What, I ask, shaped your life? You might say, for example, that common human necessities, such as the need for food, have driven you to a pattern of eating, once, twice, three times a day, or of continuous snacking. Eating: Now that’s an inescapable necessity for all humans. You might also say that what you have become was contingent on all those little events that differ among individuals, from being born into a certain economic condition or faith system to being in the right place at the right time to get a job. I think, for example of the latter, a contingency that placed me in a job I held for four decades and of all the subsequent related contingencies that I see in retrospect. A serendipitous event that produced a career also produced governmental research projects that came my way, the very first one by accident, I believe, and then the others by personal motivation to seek more of the same.
Before I continue, let me speak about that personal serendipity of decades ago by running the video of my career. Hit “Play.” Seeking a job as a college instructor, I went to visit campuses one summer day. On a sidewalk of the first campus on my itinerary, I chanced upon the chairman of the English Department who was walking across the campus. Before I left that sidewalk, I heard, “You’re hired. We’ll fill out the paperwork later.” It was a serendipitous meeting that was enhanced by synchronicity. Fast forward now.... Stop. Hit “Play.” Eventually, another serendipitous event resulted in my switching departments to teach the earth sciences, specifically, oceanography. Fast forward again…. Stop. Hit “Play.” Just about everyone had gone home for the day, leaving me in my office and the departmental secretary at her desk to mind the store. A state government agent appeared at her desk and asked for a colleague, the most senior member of the department. Because he had already left, she sent the fellow to me, and he explained that the federal government had asked the state to perform such-n-such research. The agency, he said, was at a loss on how to proceed, so he was traveling to state universities in search of someone to do the work, “chancing” upon me that day. We hit a point of synchronicity in that meeting. Keep watching this video. I did the research for the state, and all my subsequent government research stemmed from that meeting. I suppose I could say that all of it was contingent upon that meeting which was contingent upon a series of serendipitous events. I might also add that all those graduate assistants and colleagues I hired on grant money over the ensuing years also owed something to those chance meetings with a chairman and a state agent. Serendipity for sure for them, their earning some much needed money coming at just the opportune time for them, all as a consequence of my personal serendipitous events derived, as my video shows, from contingent necessities: 1) Filling the need for an instructor in the English Department, 2) Filling the English Department’s need a few years later for someone to teach a new course in scientific and technical writing, 3) Filling a personal need to acquire more scientific knowledge by enrolling in science courses that motivated the chairman of a science department to ask me to teach for them, 4) Filling the Department of Earth Sciences’ need for someone to teach oceanography by acquiring even more knowledge and switching departments, and eventually 5) Filling the need of a wandering puzzled state agent to perform some research mandated by the federal government. Yes, the video shows that my career evolved because I filled contingent needs.
Now, I wonder about you. What serendipitous event or events altered your life’s course? And I also wonder whether or not your serendipitous event or events might just as easily have occurred in someone else’s life. Had that senior colleague not left for the day, would he have conjoined the state agent synchronistically and then seized the opportunity to perform that research? Could the serendipity you have experienced just as easily have been the catalyst for someone else to walk in your shoes, to star in your autobiographical video. In other words, were you necessary? Were you “chosen” in all of Earth history to be where you are? Were your personal serendipitous synchronicities possible only with you as the actor? Did all the Cosmos conspire to place you in your current state of affairs through the accumulation of such events that filled contingent necessities? Was there an encompassing cause that produced you, the effect? Lots of questions, I realize, but I have another question.
Has your life been the result of synchronicity? There are many who believe their lives are contingent on a “special” occurrence. I just read a short autobiography of such a person. Gregg Levoy posted in Psychology Today online (2017) the story of his being in one job but thinking of possible others, listening to “Desperado” by the Eagles on the way home from work one day, hearing the line about the Queen of Hearts, stepping out of his car, and finding a Queen of Hearts beneath his foot, an event he believes was serendipitous synchronicity enhanced by other instances of running into the isolated Queen of Hearts cards in various places. He writes that such synchronicity is “A Sure Sign You’re on the Right Path.” *
Synchronicity? Here’s an example of synchronicity:
Vera: “Ralph, take out the garbage.”
