Teapots Happen
I went out in search last night of more blogs about synchronicity. My first search result was exactly on target and I've added it to my blog links at right. This guy, Gabe from Minnesota, started having synchronous experiences in 2006 when he was in his late 20s (like me). He has a very elegant way of describing synchronicity--particularly his lists of possible explanations for an experience and his detailed explanations of what makes an event synchronous (the unfolding of an event and what details he forgets at certain moments but later recalls to deepen his understanding) which could easily start sounding tedious, but doesn't. He has written some great things. His title story, "teapots happen", gave me the shivers.
The story goes that he has this awakening while on vacation. He goes home and starts to doubt his new insights. One day within a week of coming home he goes to a thrift store and feels a strange urge to purchase a teapot. He thinks there must be something mystical about it but after a period of nothing coming from his odd purchase he kind of gives up on his new heightened sense of awareness. One day, after having rented his house for 8 years, he decides, for the first time, to explore the crawl space under his stairs and finds a teapot exactly matching the one he had purchased. The photo is linked at right.
I thought that the experience which Gabe recounted is the kind that would astound anyone, not just the person to whom it occurred (in my experience, synchronicities tend to resonate primarily with the person for whom they are "intended", and can be unimpressive to anyone else.) Then I told my husband about it and he just didn't get it and started asking all sorts of questions like where the teapots were made, whether Minnesota is inundated with this model for one reason or another, and whether this guy is making the whole story up just to get attention. The timing, the weird hiding place for the second teapot, and the intense feeling that influenced Gabe to purchase the first teapot were simply irrelevant to him. It was a crazy coincidence, but it was meaningless as far as my husband was concerned.
1. The night I found Gabe's blog I was hanging out at my parent's house with my older brother. It's not often that we are both in town and it's very rare that he chooses to spend a Friday night with family. At about 10 PM my brother went out to have a smoke and I followed him because my son wanted to be outside; as soon as I stepped out the door I had deja vu--I clearly remembered a night about 9 years ago, not long after I'd met my now husband. My memory was of sitting outside with my brother and sister, telling them about my future husband. I enjoyed the sentimental moment but didn't dwell on it. Back to the present, at about 1 AM the same night, I found Gabe's blog. In the post about the teapot, he describes how he found the second teapot, mentioning that his primary passion is for exploring places which are hidden, forgotten, or underground. Later on Saturday, I followed a link from Gabe's teapot blog to his second blog, called "Action Squad" about how he used to find his way into underground tunnels and work sites late at night, just to explore.
That's when I remembered: on the night 9 years ago which I'd flashed back to before finding Gabe's blog, I had been outside with my sister and brother for a reason. That night I had just returned from a long walk I'd taken in the middle of the night or wee hours of the morning during which I stumbled upon a factory or plant of some kind where workers were soldering something, plumes of sparks lighting up the night. I was so fascinated that I stood at the window staring at the workers for a long while wondering what they were making and about the strangeness of the job these people did compared to my notion of work in an office. On my way back home I noticed that there was a no trespassing sign at the entrance and realized that I probably shouldn't have been there. I walked home and found my brother and sister sitting outside and began talking to them about my new boyfriend.
2. I was hanging out with my son while I continued reading some of the other synchronicity blogs. I was mostly exploring the sites which were linked from the comments section of the Teapot blog, which is how I found Tania Marie's blog. Before I found her blog, my son, who's 3, was drawing me pictures with his magna-doodle. He's started to draw shapes something like Rorschach inkblots--he doesn't know what he's drawing, but they often strike me as something. First he drew something that I immediately identified as a Stegosaurus. Then he drew another one that had the bill, tail, and body of a platypus--I immediately identified it as one. Next he drew what I thought was the perfect representation of a sea horse, and it seemed to be kissing a big blob next to it. We happened to be visiting his grandparents and I showed it to them--they didn't immediately see the sea horse, but for me it was clear as day. It was missing only the typically curled tail, instead having a straight tail. A few minutes later I found a link to Tania Marie's blog (through Laura Bruno's blogroll which also points to Teapots Happen). Most of the links from Laura Bruno weren't really what I was looking for and I was just scrolling through them quickly. But when I hit Tania Marie's artwork of sea horses I came to a dead stop. My son's magna-doodle sea horse picture was so similar, with the same positioning and all. Of course my son had already erased it--I wish I'd taken a picture of it. I read through the post accompanying the art and was astounded when I read: "Sea horses are graceful and almost mythological creatures that are one of those rare species that don’t seem to fit with any others in their category. They possess so many different qualities, similar to a platypus, and have been around since ancient times (40 million years ago)". What? She's making some out of place comment about a platypus that doesn't even make sense--what possessed Tania Marie to mention the platypus? It's just so weird.
