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Synchronicity

Synchronicity or Coincidence? Parapsychologist Dean Radin Tells a Strange Personal Tale

By Gregon

Dean Radin is best known as a scientist who examines possible ‘psi’ abilities in others, working at the Institute of Noetic Sciences on experiments on topics ranging from telepathy and precognition through to the effects of consciousness on quantum experiments.

But the seasoned researcher has also had his own brushes with the stranger side of reality, including the massive synchronicity he personally experienced in the year 2000 involving another psi researcher (and lead designer of the Apple Powerbook) Jon Krakower.

I’ll let Dean tell the story himself:

What do you think? Evidence that our minds/reality have certain undiscovered connections, or just a massive coincidence?

Greg
Editor
Greg is the owner-editor of The Daily Grail, as well as the author of a number of books including Stop Worrying, There Probably is an Afterlife.
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27 Comments

  1. Synchronicity
    Indeed, great synchronicity. But it’s one of those that blurs the lines between synchronicity, telepathy, and the power of attraction–and probably incorporates all three at once.

  2. Wow. Great story and
    Wow. Great story and example. Gravity + intention = consciousness emerging into the world. Resonance is missing IMO. Clearing the noise (meditation, or relaxed focus on his rendering/purpose/intention of designing his lab) that interferes with our mind resonating with the “out there” – the interference patterns, or?… that then manifests as reality, guided by unconscious intention. Twice I’ve experienced inexplicable “lucky” streaks, impossible to explain by chance or coincidence, at least by any statistical means. Both times I was in a state of pure relaxation, completely at peace – one lasting minutes, the other days. I repeatedly could not lose no matter how hard I tried. Then I began to feel stressed on impending events (stress translated as the “noise” that interferes with our resonance) and something physically clicked inside me – at least it felt as though there was a physical visceral shift within my body, and from that moment on the “magic” was gone. Couldn’t “win,” couldn’t even get remotely lucky and felt disconnected. I’ve been searching for the explanation, the mechanics ever since. This is one example, one more clue to…how does the universe really work?…

  3. Wonderful account. More and
    Wonderful account. More and more, the information I am coming across is highly suggestive of life being alot like some kind of shared dreamspace, rather than some independent, objectively existing, and often oppressive outer world.
    I have become convinced that the metaphor of the dream, is really the only one which describes our reality.
    Thank you for sharing.

      1. And also…
        …May I suggest listening to the Skeptiko interview with Bernardo Kastrup, author of the new book Why Materialism is Baloney.

        Here’s a little excerpt from the interview, that seems relevant to the discussion of ‘reality as a shared dream’:

        “Okay, let’s try to greet closer to our own personal experience of reality. Think about your dreams. When you dream at night, you dream of an entire universe, a world in that dream maybe a street, a house, and a city, whatever. And you dream of a character in that dream which you identify yourself with during the dream and while you are in that dream you think that you are that character and that the rest of the dream is the outside world. So I can dream of being a man in a house, walking around the house and thinking this house is outside of me because I identify only with that little character in the dream. When I wake up it’s obvious to me that the whole thing was generated by me. I was not only the little man walking around. I was the house too, and the city. I was the entire dream. My mind was doing the whole thing, but a split off psychic complex of my mind has turned into the little character in that dream and I identified myself with that subject of what my mind was generating, even though I was the whole thing. Now let’s bring it back to reality. In my view reality is a shared dream. We are the split of complexes of the dreamer. The difference is there is more than one now, in this shared reality. We are dreaming the whole thing up. We just happen to be dissociated and identifying ourselves with only a little character in the dream. If this is true than reality is the dream and that dream is in us, not us in the dream. In the same way that you’re nightly dreams are in your mind, not you in it.”

        1. God – whatever God is, is the
          God – whatever God is, is the dreamer. We are all spinoffs of God’s infinite mind, each with our own amnesiac identity, but still part of the whole, participating in the dream, but every once in a while seeing the cracks in the façade, momentarily experiencing lucidity before drifting off again… We’re all God’s mini-me(s)…conspirators in shaping reality. And yes, the few times I’ve experienced the lucid dream effect and peered behind the curtain, I was shocked, wowed, and found it a profound paradigm changing experience, but trying to convey that to others…mostly not a topic of conversation except for those very close (wife) and even then, others can’t truly relate without first-hand experience…just words.

