Coincidence is a function of the human mind. It exists only as a blend with synchronicity in our consciousness. Both words denote as an “occurrence of events that happen at the same time by accident but seem to have some connection” (Merriam-Webster), yet they differ greatly in connotation. Coincidence can exist without a human mind to recognize the relatedness of the two events: two different boulders could have split because of frost, revealing the same species of fossil. Synchronicity needs a mind to create meaning in coincidence, to find in the connection something more than physical phenomenon. The act of assimilating events is enough to push the events from the realm of coincidence into synchronicity. Everyone has different ratios of synchronicity to coincidence in their minds, and the ratios are what define their approach to reality.
Making inferences stimulates the creation of ideas, the connections between them, and discussions on their merit. A reading from the fairy tale “Rapunzel” draws from botany, mythology, biology, sociology, language, all to create a synchronous fable. The effects of these interpretations are positive up to a point: William Irwin Thompson draws from and connects all bases of his knowledge to create a holistic elucidation.
"She [the sorceress] is the midwife, which in French is more appropriately called la sage femme and as such she represents the knowledge of the old lunar cosmology. As an archaic of lost time, however, she also becomes a symbol of the vast reaches of time… but also the prokaryotic order that stood for a billion years before the eukaryotic. In seizing the child, the sorceress is at once regressing back from patriarchy to matriarchy…" (Thompson).
If a line is crossed into the territory of truly believing these suppositions without proof, all of the benefits quickly flip to obstructions. “An answer is always a form of death” (Fowles).
Those who take the interpretations of literature and life literally lose the imagination and creativity that comes with refusing to accept an answer or accepting all answers. By focusing only on the synchronistic, a mind closes itself to the multitudes of possibilities of the unknown that exist by shifting to the coincidental.
The decision in how to approach reality, from the coincidental or synchronistic side, has strong influences from the state of the mind. Perspective based on emotions and experiences cause the mind to pay attention to different details. Events contributing to synchronicity must breach certain levels of similarity, importance, and probability. Once a coincidence is recognized it gains prevalence in the subconscious and the mind is on the alert for more alignments to this synchronous pattern.
"On April 1, 1949, I made a note in the morning of an inscription containing a figure that was half man and half fish. There was fish for lunch. Somebody mentioned the custom of making an “April fish” of someone. In the afternoon, a former patient of mine, whom I had not seen in months, showed me some impressive pictures of fish. In the evening, I was shown a piece of embroidery with sea monsters and fishes on it. The next morning, I saw a former patient, who was visiting me for the first time in ten years. She had dreamed of a large fish the night before." (Jung)
Reading more than can be proven in life is inevitable. Humans desire the enchantment of synchronicity over the severity of all the unknowns that come along with coincidence. It is easier to choose a world where events happen for a deterministic reason instead of attempting to understand the immensity of grief and pain experienced by the Darfurian refugees.
In choosing a higher proportion of synchronicity to coincidence, the mind invokes a shield from reality. It is a dance along the ridge of a steep roof, both sides leading to delusion. One steep side leads to the insanity of facing complete reality; the other to an utterly ignorant life. In For The Time Being, Annie Dillard writes of intelligent but grossly disfigured children, the deaths of 138,000 Bangladeshi in a typhoon, the terrible power of the Emperor Qin “… he burned every book in the empire… He ordered his far-flung soldiers to kill anyone who quoted books, and, for good measure, anyone who sang old songs.” (Dillard) These topics that Dillard writes of are intensely depressing. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to truly focus on the pain, grief, suffering that she speaks of because insanity looms.
"Of the thousand or more photographs in the book, this one most terrifies me… Symptomatically, she cannot straighten her elbows…Her legs are pathologically short… No plastic surgery could help. Intelligence: normal…The confident girl and the sorrowing boy, facing each other on opposite pages, make it appear as if, at some time between the ages of three and five, these kids catch on." (Dillard)
This is where the shields rise: shields of myth, science, or numbers. Myth lets the reader imagine that a higher purpose invoked these terrible things to teach a lesson; that they are not meaningless. Science lets people focus on the causes of typhoons or disfigurements or death instead of facing truth. Numbers shield the staggeringly huge amounts of suffering. These shields are a function of synchronicity, a way to avoid facing reality. Connections are made between reality and knowledge to allow for a distancing from the objective reality.
"Chance drowns the worthy with the unworthy, bears up the unfit with the fit by whatever definition, and makes the night-sea journey essentially as haphazard as well as murderous and unjustified." (Barth)
Chance is what humanity is avoiding: it is reality, it is the unknown cause of unknown purpose. The stripping away of higher powers, of scientific explanation, of the numbness that comes from reading statistics, leaves nothing but the inexplicable. Synchronicity lends an ease to life’s rawness and terror in the unknown.
All of humanity’s angst stems from the basic fear of the unknown. The uncertainty of the unknown - of perhaps there being no purpose in life - implicates us in the deaths of children or the eradication of a species. It is a heavy load. Synchronicity is the mechanism of this burden. Man inherently desires meaning in order to shift responsibility of his species off his shoulders.
