Incredible Coincidence: The Baffling World of Synchronicity

by Alan Vaughan

Book Overview

A prophetic dream. An answered prayer. A lucky break. A chance encounter that leads to a long-term relationship or an unexpected career opportunity. We have all experienced or heard of incredible... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0345359720
• ISBN13: 9780345359728
• Release Date: November 1989
• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Length: 130 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 4.2" x 6.9"

Customer Reviews

If you ever wondered

It will be no mistake if you buy this book. Either you or someone in your path will need it. If you are reading this, you are supposed to be. This is not an error.

Whenever I get too depressed with a clock-work universe....

Whenever I used to get too depressed with the meaningless, material, clock-work universe I used to read this book. It reminded my that there is far more to the universe than the scientists and accountants would have us believe. It wasn't that the "coincidences" were so incredible or improbable that inspired me, it was the fact that so many of them were meaningful. It is impossible to explain them without positing a benevolent intelligence to the universe. If these 150 excellently documentd cases are not enough to convince you, there is an excellent bibliography for further reading. I've heard it said that it is not uncommon for clusters of coincidences to sudden pop up around a person when they start reading about synchronicity. All I know is that if I went through my own personal journals for the last decade, I could easly come up with 150 more cases of 2nd, 3rd, 0r 4th degree synchronicity in my own life. An example of 3rd degree synchronicity would be finishing a book on an obscure topic, then setting it aside and turning on the television only to find that same topic being mentioned (first degree.) Then later on a friend brings up exactly the same topic out of the blue (2nd degree.) Then still later you are browsing in the library or book store and you unexpectedly flip to the same subject unintentionally (3rd degree.) It usually concerns a meaningful topic- at least to you. Of course sometimes the meaning seems to lie in the event itself as a kind of "tap on the shoulder" that there is more to the universe than you are letting yourself imagine.The section on the nature and meaning of synchronicity is also excellent- this is far more than a simply "believe it or not" compilations of stories. The author suggests that in a way we, or our higher Selves, may somehow be co-creators when it comes to patterning the ground of existance. Of course, he also insists that we should also use cool logic, as well as our inner feelings, to interpret and act upon synchronous episodes.

Synchronicity: A Meaning-filled & Joyous Cosmology of Mind

Alan Vaughan's "Incredible Coincidence: The Baffling World of Synchronicity" is my all-time favorite book in this field. Vaughan's book is hugely entertaining (a real page-turner! with a wealth of case studies of many categories) as well as scientifically and spiritually perceptive. The book will motivate the reader to awaken to what our Spirit may be nudging us to pay attention to: how to design the patterns and meaning in our life's conscious and unconscious evolution. In a lively, intelligent style, Vaughan explores how we can apply in our own lives the personal and the transpersonal significances of these strange, wonder-filled and meaning-filled 'coincidences' that Jung termed 'synchronicities.' When we encounter synchronicities, we are awakened from our dogmatic slumbers, since they can be sometimes awe-inspiriting and other times downright cosmicly humorous. For skeptical, mechanistic moderns, synchronicities are often a wake-up call to begin suspecting that we are more than our physical bodies and economic-oriented left-brain awareness. For synchronicities present us with a trickster joker in Life's card game. Not only are they (1) baffling and anomalous to our exclusive rational materialist paradigm of Reality, but also (2) undeniably meaning-filled: resonating with significance and often signally us to look deeper into the pattern of what our lives really 'mean.' After he presents 15 chapters, brimming over with some 150 cases of synchronicity, that are arranged into thought-provoking categories (e.g. meaningful 'chance' encounters with People, Things, and Information, including the "Library Angel" or bookstore angel who, against all odds, guides us to wonderfully meaningful books or other information), Vaughan devotes the last 4 chapters to speculating on the underlying scientific and metaphysical meaning of these Meaning-filled phenomena. Here he shows exciting and thought-provoking correlations connecting our Consciousness and the nature of Quantum physical Reality. Our universe and our personal lives show patterns of meaningfulness because all of reality is created by consciousness: the underlying secret is that we live in a Cosmology of Mind. If so, then perhaps we can engage in some creative thinking to accelerate the constructive patterns of meaningful connections? Perhaps, to the extent we become Self-aware, our psyches can shape and direct all the events in our lives to have the life-affirming Meaning we choose? This Meaning-filled Cosmology of Mind vision implies what Gerald Heard called the "Psychological Revolution": "We are the first generation of self-conscious beings who have become self-conscious of the non-self-conscious [or creative subconscious/super-conscious] power that we can now intentionally direct." Vaughan (Chapt. 19) lays out some tentative assumptions that suggest the power of using synchronicities to personally design