Ralph: “Funny thing, Vera, I was just thinking you would.”
Now another question: What brought Vera and Ralph together for a life-long relationship that one day would have them thinking simultaneously about taking out the trash? Mere serendipity? Cosmic determinism? Forget the fictional couple. What about you?
With seven billion of us interacting, coincidence and synchronicity are likely. But when either occurs, we are usually astonished by our apparent inexplicable connection to others and to the universe. What are we to argue, that coincidences occur coincidentally? That synchronicity in any form is a matter of accident in a finite life? That we don’t have the connection with others we believe we have? Or, finally, that most “meetings of minds” and spiritual connections with nature ignore differences in favor of a single recognizable, and possibly imagined, common detail that a suffusion of neurotransmitters enhances in our brains? Do we impose connections where no connections by any objective standard exist?
That we ascribe meaning to synchronous and coincidental events is a normal reaction, but no one, I believe, has established that such events actually have objective meaning. Things happen. We happen to be where they happen. As Porky Pig says at the end of a Looney Tunes cartoon, “That’s all, folks.” But, darn, don’t you get that feeling that there’s something more to synchronicity and coincidence than chance? Do you believe that synchronous phenomena suggest life isn’t “looney,” but that “There’s more, folks”?
Take dating, for example. How did you meet? The universe is 13.8 billion years old—give or take a week—the planet is 4.5 billion years old; it’s been more than three billion years since life first appeared and more than a half billion years since unicellular life evolved into multicellular life that proliferated; and your type of life, hominins, has been around for millions of years with the rise of your species maybe 300,000 years ago—that’s about 150,000 generations and 100 billion people. And now there are those contemporaneous billions of humans, and you met one of them, found a meeting of minds and hearts, and, as they say, the two of you became one. What are the chances? What are the chances of finding that “soulmate”? Was your meeting serendipitous? Well, maybe you should consider that, though unprovable, you could easily have met hundreds or thousands of soulmates among seven billion members of your species. “But there was that moment,” you argue. “There was that immediate connection.”
From personal experiences, I tend to believe that we do have inexplicable connections; yet, my belief is tempered by my knowing that biochemistry, emotions, assumptions, culture, and learning control what I think and feel when I experience synchronicity and coincidence. Take the “love at first sight” experience as an example of synchronicity. Maybe you experienced it; maybe you saw it in a movie when two characters embarrassingly exchange that “knowing” flirtatious glance “across a crowded room,” as Emile sings in South Pacific.
“Some enchanted evening you may see a stranger
You may see a stranger across a crowded room
And somehow you know, you know even then
That somewhere you’ll see her again and again…
“Who can explain it, who can tell you why
Fools give you reasons, wise men never try”
I suppose that in giving you an explanation of love at first sight, of coincidence and of synchronicity, I might prove myself a fool. I also suspect that regardless of any insight embodied in the lyrics Oscar Hammerstein wrote for that song, neuroscientists do have an explanation. So, with some preconceived reservations, I checked some findings.
With regard to “love at first sight,” I am a little skeptical of any findings that embrace a mingling of pheromones as a chief cause of synchronicity between supposed star-crossed lovers. Hammerstein’s lyric phrase “across a crowded room” provides me an image of too many intervening volatiles and too much volume to make such a mingling by pedesis anything other than the rarest of chances; so, forget Brownian movements. (Being in the same room as someone infected by COVID-19 isn’t a guarantee you’ll get the disease) But then, since I don’t know how many molecules are required for pheromones to work or how often “love at first sight” occurs, I should be skeptical of my skepticism. And yet, “across a crowded room”? I can’t prove that mingling molecules aren’t the cause of “love at first sight,” but that chance mingling seems rarer “across a crowded room” than finding the winning slot machine among all the slots in Vegas and Reno combined.
