How to distinguish between precognition or actually you causing the event ?

[Dona]

I know this could be cognition misinterpreting coincidence, but it has happened many times often enough for me to start questioning it.
For example, I sometimes talk about a fire happening. Once, I spent a week burning an item I had bought from a shop. I had absolutely no ill intention. Shortly afterward, the shop itself burned down and was reduced to ashes, and the owner had to relocate (the shop was built on land that did not belong to him).
Another time, I was talking to a friend on Messenger and sent him a video about a fire. Shortly after that, his mother’s kitchen caught fire.
Feel free to point out my cognitive biases.

 

[Robert Ramsay]

The answer is: you can't really tell. Although I would say that you do not so much cause the fire as end up experiencing the version of events that contains the fire.

Otherwise, if it's less than two weeks, it could be precognition/divination. More than two weeks, much more likely to be affecting the event.

 

[Lucien6493]

Co-incident, not coincidence. Two things happening together without any direct causal connection is a function of complex systems like this group, the stock market, or like the ecology of a river delta, a forest, a human community or a flock of starlings. Usually the way in which the individual components of the system come together to create something greater than the sum of its parts is disregarded as background noise because group dynamics are impossibly complex to map out, unless you train yourself to become aware, through direct perception, of those parts of the greater pattern within which you exist and which you are emotionally invested in it. And this is important. The emotional charge is the meaning of the event for you. So just take note of it.

But here is the thing. You don't want to let your mind spin it. The more you rationalize the event, the more stories you tell yourself about it, and the more you try to explain it away the more likely it is to be what you are hoping its not. Cognitive misinterpretation going to town for happy hour. It is mythologizing in the wrong direction. Precognition, when it happens...you don't think about too much. For one thing, its embedded in other information and it is too fast, much like your reflexes when you're walking down the street and respond to obstacles before you are aware of them. You leave the obstacles to another part of your mind...and it's that part that communicates through metaphor; the part that understands magick in the way that a cat understands mice. You give it fire to play with and it's going to deliver if only because your attention will seek it out. As Robert put it "you do not so much cause the fire as end up experiencing the version of events that contains the fire."

One last thing. The way you tell the story...about how you were burning something? It's really important. Your teaching your conscious mind a new way of metabolizing its environment that way. Its not arbitrary. Your giving it new perceptual filters. Your igniting your mind, not burning down the neighborhood. Fire clarifies and tempers your perception here. Water will oppose it.

 

[Beyond Everything]

Rather than sit around speculating, start exerting your will to accomplish very specific things you consciously want to happen. See if your goals materialize. Personally, I wouldn't get too excited about 'synchronicities'. It's sort of like people getting caught up in dream symbolism. Better is to push forward and go for material goals and couple that with intrepid spiritual evolution, otherwise you're just enmeshed in a status quo net including stasis in the 'subconscious'.