meaningful coincidences

Written by Niek | 05 September 2010

The day after the funeral of a dear friend we took off at Schiphol Airport to attend CCI Europe in Ireland. We missed the CCI teachers meeting just before and that is the reason why there is no report of what happened there. Before taking off we visited a bookstore at the airport and I was attracted to a brand new publication 'Meaningful coincidence' by the Swedish author Jan Cederquist (ISBN 978-0-462-09970-5) first published in Swedish (2005), first published in English (2010). Jan died in 2009, he was a highly successful advertising executive (in Sweden) with a background in psychology and philosophy' the cover says. Finding this book with this item, at that moment was for me a kind of 'meaningful coincidence' in itself!

Swedish experiences

My Swedish experiences starts at the primary school. Mother reads Selma Lagerlöf's Nils Holgersson' s wonderful adventures (1906) for me and my 3,5 years elder brother. Selma (1858-1940) is the first woman who is awarded with the Nobel Prize for literature(1909) . She is a schoolteacher and Nil's story is about his travel with gees over Sweden. In 1953 I sleep one night in her primary school at Landskrona. My first editorial as journalist in 1954 is about the helicopter view of Nils. Several times since I have visited my brother in Sweden. Lastly we visited him early July; he died August 19th and we are taking off soon for his funeral near the church of Landeryd. And that is also the reason why CCI World News Service this month did not get that attention that it deserves the last ten years.

coincidences

Jan starts his remarkable true stories of synchronicity and the search for answers, with quoting Agatha Christie. 'Every coincidence' said Miss Marple to herself, 'is always worth noticing. Later one can throw it away, if it was just a coincidence'. And in his foreword Bishop Lennart Koskinen writes: 'Quantum physicists, psychologists and philosophers are beginning to find ways of getting closer to each other. And further on he states 'The possibility of a dimension of non-time and non-space could theoretically make possible a meeting between past, present and future, and also make spatial distances irrelevant'.
In the first half of his overview Jan mentions several coincidences which we all might have experienced in one way or another. Which attracted our attention without knowing why. At page 68 he quotes Albert Einstein: 'There are only two ways to live your life. As if nothing is a miracle, or as if everything is a miracle'.
So he mentions the 'Project Stargate'. And explains that Dale Graff was a physicist at the US Air Force Foreign Technology Division in the 1970s. His job was to analyze and report on technical advances in various areas, and also to predict future technological developments. And he wasn't able to predict anything more than a couple of years ahead. The Soviet scientists studied things like telepathy, psycho kinesis and other 'paranormal phenomena'. And that worried the American leadership.' He also studied and contemplate 'synchronic events'. He arrived at the conclusions that they occur. He writes ' Synchronicities are dynamic events that occur at surprising times in response to pressing needs of concerns. Synchronistic experiences remind us there is much we do not yet understand about the reach of our conscious and subconscious mind'.

Morphic fields

In the chapter Morphic fields (page 134) he quotes Rupert Sheldrake, a British biochemist and cell biologist. He states, that every individual consciousness is a field of energy that is connected to the brain but reaches far beyond it. Together the energy fields of people form a collective, greater field that he calls a morphonegenetic field (from the Greek morphe = form , and genesis – to come into being). In earlier studies he became convinced that everything living is organized by energy field. So our consciousness is also part of it and according to Sheldrake 'through attention and intentions our minds stretch out into the world beyond our bodies. And Jan asks 'Could it be, that we consciously or unconsciously, send out signals into the universe, into the field and as response the field sets up and organizes events that influence our lives, solve problems or points to solutions?
And again, according to Sheldrake he writes: 'It is no accident that mind has its roots in the brain, which itself is a network of nerve cells with pseudopodia-like axons reaching out far beyond the cells, He (Sheldrake) speculates that mind works in the same way'.

Interesting views

There is more interesting! Like the remark (page 141) that 'to a quantum physicist it is not an absurd notion that time can go backwards, and that an effect can occur before its cause. Or the assumption of Jan that 'Lao Tse 's words mean, that human consciousness at a higher level is connected to everything else'.
Western philosophers have a more divided opinion. Plotinus said that intuition was possibly of use in spiritual matters, but not for worldly affairs. On the other hand, Spinoza said that the highest form of knowing demanded intuition. Shopenhauer confused things further with the idea that it is the intellect which gives us intuitive knowledge (172). Though the problem is, that intuition is subconscious and cannot be controlled. The sum of all these different views seems to be, writes Jan Cederquist, that there does in fact exist something that could be called intuition.
He ends this chapter with summarizing: 'Perhaps intuition could be explained by the fact that all information already exists in the Field, and that everybody is constantly connected to it, even if most people are not aware of it'. He ends his book with quoting Einstein that 'a problem can never be solved on the level of consciousness where it occurred (196). And with his statement, that 'perhaps human consciousness is about to take a quantum leap in its own evolution, perhaps even towards an insight that everything is basically consciousness, and that consciousness is what creates the material world and what happens in it'. Anyway it is a book to read an reread!