Lately in my practice or, more precisely, in my daily life around fairly regular and intensive practice, I am observing weird little synchronicities around time. Maybe "synchronicity" is not quite the right word, but it all kind of revolves around the mind seemingly knowing what time it is. Shaun, on his thread, often reports looking at a clock and it will have some freaky "magic" time value (like "12:12", or whatever). In my case, it is more focused on knowing the time before I look. Many, many times I have wanted to look at my meditation timer, for example, only to find the bell will be ringing within the next 30-60 seconds. Or, I will wake up and look at my clock, to discover that the alarm will be going off within the next five minutes. What makes me think this is not just habit is the fact that from day to day, my alarm is set to different times depending on whether my wife has to get to train a client or not. And my sitting times vary based on how much time I have available. Then there is the thing I have reported lately of me often getting strong contractions at roughly the same time in longer sits.

How does the mind do that? Not really expecting an answer, it would be interesting to hear other experiences, and thoughts on what is going on.

Yes. No real answer, just.... yes. It happens. Maybe the mind is just good at keeping track of things subconsciously. It's another kind of mental map. There is the space map of assumed surroundings and the time map of assumed elapsed-ness.

Sometimes I think there is a subconscious "desire" that screens attention/perception in such a pre-conscious way that particular bandwidths of experiencing show up disproportionately.

When you're in love it seems to see the sweetness in everything. Even rotting carcasses are just an example of mother earth re-embracing us after death...
Sometimes it wants confirmation of control/knowing and everything seems to confirm "I know what's going on". Like it only "looks" if it "knows" and therefore it seems to always know.
Sometimes it's the flipside and we keep seeing things that are previously unseen, everything is bizarrely new
etc.

Sometimes I classify this stuff as seeing Dependent Arising -- somehow we see what we look for and we look for what we want to see.

But who the f knows!

In my experience its a combination of both rationally explainable stuff such as auto-suggestion or subconscious this-or-that, and irrational stuff such as magick, individual law-of-attraction, or fields of intention & belief.

I think a lot of people have probably had inexplicable synchronicities around the a&p. My first a&p was at an Amma retreat where I had a couple synchronicities in a row. I remember reading Derek talk about his own first a&p + synchronicities in his memoir.

At the same time, I also frequently wake up right before my alarm, which is explainable by internal clock. Or things will start going better for me in life when I am in a confident phase.