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Bernard Beitman,  a visiting psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, has been studying meaningfuly coincidence for decades and has recently completed a book on it. We’ve written several posts about his work. Recently, he posted the following piece on his website and we asked him if we could re-post it here.

Probabilities are a favorite tool of skeptics, who often go to considerable lengths to explain away a coincidence even when they have experienced it.

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David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge University and David Hand of the Imperial College of London are among several statisticians who believe that they have solved the coincidence problem.  Probabilities! Any event that can happen will happen given a large number of instances. If a coin is flipped an infinite number of times, there will sometime be a run of 100 tails in a row.

Life is not usually a series of coin flips except for lotteries and competitive games—someone has to win and occasionally the same person wins. Coincidences are defined by being low probability events, but there can be other contributions beyond probabilities to their appearance. These include: subconscious intentions and behaviors, group dynamics, yet to be discovered scientific forces, and mystery.

The faithful have an answer not only to mystery but to probability. Their explanation is God who works wonders in mysterious ways. As the faithful are the first to declare—they do not know how God works His wonders. They simply have faith that He does. Faith is belief beyond the need for causal understanding.

Statisticians and the Faithful tend to use coincidences to affirm their beliefs about the nature of reality. Just as people who own a kind of car or drink a kind of beverage are confirmed in their choice by advertising for their car or drink, coincidences can be used to feel supported in holding your cherished belief.

The statisticians and the faithful have only part of the truth, not all of it. The famous story of the elephant and the blind (in the dark) men trumpets this more accurate view.

In the common version of the tale, which originated in the Indian subcontinent, the blind men touch an elephant to learn what it is made of. Each one feels a different part, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then compare notes and learn that they are in complete disagreement. The person feeling a leg says it is a tree. Another feeling the side, says it is a wall. The tail feels like a rope, the tusk feels like a spear, the trunk like a snake, and the ear like a fan.

Like the blind men, those who feel certain about their knowledge of coincidence must recognize that each holds only a piece of the truth.

I invite my statistical and faithful colleagues to join with me in the search for a clearer understanding of the place of probability and mystery in the study of coincidences.

In the early years of our blog, Natalie, a psychic medium from Down Under, used to comment frequently. But she’s the mother to five kids from two marriages, and eventually had to give up blogging. We’ve kept in touch over the years, and I’ve always been intrigued by Natalie’s studies and quests as a medium. She seeks creative solutions to the challenges she faces.

The story she recently sent illustrates the power of intent and desire – magical thinking!

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I just had the weirdest experience! I have been feeling pretty disconnected here in my new area and have been praying for a friend. I had the feeling she was going to be a mum from the school, with older daughters, who actually wasn’t really looking, or interested in making a friend.

Haylie (One of Nat’s daughters) has been put in a class this year where she knows nobody and has had some settling issues. She also invited herself to a little girls birthday party last month (cringe) and we went along. It was really awkward at first, but I sensed this was the lady who was going to be my friend. She has two older daughters and the little one in Haylie’s class. The Mum very much felt ‘right’ to me, even though she was very closed.

Fast forward three weeks to today. I had to go to the supermarket for a few things, but didn’t want to go, as I was tired and had been up all night last night feeling very anxious and praying lots about my life. One of the prayers was help me find a friend, the other one was help me rid myself of this crushing internalized shame that blocks me in my work.

So, I get to the shop and run into the Mum. She starts chatting about her little girl and confesses her daughter is very sensitive and feels a lot of shame if she gets into trouble at school.

I say, “That’s a coincidence, I have just been watching some You Tube clips about healing toxic shame.”

Then she pipes up with: “Actually, I’m learning how to write, and I wrote a piece this morning, about a fortune teller whose beautiful heart was being crushed by toxic shame.”

I exclaimed: “I’m a fortune teller, a medium, actually, and I am being crushed by toxic shame!”

After the initial surprise and shock, we then described a vision we had both seen, of the Light trying to permeate the layers of experiences in the fortuneteller’s heart. This all happened in about two minutes in the soap aisle. I don’t even think she knows my name, but I am now convinced more than ever, she is going to be my new friend.

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I wrote Nat that I felt there was another synchro here, that they met in the soap shop. I mean, really. What is soap if not a substance that washes away stuff?

The other day when Rob and I were at the dog park, we noticed clusters of clovers were cropping up and he said, “Hey, let’s look for four-leaf clovers.”

So we moved around, hunched over like Diogenes looking for an honest man. We spotted a lot of old dog poop that proliferates when the snowbirds are here with their pooches – and don’t pick up after them – but no four-leap clovers. It reminded me, though, that St. Patrick’s Day was just around the corner and suddenly, a motherlode of memories about this day slammed into place.

