Tying The Threads Together

[gattino]

I'm sure its been discussed a million times but ive not been paying attention...will all these threads and posts be lost forever? Maybe i should trawl through them for as many of my own past accounts of other incidents a possible to copy and save so i have the contemporaneous records i made of them.

As for all of the above I don't suppose its too hard to enumerate the main options for "explaining" it all.

A: The There's Nothing To See Here Hypothesis
i) None of the incidents reported is remarkable, notable or uncanny in the first place. They're just random factoids ive strung together to insinuate meaning into them. Therefore the coincidences between them are equally imaginary..i've just dissected these random unrelated facts to extract any matching details and omitted all the unmatching ones.
ii) It's a mix of genuinely anomalous phenomena and meaningless trivia. Some of the stuff is eerie in its own right but the connections between them don't exist except in my choice to tie them together.

B: The Weirdness Is Real And There's Someone Behind It.
i) The disembodied spirit of one or more deceased person - either one of those mentioned or a third party, or some combination of all of the above - is micro managing these events to make their presence known to me. They're physically apporting and making vanish certain objects and even going back in time to bring together various interlinked events and make sure they come to my attention. They have powers to manipulate reality itself, but not to just make a pen write a straightforward message on a piece of paper.
ii) Some other form of disembodied intelligence - angel, fairy, djinn or deity - is doing all of the above for their own reasons, be it pure mischief or to convert me to a cause.

C: The Weirdness Is Real And There's No One Behind It.
i) It's my own mind effecting/attracting events in a super-psi way, akin to poltergeist phenomena
ii) Synchronicity is real as a pure nquality of reality with no intelligent purpose behind it...like is simply drawn to like by some fundamental governing principle
iii) The same as ii but with my unconscious mind being the catalyst in a pure Jungian use of the concept of Synchronicity. My personal reality is being reshaped to convey my unconscious needs and desires to my conscious mind. Whatever that means.

Think that covers the options!

 

[Krepostnoi]

I'm sure its been discussed a million times but ive not been paying attention...will all these threads and posts be lost forever? Maybe i should trawl through them for as many of my own past accounts of other incidents a possible to copy and save so i have the contemporaneous records i made of them.

I don't know that all the threads will automatically be saved. I have just nominated this one of yours for preferential rescue if it does turn out manual intervention will be needed.

 

[AmCuriousNJ]

I'm sure its been discussed a million times but ive not been paying attention...will all these threads and posts be lost forever? Maybe i should trawl through them for as many of my own past accounts of other incidents a possible to copy and save so i have the contemporaneous records i made of them.

As for all of the above I don't suppose its too hard to enumerate the main options for "explaining" it all.

A: The There's Nothing To See Here Hypothesis
i) None of the incidents reported is remarkable, notable or uncanny in the first place. They're just random factoids ive strung together to insinuate meaning into them. Therefore the coincidences between them are equally imaginary..i've just dissected these random unrelated facts to extract any matching details and omitted all the unmatching ones.
ii) It's a mix of genuinely anomalous phenomena and meaningless trivia. Some of the stuff is eerie in its own right but the connections between them don't exist except in my choice to tie them together.

B: The Weirdness Is Real And There's Someone Behind It.
i) The disembodied spirit of one or more deceased person - either one of those mentioned or a third party, or some combination of all of the above - is micro managing these events to make their presence known to me. They're physically apporting and making vanish certain objects and even going back in time to bring together various interlinked events and make sure they come to my attention. They have powers to manipulate reality itself, but not to just make a pen write a straightforward message on a piece of paper.
ii) Some other form of disembodied intelligence - angel, fairy, djinn or deity - is doing all of the above for their own reasons, be it pure mischief or to convert me to a cause.

C: The Weirdness Is Real And There's No One Behind It.
i) It's my own mind effecting/attracting events in a super-psi way, akin to poltergeist phenomena
ii) Synchronicity is real as a pure nquality of reality with no intelligent purpose behind it...like is simply drawn to like by some fundamental governing principle
iii) The same as ii but with my unconscious mind being the catalyst in a pure Jungian use of the concept of Synchronicity. My personal reality is being reshaped to convey my unconscious needs and desires to my conscious mind. Whatever that means.

