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When I was just beginning my junior year in college, I had a beautiful lighter my best friend had given me for Christmas. It had my name on it and I was so proud of it. But, alas, I lost it.
That same day, as I was sitting with friends in the student union, a person whom I had never seen before came up and sat down at our table. Two or three of the guys seemed to know him, though none of the girls did.
I thought he was kind of appealing. When he left, I asked the guy sitting next to me who he was.
"Oh, that's Gordon Hair. He's a fraternity brother who just transferred here from Northeastern to go to pharmacy school,"
"He's kind of cute," I replied.
"I'll tell him you said so," replied my friend.
The next day, I received a phone call.
"This is Gordon Hair," the caller stated. "I think I have something that is yours."
"What's that?"
"Your lighter."
"Really! Where did you find it?"
"I found it lying in the street yesterday as I was walking to class," he replied.
He became the love of my life.
Now, was that all just chance or was it pre-ordained? If you believe in noetics as I do, then you will be convinced that the whole sequence of events was pre-ordained to happen in just the way it did.
It even has a name--syncronicity
Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events that are causally unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner. To count as synchronicity, the events should be unlikely to occur together by chance.
The idea of synchronicity is that the conceptual relationship of minds, defined as the relationship between ideas, is intricately structured in its own logical way and gives rise to relationships that are not causal in nature.
Now, some would call this nothing more than a random coincidence; but Carl Gustaf Yung, the noted Swiss psychologist who coined the phrase, thought otherwise.
Synchronous events reveal an underlying pattern, a conceptual framework that encompasses, but is larger than, any of the systems that display the synchronicity.
The suggestion of a larger framework is essential to satisfy the definition of synchronicity as originally developed by Jung.
Jung coined the word to describe what he called "temporally coincident occurrences of acausal(having no cause) events." Jung variously described synchronicity as an "acausal connecting principle", "meaningful coincidence" and "acausal parallelism". And it is one of the many unexplainable phenomena that make up the science of noetics.
To believe in the concept of synchronicity or any of the many phenomena that cannot be logically explained, one must believe that something or someone is directing our path.
The vision for creating the Institute of Noetic Sciences came in 1971. Nations throughout the world had galvanized around the exciting frontier of space exploration.
The potential for scientific understanding of our world seemed unlimited to a naval air captain named Edgar Mitchell. He was a pragmatic young test pilot, engineer and scientist; a mission to the moon on Apollo 14 was his "dream come true."
Space exploration symbolized for Dr Mitchell what it did for his nation as a whole—technological triumph of historical proportions, unprecedented mastery of the world in which we live, and extraordinary potentials for new discoveries.
But it was the trip home that Mitchell recalls most. Sitting in the cramped cabin of the space capsule, he saw planet Earth floating freely in the vastness of space. He was engulfed by a profound sense of universal connectedness—an epiphany.
In Mitchell's own words: "The presence of divinity became almost palpable, and I knew that life in the universe was not just an accident based on random processes. . . . The knowledge came to me directly."
Mitchell faced a critical challenge. As a physical scientist, he had grown accustomed to directing his attention to the objective world "out there."
But the experience that came to him in space led him to a startling hypothesis: Perhaps reality is more complex, subtle, and inexorably mysterious than conventional science had led him to believe.
Perhaps a deeper understanding of consciousness (inner space) could lead to a new and expanded view of reality in which objective and subjective, outer and inner, are understood as co-equal aspects of the miracle and mystery of being.
After his safe return "home," Mitchell sought out others who likewise felt the need for an expanded, more inclusive view of reality. They resolved to explore the inner world of human experience with the same rigor and critical thinking that made it possible for Apollo 14 to journey to the moon and back.
In 1973, this small group of explorers founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences—derived from the Greek word nous, meaning something close to "intuitive ways of knowing." (Dr Mitchell's story is told in the book The Way of the Explorer: An Apollo Astronaut's Journey Through the Material and Mystical Worlds).
The mission of these noetic scientists was, and has been, to expand our understanding of human possibility by investigating aspects of reality—mind, consciousness, and spirit—that include but go beyond physical phenomena.
They seek to understand the inner world as thoroughly as we have the outer world—based on the premise that what finds expression in the world at large is a reflection of our interior landscape. Today, three decades later, the institute carries out its mission as a worldwide research, education, and membership-based organization in Petaluma, California.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity
https://www.noetic.org/about/history.cfm
