Coincidence Is No Coincidence

Theory, History

And

Inter-Relationship Of

Coincidence

And

Parapsychological

Phenomena

(Psi)

The Background

1. The Coincidence of Coincidence

Coincidence is the word we use when we can’t see the levers and pulleys. ~ Emma Bull

Make Love, Not War

The farm boy Johannes was drafted into the Dutch army at age nineteen. The Netherlands were facing imminent invasion by German forces and the whole ill-prepared and pacifist country was being mobilized to defend itself. Within a few months of basic training he was on the battlefield, facing the much superior German war machine.

The poorly equipped, small Dutch army stood but a few days. On the morning after the initial attack Johannes and one other soldier from their group found themselves the only living survivors. The victorious Germans had moved on so the twosome had little choice but to simply walk out from the battlefield. After some time they saw another Dutch contingent traveling along a dyke in the distance and started to make their way towards them across wide open farm fields. They approached despite the futile efforts of the others to wave them off and when they reached the dyke and the spellbound soldiers, they were told they had just walked across a deadly mine field. It appeared Johannes had enjoyed two Divine Interventions in a row. He joined the new group but a short time later was reported missing in action and his family and fiancé grieved.

Within a matter of days the Germans had total control of the Dutch provinces and saw the entire region as an extension of Germany. They hoped the Dutch would see themselves as German, fellow Aryans of the Master Race, and join in against the growing Allied threat. After only a few months they opened the gates of the Prisoner of War camps and the Dutch prisoners could do as they pleased, while the Polish prisoners continued to be held and abused. As it turned out, this is where Johannes had been for these months, so he walked back to his native Zeeland, the most south westerly province of the Netherlands. He did not remember later how he got home or how long it took but one day he walked into his mother’s kitchen and caught her in his arms as she fainted.

With what he had just been through in his young life, it was small wonder that Johannes joined the Dutch underground, replacing his father as the authorities were getting suspicious of the latter’s activities. Because he had German discharge papers, he was initially protected from Arbeitseinsatz, the German attempt to register all able-bodied Dutchmen so they could be transported to Germany as slave labourers. The Germans conducted regular and dreaded razzia, door to door raids to look for those who had failed to show up for deportation. Although one of his brother was picked up and shipped to German to build war materiel, almost as if by Coincidence, Johannes continued to fly below the radar of the Germans and he carried on with his underground activities until Liberation. One of the main activities of the Dutch underground was to shelter and transport downed Allied servicemen.

The Dutch have never forgotten the debt they owe the brave Allied servicemen who died in the thousands to free Europe of Nazi tyranny. Since the Canadians liberated most of the Netherlands, there is an undying love of Canadians by even modern day Dutch.

It was small wonder then that in 1952, seven years after the war ended, Johannes Zandee packed up his wife and six year old son Dick, and immigrated to Canada, settling in Oliver, British Columbia, a small farming community of four thousand. Working as farm labourers, the family was soon able to make a down payment on a mixed fruit orchard of their own.

Alois, a young Canadian of German ancestry, joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and left his fiancé to join the war in Europe on the side of the Allies aboard a Halifax bomber. After only a few sorties his plane was hit in a bombing raid over Germany but they managed to limp as far as Sweden where the plane crashed and the crew bailed out. Alois, ended up in a Swedish hospital, recovering from multiple injuries. In the bed next to him, Alois met a fellow compatriot whom he had not previously known, and who had suffered a similar fate but on a different aircraft.

One day this pilot received mail from home and passed Alois a photograph announcing this was a picture of his fiancé. Alois was shocked to see his fiancé in the photograph and it took a short delicate discussion to determine that the two women shown just happened to be in the same photograph. The women had both joined the same Women’s Auxiliary Unit in Saskatoon as part of the war effort and had just met. Upon recovering from his injuries, Alois was smuggled back to the UK for re-deployment. He ended up passing through an underground cell in Holland.

In 1959 Alois Sieben, originally from Saskatchewan, and his family moved to the same small town of Oliver and moved into a rented house less than two kilometres from the Zandee farm. Their three children entered their new school with their eldest, thirteen year old Lynn, going into Junior High. The teacher seated her in a seat at the front of the class, right in front of Dick. It was love at first sight and eight years later Lynn and Dick were married.

One day over a coffee, Alois and Johannes ended up talking about the war, something neither of them ever did. In fact the few details given about Johannes above were learned from his brother shortly after Johannes died. Although the two veterans had not known each other personally before their kids met, they quickly realized the similarity of their fluky survival and that their networks had crossed in war torn Europe less than two decades before.

The Dick in this story is the author of this book. One could attribute a series of apparent Coincidences occurring in the above story and it is a personal one for my family and is significant to us. It gives but a flavour of the many interesting and sometimes life-changing stories, all previously unpublished, that are collected here and presented in PART II.

The above story is presented to help introduce these real life stories that seem to involve aspects of Coincidence, but which evolve to a more holistic world view. Often Coincidences, or a series of them, suggest the existence of other conditions that appears to come from beyond our normal senses and understanding of reality. Coincidences therefore give us pause to question reality itself.

People are not generally in agreement what constitutes Coincidence and admittedly one is at liberty to expand or contract dictionary definitions to suit their outlook of life. The most rudimentary concept is the coming together of events without apparent cause. If one lives in small town Alberta and by chance bumps into their neighbour’s son in a café in Madrid, one is likely to be impressed and we call it a Coincidence. How about the following rather famous and previously published story? At the turn of the twentieth century a man from a small town in the small province of Prince Edward Island moved to New Orleans and took up a career in Vaudeville. Shortly after gaining some success, he died and was buried there in a lead lined coffin. A hurricane swept through the area and washed the casket from its resting place in the cemetery and into the ocean. Eight years later his casket washed up on the shore of his home town in Canada! Similarly in my personal story above, the two fiancés appearing in the same photograph would readily be seen as Coincidence. In all cases one would be inclined to exclaim, What a Coincidence! or What are the Chances!?