Think that covers the options!

Since gattino said that he hasn't been paying attention, I just want to ask: gattino, do you know that there are plans for a new forum and message board for the people on this message board, and the new forum/message board is reportedly already being created?
Here are some posts about this: http://forum.forteantimes.com/index.php?threads/update-thread.64742/#post-1794279
and http://forum.forteantimes.com/index.php?threads/update-thread.64742/#post-1794972
and http://forum.forteantimes.com/index.php?threads/update-thread.64742/#post-1795377
and (this one contains an image of what the new forum/message board might look like): http://forum.forteantimes.com/index.php?threads/update-thread.64742/#post-1796281.

Hope that gives gattino any information he might have missed.

 

[Vardoger]

Since gattino said that he hasn't been paying attention, I just want to ask: gattino, do you know that there are plans for a new forum and message board for the people on this message board, and the new forum/message board is reportedly already being created?
Here are some posts about this: http://forum.forteantimes.com/index.php?threads/update-thread.64742/#post-1794279
and http://forum.forteantimes.com/index.php?threads/update-thread.64742/#post-1794972
and http://forum.forteantimes.com/index.php?threads/update-thread.64742/#post-1795377
and (this one contains an image of what the new forum/message board might look like): http://forum.forteantimes.com/index.php?threads/update-thread.64742/#post-1796281.

Hope that gives gattino any information he might have missed.

Don't take him for a fool. Of course he knows.

 

[AmCuriousNJ]

Don't take him for a fool. Of course he knows.

I didn't mean to suggest that gattino was a fool. He just said that he wasn't paying attention, and maybe he might have missed the details about the new forum/message board. He said himself that he wasn't paying attention. I was just trying to be helpful by providing him with some information that he would need if he wants to stay with the new message board.

 

[EnolaGaia]

For the record ...

Gattino is included on the emergency email list, so he's presumably aware of the upcoming transition.

 

[AmCuriousNJ]

For the record ...

Gattino is included on the emergency email list, so he's presumably aware of the upcoming transition.

Didn't mean to confuse anyone, was just trying to provide a few updates to gattino, since he said he wasn't paying attention.

 

[EnolaGaia]

Didn't mean to confuse anyone, was just trying to provide a few updates to gattino, since he said he wasn't paying attention.

Understandable ... No problem ...

 

[gattino]

Since gattino said that he hasn't been paying attention, I just want to ask: gattino, do you know that there are plans for a new forum and message board for the people on this message board, and the new forum/message board is reportedly already being created?

Hi. Thank you. Despite Vardoger's gallant defence of my unfoolishness I did find your post helpful and appreciate it as im aware the current boards are closing and that im on a list for any new one, but didn't know about the certainty of there being one and more importantly whether the existing threads and posts will still exist and be searchable somewhere. I still don't know the answer to that but assume i'll find it in one of the links you've provided.

 

[AmCuriousNJ]

Hi. Thank you. Despite Vardoger's gallant defence of my unfoolishness I did find your post helpful and appreciate it as im aware the current boards are closing and that im on a list for any new one, but didn't know about the certainty of there being one and more importantly whether the existing threads and posts will still exist and be searchable somewhere. I still don't know the answer to that but assume i'll find it in one of the links you've provided.

Glad you found my post helpful, gattino. (That was the reason I made the post: To try to be helpful.)

Regarding threads and posts: In the email that was sent out this past Saturday, it says this (in the next to the last paragraph): "...there will be a cut-off point beyond which posts made on the old board will not be transferred to the new one. Unfortunately, it is not yet known when that cut-off point will be. For this reason we have already advised that no substantive posts be made from now on, but I’ll take this opportunity to restate it now: new material may be lost, hang onto it until new week."

For anyone who didn't get the email, the text of the email is now posted online at the post at this web link: http://forum.forteantimes.com/index.php?threads/update-thread.64742/#post-1796484

(Edited to clarify: My post is meant to be helpful, hope it reads that way.)

