Lent 2026: day 42 – dreams, coincidences and destiny

In the annex part of the building, the big table awaits delegates for the sit-down dinner that formally ends the two-day linguistics conference. Outside, it's already dark. In the main ballroom, people are mixing in small groups, chatting, champagne flutes in hand, waiting for the signal to take their seats. Everyone's in business attire. I walk across from the ballroom, into the annex, which is still mostly empty. But I see one person already seated, his back to the table, head in hands. He's not wearing a suit, but a dark-grey woollen jumper. I recognise him. It's Rysiek. But Rysiek's dead. He died in December 2023. I walk over to him and put my hand on his shoulder. Telepathically, I express my sadness at his passing. He raises his head, looks at me and stands up. We hug. I wake up from my dream with a start. He has just imparted to me the name of the next boy from our West London Polish scout troop and Polish Saturday school who is soon to die...

Do I believe in prophetic dreams? Not really. I can be persuaded by empirical evidence – but I've not really had any that I can correlate to a future event about which I dreamt. But are prophetic dreams not more similar in nature and mechanism to contemplated synchronicities – those meaningful coincidences that lead you to think about some possible misfortune which is then prevented? 

Yes – this is more like it. Collapsing the wave function. With consciousness. The person whose name came to me in my dream this morning will not die anytime soon, because I have considered that possibility happening. By narrowing down a range of possibilities, I have precluded an event from occurring by the simple act of awareness that it may happen.

Preventing the inevitable by thought: is this at all possible? How about a more nuanced approach – not so much preventing but postponing the inevitable, mitigating its effects, reducing the impact of the inevitable? This, I believe, applies to completely unexpected, out-of-the-blue occurrences. We were all expecting the Iran war to kick off – the roots were too deep for it not to have happened. It was just a question of when. The same goes for Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. But how about the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 that killed 227,000 people? Could it have been forestalled, postponed or its effects mitigated by consciousness? By merely considering its possibility?

But what about (divine) purpose? The continued presence of latent chaos on earth, inherent in nature, between nations, and the small-scale chaos that can randomly befall any of us in our day-to-day lives?

Ultimately, we are here to learn, to develop, to elevate our consciousness through facing challenges such as illness, bereavement or war. I prefer the word 'challenged' to the word 'suffering', 'trial' to 'ordeal'. That we may overcome, elevated. And, having learned, moved on, out of one biological container to another, our consciousness having evolved a notch or two.

Six weeks of Lent have elapsed. Tomorrow I shall begin summarising this year's Lenten journey.

Lent 2025: day 42
Accident of birth

Lent 2024: day 42
More questions than answers (Pt III)

Lent 2023, day 42
Where did religions come from?

Lent 2022: day 42
A Future Like This

Lent 2021: day 42
Actively seeking Understanding

Lent 2020: day 42
From Zero to One

Lent 2026: day 16 – synchronicity and coincidence

These two related concepts should be seen in the context of the unfolding – the personal unfolding – of your Cosmos as you see it, as it befalls you. Coincidence and synchronicity are also very much connected to mindfulness. 

'Coincidence' comes from the Latin coincidere, meaning 'to fall together'. 'Synchronicity', in the Jungian sense, refers to coincidences that seem to be meaningfully related – supposedly the result of "universal forces.

We notice coincidences around us, some of us noticing more coincidences than others. But making sense of them? We should see coincidences as warnings, as harbingers, signals to be heeded. 

I remember, decades ago, walking past West Ealing station and seeing a woman wearing a black eye-patch. Later that day, I saw another woman on the Central Line also wearing a black eye-patch. One such sighting is unusual. But seeing two in a day – is it a sign? Let's imagine that I didn't consciously note this to myself at the time. And then two days later, I scratch my eye deeply on a low-hanging branch of a rosebush and end up in hospital. As I wait to be seen, I now remember those two women with eye-patches. I had ignored the warning...

Or is this seeing too much into it? 

Being aware of the possibility of things going wrong is an important part of guarding against ill-fate, forestalling or precluding misfortunes of all kinds. As you walk your daily life along the edge of chaos. Seeing two magpies does not mean sorrow – it means it's time to reflect on the possibility of things going wrong and leading to a sorrowful outcome. But just being aware of that is enough to lift that cloud. But if you  understand this, I believe that you can use synchronicities or observed coincidences to ward off bad luck – random events that have a negative outcome on your life., 

To do so, you need to do two things:

1) Accept that coincidences do can contain meaning. This means stepping above the materialist reductionist mindset that would dismiss synchronicities as meaningless. 

2) Act consciously upon observed coincidences. If you consciously observe two people on crutches within a short space of time, it doesn't mean you will have an accident that results in you walking on crutches; rather it is a suggestion offered to you to be aware of the possibility of an accident occurring to you. And a prompt to switch on heightened levels of mindfulness.

There is a balance, between obsessively over-reacting to every possible manifestation of coincidence - and just outright ignoring this phenomenon. Seeking coincidences where there are none is as dangerous as dismissing coincidences that you do become conscious of. So don't go out of your way to look for coincidences; but when you do notice them – don't ignore them!"

The effect is weak but noticeable over the long term. But it will grow in strength as we evolve spiritually. Consciously observed coincidences can be a powerful set of signals to point daily life in the right direction.

"Everything is connected in Time" by ChatGPT

Just as there is the mycelial network of fungus under a forest floor connecting colonies of mushrooms, there is a similar unseen network of coincidence that holds events together.

Lent 2025: day 16
Intuition, the secret power of your consciousness

Lent 2024: day 16
Do we tend to get more spiritual as we get older?