When I was in college in Utica, New York we used to celebrate St. Patty’s Day with a lot of drinking and partying and oh my, if you didn’t wear something green, you ended up buying drinks for everyone. Back then, St. Patty’s Day was about green beer and fun.

In the years since, I’ve come to think of the day as a celebration of life, of luck, of serendipity, and yes, perhaps even synchronicity! This video, I think expresses the essence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZNrxn5niyg

We’ve probably all thought at one time or another how great it would’ve been to be a fly on the wall when something momentous, outrageous or historical happened. In the world of psychotherapy, one such incident was a dispute between Freud and Jung, when the two argued about the validity of psychic phenomenon and something  strange…seemingly paranormal and definitely synchronistic happened.

So with the movie, A Dangerous Method( 2011)  directed by David Cronenberg, we have a chance to be that fly, at least in a fictive sense. Here’s the trailer of that scene in which Freud (Viggo Mortensen)  lectures his student (Michael Fassbender) about ‘paranormal nonsense’ and a cracking sound is heard from Freud’s bookcase. Jung is almost ecstatic and predicts it will happen again…and it does.

I’ve found that hair salons are great places for things other than getting your hair cut – like hearing synchronicity stories. Angie, one of the stylists at the salon I’ve been going to for twenty years, is very tuned into synchros and we’ve used her stories before. One of the best was a series of transformative synchronicities that occurred during a transitional phase in her life that we wrote about here.

So today she told me that her daughter is pregnant with her second child, which is due October 17. “A Libra,” I said. “Make sure she pays attention to the time of birth so I can look at her chart.”

“I’ll remind her,” Angie said.

“What sign is your daughter?”

“A Virgo, just like me.”

“And her husband?”

“A Leo. Now you want to hear something weird, Trish?”

Well, sure. Always.

Angie’s mother was born August 25 – early Virgo – and her father was born August 10, so he’s a Leo. Angie’s daughter, Teresa, was born August 25 and her husband was born August 10.

Sometimes, this parallel with birthdates can happen with perfect strangers. We write about one such instance in 7 Secrets of Synchronicity that involved our friend, Carol Bowman, an author and past-life therapist:

Carol was visiting her mother in New York’s Hudson Valley, a small town, not much there. She had gone to the grocery store for basics. While waiting in line, she noticed the Asian woman behind her had a toddler in her cart, a cute little girl. Carol asked the woman how old her daughter was.

Asian woman: “She’ll be two next month. She’s an Aries.”

Carol: “My Aries daughter will be thirty next month. Aries kids are a handful, aren’t they?”

Asian woman, laughing: “That’s for sure. And I’m married to an Aries.”

Carol’s antenna twitched. “Me, too!”

So we can imagine these two women in line at this dinky store, suddenly aware of some sort of connection, both with Aries daughters, both married to Aries men.

Asian woman: “I’m a Libra.”

Carol understood that something odd and fascinating was happening. “I’m a Libra, too. What’s your birthdate?”

Asian woman: “October 14.”

“That’s, uh, my birthdate, too.”

Yes, it sounds like an episode out of the Twilight Zone, weird music and all. But the upshot was that Carol handed the woman her business card and said she would be conducting a past-life workshop in the area in June. The Asian woman said she would definitely attend

What are the odds?

During one of our recent radio shows, the person interviewing us asked about clusters of synchros and we got into a discussion about number clusters. One of the most interesting, which we wrote about in 2009, involves the number 23.

In Tangiers in the early 1960s, William Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, knew a certain Captain Clark who ran a ferry from Tangiers to Spain. Clark boasted that he’d been running the ferry for twenty-three years without incident. That same day, the ferry sank, killing Clark and everyone on board. That very evening, Burroughs was thinking about this gruesome event and turned on the radio and heard about the crash of a New York-Miami airplane. The plane was piloted by a Captain Clark. It was flight 23.

The synchronicity apparently shocked Burroughs enough so that he started compiling a list of synchros involving the number 23. In 1965, his friend and fellow author Robert Anton Wilson also began putting together a list of oddities about that number. One of the personal synchros he noted concerned his daughters. They were born on August 23 and February 23. Wilson wrote about the number for the Fortean Times in 1977. His article appeared in issue – yes, you guessed it! – number 23.

Here are some other synchros involving the number 23. In science and math:

During conception, each parent contributes 23 chromosome apiece to the fetus.

Euclid’s geometry has 23 axioms.

23 is the first prime number in which both digits are prime numbers and add up to another prime number.

It takes 23 seconds for blood to circulate through the human body.

Every 23rd wave that slams into a shore is twice as large as the average wave.

The first lunar landing was in the Sea of Tranquility, 23.63 degrees East. The second lunar landing was in the Ocean of Storms, 23.42 degrees West. The first two landings were Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 – 11+12=23.

