universe gently regains its shape plus whatever you happened to inject into it. It bounces a little bit in the process of equilibrium, but not in a way that's going to burn you. But let's say you're doing something much less subtle, like Chaos Magick. You take no precautions, you have no spiritual chain of command that helps mitigate the damage you're about to do and you throw a wild haymaker at that same membrane. You end up getting what you want but, as reported by folks that dabble in Chaos Magick (I.e. the hosts of Last Podcast on the Left), you also get a little on ya. The membrane bounces back and forth wildly, trying to regain its shape and in the process of correction, all kinds of crazy, unexpected shit happens.
Those higher dimensional beings are working with the same sort of machinery and have to reach through the membrane to get their message to us but I suspect that reaching upwards is much easier to do gently than it is to reach downward and no matter how powerful the acting spirit is, the process of speaking to the monkey men of the third dimension can only be done with a blunt instrument. It causes the membrane to bounce wildly, resulting in strange happenings here on this planet which is why UFO sightings, Bigfoot, Mothman, are all accompanied by strange and crazy shit happening on the margins. Consider UFO crashes. Civilian witnesses of these events almost always report that the debris doesn't much look like technology. It's like these crafts are full of Legos or something. In the first pages of John Keel's Mothman Prophecies, a man in black haunts Point Pleasant in the days following the bridge collapse, stuttering and spooking the locals. He doesn't really seem to be up to much, though. He just sort of insists that he's a friend of Gray Barker and wonder aloud what a particular woman in town would do if she were told to stop writing about UFOs. It's as though in the process of delivering whatever the message was that Mothman was supposed to be an omen of, some wild energy slipped through, as well, and just kind of bounced around Point Pleasant's reality bubble until it ran out of gas and the membrane stopped bouncing back and forth.
Synchronicity and high-strangeness is striking the Hellier gang hard and fast because whatever it is that they're on the trail of is constantly signaling to them with that cosmic machinery. It allows them to manipulate probability in such a way that it steers the investigators in the directions that they need to go. The chain of synchronicity stretches outward to the viewers of the show either because we, too, have to receive this message somehow or because Planet Weird is broadcasting it to a wider audience on the carrier wave of consciousness by way of electromagnetic force. Electromagnetism is one of the fundamental forces of physics. It's as though by delivering their documentary to us on the internet, they're hooking that synchronistic energy to the world's biggest guitar amp and extending its power and influence to everyone else that sees it.
Back in the golden age of paranoid paranormal investigation, this information was spread through books and newsletters. Maybe you could sneak it on Coast to Coast AM, if you were lucky. The audience was small and, as a result of these tight reality bubbles, the weirdness influence didn't extend much beyond them. But now, with the broad accessibility of the internet, Planet Weird has, without knowing, extended the bubble to vast dimensions in such a way that it also resonates in the lives of its enormous viewer base.