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Coincidences are not Random but Inspirational
- Bernard Beitman M.D.
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Welcome to Healing from Within. I am your host Sheryl Glick RMT Reiki Master Energy Teacher, author of a trilogy with the newest edition A New Life Awaits: Spirit Guided Insights to Support Global Awakening which shares stories and messages from spirit that show us our physical life challenges are not merely economic political or societal but often a disconnect from our soul guided inner essence. Today I am delighted to welcome Bernard Beitman M.D. author of Meaningful Coincidences who like Carl Jung, the father of spiritual psychology has systematized the study of coincidence
As listeners of Healing From Within are well aware Sheryl and her accomplished guests share intimate, amusing, prophetic stories that open the mind and heart to the true nature of life in its duality of physical and spiritual aspects, for in knowing the complete nature of Self, we learn to create or manifest the best quality of life both here and beyond. However, one discovers they are more than their physical body is the real gift that is offered to those souls who chose to have a challenging physical life.
In today’s episode of Healing from Within Bernard Beitman M.D. graduate of Yale Medical School who did his psychiatric residency at Stanford University tells us having both an academic mind and a spiritual soul heart he merges the best of all worlds to explore the human condition, healing, and the pursuit of happiness most prominently interested in the anatomy of a coincidence and defines coincidence types through their fundamental constituents -external events and physical events. Through meaningful coincidences emphasizes that synchronicity and serendipity though mostly positive also have their shadow side. By detailing how to record your experiences, he explains how to find patterns guiding life decisions which helps you to be ready to use them when they occur.
Dr. Beitman and Sheryl share coincidences as they are a always present event in their lives. Sheryl tells Bernard her first book Life Is No Coincidence The Life and Afterlife Connection was an awakening process that allowed her to shed many former beliefs to understand life as a duality and how coincidences or messages from spirit guided her to study Reiki Energy healing, develop a practice as a medium and intuitive healer and helped others begin to see the value of seeing life not only through the senses but through an intuitive connection to Universal source. Bernard Beitman M.D. is like a Vitruvian Man merging the best of western medicine in alignment to the history and spirituality of humanity.
When Bernard is asked to think back to his childhood and remember a person place or event that may have signaled to him or those around them what his life path or destiny might be in adulthood Dr. Bernard writes, “Please allow me to introduce myself. I am a psychiatrist. I am paid to distinguish between reality and crazy. I walk that line in my life and in this book. A meaningful coincidence is the coming together of two or more events in a surprising, unexpected, and improbable way that seems to have significance to the person experiencing it, either at the moment, or in retrospect. Coincidences have been a regular companion throughout my life beginning at age nine when my dog got lost, and I got lost. Then we found each other. Coincidences were deeply solidified in my consciousness when, at age thirty-one, I found myself uncontrollably choking while, three thousand miles away, my father was choking on his own blood and dying. The experiences of meaningful coincidences have expanded my awareness of my mind and heart, of the heart and mind of others, and of the natural world around us. Coincidences have contributed to my psychological and spiritual development, guided me in my academic career, and helped grow my relationships. They have jolted me out of the conventional views of how the world works. They have made me stop, think, and wonder. In high school, I imagined hitting the first pitch of the game for a homerun. I did it once. In college, I imagined running the opening kickoff back for a touchdown. I did it once. What did imagining have to do with the actual events? Were they “just a coincidence?”
Bernard Beitman M.D. went to Yale Medical School and completed a psychiatric residency at Stanford. My richest coincidence environment was San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district in the late 1960s. I was a part-time psychiatric resident and part-time hippie, spending half the week at Stanford and half the week on the streets of the city. During those days, coincidences flew rapidly into my consciousness
Dr Beitman explores the purpose of Knowing Coincidences and writes “Exploring the crucial role of personal agency—individual thought and action—in synchronicities and serendipities, Dr. Beitman shows that there’s more behind these occurrences than “fate” or “randomness”. They can be clues to the functioning of the psychosphere, our mental atmosphere through which many of them happen. By sharing our personal coincidence stories, we help each other to grow through the incremental mapping of our connections to other people, to other living beings, and to the Earth itself.
Bernard Beitman, M.D., has experienced and studied coincidences for decades. This book emerged from his infectious passion and extensive scholarship and may be the most comprehensive guidebook ever written on the subject. He examines coincidences through multiple lenses—Carl Jung’s “synchronicity” (meaningful coincidences), Horace Walpole’s “serendipity” (happy accidents), Paul Kammerer’s “seriality” (recurrence of numbers or events), and his own concept of “simulpathity” (empathic resonances across space or time). He also systematically categorizes coincidences into three types, explains the conditions likely to stimulate them, describes their benefits as well as limitations, and illuminates the spectrum of possible explanations.