Lent 2023: day 16
Intuition – is it magical?

Lent 2022: day 16
The difficulties of focusing on the spiritual

Lent 2021: day 16
This planet is my home, today and tomorrow

Lent 2020: day 16
My metaphysical journey, as I see it

Pareidolia, hypnagogia, hypnopompia – and coincidence

It's dark in my bedroom as I wake for a wee. The only light in the room is from the soft digital glow of my thermometer/clock. I'm not wearing glasses. As I return to consciousness I look across at the device. It looks like a negative image of an old yellowed newspaper, shrunken to a tenth of its size and turned anticlockwise... Can't be...! As my eyes adjust to the light and my brain adjusts to being conscious, I make out the three digits separated by a colon: it's 04:44. It's 17.8°C in the room and -6.1°C outside

I look down. I see two kittens on the floor... no, it can't be kittens. They're in the kitchen. It's my sheepskin slippers. I return to bed. There's a cat on my pillow? There isn't. It's my pyjama top... 

The mind plays tricks on you in those liminal spaces between wakefulness and sleep, sleep and wakefulness. Not only what I see, hear and feel, but within my stream of consciousness. I wrote recently about waking up with the name 'Sylvia Bossack' (with that exact spelling) on my mind. This is quite a common phenomenon. 

One I had on Monday night as I was dropping off to sleep: 'Mount Shasta'. I returned to wakefulness to note it down. Later that night, waking up for a wee, the word 'Carrevolins' and the placename 'Bassetlaw' pop up in my stream of consciousness. It is 04:30.

I drop off to sleep again. I dream that I'm back in West Ealing, having my electric scooter serviced at a shop on the Uxbridge Road. (I don't have, and never had, a scooter, electric or otherwise. The shop is where a barber's is currently located). I chat with the young bloke who's looking at my scooter and agreeing the price for the service. He's done the work on this scooter before, and says he still remembers my address, which he's about to jot down on a piece of paper. "44 Rosebank Road," he says. I correct him, giving the Cleveland Road address. 

Waking up on Wednesday morning, 'Puget Sound' floats into my stream of consciousness. Why?

I get out of bed and the first thing I do is to consult my 1973 editions of Kemps Ealing and Hanwell Directory for 1973. The owner of 44 Rosebank Road back then was a Mr A. R. Casseltine. Not a precise match for 'Carrevolins', but – you must admit – close. 

I consult ChatGPT. "Casseltine is an extremely rare surname worldwide – forebears.io estimates there are only 70 individuals with that name globally, with the highest incidence in the United States and only two in England."  Puget Sound? Mount Shasta? Searches revealed people with that surname connected with both places, but spelt 'Caseltine'.  No precise match, unlike the Sylvia Bossack case.

What could such a sign... mean?

Follow-up, Sunday 11 January 2026. I wake with the words 'Dov Meckler Band' on my mind. Used Google and ChatGPT, one and only mention of a Dov Meckler was one from Wolbrom, born 1902. No musicians of that name noted, despite a vast amount of resources searched by AI. But no matter. In a parallel universe...

This time last year:
Sleepy time, Christmas to Three Kings

This time last year:
Trains in the snow around Chynów

This time seven years ago:
New football pitch for Jeziorki

This time eight years ago:
The Winter Sublime

This time 14 years ago:
Long train running

This time 15 years ago:
Most Poniatowskiego

This time 17 years ago:
Warsaw well prepared for winter

Precognition – the future foretold

I was sitting at my kitchen table one morning last week, writing an article for work, when all of a sudden, out of nowhere comes a thought: "3:30 at Kempton Park." A random thought, stochastic misfiring of neurons – or what? Not an auditory sensation, no sound 'heard', not a voice. Just a thought. 

I've never been into horse racing – the last time I was in a bookmaker's shop was back in the 1980s to place a speculative bet on the Derby. Since then, I've not bet on horses or indeed anything. But I am intrigued; curious. What's this all about? Firstly – do they even race at Kempton Park in January?

It turns out that indeed they do. 

I googled it; yes, there's a racing at Kempton Park this afternoon, and there's a race at 3:35 (rather than exactly 3:30). I look down the race-card, scanning the list of runners and riders for one to back. My eye is drawn to just one horse – Magic Fluke (my favourite opera is Magic Flute). The rider and the trainer are both called 'Marco'. Starting price 7/2.

As I said, I haven't placed a bet for over 35 years, and I've never placed one online. I was put off by the profusion of logos and confusing offers, and in any case it's a working day, so I had no time to work out how to do this, set up an account with a bookmakers, logins and passwords – all too much. 

However, about an hour later, I happen to be on a call with the managing director of a financial-services company based in the City of London. At the end of a half-hour long business conversation, I casually mention to him the story of how the words "Kempton Park 3:30" popped up in my mind out of nowhere. "Worth placing an each-way bet on Magic Fluke in the 3:35 at Kempton Park!" I advised him, jokingly. He thanks me for the tip, and goes on to place an each-way bet on Magic Fluke online – and it came second.

An each-way bet means you get a smaller percentage of the odds should the horse come second or third). Had he put £10 on Magic Fluke, for example, he'd have walked away with £17.40. Or £34.80 for a £20 bet.

Magic Fluke. The very name...

"Magic (noun) – practice intended to summon a tangible effect in the natural world by breaking the laws of causality; invoking a physical effect without a physical cause" 

"Fluke (noun) – a lucky or improbable occurrence, with the implication that the occurrence could not be repeated."

Is this nothing more than a coincidence? Richard Feynman's ARW 357? Or did I pick up a weak signal from the future? If so, how?