I'm trying to imagine some possible explanation for this that doesn't involve a mysterious guiding force attempting to alert me to some vital information. Of course, it could be just a plain coincidence, but the timing and the weird placement of Tania Marie's comment about platypus makes me think there is more to it than mere coincidence. One of my favorite explanations--because it could explain so many synchronicities--is to accept that humans can see into the future a bit. As it stands, the story is implausible. What is more plausible is that I saw Tania Marie's sea horse painting first and read about the platypus, which primed me, but not my parents, to interpret my son's drawings as a platypus and sea horse. Except that my conscious mind is quite convinced that it saw first the magna-doodle sketches and THEN Tania Marie's artwork (because I distinctly remember taking a break from reading to focus on my son, even Googling images of sea horses and platypuses to compare with the sketches before going back to searching for blogs). Furthermore, it was only because I was stricken with awe upon seeing the sea horse painting which matched the magna-doodle sketch that I took the time to read far enough to see the platypus mentioned. So the future and the current experiences would have to be melded in some inexplicable way, with only the conscious mind held back a few paces. There may have been up to 5 minutes between the two experiences, though it could potentially be far shorter a time.
I wonder--could Gabe have melded the future experience of finding the teapot under his stairs with his experienced present of being in the thrift store with an odd attraction to a matching teapot? Gabe mentions in his blog that he hasn't been motivated to post all of his synchronicities because he started having so many of them that they became blasé. Could people that experience more synchronicity simply be progressively extending and improving their propensity for trusting their intuition/future view?
I suppose I have to mention a background study which is influencing this theory, but I can't seem to find it right now. Scientists hooked people up to thermometers and sweat sensors in fingers. Then they showed them pictures, some average photos, others really disturbing. They found that people's palms started sweating a moment before the disturbing photos got flashed on the screen. Proof of future vision?
My husband raised some good points, but after having spent a few hours on Gabe's site I felt that it was unlikely that he was lying, especially given my own experiences with synchronicity. Gabe's tone is careful, intelligent, and cohesive. As for the possibility that this model of teapot just happened to be the standard at some point in Minnesota's history--it could very well be true and a logical reason why this guy happened to find two matching teapots. But it doesn't explain why Gabe got the urge to buy a broken teapot when he doesn't drink tea or why he found both of them within a short period of time.
I told my brothers and sister-in-law the story and they all seemed fairly impressed. Then I told a coworker today and he reacted like my husband--he just didn't get it. "What's it mean?" he asked me. "Couldn't this blogger just be inventing the story?" Personally, I think the teapot is a symbol of connections that exist beyond our understanding--that there is more to the universe than meets the eye. It is a symbol that mystery still reigns supreme in this world. And I'm predisposed to believe that there exists some guiding force in the world, which leads living beings towards something--I'm not sure what. I told my coworker as much and he said, "But who is it? Who is behind it?", to which I had no answer.
My coworker then preceded to tell me that for the past year and a half he has noticed that every time he looks at a clock it seems to be 11:11. Even when a clock stops, it seems to be stopped at 11:11. He's been wondering if it means he is going to die on November 11th or something. Strangely enough, one of the comments on Gabe's blog is from someone describing the same type of synchronicity. Maybe, I suggested, we have an internal clock which is much more precise than we realize and once we start feeling a connection to a certain time we start looking for a clock at the same time every day. But that doesn't explain why clocks stop at that time...