In this book we are going to take a more inclusive and broader definition of Coincidence. We will do this because we are going to build upon the concept of apparent simple Coincidence being part of bigger issues which are the basis is this book. Consequently we will present an extensive selection of donated stories, here referred to as Personal Accounts (PAs). We have well over five hundred to choose from and in Chapter 14 will do an analysis of types of stories. In addition we have another data base of five hundred stories not presented here to examine types.

Our expanded definition accordingly is as follows:

A Coincidence is the convergence of two or more events, circumstances, and/or people, either temporally or spatially, coming to a single realization or actualization, remarkable for lack of apparent causal connection, and in a way that it is significant and meaningful to those experiencing it.

At first pass this may seem like a mouthful but the key ingredients are spontaneity, acausality, personal significance, and lack of temporal and spatial limitations. In many of the Personal Accounts presented in PART II it becomes apparent that some people take this much broader view of Coincidence. An example might be the circumstances under which one meets their significant other where people often see a series of apparently unrelated events leading to this happy conclusion. A couple might muse upon the fact they both stopped for fuel at a certain service station and bumped into each other. It is very significant to them and leads them to question if the events were really Coincidence or something bigger. Another illustration is when one dreams their mother, who lives on a different continent, dies and this is confirmed the next day. Again we must conclude this apparent Coincidence has atemporal and aspatial aspects. Such extensions to the simplistic definition of Coincidence illustrate where we are going with this book.

Let us examine a historical event that had tremendous, far-reaching and meaningful ramifications to millions of people. On June 28, 1914 the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was invited to Sarajevo in Serbia to observe some military manoeuvres. A crowd of tens of thousands lined the street to watch the Archduke’s motorcade and in this crowd were seven men determined to assassinate the Archduke. The first lost his nerve, the second threw a bomb and missed and the conspirators thought they had exhausted their chances and withdrew and went into hiding. Later in the day the Archduke’s driver turned into a wrong street and by Coincidence stopped in front of Schiller’s Food Store. Also by Coincidence Gavrito Princip, one of he conspirators was hiding there. He simply stepped out into the street, walked right up to the stopped car, and executed the Archduke and his wife at point blank. A consequence of this was that Austria declared war on Serbia and within weeks Germany, Russia, France, Britain and Japan joined in to start the First World War. As a result 65 million combatants became involved, nearly 25 million were wounded and more than 10 million died. Four dynasties, the Russian, Turkish, Austro-Hungarian and German, ended and the Imperial Empires of Britain and French started to collapse. Worse, the war that was to end all wars led to WWII which had even greater loss of life. All this because the car took a wrong turn and came to a full stop in front of the assassin who was out of position.

The opening story of this chapter, my own Personal Account, is another example of a series of events but in comparison that story had only personal significance. Over a period of nearly two decades critical events combined to result in a meaningful development in my and my family’s lives. Next to being born, meeting my wife is the most important event in my life. From that came our children, our grandchildren, and our eventful lives together.

To stress the point of the combination of events let us review this story. Sceptically one could question if all the events listed are really examples of Coincidence. Are the following examples of Coincidence? A young soldier is one of only two men, out of a group of 150, to survive a battle, he walks across a mine field and survives, he is reported missing in action and six months later walks into his mother’s kitchen. He becomes an officer in the Underground which often smuggles Allied service men. Seven years later he packs up his wife and six year old son and immigrates to a particular small town in Canada.

In an apparent Parallel Universe (we dedicate a whole chapter to this later), a Canadian of German descent joins the RCAF and is shot down in a bombing raid on Germany but his plane manages to limp to Sweden where it crashes. He is one of few who survive and ends up in a hospital there. He meets another Canadian pilot who suffered a similar fate. Most Allied airmen died over Germany or in the North Sea. This compatriot shows him a single photograph of their respective fiancés, neither of which the other knows. Alois is smuggled back to the UK through the Dutch underground and ultimately returns to Canada. He also takes his young family to the same small town as the Dutchman’s and their children are seated next to each other in school and fall in love.

From my perspective the convergence of all these factors led to one of the most important events in my life. I call the totality a Coincidence but lead on to question what really is this all about. Is there more to Coincidence than meets the eye? Is it part of a bigger picture? To analyze this question we move onto a different way of thinking. The following story, another of my Personal Accounts, illustrates this transition and moves us on to the main topic of this book.

My wife to be, Lynn and I attended the same high school as kids and when we graduated, she moved to Vancouver to attend Business College and work in that city. I chose to stay in our hometown and take what was then called Grade Thirteen, the equivalent of first year university, at our old high school. This was a much cheaper option than going to university in Vancouver, which I had to do the following year.

During our year apart Lynn came back to our hometown of Oliver by Greyhound Bus on a few occasions for long weekends. This was in those days a very rural area, and it took several bus connections to get to Oliver. By driving north to Kaleden, about twenty kilometres away, an Oliverite could intercept the Greyhound destined for a major hub in Penticton and save several hours for someone travelling from the Coast to Oliver. A bus would drop passengers anywhere along the route and a roadside service station near Kaleden was a logical spot. Passengers would disembark there even when it was closed at night. Recall that in 1964 there were no cell phones so coordination was much more difficult.

One Thanksgiving weekend Lynn was coming to visit and it was arranged by snail mail that I would pick her up Kalenden around midnight, as she had to leave Vancouver after work. I was eighteen and had my first car. A combination of being young and foolish and excitement about seeing Lynn, I was definitely stretching the speed limit in my ’55 Chevy, despite the fact it was a dark rainy night. Along the route I had to cross a narrow wooden bridge across the Okanagan River and although two cars could pass, it was very narrow by today’s standards. For some reason I do not comprehend to this day, I slowed from my excessive speed and even geared down (a three speed manual) and crept onto the bridge. It was overly slow, by anyone’s standards. Suddenly there in the rain stood a completely black horse, right in the middle of bridge! Had I not been at a dead crawl I would likely have hit the horse. The wooden planks on the deck ran parallel to the bridge so would have been very slippery and there was no where to go, other than through the wooden railings on both sides, and a drop into the river ten metres below.

