11:11 - Coincidence Or Destiny?
It was about four years ago that I first noticed the amber glowing 11:11 on my digital cable box. No biggie, it was just eleven minutes after eleven o' clock, right? Then it happened again that evening, I was not thinking about what time it was, I just happened to look at the cable box at that exact moment. I didn't think too much about it, the way most people would react I suppose, until it happened again the next day while I was preoccupied with the usual morning routine. At this time, I'm scoffing and shaking my head in amusement, "Three times in a row, hmmm." but the grinning stopped when it occurred yet again, that same evening.
One week later, I'm gathering my writing materials together to call it a night and glance over my shoulder to see the bright amber 11:11 staring at me. I dropped the folders and books beside the computer monitor saying, "What is going on here?" This time, my wife was present and she asked, "What's wrong?" I pointed at the cable box clock, "I keep seeing eleven-eleven!" My wife reacted with only mild amusement, completely unaware that I was seeing this now almost twice a day continuously for the entire week. Her suggestion; "Maybe we should play it in the lottery."
The next day we went to the nearby mall and I headed straight for the bookstore, I hoped to find something, anything, which might help explain the weird appearance of that number. Bible verses and numerology books didn't help much, although a small paperback titled Angel Numbers by Doreen Virtue Ph.D. proposed that we all have guardian angels and "one of their favorite signs relates to number sequences". Some of the examples given of where the numerals may repeatedly appear are; license plates, phone numbers and clocks. Although the book's general meaning of numbers is from 00 to 999, the number 111 is basically the same as 1111, which has to do with "an energetic pathway" opening and manifesting one's thoughts.
Although interesting and positive, Angel Numbers left me feeling as if something was still missing. I resigned myself to the notion it was all a personal quirk, an odd coincidence that perhaps became a subconscious anticipation for the number; I saw it because I was looking for it. However, that answer didn't seem right either. What made it all so strange was the fact that I was engrossed with other things when I would casually look at the clock and see those four glowing lines. Did it mean all coincidences are choices at the subconscious level? Unfortunately, Plato and Carl Jung were not standing around to answer that question.
For some reason, it never occurred to me to try an Internet search on 11:11 to see what might show up there. When I returned home, I booted up my annoyingly slow old computer and entered the search. The link seemed to jump out at me, I stared at The 11:11 Phenomenon and had to rub my eyes to take another look. "What?!" There were other links listed as well and I quickly looked them over with equal disbelief. I was absolutely astonished to discover that there were others who also had the same experience. It was not merely a handful of people, nor a few hundred here and there. No, there were/are actually thousands of people, globally, who share the same experience. A large piece of a very mysterious puzzle seemed to fall into place for me then. I was gratified that I was not insane after all. It was either that, or all the people who have had the same eleven-eleven experience are all insane as well.
What the eleven-eleven experience actually is remains a frustrating mystery. My own experience of it four years ago and the on and off appearance of it to this day, still has me wondering. It should not be surprising then that there are many opinions and theories. A few examples are; Eleven-eleven is the time prompt of Spirit Guardians or certain angels, eleven-eleven is a pre-encoded trigger in our cellular memory banks, it is a doorway to a parallel universe, or it is the balancing of forces. Others believe eleven-eleven is simply our body clocks playing tricks on us, while others believe it is linked to some sort of devious CIA mind program or that it can be found in certain crop circles. It has also been indicated the 2012 winter solstice will occur at 11:11 universal time on Dec 21, a fact that can be verified via the Earth's Seasons page of the U. S. Naval Observatory (USNO) government site. This also happens to be the last day of the Mayan calendar. Many believe this to be the actual connection between the 11:11 phenomena.
Numerologists believe that events linked to the time 11:11 appear more often than chance or coincidence. This belief is related to the concept of synchronicity, a notion developed by Carl Jung to explain "meaningful coincidences." Synchronicity, he believed, was an acausal principle that links events by their coincidence in time, having a similar meaning.
Skeptics explain 11:11 with statistics; to say that the odds of something happening are a million to one, may seem so large as to rule out coincidence or chance. However, with over 6 billion people on the earth, a million to one shot will likely occur frequently. One example is the airplane crash dream. Let's say the odds are a million to one that when a person has a dream of an airplane crash, there is an actual airplane crash the next day. Given 6 billion people having an average of 250 dream themes each per night, there should be 1.5 million people a day with dreams that seem clairvoyant.
Skeptics go on to add that we have a versatile ability of finding meaningful connections between things that may not have any, therefore it is likely most people will experience many meaningful coincidences. Because of the billions of people and the number of meaningful coincidences is millions of billions, it is inevitable that people will experience very strange and bizarre coincidences every day.
Some eleven-eleven believers, or "Eleveners", have a math and probability analysis of their own, asserting that when we are looking of proof of things intangible and the fingerprints of greater intelligence, we can decipher it via patterns. If out of the chaos appears a pattern, there is an intelligence behind it. Thus, the chance of facilitatory events occurring randomly is well against the odds. An example used is 111111111 x 111111111 = 12345678987654321. Could this count up and countdown hint at a parallel universe, the balancing of forces, or the Mayan countdown to 2012 as mentioned previously? Perhaps we will know the answer at 11:11 am universal time, December 21, 2012. Perhaps nothing will happen at all on that date and the mystery will remain forever a mystery. We will soon see.
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