I had two or three synchronicities related to my search of other blogs this week, mostly so small and strange that I can't make anything of them.
So, this is a tenuous connection at best, but it had the ring of a synchronicity. Like Gabe, I have always been fascinated by hidden places, but that night was the only night in my life in which I've done any kind of urban adventuring.
I'm trying to imagine some possible explanation for this that doesn't involve a mysterious guiding force attempting to alert me to some vital information. Of course, it could be just a plain coincidence, but the timing and the weird placement of Tania Marie's comment about platypus makes me think there is more to it than mere coincidence. One of my favorite explanations--because it could explain so many synchronicities--is to accept that humans can see into the future a bit. As it stands, the story is implausible. What is more plausible is that I saw Tania Marie's sea horse painting first and read about the platypus, which primed me, but not my parents, to interpret my son's drawings as a platypus and sea horse. Except that my conscious mind is quite convinced that it saw first the magna-doodle sketches and THEN Tania Marie's artwork (because I distinctly remember taking a break from reading to focus on my son, even Googling images of sea horses and platypuses to compare with the sketches before going back to searching for blogs). Furthermore, it was only because I was stricken with awe upon seeing the sea horse painting which matched the magna-doodle sketch that I took the time to read far enough to see the platypus mentioned. So the future and the current experiences would have to be melded in some inexplicable way, with only the conscious mind held back a few paces. There may have been up to 5 minutes between the two experiences, though it could potentially be far shorter a time.
I wonder--could Gabe have melded the future experience of finding the teapot under his stairs with his experienced present of being in the thrift store with an odd attraction to a matching teapot? Gabe mentions in his blog that he hasn't been motivated to post all of his synchronicities because he started having so many of them that they became blasé. Could people that experience more synchronicity simply be progressively extending and improving their propensity for trusting their intuition/future view?
I suppose I have to mention a background study which is influencing this theory, but I can't seem to find it right now. Scientists hooked people up to thermometers and sweat sensors in fingers. Then they showed them pictures, some average photos, others really disturbing. They found that people's palms started sweating a moment before the disturbing photos got flashed on the screen. Proof of future vision?
I agree that somehow knowing the future - or otherwise having apparently inaccessible information - could explain many synchronicities. Of course, the how/why people may have such knowledge is the really interesting, and unknowable aspect. Perhaps it's because we really are all 'god', unified and allknowing, outside of time and connected to all things and one another in infinite ways, with our sense of isolation in time and self merely an illusion we maintain ... or maybe these coincidences really are winks or nudges or clues from the universe/god/the collective consciousness etc, deliberately or incidentally letting us know that there is more to life and reality than meets the eye, on the surface, from the POV of limited selves in time ... 'psychic powers', like synchronicity, would ne primarily interesting to me not so much in and of themselves, but as symptoms or clues, pointing toward a less simplistic/mechanistic view of reality and consciousness.
ReplyDelete... anyway, rambling ...
As far as your post goes, a couple things - I wouldn't say that I'm "blase" about the synchronicities I experience and no longer write about - I still get joy and inspiration and wonder from them all - but as I mentioned in the previous ramble, my interest in the phenomenon goes beyond the coincidental events themselves, and to what they may indicate about the nature of reality, etc ...
The other thing I wanted to mention was in regard to your co-worker's skepticism. I totally get it, and would almost certainly not have believed the story if it hadn't happened to me. I'd have assumed it was either fabricated, or at least embellished to seem more significant than it was, etc. And I would have written off the basic story as a mere coincidence, one of the millions of 1-in-a-million things that happen every day. For me though, that is not an option - I was there, and I know it was not just a random co-incidence of objects. The context of the mystical experience on LSD, the resulting belief that the universe was all 'god' and I was too, the understanding that to the extent that I must live as a individual self, I could and should learn to pay attention to intuition, and the way this led me to the first teapot ... it was enough to crumble even my incredibly well-built wall of skepticism and reductionist hyper-rationalism ...