I suppose everyone has had a share of sitting at the right “slot machine” of life and found, in this mixed metaphor, a meeting of minds. So, I have to ask whether or not there aren’t visual or audio clues that work like pheromones, making that “across the room” connection just as likely as standing next to a pheromone-emitter. Yet, according to Dr. Trisha Stratford, a neuropsychotherapist, speaking in an interview with Emily Blatchford for the Huffpost, a woman can smell a man at ten feet. ** I suppose that’s the pedesis I mentioned above, and I also suppose that there’s a limitation by position upwind or downwind. Nevertheless, I met my wife, for example, in a crowd, but we weren’t separated, weren’t “across a crowded room.” Rather, we were standing next to each other in a crowded room. Could those pheromones have been wafting? We were only a couple of feet apart,maybe only 18 inches. In the context of billions of years of life and untold numbers of recirculated compounds, did those pheromone atoms and molecules intermix synchronistically just at “the right moment and place in the history of the Cosmos” to make us fall in love? What are the chances? ***
Although I would not place some Jungian paranormal meaning on a first meeting of “star-crossed soul mates,” I must still admit that I cannot explain my—or your—meeting the “right” person at the right time to form a lifelong happy relationship. Was Providence involved? Would that mean, then, that in 13.7 billion years of Cosmic History, a meeting that took a couple of minutes was predestined, that my life or your life was determined at the Big Bang in a string of causality?
In fact, we’re all very complex. Those who seem to find several or even many soul mates might differ from me and my life experiences. Second, third, and more marriages are common. Look, for example, at the life of the late actress Elizabeth Taylor, who seemed to fall in love twice with Richard Burton whom she married, divorced, remarried, and divorced again. And that brings me back to the inexplicable.
We can never fully know how the other person might experience any event regardless of our supposed mutual feelings. We can analyze the brain to find serotonin and dopamine coursing through networks of neurons in the brain’s adaptive oscillators; yet, we can’t dismiss the holistic mind, the whole person that seems to be in perfect sync with us “across a crowded room.” Let’s get existential-like here: I am my brain that fell in love. I am my brain that experienced synchronicity. I am my brain that experiences a meeting of minds and hearts. But I am not, it seems to me, relegated to just a brain operating on sensory data.
There appears to be a meeting of minds, a synchronicity that is real. And that synchronicity seems to take place outside the skull. I know of other stories like that of Gregg Levoy, stories about some object appearing by chance to symbolize a desire or a destiny and stories about meetings of minds that have brought people together. Of course, we can’t impose a meaning on any of them until after their occurrence, making serendipity and synchronicity both matter for retrospect.
Now, I feel a need to tell you and Gregg Levoy that his chance of running into that odd and isolated Queen of Hearts card isn’t necessarily a sign of anything. The United States Playing Card Company was founded in 1867. It sells 100 million decks of playing cards annually. So, do the numbers for yourself. That’s 100 million Queen of Hearts cards every year. Go back ten years. That’s a billion Queen of Hearts cards. Now count up all the cards produced from 1867 to 2000. Queen of Hearts cards? There is just one in a deck of cards, but they are not so rare. Right? Chances of running into one are good, even in the wilderness, where campers might have played poker in their tents. Gregg says he stumbled upon one off the beaten path of a hiking trail.
What of those current seven billion human beings? That’s a big number, more humans are alive each year than the number of Queen of Hearts cards produced in a half century. Chances of running into any of your potential soulmates are pretty good, it seems to me. If there is only a sole soulmate, however, your odds of finding each other are slim.
Vera: “Ralph, take out the garbage.”
Ralph: “Funny, Vera, I was just thinking that you would.”
So, I have to ask you, “Are serendipity and synchronicity fortuitous only in retrospect?” Do you think everything has worked out well simply because everything worked out well? Think about that as you take out (or don’t take out) the garbage.
Notes:
*Levoy, Gregg. 19 Dec 2017. Synchronicities: A Sure Sign You’re on the Right Path. Psychology Today, Online at https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/passion/201712/synchronicities-sure-sign-youre-the-right-path Accessed July 11, 2021.
