Weird or what?!

[Romeo]

I thought up this analogy about life and death, about how the waters of the earth go to the clouds, become individual raindrops (that's us in our lifetimes), then hit the ground (death) and become waters of the earth again. And then Whickerman, without me prompting him, comes out with my same idea. How can two people who have never met have exactly the same idea? Is that not just weird?

[jake-the-peg]

Without wanting to be too glib ..not really.

Water is essential to life and so has been part of pretty much every religion in one guise or another - washing before prayers, baptism, water into wine etc.

It's pretty much a universal religous symbol.

Then if you're into reincarnation it's pretty natural to put the water cycle into such a metaphor.

Now if you'd both come up with the metaphor using the long term geological carbon cycle reusing subducted material and recycling it through volcanoes - not that would have been a coincidence!

[Whickerman]

...aaah but Jake, we did, but just hadn't got around to posting it!

[Llamatron]

<sarcasm>

Well imagine that, six and a half billion people in the world and two have similar ideas at once.

</sarcasm>

Apologies

[taliesin238]

Yeah it is weird!! But i like that analogy!! it reminds me of the ancient sumarian belief (which is very neo pagan also) that the earth is female and the sky is male and rain is the sperm coming down to impregnate the mother earth!! And thats where life on the earth sprouts from!! thats one of my personal favourites. The actual sumarian word for rain and word for sperm, are the same word. They both have the same meaning!! How nice is that!

[mibn2cweus]

Last time I go out in the rain without a raincoat!

[Romeo]

I've been thinking about this, and maybe two ideas of CG Jung apply here: (1) The collective unconscious (2) Synchronicity. Both of these can explain how different cultures around the world use the same universal symbols.

Still Twilight Zone stuff though, eh?

[jake-the-peg]

Or maybe it's simply that we all eat food, drink water, sleep at night so it's natural that this common experience generates similarity in cultures even though they are physically seperate.

We can't fly so Gods live in the sky, bodies decompose to earth so there is an underworld.

Most cultures have stories of faeries or genies or spirits would you have us believe that this is a collective unconcious race memory of a time when magical creatures roamed the earth....

...or do we just like the same stories?

[ASKRONN]

i was driving to my girlfriends on tuesday...i pulled to the side of the road,,, to phone and check she was home ,,,when the phone rang and it was she,,phoning me ,,thats coincidence,,as is the first few lines of the question,,