Even if I had I not been seriously injured, which is unlikely, undoubtedly the car would have been damaged beyond being able to carry on. An eighteen year old girl would have been standing alone on the side the road, in the middle of a rainy night, with no way to communicate with her pickup.

I would like to credit my own good common sense for having saved me from what could have been a serious accident. However, I was so surprised by the whole affair I remember thinking at the time that something or someone outside of me had taken control. It is still vivid in my mind as if this event happened yesterday rather than fifty years ago. Was it in fact my own better judgement? Was it a Coincidence there was a horse on the bridge and that I slowed down so dramatically and was able to avoid the accident? How about the fact a black un-tethered horse, kilometres from the nearest paddock, would be standing on a bridge in the middle of the night? It could have been standing on the open road where there was room to manoeuvre. The horse could have been white! Another car could have been approaching from the other direction and lit the bridge. Were these all Coincidences? Was something guiding me the way something did when my father walked across a mine field a generation earlier?

People react to situations like this in manifold ways, from shrugging it off completely, to crediting good luck, or to reading all sorts of other explanations into such cases. Coincidence might be the first thing to come to mind but more likely people might thank their lucky stars or a guardian angel, while others might simply call it Divine Intervention. Still others might say it was a case of ESP, Precognition, Clairvoyance, a Gut Feeling, a Premonition, a Sixth Sense or some other inexplicable psychic factor. An equally perplexing quandary is that often no single category fits in such cases! Often it can be several of these strange categories at the same time, and not just because of overlapping definitions.

This story illustrates how we move from considering unusual events, which on the surface might appear as Coincidence, and realize we have moved to a whole new paradigm of reality.

Moving Beyond Coincidence

This chapter is a general introduction and exploration of the phenomenon of Coincidences and an attempt to analyze why and how they manifest. We also move from only Coincidence to a broader subject constituting Parapsychological Phenomena.

Parapsychological Phenomena are commonly abbreviated to psi (ψ), the second last letter of the Greek alphabet. Psi, pronounced sigh, is the root of such words as psyche, psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis, etc. Etymologically the word psyche derives from the classical Greek where it meant life but progressed to connote spirit, ghost and ultimately self or conscious personality and this concept was the foundation of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophies. Later the word became Latinized to anima. However, since much of the early Western work in the field of psychology was done by two Germans, Freud and Jung, the German seele became commonly used. Freud divided seele into the id, super ego and ego, while Jung went to great lengths to distinguish between the totality of psychic processes and soul. The prefix para in parapsychology of course means beyond. The capitalized psychic factors listed above constitute examples of types of psi. A full chapter on Parapsychology, Chapter 5, follows later.

The point is that significant, suddenly revealed situations, progress from Coincidence to other more complicated issues quite frequently. They qualify as Parapsychological Phenomena, whether we feel comfortable with that term or not. Our most common reaction is to exclaim, Wow! What a coincidence! This is a natural reaction because at first pass we do not really know, nor stop to question, what is really going on.

In PART II we will categorize the Personal Accounts into eighteen different chapters, each representing a different type of psi. We will see that less than 25% of donated Coincidence stories are only Coincidence, the rest being different types of psi.

Knowing the process will evolve to relating Coincidence and psi, and even suggesting Coincidence is merely another form of psi, and ultimately theorizing how and why these entities manifest, we can look in more detail at the background and history of studying Coincidence.

A Secondary Goal of This Book

From the start of this entire project I knew many Coincidences would arise in the process of writing this book and these were recorded and will appear in the penultimate chapter of the book, in PART IV. One of the most significant events turned out to be previously unknown factors related to the wartime story of my father, with which I began this chapter. It quickly becomes evident that we have great trouble understanding Coincidence and psi; what they constitute, why they happen and how they manifest. The main reason for this is that we in the West especially, are indoctrinated into a common sense paradigm born out of Newtonian determinism. PART III is a rudimentary introduction to the New Sciences, including Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and the Theories of Chaos, Super String and Parallel Universes. Therein lies the missing links of traditional science as a means of understanding how and why Coincidence and psi manifest, and ultimately what defines Reality.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF COINCIDENCE

How Do We See Coincidence?

Man has always been impressed with apparent surprise discoveries outside of routine predictable life. Because they stand out, we are impressed that certain types of these events seem to arise without apparent cause and from the conjunction of several factors at a given moment. The terms Synchronicity and/or Coincidence naturally apply. Upon reflection one might wonder if such phenomena were not the impetus for the creation of religions. Once this happened, these religions gradually precluded people from attributing natural instrumentality.

The human mind is most likely to discover such Coincidences when it is at a boundary condition, such as when not concentrating on anything in particular. It may also occur when the mind is either totally relaxed or in the other extreme, under dire stress, trauma or fatigue and all these conditions are frequently referred to as an altered state of consciousness (ASC). When the Coincidences are actually occurrences of psi, it becomes apparent we experience the revelations by Extra Sensory Perception (ESP).

There are of course those, particularly adherents of some Oriental philosophies, who hold there are no Coincidences per se in life, they are merely a manifestation of fate, or a cause – effect duality. If fate is a cause, then by definition, there can be no Coincidence. One of the guest chapters, written by Cedona Holly, examines this aspect. Similarly, certain theological considerations hold that everything in life is predetermined by deities, gods, or God. This is of course especially true of Calvinistic reformed Christianity and Islam. This again would remove the essential ingredient of acausality, thus proving Coincidence does not exist. Rev. Dwight Geiger’s chapter will examine this aspect, not only for Christianity but other religions as well.