**Blatchford, Emily. 7 July 2016. We Talk To A Neuroscientists About Love At First Sight. Huffpost online at https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2016/07/20/we-talk-to-a-neuroscientist-about-love-at-first-sight_a_21435275/ Accessed July 11, 2021.
***I remember reading as a kid that someone had calculated the chance of a modern human breathing some of the same molecules that the Buddha, Caesar, or Jesus breathed.
Before I continue, let me speak about that personal serendipity of decades ago by running the video of my career. Hit “Play.” Seeking a job as a college instructor, I went to visit campuses one summer day. On a sidewalk of the first campus on my itinerary, I chanced upon the chairman of the English Department who was walking across the campus. Before I left that sidewalk, I heard, “You’re hired. We’ll fill out the paperwork later.” It was a serendipitous meeting that was enhanced by synchronicity. Fast forward now.... Stop. Hit “Play.” Eventually, another serendipitous event resulted in my switching departments to teach the earth sciences, specifically, oceanography. Fast forward again…. Stop. Hit “Play.” Just about everyone had gone home for the day, leaving me in my office and the departmental secretary at her desk to mind the store. A state government agent appeared at her desk and asked for a colleague, the most senior member of the department. Because he had already left, she sent the fellow to me, and he explained that the federal government had asked the state to perform such-n-such research. The agency, he said, was at a loss on how to proceed, so he was traveling to state universities in search of someone to do the work, “chancing” upon me that day. We hit a point of synchronicity in that meeting. Keep watching this video. I did the research for the state, and all my subsequent government research stemmed from that meeting. I suppose I could say that all of it was contingent upon that meeting which was contingent upon a series of serendipitous events. I might also add that all those graduate assistants and colleagues I hired on grant money over the ensuing years also owed something to those chance meetings with a chairman and a state agent. Serendipity for sure for them, their earning some much needed money coming at just the opportune time for them, all as a consequence of my personal serendipitous events derived, as my video shows, from contingent necessities: 1) Filling the need for an instructor in the English Department, 2) Filling the English Department’s need a few years later for someone to teach a new course in scientific and technical writing, 3) Filling a personal need to acquire more scientific knowledge by enrolling in science courses that motivated the chairman of a science department to ask me to teach for them, 4) Filling the Department of Earth Sciences’ need for someone to teach oceanography by acquiring even more knowledge and switching departments, and eventually 5) Filling the need of a wandering puzzled state agent to perform some research mandated by the federal government. Yes, the video shows that my career evolved because I filled contingent needs.
Now, I wonder about you. What serendipitous event or events altered your life’s course? And I also wonder whether or not your serendipitous event or events might just as easily have occurred in someone else’s life. Had that senior colleague not left for the day, would he have conjoined the state agent synchronistically and then seized the opportunity to perform that research? Could the serendipity you have experienced just as easily have been the catalyst for someone else to walk in your shoes, to star in your autobiographical video. In other words, were you necessary? Were you “chosen” in all of Earth history to be where you are? Were your personal serendipitous synchronicities possible only with you as the actor? Did all the Cosmos conspire to place you in your current state of affairs through the accumulation of such events that filled contingent necessities? Was there an encompassing cause that produced you, the effect? Lots of questions, I realize, but I have another question.
Has your life been the result of synchronicity? There are many who believe their lives are contingent on a “special” occurrence. I just read a short autobiography of such a person. Gregg Levoy posted in Psychology Today online (2017) the story of his being in one job but thinking of possible others, listening to “Desperado” by the Eagles on the way home from work one day, hearing the line about the Queen of Hearts, stepping out of his car, and finding a Queen of Hearts beneath his foot, an event he believes was serendipitous synchronicity enhanced by other instances of running into the isolated Queen of Hearts cards in various places. He writes that such synchronicity is “A Sure Sign You’re on the Right Path.” *
Synchronicity? Here’s an example of synchronicity:
Vera: “Ralph, take out the garbage.”
Ralph: “Funny thing, Vera, I was just thinking you would.”
Now another question: What brought Vera and Ralph together for a life-long relationship that one day would have them thinking simultaneously about taking out the trash? Mere serendipity? Cosmic determinism? Forget the fictional couple. What about you?
