What is Coincidence?

SUNSET AT KINCARDINE'S LIGHTHOUSE

I am prompted to write about coincidence because of three events that have happened to me during the past twenty-four hours. The first is a coincidence of a 'word,' and the second is a coincidence of an event in time. The two coincidences together contrive to create an event in my mind that tells me something meaningful.

Sometimes, we have things happen to us that as I put it 'should not happen.' That they happen to me fairly regularly makes me aware of them and causes me to think that there is something unseen going on around me, and that I should possibly accept that there are secret guardians at work, known only by what happens, or that I am missing something about how 'my universe' has been constructed for me to experience, or how my universe is constructed.

I wish that could dismiss the coincidences as deriving from known probabilities, but I can't, even though I am trained as a mathematical statistician. In statistical terms, I am seeking the generating function for events that are unrepeatable. I can never reconstruct the events. They will not happen again in this life cycle. They have a probability of almost zero.

I wish that I had such events to prompt me to gamble but I don't. There is no way that I can possibly benefit from the events other than this blog or by reading a meaning into the events that triggers behaviour that I would not initiate without the events.

My recourse is to re-examine the subject matter of coincidence. I would begin with the book 'The Roots of Coincidence, An Excursion Into Parapsychology' written by Arthur Koestler. Koestler focuses on the possibility of telepathy in the causation of coincidence. This could have contributed to one of my cases, one which occurred yesterday, and which involved a human being, but not to the one which occurred today. Its possible that I am missing something about how the world is constructed.

Let me describe the first coincidence and see what you think. I was in Stratford about two weeks ago, and arrived at the Home Hardware five minutes before closing returning from Orillia. During the five minutes, I picked a colour from about two hundred different colour cards and had the paint mixed. The name of the paint colour was Lily. I painted a bedroom with the paint and used it all up, but needed more for a second coat. I returned to the local Home Hardware, but I had forgotten to bring my colour card and there was no one serving at the paint desk in any event, so I left without paint. I selected a colour card of the colour that I thought that I needed.

Sunday, I returned to the Home Hardware, but in my town which is about 60 miles from the other Home Hardware store, with the correct colour card since I had chosen the wrong colour card the previous day. I had with me the lid of the paint can and it had the codes needed to identify the paint colour. Up to now everything seems pretty normal doesn't it. If you think you are clever tell me what you think the coincident is, based on the above information. I am sure that you cannot.

I handed the lid to a girl behind the paint counter. She was one who mixed up paint. She was one of two girls there and she volunteered to serve me. She went to the computer and entered the numbers, then came back to me and said smiling all the while that this was her colour. She shouted over to the others nearby that someone had named a paint colour after her name, which is Lily. She looked at me, and said, "My name is Lily." I was puzzled and then she explained that the name of the paint colour was 'Lily.' Out of about 200 colours, I had selected 'her' colour and had been served by her. She mixed the paint.

Thinking back on the coincidence, it still seems extraordinary. How many people do you know named 'Lily?' How many Lily's work in paint shops? It was a Sunday, and I could have got the paint on another day when she was not working. I had chosen the paint colour as a split second decision. I could not remember the colour exactly on the Saturday, when I intended to get the paint and forgot the paint tin lid and had lost the paint card. I did not recall the name of the colour of the paint until she told me.

I won't tell you about the other coincidence right now until the story has played out much further. There may be much to record!

Was the above a coincidence? What do you make of it?

Figuring it all out, Coincidence, Fate, Luck, God, or the Source of Being

A HARE'S BREATH

by

AW LAKE

What is the true nature of our world, or is it even a world. Who or what governs it. I am never really sure whether my friends think that it is a rightful preooccupation for anyone to try to figure it all out. That has been the bane of serious speculation through the ages. "Who are you to speculate about such unknowable matters?" "What is your authority?" Even worse, people who did come up with new ideas were called heretics. They were stoned, burned at the stake, poisoned, clubbed to death, shot, to name but a few of the awful outcomes.