Later we will look at other references to religion concerning Coincidence and psi but it is interesting to interject here an observation arising from the juxtaposition of mentioning both the contributions of Cedona Holly and Dwight Geiger. The chapter by Cedona starts with her largely Eastern philosophy, mainly Buddhism, and she says, I now feel this (coincidence) is a tap on the shoulder from Spirit. ‘There is more to life than you know! This is a sign for you!’. In Pastor Geiger’s chapter (of course Christian) we read, …(coincidence).. is the vehicle that God can use to shake us awake to His existence and power. It is interesting that two different world views share the same view of Coincidence, ie, it is a tool of divine intersession calling us to pay attention.

After the surprise of discovering a Coincidence, and after the Wow! Moment, we naturally wonder if it could possibly be a Coincidence at all, or did something else just happen, and if so, what? Some Coincidences are so far-fetched one might be led to question if in fact there are not some other explanations. We will see this is the case.

Likely the first rational thing that comes to the sceptical mind is the question, what is the likelihood of such a Coincidence occurring just by chance? This leads us to the Laws of Probability, and a branch of mathematics called Statistical Analysis. Mathematicians can work out regimes for assigning numerical values to the probability of certain events happening. If there are several related issues, then the probability of them all happening together or at once results in a number progressively smaller, ie, less likely.

An example might be the oft sought after perfect Bridge hand. Obviously the chance of being dealt the first spade is one in four, but the probability of being dealt successive spades declines with subsequent cards. Obviously after being dealt 12 spades in a row the chance of getting the thirteenth is one in forty. To be dealt thirteen spades has a chance of one in 650,013,559,600 of occurring. Some time ago the London Times carried a story of a player suffering a heart attack when being dealt such a perfect hand.

The chances of winning the six-digit Lotto 649 is one in 13,983,816. The world’s record lottery, the March 2012 Maryland Lottery, paid out $640,000,000 to three winners. The chance of winning was one in 175,000,000. Surprisingly the chance of being hit by lighting is one in 576,000. In fact, the News reported at least one of the people who bought a ticket in the Maryland Lottery was actually hit by lightning on that date. It makes one wonder why anyone would buy lottery tickets rather than life insurance!

Are any of these cases examples of Coincidence when they do happen? Even though it may be very significant and meaningful to the person, technically the real answer is no, due to the causality – the chance aspect. If on the other hand, Aunt Joan had a Precognition she was going to win, told you about it, and then won, well then we really would be in a whole different paradigm!

There are problems in using Statistical Analysis to quantify Coincidences. Some Statisticians would prefer to work out the overall probability of something happening in the future. If the event does not materialize, then numbers justify it not happening. However, if something has already happened, obviously it has, and what is the purpose of trying to predict if it would as the answer if obviously 100%.

Not only amongst Statisticians are there diverse views of the relationship between Coincidence and Statistic Probability. Professors Combs and Holland, in their book Synchronicity definitely say they don’t believe in probability equations to explain this subject. On the other hand, John Briggs and David Peat in Turbulent Mirror view the mathematical approach as paramount.

We are very fortunate to have a guest chapter on Probability prepared and donated by Dr. Anthony Quas, a Professor of Dynamical Systems and Probability at the University of Victoria. In a somewhat unique application, he reviewed the first one hundred or so Personal Accounts to be compiled in this book and he based his comments on those particular examples.

This book draws conclusions on how we see Coincidence by examining a data base of nearly one thousand Personal Accounts. There are enough examples to disprove that Coincidence and psi are only a probability function.

One of the most common events offered as an example of a Coincidence is the ubiquitous situation where you are thinking about, and perhaps feeling a little guilty that you haven’t called your Aunt Joan, who lives on the other side of the continent or world. Suddenly the phone rings and it is her! I call this the Aunt Joan Effect because we have an Aunt Joan and she often calls under such circumstances. I theorize that through the use of electromagnetic brain waves, or some other unknown physical brain mechanism, the two individuals have subconsciously and telepathically contacted each other’s field of awareness, leading them to communicate. This desire to communicate would be causal and a discrete reason, thus the so-called Coincidence again would be disqualified just by definition. Furthermore, Telepathy is a classical example of psi and later we will discuss at length Energy Field theory. If mental radio/telephone exists, it is definitely causal and disqualifies Coincidence.

Causality and Acausality

As we have stated several times now, one of the main requirements of Coincidence by the classical definition is that it must have no apparent cause. Although we can challenge that very definition, let us look at this factor as it is also fundamental to our common sense. This will at the same time confirm Coincidence is outside our common sense. The concept of cause arises in a field of study called Causality or Cause and Effect, a field all to itself. Causality denotes a necessary relationship between one event (a cause) and another event (an effect) which is the direct consequence of the first. Appreciation of cause and effect is an ingrained characteristic that defines humanity and largely appears to set us apart from other life forms. However it may be argued that even animals have a significant understanding of cause and effect, perhaps making it an underlying characteristic of consciousness. Your view will be tempered by whether you think humans are the only creatures capable of self awareness.

Clearly the higher apes possess awareness of cause and effect. Ostracized monkeys have been known to die of broken hearts. Within chimp colonies there is a political hierarchy and males do make alliances to meet their goals. These examples all require an appreciation of cause and effect.

For other life forms it is debatable if they appreciate this mechanism or if they are merely responding to instinct. For example North American deer fawns quickly learn which plants they can eat in my wife’s garden. On the other hand, how would we explain the fact that in lean hard winters pregnant does will deliberately eat certain junipers to cause natural abortion? It is difficult to see that these creatures have not understood cause and effect at a fundamental level.

Such questions also bring into question what constitutes instinct, for both humans and other animal life. Is the understanding of cause and effect merely a learned condition? Or are we dealing with some interconnection between members of a species that passes on such abilities? We will explore overlying informational Energy Fields in some detail in a later chapter.