With seven billion of us interacting, coincidence and synchronicity are likely. But when either occurs, we are usually astonished by our apparent inexplicable connection to others and to the universe. What are we to argue, that coincidences occur coincidentally? That synchronicity in any form is a matter of accident in a finite life? That we don’t have the connection with others we believe we have? Or, finally, that most “meetings of minds” and spiritual connections with nature ignore differences in favor of a single recognizable, and possibly imagined, common detail that a suffusion of neurotransmitters enhances in our brains? Do we impose connections where no connections by any objective standard exist?
That we ascribe meaning to synchronous and coincidental events is a normal reaction, but no one, I believe, has established that such events actually have objective meaning. Things happen. We happen to be where they happen. As Porky Pig says at the end of a Looney Tunes cartoon, “That’s all, folks.” But, darn, don’t you get that feeling that there’s something more to synchronicity and coincidence than chance? Do you believe that synchronous phenomena suggest life isn’t “looney,” but that “There’s more, folks”?
Take dating, for example. How did you meet? The universe is 13.8 billion years old—give or take a week—the planet is 4.5 billion years old; it’s been more than three billion years since life first appeared and more than a half billion years since unicellular life evolved into multicellular life that proliferated; and your type of life, hominins, has been around for millions of years with the rise of your species maybe 300,000 years ago—that’s about 150,000 generations and 100 billion people. And now there are those contemporaneous billions of humans, and you met one of them, found a meeting of minds and hearts, and, as they say, the two of you became one. What are the chances? What are the chances of finding that “soulmate”? Was your meeting serendipitous? Well, maybe you should consider that, though unprovable, you could easily have met hundreds or thousands of soulmates among seven billion members of your species. “But there was that moment,” you argue. “There was that immediate connection.”
From personal experiences, I tend to believe that we do have inexplicable connections; yet, my belief is tempered by my knowing that biochemistry, emotions, assumptions, culture, and learning control what I think and feel when I experience synchronicity and coincidence. Take the “love at first sight” experience as an example of synchronicity. Maybe you experienced it; maybe you saw it in a movie when two characters embarrassingly exchange that “knowing” flirtatious glance “across a crowded room,” as Emile sings in South Pacific.
“Some enchanted evening you may see a stranger
You may see a stranger across a crowded room
And somehow you know, you know even then
That somewhere you’ll see her again and again…
“Who can explain it, who can tell you why
Fools give you reasons, wise men never try”
I suppose that in giving you an explanation of love at first sight, of coincidence and of synchronicity, I might prove myself a fool. I also suspect that regardless of any insight embodied in the lyrics Oscar Hammerstein wrote for that song, neuroscientists do have an explanation. So, with some preconceived reservations, I checked some findings.
With regard to “love at first sight,” I am a little skeptical of any findings that embrace a mingling of pheromones as a chief cause of synchronicity between supposed star-crossed lovers. Hammerstein’s lyric phrase “across a crowded room” provides me an image of too many intervening volatiles and too much volume to make such a mingling by pedesis anything other than the rarest of chances; so, forget Brownian movements. (Being in the same room as someone infected by COVID-19 isn’t a guarantee you’ll get the disease) But then, since I don’t know how many molecules are required for pheromones to work or how often “love at first sight” occurs, I should be skeptical of my skepticism. And yet, “across a crowded room”? I can’t prove that mingling molecules aren’t the cause of “love at first sight,” but that chance mingling seems rarer “across a crowded room” than finding the winning slot machine among all the slots in Vegas and Reno combined.