Dr. Beitman describes the range of patterns by which people experience coincidences. These include: generalists, connectors, super encounters, serialists, probability and theoreticians. I am a “generalist” in so far as coincidences of all kinds have always been central to my life. When younger, I recall special delight in grabbing a handful of nails, only to discover I had nabbed exactly the number I needed. In my role as a clinical psychologist, coincidences appear regularly. They show up as clusters in new patients, like a series of artists or a series of attorneys. Sheryl confirms the same happens within her practice. Perhaps we can learn and refine our thoughts through the repetitive happenings. They emerge from patient stories when outer events perfectly mirror inner issues. The deeper or more charged the subject matter, the more likely synchronicities are to appear. Both personally and professionally, these occurrences continually inform me whether I am “in the flow” or facing a block,
Coincidences cannot help but fill us with wonder at the fundamental interconnection between inner and outer realms.
This book brings much needed scholarship to the study of coincidences. It presents the first systematic categorization of meaningful coincidences. Unlike all previous contributions, this book describes the anatomy of a coincidence, an extensive survey of the different types of coincidences, the conditions that increase the likelihood of their occurring, their limitations as well as benefits, and the wide variety of hypotheses that have been put forward to explain them. The primary intent of this book is to serve as a guide to anyone wishing to incorporate the flow of coincidences in their life
Serendipity differs from synchronicity and coincidences. Words are created to carve out portions of reality that deserve our attention. The phrase “meaningful coincidence” is an umbrella term that covers four words used to describe various types of meaningful coincidence: Carl Jung’s synchronicity, Horace Walpole’s serendipity, Paul Kammerer’s seriality, and simulpathity, a term I coined myself. The definitions of these four words overlap.
The Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology Carl Jung is single-handedly responsible for the emergence of the idea of meaningful coincidences in Western thought. He did so by inventing the word synchronicity from the Greek syn—“with, together”— and chronos—“time (as in chronology).” Synchronicity, then, means “together-in-time.” In his writing, Jung referred to the synchronicity principle, with which he attempted to explain a variety of phenomena in addition to meaningful coincidences. For Jung, synchronicity was a causal connecting principle by which apparently chance events were connected not by cause but by their similarity in meaning.
As the use of the word has evolved, it has come to be seen as the equivalent of meaningful coincidence. For single events Jung usually used the terms coincidence and meaningful coincidence. Currently, synchronicity is regarded as one type of meaningful coincidence.
The primary form is accidentally finding something of interest or value. From this comes two major variations:
(1) looking for something and finding it in an unexpected way and
(2) looking for something and finding something entirely different.
Sociologists Robert Merton and Elinor Barber wrote a delightful and scholarly history of the word serendipity. Their book is aptly titled The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity, which begins with Walpole and travels through bibliophiles, science, and the humanities. He suggested that these two variations share a fundamental characteristic: the intentions behind the activity taking place at the time of the unexpected observation or event are only indirectly related to the outcome. An example of looking for something and finding it in an unexpected way is the famous case of penicillin. Microbiologist Alexander Fleming was actively searching for a new antibiotic in 1928. When he returned from vacation, he found penicillin juice killing bacteria in petri-dishes that should have been washed while he was gone.
So the value of serendipity may be recognized immediately or in hindsight. The sagacity required for this discovery and many other serendipity-fueled findings is the investigator’s ability to see the single instance as representing a universal pattern. A variation involves noticing something in one situation and recognizing how that something can fill a need in another situation.
Dr. Beitman invented a new term simulpathity. The word simulpathity has a recent history. I coined the word to describe a personal experience that I soon realized many other people have experienced as well. Late in the evening of February 26, 1973, when I was thirty-one years old, I found myself bent over the kitchen sink in an old Victorian house in San Francisco, choking on something that was caught in my throat. But there was nothing to cough up as I hadn’t eaten anything. I choked for about fifteen minutes, a very long time, before I could swallow and breathe normally. The next day, my birthday, my brother called to tell me that our father, three-thousand miles and three time zones away, had passed away in Wilmington, Delaware, just as I was choking in California. My father had bled into his throat and choked on his own blood. The timing led me to think that it couldn’t possibility have been random. Through reading and research, I could confirm that my experience with my father was no anomaly. The simultaneous experience by one person of the distress of another without conscious awareness and usually at a distance is common. One person is in pain; the other begins to feel something similar without knowing why. Twins serve as a prototype for these kinds of experiences because the largest number of reports of this kind come from twins, although there are similar stories about mothers and their children as well as other closely bonded pairs.