          1. Joseph Campbell on Schopenhauer
            From “The Power of Myth” TV series:

            Bill Moyers: So the experience of God is beyond description, but we feel compelled to try to describe it?

            Joseph Campbell: That’s right. Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual,” points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others, The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with verything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature.

  4. Great story-but…..
    It is an interesting piece, but one thing I don’t understand- John K. was reportedly trying to “manifest” Dean R. by some occult technique- why the heck didn’t he just send him an email, contact him by phone, or even send him a snail-mail letter? The inventor of the PowerBook presumably knows how to find someone online. And if John’s manifestation technique was working, when he opened the door, instead of “looking like he was going to have a heart attack”- I would have expected a greeting like ” Welcome, Dean, I have been expecting you”…….am I missing something here ?

    1. Valid question
      A valid question, that only Krakower could answer. Maybe he was too starstruck with Radin, and first wanted to get his lab in order before getting in contact with him though ‘standard’ means 😉

      As for his surprise that his manifestation technique actually worked… that’s something I’ve experienced a few times over my years of involvement with Forteana. It’s one thing to read a book & entertain yourself with these ideas, but the moment they irrupt into YOUR life is truly a game-changer. The Universe forces you to admit ‘this $#!t is real, yo!’ and there’s really no going back after that 😉

      But as I said, we can only speculate about Krakower’s true motives & intention.

  5. Dean Radin’s synchronicity
    There’s a context that should be kept in mind when considering experiences or stories about experiences such as Mr. Radin has described in this video interview.

    This context doesn’t contain just the frame of reference that I, as well as most of the rest of the readers here (judging by their comments), tend to utilize. It’s a wider context which recognizes & includes an alternative frame of reference that’s utilized currently by a large number of our fellow human beings who also consider themselves to be actively exploring the world in search of fundamental answers.

    This wider context recognizes that there are — at least — two very different interpretations of what Mr. Radin reports. To compare & contrast both of these interpretations when considering a phenomenon, without excluding any aspects of either is, I think, a characteristic of true inquiry, in the best sense of the word ‘scientific’.

    One interpretation — the most familiar one to myself and to most of the readers here, I believe — uses a frame of reference that recognizes non-physical & acausal (in the Jungian sense) pathways for the production of physical phenomena that we can & do experience in our daily world.

    In this context, one way Mr. Radin’s experience might be described is as the consequence of elements moving in another kind of reality — non-spatial, non-temporal, however that might be conceived — inserting themselves into & dovetailing with his (and Mr. Krakower’s) daily world.

    Another interpretation — which is important to acknowledge and consider — is one in which Mr. Radin’s experience followed a few predictable principles that fit well with purely physical & causal pathways as currently conceived in our western intellectual culture.

    One piece of this interpretation is that the probability of two separate people with professional or aspiring-to-professional interests & intentions in parapsychology should choose the same business complex in California to house their offices, and to end up next door to one another, could be significantly higher than pure chance. The prosaic elements involved could include: proximity to investigator’s location, availability, and price. In addition, the sociocultural & economic setting of the San Francisco Bay region of California could be conceived as one more likely than other regions of the country to contain individuals or groups with the aforementioned interests .

    There is a notable current trend amongst technical & scientific writers in the field of statistics to elucidate mathematical models that describe the occurrence of very rare phenomena. In these models, which are constituted of unarguably sound mathematics, the rarest & most unlikely events become predictable, in principle, and even highly expected. Awareness of this newly-articulated statistical reasoning is expanding and taking a spot in our cultural inventory. A good example is: “The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day”, by statistician David J. Hand. [ http://improbability-principle.com ]

    The ultimate application of these newly-emphasized statistical models to our conception of reality will be, so far as I have presently been able to grasp, to ‘normalize’ events that many now tend to consider coincidental even to the point of being incredible. Using a chain of variables, with the sheer statistical inevitability of the most unlikely events as the end link, anything reported by human beings can be comfortably placed into the causal framework of this second interpretation. Mr. Radin’s would certainly be no exception to those who operate therein.