OK I am rambling again! Love your blog, glad to meet, hope you continue to explore and experience synchronicity and magic!
So, this is what happened when I posted that comment above ... the first time I failed the CAPTCHA, not realizing I was also supposed to type the numbers in the little photograph. So I was paying close attention to the letters in the 2nd one ... and laughed pretty hard when I saw how it dovetailed with what I'd just written in my comment!
ReplyDeletehttp://farm9.staticflickr.com/8337/8193466095_549e047264_o.jpg
"U R IN GOD" ... not "URIN(e) GOD". in my read of it anyway ;)
ReplyDeleteThanks so much for reading & commenting on my blog--you are kind of a celebrity in my eyes :) About "U R IN GOD"--I feel a bit of deja vu about it, like I read something similar on your blog, but I can't find it. I don't think I would have caught it! I like that it made you laugh--sometimes, there's just no other appropriate response.
ReplyDeleteThanks for clarifying about not being blase about your synchronicities--and sorry I misrepresented you. I would have been a little bit depressed about the idea of synchronicities losing their ability to inspire awe. Actually, I went back through my list of synchronous experiences and started questioning a lot of them--because really, many of them aren't that impressive when taken out of the context of the emotions of the moment. For example, when I told people about your teapot experience, I think I left out the part about your mystical experience and how you were questioning your insights. So of course people said, "But what does it mean?" In the last year I've had so many synchronicities that correspond to feelings of self-doubt or negativity--it's like the universe is stepping in to reassure me.
I also like the unknowable aspect of synchronicity and the idea that they are indicative of deep connections and ways of knowing that are not acknowledged by science. And I'm fascinated by quantum physics and the possibility that it will shed some light on these phenomena. BUT, I think that the synchronicities themselves have meaning on their own. I read Frank Joseph's study of synchronicity in the book "Synchronicity and You" (http://www.amazon.com/Synchronicity-You-Hidden-Power-Coincidence/dp/1843331020) which for me was an excellent introduction to the topic. Joseph encourages people to keep detailed records of their synchronous experiences--after years of doing so, Joseph was able to go back and find evidence of guidance and a calling in his life.
For me, individual synchronicities often feel like direct guidance--like a friend showing me (not telling me) that I'm making a mistake or should go this way, not that. But it can make me a little crazy...because there are multiple paths that my "guide/s" approve of, or so it would seem by some of the contradictory guidance I get. I know that sounds a bit crazy :)
Yes, there is definitely something to that. My 'peak experience' was very personal, even as (seemingly contradictorily) it made me see that "I" didn't really exist as a discrete self, that it was all part of an indivisible great and loving Whole. ie what a lot of people call "god" (but a word I am not all that comfortable with, outside of scare quotes).
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, I don't get to really FEEL or know that in much of my day-to-day life.
Fortunately, I still have a growing, surprisingly stable belief that it's real, even when I can't quit 'grok' it. I know that perspective is there, and powerful, experientially validated for me. Confirmed by teapots, and able to survive my most keenly skeptical examinations.
Interesting that you are a librarian, a worker in Information. I have friends in the same field (such as Megh, who I first wrote about the Teapot experience to: http://teapotshappen.com/2009/04/01/email-from-the-former-king-of-the-atheists-21706/, and also posted about here: http://teapotshappen.com/2010/09/30/louisville-swamp-flight-of-the-nightcrawlers-postscript/). I tend to see some similarity to work with search engine optimization, which somehow became my field (after a degree in philosophy and religious studies, naturally).
About Megh: She seems very cool and we seem to have a lot of things in common (we are both librarians & like writing and such). I read through some of the synchronicities she was involved in, and then I read her description of the swamp visit--really cool to know that you just picked that location out of the blue and went there--maybe it is a magical place.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, she has a really nice portfolio on the web with her resume and descriptions of her projects and such. The first thing I looked at was "Projects--websites" (I clicked some other links first but they were taking too long to load) and from there read that she worked in the library at the University of Victoria in 2008.