The Western view of cause and effect goes back to the early Greeks and led to the development of Occidental philosophy of Cause and Effect and Determinism.

Until the twentieth century, the definition of causality included:

1. laws exist that govern how a cause can have an effect.

2. cause must be prior, or at least simultaneous with the effect.

3. cause must be spatially connected to effect by a chain of intermediate things in contact.

The study of causality sequentially led to the concepts of Determinism, which we will also examine briefly, and Existentialism. The latter maintains that because of and despite the fact the universe has not provided us a meaningful frame of reference, humans must and can each provide a meaning for themselves.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860), the pessimistic German philosopher, proclaimed that physical causality was only one of the rulers of the world, the other was a metaphysical entity, a kind of universal consciousness, compared to which individual consciousness is as a dream compared to wakefulness. It is interesting, as we will see shortly, that Carl Jung preferred to look at this concept as the universal unconsciousness.

Schopenhauer felt we can never attain the degree of emotional, physical and sexual desires we seek fully so we are doomed to live in an unfulfilled state. As a consequence we keep trying and searching for fuller lives, including defining what constitutes our reality.

He said Coincidence is the simultaneous occurrence of causally unconnected events (a good, short definition). Further he posited that everything we experience fits into two fundamentally different kinds of connection, firstly, in the objective, causal connection of the natural process, and secondly, in a subjective connection which exists only in relation to the individual who experiences it, and is thus very personal and subjective as are his own dreams.

With our difficulty in understanding the reasons for Coincidence, we may be tempted to look towards Oriental thinking, as Jung did for Synchronicity, for possible clues. The appreciation of cause and effect is predominant in many Oriental philosophies, albeit in many different forms. Indian philosophy focuses largely on the relationship between cause and effect and there are at least two distinct views, one which states an effect is a real or apparent modification of the cause, and another, that an effect is a new arising. Buddhists however, reject both and propose a middle way and consider fundamental intentionality behind effects in a Karmic Law.

The framework of cause and effect is so ingrained in the human psyche that it is small wonder we can not easily understand an explanation for Coincidence, which by definition has no cause. Failure to be able to understand Coincidence repeatedly brings us back not only to Eastern philosophies but also to archaic (not primitive as Jung says) ways of thinking which are foundational. Hippocrates (460 – 370 BCE) held there is a common flow in life, one common breathing, and all things are in Sympathy, the so-called Doctrine of Sympathy. Coincidence is merely such an alignment. Pythagoras (570 – 495 BCE), father of Pythagorean philosophy, presented the concept of Harmony, so that meaningful Coincidences are manifestations of an all embracing universal order.

Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630), the German Mathematician, astronomer and astrologer, posited that nothing is meaningless and nothing happens that is not evident in space or on earth. He felt the human soul was a cosmic resonator and that the soul was connected to Plato’s (427 – 347 BCE) concept of a world soul or anima mundi. In this way the observance of Coincidences followed naturally. In fact many early thinkers appreciated Coincidence as a result of a universal connectedness, which in effect challenged the definition we now use for Coincidence.

In PART III we will look at Quantum Mechanics (QM) which turns our whole understanding of reality upside down for various reasons, not least of which is the connection to cause and effect. In QM information can be sent and received faster than the speed of light, meaning information would be received before it was sent and an effect would be apparent before the cause! QM also proves effects do not required causes at all.

Determinism

Almost universally we fundamentally believe in some sort of temporal mechanism of cause and effect. Determinism, particularly mechanistic determination, is the school of thought that holds every event is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences.

Determinism does not necessarily go as far as to imply humans do not have an influence over future events, thus it is not a prescription for fatalism. On the other hand the doctrine maintains our ability to influence the future is dependent on the present and past. Still, some feel that determinism and free will are mutually exclusive. There are many fields of determinism including biological, cultural, psychological, logical, theological, environmental, and others.

Causal (or nomological) determinism states future events are a result of past and present events combined with the laws of nature, and as such have a relationship with predictability. Although Coincidence may fit the first requirement, predictability is definitely not part of the equation! The jury is still out on psi however as some forms, such as remote viewing or dreams that manifest, suggest predictability may come into play.

The concept that the entire universe is a deterministic system is internationally widely held, but Eastern determinism is somewhat different, especially in Buddhism. Here in what is called Dependent Origination, it is held that every phenomenon is conditioned by, and depends on, the phenomena that it is not.

One of the most fascinating concepts in Indian culture for me is Indra’s Web. Indra Śakra is the leader of the Devas or gods and the lord of Svargaloka or heaven in the Hindu religion. He is also the god of rain and thunderstorms. Prosaically Indra’s Web is described as a cobweb with delicate dewdrops at every junction. By looking at a single dewdrop one sees images reflected in every other dewdrop and they are interconnected ad infinitum. Other less prosaic accounts describe the net as a vast number of reflective glass spheres suspended from the ceiling of Indra’s temple, and a single flash of light would illuminate the entire array as it bounced from bauble to bauble. Similarly every person and every event is lit by all others in the universe. Every thing is dependent on other factors. For Indra’s Web, this bouncing light is analogous to karma which postulates each intentional action will have a result in the future.

Another associated Eastern philosophy is found in the classic Chinese book and philosophy of I Ching, The Book of Changes, which Jung studied when developing his ideas. Here the probabilities for the future events are set by a kind of divine influence, and/or Coincidence, minimizing the influence of things and people, although it does consider how we humans will deal with what fate throws at us. We will have more to say on I Ching later.

Our modern physical view of the world was largely cast by Isaac Newton’s (1642 – 1727) determinism and we are seemingly incapable of psychologically moving beyond it. Predominantly in the West, Newtonian physics is seen to control events through rigorous physical rules and laws. Once initial conditions are set, everything else can theoretically be predicted and calculated. The analogy of a group of billiard balls traveling on a table is often used to express the ultimate outcome of simply setting one entity in motion. In some way this is not dissimilar to Indra’s Web, except it introduces the scientific predictability aspect.

