Monday, February 27, 2006

Here's a website devoted to the number 23 and its mystical implications, courtesy of Frequency 23.

As some readers of this blog know, I'm plagued by occurrences of the "23 phenomenon." (Click here for an example.) I truly don't know what to make of it, other than that it can be quite trippy.





I'm open to the possibility that the number's near-incessant recurrence in my life is due to a psychological filtering mechanism of which I'm not consciously aware. Maybe I was subconsciously "programmed" to seek out the number when I encountered the works of Robert Anton Wilson and William S. Burroughs. Conversely, maybe reading Wilson and Burroughs helped trigger a "synchronicity circuit" in my mind, revealing a hitherto unacknowledged phenomenon.





At one point I reasoned that, if our universe is a computer simulation (a possibility I'll return to in a later post), we humans might be able to discern compression artifacts that take the form of recurring numbers. I even likened the Cosmos to a kind of hyperlinked retrieval system in an attempt to explain synchronicity in general. So far no luck on that front (despite my growing hunch that "reality" is indeed more elusive than we think . . .)

Lately, whenever I look at a digital clock, I usually see either 1:11 or 11:11, sometimes with the digits interspersed with zeroes. This started not long after reading about my friend Peter Gersten's experiences -- which suggests that the phenomenon is either genuine and literally contagious or else a potent, if inadvertant, mind-fuck.

Since I haven't attempted any sort of formal analysis, I can't claim that anything statistically unusual is actually happening; it merely seems like it is. This leaves me no room but to concede that my subconscious might be cuing me to look at clocks at specific intervals -- weird in itself, but admittedly not as interesting as the prospect of tapping into some acausal continuum.

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