If so... yesterday, lo, I dreamed... I foresaw myself living here in Jakubowizna until the age of 85 (in 2042, you will understand), and then move into a 20th-floor flat (though not in a city!). And still in the dream, I am in my old office (when it was on the 9th floor), sat around a large boardroom table with half a dozen of my colleagues. I am telling them about this dream I had in which I am living in Jakubowizna until the age of 85. One colleague says "That's an interesting dream – I'm sure it will come true!", whilst another says "It's just neurons in your brain misfiring." So in this dream I find myself critiquing the dream along with my colleagues! Furthermore, in this dream I carried on to dream that I would live on for another 18 years – to the age of 103! Maybe there's more to dreams than meets the eye...

See too this post about retrocausality.

This time last year:
Levels of Detail, Applied
[More dreams!]

This time five years ago:
Dreams of birth?

This time six years ago:
Foggy, icy, slippery day in Jeziorki

This time ten years ago:
Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil

This time 11 year ago:
Snow scene into the sun

This time 12 years ago:
More winter gorgeousness

This time 13 years ago:
New winter wear - my M65 Parka

This time 14 years ago:
Winter and broken-down trains

This time 15 years ago:
General Mud claims ul. Poloneza

This time 16 years ago:
Just when I thought winter was over...

Mycelial roots of coincidence

And thus did it occur to me, as I was walking up the escalators from Metro Centrum and across the patelnia on my way to Warsaw Central station, en route to Wrocław. 

That like the mycelial network of fungus under a forest floor connecting colonies of mushrooms, there is a similar unseen network of coincidence that holds events together.

A beautiful intuition! It draws me back to this worthy post from Lent 2021. 

Literally, the roots of coincidence. As in the title of Arthur Koestler's seminar book of that title. It's a book I read back in the late 1970s, when it was all the rage among students. [With the perspective of the decades, I'd argue today that Koestler's attempts to explain metaphysical phenomena using the scientific method were doomed to fail.]

But if you accept it as it is, and understand it, you can use synchronicities or observed coincidences to ward off misfortunes, as you walk your daily life along the edge of chaos.

To do so, you need to do just two things:

1) Accept that coincidences do contain meaning. This means stepping above the materialist reductionist mindset that would dismiss synchronicities as meaningless. 

2) Act consciously upon observed coincidences. If you consciously observe two people on crutches within a short space of time, it doesn't mean you will have an accident that results in you walking on crutches - rather it is a suggestion offered to you to be aware of the possibility of an accident occurring to you. 

There is a balance, between obsessively over-reacting to every possible manifestation of coincidence - and just outright ignoring this phenomenon. Seeking coincidences where there are none is as dangerous as dismissing coincidences that you do become conscious of. As I wrote two and half years ago, "don't go out of your way to look for coincidences; but when you do notice them - don't ignore them!"

The effect is weak but noticeable over the long term. But it will grow in strength as we evolve spiritually. Consciously observed coincidences can be a powerful set of signals to point daily life in the right direction.

This time last year:
Personal reflections upon the death of Queen Elizabeth II

This time four years ago
Best sandwich ever

This time five years ago:
Pictures of Warsaw

This time  eight years ago:
Scotland's independence referendum looms

This time 11 years ago:
Summer comes crashing to a halt

This time 12 years ago:
The atmosphere of impending autumn - Mono no aware

This time 13 years ago:
Time to recycle.

This time 16 years ago:
Coal train running

Intuition and Dreaming - Lent 2023: Day 25

And Lo! Did I dream... I was in a garden centre somewhere in the Thames Valley (Pangbourne? Goring?); a Victorian-style conservatory, cast-iron painted white, glass walls and roof. I was just about to buy a sapling pine; the small tree was about 25cm high, in a clear plastic pot. A slender grey stem, some needles sprouting at the top. I was about to take it to the checkout and pay for it, when suddenly I felt my intuition telling me calmly: "This tree will not take root in your garden - put it back." 

And as that intuition came to me, I realised immediately that I was dreaming, and that in fact this dream of an intuition was the very first time in my life that I had dreamed of intuition! A lovely moment of lucid dreaming! The dream, as usually happens, then drifted off into other, less memorable, themes, but the moment stayed with me until I woke. I wrote it down in my notebook [See, coincidentally, my injunction on the 25th day of Lent last year to... write everything down.]

As I write these words, I can see in my mind's eye - I can feel the klimat, the atmosphere - of the garden centre, quite posh, beyond it the escarpment of the river valley, a low, rocky, cliff-lined wall with trees. It is early summer.

And so it seems that my recent series of Lenten blog posts about intuition has worked its way into my subconsciousness. A new way of looking at the world. 

Does it have practical meaning though? Something I should act upon? That I, Dembinski, should avoid garden centres? 

I have indeed been considering buying some blackcurrant bushes to plant in my garden. And I have noticed a few days ago a couple of pine saplings emerging from the soil near my apple trees. My own trials of grow pine saplings from cones failed, while the acorns I planted the same way have successfully taken root. Maybe the soil was wrong? 

Well, I can certainly detect day-to-day trains of thought being recycled and recombined in the dream. The Thames Valley setting? A typical disjunctive cognition. [Coincidence corner - on my desk I have a blank sheet of paper; just now, I turn it over to see what's on the other side - it's a to-do list from Monday 27 February, written in black biro. Just two words written in red biro: 'DISJUNCTIVE COGNITION']

But back to the question in hand - should I buy the blackcurrant bushes? Do dreams serve as warnings?

Yes, I should buy the blackcurrant bushes. But the dream, if anything, stands as a warning against complacency. The bushes, if bought, will only grow and flourish if a) I will them to grow, unhindered by unseasonal frosts or hail or other random events, and b) if I look after them.