The earth rotates completely every 23 hours, 56 minutes.

The axis of the plane Earth is 23.5 degrees.

The human biorhythm cycle is 23 days.
The pattern of DNA shows irregular connections at every 23rd section.

Humans have 23 vertebra running down the main part of their spines.

The Harmonic Convergence occurs every 23,000 years.

Geosynchronous orbit occurs at 23,000 miles above Earth’s surface.

September 23rd is the Fall equinox.

23+23+23=WWW, the World Wide Web (W being the 23rd letter of the alphabet)

In Hollywood and with movies and TV, the number also plays a role. Take X-Files. The production company, Ten-Thirteen -10+13 – adds up to 23. 10-13 is the birth date of creator Chris Carter. For fans of X-Files, remember that abandoned nuclear silo where a UFO is being held? 1013 is the number on the silo. In another episode, Mulder goes to the apartment of a recently deceased man and the number 23 is on the door.

In the popular TV series Lost, which builds on layers of synchronicity, there are a number of oddities involving 23:
Oceanic Flight 815 – 8+15=23
The gate number from which the flight departed
Jack’s seat on the flight was 23A
Rose and Bernard were sitting in row 23
Hurley stayed in a Sydney hotel on floor 23
The reward for turning Kate in: $23,000
One of the numbers in the sequence of 6 that won Hurley the lottery and opened the hatch: 4 8 15 16 23 42.
Even if the repetition of 23s in the series is intentional, it’s nonetheless the sort of weirdness that would have interested both Burroughs and Wilson.

In 2007, a Jim Carey movie, The Number 23, met with lukewarm reviews, but the premise is intriguing. Walter Sparrow, an amiable dogcatcher, becomes obsessed with a murder mystery novel that continually circles the number 23. The characters in the novel who become obsessed with the number invariably end up dead. Carey’s character believes the number parallels his own life and that the author is writing about him.

And all this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg with this number.

Here are a couple of quotes on synchronicity. The first is by Carl Jung and is something I (Rob) might say to skeptics on certain group sites, and then get called for ‘passive aggressive’ behavior by the web police. But sometimes you just have to say it.

This one speaks for itself!

Several years ago, we wrote a post about a fascinating synchronicity involving a teapot hidden in the bowels of an old house in Minneapolis. The man who lived in the house had purchased, on a whim,  a teapot in a second-hand store, even though he didn’t drink tea very often. The man, Gabe Carlson, was also a member of a group of people who had an odd hobby. They liked to explore old shuttered buildings—department stores, banks, whatever—places that were condemned and boarded up. Kind of a spooky past time. They weren’t ghost hunters, they were urban explorers of the past, of the old and abandoned.

So shortly after Gabe had purchased that teapot, he realized that he had never explored a hidden passage beneath the house where he lived. He lifted the hatch and with a flashlight crawled underneath the floor. He came across an old rotting blanket with a lump beneath it. He peeled away the blanket and found a teapot. He carried it out, cleaned it up, and was astonished to discover that the teapot was identical to the one he’d purchased in the second-hand store.

The event was a game-changer for him. He began studying synchronicity and altering his views about reality. We used his story in The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity. It’s a good one. But, amazingly, it’s continuing, and now Gabe is actually on the sidelines as a new player in the ‘teapot’ synchros is coming forward.

But before we talk about Jacqueline’s teapot synchronicity, we have to introduce a psychiatrist into the story. That’s Gibbs Williams, who has written a book on his view on synchronicity. Unlike many mainstream scientists, Gibbs accepts the reality of meaningful coincidences. He rejects the idea that these experiences are random and meaningless. However, his perspective is quite a bit different than mine and Trish’s, as I’ll explain.

Recently, on a synchronicity Facebook page, Gibbs analyzed Gabe’s teapot synchro. He asked Gabe a number of questions, then made his analysis of the experience. It’s lengthy and you can read it here. The bottom line is that, not surprisingly, Gabe’s experience conformed to Gibb’s take on synchronicity, which is a reductionist point of view.

Gibbs rejects the concept of a collective unconscious or an underlying reality where everything is connected, a realm that exists outside of the everyday world of cause and effect, what we refer to as the birthplace of synchronicity. He calls that a fantasy. From his perspective, it’s all about the personal subconscious.

Okay, fine. He can believe whatever he wants. His perspective is not the point here. That’s where Jacqueline come in. She responded to Gibbs’ assessment of the teapot syncho in this way:

“The point of synchs is that the inner and outer worlds become ‘as one’. Not really to be interpreted either as ‘you creating your reality’ or as an ‘external god’ throwing signs at you. The point of synchs as I experience them is that the inner/outer dichotomy is healed as well as inner conflicts being resolved.”

