Intro to Synchronicities | why patterns in your life aren’t a coincidence

One of the most common ways to dismiss an idea  is to say "it's just a coincidence. " But how do we know if something really is a coincidence? It's  something that even scientists struggle with.

When you think of a scientist you probably imagine a  very logical person. Someone who accepts facts and observation above all else. But that's not  always the case.

Let me show you what i mean. Try to remember the first time you looked at a  picture of the Earth. You probably noticed that it looked a lot like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle  that fit together.

They look like this because at one point they were all connected, in one super  continent called "Pangaea" about 100 million years ago. And over time the pieces broke apart and  moved away from each other, to create the world as we see it today. This idea is called continental  drift.

This seems obvious to us now but there was a time when it wasn't obvious to everyone.  And it wasn't obvious to most scientists. In the early 1900s almost no one believed  that continents could move or shift around.

To explain this, many scientists believed  that there was once a huge bridge of land that connected Africa and South America. A bridge that  somehow disappeared without a trace. But a german geophysicist named Alfred Wegener believed that  Africa and South America seemed to fit together like puzzle pieces precisely because they were  connected at one point, in one huge mass of land.

To test his theory, Wegener looked at the  rocks and fossils on the coasts of Africa and South America, and he found that they were  remarkably similar. In 1912 he published his findings in his theory of continental drift.  You'd think that the scientific community embraced all this evidence, but they didn't.

Most  scientists dismissed it as just a coincidence. In fact the idea was so controversial, and  scientists were so threatened by Wegener's findings, that the American association of  petroleum geologists held a forum for the sole purpose of trying to tear down the continental  drift theory. All because it didn't fit their world view.

Think about that for a  second. Scientists, people we expect to be logical and driven by facts, all got together to  reject an idea just because they didn't like it. Even though there was a huge amount of  evidence to support that it was true.

And they did this even though it's something  so obvious that even a child could notice. It wasn't until the 1950s almost 40 years later  that the scientific opinion began to change, and the scientific community began to accept  Wegener's continental drift concept. What this shows is that the fact that South America and  Africa look like puzzle pieces that fit together wasn't a coincidence at all.

The history of  science is filled with examples just like this, and this alone should make us skeptical  whenever so-called experts dismiss something as "just a coincidence. " In the words of the Nobel  Prize-winning physicist Percy Williams-Bridgeman "coincidence is what you have left over after  you've applied a bad theory. " And this shouldn't be all that surprising because according  to german philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, all truth passes through three stages: First  it's ridiculed; Second, it's violently opposed, and Third it's accepted as self-evident.

And what  this suggests is that we should be very careful about immediately dismissing things  as mere coincidence. And it also has important implications for many of the things we  experience in our everyday lives. Things we might be tempted to dismiss as just a coincidence.

Take  for example the real life story of Paul Gratchen. Paul had just started dating a woman named Esther  and he was thinking about asking her to be his girlfriend. He was standing in a deli, paying  for a sandwich, when he noticed a dollar bill with the name Esther on it.

"How strange,"  he thought to himself that the name Esther would appear at the exact moment he was thinking  of their relationship. For some reason he decided not to spend it and instead he took the bill home  with him, something he would never normally do. He decided that this dollar bill would be a funny  gift for Esther, and so he put it in a frame and he gave it to her on the day that he planned  to ask her to make their relationship official.

But when Esther unwrapped the frame with the  dollar bill inside she didn't laugh. She was absolutely speechless. As she stared at the  dollar bill she seemed shocked and confused.

After some silence, Paul told her that it  wasn't quite the reaction he was hoping for. He asked her if something was wrong.  Esther replied that everything was fine, and she happily agreed to date Paul exclusively. 

Two years went by without any mention of the dollar bill. They grew closer and Paul  eventually proposed to Esther. They got married.

And it wasn't until they moved into their new  home together that Paul saw the dollar bill again. He was surprised that Esther had kept the dollar  after all this time. It was only then that Esther finally revealed why she reacted the way she  did to the bill all those years ago.

It turns out that when she was 19 years old she was in  an unhappy relationship. It was ending. And in the middle of that breakup she remembers thinking  that she wasn't sure if true love was even real.

