Coincidence?

Has anyone here read Paul Auster's book 'True Tales of American Life'? It's a collection of true stories sent in to him at his request by the general public and it's full of some amazing stories of synchronicity.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/de ... on.society

'...This is probably a book best dipped into: a bathroom book, although one with real guts. Many tales turn on coincidence, which doubtless reflects Auster's original request for stories 'that defied our expectations about the world, anecdotes that revealed the mysterious and unknowable forces at work in our lives', as well as his own prejudices (he is, after all, the author of a novel called The Music of Chance).'

This is interesting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_Enigma

23 Enigma

The 23 Enigma refers to the belief that most incidents and events are directly connected to the number 23, some permutation of the number 23, or a number related to the number 23.

Origins

Robert Anton Wilson cites William S. Burroughs as being the first person to believe in the 23 enigma:[1][2][3] Wilson, in an article in Fortean Times, related the following story:

I first heard of the 23 enigma from William S Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, Nova Express, etc. According to Burroughs, he had known a certain Captain Clark, around 1960 in Tangier, who once bragged that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. That very day, Clark’s ship had an accident that killed him and everybody else aboard. Furthermore, while Burroughs was thinking about this crude example of the irony of the gods that evening, a bulletin on the radio announced the crash of an airliner in Florida, USA. The pilot was another captain Clark and the flight was Flight 23.[4]

Discordianism

The Principia Discordia states that "All things happen in fives, or are divisible by or are multiples of five, or are somehow directly or indirectly appropritate to 5"[5]—this is referred to as the Law of Fives. The 23 Enigma is regarded as a corollary of this law. It can be seen in Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's The Illuminatus! Trilogy (therein called the "23/17 phenomenon"), Wilson's Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of the Illuminati (therein called "The Law of fives" and "The 23 Enigma"), Arthur Koestler's Challenge of Chance, as well as the Principia Discordia. In these works, 23 is considered lucky, unlucky, sinister, strange, or sacred to the goddess Eris or to the unholy gods of the Cthulhu Mythos.

As with most numerological claims, the enigma can be viewed as an example of apophenia, selection bias, and confirmation bias. In interviews, Wilson acknowledged the self-fulfilling nature of the enigma, implying that the real value of the Laws of Fives and Twenty-threes lies in their demonstration of the mind's power to perceive "truth" in nearly anything.

When you start looking for something you tend to find it. This wouldn't be like Simon Newcomb, the great astronomer, who wrote a mathematical proof that heavier than air flight was impossible and published it a day before the Wright brothers took off. I'm talking about people who found a pattern in nature and wrote several scientific articles and got it accepted by a large part of the scientific community before it was generally agreed that there was no such pattern, it was all just selective perception."[6]

In the Illuminatus! Trilogy, he expresses the same view: that one can find a numerological significance to anything, provided "sufficient cleverness."


http://www.studio23.com/cms/index.php?o ... &Itemid=32

TheSynchronicity of 23:

Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes.
The earth rotates completely every 23 hours, 56 minutes.
The axis of the plane Earth is 23.5 degrees.
The human Biorhythm cycle is 23 days.
The pattern of DNA shows irregular connections at every 23rd section.
Humans have 23 vertebra running down the main part of their spines.
Blood circulates the body on average every 23 seconds.
There are 23 letters in the Latin alphabet.
The number of joints in the human arm is 23.
23 is the first prime number in which both digits are prime and add up to another prime.
On average, every 23rd wave crashing to shore is twice as large as the average wave.
The Harmonic Convergence occurs every 23,000 years.
Geosynchronous orbit occurs at 23,000 miles above Earth's surface.
September 23rd is the Fall equinox.
Standard TCP/IP port for Telnet is 23.
The number 23, written in base 3, is 212 (2+1+2=5)
23+23+23=WWW, the World Wide Web.

Hammerdonkey wrote:

Also, almost everytime I look at my watch, the digital part is on 00 seconds. Just randomly looking at my watch, it might be 12:17 pm 00 seconds. Several times through the day I do that.

My brain is in sync with the earth.

I do that too. Usually when I look at my watch it's 13 minutes past the hour.

Often now when I wake up I lay there and try to work out what time it is before I check the clock, just to see how close I can get. On a few occasions I've hit the exact minute.