The old woman who weaves may be making a sweater or some socks or
perhaps she weaves delicate strands of existence, sewing the
threads of 6.6 billion stories into this fibrous fabric.

There is a fixed number of people on this planet and each one of these individuals has a different perspective, a different way of thinking. Each person has
something to teach and many things to learn. Each person has a tiny
piece of a puzzle that creates some bigger picture. Each person weaves
a thread into this fabric of humanity.

So as the old woman weaves, so too does she weave the world.

You find yourself at a party in a city that you are visiting for the
first time. There is something oddly familiar about the tall man and
blond woman in the kitchen corner. Have you ever seen them before,
have you ever met them?

In all the public places around the world, how many times have you
been around the same people and not even known it. From rock concerts
to sporting events, parties to parks. Thick crowds of people, yet
there is an old friend or co-worker that you didn't expect to see.

I travel frequently. From Europe to the US. I run into people in
strange places, other cities and countries. These are people I know,
what are the chances that they are in the same place at the same time.
Imagine how frequently this occurs with people I don't know.

When I was in college in a town of about 35,000+ people I seemed to
see the same people over and over. We had friends in common, hung out
in the same places, lived near each other yet we never met. My
roomate's and I would make up names like perky girl and the naked guy
(he was hard to miss at parties).

After recently moving to a new city, I see the same people around,
even people that I meet once and they seem to keep showing up in
strange places.

Synchronicity is the concept of meaningful coincidence. Could it be
that these are people that I should be meeting. Perhaps they have
similar interests. Perhaps they have information that would be helpful
for me, or an answer to a question that's been on my mind.

Would it be possible to assign people an ID, even anonymously and
determine which ones are in proximity of each other? Something like a
google map mashup where we can look at an event or location and see
what other ID's are near by when you were there. The software could
track frequency so that the more times the same people are in the
places we go, the higher they are ranked.

Of course there are issues of privacy. People generally do not want to
be tracked, however it still seems like a worthwhile experiment.

We could do something similar on a smaller scale. Online we have many
identities. We have an IP address, we have aliases and nicknames at
community websites. How many times have you been browsing the Flickr
photos of the same person that was running past you casting spells in
World of Warcraft hours earlier?

Similar to the 6 degrees of separation, how far are you from the same
set of people every day? An even smaller experiment could be specific
to one site or application. How many times in Second Life or other
virtual world have you been near the same people in different places
at the same time repeatedly without being aware?

In the end I think we meet the people we are supposed to meet. We find
ourselves in the same place one two many times and talk to each other.
The ones that really stick often have something else in common like
they grew up one town away or used to work in the same company. Still,
it might be fun to use technology to see who's around.

One of my friends sent me a link to this NY Times article
Out of Body Experience, Your Brain is to Blame

The gist of the article is that scientists have observed that by stimulating certain areas of the brain they can induce the feeling of shadow people or ghosts near by or even one woman who claimed to have the perspective of looking down at her body from the ceiling.

While I have no doubt that science will eventually find a rational explanation for every unknown phenomenon known to man I think they are still missing a point here.

We can already explain why taking certain drugs affects our brains in certain ways but it does not provide any explanation for the potential of this experience to profoundly change a person.

NY Times News Flash
8 hours of madness, A tiny piece of paper coated with Lysergic Acid Diethylamide to Blame!

Events themselves are for the most part neutral. What is not so easily measured is how we percieve and integrate these events into our lives.

I think the same can be said for meaningful coincidence or what some of us like to call synchronicity. Surely in the realm of all things possible there is a statistical probability that two seemingly related events may seem to occur in an impossibly connected way. What is important about synchronicity is that it may generate a spark of creativity, recall or inspiration that was not previously there. Surely any number of events could occur but it is this event at this moment in our life that happens to trigger something new that had not previously existed.

It will be interesting to see more of these types of articles as scientists try to discover the God Spot or simulate how the brain works.