She decided to leave her fate in the hands of  the universe. She took ten different one dollar bills and on each of them she wrote her name. She  said to herself if I'm meant to find my true love, then one of these bills will end up  in the hands of the man i will marry.

And so when Paul gave her the dollar bill with  her name on it, in that moment, she knew that she would marry him. But she didn't want to  reveal this so early in their relationship. It's an astonishing and  unlikely story, and as of today Paul and Esther have been married for more than  19 years, and they have three children together.

Gregg Lavoy once said when you're on the right  path the universe winks and nods at you from time to time just to let you know. And once  you start noticing these little cosmic clues, once you understand that you're on a path  at all, you'll begin to see them everywhere. These clues are what swiss psychologist Carl Jung  called "Synchronicity.

" In 1952 Jung published a paper explaining that in the same way that  we can connect events by cause and effect, we can also connect them by meaning. Synchronicity  happens when there's a meaningful coincidence. And we find it when an event in the world  coincides meaningfully with a thought or feeling in the mind.

Often this happens when you're  thinking of something and then almost instantly you notice something else that's connected  to what you were just thinking or feeling. Like what happened when Paul Gratchen found  himself thinking about Esther and immediately noticing a dollar bill with their name on it.  Why does this happen?

Jung believed that life is not a series of random events, but rather an  expression of a deeper order which he called "unus mundus. " In fact Jung's concept of unus mundus  bears a striking similarity to Pythagoras idea that everything in the universe is connected  by a basic structure of numbers. According to Jung we're all connected within a network  that gives us a sense of universal wholeness, and this realization is more than just an  intellectual exercise, it's a spiritual awakening.

Jung says that synchronicity  plays a role similar to that of dreams, and its purpose is to shift our conscious thinking  to connect with this greater universal awareness. Jung is careful to point out that he's  not denying that coincidences can happen, but at the same time we also have to admit that  there are some coincidences that are connected so meaningfully, that their chances  of happening would be so unlikely, so improbable, that they're virtually impossible  to explain. And it's for this reason that we shouldn't ignore synchronicities when they  happen.

We should pay careful attention to them. Here's another common example: If you dream about  someone one night and the next day you run into that same person, you should ask yourself, why is  this person coming into my life at this moment? What does this mean, and what's  the message i'm supposed to draw?

This takes us into a realm  beyond the material world, and it implies a deeper and unseen order in  the universe. Because in a much broader sense, our whole universe and life itself can be  thought of as an almost impossible coincidence. Many scientists have pointed out that the  physical laws we see all around us seem to be perfectly arranged, in just the right way, in  order to support life as we know it.

We also know that there are mathematical constants in nature  all around us, like the speed of light, and the strength of gravity. And all of these numbers seem  to be just right for our universe to contain life. If they were just a little bit  different, the universe would collapse or it wouldn't have the right chemical  elements needed for stars or planets to form.

It's a question worth asking. Is it just a  coincidence that the laws of nature and the mathematical constants we see in the universe,  happen to be exactly the way they are? And that they just so happen to be arranged in a way that  makes it possible to support life?

This has led to what many scientists have called the idea of the  "fine-tuned universe. " And if we go even deeper, we find another type of synchronicity that shows  up in relation to numbers. According to numerology when you see numbers that keep appearing in your  life over and over again, in different situations and in different ways, it's not an accident.

It's  happening for a reason. In much the same way that a recurring dream can be understood as a message  from your subconscious mind, a number that you keep seeing in your life, can be understood as a  message from the universe. But whether or not you take advantage of that message is entirely up to  you.

In numerology, these recurring numbers are called "angel numbers. " And they can give valuable  clues into the opportunities that already exist all around you. If you stay with me in a future  video we'll go deeper into what these angel numbers mean, how to spot them, and what they  reveal about your path throughout this life.

Have you noticed any strange or beautiful  coincidences in your life? Let me know in the comments, and if you enjoyed this video,  please give it a like and subscribe. It really helps me out with the youtube algorithm and it  helps me bring more content like this to you.

Thanks so much for watching take care of  yourselves and i'll see you in the next video.