The only certain destiny that is to survive long enough to die. All adaptations, physical traits, responses to stimuli, have all evolved in order to continue and expand the human species. This is the only fate, inscribed in DNA; the inherent core of life.
"I continue to swim - but only because blind habit, blind instinct, blind fear of drowning are still more strong than the horror of our journey." (Barth)
Only individuals can give their own lives meaning. Self-generated ambitions are integral pieces and are crucial to learning and expanding the base of knowledge, which increases chances of survival. Synchronicity, the function of believing that there is something more in life, is how humans rationalize purpose in life in order to continue expanding knowledge. Contrastingly, coincidence, is the very thing that inspires fear, reality, the unknown.
In Eastern philosophy there are two types of truths, or satya, but instead of differentiation based on how factually correct they are, each has a metaphysical differentiation. Paramārtha-satya is “that which pervades the universe in all its constancy” (Lusthaus), the absolute truth of reality. Saṃvṛti-satya is “the truth based on the common understanding of ordinary people” (Lusthaus); generally accepted things that people use to connect and to communicate what may or may not be true. All humans have an aversion to facing absolute truth, the paramārtha-satya, and they use all manners of methods to avoid it. Credit cards or religion or television or drugs or cheap novels are all powerful shields. Just as synchronicity shields from coincidence, saṃvṛti-satya shields from paramārtha-satya.
Everyone has his own perspective and interpretations, creating his own universe. Both types of satya tie individual universes into one. There are invisible forces that keep humans, the earth, the universe, in existence. These forces of paramārtha-satya are the ones that physicists and chemists try to explicate, the unchanging facts of a common reality, that connect all of time. The forces of saṃvṛti-satya are that of language and emotion and the media, the fluid connection between universes only in the present. The things that we understand as the laws of the universe, are what govern what is probable in every moment, but not socially predetermined.
"Every action is an interaction and so nothing is random" (Newton). The roll of a die is not chance, the surface area and friction and curve of our palm, the orientation and force and distance the dice is rolled from, the friction and orientation of the surface on which it lands, all are the variables that create this seemingly random effect. Nothing is free of influence. The forces that we explain with physics and chemistry are the very same that governed the very birth of this universe. This doesn’t prove the existence of fate however. Everything that has ever occurred in the past has interacted and built the present, but the future is fluid and the choices and interactions made are constantly shifting it. Humans have as much of an effect on the universe as it does on them.
The universe is a construct of these natural forces, the ones that keep the atoms of trees from dissolving into energy particles or things from falling upward instead of down. Yet this confinement is completely necessary for invention.
Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room;
And hermits are contented with their cells;
And students with their pensive citadels…
…In truth the prison, unto which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is…
…Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.
(Wordsworth)
A world without structure, without synchronicity, is a world with infinite possibility. How could anyone even begin to create structure out of chaos. “The weight of too much liberty” is hobbled by the rules of the sonnet just as in knowing that the laws of the universe exist, the freedom of invention is known. Humans need a structure to begin from in order to experience eleutheria. The creation of order is difficult, it requires much more effort than simply accepting that there is a higher power, a synchronicity, a structure in place already. The mandatory twelve years of schooling are essential to teach the exact forces that constrain our lives so that when the schooling has finished, students can work within the limitations to pursue knowledge and freedom.
Every human interprets the occurrences of life through a fusion of coincidence and synchronicity. Recognizing a coincidence as synchronicity, even if it is wrong, is vital to a functional mind. “Characters occupy the designed time and space of their creators… their paths may cross in sheer ‘coincidence.’”(Frye) Man wants to believe that life is not deterministic, that there is an author of his life who has created all life’s interactions. The reality of coincidence and synchronicity is that every action tends to be an unknown pull of life’s slot machine. Most of the time, the results are mismatched. Sometimes, inevitably, the jackpot symbols match, a synchronicity.
"Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten." (Pratchett)
Bibliography
"coincidence." Merriam-Webster.com. 2013. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/coincidence
“synchronicity.” Merriam-Webster.com. 2013. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/synchronicity
Thompson, William Irwin. Cosmology Lost. Imaginary Landscape. Macmillan. 1990.
Fowles, John. The Magus. Little, Brown and Company; New York, NY. 1978, 2001.
Jung, C. G. On Synchronicity. Man and Time. Princeton University Press. 1949, 1951.
Dillard, Annie. For The Time Being. Random House; NY. 1999.
Barth, John. Night-Sea Journey. Rakuten, Inc. 1997-2013. http://plaza.rakuten.co.jp/heren/2002/
Lusthaus, Dan. The Two Truths (Saṃvṛti-satya and Paramārtha-satya) in Early Yogācāra. The Two Truths in Early Yogācāra.
Newton, Isaac. Propulsion. http://www.qrg.northwestern.edu/projects/vss/docs%20/Pr opulsion/2-every-action-has-an-equal-and-opposite.html
Wordsworth, William. Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent's Narrow Room. ~1806. http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/nuns-fret-not-at-their-convent-s-narrow-room/
Frye, Northrop. The Secular Scripture. Harvard University Press; 1976.
Pratchett, Terry. Mort. Harper Collins; 1987.