 

[gattino]

A little dip back into the rabbit hole....

Nothing paranormal seeming has happened. The following is best categorised merely as a pleasing coincidence...but still..i have to add it to the cabinet of curiosities displayed thus far. If my previous reports were Marvel movies, this resembles a post credit hint at an upcoming cross over event.....


So if you've been paying attention the two things which keep cropping over and over again in these incidents (apart from the cross motif) have been Kalil Gibran's the Prophet and the Exorcist author William Peter Blatty. There has not however been any reason to imagine any connection between those two things themselves.

In the last couple of days ive come across references to a psychic called Alex Tanous. Never heard of him. So this morning I looked him up. First few lines of his potted biography on the Psi Encyclopedia includes "His father was a friend of the Lebanese writer Kahlil Gibran, author of The Prophet, who once predicted: ‘You will have a son, a man of exceptional gifts, of great abilities – but also a man of great sorrows.’ "

If this Gibran/Prophet reference had stood alone id have rolled my eyes to the heavens and kept it to myself. But in combination with Tanous's photograph I was compelled to report it here.

The man in the top row of the montage below is Tanous. The man in the bottom row is...William Peter Blatty. If you contend their facial similarity is limited to possession of a moustache I shan't play with you any more.

In fact, all paranormal inferences left out of it, its reasonable to speculate these lookalikes - whether they knew of each other's existence or not - could conceivably have been related. Born 13 months apart in the US in the 1920s, each was the son of Lebanese Christian immigrants. Surely a small enough population base to make a distant familial relationship more than plausible. No relevance if there was, but you know...

Curiouser and Curiouser said Alice to herself.

 

[gattino]

I've speculated, lightly, in the past that these recurring elements act as a kind of calling card for the authorship of the odd events or coincidences around which they occur. When I posted about the recurrence of The Prophet and Blatty 2 days ago there was no coincidence to which they were attached. Now, however....

Yesterday my sister came to visit. I had not mentioned the gibran/blatty stuff to her at all. But sitting there, and reminded somehow by the colouring on a medicine packet in her line of sight, she said suddenly "oh...what was that book you couldn't find? One Last Hug Before I Go? I found it in mine"

Backtrack: OLHBIG was the book that appeared on our late brother's bed on the day of his death. I've never seen it since - though whether its disappearance is as mysterious as its appearance is a moot point. The working speculation is that maybe one of his two kids took it. But ive never pursued the matter. So the idea 3 years on of my houseproud sister only just noticing it in "the alcove" in her living room came out of nowhere. I asked as many questions as i could and then started telling her about the new Prophet/Blatty refernces..she interupted me saying she too had a copy of the Prophet...and that in fact it was in the same place, sitting on top of, the aforementioned "hug" book. I'm as confused as you, dear reader. Here's where it gets messy...

My sister goes home and a couple of hours later rings me and reports two things. The first is that on reinvestigation it was neither the aformentioned book she had found after all, nor in the location she said it was...She was bewildered as to how she had so quickly misremembered its location and identity..and more than that, why the (incorrect) correct title of the lost book..one last hug...popped into her head when sitting in my house. It's not something she would have ever reliably recalled if asked as she never saw the book and it was 3 years ago now. Thus far a confusing muddle of mental mishaps perhaps. Except for the second thing she then reported as happening after leaving my house.

Due to a number of small distractions she had one of those sliding door moments whereby a minute later or a minute earlier it simply wouldn't have happened. She found herself in a shop face to face with our late brother's daughter...who she had been trying and failing to get back in touch with for the last several months.

 

[IbisNibs]

i have had to ask "them" to return lost items, and they did seem to suddenly reappear, but had I been too anxious to properly search before, and did the ritual of asking take the pressure off me, and allow me to see what i had perhaps unconsciously ignored before, or been too nervous to notice?

I wish so much there was a way to do a double blind study of this!

 

[IbisNibs]

I recall reading of a coincidence debunker mentioning the "birthday paradox" to prove his point on a tv show with an audience of 200 people (or at any rate considerably more than 23), and his embarassment when there was not a single matching birthday among them.