Intuitions like this, whether dreaming or awake, signal the observer to draw from out of the future, by act of will, an optimal outcome. These intuitions do not serve not prophecies - they do not mean that "something that I will invest in is likely to die" - rather they are warning signals to heed, meaning "watch out for something, and to will it to go the right way."

Lent 2022: Day 25
Writing It All Down

Lent 2021: Day 25
Faith and Knowledge

Lent 2020: Day 25
Chances, complacency and gratitude

Accounting for coincidence

It rained all day Friday, so I didn't go for a walk. A long one was needed on Saturday, to make up for the lack of paces. And my walk was indeed long (over 16km); it took me from Chynów to Krężel, the next station along the Radom line, followed by an eastward turn towards Barcice Rososkie, then through Gaj Żelechowski and Machcin II, and home.

Along the way, I come across a signpost for the village of Henryków. I stop to take a photo, being minded of the 1970s British progressive/ avantgarde group, Henry Cow (anyone else remember them?)

It was name one would bandy around the sixth-form common room to demonstrate one's on-trend credentials; often mentioned in the quality music press at the time, and heard late-evening on John Peel's Radio 1 show. (If you actually knew Henry Cow, it meant you had an Older Brother.) So while not a group whose works I could hum along with, Henry Cow was certainly a part of the musical landscape in the pre-punk era - a band to be reckoned with.

I think no more of it until returning to the działka; I listen to some Henry Cow on YouTube and read up about the band and its rich history on Wikipedia. Below: the cover of The Road, the box set of the band's works.

One of the more immediately accessible Henry Cow tunes, Nine Funerals for a Citizen King.

And then I make a stunning discovery. The definitive book (512 pages long) about Henry Cow, published in 2019, entitled Henry Cow: The World Is a Problem, was written by American academic Benjamin Piekut. 

Benjamin Piekut. Piekut...

PIEKUT IS LITERALLY THE NEXT VILLAGE TO HENRYKÓW.

The two villages border each other, and their centres are less than one mile apart. What are the chances?

The photograph below was taken just a few hundred metres from the one towards the top of this post.

Although Poland has a Piekuty, a Nowe Piekuty and a Piekutowo, it has only one Piekut.

Below: an OpenStreetMap view of the area, Piekut abutting Henryków.

On to the philosophical point. It is indeed possible that a young American, Benjamin Piekut, curious as to the origin of his surname, googled it and found it on a map of Mazovia, next to a village that sounded like the name of a 1970s British prog-rock band. Which piqued his interest to the point that he ended up writing a book about them.

Or not! I shall have to find out!

It's coincidences like this that make physicist Richard Feynman's famous quote about coincidence sound like bollocks: "The most amazing thing happened to me tonight... I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight?"

I return to Henryków by motorbike to have more of a look around.

The universe is indeed held together by a latticework of coincidence. 'Plate' or 'shrimp', 'plate of shrimp'.

This time last year:
Działka food

This time two years ago:
Proper summer in Warsaw

This time three years ago:
Poland's trains failing in the heat

This time four years ago:
"Learn from your mystics is my only advice"

This time five years ago:
Out where the pines grow wild and tall

This time eight years ago:
Behold and See (part V) - short story

This time nine years ago:
Syrenki in Warsaw

This time ten years ago:
What's the Polish for 'impostor'?

This time 11 years ago:
Running with the storm on the road to Mamrotowo

This time 13 years ago:
St Pancras Station - new gateway to London

This time 14 years ago:
Mountains or sea? North Wales has them both

Measuring the immeasurable

"Wow! What a coincidence! Imagine the odds against that!" "I was thinking about her, and out of the blue - she calls me!" 

Most of us have experienced this, where meaningful coincidences make us pause to consider the phenomenon of synchronicity - circumstances that appear meaningfully related yet lack a causal connection. Rational science, based on classical Newtonian physics, is happy to dismiss coincidence as mere manifestations of the random. Can this sceptical point of view be overcome?

I have two copies of Explaining the Unexplained by Hans J. Eysenck and Carl Sargent (one in London and one on the działka); a popular book in the early 1980s, but one that missed the mark by miles.

Eysenck (a controversial figure) and Sargent (only slightly less so) set out to explain the mysteries of the paranormal in scientific terms, to prove that supernatural powers can be proven. They use the term psi to encompass all manners of paranormal activity from telepathy to psychokinesis, from precognition to remote viewing, and attempt to convince the reader that all these are real - on the basis of scientific experiment.

Pictures of machines used to 'catch dreams', to 'detect extra-sensory perception', or 'photograph ghosts' etc., adorn most of the pages of the book, along with diagrams of how consciousness acts on the needle of a meter etc; the aim being to show how science is in a position to validate claims made about supernatural, paranormal or metaphysical manifestations. 

"Consciousness can influence random events directly, both within the body and outside of it, by collapsing the wave function of of those events in the act of observation." This is the Dean Radin hypothesis, that you can will a quantum event into happening. Dr Radin believes that parapsychology is as repeatable as any science but also says that it is "difficult to replicate".

Explaining the Unexplained  was unconvincing to me when it came out, and looking at it today - even more so. The premise itself is faulty - that supernatural phenomena can be tested by scientific method - which above all means their experimental repeatability.

The guardians of the rational world, the sceptics and debunkers, ever rational, ever watchful for trickery, are keen to point out all the hoaxes, the statistical errors (deliberate or otherwise) and plausible non-paranormal explanations in any of these flaky pseudosciences as proof of absence of any paranormal phenomena. 