    My personal apprehension of all this is twofold: One, that we may well be setting ourselves up, in the mainstream western intellectual world, to be tightly closed off from future recognition of some very significant aspects of our being & experience. Two, that the distance between the members of our society who are willing to look for ways to inquire into a cosmos that has non-physical & acausal aspects, and members of our society to willing to consider only a cosmos without these characteristics, will increase to a very uncomfortable degree. Collaboration is now far too critical an element for the survival of the human race to be so conveniently relinquished.

      1. lab layout
        if the complex has similarly-constructed rooms, the congruence of the layout of the two labs, set up with similar purposes in mind, would be considered to have a probability significantly less than chance.

  6. Synchronous
    After I had a precognition experience I set out to read about and learn all I could about psychic phenomena. The best explanation of my experience came when I learned about the “Law of Attraction”. The Law of Attraction states that whatever you focus on and intend in your life, shall be delivered to you. In some cases, it’s your actions that get you what you want, and in others, things just seem to manifest themselves somehow.

    It seems to me that this may have been the case here.

    1. Less The Secret and more Vallee!
      Yeah, the “law of Attraction” may be part of it, but for myself I just can’t stand the mercantile notion which has turned that book into a best-seller. Thinking of thousands of greedy individuals attempting to manifest a BMW makes my stomach sick :-/

      I’d suggest you read Messengers of Deception, by Jacques Vallee, along with his incredible talk at TEDx Brussels in 2010 🙂

      BTW Welcome to the Grail ^___^

      2. But…but…but…
        I manifested myself a BMW. Well, actually, I worked my ass off. I think any financial success is a by-product of knowing what to do, when to do, how to do it, and of course, why to do it. The keyword here is “doing”.

        I kinda dislike the idea of “Law of Attraction”, you know, receiving a reward for supernatural reasons through a mechanism, which brings in mind: “to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy.”

        In my personal opinion, it might empower an individual to make the “right” choices in pursue of whatever it is that the individual pursuing. That kind of magical thinking, I guess, makes refining the goals easier and one can justify the sacrifices made.

        Speaking of which: back to day job (game development).

        Best regards to all the mighty Grailers!

          1. Well
            I think it was Robert Fripp, who said “we attract to ourselves the life that we live” and “we attract to ourselves the quality of life that corresponds to our quality of being alive.” This is, of course, spoken while sitting firmly on the lap of modern luxury.

            From my point of view, the aforementioned quotes and “law of attraction” being tied to (unknown) physical laws proposes a few problems. The foundation of that thought is that every single man-made metaphysical structure and/or pattern has a correlating manifestation in space-time, or that very complex series of “events” in space-time can be manipulated through these structures and patterns. Furthermore, this would also mean that every single human fallacy or personal subjection has a direct manifestation or can be used to fabricate one. To me personally, that sounds very frightening, and to be honest, bordering hubris.

            Like I said before, I dislike the “law of attraction”. What this so-called “law” means is that all those less fortunate beings on this planet are not “wishing” or “attracting” enough. The uneven distribution of resources? Attract more. World peace? Attract more. Other uncounted human tragedies? Attract more (rainbows and happy thoughts and crap).

            The bottom line? If the “law of attraction” accords with physical laws, the universe is truly screwed. If there is a “god” behind it all, he is not only a complete prick but a monster.

          2. That may be a peculiar
            That may be a peculiar definition of a poorly understood phenomenon, and the phenomenon may be quite ephemeral anyway.

            Some years back, I made a sort of “mind machine” for a good friend of mine who was in financial difficulties with her small shop here in my home town. I was actually using one of these:

            http://www.ebay.com/itm/BLACK-HOLE-TRANSFORMATOR-REMOVE-NEGATIVE-PHENOMENA-/121503654885?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item1c4a2ea3e5

            I have a funny collection of this guy’s devices.

