Synchronicity

[Sethomas]

Everyone in the world has heard of the "Dark Side of the Rainbow" trick where you listen to Dark Side of the Moon while watching The Wizard of Oz on mute. At best, this is a good way to convince stoners in your dorm hall that there's more to reality than the corporate fascist pigs or pedophile priests want you to realize. However, if you want to REALLY challenge your perspective on the world, an even more strenuous attack on your sensibilities will come from a much more obscure example of synchronicity. That is, listen to "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" by Genesis while watching the 1998 film "Sphere", an adaptation of the Michael Crichton novel by the same name and featuring Samuel L. Jackson, Sharon Stone, and Dustin Hoffman.

I know a graduate student here at IU who is presenting her findings on the subject as part of a MA dissertation. The central mystery being latched upon by her critics is that the internet has virtually zero record of this as a social phenomenon--a very conspicuous fact given the socological nature of the findings. Her argument is that the discovery of the Sphere/Genesis synchronicity leaves the viewer with a sensation of "forbidden knowledge", resulting in a secretive behavior pattern. According to Alicia, the MA student, among 34 anonymous students who claim to have watched this synchronicity across eight universities in the United States and two in Canada, none of them report having attended a social gathering in having made the discovery. There is no broad consensus in how the synchronicity was discovered, most reports being that it spread by word of mouth or through electronic media. Hence, one would expect there to be a greater presence of the phenomenon on the internet.

Alicia's argument is as follows: as word spreads of the synchronicity, it is accompanied by an overbearing sense of elitism. Viewings occur traditionally in groups of a maximum of three persons, the mode being one. The profound psychological aftermath of the viewing incurs a feeling of responsibility to limit the knowledge flow. This is an odd behaviour, but not without precedent. Word is spread only to those with whom a person has deep trust and confidence.

More on this as her work continues, I guess.

[DaxF]

uhh, dude it don't work unless you get stoned

[Sethomas]

According to Alicia, the frequency of recreational drug use among those in the study was no higher than the local averages for university students.

[DaxF]

whuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuutttttttttt

[Seven Force]

Stop shitting up a decent thread, and go to sleep.

[DaxF]

WHy don't you go suck your big dick you black fag.

[Sethomas]

WE DO NOT TAKE KINDLY TO HOMOPHOBES HERE.

[Seven Force]

Yeah! Bein' disrespectful to dem ******s is one thang, but you gotta accept fa-uh, ho-mo-sexuals as hum'n beans, man.

[Emu]

Dax where can I get a sexxxy signature like yours?

[WhiteRat]

WHy don't you go suck your big dick you black fag.

POST OF THE MILLENIUM

[RaNkeri]

Woo yay! Dax is definately my new hero :)

[Emu]

I think Dax is actually The Internet Itself, having seeped out of a computer and congealed into a greasy man-like form. :eek

[kahljorn]

Synchronicity is the stupidest thing in this context. OH THIS SONG ITS LIKE ITS PLAYING FOR ME ON THE RADIO IT SPEAKS TO MY SITUATION MAN THIS MUST MEAN I'M JESUS. I fucking hate that. I know so many people like that and none of them are better for it. I swear I knew this one guy who's face looked like the moon due to it's sheer mass and he thought he was enlightened because a particular song came on while he was tripping on shrooms.
That mother fucker isn't any better than he was before the "Synchronicity".

Synchronicity is a connection between two events that don't occur due to casuality. As such, this experiment is bullshit. "Let's find two things that match up well together and play them for people". That's so ridiculous, people in the media editing industry deal with that kind of synchronicity everyday, according to this theory they should be God almighty. Everytime I watch a cartoon I don't consider it magical.

Synchronicity is more like coincidence that you can't ignore, not chance and certainly not the chance that a music album would happen to "Synchronize" with a movie.
Obviously whoever created this experiment doesn't even understand what synchronicity is. Unless she's studying how easily people can become obsessed with themselves this is a dumb experiment.

[Protoclown]

Well, you always were just a delightful little ray of sunshine, weren't you?

[Girl Drink Drunk]

Everyone in the world has heard of the "Dark Side of the Rainbow" trick where you listen to Dark Side of the Moon while watching The Wizard of Oz on mute. At best, this is a good way to convince stoners in your dorm hall that there's more to reality than the corporate fascist pigs or pedophile priests want you to realize. However, if you want to REALLY challenge your perspective on the world, an even more strenuous attack on your sensibilities will come from a much more obscure example of synchronicity. That is, listen to "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" by Genesis while watching the 1998 film "Sphere", an adaptation of the Michael Crichton novel by the same name and featuring Samuel L. Jackson, Sharon Stone, and Dustin Hoffman.