But proof of absence is not absence of proof.

So it's not that I'm sceptical about claims regarding the paranormal - it's just that I believe the paranormal - the metaphysical, if you prefer the term - won't let itself be measured. 

Out-of-the-ordinary events will happen when they happen. You will continue to experience them. But when you're looking out for them, or checking for them, waiting around for them, armed with scientific instruments - then these paranormal phenomena will evade you, because that is their nature.

That which we routinely experience as 'spooky', 'bizarre' - or even just 'unusual' is the lattice or web of coincidence that holds - in my belief - the Universe together. 

We know now that the universe is a field, a field of forces and points, fluctuating, repelling, attracting, resonating and converging into matter - it is entirely likely that a field of consciousness co-exists in the universe along with fields of waves, particles and probabilities.

But try to nail it down - and it won't let you. Over the generations, our paranormal powers will develop. The paranormal is that which runs beside the normal (from the ancient Greek παρά pará, 'beside' or 'next to', as in 'parallel'), rather than above the natural (supernatural) or that which lies behind physics (the metaphysical). Intangible to us, in other words. That's just the way it is. For us. For now. 

This time two years ago:
Heading Home [my father leaves Warsaw for the last time]

This time four years ago:
From my father's historic return to Warsaw

This time five years ago:
Country life in a capital city 

This time seven years ago:
My ogród is my działka

This time nine years ago:
Mazowieckie province tempts with mini- and micro-breaks

This time ten years ago:
Pride and anger

The metaphysics of coincidence: Lent 2021, Day 35

They come thick and fast; they're impossible to overlook - coincidences. "A coincidence is a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances that have no apparent causal connection with one another". A key word here is 'remarkable' - something that bids you to make a remark about it. It is sufficiently out-of-the-ordinary as a coupling of unrelated events that make you feel urged to tell someone about it, without expecting mockery.

I mentioned physicist Richard Feynman in the context of coincidence and his famous quote "On my way to the lecture, I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!"

What would have been amazing - and maybe Prof Feynman would have come to a different conclusion - had he observed ARW 357 parked next to BSX 468 and noticed that each letter and digit was advanced exactly by one. But even had he seen these two cars and noticed the numbers - would it have meant anything to his life?

I mentioned in yesterday's post Wilko Johnson referencing William Wordsworth The Daffodils and Shakespeare's "To die to sleep, to sleep perchance to dream" quote, and then discovered that I had referred to both in my blog post of exactly one year early. What are the chances?

Well, an obvious link is the grammar-school English Literature curriculum taught in the 1960s and '70s in England included Shakespeare and Wordsworth, and so both of us would have had been exposed to them as teenagers; Wilko also (briefly) taught English at school before giving up teaching for rock'n'roll. 

But still - on that same day exactly a year apart? I'd been looking for a YouTube link for the whole of Oil City Confidential, the Julien Temple documentary about Dr Feelgood, which I wanted to see after having watched Mark Kimmel's documentary So You Wanna Be A Rock'n'Roll Star? - the same musical genre from the same part of Britain. Instead, I ended up watching The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson and was swiftly drawn into it. Serendipity, rather than blind chance.

Today, stepping into my study/bedroom on my działka, the first book I noticed on my bookshelf (while looking for The Tao of Physics, by Fritjof Capra) was Arthur Koestler's The Roots of Coincidence. It's been a long while since I last read it - 30 or more years ago. Koestler was somewhat sidetracked by a search (fashionable at the time, in the early 1970s) for extrasensory perception (ESP). I personally consider the case for ESP to be extremely weak - and applying Newtonian tools to find what is essentially a quantum result is futile.

So a web, a lattice of coincidence exists, and these intersections should be seen as no more - but also no less - than a 'stop' sign for our conscious minds. Pull up that rushing train of thought for a second, and ponder. Seek meaning, seek relevance, look out for useful hints But don't expect Clues Where To Find The Treasure; rather take the opportunity to pause and look around. 

Several years ago, my son, travelling to university on three successive weekends, had the same seat-number on his InterCity train three times in a row - carriage 12, seat 12. (His birthday, coincidentally, is the third of December. One and two equal three.) However, no combination of 1s, 2s, 3s or 12s produced any winning lottery number that week, nor in coming weeks did anything unusual or significant involving those numbers occur to him. But should it not cause a more profound reflection?

You'll notice them if you are observant, but then you need to apply a bit of Occam's Razor and all-round intelligence to them. I see two women wearing an eye patch over their left eyes, on the same day. What does it mean? Watch out for eye accidents! Take particular care for a few days; build up your muscle-memory in the eye-protection field!

Don't go out of your way to look for coincidences; but when you do notice them - don't ignore them!

This time last year:
The physical and metaphysical, science and religion

This time two years ago:
The People vs. Brexit

This time four years ago:
A leader for our times

This time five years ago:
Social justice - the Church and inequality

This time six years ago:
Google Street View comes to Poland

Connecting with the Metaphysical: Lent 2021, Day 33

A bit of that 'how much spirituality do we need?' in this post - the need to connect, the hear feedback - from that part of the world that's closed to our five senses, yet we feel exists. If the matter of 'God' is primarily one of definition, and that's down to individual preference for how we seek to understand All That Is Above Us, that which exceeds mankind's capacity for understanding.