I suppose everyone has had a share of sitting at the right “slot machine” of life and found, in this mixed metaphor, a meeting of minds. So, I have to ask whether or not there aren’t visual or audio clues that work like pheromones, making that “across the room” connection just as likely as standing next to a pheromone-emitter. Yet, according to Dr. Trisha Stratford, a neuropsychotherapist, speaking in an interview with Emily Blatchford for the Huffpost, a woman can smell a man at ten feet. ** I suppose that’s the pedesis I mentioned above, and I also suppose that there’s a limitation by position upwind or downwind. Nevertheless, I met my wife, for example, in a crowd, but we weren’t separated, weren’t “across a crowded room.” Rather, we were standing next to each other in a crowded room. Could those pheromones have been wafting? We were only a couple of feet apart,maybe only 18 inches. In the context of billions of years of life and untold numbers of recirculated compounds, did those pheromone atoms and molecules intermix synchronistically just at “the right moment and place in the history of the Cosmos” to make us fall in love? What are the chances? ***
Although I would not place some Jungian paranormal meaning on a first meeting of “star-crossed soul mates,” I must still admit that I cannot explain my—or your—meeting the “right” person at the right time to form a lifelong happy relationship. Was Providence involved? Would that mean, then, that in 13.7 billion years of Cosmic History, a meeting that took a couple of minutes was predestined, that my life or your life was determined at the Big Bang in a string of causality?
In fact, we’re all very complex. Those who seem to find several or even many soul mates might differ from me and my life experiences. Second, third, and more marriages are common. Look, for example, at the life of the late actress Elizabeth Taylor, who seemed to fall in love twice with Richard Burton whom she married, divorced, remarried, and divorced again. And that brings me back to the inexplicable.
We can never fully know how the other person might experience any event regardless of our supposed mutual feelings. We can analyze the brain to find serotonin and dopamine coursing through networks of neurons in the brain’s adaptive oscillators; yet, we can’t dismiss the holistic mind, the whole person that seems to be in perfect sync with us “across a crowded room.” Let’s get existential-like here: I am my brain that fell in love. I am my brain that experienced synchronicity. I am my brain that experiences a meeting of minds and hearts. But I am not, it seems to me, relegated to just a brain operating on sensory data.
There appears to be a meeting of minds, a synchronicity that is real. And that synchronicity seems to take place outside the skull. I know of other stories like that of Gregg Levoy, stories about some object appearing by chance to symbolize a desire or a destiny and stories about meetings of minds that have brought people together. Of course, we can’t impose a meaning on any of them until after their occurrence, making serendipity and synchronicity both matter for retrospect.
Now, I feel a need to tell you and Gregg Levoy that his chance of running into that odd and isolated Queen of Hearts card isn’t necessarily a sign of anything. The United States Playing Card Company was founded in 1867. It sells 100 million decks of playing cards annually. So, do the numbers for yourself. That’s 100 million Queen of Hearts cards every year. Go back ten years. That’s a billion Queen of Hearts cards. Now count up all the cards produced from 1867 to 2000. Queen of Hearts cards? There is just one in a deck of cards, but they are not so rare. Right? Chances of running into one are good, even in the wilderness, where campers might have played poker in their tents. Gregg says he stumbled upon one off the beaten path of a hiking trail.
What of those current seven billion human beings? That’s a big number, more humans are alive each year than the number of Queen of Hearts cards produced in a half century. Chances of running into any of your potential soulmates are pretty good, it seems to me. If there is only a sole soulmate, however, your odds of finding each other are slim.
Vera: “Ralph, take out the garbage.”
Ralph: “Funny, Vera, I was just thinking that you would.”
So, I have to ask you, “Are serendipity and synchronicity fortuitous only in retrospect?” Do you think everything has worked out well simply because everything worked out well? Think about that as you take out (or don’t take out) the garbage.
Notes:
*Levoy, Gregg. 19 Dec 2017. Synchronicities: A Sure Sign You’re on the Right Path. Psychology Today, Online at https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/passion/201712/synchronicities-sure-sign-youre-the-right-path Accessed July 11, 2021.
**Blatchford, Emily. 7 July 2016. We Talk To A Neuroscientists About Love At First Sight. Huffpost online at https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2016/07/20/we-talk-to-a-neuroscientist-about-love-at-first-sight_a_21435275/ Accessed July 11, 2021.
***I remember reading as a kid that someone had calculated the chance of a modern human breathing some of the same molecules that the Buddha, Caesar, or Jesus breathed.
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