She no sooner started typing her comment when up came an ad for a business called The Magic Teapot. Was that a Facebook bot following her trail on the Internet and providing advertising links? Or was it a ‘random’ ad, in that case a clear synchro? She noted that she didn’t use the word teapot in her comment. And, when she followed up with another comment, using teapot several times, no such ad appeared. (See that post at the end. It’s kind of funny.) Furthermore, she says she has never seen a local ad on Facebook.

But, it didn’t stop there. It was as if the universe said to her, “Okay, you’re not sure about that synchro, then how about this one?” She went to the Magic Teapot site and the first thing she read was about a market in Jedburgh. Just prior to going on Facebook, she had looked up a website that was seeking volunteers to help out on a reforestation project, something she was interested in. To her surprise, a friend of hers was the director of the project…and the project is based in Jedburgh.

Skeptics, of course, can dismiss all of these incidents as mere coincidences or Facebook technology. But clearly they were meaningful to Jacqueline. As someone else noted, “Maybe the universe is using Facebook to teach us all a lesson here on how our thoughts create our reality. We are attracted to things that we think about, consciously and subconsciously. Intuition is the glue that gets birds of a feather to flock together. When something resonates with our heart, I think our souls send out flares or rockets and connects ourselves to common universal consciousness.” Well said, Michael Collett.

I can’t leave this out…Jacqueline’s attempt to produce a local ad about teapots.

TEAPOT ADVERTS IN MY LOCAL AREA PLEASE : > >>> HERE , SEND ME TEAPOT ADVERTS HERE .. MAGIC SUPER TEAPOT ADVERTS PLEASE JUST HERE >>>>>>>>>>> i AM WAITING MR FACEBOOK ROBOT SPIES .. SEND ME LINKS ON THIS PAGE TO TEAPOTS NOW!!!! PLEEEEEEEEEEEEASE ..

Several years back, Rob’s co-author for The Fog,  invited us to lunch to meet Kathy Doore.  I can’t remember where this lunch took place, but I do remember Kathy’s passion for Markawasi, Peru.

This mysterious place has been on my bucket list since that first lunch, when she gave us her book about Markawasi. Bruce and his wife, Lynn, signed up for a tour with Kathy to Peru. Unfortunately, health issues prevented her from leading that trip and it was postponed to the following year.

Kathy and I got to be friends. We would meet for lunch periodically at the Macaroni Grill, and she would invariably have coupons that would entitle us to a three-course meal for ten bucks apiece. These lunches usually lasted a couple of hours and were never trivial or superficial. She wasn’t the sort of person who talked about her manicure or her love life or even much about her personal life. For her, it was always about ideas concerning consciousness, the nature of reality, synchronicity, UFOs, the paranormal in all of its strange and often bewildering manifestations.

For me, a Gemini writer, Kathy was a treasure trove of speculations. She was right up my alley, a woman with whom I could talk about the weird and the strange and who sat there nodding, understanding, Yes, yes, I get it.

During one of our lunches, she told me about her experience in a fog on Lake Michigan, in which she talked to her dead father and experienced a time displacement that paralleled Gernon’s in the Bermuda Triangle years before. I had my iPad with me at that lunch and did her astrological chart. The transits looked great, with Jupiter expanding her work opportunities and Saturn bring in solidity, a foundation.

But as I was telling Kathy about these aspects in her chart, I remembered what my mentor, Renie Wiley, had told me years before about Jupiter transits. Yeah, this planet is about luck and expansion and all the good stuff. But often when it forms a positive angle to a particular planet, it offers the soul a way out.

“Wow, Trish, I hope all this stuff unfolds,” she said. “Because I’ve been feeling that I may be passing over, that what I came here to accomplish is done.”

One evening, we had Kathy over for dinner and she sailed in with the makings of a killer salad and Rob made some delectable dish and we drank wine and coffee and talked for hours. The only reason she left was because she had an aging cat to tend to.

The last time we saw her, it was at the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach, where she, Bruce and Lyn, Rob and I went ghost hunting.

This morning, March 5, we heard from Bruce Gernon that Kathy, who’d had emergency intestinal surgery late last fall, was in hospice. Lynn, Bruce’s wife, called us this evening to tell us that Kathy had died. She was 61. She was estranged from her brother, had a couple of distant cousins, a few close friends. She died alone in hospice, died as she had lived, a mystery, a riddle, a private woman, an enigma.

Her legacy is that she brought the mystery of Markawasi into western consciousness. She was proof that each of us has something unique to contribute to the larger collective of humanity.

I won’t say RIP to you, Kathy. You were, after all, a Do-er, and that won’t change in the afterlife. You’ll be galvanizing souls on the other side and your passion will forever prevail!