Summary: Interview examines research into synchronicity, coincidence, spirituality and the paranormal. Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Robert Perry, author of, Signs: A New Approach to Coincidence, Synchronicity, Guidance, Life Purpose, and God's Plan. During the interview Perry explains his research: Robert Perry: CMPE which stands for a Conjunction of Meaningfully Parallel Events. It’s basically an extreme form of synchronicity. Most of our paranormal events that we’re studying now, they’re inner experiences with hopefully a veridical component but in the end they seem to say something about our abilities or our ultimate nature being perhaps immaterial. But with CMPEs their statement seems to be more about something other than us that seems to giving us messages. Alex Tsakiris: I’m just not quite sure that we can make that last leap because there’s this whole idea of time and that maybe time is not linear. But also in terms of you and I being co-creators of our reality. So we get back to this idea of what’s reality and how is reality being created and experienced and again, what’s our relationship to time? Robert Perry: We shouldn’t act like anything is substantive yet however I think that there is a contemporary bias, even among those of us who are into the paranormal; a bias against sort of agents that are beyond the human. Maybe, if we take NDEs seriously for instance, it looks like that experience involves a certain amount of initiative from the Other Side. Maybe something coming to the human level from the Other Side is part of how life works. Robert Perry's Website Play It: Download MP3 (44 min.) Read It: Alex Tsakiris: Today we welcome back to Skeptiko Robert Perry. Robert’s here to talk about his book, Signs: A New Approach to Coincidence, Synchronicity, Guidance, Life Purpose, and God’s Plan. He’s also here to tell us about a pilot study he’s done about this work along with Dr. Bruce Greyson that is suggestive that he really is onto something here. So Robert, thank you for joining me. Welcome back. Robert Perry: Oh, it’s a great pleasure and I’m very honored to be here. I love the show and listen every week. Alex Tsakiris: Super. And I really appreciate you’ve made some great contributions on the forum and on the comment section of the website. I always look forward to reading your posts. It’s great to have you back on. So I have to say, this book you’ve written, it’s amazing. It’s kind of startling when you get into it because you claim to have uncovered a rather remarkable new paranormal phenomenon that you’ve coined, “CMPE.” So there’s a lot here to wrap our arms around. Why don’t you start by telling us what you think you’ve uncovered here? Robert Perry: Okay. Basically, a CMPE stands for a Conjunction of Meaningfully Parallel Events. I call it “a sign” for short because I use that word in a very nonstandard way. Hardly anybody else calls it those. CMPE seems to be the handle of choice. It’s basically an extreme form of synchronicity. Now, synchronicity tends to be an extremely subjective thing. There’s almost no rules for what constitutes a synchronicity, but the pattern that we typically associate with synchronicity is two events coming together and sharing some striking similarity. The classic case is Carl Jung’s scarab story where a patient is telling him about a dream in which she’s given a gold scarab. As she does, a gold scarab beetle is tapping at the window of Jung’s office. So there you have two events, foretelling the dream, the appearance of the scarab, and they both share one striking parallel which is a golden scarab. Alex Tsakiris: Right. And more on the day-to-day synchronicities that we’re all familiar with, you’re going to take it way beyond that. Robert Perry: Right. It’s a much more extreme version of that basic pattern. You still have two events that just happen to come together in time.
