Coincidences And Deeper Implications

Can our finite minds every fully understand the amazing cosmos of which we all are a part? Just the fact that we are thinking beings in a comprehensible universe strikes me as an amazing thing. It seems that it did Einstein, too, for he said that "the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible." For all the knowledge we have gained over the centuries and the vast number of things we know, we haven't got it all figured out yet, nor can we say we are close to having it all figured out.
   

Some three decades ago I slowly began a journey away from what is typically considered a supernatural understanding of the universe (strong theism) to a more natural worldview, pantheistic or panpyschistic - for want of a better label. I can't say I'm totally comfortable standing where I do today, and certainly I am not closed-minded. One thing I have never been able to rid myself of is this niggling feeling that there may be a deeper reality in all of this. Of course, maybe not.

I can't recall exactly when I encountered Carl Jung along the way, but some of his insights meshed with a lot of my niggling suspicions. The world of Synchronicity and oddball coincidences always fascinated me. As a child in school I eagerly waited for the next edition in the popular Ripley's Believe It Or Not paperback series, which only fueled my ideas about possible deeper implications for reality. Jung at some point in his life entered into a collaboration with renowned physicist Wolfgang Pauli in order to flesh out a synchronistic view of reality. The result was interesting to me, but I admit not conclusive. (And I still enjoy Ripley's Believe It Or Not.)

The greatest coincidence of all, it seems to me, is that we live in a universe that has been described as fine-tuned or apparently fine-tuned. Some fight that concept tooth-and-nail. If you are really into speculation, the multiverse concept has been employed in order to give an explanation of why with countless other universes having popped into existence along the way maybe it isn't so strange that our unique universe popped into existence. According to that line of thought it was almost inevitable.
  

I don't pretend to have the brain power necessary to assess all the arguments pro and con and then come up with a considered opinion. It's enough for me to keep an open mind and try to keep my intuitions and gut-feelings somewhat in check. In the meantime I will continue to read and try to learn, but most importantly, try to keep myself from falling back into some form of fundamentalism, of reaching a conclusion that is THE conclusion and which must be defended and protected at all cost.

It doesn't hurt me to say "I don't know." And allowing myself the freedom to entertain alternative ways of looking at things is fun and liberating as well.

And speaking of coincidence - real or imagined - I want to tack on below an introduction from on article on the subject that was printed long ago in Harper's New Monthly Magazine Volume X, December 1854, to May 1855:

There are a thousand mysterious circumstances occurring every day of our lives, the solution of which philosophy fails to reach. And because this is the case, the wise heads dispose of them in a very summary way, by denying the facts.

There are a thousand strange and mysterious sympathies linking us with each other and drawing our hearts together, so that, even when separated far away, we often have the same thoughts and feelings at the same precise moment of time. The same sigh heaves breasts ocean-wide apart, when the same longing desire springs up for communion face to face. And these, these same philosophers dispose of quite as summarily, by calling them "striking coincidences"—as if this were any explanation of the phenomena.

The wildest dreams of the night are not more wild and strange than those traits of the human mind in our waking hours, and which, unaccounted for as they may be, still demonstrate to us a hidden chain of sympathies running down the whole course of life, and binding our hearts together. Call them by what name we will—they are still there, and still the same. We can not get rid of them by denying their existence—and it does not explain them to call them "coincidences."