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Explaining the “23″ Phenomenon
Been pondering a lot lately the mechanism behind the phenomenon that some people have attached to the number 23 and the web of synchronicities which surrounds it. This discussion began around the movie trailer for the upcoming movie about this, but has bled into other posts as well, I think.
Actually, this point really crystallized in my head after a phone conversation I had earlier today with a fellow named Gary van Warmerdam, who runs a website called “Pathway to Happiness.” Very interesting guy and a very good conversation which I plan to write more about separately. But one of the things we talked about was how to see things as they are, and how to turn down the addictive chattering that your mind places between you and things.
After experimenting with some of the techniques he described to me over the phone, I hung up and immediately had my mind turn back on and chatter away - because, as I said, I am addicted to it. I’ve somehow trained myself to hook up the mechanisms associated with internal chatter and endless recursive thought into some kind of reward center in the brain or mind. So it becomes “fun” for me to engage the world in this manner - although it can also be maddening as well. Which is why Gary originally offered to speak to me, to show me how to turn down the noise, as it were.
In any event, this conversation made me more keenly aware of how to navigate a chain of coincidences which has recently been occurring with me, centered around my reading of the Bible - the Gospel of Mark, to be specific. The realization that I have been operating under with regards to that is that the Bible can function as a kind of “magical” point of transformation if you engage yourself with it. The patterns you pick up from it begin to become activated within your life, and you start seeing them reflected in increasingly eerie ways - or at least, that’s my experience.
Now, I’ve not gotten heavy into numerology ever, but I am starting to realize that the phenomena associated with the number 23 (or any number for that matter) works in a somewhat similar way. What’s happening is that you have a part of your mind that thrives on describing the reality that you are experiencing. And most of us have a closer relationship to our own descriptions of reality than we do with actual reality. (Which I’ve explored recently in a podcast about why movies seem more real to us than our real lives nowadays)
And so, as a result, when we start uploading “programs” into this part of our mind that describes reality, then we start to influence the language that part of us uses to describe reality. A commenter on a previous post gave a really good example of this:
i`m telling my children not to hold firecrackers in thier hands while the wicks are burning because there is enough explosive force in one of those things to seriously damage your hand and i just finished relating a story about a bass player in a band i played in that had only two fingers on his left hand from a firecracker accident when i notice a man sitting at the next table from us at starbucks has two fingers missing on his right hand.
we create the jumps in event streams with our thoughts. the more we do it the more like-minded events run into our stream.
So, in other words, if you start applying the “23 patch” or the “Bible patch” (or the “two-finger firecracker patch”) to the part of your mind that describes the world, then you’re going to train it to apply that patch in the future. Hence, you start seeing 23’s everywhere. You start seeing Biblical patterns overlay your regular life. In other words, you create a feedback loop from your thoughts back into your thoughts, which then change the focus of the filter you use to perceive the world. And when you start tinkering with that filter, looking for different types of things, you are going to automatically select for a reality or a slice of reality which rewards the filter that you have created.
And this is something we do naturally all the time as it is, it seems. So our options have to do with how to take control of it. How do you create filters which allow you to select for a reality which you actively want to engage in, as opposed to one that you’re just existing in because that is what you know and what you are accustomed to. And, at some point, how do you allow yourself to disengage altogether with the stories and filters and devices which you place between yourself and reality as it is? And what happens when you start living more fully and with greater intention in that world?
November 16th, 2006 at 11:55 am
Question 1: This is what we’re watching, or rather reading and listening to, you do, and we are too. Because we want to. But why, and then why don’t others, or in degrees?
Q2: Is this your current desire?
Q3: hmm, in the Q2 world? Are “…stories and filters and devices…” beliefs?
Hey, since we’re on the physics thing here, you can watch a 45 minute BBC show called “Parallel Universes” here (with subtitles, can’t find one without…?). Though I’m not mathematically proficient enough to really understand, I did do quite a bit of follow-up research and it all points to the ideas discussed in the show, specifically on “M-Theory” (a uniting of string theories which insists on multiple universes).
November 16th, 2006 at 12:47 pm
It’s happening again ….
My wife’s birthday is 9/23 and always claimed those numbers reoccur to a stunning degree with amazing frequency, in various guises. I’ll concur and state for the record that for the nearly 18 years we’ve been together, a disproportionate percentage of the time I check the clock, it happens to be 9:23. Whether it’s AM or PM I accept it as a given now. We often exchange glances when 23 shows up somewhere … most recently in the film Stranger than Fiction, when Dustin Hoffman produces his list of 23 questions for Will Ferrell.