            Below its bottom pointing crystal I had used Microsoft Publisher to print out a circular design with something like “health” “wealth” “friendship” and “Love” printed around the circular edge of the paper. The printed circle was then cut out with scissors and laid below the bottom crystal. The “mind machine was then placed on a table in her shop much to the passing amusement of customers. Mind you, this little excursion was more of a lark than anything else. I just had some time on my hands and felt like playing. The very next day I visited her while I was in town, and was greeted by a very astonished and ennervated friend who told me that the night before while having dinner at a local restaurant an old but estranged former friend having dinner there approached her and apologized for destroying their former friendship some years back. This woman had borrowed $400.00 from my friend years ago and her not being able to pay her back had essentially ruined the friendship. Then she plucked the $400.00 from her purse, handed it over, and gave my friend a hug saying something to the effect that she hoped they could renew their friendship and that she had always loved her.

            You could within reason certainly call this a mere coincidence, but I have always thought that if it worked it may have been because the “wealth” part wasn’t really wealth – my friend in need was of low income status and just needed money to help pay for the basics of life. It may also have worked because love and friendship was also involved – it was “part of the deal” so to say.

            I still use mind machines, but never for personal gain or material things – I use them to influence events globally in a loving and peaceful way. I may be delusional, but what’s the harm in trying?

          4. You are aware of the “many
            “The bottom line? If the “law of attraction” accords with physical laws, the universe is truly screwed. If there is a “god” behind it all, he is not only a complete prick but a monster.”

            You are aware of the “many universes” idea?

  7. My Big One
    This happened several years ago. I was driving to work in the early morning hours on a semi-rural highway. A family member had borrowed my car the previous night, and left my tank on empty. There was a gas station a few miles away, and I though I had enough fuel to get there. I was wrong, and felt the engine sputter and die. Now along this route was an entrance to a driveway with a stone gate, and to one side a magnificent ancient twin- trunked oak tree that I had always wanted to see closely but never did. So, when my car finally quit, I coasted downhill for a minute and then took the shoulder, finally stopping right at the above- mentioned driveway. Being more worried about arriving on time than seeing the tree, I fumbled around for my cell, dialed my wife for help, only to have the phone die from an uncharged battery while in my hand, My phone charger had been removed my the same person who drained my tank, and at the exact second I realized I was out of luck and would have to walk miles to the gas station, I saw a figure appear further down the driveway- it turned out to be an occupant of the house (which was invisible from the road) out for her morning jog. So, I got out, gave her a wave, and she came to the entrance. She didn’t want to break her training so she jogged in place while I asked her if I could use the house phone to call a wrecker- she casually pulled a cell phone from her pocket, handed it to me, and told me to leave it on the stone gate when I was finished, smiled, turned around, and jogged back up the hill. And it gets even deeper,,,,, My wife didn’t pick up so I called into work,and I told the secretary where I was located and could someone come and pick me up. She put me on hold, and came back on and said “We got you covered,” gave a giggle and hung up. And almost instantaneously afterwards, a wrecker truck pulled up behind me, a burly fellow hopped out carrying a five gallon gas can. He was the husband of the woman I had called, and she had put me on hold to call him. He was about a half mile away, coming in my direction.He said he saw my car right when he got his wife’s call. I paid and thanked him, and went out to finally look over the tree while I pondered how my need for a phone and gas were essentially met instantaneously, with timing down to the second. And the day had another surprise ….
    Shortly after arriving home that evening, our land-line phone and my cell rang- you guessed it- at exactly the same moment. I answered my cell,my wife answered the house phone. My call was from my sister, who was very upset with news that she had just learned of a serious health problem . I did my best to console her, and then I heard my wife start to shriek and become very emotional- her call was from our teenage daughter telling us that she was pregnant. So two unrelated people, calling at the exact same moment, both with very bad news. What a day, I think about it every time I pass that glorious old oak…

  8. Pingback: Review: Dean Radin’s ‘Real Magic’ – paramystic news

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