There’s a great story from Jacques Vallee, posted on Rigorous Intuition:
One afternoon in Los Angeles in the winter of 1976, the week he began compiling his notes on various branches of the UFO cult “the Order of Melchizedek” for what became Messengers of Deception, Jacques Vallee stood curbside at Sunset Boulveard and hailed a taxi. He looked downstream at the rush hour traffic, raised his hand towards several oncoming cabs, and one swerved into the curb lane and stopped for him. After a short ride, during which Vallee did not discuss his current research, he paid his fare and accepted a receipt. He stuffed it in his wallet and thought nothing more of it, until two days he noticed it was signed Melchizedek:
[Vallee explains]“…There is only one Melchizedek listed in the LA phone book, and I have the receipt signed by the driver right in front of me. It was this incident that convinced me to put more energy into understanding the nature of such coincidences.”
Vallee, who is both a computer scientist and a UFOlogist, invested his energy in Information Theory, which led to his model of an Associative Universe.
Time and space may be convenient notions for plotting the progress of a locomotive, but they are completely useless for locating information…. What modern computer scientists have now recognized is that ordering by time and space is the worst possible way to store data. In a large computer-based information system, no attempt is made to place related records in sequential physical locations. It is much more convenient to sprinkle the records throughout storage as they arrive, and to construct an algorithm for retrieval based on some type of keyword…..
The Melchizedek incident that I experienced on February 21, 1976 suggested to me that the world might be organized more like a random database than like a sequential library. Since there is only one person named Melchizedek in the LA phone book, I have to conclude that mere coincidence cannot explain this incident. Alternative explanations are equally inadequate, unfortunately. I did not discuss my research with the driver, so a hoax is out of the question. There could be a well-organized conspiracy against me, of course, to put lady taxi drivers on my path with names related to my current reading interests, but the motivations of such conspirators would be rather obscure! Fortunately, another avenue of explanation exists.
If there is no time dimension as we usually assume there is, we may be traversing events by association. Modern computers retrieve information associatively. You “evoke” the desired records by using keywords, words of power: you request the intersection of “microwave” and “headache” and you find 20 articles you never suspected existed. Perhaps I had unconsciously posted such a request on some psychic bulletin board with the keyword “Melchizedek.” If we live in the associative universe of the software scientist rather than the sequential universe of the space-time physicist, then miracles are no longer irrational events.
On Friday night I had some friends over and we got to talking about the Fremont Solstice Parade – a naked bike ride and sexual inneundo extravaganza in the streets of Seattle that’s fun for the whole family!!! Someone mentioned that one year a whole bunch of people showed up with Storm trooper costumes and that they found it to be rather awkward amongst all the naked hippies body-painted in paisley and leopard print. I remember immediately seeing this image in my head of people wearing storm trooper helmets but painting the rest of their exposed flesh to mimic the uniform.
Here’s the weird thing: Later, right before I feel asleep in a drunken fog, I saw this picture in my boingboing.net rss feed:
What the hell? I shot off an email to Tim who I had told about the Melchizedek story, and he in return sent me this wikipedia article which explained it in more detail. One thing caught my eye:
“Gnostic Revelations
A collection of early Gnostic scripts found in 1945, known as the Nag Hammadi Library, contains a tractate pertaining to Melchizedek. Here it is revealed that Melchizedek is Jesus Christ[8]. Melchizedek, as Jesus Christ, lives, preaches, dies and is resurrected.”
Two conclusions, one question:
1. I really like what Vallee had to say about a database universe. The fact that concentrating on a certain idea or image may indirectly pull in similar or related images into your reality is pretty amazing. It’s as we’re all individually “googling our reality” and living and dying in the search results.
2. But I am beginning to think he was missing a major point – maybe there was only one “Melchizedek” in the white pages BECAUSE IT WAS JESUS FUCKING CHRIST HE MET IN THAT CAB! OF COURSE THERE’S ONLY GOING TO BE ONE LISTED IN THE PHONE BOOK!
3. Where does all of this put my coincidence with the storm trooper sex pots, hmmm?