I know a graduate student here at IU who is presenting her findings on the subject as part of a MA dissertation. The central mystery being latched upon by her critics is that the internet has virtually zero record of this as a social phenomenon--a very conspicuous fact given the socological nature of the findings. Her argument is that the discovery of the Sphere/Genesis synchronicity leaves the viewer with a sensation of "forbidden knowledge", resulting in a secretive behavior pattern. According to Alicia, the MA student, among 34 anonymous students who claim to have watched this synchronicity across eight universities in the United States and two in Canada, none of them report having attended a social gathering in having made the discovery. There is no broad consensus in how the synchronicity was discovered, most reports being that it spread by word of mouth or through electronic media. Hence, one would expect there to be a greater presence of the phenomenon on the internet.

Alicia's argument is as follows: as word spreads of the synchronicity, it is accompanied by an overbearing sense of elitism. Viewings occur traditionally in groups of a maximum of three persons, the mode being one. The profound psychological aftermath of the viewing incurs a feeling of responsibility to limit the knowledge flow. This is an odd behaviour, but not without precedent. Word is spread only to those with whom a person has deep trust and confidence.

More on this as her work continues, I guess.

Look, I know your a veteran around here, and I normallybut could you put your threads about music in the danmed Music section? Also, I downloaded the Wizard of Oz set to Dark Side of the Moon, and it doesn't sync in.

[Fathom Zero]

But he's not talking about movies or music, he's talking about the synchronicity phenomena in general.

[Girl Drink Drunk]

Sigh......good point. Anyways, I think the idea of some proffessor or something is as trivial as those college courses that study A Hard Days Night (considering that the guys who made were just trying to make cheap offa the Beatles, thinking they were going to go out of style).

[Sethomas]

This is not something about music, this is not something about movies. If anywhere else, this belongs in the philosophy forum, but interest in the subject seems to be too broad for such limited attention. To address Kahljorn's concerns:

I've only seen synchronicity applied as a term to cases where two different media converge, as if engineered together for counter-point. At any rate, that was no doubt the case "in this context". If you want to consider perceptionality a media, then there could be strictly esoteric understanding of synchronicity within the mind, but general consensus is that the combination of Genesis and Sphere has a certain universality about it. The experience, however, is NOT universal. "Dark Side of the Rainbow" has a wide variety of "official" techniques and etiquette, varying by locale or internet community or whatever else. Some people insist that the album be begun at a certain moment (e.g. "the second roar"), some people insist that to use anything but a vinyl record kills the effect. At the same time, countless internet sites provide "guides" for what to look for and expect during the movie.

With Genesis/Sphere, however, the only "constant" is the extreme level of personalization. Alicia is not coming across funds very easily for such studies, but a handful of subjects have been exposed to the project with (so far) two variant procedures for synchronicity verification. Four subjects were instructed to write in ink on a paper tablette while watching Genesis/Sphere each perceived instance of synchronicity. Of these, all reported (in the tablettes) evidence of emotional internalization of events that cannot be deciphered as relating either to the album nor the film. In three cases of the above, the text was written in a second or third language of the student. Grammatical consistency was far more impressive than when the students attempted to use these languages "intentionally", but the tablettes recorded no instances of foreign vocabulary previously unknown to the students. In the remaining subject, the results were in English but employed a business shorthand purported not studied by the student since age thirteen.

Another variant involved the subject viewing the project then attempting to provide examples of synchronicity in an interview setting. These six subjects, however, seemed more disjointed than the others immediately after the viewing, and none could provide any example of synchronicity. A faculty advisor helping Alicia from the Psychology Department believes the synchronicity is not a surreptitious display of audio events alligning with visual events, but taken together they somehow form a "somnambulist trigger".

Of these ten subjects, within four days the two groups had converged into a set picture of an early long-term effect caused by the synchronicity. After four days, the ten subjects from two groups each displayed "A dead spark of personality and a new fire of purpose." Unfortunately, the previously mentioned 34 anonymous students cannot be regarded in their survey responses as reliable for any further validation of this phenomenon.

[glowbelly]

seth, you've been posting a whole lot lately. are you close to taking more aspirin or almost killing someone again?

[Sethomas]

I could explore that ad nauseum, but for now I think my ad nauseum explorations shouldn't be introspective. So, I'll answer honestly, "I don't think so."

[kahljorn]

It's really too hot to read and digest what you're saying and properly respond, so for now I'll post a definition of synchronicity, courtesy of wikipedia, for clarification.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity

Synchronicity is a word coined by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung to describe the "temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events." Jung spoke of synchronicity as an "acausal connecting principle" (i.e., a pattern of connection that cannot be explained by direct causality).