In June of 2008 I was in library school and attended the University of Victoria Digital Humanities Summer Institute ( http://dhsi.org/archive.php ) with a bunch of my library school classmates. Interesting to think we may have crossed paths there.
just re-read my previous comment - slightly misspoke; the "surprisingly stable belief" that I can hold onto even when I'm not 'feelin it' is that there is more to life/reality than meets the eye, that however things work or connect, even if it really was purely material and potentially explicable, is nonetheless indistinguishable from magic, connected to consciousness in strange ways, etc etc yadayada - anyway, not so much that 'we're/it's all god,' which is what my comment made it sound like ... I definitely do sometimes get up to believing that (esp with psychedelics), however it's more specific of a theory/model than I prefer to hold to. I prefer being model-less I reckon (which is quite a change from the days when I was obsessed with trying to figure out a "T.O.E." lol)
ReplyDeleteOK, so you have a background in philosophy. Isn't the point of philosphy to step in and make models for things that science can't yet explain? And you took the first step to building a new philosphy when you rejected the dogma of atheism (which Megh eloquently described in her first response to your teapot experience)--the atheism dogma that closed your minds to the magical realm. So, after several years of experimenting and ruminating on synchronicity, what's your philosophy? What happened to your Theory of Everything?
ReplyDeleteYou say that you've used tarot cards and other tools of divination. How do you explain tarot working if there is no guide leading us?
Oh and by the way, by guide I don't mean "God"--it could be consciousness itself, a collective unconscious or whatever.
ReplyDeleteI read the documents you posted (Ian Robinson's "Can an Atheist have a Religious Experience?") and I found it a bit depressing though also very interesting. The depressing bit was the idea that we have constructed an identity which does not exist in reality and that all of our ideas are basically uncreative memes passed between us...maybe I still don't get it. And the whole thing about our conscious minds being a bit delayed--not actually making the decisions but perhaps just picking up on our brains decisions after the fact...I don't know...they were testing some pretty simple actions--choosing a hand to lift and such. Maybe our minds learned to provide autonomic responses for them long ago, but still checks in with our conscious mind when any really complex processing is required--I get a lot of impulses which I know are "wrong", so my conscious mind chooses not to follow them. Or I consciously choose to separate myself physically from the impulse-inducing stimulus so that I won't be tempted to act on them mindlessly.
I should mention that the study of consciousness has always been one of my passions.
And I"m not rejecting Robinson's proposals. I remember when I was a kid--under 12 years old--every now and then a very unsettling feeling would pass over me when I would ask myself "Who am I?". I really enjoyed the spookiness of the question. The unsettling feeling would be one of looking at myself from the outside, at a human somehow plopped down in this time, place, and family. I would feel my body in an altogether alien way, like it was the body of an animal. I asked my younger sister then if she ever had this feeling and she said--yes, but I hate it, it's so scary! And I couldn't understand her, becuase I loved it.
Maybe that sensation is normal for kids to feel and we tend to forget it as adults. There are a lot of explanations that might explain it, but one of them could be that our selves are mere constructs... another could be that we have a consciousness inside of us that is separate from the workings of our bodies and brains.
re: Ian Robinson paper - I also was ultimately unmoved by that essay, although I was nonetheless pleased just to have an atheist POV on the mystical experience that recognized it as both positive and powerful, and not just delusional BS. But then the end of the paper didn't do anything for me. I don't buy his model.
ReplyDelete> So, after several years of experimenting and ruminating on synchronicity, what's your philosophy?
Hmmm ... that one is still percolating, still congealing; you may have an idea of its rough outline, though, from reading a lot of the teapotshappen blog.
Yeah, dismantling and rejecting my previous dogmas and models was definitely a huge step - but not necessarily one toward a new model. I think - for the time being at least - that my best option is to resist the analytical desire/compulsion to perceive reality through the limiting lens of a model, not even a tentative working model. I reckon that the Zen folks would agree with that notion, so at least I'll have company. It also allows me to approach my philosophy, my grokking of reality and consciousness etc, from an intuitive and mystical (rather than analytical, dichotomous) perspective.