The occurrence of coincidences have intrigued, baffled and fascinated man since ancient times. Why do random but meaningful events happen with no apparent cause? They certainly pose a big challenge to modern science.
Whereas the ancient Greeks, at least, had an explanation for coincidences by regarding them as an intervention from the gods, modern scientific and rational man has no such convenient explanation. And so the growing occurrence of coincidences has remained an unexplained phenomenon for him, for no scientific theory could account for them.
It is true that most coincidences are trivial or inconsequential, but they never fail to baffle those who experience them. The following examples will serve to illustrate these types of coincidences:
1. A young nurse named Jean Vianney assisted my wife Yolanda and me during the recent 56th graduation ceremonies in Marinduque State College. When she went home, she was struck by the coincidence that her parents are also named Jaime and Yolanda, and that we have a granddaughter named Jean.
2. A German housewife discovers a ring she lost 40 years before—inside a potato! There have been stories of valuable objects being found inside the stomach of a fish the person has caught, but inside a potato? First time I heard of such an incident.
3. Several office workers were chasing a fly around the office and swatting it with rolled up magazines, when the fly landed on the open pages of a heavy dictionary. Somebody simply slammed it shut. When the dictionary was opened, the people saw with astonishment that the ill-fated insect had smashed against the word “housefly.”
Dismissed
The above examples are one-time events that could easily be dismissed as random chance, with no significant meaning. But what about the following case of repeated coincidences that defies logic?
“On December 5, 1664, the date of the greatest series of coincidences in history occurred. On this date, a ship in the Menai Straight, off North Wales, sank with 81 passengers aboard. There was one survivor—a man named Hugh Williams. On the same date in 1785, a ship sank with 60 passengers aboard. There was one survivor—a man named Hugh Williams. On the very same date in 1860, a ship sank with 25 passengers onboard. There was one survivor—a man named Hugh Williams.”
The second and third examples above were taken from a fascinating book by Phil Cousineau called “Soul Moments: Marvelous Stories of Meaningful Coincidences from a Seemingly Random World.”
In 1973, Arthur Koestler, a prolific former correspondent and later a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford University, published “The Roots of Coincidence,” where he brilliantly synthesized the existing literature related to coincidence in such diverse fields as religion, psychology, modern physics and philosophy.
These books, as well as a most influential scientific research on the subject by the great psychologist, Carl Jung, speak of the existence of noncausal reality—noncausal only from the point of view of rationalist science, but not from the mystical and nonrational point of view.
There is order in a seemingly disorderly universe that is beyond current paradigms of modern science to explain. There cannot be a noncausal event. There can only be our own inability to recognize the underlying causes. Coincidences are called “Soul Moments” by Cousineau and synchronicity by Carl Jung.
Synchronicity has been defined by Jung as the “simultaneous occurrence of two unrelated but meaningful events.” And he gave the following example from his own experience about an unbelievable coincidence which helped solved his problem with a very difficult and very rational female patient. Here is Jung’s story:
Inaccesible
“My example concerns a young patient who, in spite of efforts made on both sides, proved to be psychologically inaccessible. The difficulty lay in the fact that she always knew better about everything. Her excellent education had provided her with a weapon ideally suited to this purpose, namely, a polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably ‘geometrical’ idea of reality. After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism by a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself.
“Well, I was sitting opposite to her one day, with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab—a costly piece of jewelry. While she was still telling me about this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping the window. I turned around and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window pane from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room.
“This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), whose gold-green color most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed this beetle to my patient with the words, ‘Here is your scarab.’ This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results.”
Next week: Why do coincidences happen?
NOTE:
E-mail jaimetlicauco@yahoo.com. Visit my website www.jimmylicauco.com and listen to my radio program over DZMM Teleradyo every Sunday from 8-9 p.m. The next Soulmates, Karma and Reincarnation seminar is on May 19, 1-7 p.m. Call 8107245 or (0920) 9818962 for more details.