An example on the same page:

A well-known example of synchronicity is the true story of the French writer Émile Deschamps who in 1805 was treated to some plum pudding by the stranger Monsieur de Fontgibu. Ten years later, he encountered plum pudding on the menu of a Paris restaurant, and wanted to order some, but the waiter told him the last dish had already been served to another customer, who turned out to be M. de Fontgibu. Many years later in 1832 Émile Deschamps was at a diner, and was once again offered plum pudding. He recalled the earlier incident and told his friends that only M. de Fontgibu was missing to make the setting complete - and in the same instant the now senile M. de Fontgibu entered the room.

Synchronicity is a pretty 'metaphysical' phenemenom, I just don't see this experiment as having any real involvement with Synchronicity. It's almost as if she thinks the music synching up with the movie is the "Synchronicity". I can kind of see some possibilities of synchronicity arising out of this, but it just seems unlikely and difficult to record ;/

[Sethomas]

Well, I did investigate that link, and in the related articles section it provided a link to the article on Dark Side of the Rainbow as an example.

The Sphere/Genesis synchronicity is definitely metaphysical by nature, and as such the study is not really interested in "proving" its existence except as a social phenomenon. As I mentioned, it doesn't really fit into apophenia because the experienced synchronicities appear to be inconsistent between subjects and at any rate not grounded in either the movie nor the album.

[kahljorn]

Yea I know, I thought it was funny that they had that linked on there(synchronicity man ;) ). Alot of people seem to think it's a great example of synchronicity, and I disagree. As I may have mentioned, I believe it is a very poor example. The chances of an album seeming to synch up to a movie is pretty likely, especially since that is a matter of perception. With the millions of albums, the millions of movies, and the fact that most of them run the same length you have a pretty decent chance of some "Synchronizing"(and decent chance makes it meaningless as an example of "Synchronicity"). Have you ever listened to music while browsing a message board, and noticed that alot of avatars seem like they dance to it? Maybe they know you AND what music you're listening to!? DID I SAY THAT OUTLOUD? COULD THEY HEAR ME?
Also, if you think hard enough you can make any coincidence seem meaningful by picking out minute details.
The different techniques and perceptions or whatever involved also kind of nullify the entire concept.

The part of that page I was referring to was this;

It differs from coincidence in that synchronicity implies not just a happenstance, but an underlying pattern or dynamic that is being expressed through meaningful relationships or events. It was a principle that Jung felt compassed his concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious, in that it was descriptive of a governing dynamic that underlay the whole of human experience and history—social, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. Jung believed that many experiences perceived as coincidence were due not merely to chance, but instead, suggested the manifestation of parallel events or circumstances reflecting this governing dynamic

Like you said, if anything this trick will teach some jerkoff that there's more to life than whatever. Like I said, I know tons of people who listen to music and go, "This song is about me I'm the God of this universe it's all directed at me IM IN THE FLOW BABY I AM THE FLOW WHAT ELSE WOULD MAKE THIS SONG PLAY AT THIS TIME???" I just don't see what governing dynamic this represents, is there some deep message beneath these songs and movies that will enlighten mankind? Does it represent the fact that, as a society, we like pink floyd? I liked Wizard of Oz when I was a child.

When you really get into the concept of synchronicity it begins to vaguely suggest some inter-connectedness between all events and time(it's Jung we're talking about). You almost feel like you can predict what will happen the next day and what happened 1,000 years ago at the spot you're at, and they are obviously so obviously connected; any minute detail could tip you off as to what's going to happen next. Every event has meaning because it guides you into the next event of your life. You start to feel like a diviner, or a soothesayer, and your brain is constantly propelled into that cyclic nonsense you probably experience late at night while laying in the dark, discovering secrets of the anatomy of the universe. All symptoms of supposed insanity and restlessness in relaxation.
In that sense, and that sense alone, this could be considered an example of synchronicity- but that still doesn't make it a good example.


I like that the experiment is about "Social phenomena", I find that to be hilarious for some reason. The only problem I have with it is that anything can become a social phenomena, regardless of if there's anything meaningful behind it. I think this is a pretty good example of that. Like I said this is a great experiment in the sense of showing how utterly retarded people can be.

[Sethomas]

You know, I hope that everyone who believes that God is speaking to them through Google ads in their Gmail accounts buys everything that God tells them to.

[sadie]

yah, i really like the police. but not the police, y'know.

[Sethomas]

Yeah, it's so much more fun if you pretend that rap song of years back called "Fuck the Police" or whatever was actually about Sting and his band.

[kahljorn]

:lol I talk to God through empty two liters and rainstorms.