Synchronicity: Our Meaning-filled & Joyous Cosmology of Mind

Alan Vaughan's "Incredible Coincidence: The Baffling World of Synchronicity" is my all-time favorite book in this fascinating field. Vaughan's book is hugely entertaining (a real page-turner! with a wealth of case studies of many categories) as well as scientifically and spiritually perceptive. The book will motivate the reader to awaken to what our Spirit may be nudging us to pay attention to: how to design the patterns and meaning in our life's conscious and unconscious evolution. In a lively, intelligent style, Vaughan explores how we can apply in our own lives the personal and the transpersonal significances of these strange, wonder-filled and meaning-filled 'coincidences' that Jung termed 'synchronicities.' When we encounter synchronicities, we are awakened from our dogmatic slumbers, since they can be sometimes awe-inspiriting and other times downright cosmicly humorous. For skeptical, mechanistic moderns, synchronicities are often a wake-up call to begin suspecting that we are more than our physical bodies and economic-oriented left-brain awareness. For synchronicities present us with a trickster joker in Life's card game. Not only are they (1) baffling and anomalous to our exclusive rational materialist paradigm of Reality, but also (2) undeniably meaning-filled: resonating with significance and often signally us to look deeper into the pattern of what our lives really 'mean.' After he presents 15 chapters, brimming over with some 150 cases of synchronicity, that are arranged into thought-provoking categories (e.g. meaningful 'chance' encounters with People, Things, and Information, including the "Library Angel" or bookstore angel who, against all odds, guides us to wonderfully meaningful books or other information), Vaughan devotes the last 4 chapters to speculating on the underlying scientific and metaphysical meaning of these Meaning-filled phenomena. Here he shows exciting and thought-provoking correlations connecting our Consciousness and the nature of Quantum physical Reality. Our universe and our personal lives show patterns of meaningfulness because all of reality is created by consciousness: the underlying secret is that we live in a Cosmology of Mind. If so, then perhaps we can engage in some creative thinking to accelerate the constructive patterns of meaningful connections? Perhaps, to the extent we become Self-aware, our psyches can shape and direct all the events in our lives to have the life-affirming Meaning we choose? This Meaning-filled Cosmology of Mind vision implies what Gerald Heard called the "Psychological Revolution": "We are the first generation of self-conscious beings who have become self-conscious of the non-self-conscious [or creative subconscious/super-conscious] power that we can now intentionally direct." Vaughan (Chapt. 19) lays out some tentative assumptions that suggest the power of using synchronicities to person

It gives a glimpse of how we interface with another world.

At the end of the book Mr. Vaughn lists 10 facts about how he understands the field from which synchronicities arise, I believe he is correct. We, the two legged uprights on this Earth, are the field He give quite a number of examples of some kinds of synchronicity, that I suspect most people don't regard as 'coincidence' so much as luck. However almost everyone has enough of that kind happen, to be able to relate to what he's writing about. What impressed me first and foremost in the book, was a seemingly simple idea that a person is generally the star in his/her own life, but that at times that changes, and the person becomes a star in someone else's life. This is a loaded idea, related to some very esoteric ideas about how the future happens, through the individual and the collective interface with what is at work shaping the future. When the individual begins to fit within the implotment of higher levels than the ordinary life contexts, it seems likely one becomes a bit player in the smaller individual life, at least for a time anyway. He brings in the ideas of David Bohm, and this brings in ideas about quantum level physics. There's been a great advance in knowledge, since Mr. Vaugh wrote the book, and I'd personally like to see him expand synchronicity , in the context of Paul Davies work, particularly. The Cosmic Blueprint. If the individual is 'informed' by some 'interactive force' , and Jung did identify meaningful coincidences as arising from a function of mind that works towards individuation, then the potential of synchronicity as a communication process and as a highly complex, context generatinglanguage is certainly inferred. And if the ideas of F. David Peat and Jung are correct, the interactive force is a function of what we experience as Time, and the means by which man and woman are informed about the individuals work at the highest and best level of which the individual may be informed. It seems obvious that synchronicity is nothing new, and its never been understood, although its almost certainly existed for centuries and thousands of years, under different names, within different contexts in eras in history. If we think of history as an incomplete record, since it focusses mostly on 'crime', there's a lot of territory to explore. I thought "You have been waiting 65,000,000 years for this." really meant something other than an advertisment for Jurassic Park, it meant we have achieved the point at which we were aimed, exploring space. The International Space Station was pre-drawn in Carl Sagan's Contact. How nicely everything converges when the time is right! The idea that contact with extra terrestrials will come through radio waves or the kinds of signals we recognize easily may have to be tossed aside, if synchronicity is as F. David Peat described it, an 'interactive force'. Who and what is at the point of interface? Carl Jung had an answer, although Mr. Vaughn's book d