You have an amazing ability. Your thoughts and feelings, your memories and experiences, are reproduced in the events around you as coincidences. It’s not only you with this ability, its everyone. We all live in a reality in which our thoughts and emotions are mirrored back to us as synchronistic events. – Author, Dr. Kirby Surprise

Have you ever thought about how much influence you might have over life? Are we the writers of our life stories? Or are we passive passengers? Is there another explanation underlying our existence?

I tend to believe we do have some influence over our experiences, and Dr. Kirby Surprise’s book, Synchronicity: The Art of Coincidence, Choice, And Unlocking Your Mind, explains his research and experiences on why he thinks so as well.

The possibility of this resonates with me because of a number of personal experiences and events that have mirrored internal thoughts, or personal aspirations, which have manifested in ways that seem beyond mere coincidence. The events/experiences don’t always happen exactly as I imagine them to, yet there is still a connection to the initial vision. It’s important to note the subjectivity of this, as this is entirely based on my interpretation of the situations and the meaning I apply to them. If you believe in synchronicities and are looking for them, you are more likely to see them than if you perceive all events as coincidences.

Consider this:

Your being able to influence patterns of synchronicity likewise violates no physical laws. There is no reason to believe that states of personal consciousness cannot produce SEs (synchronistic events) independent of physical energies. There is no physical law that says you can’t create the patterns of meaning and relationship around you using your own brain and focus of attention. Trying to find reasons you can’t do this is like looking for your keys where the light is [referring to the streetlight effect].

All thoughts and emotions are chemical interactions within the brain that follow definite laws of biochemistry. Our thoughts may be linked to other planes and have effects on them, but we are primarily physically focused beings and are bound by the laws of our chemistry. We are dependent on our chemical states for the perception and processing of all sensory input, memory, and pattern-matching. Mess with your brain chemistry, and you change your ability to process information.

Surprise offers his theory on how our ancestors came across this ability and how it evolved into many of the customs different cultures follow and are adhered to by shamans:

Our hunting ancestors tried to use SE to increase their chances of survival. They tried to forge a cause and effect relationship between their own inner states and what they wanted from the outside world. The hope was “If I dance like this, think these thoughts, feel these feelings, game will appear.” This was a straight-forward attempt to change events in the environment in their favor. Our hunter was probably carrying charms, magical decorations, even scarifications and body modifications as reminders of [their] intent.

The more curious I’ve been of this phenomena, the more I’ve tried to experiment and see how much I can play around with influencing my reality. It might be helpful to look at it like this:

Imagine for a moment that your thoughts are real things. Each time you have a thought or emotion, objects are created from them in the MN-fields (M-Theory and N-Theory, which attempt to explain how existence navigates through probable events, by stating there are an infinite number of membranes, all of them parallel universes) around your body. These thoughtforms are actual objects on their own dimensions. Some of them are as simple as a blob of color, some as complex as the moving landscape of a lucid dream. They form, change, and disperse around you as quickly as your stream of thought flows.

These thoughtforms automatically cause changes in the direction you move in probability. What you think about becomes your navigational system through SE. Potentially, each thought can cause background SEs by changing your course through probability. Most never last long enough laps on your course. Many of our thoughts lead in opposite directions. We have many motivations and needs that our thoughts manifest. We are rarely just of one mind about anything.

The first person to really bring the idea of synchronicity to the modern Western world was Carl Jung (for more on him: Jung, Synchronicity, and Human Destiny). Jung’s explanation of synchronicities centered around the concept of archetypes and the interplay our lives have with them.

An archetype is a pattern of force that causes external and internal events to constellate around it in specific patterns of meaning. It is a “something” that changes both the pattern of events and your thoughts. The result is your thoughts and the events around you mirror each other. Jung believed there are four levels of consciousness. The first is ego consciousness. This is approximately what you consider your conscious self. Ego consciousness arises out of the next deepest level, the personal unconscious. This is made of personal experiences and memories. This developed out of a vast area called the collective unconscious. It connects all of us the way the sea floor connects all the continents and islands that rise from it. It is the common ground. Below even this is the psychoid level. At this level subjective and objective are mixed and merged without clear boundaries. There is no clear internal or external reality. The inner and outer worlds are actually fused at this primitive level, consciousness is just emerging from the background of the infinity of timeless and spaceless consciousness.