I decided to name this coincidence pattern simulpathity, from the Latin word simul, which means “simultaneous,” and the Greek root pathy, which means both “suffering” and “feeling,” as in the words sympathy and empathy. With sympathy (“suffering together”), the sympathetic person is aware of the suffering of the other. With simulpathity, the person involved is usually not consciously aware of the suffering of the other (except for those pairs with whom this shared pain is a regular occurrence). Only later is the simultaneity of the distress recognized. No explanatory mechanism is implied. (The original meaning of telepathy, coined in 1882 by the classical scholar Fredric W. H. Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research, was “distress communicated at a distance,” as suggested by the suffix pathy, which also means “feeling, passion, affliction.” But the definition has come to mean “thought transference.” Jung was suddenly awoken by a dull headache “as though something had struck my forehead and then the back of my skull.” The next day he received a telegram saying that his patient had shot himself in the head. The bullet had come to rest on the back wall of his skull. Simulpathity reveals the existence of a kind of tunnel between minds. These incredible interpersonal connections point us toward a new view of reality
Humans seek coherent structure and order. We seek patterns by which to describe, predict, and control realities. Words and numbers of order perceptions. Numbers on buildings define places on Earth. Numbers indicate values in athletics, academics, friendships, and business. Maps order space; clocks order time. Daily routines create predictable futures. The language of math can predict things, such as where two cars traveling toward each other on the same route will meet each other, given their speeds and starting locations. Words in sentences package complex experiences. In a similar way, a taxonomy of coincidences organizes this complex territory into patterns from which order, usefulness, and explanation can emerge.
Coincidences are formed from two kinds of events: mind and object.
Mind events are thoughts, feelings, emotions, sensations, and images. These are primarily private events. Mind includes emotions, like grief, and sensations, like pain, that can also be inferred from observations by others.
Object events occur in the public sphere so that someone else could possibly observe them
A mind-object coincidence is the most reported form of coincidence. The coincider thinks, imagines, or feels something that is paralleled in an event outside their mind. To varying degrees each object has a form and a meaning that resonates with something in the mind of the coincider.
Dr. Beitman writes, “The words coincide, and coincidence came into English through philosophy, likely from translations from the Latin of Roger Bacon (1220–1292). The words then passed into the vocabulary of scholarly English writers during the first half of the seventeenth century and then were taken up by mathematicians during the great revival of mathematical study at that time in England. The word coincidence became a household word in American English following the simultaneous deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams on July 4, 1826. The pair died exactly fifty years after each had signed the United States Declaration of Independence.
So then, what is a coincidence? We know very little about what they are. That reality is best illustrated by the dictionary definition, which states that a coincidence is the remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection. Why is it remarkable? Because they occur at the same time? Because their concurrence is surprising? Because there is no apparent cause though it seems there should be one? And left unsaid in that definition is the suggestion that the coincidence may have meant.”
Sheryl knows as a medium able to download information from spirit that coincidences are indeed messages from Universal Source that help us find our way to the destiny of our soul life that assumed a physical life for the purpose of remembering who we are. and to refine our energy to higher levels of compassion and love. Coincidences are not random and assist each person to discover more about themselves and the nature of life.
But one thing about coincidences is certain: they are all around us. In our daily lives, on the internet, radio, and television, and in our entertainment; but like the gorilla in the room, we often don’t notice them, or do so only briefly, in passing, and often without giving them a second thought. The survey I conducted while at the University of Missouri in 2009 found that at least a third of the general population frequently notices coincidences.
Some of the uses of meaningful coincidences in fact, the time intervals characterizing coinciding events can vary from simultaneous to many years. And coincidental events taking place years apart can be every bit as astonishing as those that are instantaneous. Take this example as related by psychologist Alan Combs and English professor Mark Holland in their book Synchronicity: Through the Eyes of Science, Myth and the Trickster: “Allen Falby was a highway patrolman in Texas. One night on duty he crashed his motorcycle and lay bleeding to death on the road, having ruptured a major artery in his leg. At that point, a man named Alfred Smith arrived, quickly put a tourniquet on his leg, and saved his life. Five years later, Falby was again on duty and received a call to go to the scene of an auto accident. There, he found a man who was bleeding to death from a severed artery in his leg. He applied a tourniquet and saved the man’s life. Only then did he find out it was Alfred Smith, the very man who had saved his life in the exact same way five years earlier. Falby joked, ‘It all goes to prove that one good tourniquet deserves another.”