My first need is to express gratitude for life, for health, for consciousness. I have habitualised this into my daily routine of brushing my teeth. Should I catch myself forgetting to do so having left the bathroom, I return, pick up the brush, and having another go - this time with gratitude. It is also present as I drop off to sleep. There are many things that I should really recall as I fall asleep - but there's not the time, as I am blessed with the ability to switch off very quickly. It's different in the middle of the night. A night's sleep usually consists of four or five sleep cycles, each of between 90 and 135 minutes, each ending with a rapid-eye movement (REM) phase during which the most vivid dreams occur. Usually the second or third cycle (around 2am/3am) is followed by a short period of insomnia. And it is this time that should be put to use in either meditation or prayer.

Prayers for the wellbeing of our planet, our tiny corner of the Universe; prayers for peace, understanding and cooperation. Pretty soon, I've nodded off again.

Do not overlook the importance of Coincidence. I notice them, and roll them around my mind for a while, rather like a nice bogie before flicking it away. Physicist Richard Feynman roundly rejected our irrational tendency to mistake randomness for coincidence and coincidence for meaning. I don't. Just don't read too much into it - see it as a pointer rather than a forecast. Last year, while out walking on the other side of the tracks I was considering when the pandemic would end, and the Unbidden Voice replied - "When you have learnt not to harm your planet." A few hundred paces up the track I came across several large bags of household waste strewn across a field. Today, in the same field, I saw four separate piles of junk removed from the insides of a car, probably by a scrap metal dealer getting rid of everything that was non-metallic and dumping it here. "The pandemic will not be over soon", was my instant take. Creating myself a comforting narrative? Don't know. It just feels right.

Returning to yesterday's post about meditation, while in the sauna tonight, I was thinking about why I reject the notion of the Rosary. Simple really - I just don't buy into the 'Holy Mary, mother of God' thing. And yet Swinging Sixties Britain tuned into some traditional Hindu stuff about Ram and Deva and Hari Krishna. Was it just an attraction to an exotic sounding language? Take a tip from David Bowie, and listen to some Silesian folk singing - create an imaginary language, and write Warszawa...

Sula vie dilejo
Sula vie dilejo

Cheli venco deho
Cheli venco deho

Mali, Malio

Helibo seyoman
Helibo seyoman

Cheli venco raero
Cheli venco raero

This time last year:
Chance, complacency, gratitude

This time seven years ago:
The clash of narratives

This time eight years ago:
The Church and democracy

This time nine years ago:
Prime lens or zoom?

This time ten years ago:
Warsaw's failed bid as City of Culture, 2016

This time 11 years ago:
Stalinist downtown at dusk

This time 12 years ago:
The End of an Age of Excess?

This time 13 years ago:
Snowy Easter in England

Don't Let Misfortune Catch You Unawares!

Lent 2020 - Day 39

Our lives are forever teetering on the edge of chaos. The longer one doesn't fall, the longer one can heuristically deduce that one will never fall. Complacency sets in.

People in less happy times than the ones we've just left, people who had death, disease, war and famine all around them were constantly wary. Superstitions set in.

"One for sorrow, two for joy" - subconsciously, I've seen solitary magpies as birds of ill omen; bad luck catches out those who are unaware, complacent. Superstition is regarded primarily in terms of  omens that herald misfortune. This is wrong. For me, omens are a signal to take special care, to look out. Be on your guard.

One for Sorrow... but a second magpie lurks in the cherry tree

Coincidences are meant to be meaningless. To rationalists, they most certainly are. The physicist Richard Feynman once said “You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight... I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!” In trying to poo-poo the idea that coincidences can have a metaphysical nature, he fails to connect.

'ARW 357' would have truly been amazing had it cropped up in another context around the same time, say, a phone number, and had the observer been conscious of both. The question is - what to make of such a coincidence?

Coincidences happen more often to those with greater powers of observations, those who are conscious and aware - and curious. Knowing how to respond to them is all important. Wealth and status will not help you along your eternal journey; that coincidental series of digits you see recurring won't be a lottery ticket number. But extending your life into a ripe - as in productive - old age is desirable in the Great Scheme of Things.

Boasting and pride brings it on. Beware hubris. Beware that moment when you think that you are the Master of the Universe, and that nothing can touch you. As that great English 20th century mystical philosopher, the Reverend W. Awdry, would tell his young readers, pride comes before the fall. "Look at me," whooshed James. "I'm a splendid red engine." And children would know, as they turned the page, that on the next one, James would run into a tar wagon, his splendid red paint coated with sticky black tar. Be not boastful. It is a human trait we must rise above.

Licho nie śpi, the old Polish saying warns us that Licho, the Slavic pagan demon of ill-fortune, doesn't sleep, and is ever present; it's ready to burn your barn, blight your crops, sicken your livestock, and bring illness and hunger to your people. Be on guard - spiritual as well as physical - especially at times like this.

And stay grateful. When your guard slips, you take the good life for granted. By actively promoting those thoughts of gratitude to play around your consciousness, you lower the chances of Licho catching you unawares.

This time four years ago
HOT! (24C)

This time five years ago:
Snowy Easter Sunday

This time eight years ago:
Look upon my lack of works and despair

This time nine years ago:
More old-school retailing
(the old Sezam)

This time ten years ago:
Easter Sunday - Lent's over

This time 11 years ago:
Węzeł Lotnisko - site cleared, ready to start construction

This time 12 years ago:
Classic Polish cars - the Polski Fiat 125P

This time 13 years ago:
Jeziorki in Google Earth

A few words about coincidence

One of my Top Ten Favourite Movies Of All Time Ever is Alex Cox's Repo Man (1984). By 'cult film' I mean one that's dearly loved by the few down the ages. Reputedly, Cox set out intentionally to make a cult film, rather than just shoot something and then see whether it would become one. Anyway, it has, and I've seen it many, many times.