The archetypes are found at the psychoid level. They are the patterns of creation. They are not thought of as causes in and of themselves, they are patterns that events and perceptions follow as they emerge from the collective consciousness. It is as if events and experiences orbit around them. Jung said SEs occur when internal and external events become constellated by an archetype into the archetype’s pattern. What happens then is called a co-occurrence event. The person’s psychological state and the external events of the environment seem to mirror each other. This produces the experience of meaning in the SE. In Jung’s model, the archetype has brought both the psychological state of the person and the events into a synchronous relationship.

Ultimately, Surprise goes a step further than Jung was willing to, and claims that individuals have more influence over the occurrence of synchronicities than previously believed. Here are some tricks Surprise shared to unlocking this ability:

There are some tricks you can use to bring some of your thoughts out of this background, to make them more effective at creating SEs. Your mind is designed to follow your lead. If you decide a thought is more interesting or important, you pay more attention to it. Your attention imparts energy to the thoughts you choose. Neurologically, each thought is a pattern of electrical pulses passing across connected neurons. Think a thought once, the pathway soon disconnects. Neural pruning causes unused pathways to fade out over time, conserving resources for pathways used more often. Pay conscious attention to forming a thought; repeat that thought, and the pathway gets stronger. The activity draws connections from surrounding neurons. Put enough energy into any thought pattern, and it becomes a habit. Other thoughts begin organizing themselves around its pathways. This is the basis for learning. Engrain the pathway more, and it feels meaningful.

Thoughtforms operate on the same principles. If you choose to think any thought often enough, or put conscious attention into it, the thoughtform persists longer. Eventually, the thoughtform remains solid and coherent, even though you have turned your attention elsewhere. It remains in the MN-fields around you, automatically directing your course through probability. These persistent thoughtforms cause most of the SEs you experience. They organize events in probability around you and create the patterns of persistent SEs. Thoughtforms are created by all mental activity. The bulk of your thoughts are automated processes in the unconscious. These thoughts are the mental habits you have built through your thoughts and judgments about your life experiences. Most SEs are reflections of those processes, caused by the thoughtforms resulting from them. The more you understand about your own unconscious, the more familiar the patterns of SE become. Your party trick can create these thoughtforms consciously. You have the ability to choose to objectify chosen thoughts into persistent thoughtforms.

Prayer is almost an ideal way to set up an SE format. Two aspects of most systems of prayer contribute to this. The first having to do with effects on the person’s focus of attention, the second with the mythologies that surround prayer […] The best prayers are conversations, a heart-to-heart. Regular focus is good for creating SEs. It sets regular patterns in your thoughts and emotions. This causes the same patterns of neurons to fire and wire together in your brain. The more you think a thought, the easier it is to think it again. This sets the patterns and energy of your emotional and mental bodies into better defined thoughtforms. That in turn causes SEs in the pattern of prayers you repeat. It causes a regular transmission of energy, confined to specific frequency ranges, producing more noticeable SEs because of the steady focus for a longer period. Prayer is powerfully effective at creating SEs.

The other way to create a feeling of deep meaning is repetition. When we recognize a pattern repeatedly, that set of neural pathways wires together for faster recognition next time. We experience the pattern as having deeper meaning. Even completely meaningless phrases, repeated often enough, become highly meaningful. Prayer strengthens faith. It allows you to believe in greater depth what you think. It increases SEs because it allows you to focus more of your thought, your sense of meaning, on chosen patterns.

If you’re reading this now, maybe you’ve had a number of coincidences happen to you that made you curious as to what shapes our reality and how much influence we might have over it. Belief and perception, as exhibited in the placebo effect and double-blind tests, both show just how influential the mind can be in our lives. If you’re still curious to the workings of the universe, maybe tinkering around with synchronicities will provide some meaningful lessons.