The effect of Newtonian determinism can not be underestimated in our very basic makeup and it has in fact constructed the very essence of our common sense. Because Newton’s Laws, formally set out in his Principia of 1687, still explain virtually everything physical in the macro world, we find it impossible not to let this deterministic viewpoint rule our lives. We cannot help ourselves from trying to explain virtually everything we encounter in terms of what we think constitutes the laws of the universe. There is no implication this is a bad thing, but merely that when we try to move beyond the macro physical world, it is as if our brains are locked in a boiler plate lined box. It is only QM in the last century that brings traditional science into question. Coincidence and psi do this as well!

Yes dear reader, it is not beyond me that I am exactly guilty of what I lament as our constrictive common sense. As a technocrat I am trying to explain Coincidence and psi in deterministic terms. It constitutes a large part of this book.

Also challenging Newtonian determinism is religion. Even some of the earliest Western philosophies include the concept that there must be some inherent absolute natural laws governing, but these come from God. One of the reasons Isaac Newton became the foundation of modern science is that some of his predecessors, such as Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642), did not publish similar theories because he was well aware the authorities would have burned him at the stake as a heretic.

Even today the struggle continues. Many Christians seem to be able to internally justify their opposing positions or put their reality into separate boxes. How else would we explain a university graduate in technical sciences espousing the world is 6000 years old! No greater example of continued conflict is the revolution that erupted over evolution, started by the 1859 book On The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882). One need only refer to the 1991 book Darwin on Trial by Philip Johnson, then a Professor of Law at Berkeley, to see how great a controversy evolution remains even today.

QM is now challenging the West’s clinging to an idealistic set of universal and simple laws ruling the world. In QM, by looking at the constituents of matter, it turns out both their motion and position is not predictable simultaneously. The basic tenant of QM is that there is merely the probability of something existing. This raises questions about Determinism because it would be possible to conclude things are in fact not predictable. Some students of QM hold there may exist hidden variables which could in fact explain that things do proceed in an absolutely deterministic way. From this prospective, we just have not yet found the missing links, and there is hard evidence they do not exist.

In general, QM postulates natural physical occurrences happen without cause. As we have seen, this of course aligns with our classical definition of Coincidence. This is a significant endorsement of Coincidence as a part of reality! We will dedicate an entire chapter on Quantum Mechanics in PART III to enlarge on some of these crazy ideas.

The History of Studying Coincidence

We have already mentioned various personalities, some from antiquity, who have expressed opinions on Coincidence. These were mentioned as a way of defining and setting boundaries on the subject as a whole. Let us now look at some others who have studied Coincidence in the past and built a foundation for modern comprehension.

One of the most interesting early investigators of Coincidences was Paul Kammerer (1880 – 1926), an Austrian biologist, who looked at numerous examples of meaningful coincidences he experienced in his own life. However, he became focused mainly upon the inexplicable occurrence of series of numbers, letters, words or names. He saw them as objective physical phenomena and things beyond mere chance and postulated an acausal organizing principle. Kammerer’s concentration on numbers led him to write Das Gesetz der Serie, or The Law of Series in 1919.

Krammerer was not the only person known to have been obsessed with numbers. Pythagoreans believe in the magic seven, the Bible is full of numbers, especially three, seven and twelve, Geothe believed in revolving cycles of good and bad days, and Freud was obsessed with cycles of 23 and 27 days. Other than Krammerer, none of these other sources however made a particular point of connecting them to Coincidence. Especially in the Bible these recurrent numerical references are instead actually symbolic of divine characteristics. We all know 666 as the Devil’s number and 777 as Completion. Is it a Coincidence there are 66 books in the Bible?

Being at the leading edge of an iceberg, Krammerer did not apparently get much support or collaboration from like minds. In fact he was somewhat ridiculed in his day, perhaps because he got so deeply into the series issue, rather than concentrate on the broader subject. Modern writers are not much more supportive of his work, although some do recognize his pioneering bravery.

Poor Krammerer, he was so widely criticized during the period of his work, that he became so depressed that he ultimately committed suicide. Ironically he became much quoted in later years. Perhaps little different from van Gogh?

Personally I think Krammerer’s work was under-appreciated as it led to the next step in formalizing the study of Coincidence. Ultimately he defined synchronicity as coincidences that mirrored deep psychological processes. This is where Carl Jung entered the fray, and to put it somewhat unkindly, he dressed up some of Krammerer’s work (and words) in his own words and took the glory.

Jung Makes Synchronicity Out of Coincidence

Some view the enigmatic Carl Jung as the Father of Modern Psychology, so hardly anyone can ignore him for manifold reasons, not least of which was his moving along the formal study of Coincidence, or Synchronicity as he called it.

Carl Jung (1875 – 1961) was a Swiss psychologist and is best known for his contributions to the science of psychology and the practice of psychoanalysis. Personally he had to deal with many demons in his life, growing up with his own neurosis as well as his mother’s. His father, a clergyman, put a lot of pressure on Carl to follow in his footsteps or at second best, make something of himself in a recognized field such as medicine. The clergyman tried to steer him away from science but when he suffered a faith crisis of his own, Carl became even more confused.

Regardless, as a young man Jung developed an intense interest in the paranormal, undoubtedly a sin in his father’s eyes. He used to host regular spiritual séances, where all sorts of strange things reportedly happened. It seems Jung ended up battling the dichotomy of science and religion his whole life.

