Here are the ideas which arise for me upon reading back through this thread-
Sophie-David's idea of synchronicity as "magic" strikes me strangely; people often use the word magic to cover anything which seems either "neato" or unexplained. Synchronicity is both of those, but, for the purposes of this discussion, we are trying to explore it, not just dismiss it as magical- (in like manner, I so often find people attributing to "god" every unexplained phenomenon; and that doesn't seem very conducive to understanding to me.)
But I find his idea of magic (switching the meaning to practical magic, now)as "information exchange" to be something I've never thought of. As a way to modify external/internal realities- sure. But I always come back to wondering what is internal and what is external. Sophie-David's and Stella's "all is one" ideas sound very nice, and give me a nice feeling, but I don't know if they explain anything.
There are a few other points I found interesting in the thread which I won't quote box because there are too many:
Alissa's statement that listening to a language that you don't know is exactly like hearing strung together syllables that don't make sense-
I have not found that to be my experience. I've heard english speakers "speak in tongues" and chinese speakers "speak in tongues". I don't speak chinese, but when I hear it spoken I can easily tell that it is a language; when I hear a chinese speaker switch from speaking chinese to speaking in tongues, however, I can tell immediately that they are no longer speaking in language. A chinese speaker's "tongues" sounds exactly like an english speaker's "tongues"- and neither sounds anything like language. What it sounds like is gibberish.
What a cool story, though, that Alissa began to hear phrases from Hindu religious texts before having heard or read about them. Could these phrases be embedded in the structure of our brains, did she intuit them, or are they really supernaturally related?
Alissa's clairaudience sounds not only benign, but beneficial. I don't know how to interpret it, though.
Which brings me to the statements of a few others in this thread- "I have to take medication for that" "I don't know if it's a mental condition or a psychic gift" "sometimes I wonder if there's something organically wrong with my brain". Those are something to consider. Where does religious or psychic experience end and psychosis or schizophrenia begin? Does mental illness exist at all, or is it all just a spectrum? It seems like a lot of people who hear voices do experience it as detrimental, and not benign or spiritual, those on this board notwithstanding (the writer of "I have to take medication for that" being a possible exception.)
I just keep going back to wanting to know where "our stuff" ends, and the "big stuff" begins. (Our stuff is big stuff, of course- I mean big, outside of ourself stuff.)
Unrelated to the above ideas- Simone's experiments with different sounds on the chakras I found very intriguing, and I'd love to see a thread about that.
Final thoughts- internal reality, spiritual reality, archetypes, mental health, god.
?
Big questions- probably unanswerable.