The fact is, however, that normal people can't help wondering, and even those like Richard Dawkins, the evolutionist biologist, who preaches the notion of God 'the delusion.' Well, he seems to protest too much! I wonder at his keen interest in this greatest of mysteries. Certainly, the world is moved by the forces of evolution, and most of us, but not all, are now outside of the denial of that. Visits by children to websites that tell us lots about dinosaurs. They prove in a verifiable way that there is a longer earthly history than the Bible allows. Those that think otherwise need to 'Wake up!' as Jesus Christ said. The issue is not whether the Bible is the word of God, but whether we recognize Jesus as evolution, and evidence of evolution as Dr. RM Bucke, of the London, Ontario in the late 1800s, insane assylum would have us believe.

The fact is that Walt Whitman, who lived in Dr. Bucke's time believed in human evolution and believed that he was, himself, part of human evolution. Whitman did things on the battlefield of the American civil war that no humans would normally do. He actually went out onto the battle field and saved lives without fear for his own personal death. Would that the arab terrorists were more like him, and went about saving lives. They would give their cause a tremendous boost if they did.

It is interesting that terrorists take lives rather than saving them. They damage the causes that they are fighting for because they give others the urge to destroy the civilizations from which they have come. If bin Ladin's plan is to destroy Saudi Arabia then he is succeeding. He would do much better giving medicine to dying children.

I am keenly interested in learning about human evolution.

People often ask me, "Do you believe in God?" I find this question often reflects a bias on the part of the questioner. It would not be appropriate to answer, "Whether or not I believe in God is my personal matter. Go mind your own business." My answer is "Yes! I believe in God, and God believes in me!"

Without some form of personal experience no one believes in God. It is important that a person know that they have been visited by God in some meaningful way. If someone said that they had been visited by God, who in some way opened up a communication channel, I would want to know more about the nature of that visit was and more about the nature of the communication channel.

I would not dismiss anyone's claims outright.

Through history, people have claimed that God has opened up communication channels for them. Such people ended frequently up in insane insylums or were killed by others because they were outspoken about something extraordinary that they could not understand. What we have is a failure to communicate. One has to wonder why God fails to communicate more effectively and we can only speculate about the methods that would be used if ever.

In the period recorded by the Bible, Abraham came down from the mountain with the ten commandments written on tablets of stone. The strength of the Bible is that it is the collection of very ancient writings. Many communities may have have had similar experiences, but they did not have writing and could not communicate their experiences for later generations. The Romans did what they could to destroy competing civilizations and any written materials that these civilizations possessed.

The Romans destroyed the civilization based from Carthage; they destroyed the civilization based from Alexandria; they destroyed the civilization based from Mona, Britain; they destroyed the civilization based from Jerusalem. They absorbed the civilization based from Athens. Because the Romans were so destrucive of other civilizations, they impoverished the world in ways that we can only begin to imagine. What we have received down the ages is a very narrow Roman slant on history and civilization. We know too little about the Carthagean, Alexandrian, Monian, and Jewish civilizations and experiences. Western culture, based dominantly on the Roman civilization, is a fragment of what it could have been. Our potential Western heritage was destroyed by the aggressive war like Roman culture.

The crusades helped to regained some culture that perculated through from North Africa into Spain, eventually, to spawn the Renaissance several hundred years later. That was a very slow process and did nothing to redress the losses, for example, to replace the pharmacopea of the Alexandrian civilization that would have given us medicine and would have resulted in more rapid population growth and possibily the escape from the spread of disease that wiped out so many people. Some of the worst of the great plagues might have been avoided! We might have had a knowledge of microbes and germs many generations earlier.

In any event the improverishment of knowledge, that the Roman dominance of the continent caused, resulted in its own declining influence and eventually in the crusades which were the first serious and well financed attempts to recover lost knowledge.

The crusaders may have been the one's to rediscover penicillin, but how was that information lost.