For seven years Jung worked with Freud and took away some key concepts, including psychoanalysis, dealing with patient’s subconscious and interpreting their dreams. Sometimes we miss the immense contribution of Freud to Jung’s fame. Their relationship was doomed to failure, especially because of Freud’s scathing remarks about Jung’s religion. Professionally they diverged as well and to me the divide between the two was that Freud branched off into the science of pure psychology and treating patients from that frame of reference, while Jung followed the path of parapsychology. While Freud continued to delve into internal mental processes tied to some universal consciousness, in some ways Jung diverged into a universal unconsciousness or the unus mundus as he called it.

Jung worked as a psychiatrist and over the years learned from his own patients their deep seated issues related to subconscious problems, ultimately leading him to also popularize the attention on archetypes as a tool for psychoanalysis. At one point he got so involved in this type of work he suffered a mental breakdown but when he recovered he started to develop his theories on Synchronicity.

Jung frequently started his treatise on this subject by relating two personal incidents wherein he experienced Synchronicity. The first incident concerned his treatment of a recalcitrant patient who at one session was relating a dream about a scarab beetle. During their session Jung noticed a beetle hit his office window and upon examining it, found it to be the closest European equivalent of a scarab. The connection of the dream and the real beetle became a breakthrough moment for the patient, and the start of Jung’s future views. The second event he frequently referred to was another personal case concerning the repeated experience with fish images over a short period.

In PART II we will examine many Personal Accounts of Coincidence and psi that make Jung’s two hallmark cases seem trivial and insignificant. Perhaps he too sensed he had a weak case and started looking elsewhere.

Jung became sympathetic to the battle that J.B. Rhine et al were having convincing the world that their meticulously conducted scientific research into psi was genuine. Rhine was desperately trying to make parapsychology a recognized field of science and even today it is barely so recognized. However because of Rhine’s disciplined scientific approach, Jung quoted him broadly, trying to add recognition and status to his own work.

Jung’s study of archetypes was somewhat seminal in tying his philosophy to a universal unconsciousness. He said Synchronicity is rooted in deep levels of the mind or psyche arising from the unus mundus. He called this the pseudopsychic or psychoid state, ie, not strictly psychic but partly physical as well.

Like myth, archetypes are part of human makeup but we do not really know the origins. Archetypes are repetitive patterns of thought and action throughout mankind. They are the model of a person, personality or behaviour that may be stereotype or epitome and they are so basic to our makeup we cannot fathom their origins. Jung’s main archetypes were: The Self, the Shadow, The Anima, The Animus and The Persona. Secondary archetypes were: the father, the mother, the child, the hero, the maiden, the wise old man, the magician, the earth mother, the witch, the faithful dog, the enduring horse, the devious cat and the trickster.

The Trickster is felt by some to play a significant role in experiencing and understanding Coincidence and deserves special mention in a chapter of its own later.

We will look at Jung’s definitions of Synchronicity shortly but they evolved over time from something like a common dictionary definition of coincidence and at one point as a Coincidence tied to an archetype, in fact he defined Synchronicity as a coincidence tied to an archetype. Generally however, he steered away from using the term Coincidence because he seemed to be stealing Krammerer’s work and also it smacked of chance, not science. With such an array of archetypes listed above, and taking their allegorical or symbolic interpretation, Jung could elevate the most mundane Coincidence to his high brow Synchronicity. For example in his questionably famous foundation of the scarab beetle, he said the beetle was a symbolic or archetypical representation of rebirth, thus allowing his patient to see a new beginning. A little obscure?

Still Jung was having trouble making total sense of his evolving Synchronicity theories and in desperation turned to Eastern thought for inspiration.

Previously we made brief mention of I Ching. For those not familiar with I Ching, it defies scant description, but basically it is based on traditional Chinese oracles, much like the Romans who as founders of western culture, looked at animal entrails. It is believed Chinese I Ching predates written language and has evolved to the present, where it still has followers. Basically the casting of yarrow stalks led to an array of lines (somewhat like the children’s game of Pick Up Sticks), into which were read some sort of significance as basic life situations. It was particularly popular with the illiterate peasantry looking for fortune telling, but was modified by the intelligentsia with Confucianism and Taoism. In western cultures the I Ching can be compared to geomancy.

During the Han Dynasty the yarrow stalks were replace with three coins. It was during the Warring State Period (475 – 221 BCE) that I Ching was re-interpreted as a system of cosmology and philosophy, centered on the balance of opposites.

This may all sound somewhat like primitive black magic but because I Ching developed over perhaps five thousand years, it became a basis for Chinese philosophy. The Ying – Yang concept is mainly Taoist but even here Ying was represented by broken lines, Yang by unbroken. The system was much modified by Confucianism, a mainstay of Chinese culture.

Jung sought direction in I Ching, likely because it represented ancient wisdom and is seen as the basis of one of the oldest and greatest cultures on earth. It is however not difficult to see the connection to Coincidence, because the casting of stalks led to coincidental arrangements, representing different views of reality. With his belief in the universal unconscious, Jung must have seen that somehow the universe was arranging the stalks? Regardless, it is a philosophy based on primitive divination. And this man is viewed as the Father of Modern Psychology?

One final source of Jung’s research into coming up with a view of Synchronicity was his befriending one of his patients, the neurotic but brilliant scientist, Wolfgang Pauli. Pauli was at the forefront of the development of Quantum Mechanics and obviously led Jung to think outside the box by re-considering causality. Pauli was instrumental in helping Jung finally record his theories.

So what exactly was Jung’s interpretation of Krammerer’s Synchronicity? Jung finally got around to writing his series of books on Synchronicity when he was in his seventies. He published Synchronicity – An Acausal Connecting Principle, first in German in 1952 and then in English in 1955. After being accused of being vague and incomplete, Jung added a final chapter called Resumé, as a final explanation. His final view of Synchronicity sounds very much like a treatise on psi.