Among the memorable quotes (and a cult film usually has many such quotes), is this one:

"A lot of people don't realize what's really going on. They view life as a bunch of unconnected incidences and things. They don't realize that there's this like lattice of coincidence that lays on top of everything. I'll give you an example, show you what I mean. Suppose you thinking about a plate of shrimp. Suddenly somebody will say like 'plate' or 'shrimp' or 'plate of shrimp' out of the blue no explanation. No point in looking for one either. It's all part of a cosmic unconsciousness."

This line, which I first heard a third of a century ago, has helped shape my worldview. "Web of coincidence" rather than "lattice" in my usage, but typing in that phrase into the search box on my blog yields several meaningful results from the past decade.

So. Today's one. I'm just leaving the office and step up to the windows to admire the view - the sinking autumnal sun illuminates Warsaw... I catch sight of a large crow or raven flying across the sky and find myself singing the line from Roxy Music's Bitters End... "You were the raven of October..."

And as I walk out into the street, I'm still singing Bitters End. Once out of the building, I find myself singing it aloud...

Give now the host his claret cup
And watch Madeira's farewell drink
Note his reaction acid sharp...

Now - to catch the moment, you need to listen to Bitters End and scroll forward to 1:55 - immediately after the words "acid sharp"... that trilling bell, before Bryan Ferry sings the last line of the song.



So here I am, walking across ul. Bagno, singing "Note his reaction acid sharp" - and EXACTLY then, to the beat, I hear this sound:



...Should make the cognoscenti think

Now, it's not exactly the same bell sound, but it came at exactly that same moment. Trams go down Marszałkowska all the time, particularly at rush hour, and the older ones sound their old-style bell as they near the junction with Świętokrzyska, but the timing was extraordinary enough for me to want to write about it as soon as I got home.

It confirms my long-held view that the universe is indeedheld together by a web of coincidence; when we stop noticing coincidences in the world around us - then is the time to start worrying!

Last week, Moni SMSed me, asking why Ian Dury claimed to have been born in Upminster, was actually born in Harrow Weald. I explained the importance of 'street cred' in the days of punk, and thought no more of it - until the next day, when I found that I would be speaking about trends on the Polish jobs market in a conference room in Warsaw's Lumen building called... Upminster.

The great physicist Richard Feynman once said "“You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight... I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!” In trying to poo-poo the idea that coincidences are somehow seen as metaphysical or supernatural in nature, his glib comment fails to connect. 'ARW 357' would have truly been amazing had it cropped up in another context around the same time, say, on a scratch-card or phone number, and the observer been conscious of both.

Coincidences happen more often to those with greater powers of observations, those who are conscious and aware - and curious.

Below: the Raven of October, as seen from my office window

Don't go into some exaggerated hunt for coincidences, or finding them, seek deeper meaning (or worse) prophesy; just take comfort that our planet spins on around a sun in a galaxy that's moving ever further from the Singularity Event, and that the coincidence you've just experienced is part of the space-time fabric into which we fit. I shall give the final word to David Bowie, a man who to me proves that there is more to human existence than flesh and bone...

Here are we 

One magical moment

Such is the stuff from 

Where dreams are woven

Not quite the final word... these words remind of the first stanza of Poem XXXII from A.E. Housman's cycle of 63 poems, A Shropshire Lad, published in 1896.

From far, from eve and morning

And yon twelve-winded sky, 

The stuff of life to knit me 

Blew hither: here am I. 

Did Bowie know Housman's works...? Maybe, maybe not.

This time three years ago:
Hello, pork pie [my week-long pork-pie diet]

This time five years ago:
The meaning of class - in England, in Poland

This time six years ago: 
First frost 

This time ten years ago:
First frost 
[Today, by contrast, the daytime high was 22C]

Coincidence, consciousness and quantum physics

Lent 2017 - Day 9

Arriving at Warsaw's Okęcie airport yesterday on the lunchtime BA flight, I crossed from the plane to the terminal building over the passenger boarding bridge. As I stepped on to it, I was suddenly minded of the disaster at Ramsgate harbour in 1994 when six people died as a result of a walkway collapse. "An unusual thought," I thought. As a frequent flyer I'm not often beset by thoughts of disasters, but here I was ruminating on collapsing bridges. I was still thinking about it on the other side of passport control, walking down the stairs towards the railway station. "The fact I've consciously thought about collapsing bridges means one thing is certain - a bridge won't collapse today," I thought.

So imagine my shock when, on the train, I swiped my phone and saw the BBC Breaking News headline: "Italy motorway bridge collapse kills two".

The tragedy occurred on the A14 motorway between Ancona and Loreto, the two victims, a husband and wife in a Nissan Qashqai were in precisely the wrong place at the wrong time. Behind them stopped short several vehicles whose occupants suddenly realised how close they were to an untimely death. Driving slightly slower a bit earlier on would have saved their lives...

Time.. the time of the accident? This is crucial to me. I checked a number of Italian news websites (Google and Google Translate are invaluable) and found it happened just before 14:00. I had my thought at around 14:45.

Cause, effect, coincidence?

There are some coincidences that are utterly meaningless, such as the time when Eddie got three tickets all with the same number - seat 12 in carriage 12 - for the same train from Warsaw to Łódź on three consecutive trips. What did this coincidence, with the odds against it being many thousands to one - mean? Nothing, as it happened.

But in this case? Maybe I'd have dismissed it as coincidence, forgotten it eventually, had not - by further coincidence, I not come across this article on the BBC website this morning. It is a long, and by no means easy, read. Is there some science between thoughts making their way across space and time?

I shall try to abridge it. But first, what's it about?

