Image by 愚木混株 Cdd20 from Pixabay

chance, accident, concomitant, concurrent, fluky, fortuitous, parallel, simultaneous, unintentional, unplanned, synchronous

We all know how it works …

A song has been running through your head to the point where it is becoming maddeningly annoying. You suddenly decide to turn on the radio in hopes that you can rewire the loop in your brain and there is that exact same song resounding through the airwaves right back at you.

You’ve been thinking about someone and you inexplicably bump into that person while you’re out and about or the phone rings and that person is on the other end of the line.

You are planning to write a blog post or plan a social event or a vacation and suddenly you’re inundated with useful information regarding your plans from all manner of media sources; including the guy next door who rarely talks to you but just happened to run into you at the mailbox and has amazingly turned into a veritable magpie with a vast wealth of knowledge he cannot wait to share.

Out of twenty guests at a party, two of them have exactly the same birthday.

We all live with these little “coincidences” or as Jung so fondly referred to these acausal principled events, “synchronicities,” every single day. Most times we ignore them or just accept them as unimportant part of our mundane lives.

Yet the phenomenon fascinates believers and skeptics alike. It's a porthole into one of the most interesting philosophical questions we can ask:

Are the events of our lives ultimately objective or subjective?

Is there a deeper order, an overarching purpose to the universe?

Are we the lucky accidents of evolution, living our precious but brief lives in a fundamentally random world that has only the meaning we choose to give it?

In essence: Is the “internal” process creating “external” manifestation of events and situations OR is the “external” providing the manifestation of events and situations to get our attention so we keep traveling life’s highway to face challenges?

Although this mind boggling query has obviously been dissected to the point of obliteration aka “kicking a dead horse,” consider the following:

If we accept the premise of incarnation within the mental construct that we have come here to accept life’s challenges as the reason we are all here, then we can also accept that the long stretch of highway known as life just might have “flagged” events that act like distance markers.

By review we are:

1. Having a thought, pondering or daydream.

 2. Seeing it manifest itself shortly after the thought, pondering or daydream occurred.

3. Considering and discerning if we are actually foreseeing one of those flagged events.

Kick that up a notch. Are the experiences we tend to shrug off so dismissively just “coincidences” or are they proof that we were very much alive before we came into this life and will be very much alive upon re-entry?

Are they snapshots of immortality that tell us we are in perfect synch … AND with what?

If so, this would undeniably relay that there obviously is NO SUCH THING AS COINCIDENCE.

For those with a highly empirical bent, a coincidence is happenstance, a simultaneous collision of two events that has no special significance and obeys the laws of probability. "In reality, the most astonishingly incredible coincidence imaginable would be the complete absence of all coincidence," says John Allen Paulos, professor of mathematics at Temple University in Philadelphia, and best-selling author of Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences. "Believing in the significance of oddities is self-aggrandizing," he adds. "It says, 'Look how important I am.' People find it dispiriting to hear, 'It just happened, and it doesn't mean anything.'"

To the mystically inclined, however, coincidence is a synchronicity, the purposeful occurrence of two seemingly unrelated events. The argument is not likely to be resolved anytime soon. Of late, though, the phenomenon of coincidence has begun to yield new scientific insights. It turns out that we may actually be hardwired to connect anomalies in a meaningful way. Many of the remarkable feats our brains regularly perform—including our ability to learn the meaning of words or decode the unspoken laws of social decorum depend on our penchant for noticing coincidences. In fact, mathematicians, cognitive scientists and paranormal researchers are applying the tools of statistics and probability to tease out just where coincidences lie on the bell curve of everyday experience. ~ Jill Neimark Psychology Today

“Every individual decision is nothing but coincidence …” ~ Alva Noto

This blog is the Written Collaboration of Rev. Dr. Loni Haas and Rev. Marilee Zamaralia from a personal conversation. It may be shared in full with no changes to the content and with accredidation of the authors and the origin link to this site.