He redefined Synchronicity as the occurrence of a meaningful coincidence in time that can take three forms:

a. The coincidence of a certain psychic content with a corresponding objective process which is perceived to take place simultaneously.

b. The coincidence of a subjective psychic state with a phantasm, ie, dream or vision, which later turns out to be a more or less faithful reflection of the synchronistic objective event that took place more or less simultaneously, but at a distance.

c. The same, except that the event perceived takes place in the future and is represented in the present only by a phantasm that corresponds to it.

In the end it appears that Jung concluded that one needed a psi event to prove Synchronicity/Coincidence, a rather strange conclusion. Diametrically opposed, this book opines that Coincidence events are really what we call it when we experience psi events. In fact, there seems ample evidence to suggest that Coincidence is just another form of psi.

Studies of Coincidence After Jung

An excellent and classic book on Coincidences is the 1972 release of The Roots of Coincidence by Arthur Koestler. He obviously was not a Jung fan and almost accused him of plagiarism of Krammerer’s earlier work, in fact he stressed he used the latter’s definitions almost verbatim. However while Krammerer tried to explain Coincidence in physical terms, rejecting any mentalistic or ESP mechanisms, Jung said that everything had to do with the unconscious mind.

Koestler opined one of Jung’s greatest failures was his inability to shake the shackles of cause and effect. Jung kept relapsing into spurious causal explanations to make the acausal principle work. I fear Koestler could level such charges at me as well as I look for scientific explanations, based on New Sciences.

Koestler’s comparison of Krammerer and Jung is most intriguing! From my perspective both views (physical versus mental) were correct and both were incorrect! When we come to examining the Quantum Brain sending and receiving information to and from Energy Fields, we will see that Coincidence and psi are both physical and mental at the same time!

Interestingly, Jung categorically stated physical force fields could not possibly explain paranormal occurrences. He based this conclusion on Rhine’s reference to work done by Usher and Burt which showed positive ESP correlations could be shown to exist at distances up to 4000 miles. He stated, the fact that distance has no effect in principle shows that the thing in question cannot be a phenomenon of force or energy. Likely with the aid of Pauli, he correctly states energy fall(s) proportionately to the square of the distance. I think what they both missed was that information can be encoded upon a universal energy field, something that had not been discovered in Pauli’s time. It is aspatial and atemporal.

Dr. Roderick Main’s approach to evaluating Jung’s work is also worth noting. Main originally wrote an article for the 2002 edition of Harvest, and Lance Storm reproduced the article in his 2008 book Synchronicity. Multiple Perspectives on Meaningful Coincidence. Storm presents Main’s article as the entire Chapter 3, and it is entitled "Religion, Science and Synchronicity".

Main is representative of modern thinkers who continue to look for different angles of the traditional Jung. As the title of his essay suggests, he focuses on the religious aspect of Jung’s work. With that view he systematically went through Jung’s writings and highlighted a large array of references to Jung’s struggle of reconciling religion and science. Main ends up with a diametrically opposed view to common thinking that Jung used Synchronicity and the whole field of archetypes as tools to assuage and promote his religious quandaries, not psychoanalysis.

As a very brief introduction to the chapter, Storm as editor, concludes Synchronicity is seen as a theory that emerged from Jung’s observation that religious and scientific ideas were born of one and the same source – the psyche.

Main’s position is that Jung’s work with Synchronicity, to a large degree, manifested in his struggle to satisfactorily reconcile religion and science. Jung had stated, In science I missed the factor of meaning; and in religion, that of empiricism. Main illustrates how Jung attempted to preserve religion in the face of science and how in his early career he tried to present a position that would allow religion to win out.

Addressing physics, Jung claimed that Einstein set me off thinking about the possible relativity of time as well as space, and their psychic conditionality.

However, to tie in his religious dilemma, within Synchronicity, he incorporated the I Ching, which he called the standard text book of Chinese science. This may be a bit of stretch as it represented centuries of divination.

Jung was accused of tying the issue of souls to scientific investigations on out of body and near death experiences. He also connected the concept of miracles to unusual occurrences within Synchronicity. He posited some Synchronistic phenomena showed connections to existence outside of time, making a connection to religious views of afterlife. Personally I applaud him for inter-relating such manifold subjects because I see them as forms of psi. It was perhaps unfortunate he was stuck with religious constraints in that he was compelled to revert to the concept of soul, rather than simply refer to consciousness. Had he done that, the references to OBE and NDE could have been further developed, as I will do later.

Robert Aziz, a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist, in his book C.G. Jung’s Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity, went as far as to suggest Jung’s theory of Synchronicity was actually his personal attempt to understand religion. Jung had been criticized by theologians for having his psychology of religion being a form of psychological reductionism, or in other words, he was reducing religion to psychology! This must have given poor old Jung heartburn!

In the end, Jung’s use of Synchronicity as a bridge may in fact have been a stroke of genius, an example of professional intestinal fortitude, and a precursor to many thinkers that followed: Peat, Mansfield, Bohm and Sheldrake, to mention just a few. Quantum Mechanics pretty much demands a much more holistic view of science and reality.

The book Synchronicity, by Allan Combs and Mark Holland is also a major review of Jung’s initial work and more modern thinking. Ultimately Combs and Holland view Coincidence as happenstance. Again, they are entitled to their views. It seems a loss to not consider such incredible stories of Coincidence because of a definition.

Beyond Restrictive Definitions

We have likely spent sufficient time worrying about formal definitions of how different people view Coincidence, Synchronicity and psi, but it has been a necessary step to further our discussion.

The Personal Accounts of PART II describe a selection of unusual events that people from all over the world submitted for this book. They obviously saw their experiences as Coincidences, as they provided them on that basis. These have been grouped into several main categories, each warranting a separate chapter. The type analysis of these stories, plus another 500 not recorded here, will illustrate how modern people view Coincidence.

Conclusion

This is in fact a lengthy introductory chapter to both Coincidence and psi and warrants a short conclusion. We have traced the historical study of