The perennial puzzle of consciousness has led some researchers to invoke quantum physics to explain it. That notion has always been met with scepticism, which is not surprising: it does not sound wise to explain one mystery with another. But such ideas are not obviously absurd, and neither are they arbitrary. 

For one thing, the mind seemed, to the great discomfort of physicists, to force its way into early quantum theory. What's more, quantum computers are predicted to be capable of accomplishing things ordinary computers cannot, which reminds us of how our brains can achieve things that are still beyond artificial intelligence. "Quantum consciousness" is widely derided as mystical woo, but it just will not go away.

So here we all are, conscious beings (some of us anyway), balancing constantly on the edge of chaos, aware that disaster can strike out of the blue; can we will it away by applying consciousness at it?

Can our thoughts actually - even in small measures - affect the course of events? Or can events beyond our field of vision affect the course of our thoughts?

Perhaps the most renowned of [quantum mechanics'] mysteries is the fact that the outcome of a quantum experiment can change depending on whether or not we choose to measure some property of the particles involved. 

When this "observer effect" was first noticed by the early pioneers of quantum theory, they were deeply troubled. It seemed to undermine the basic assumption behind all science: that there is an objective world out there, irrespective of us. If the way the world behaves depends on how – or if – we look at it, what can "reality" really mean?

Schrodinger's famous thought-experiment concerning the cat in the box with the decaying radioactive particle, leads up to the supposition that the cat is both alive and dead until the observer opens the box to check, The importance of the conscious observer into the outcome of a quantum experiment is then thus:

It is as if nature "knows" not just if we are looking, but if we are planning to look.

American theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler (1911-2008) took this further:

[He] even entertained the thought that the presence of living beings capable of "noticing" has transformed what was previously a multitude of possible quantum pasts into one concrete history. In this sense, Wheeler said, we become participants in the evolution of the Universe since its very beginning. In his words, we live in a "participatory universe."

Wow. The role of consciousness in the actual course of the unfolding of the Universe - mind-blowing stuff. The physical 'how' of what mechanisms are at work here are still a matter of conjecture (a number of them - which I cannot pretend to begin to understand - are expounded in this article).

So which is it? Orchestrated objective reduction? Quantum cognition that involve vibrations in  microtubules - protein strands found in the neurons in our brains? Quantum positions in the nuclei of phosphorous ions within our cells? Lithium isotopes? Different theories are at play here. But the conclusion is difficult even to the most sceptical of scientists to dismiss:

To this day, physicists do not agree on the best way to interpret these quantum experiments, and to some extent what you make of them is (at the moment) up to you. But one way or another, it is hard to avoid the implication that consciousness and quantum mechanics are somehow linked.

So - science suspects there is something going on. It's weak, hard to detect, hard to reproduce in the lab, still harder to find in the human brain. I certainly believe it's there, the deeper questions are what does this mean, and how can we use these effects? I doubt if I'll find out in this lifetime...

This time two years ago, Warsaw's M2 metro line opened:
It's been 19 years, 11 months and 1 day...

This time four years ago:
A selfless faith

This time five years ago:
Ul. Profesorska after the remont

This time six years ago:
Lent kicks off again, for the 20th year in a row for me

This time seven years ago:
Half way through Lent

This time nine years ago:
Spring much closer

Defining the human experience

Poets often have our human life more precisely measured than any scientist. Insights offered by Mankind's greatest poems often precede scientific validation by hundreds or thousands of years.

This is Poem XXXII from A.E. Housman's cycle of 63 poems, A Shropshire Lad, published in 1896.

From far, from eve and morning
And yon twelve-winded sky,
The stuff of life to knit me
Blew hither: here am I. 

Now - for a breath I tarry
Nor yet disperse apart -
Take my hand quick and tell me,
What have you in your heart. 

Speak now, and I will answer;
How shall I help you, say;
Ere to the wind's twelve quarters
I take my endless way.

Long before Joni Mitchell sang that we are "stardust/Billion year-old carbon", Housman intuitively felt that the matter of which we are composed comes together to form us - and then disperses. He notes that life is but a brief moment in time; our priorities are to communicate sincerely with one another - and to help one another, before the time passes. But the last verse suggests rebirth, constant rebirth.

Housman, being a classical scholar (he taught Enoch Powell at Oxford), refers to the 'twelve-winded sky', the 'wind's twelve quarters', as used in antiquity, rather than the eight/16/32 wind directions that have evolved since the Middle Ages. His references to 'the Roman' in Poem XXXI, On Wenlock Edge suggest that Housman felt a strong familiarity with those times. He has seen before. And is certain that he will do so until Eternity.

Six of the poems from A Shropshire Lad were set to music in 1909 by Ralph Vaughan Williams, my favourite British composer. For From Far, from Eve and Morning on YouTube, click below.



By way of coincidence, this is a quote from Warsaw-born Russian-Jewish poet Osip Mandelstam, featured this very morning as Quote of the Day on the Moscow Times' Twitter feed:

All was before
All will be repeated again,
And only the moment of recognition
Brings us delight.

Yes. That 'moment of recognition'. So perfectly, succinctly put.

Written on this very day that Mankind first announced the first detection of gravitational waves.

Tomorrow: spiritual or physical? Transmission of consciousness.

This time two years ago:
The City of Warsaw wants you to complain

This time three years ago:
Czachówek's wild woods in winter

This time four years ago:
Vistula freezes over downstream of Warsaw

This time five years ago:
Twilight of the Ikars

This time six year ago:
Polish TV adverts for parapharmaceuticals

This time seven years ago:
Jeziorki wetlands in winter

This time eight years ago:
A week into Lent