Theme of Discussion Zoom Meeting: Coincidence

For several questions, I have provided links that will take you to related online information. Try coming up with your own thoughts first – then investigate the links or ignore them – whatever you wish. If the links don’t work with just clicking your mouse arrow, hold down your Ctrl key as you click. Any problem with a link, please let me know: rgordon118@tampabay.rr.com

No need to attempt to respond to all the questions -- or even most of the questions. Feel free to choose only those questions that appeal to you.

Questions:

1. What does coincidence mean to you? Another meaning?

2. What is the opposite of coincidence?

3. What are some questions you have about coincidences?

4. Do some people seem more gifted than others in experiencing coincidences? Can you think of any reason(s) behind this gift?

5. Can you share with us an amazing coincidence in your own life?

6. Any evidence that coincidences are often not so strange after all?

7. What is the most amazing coincidence you have read about? Are there many of such examples in literature?

8. Are coincidences meaningful? Always? Just sometimes?

9. Any scientific evidence supporting the view that coincidences may be more than just chance happenings?

10. Any evidence that prayer can be a real cause of a cure or is such evidence just a matter of chance or coincidence?

11. What famous psychologist believed that coincidences could have great importance in treating a patient? What is the difference between synchronicity and coincidence?

12. Try drawing a quick sketch to illustrate coincidence, First Second Third Fourth

13. Is a highly successful gambler gifted with a special power to bring about coincidences? How about someone who wins multiple lotteries ?

14. Which term had special significance to many psychologists, including most notably Carl Jung?

15. Bill has a phobia about spiders. Everywhere he goes – to church, the men’s room, the local Chinese restaurant, he always seems to be running into spiders – or pieces of spiders; maybe just their legs, their webs. He has fifty spider coincidences a days, it seems. He obsesses about spiders, and sure enough – he’s always bumping into them. Is he just the unlucky spider-coincidencer or is he an obsessive spider magnet?

16. Give a made-up or real coincidence that you will tell our group about. Have them guess where whether the coincidence was real or invented?

Quotations:

1. “It’s no coincidence that Stressed spelled backwards is Desserts.” -- David Smit

2. “In the Hebrew language, there's no such word as coincidence.”—Paula White

3. “Coincidence is the word we use when we can't see the levers and pulleys.”—Emma Bull

4. One of the great cosmic laws, I think, is that whatever we hold in our thought will come true in our experience. When we hold something, anything, in our thought, then somehow coincidence leads us in the direction that we've been wishing to lead ourselves.—Richard Bach

5. “A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.”― Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark

6. “Coincidence is God's way of being anonymous.”― Laura Pedersen, Best Bet

7. “The probability of a certain set of circumstances coming together in a meaningful (or tragic) way is so low that it simply cannot be considered mere coincidence.”― V.C. King

8. “We are today beginning to see work by very reputable scientists that says the universe is created by our observations. It is not a coincidence; we are actively involved in physically shaping the world that we experience.”-- Bruce H. Lipton

9. Synchronicity is a term used by Carl Jung to describe coincidences that are related by meaningfulness rather than by cause and effect.-- David Richo

10. “When we’re interested in something, everything around us appears to refer to it – the mystics call these phenomena ‘signs’, the skeptics ‘coincidence’, and psychologists ‘concentrated focus’, although I’ve yet to find out what term historians would use.”-- Paulo Coelho

11. “I do not believe in meaningless coincidences. I believe every coincidence is a message, a clue about a particular facet of our lives that requires our attention.” -- Deepak Chopra

12. “It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice.” -- Henry A. Wallace

13. “Synchronicity: A meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved.” --Carl Jung

14. “Is it just a coincidence that when a loving, devoted owner discovers his beloved cat run over by a bulldozer, that to him it is, indeed, a CATastrophe. – R.E. Gordon

The End (Is it just a coincidence that the End always comes at the End? Why for once can’t the End come at the Beginning.)