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Synchronicity: The Art of Coincidence, Choice, and Unlocking Your Mindby Kirby Surprise, Allan Combs2012 | pages: 187 | ISBN: 1601631839 | EPUB | 2,4 mbThe experience of meaningful coincidences is universal. They are reported by people of every culture, every belief system, and every time period. Synchronicity examines the evidence for the human influence on the meaningfulness of events, and the way the modern computational model of the mind predicts how we create meaning.It demonstrates that these events, based on the activity of the mind, are caused by the person who perceives them.In this fascinating work, you will:Learn to use your amazing ability to create synchronistic eventsDiscover how your mind creates the reality you experienceUnlock your brain’s vast resources of connectivity and creativityChange from living as a separate being to living as a part of the unified wholeSynchronicity will show you how you already create events around you, and make you a conscious co-creator of your reality. Dr. Surprise describes the miracles of your brain’s processes, merging the worlds of modern physics and ancient mysticism to reveal abilities you have always possessed, but which were not fully understood–until now.Learn to make reality dance to the rhythms of your thoughts.About the AuthorDr. Kirby Surprise received his doctorate in counseling psychology from the Institute for Integral Studies. He works in an advanced outpatient program for the State of California where he assesses, diagnoses, and treats clients with psychotic and delusional disorders. He lives in the San Francisco Bay area. Dr. Allan Combs is author of more than 100 articles, chapters, and books on consciousness and the brain. He is co-editor of the Journal of Conscious Evolution, and associate editor of Dynamical Psychology. Combs’s most recent book is Consciousness Explained Better. Amazon Top Customer Reviews5.0 out of 5 starsExplore Your Mind with Dr. SurpriseBy Amazon Customer on February 1, 2012You’re not feeling well and something is telling you not to go to class today, yet you go anyway because there’s a big test scheduled next week. The bus is late, there’s a traffic jam 12 miles long, yet you still go on ignoring the inconvenient events and your sniffling nose. You reach the class room door just to discover … the class is cancelled. Your intuition and the signs around you were right all along; you should’ve stayed home.The above scenario is an all too common Synchronistic Event (SEs), often tossed away as coincidence, dumb luck, intuition, or simply a gut feeling during a specific moment in your life. Ever wondered if there was something more to them then just that? Well there is and you can find out more in Dr. Kirby Surprise’s Synchronicity: The Art of Coincidence, Choice, and Unlocking Your Mind.One part science text book, one part metaphysical treatise, and two parts (non-fiction) story telling, Synchronicity is a book that will change the way you understand your own mind and the reality in which you live in. Through it, you will gain the ability to recognize your own SEs, create them, and recognize the SEs of other’s around you.This book is written in such a way that anyone could easily grasp the concepts presented by the author. As an individual with an English degree (something as far away from the scientific field as Neptune is from the sun), I can vouched for this book’s accessibility. Moreover, it has changed my mind for better, and it can change yours too!I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in psychology, Jung, synchronicity, and, of course, to anyone who is interested in themselves.3.0 out of 5 starsInteresting Content But Needs Clearer FocusBy Ileana Grams-Moog on May 14, 2012Kirby Surprise has written a book about a longtime interest he has in how we create synchronicities in our lives. He thinks that we ourselves are responsible for them, because we are multidimensional beings who create the synchronous events we experience in this dimension in the higher-dimensional reality our greater selves inhabit. His examples of synchronicities in his own life, often in sidebars to the text, are intriguing, as are his accounts of how psychotics misinterpret the synchronicities they experience as having a meaning which they don’t in fact possess. He also teaches, in the last half of the book, a method to create synchronous events, and even thought-form beings, in your own life.However, his book is not very well-written, nor are his claims either clear or well-supported. He seems to have tied his view of the nature of SEs (his abbreviation of “synchronous events”) to a theory in physics–a version of string theory–that may or may not turn out to be true in the long run. This seems to be a weak point that a very sceptical, science-oriented person, which he repeatedly says he is, would notice and discuss. But he doesn’t. He believes that SE’s cannot be other than our own creations, and that this view is somehow scientific. But he gives no argument for his opinion, which seems to me to need defending. He also believes that SE’s are amusing, but have no greater significance–again a view that needs arguing for, especially given the testimony of so many over so long years that SE’s can be highly meaningful. But there is no argument given. In the light of his views, teaching you to produce SE’s is on the level of teaching parlor tricks, and that is the tone of his presentation. But if that’s so, what’s the point? My impression is that he believes there is one, but is not able to articulate it clearly.Added to these problems are poor writing at every level from the sentence and paragraph level to the organization of the whole, and no clear overall point to the book. It’s a pity, because there are some very interesting ideas here, by someone who seems to know SE’s very well.2.0 out of 5 starsUltimately, A Dissapointing ReadBy R. Hawk on June 10, 2012I have read many books on synchronicity as well as books on related subjects where quantum theory is tied to the psychological study of the human mind, and I have to agree with all of the 3 star and 1 star reviews for this book to date. The author inserts limiting biases into his text that are not backed up by any sort of serious scientific evidence though he claims to approach the topic from an unbiased, scientific viewpoint. This is not true of most books on this subject, that are much more thorough and balanced.The greatest value in this book, and its a limited one, is that the author provides seven steps for cultivating synchronous events in your life at the end of the book. Whether these techniques will be effective for you is debatable, but they are good suggestions which should have a broad appeal and usefulness.As an avid reader, especially in the field of how the human mind works, and its relation to metaphysical studies and quantum field research, I will admit that some books are obviously much better than others. This is not just a personal bias however of “liking” one over the other. If I had to rate the quality of the “argument” so to speak in this book against every other one I’ve gone through in a general sense, with the others averaging a 7-8 out of 10 with 10 being perfect, I’d have to give this book somewhere in the range of a 5.My advice to those who pick this book up is to simply browse through it, take note of his steps at the end, and consider one point:Why would someone argue for the presence of extra-physical “coincidences” which synchronicity is, produced by unfathomable non-random means (probabily wave or underlying “field” structures to the universe), and then explain the presence of SEs by saying they are all a direct byproduct of your own mind and personal worldview? It may indeed be true that many if not most SEs are a form of self-delusion, of looking for patterns in everything. Books that look for “The Bible Code” for instance are often discredited in this way. But if you as a scientist truly believe this, why bother writing a book about it? It’s like saying perpetual motion machines are impossible, but here are dozens of personal examples of them if you want to try to build one yourself…(as the author points out with dozens of personal examples of SEs throughout his book).In my opinion, this book is another example of saying, God exists, and he is you, and you are Insane if you believe these SEs are some sort of meaningful supernatural guidance for your life. Its a trend in modern writing like this to essentially discredit all metaphysical experiences as a “politically correct” way of saying, there is no god, and you are deranged if you believe you are god.I will also admit that I did not read the entire book cover to cover, so my review is not a true in depth analysis. I spent four hours “browsing” through it in the bookstore and ultimately decided not to buy it as I didn’t feel it would add anything profound to my understanding of the topic.I do however think the seven steps provided at the end of the book are well worth exploring.