Author’s note:
“While the foundational concepts and arguments were conceived independently, artificial intelligence was deliberately and experimentally integrated into the drafting and development process through an iterative human-led dialogue. Throughout this collaboration, the author has maintained active editorial and conceptual control. This approach serves a dual purpose: to evaluate the practical utility of AI in academic writing as an extension of original human thought, and to invite critical reflection from the reader regarding its efficacy. As an open experiment in scholarly methodology, the resulting text remains fully subject to academic scrutiny concerning how effectively AI can enhance not only contextual richness, but the intrinsic quality of essayistic work.”
The Initiative
IKAR is a research and publishing initiative in development, conceived by Filip Firlefijn to explore coincidences, perceived synchronicities, unusual experiences and recurring cultural patterns.
Its central question is simple: why do certain events, images and ideas appear meaningfully connected—and how can those connections be investigated?
Emerging from the philosophical and cultural research behind The Spiral of Consciousness, IKAR brings together close observation, comparative interpretation and critical inquiry. It offers a framework for examining experiences that can be personally compelling yet difficult to explain or evaluate.
An Open, Critical Approach
Documented observations: what can be established from records, sources and independently checkable information.
Plausible hypotheses: explanations that can be compared, questioned and, where possible, tested.
Psychological and cultural interpretations: how people experience connections and give them meaning.
Further speculation: possibilities that extend beyond the available evidence and are explicitly presented as such.
The aim is to make curiosity more precise while allowing uncertainty to remain visible.
Fields of Inquiry
Coincidence and synchronicity
Examining striking correspondences between events, including experiences described as synchronicity, without presuming a hidden cause.
Cultural repetition and symbolic resonance
Tracing how images, narratives and motifs recur across literature, art, mythology, individual lives and historical periods.
Perception and collective meaning
Exploring how attention, memory, expectation and shared stories shape the patterns people recognise. Concepts such as the collective unconscious can be examined as interpretive frameworks rather than assumed explanations.
Power, media and social influence
Investigating how institutions, communities and media select, amplify or use symbolic associations—and how those associations acquire emotional and political force.
Anomalous experiences
Documenting difficult-to-classify reports with attention to context, source quality, alternative explanations and the limits of retrospective reconstruction.
Research into Archive
IKAR is envisioned as a meeting platform. Planned formats include essays, comparative case studies, an organised archive, publications, talks and moderated conversations.
IKAR
Insitut für Koinzidenz, Anomalistik und Resonanz / Institute for Coincidence, Anomalistics and Resonance
Research of suggestion
into Coincidence, Geometry and Resonance
unfinished collection of books, with apologies for the delay
“According to principles of suggestion and resonance I started exploring resonant coincidences in a thus psychological but non-personal inverted sense, coincidences that may be called synchronicities but at the same time have a potential to go beyond. It is an antipsychotic search for what can be found if one searches fearlessly and beyond literal science with an open mind to taostic context incorporation.
What I found created a collection of resources so vaste that I could write books for the rest of my life or make endless video content. Yet, the danger would also exist to endanger my true more scientifically oriented methodological work, of course, which with AI becomes even more easy to fully develop. The risk is to become mocked by academia instead of hailed.
The other strange matter besides finding so many interesting “coincidences”, the work that I have been doing for years, is that lately, under a series of consequential events, I am having less and less financial resources while thousands of those documents have mysteriously disappeared as well. The memories in my head may be the only things I have left.
I must even admit to myself that nothing from here on will ever have any normal significance or value again.”