[not2too]

But seriously folks...The Cosmic Joke is being cracked by the Cosmic Jokester all the time...everywhere we look...if we know what to look at. (Maybe that's why Taoist and Zen masters point so much...just smiling and not saying a word.)

For example, the delightful (usually) and mysterious phenomenon of synchronicity, identified and named by Carl Jung, may be defined as(excerpted from Wikipedia) the experience of two or more events which occur in a meaningful manner, but which are causally un-related. In order to be synchronous, the events must be related to one another conceptually, and the chance that they would occur together by random chance must be very small. I have experienced many of these connections at various points over the years (often, at times when I am reading about synchronicity or the Trickster) and am always left with the feeling that the Old Cosmic Prankster has just done it again…to remind me of what's going on.

In a well known example, Jung claims that in 1805, the French writer Émile Deschamps was treated to some plum pudding by a stranger named Monsieur de Forgebeau. Ten years later, the writer encountered plum pudding on the menu of a Paris restaurant, and wanted to order some, but the waiter told him the last dish had already been served to another customer, who turned out to be de Forgebeau. Many years later, in 1832, Émile Deschamps was at a diner, and was once again offered plum pudding. He recalled the earlier incident and told his friends that only de Forgebeau was missing to make the setting complete - and in the same instant, the now senile de Forgebeau entered the room.

One of Jung's favourite quotes on synchronicity was from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, in which the White Queen says to Alice: "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards".

Another well known synchronicity, the Pauli effect, is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the apparently mysterious failure of technical equipment in the presence of certain people, particularly theoretical physicists. It is named after the Austrian theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli

An incident occurred in a physics laboratory at the University of Göttingen. An expensive measuring device, for no apparent reason, suddenly stopped working. Obviously, the head of the research group concluded, they had fallen victim to the Pauli effect; but, as someone countered, Pauli was on his way to Zurich, so that was not possible. When this story was related to Pauli, though, Pauli recalled that at that moment he had indeed been in Göttingen — waiting for a connection at the train station.

Pauli, who in his professional life was severely critical of confirmation bias (often used to "explain" synchronicity), lent his scientific credibility to support the theory, coauthoring a paper with Jung on the subject. Some of the evidence that Pauli cited was that ideas which occurred in his dreams would have synchronous analogs in later correspondence with distant collaborators.

Terence McKenna used the term 'Cosmic giggle' to mean "a randomly roving zone of synchronicity and statistical anomaly. Should you be caught up in it, it will turn reality on its head. It is objective and subjective, simultaneously 'really there' and yet somehow is sustained by imagination and expectation...."

Further,
not2too