[Acting Like Godot]

Originally Posted by Mark Lapierre

Acting Like Godot: I've been practicing Vipassana meditation (as per Mindfulness in Plain English) for about a year. It hasn't led to any experiences, or revelations about experiences, which have changed my opinion about coincidence.

Go to Chapter 16 of your own link. There is a stage in the meditator's development which the materials describe as follows:

"As meditative mindfulness develops, your whole experience of life changes. Your experience of being alive, the very sensation of being conscious, becomes lucid and precise, no longer just an unnoticed background for your preoccupations. It becomes a thing consistently perceived.

Each passing moment stands out as itself; the moments no longer blend together in an unnoticed blur. Nothing is glossed over or taken for granted, no experiences labeled as merely 'ordinary'. Everything looks bright and special."

This is the stage (for myself, at least) when I began to discern something about the nature of "coincidences". They are truly non-random. Little coincidences that in the past you would have missed or dismissed - now it becomes impossible to gloss over them or take them for granted - there is nothing merely "ordinary" about their nature. Every moment, and every coincidence looks bright and special.

When you leave aside your own interpretations and judgments of events, the events (including coincidences) can be perceived with a kind of clarity that would startling to the you, before you were a meditator. The true meaning jumps out at you, quite unmistakeably.

I should add that I was a meditator before I ever heard of the LOA or IM. And that I started to perceive coincidences in such a way, before I ever heard of LOA or IM. Therefore it cannot have been the subconscious influence of anything I'd heard about IM which led me to perceive coincidences in such a way.

Later in your meditation, you may have the experience (if you have not already had it) of sensing the interconnectedness of all things - then it will become quite easy to understand that coincidences are not random. All things are connected.

On a separate note, in the context of this kind of discussion, we should perhaps drop the term "coincidence" and use the more precise term "synchronicity" - coined by the 2nd-most famous psychologist in the history of the world.

Synchronicity is a word that Swiss psychologist Carl Jung used to describe the "temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events." Jung spoke of synchronicity as an "acausal connecting principle" (i.e. a pattern of connection that cannot be explained by direct causality). Cause-and-effect, in Jung's mind, seemed to have nothing to do with it. Jung introduced the concept in his 1952 paper Synchronicity — An Acausal Connecting Principle, though he had been considering the concept for almost thirty years.[1]

Put plainly, synchronicity is the experience of two or more occurrences (beyond coincidentally) in a manner that is logically meaningful- but inexplicable- to the person or persons experiencing them. Such events would also have to suggest an underlying pattern in order to satisfy the definition of synchronicity as developed by Jung.

It differs from mere coincidence in that synchronicity implies not just a happenstance, but an underlying pattern or dynamic that is being expressed through meaningful relationships or events.

It was a principle that Jung felt encompassed his concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious [2], in that it was descriptive of a governing dynamic that underlay the whole of human experience and history — social, emotional, psychological, and spiritual.

Jung believed that many experiences perceived as coincidence were due not merely to chance, but instead, suggested the manifestation of parallel events or circumstances reflecting this governing dynamic.

Here is one of Jung's accounts of a synchronicity - related in his paper "Synchronicity, An Acausal Connecting Principle".

Introduction to Carl G. Jungs Principle of Synchronicity; synchronicity, synchronicity, synchronicity, synchronicity