Synchronicity and The Number 23

In 2002, I began an essay about the number 46 and the theory of Shakespeare and the Bible (Shakespeare was baptized on April 26, 1564. It is widely assumed that he was born that year. The Authorized Version was being revised in 1610, by which time Shakespeare would have been 46. In the King James version of Psalm 46 (see below), counting 46 words down from the top, we find "shake", and counting 46 words up from the bottom, we find "spear." "Selah" doesn't count -- it is sprinkled throughout the Bible as a sort of punctuation mark.)

The essay was intended to poke fun at those who spend their time chasing these synchronicity rabbits down their respective holes. But a funny thing happened:I briefly became one of those people. Half of 46 is 23, and once I started digging up that number from my life and the world around me, there was no going back. It was everywhere, suffused with meaning, and beckoning my mind to join the schizophrenic contingency. Significant events happened in my life at the time and the number 23 was prevalent. After a brief time of exploring the meaning behind all this, I realized I had a choice: follow the rabbit and risk madness, or let it go. I let it go and my life has been one of relative stasis ever since. Had I followed the rabbit, perhaps I could have been the writer in the following story:


Carrey Counts On Number 23
Jim Carrey told SCI FI Wire that he's particularly excited about his next film, The Number 23, a mind-bender about a man who becomes obssessed with the number 23. Carrey said that it was likely fate that brought the project to him, since he himself is obsessed with the number 23.

"I've had this obsession with the number 23 for years," Carrey said in an interview, while promoting his current film, Fun With Dick and Jane. "[The script] was given to me by a friend who had the obsession with it, where he talked about the Earth's axis is on the 23rd degree and 23 chromosomes in the human body from each parent and all that, and he has books written about everything that adds up to 23. As soon as he told me, I started seeing 23 everywhere. And it's shocking how much adds up to 23; it's a primary number, but it's bizarre. But it really works out in a strange way to be very prevalent everywhere."

Carrey (Bruce Almighty) will share the screen with Virginia Madsen in the film, which Joel Schumacher will direct. Schumacher last directed Carrey in Batman Forever. But, Carrey said, The Number 23 is not a comedy. "No, it's a thriller," he said. "It's about a guy [Carrey] who finds a book that's about a character that is obsessed with the number 23, and the number 23 is haunting him and leads him to do some very bad things. And then finally it starts happening in his life, and he starts to notice parallels between the book and his life, and the character and his life."

Carrey added: "I don't want to say too much about it, but it's really an interesting movie. I was talking about all this 23 stuff. ... First of all, the number 23 thing for me culminated in ... me talking about it, and at the very same moment, someone handing me a book about the 23rd psalm, which became like my kind of mantra a little bit. Because it's about living without fear, feeling like you're taken care of, like you're safe. And so I changed the name of my company to JC23 a couple years ago. I started telling somebody about the 23 thing, and 'the valley of the shadow of death' and all those things it means, and they said, 'I just read a script called The Number 23.'"

Carrey read the script and found it compelling. "It's so interesting, and the way the mathematics are worked out in it, it's like this guy is Rain Man, the guy who wrote it, Fernley Phillips. So I decided to do it, and I gave it to a friend of mine to read. He read it in an hour and a half, [and] when I came back in he was on page 23, circling every 23rd word, to see if there was a puzzle. That's the kind of thing that I want to do to an audience." Production on The Number 23 begins this week, with an eye toward a late 2006 release.

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