Another variable in coincidences is similarity: the two or more events making up a coincidence must be similar. In the Allen Falby example, both events involve a tourniquet on the leg saving the life of a man bleeding to death. That is not a coincidence, but the fact the two men happen to save each other’s lives years apart without knowing or being involved with one another—and each showing up at the right place and time to save the other person’s life—is what makes it a coincidence. It would be seen as somewhat less of a coincidence if Falby, who had been saved from bleeding to death with a tourniquet applied by Smith, had saved Smith say, from drowning, by resuscitation. And perhaps it would not be seen as a coincidence at all if they were both in the same police department; that would certainly be the case if they were patrol partners.
Many people think that some synchronicities and serendipities are always positive, beneficial and helpful. Dr. Beitman makes the point quite clearly that some coincidences are definitely not so great.
Sheryl tells the story of flying to Barbados having been told she would be traveling with another woman and meeting a woman from Barbados returning for the funeral of her ex-husband. When Sheryl told her that she was searching for answers to understand afterlife communication as many coincidences had contributed to her being on this plane to attend a spiritual convention the woman told Sheryl that years ago through an empathic feeling coincidence she sensed her 21 year old son was in danger and rushed to the place where he had just died. She was unable to stop his death but the spiritual message made her understand it had to happen and he would be okay.
No project captured Targ’s enthusiasm and commitment more than her study of the possible efficacy of prayer in healing. Through randomized double-blind clinical trials, she and her colleagues found strong evidence that AIDS patients, who received prayers from distant healers of a variety of faiths, had significantly better medical outcomes than patients who did not receive supportive prayers. Then, in 1997, Targ designed a study and secured funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to explore distant healing and prayer as trainable skills that nurses, and other health professionals might integrate into their healing work. Principally, the study examined the efficacy of prayer on patients with a rare and difficult-to-treat form of brain cancer, glioblastoma. Shortly after receiving funding from the NIH, Targ herself was diagnosed with this same form of cancer. But healing prayer, radiation, and chemotherapy were not able to stop this rapidly growing cancer. She died shortly before her forty-first birthday. Sheryl knows that we all have a time to be born and a time to pass to eternal life.
This book offers ways to align all the aspects of soul and physical life to function more fully within the use of our spiritual or universal gifts and talents. The following story by Carl Jung in working with a patient shows this to be true.
Through his towering intellect, reflected in his theoretical writings and anecdotes, Jung laid the groundwork for the twenty-first century study of meaningful coincidences. Jung participated in the creation of the world’s most famous meaningful coincidence during a therapy session. In his office in Zurich, Switzerland, he had been treating a young woman of high education and serious demeanor. But Jung could see that her quest for psychological change was doomed unless he could succeed in softening her rationalist shell. As he remained attentive to the young woman, he hoped something unexpected, and irrational would turn up. And as she described a golden scarab—a costly piece of jewelry—she had received in a dream the night before. Jung heard a tapping on the window. Jung opened the window and plucked a scarab beetle out of the air. The beetle, closely resembling the golden scarab, was just what he needed— or just what she needed. “Here is your scarab,” he said to the woman, as he handed her a link between her dream and external reality
Sheryl in a reading for a client received many messages to share that the woman was able to account for. There was one message about a green praying mantis that did not make sense at the time. A week later the client called Sheryl telling her that while cleaning a drawer a green praying mantis jumped out and she laughed because she knew Sheryl had used that image. What it showed the client was that the future had already happened a week before, and Sheryl was able to retrieve that happening before it physically transpired. Obviously, spirit wanted Sheryl and her client to know that truth as it would aid her in accepting how life worked and take much fear out of the equation.
The five most common types of coincidences in this analysis were:
1. Sharing a birthday with someone (11 percent)
2. Connections involving books, TV, radio, or the news (10 percent)
3. Vacation-related coincidences (6.1 percent)
4. Meeting people in transit—while walking around, in airports, or on public transportation (6 percent) 5. Coincidences related to marriage or in-laws (5.3 percent) The researchers also looked at the tone of the stories and found that more people described their coincidences using negative language (32 percent) or neutral language (41 percent) than positive language (25 percent). This finding is unexpected because coincidences are generally considered to be positive experiences. Maybe it’s because people seeking meaning are more likely to experience coincidences, and that often happens in times of distress.
