INTRODUCTION The Strangeness that Masquerades as Real Life Paper is patient. —Anne Frank I’VE BEEN IN MANY PLACES in my life and times. I’ve encountered many coincidences and made some surprising finds. I’ve taken a chance on chance. Like Alice in Wonderland, I’ve encountered the strangeness that masquerades as real life. I was an adventuresome and curious boy who discovered an imaginary hidden tunnel in the woods near my house. When my dog Snapper and I walked through the tunnel, a beautiful jungle was revealed, teeming with dazzling pairs and bouncy triples and occasional twirls of four. Within the repeating patterns, similarities were glowing that were strikingly familiar and simultaneously different. Opposites within opposites. I ran back through the tunnel to tell anyone who would listen. But I was mute. I could not speak. I had no words to describe what we saw. No one was there to understand except Snapper. Were they illusions or emblems of an untaught reality? Many years later I found a way to describe those dazzling shapes. These meaningful coincidences are keys to how our minds work, to our interconnectedness, and to saving ourselves from our own self-destruction. Contrasts breed synchronicity and serendipity. I am an ambulating contradiction. As a scholarly, nearsighted student, I ran back kickoffs and punts during high school and college football games without glasses or contact lenses. While a psychiatric resident at an elite school, I was a part-time hippie during the ecstatic vortex of Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, in the late 1960s. As chairman of an academic psychiatry department, I initiated a formal research project to investigate the immense promise in meaningful coincidences. This autobiography unfurls the tapestry of meaningful coincidences across my life. They feel extraordinary to me. People often believe that their synchronicities are extraordinary. I am no exception. But to others these synchronicities may not be particularly striking. What is unique here is the sheer number of them on display over a lifetime. Some may strike you as funny. Others may seem unusual. Many will seem familiar. Taken together, they serve to illustrate common coincidence forms. As portals to exploration and adventure, meaningful coincidences make living more interesting, surprising, and exciting. I hope you will see your own life reflected in these stories. Perhaps you will be stimulated to excavate a buried memory of a synchronicity that changed your life. You might look back over your life stories to see the recurrent patterns across them. Writing and organizing these coincidence stories has made another more disturbing pattern in my life quite evident. To my horror, I saw the many times coincidences have led me down the wrong paths, often feeding my grandiose sense of self. By recording these stories, I am trying to dislodge from my heart, mind, and spirit the sense of my being special for having experienced these events. Instead, I am learning to be grateful for them. Many other people have similar experiences. A basic principle emerging from the study of coincidence is, If you have some improbable coincidence, someone else has had, or will soon have, a similar experience. Each of us is unique so we share certain uniqueness with others. In this world of polarities, each of us is both special and ordinary. By recording these stories, I have put them behind me to seek a release from the hold some of them have had on me. I hope to get their now decaying grandiose feelings expunged, exorcised from me. This writing process enables me to more fully embrace the remainder of my days in this body and enjoy my uniqueness and my ordinariness. No one else is occupying this space at this time. No one else is occupying the space you are in at this time. We are all ordinary, unique beings in our time and our space. You may be one of the ever-increasing number of human beings who recognizes that synchronicity offers help to our troubled species. We are increasingly disconnected from each other and from Earth’s natural world. War, income disparities, isolation, loneliness, and global warming shout out: "You are not acknowledging your connections with each other!" The quiet powers of synchronicity and serendipity can aid our healing by creating experiences of connecting us to each other, to trees, to animals, and to other beings. PERSONAL SYNCHRONICITY PATTERNS Each of us has a personal set of patterns by which to notice and process coincidences. I have initiated a research project using artificial intelligence to seek patterns in coincidence stories and then to match people with similar patterns, something like a dating app. Hopefully, this idea will reach fruition and you will be able to find like-minded synchronicity friends to further enrich your experience of both uniqueness and similarity. I noticed several recurring patterns in these stories. I enjoy being in the right place at the right time without making a conscious decision to go there. In the chapter titled "Internal GPS," I tested out my own ability to consciously get where I wanted to be at the right time. Like flocks of birds flying to their breeding grounds or lost dogs finding their way back home, I could intuitively time my actions for really nice coincidences to happen. Others do this too. Do you? Have you activated your Human GPS? Knocking on strangers’ doors became another consequential pattern. As you will see, knocking on doors led to my taking LSD well before our society had recognized its potential. With that LSD knock came an introduction to astrology and tarot cards. Knowing these areas of study helped me adapt to the pop-up hippie culture of the late 1960s. Another knock-knock led to my securing the necessary data for the required medical school thesis. Then came a knock that led to my marrying the daughter of a past president of the American Psychoanalytic Association. And a hesitant knock on a colleague’s door opened the path to becoming chair of psychiatry. My favorite is a cartoonlike pattern that has me swinging from vine to vine in the coincidence jungle. I’d grab one vine attached to a certain tree, climb around on the tree, and meet other coincidence monkeys and circumstances. Sometimes I went out on a limb and needed to jump to catch another vine to another tree. From Devine to Devine, quipped a colleague. Or Coinci-Dancing, punned another. Like many potential coincidences, I had to jump to catch the next vine. Without moving, without action, many potentially great synchronicities do not happen.With this knowledge, over time I got pretty good at imagining possibilities and helping to make them happen. This time-tested capacity soon became a guideline—imagine something possible and help make it happen. High emotion and strong need are often the drivers for manifesting what you imagine. Without deciding to act, the desired outcome is unlikely to happen. You violate yourself by not moving. As opposed to being ticketed and fined for driving too fast (a moving violation), you are fined by missing a potential opportunity—a "non-moving" violation. I strive to improve what I do and expand on what I know. I love to get better at doing things. Each improvement is new learning. Each new action creates novelty. Try looking for your own basic coincidence patterns. Like most things on planet Earth, polarities rule. The bad comes with the good with a message that there is more to learn. What I imagined into happening sometimes became too real, injuring me psychologically or physically. Be careful, you might get what you wish for. I learned that the less I was contained and restrained by social structures, and the more I was left to my own devices, the more coincidences arose from apparent randomness. Others have confirmed this observation. The content of this book is filtered through my mind, expanded and limited by my experiences with the subject. Uniqueness brings limitations. My two previous books Connecting with Coincidence and Meaningful Coincidences grew out of my being objective about synchronicity and serendipity. In this book, I turn that filter inside out to show you the patterns from which those books grew. Here you will see the lived-in-the-world experiences from which I have drawn the many observations and conclusions I have made about meaningful coincidences.Our life stories are sprinkled with coincidences. Novelists and script writers know this idea: No coincidence, no story. And that includes the story of your life.
Les mer
