Synchronicity is worshipped as evidence of the influence of the divine. I say worshipped because it is held aloft, revered, admired, and kept separate from the mundane. Synchronicity is meaningful, and because it is meaningful, it implies communication. Because it implies communication, it implies an intent behind it. Because it implies intent, it implies consciousness and therefore conscious will to help guide our actions. It is proof.
It is also well known, colloquially, so I won't bother fetching sources, that different people are "tuned in" to synchronicity. It is also, I think, colloquially understood that belief in the existence and value of synchronicity is in some way related to one's beliefs about the nature of the divine.
Synchronicity is discarded by skeptics as statistically explainable. It is dismissed as apophenia, which is the ability to map meaning onto data that has no causal process associated with the construction of intentional meaning. When we see faces, shapes and objects that we recognize in inanimate or natural objects or systems, this is apophenia. Nature did not intentionally create Italy in the shape of a boot. The subreddit /r/mildlyinteresting is just shy of being devoted to finding instances of visual apophenia.
Amazingly, the story of Odin's discovery of the runes appears to describe something truly fascinating. A shamanistic ritual which elicited apophenia: the attachment of meaning to signal noise.
All of the runes can be described using a [set of staves](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1xasUIUK4HI/VBsovcPEiJI/AAAAAAAAAnw/xsI0OXFmkjo/s1600/NineGloryWands%2B(1). In some versions of the poem, the staves have been cast by Odin; in others, the staves are actually the criss-crossing roots of the tree Yggadrasil. Importantly, one of the first things that Odin is said to have done after discovering the runes was to go about Northern Europe teaching people how to use them.
Taken in this way, a shaman utilized methods of self-sacrifice and duress in order to provoke apophenia. in this state, probably well worn archetypical concepts important to the culture were able to be attached to novel shapes. Shapes that could be discretized, and rendered externally. In other words, Odin discovered a form of external concept recording. He discovered a form of writing, and then travelled the Northern climes spreading literacy to its people.
It is important not to underestimate the importance of this technology to pre-literate peoples. With the written form comes all sorts of amazing abilities, ranging from the extension of memory into the environment to facilitate the development of conceptual abstraction, to simply indicating signage, property ownership, or hazards. We are unaware of what it is like to be absent these abilities. We have never known a world where the culture was not defined by the Word. To new people the word allowed the silent communication of thought. It was, almost certainly, magic.
If you do not know the runes, then you almost certainly can see no runes in the stave pattern. They are invisible to you in the world. Once you know them, however, you can find them quite literally everywhere. you can find them on buildings, in cracks in the sidewalk, in the twining of branches, or in the tangles in your lover's hair.
The runes are fascinating for another reason. They gain meaning from their location. Language, in general, does this, but for the runes it is especially important. Their meanings tend to be ephemeral and ambiguous at the best of times. Their meaning is imprecise, and so their capacity to communicate detailed ideas is limited. The runes are to language as some [forms of abstract art](http://hdwallpaperfun.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Abstract-Painting-Wallpaper-Photos-HD-826248.jpg) are to [realism](http://www.artcountrycanada.com/images/bateman-at-the-nest.jpg).
The runes pick up meaning from where you find them.
The runes are, quite literally, everywhere. The shapes are so basic and primitive that they can be found in nature and in humanity's works. Finding them -or rather the ability to find them- is a skill; but that skill is almost certainly apophenic.
But what does this tell us? It tells us that finding the runes, and finding meaning in them, and then extra meaning by virtue of their situation in time and space is in fact a skill. It is, above that, a cognitive skill. It is also worth noting that the runes are there whether you go looking for them or not. If you are not looking for them, you will not find them. If you look for them, you will find them anywhere you look. If you find them, and you are skilled in their use, then their discovery will provoke a thought. That thought may change your actions. Your actions will change the outcome of your day. And if anything even slightly out of the ordinary occurs as a result, then you can say that the outcome was caused by your discovery of a particular rune, at a particular time, in a particular place.
And you, and only you, will have any idea that anything of importance has happened at all. An interaction will have occurred between you and your environment. What are the odds? The odds that you would be in that place, at that time, to see that rune, with that meaning, while you had that thought, about that thing, that led your heart to skip to your throat as you whisper to yourself
I needed to see that. Thank you.
If you are skilled in the use of the runes, this will happen constantly. It will happen especially in moments of hardship, passion, yearning, learning, growth, pain, joy and serenity.
If you are not familiar with the runes it will never happen. Ever. At least not with the runes as the vehicle of meaning.
Meaning is constructed^[1](http://lchc.ucsd.edu/MCA/Paper/Smagorinsky/meaning.html),[2](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meaning_(philosophy_of_language),[3](http://muse.jhu.edu/books/9780253116086)
It is well known, well studied, and empirically verifiable. Meaning is something that our brains do, and do well.
In my view, a discussion of synchronicity cannot seriously progress without a discussion of the role of the brain and its processes. The story of Odin, however, shows us that apophenia likely cognitively predates written language. In fact, at cursory glance, even ancient cave paintings do not work without the brain's ability to identify and map abstract form onto the familiar. The runes take this process a step further by mapping concepts that are more abstract than *antelope* onto shapes that have an arbitrary relationship to the concept.