It’s probably all Grant Morrison’s fault ….
November 16th, 2006 at 1:09 pm
An example of magickal numerical recurrence:
hxxp://www.maybelogic.org/maybequarterly/01/0112LamenandSigil741.htm
November 16th, 2006 at 3:50 pm
I’m tending towards the meta, the process, rather than the occurrences.
Been feeling like I can’t keep up - with posts and podcasts and my other readings and thoughts, can’t weave them together in a satisfying way.
On your podcast about religions as species - I went along up to the point where I saw the blackberry takeover analogy to religious takeovers failing because Christianity was forced on people, often at the barrel of a gun. My boyfriend said, “But aren’t the guns like the blackberry thorns?” POP
So, ideas are real and exactly like evolving/growing a 3rd eye or 3rd arm or going from hoppers to fliers - an extension of ourselves. Reminds me also of Graham Hancock’s latest book, “Supernatural” where he posits that through ingesting various plants our consciousness evolved. And your cavemen not analyzing their dreams, whereas we now have a feast of ideas about all sorts of things.
Where I’m stuck, or one part of my stuckness: We hunger for ideas, especially unifying ideas, ala Kuhn, the next worldview or paradigm with which to live and explore - the “hunger” drives this. Or maybe the obliteration of all of them, if I get you correctly. But, what is this hunger?
1) The mental feeling: Not really pain, though kinda, a dissonance, we can’t get with the groove of the different feelings and frequencies that we can even feel as spatial - the different ideas are located - looking up 45 degrees NW, for instance, or ideas/thoughts/memories being released during massage, or the exact location on a dusty road when you first thought and said an idea.
2) Is it physical - where, why, how? Arms and eyes don’t hunger, but a system does - the digestive system which involves many different parts and organs. So, might ideas be a system with many parts distributed and connected throughout our bodies? Just brains in anything mental doesn’t sound right, given work like Candace Pert’s on the biology of our emotions. In any event, this feels stinky to me somehow, but if you factor in that some folks are happy to believe in an idea system - period, forever and ever amen, and folks with degrees of such belief and going beyonds, then hmmm. I can’t get past the idea that there’s something or somethings that we’ll be able to point at that are responsible.
Next, I’ll pay more attention to the synchronicities themselves and see what happens…
Hey, thanks Tim - this is great fun!
November 16th, 2006 at 4:01 pm
Sorry - one more thing. Amending the different folks and beliefs - maybe they go through the same process, just with different concerns, ie, religion is set, but relations with others, money, etc. concern them…?
November 16th, 2006 at 4:11 pm
[…] Ordinarily, we think of the present, the past and the future all being on the same line in time. But what if they are not? What if each event that exists is a thing unto itself, and the moments which we call “now” are more like the “interference patterns” where two lasers meet, captured on film in the creation of a hologram? If that’s the case, then the way that I would imagine our brain/mind might work is by firing the third laser onto the “film” which then renders a three dimensional image duplicating the original. It may be a convoluted metaphor, but it may also help us explain such peculiar phenomena as our seeming ability to actively select for certain slices of reality based on what filters our minds are running (more here). […]
November 16th, 2006 at 4:16 pm
it is becoming more and more clear that the media programs us to think in certain ways and then we go about creating the reality………….to satisfy the media.
i choose which media to consume and what content to run to the best of my abilities and energy.
no tv. and no newspapers and absolutely no cbc radio news. and the really hard one, the conversations of certain groups of people.
November 18th, 2006 at 5:21 pm
And the reason I think things like the 23 phenomenon or any other obsessive pattern recognition becomes useful as a tool for consciousness modification is the realization that:
If I am only recognizing information from the world which matches the conceptual filters I am applying, then I can change those filters and recognize new patterns of information. Further, if my conceptual filters cause me to select only certain sub-sets of the whole available data, then it follows that my senses are acting in the same way: filtering down to one specific sub-set of available data. Can I begin to modulate my sense perception in the same way which I modulated my conceptual recognition filters?
August 27th, 2007 at 11:19 pm
[…] This to me is just about the perfect explanation of why and how the “23 phenomenon” works, or for that matter just about any synchronicity. I feel like people who subscribe to more mystical “explanations” of things of this nature may not like the hypothesis I am about to put forth. But since it is a hypothesis, the point is to test it and re-test it under different circumstances, pick it apart and break it down. Or at least that is how science works though. And honestly, I think the best types of mysticism, that’s all they are: science. Do this and this other thing happens. Very simple. It’s a cause effect truth exchange. […]