The other coincidences, in descending order of frequency, were:
• I am introduced to people who unexpectedly further my work
• I need something, and the need is then met without my having to do anything
• I run into a friend in an out-of-the-way place
• Meaningful coincidence helps determine my educational path
• I think about someone and then that person unexpectedly drops by my house or office, or passes me in the hall or street
• I experience strong emotions or physical sensations that were simultaneously experienced at a distance by someone I love
• When my phone rings, I know who is calling without checking the screen or using personalized ring tones
Two emotionally connected people doing the same thing at the same time at a distance is clearly a coincidence.
SQuire Rushnell a former guest and author of When God Winks tells the story of Christopher and Marion, who were still reeling from divorces each had gone through around the same time. They felt good with each other, but the fear of intimacy kept them wavering. And they lived two thousand miles apart. Yet they knew that marriage looked like an increasingly likely possibility. One day, Christopher stood trance-like in front of his bookshelf. He picked up The Nature of Love and randomly turned to a page discussing the writings of Kahlil Gibran. He read, “Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping, for only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.” He called Marion and read the lines to her. She paused and told him: “I am, right now, holding the same book in my lap . . . The Nature of Love . . . and the only part of the book I have read is the part you have just read to me.” His mind was on the same idea as her mind
Since Sheryl is an intuitive medium empath and has twin granddaughters she found the following notation interesting. Dr. Beitman wrote, “Playfair summarized the research of Mary Rosambeau who, in preparation of her book How Twins Grow Up, created a lengthy newspaper appeal for answers to her twin questionnaire. She received six hundred replies.
Her questionnaire on many aspects of twin activity included these two questions:
1. Have you or your twin(s) had any experience which might be explained as being able to read each other’s minds? If so, what?
2. Have you ever been surprised by both of you having the same illness or pain at the same time?
The 183 “yes” replies included these categories:
1. “Knowing” when one twin is about to telephone the other.
2. Saying the same thing at the same time; singing a song the other was just thinking of.
3. Using identical words when replying to the same exam question after doing the same homework.
4. They “just knew” that their other was in trouble. They commented, “I felt something was wrong,” “I felt very uneasy,” or “I was overcome with misery.”
5. They seem to share the same dream.
6. They share the same pain or injury.
We thank Dr. Bernard Beitman author of Meaningful Coincidences for showing us that each of us has more to do with creating coincidences than we think. Coincidences expand our reality, and we can use these occurrences to inspire psychological interpersonal and spiritual growth.
In summarizing today’s episode of Healing from Within we may conclude all of us have experienced coincidences that piqued our curiosity brought us information that helped us in some way and often just amused us.
Sheryl in her book The Living Spirt sh wrote, “Sometimes we find the most resistance among those closest to us. Most of my own relatives are grounded in the practical aspects of life, and it’s difficult for them to let go of antiquated belief systems and consider the idea that energy, thoughts, and all our memories survive even after leaving the physical body. My cousin, Erica, on the other hand, is more receptive to these spiritual ideas, so I felt comfortable relaying a story about her mother, my Aunt Gladys, who had passed away some years before. Aunt Gladys had been coming through with humorous messages at my unfoldment group. After I finished telling Erica this, Erica told me about a coincidence that she specifically asked me to include in this book. Her middle son, Justin, had been born on her father’s birthday. Her father had passed long before Justin’s birth. Now thirteen, Justin would have his bar mitzvah on the 12th of January, which was her mother’s birthday. Erica felt—and I agree— that these two important dates were signs that Justin still had a connection to his grandparents in spirit. The fact that her mother was also coming through to me brought the “coincidence” full circle. Gladys was reaching out to let us know she is still around and still loving her family. Most of us have experiences like these but dismiss them as “crazy.” When we do this—or allow others to do it to us—we disconnect from our loved one in spirit and their messages.
Dr. Bernard Beitman and Sheryl Glick RMT would like you to remember that when you start to recognize coincidences as messages from Spirit to guide and help us find more joy and purpose in life, your soul will have awakened to the eternal truths of the Universe and Life will be intrinsically enhanced for your personal growth and happiness.
I am Sheryl Glick RMT author of the newest book in a trilogy A New Life Awaits Spirit Guided Insights to Support Global Awakening and Invite you to visit my website www.sherylglick.com to read about and listen to leaders in the metaphysical, scientific, spiritual, medical and energy healing field, psychological, educational and the arts and music fields, who seek to know answers to questions that may explain life on both the physical and divine expressions connecting “All that Is” and leading us past fear doubt limitation. Shows may also be heard on www.webtalkradio.net and www.dreamvisions7radio.com