Picking the runes out of the staves involves other cognitive processes. Ones that involve discretizing patterns in the brain. What do I mean by a discrete process? I mean temporally extended organizations of matter, often sustained by a flow-through of energy, that can take on stable configurations with identifiable and describable features. Things like [the eye of hell](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avJefZ0upEA). In order to pick out the rune staves, you need to have the ability to emphasize particular features in the information stream, allow those features to stabilize into a discrete form, and de-emphasize information extraneous to the pattern. The difference between R and P in the staves is the exclusion or inclusion of the slant \.
*Meaning is constructed by the brain, by emphasizing and deemphasizing input signals*.
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Apophenia is closely linked with delusion, and schizophrenia ([brief non academic summary](http://skepdic.com/apophenia.html) ).
>In 1958, Klaus Conrad published a monograph entitled Die beginnende Schizophrenie. Versuch einer Gestaltanalyse des Wahns, in which he described in groundbreaking detail the prodromal mood and earliest stages of schizophrenia. He coined the word "Apophänie" to characterize the onset of delusional thinking in psychosis .... to reflect the fact that the schizophrenic initially experiences delusion as revelation. In contrast to epiphany, however, apophany does not provide insight into the true nature of reality or its interconnectedness, but is a "process of repetitively and monotonously experiencing abnormal meanings in the entire surrounding experiential field"
This was indeed my own experience with my Election as Christ on Easter of 2004. The synchronicities piled on thick and fast, and left me staggering to understand the mechanism. Indeed, when later that year I fully experienced the remarkable cognitive state that has defined my very existence to the utmost, I took as evidence the amazing strings of coincidences that had led me to the discovery.
Let me give you a quick summary by highlighting some of the chancier things.
I was homeless. So I went to visit my sister. While on the way home, she spotted a friend in the thick, heavy crowd. He told us of a rave event later that evening. I desperately wanted to go, but neither my sister nor I had any money. Later, she was doing laundry and found $20 in her pocket, by chance. It was her only $20, but she gave it to me.
While there, I met a girl named Jessie. We shared a hometown, and became fast friends. One minute later, and we never would have known about the rave, and I never would have met Jessie. After another long stint on the streets, reading the runes to people for money, I wound up moving in with Jessie after finding an opportunity (by chance) to call her.
She introduced me to her friends, and them to their friends, and soon I was surrounded by psychedelic loving friends. I found some LSD that had the illuminatus pyramid on it. Through a *very* strange series of instances, I found myself on acid, watching my friend play a video game.
Being in exactly that place at exactly that time being exactly who I am is what showed the state to me.
That string of coincidences -so minor, so ephemeral- completely changed my life. So it is for *any* life changing event. There you were one day, and *instantly*, it all changes.
I followed the string of coincidences, but took them **literally** as God's **specific instructions to me**. I could not be wrong about my insights or inferences, because they were God-given. I had God-given knowledge and God-given authority.
I was almost completely unemployable. I could barely keep from bursting out in public and screaming "I am Christ! I am come! Come to me to be healed!"
I tried to adopt the homeless, though I myself was only a week's income away from that state myself. I could cure them, I believed. I tried to cure my friends of their heartaches, and their drug problems.
Their hurts, their sorrows - theirs and mine - stubbornly refused to bend to my authority. I could not cure. I could not heal.
I could only enter this state, change, and then talk about it. If I had God-given powers, the state itself was it. And the world didn't care. The world couldn't care.
I lacked credibility.
But I had proof.
Synchronicities.
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One day, I showed up in a sub called /r/DigitalCartel .
It's background was the illuminatus pyramid, and across its' visage were scrawled the runes. It was a subreddit devoted to the exaltation of a Christ claimant.
*This synchronicity is aimed at getting my attention. This subreddit is for me.*
Nobody, not even the Christ claimant, or his apocryphal herald had any idea that this sub was clearly aimed at me. I'm the only one that the symbols had meaning for. Nobody knew but me.
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Of course, this is apophenia in action. *Of course those symbols had meaning to me. Of course this was a startling series of coincidences.*
Even a cursory glance of my life's history clearly explains why.
But this sub is not for me, because no agent or process can be identified that created the sub with me in mind.
The subreddit, and it's accidental symbolism, was *not* created for me, but it *is* meaningful to me. And it is that meaning that caught my attention and keeps me interested.
The question is this:
Did Odin spy the runes in the staves that *he* cast? Or did he spy the runes in the tangle of Yggdrasil's roots?
It does not matter to me.
I see the runes everywhere. They are there if I look, and they are absent when I do not. They are thematically relevant when I am seeking guidance, and I am the only one who sees them as meaningful within my own narrative. If the universe is guiding me, then my own brain is a part of the process. If my own brain is part of a process, then many people before me discovered and exploited how to use the brain to construct meaning to guide themselves. It is a magical mystery *why* this is the case, but it does not grant Divine Authority to my thoughts because of them.
My relationship with synchronicity can be expressed by a poem that I penned when I first started going through these experiences.
>When it's happening, everything is Golden. When it ends, that gold crumbles into black, dark earth. I pick some of it up again and say "This... this is your saviour. The rest of it... that was just madness."
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Synchronicities bear meaning, because you build meaning. If you seek meaning, then you will find it. If you weight its origins as instructions, then you will be led to hardship. If you discard the meaning because its origins are Just Cold Statistics, then you are to deprive yourself of the guidance *that you provide to yourself*.
I see the runes everywhere.
They bear meaning when I ask them to.
Otherwise, they are always exactly what they appear to be.
Sticks on the ground.