For some reason, this reminds me of something from Jung's autobiography (Memories, Dreams, Reflections). (Or at least I thought it was -- haven't beem able to locate it, so can't quote it as I'd wanted to. Now we all have to rely on my memory, which is not so good right now due to the sleep deprivation I suffer as a result of staying up past midnight reading this forum, drat it!) The coincidence debunker's result on that occasion was sort of perversely opposite to the results that Jung and his assistants got when he was eliciting data relating to astrological indications of likely marriage partners. I forget exactly what it was -- married couple, according to astrologers, were more likely to have either (A) moon conjunct their spouse's ascendant or (B) sun conjunct the spouse's moon or (C) sun conjunct the spouse's Venus, stuff like that. He ran an ad or something to elicit birth data from married couples. Jung and his assistants divided the letters that came in and tallied the results. What was weird was that the responses tallied by Jung showed a higher than random chance of, say, (A) result, one assistant tallied a higher than random chance of (B), and the other assistant a higher than random chance of (C). None of them got the same results, but none of them got a random chance assortment either.
If this makes unclear reading it's because of aforementioned sleep deprivation.

 

[gattino]

Not linked to me of course, but I can't resist adding this very interesting correlate story I stumbled on last night.

There is/was a US TV show called Celebrity Ghost Stories in which a seemingly endless number of notable figures from American television culture recount to camera with seeming utter sincerity their own personal brushes with the paranormal, accompanied by an exaggerated dramatic re-enactement (often the celeb will be saying "i felt someone behind me" while the dramatisation is showing a hollywood style juddering ghoul emerging from the darkness which the witness never mentioned!). It's non the less a fascinating catalogue of extraordinary apparition experiences.

Anyway i put an episode of this show on last night. I'll try and link to it below. The story in question, from a man called Dan Cortese, starts at 16:30 into the video. The tale in short is that he's going through a divorce and other personal struggles when his mother tells him she has cancer. Utterly distraught and consumed with thoughts of these problems he's in bed on his laptop when an ad pops up for rosary necklaces. The re-enactment shows a series of crosses on chains. He determines to get one for his mother the next morning. He wakes in the night to an apparition of his dead grandmother at the foot of his bed telling him its all going to be ok. In the morning he rushes out to report the experience to his mother, but when he opens to leave his front door, there on his step is a box, no address, no explanation, he opens it and it contains a rosary. A cross on a necklace.

 

[catseye]

I've just come back as this thread has been popped to the top of the list, and given it a re-read (although I read it at the time).

And I honestly did read it at the time! So, I was somewhat startled on the re-read to see the date May 17 given as a synchronous date. It's my youngest daughter's birthday and also the birthday of my eldest grandson (sixteen years apart).

 

[gattino]

It's over 2 and a half years since there was anything to add to this saga. Until this morning.

I never take the cross/chain that was at the original centre of all this, off my neck. The chain opens and closes with a little hoop/latch you struggle to hold open. The cross just hangs permanently in the middle of the chain on it's own little free moving loop. That bit never gets touched or even looked at. In the 7 years I've worn it it's never become detached.


Recently Ive been listening to a paranormal podcast where people phone in and tell their personal encounters with strangeness. I did so in bed last night I went to sleep wondering a) why can't our loved ones just turn up and converse directly in a dream like the woman who had just phoned in had experienced and I "asked" them to do so and b) if I could ever imagine ringing up and telling the whole cross saga.

I drifted off to sleep.

Anyway I got out of bed this morning...looked back and..what's that? Half way down the bed was the cross. I panicked thinking it had snapped off. But no. Neither the hoop on the cross nor the clasp that holds it on the chain were damaged in any way. I don't know how that's possible! It can't be that it just rubbed against the pillow the wrong way and opened the latch as, as I say, it's never come off in all the years Ive been wearing it in bed. It took me a good number of tries to open the latch and keep it open long enough to slip the hoop of the cross back through the tiny gap. Plus it's half way down the bed not up by my neck or chest.

Above all its the timing that elevates it.

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