ep. 504 - The Art of Coincidence

You are listening to the Primitive Intelligence podcast, Episode 504, The Art of Coincidence. I'm your host, Curt. And if you really think about it, I guess, depending on how you think about it, coincidence can be an art form. Before we get into the episode, though, a little shout out, a little what do you call it, call to action. Depending on how you listen to the podcast, Spotify or Apple, iTunes, Google podcast, whatever you listen to it on, if you like it, rate it, whatever they got there, subscribe or follow, any of those things, it really helps in the algorithm, which is why you always hear creators ask this call to action to subscribe or like or rate. It does help. Promotes the podcast. It's the easiest thing to do because getting listeners is no coincidence. There's actually work involved in it. See what I did there? Luckily this week, there's no congressional hearing I had to sit through. I didn't want to sit through another two or three hour congressional hearing. I just, as a joke, I looked it up to see if there was a congressional hearing on coincidence and there was not. And I was very happy for that. I've made a few more recording space tweaks going into this episode. I was getting a lot of echo back off of the wall in front of me, which is now to my right. I shifted everything around and I got a new pop filter for the microphone, trying a couple of different things to maybe help the audio be a little bit better. That's what I'm really striving for is better audio. You'll notice if you watch the video, the editing to the video can be a little jumpy because that's very much secondary. That's why it's on a smaller screen. Audio is my goal. But if you are watching the audio, or if you go down to the show notes, I'll put a picture of it as well. You may notice I'm wearing a primitive intelligence t-shirt with the new primitive intelligence logo on it. Those are available. There'll be a link in the bottom to the merch. If you want a t-shirt, that's another way you can help out the podcast and keep things rolling. With all that out of the way, Episode 504, The Art of Coincidence of the Primitive Intelligence Podcast starts now. I have three classifications for coincidence. Maybe it's the same for everybody. I don't know. I look at them three different ways. They're either one, there's no such thing as coincidence. It's just a higher power or God has put you in a certain place at a certain time for a certain thing to happen. There's a plan for you. And if you're not on the right course, you'll get diverted to the right course. Pretty much no coincidence, just part of the plan. The second option is it's just something that happens. There's enough moments in your life, enough seconds in your life, enough events happen to you that just the law of averages dictates that at some point you're going to have what we call coincidence. Two seemingly unrelated events will kind of mesh up enough that you'll see a pattern in it and call it coincidence. That's a possibility as well. The third is a little deeper. There are messages from the universe, whether you're doing something right, you're doing something wrong, you're on the right path, wrong path, more of a synchronicity. It's an actual communication from the universe or higher power, God, whatever you want to call it. Speaking of that, coincidence or synchronicity, which is which are the same thing? Synchronicity applies to more meaningful coincidence. It's kind of like my third classification there. The term synchronicity was coined by Carl Jung. And I don't know if he spent a lot of time talking about it, but basically his idea was coincidence are small things that seem to fit together while synchronicities are much more meaningful to the experiencer. For this episode, I want to come in really prepared, well prepared. So I got some books and I started reading about coincidences and neither one of them are quite what I was expecting. The two books that I downloaded, I'll talk about them. I'll put the links in the show notes and I'll just go over some of the high points of the books and what I thought of them. And we'll see how that goes. It's a little different than what I've been doing the past few weeks with watching the congressional hearings, but always looking for something different. The first book I read was There's No Such Thing As Coincidence by Jan Wolterman. And again, link will be in the show notes for this. I knew right off the bat from the description, there was going to be a significant religious tilt to this book, but I wanted to put that aside and just read it for the stories. And it started out really good. A story about a chaplain who used to go back to the seminary he went to and he'd visit, go to his old room. He'd sit in his room, focus his thoughts, basically meditate for a while every time he was back in the area. And the last time he had gone, the seminary was abandoned. It was no longer in use, but he decided he still wanted to go to his old room and do his normal routine, sit and think and focus and kind of rejuvenate himself. As he approached the room, he was still in the hallway, his beeper went off and this took place back in the nineties. So he had to go out and find a payphone. So he had to leave. He was dealing with some hospitals and some other churches. So this could have been an emergency. He didn't want to wait around. So he went, called everybody he knew that had that number that would have beeped him. Nobody sent the alert. So he kind of chalked it up to a wrong number and decided to head back to the seminary. This whole transaction took about eight minutes while he was gone calling the people that could have beeped him. He gets back and sees that the entire north wing of the seminary building had collapsed, including the section that his old room was in. So if he hadn't gotten the beeper notification, he would be sitting in that room when the building collapsed. They say that if you were to ask him what happened, he believes the beeper went off through the graces of the Virgin Mary because the seminary was dedicated to the Virgin Mary and he was saved from this collapse and he would have been gravely injured if not killed in this collapse. So that was a really good story for this book to start out on really high hopes. One of the next stories was from a friend of the author who related the story about her and her husband who were placing their home up for sale. They had a pretty strict routine of when they ate dinner and what they would do after dinner. She would go sit in the living room and just kind of relax, plan out her, you know, the next day, but because they were getting ready to show their home. So on one particular day, they're getting ready to show their home. I think they had a showing that night or not that night, but that weekend. So they're running back and forth to the hardware store to get the little things they need to make their, you know, make everything just right. Pushes their dinner time back about three hours. As they finish up dinner, she decides I'm still going to go sit in the living room, plan out the day, but still have some things to do. So she takes her glass of wine, puts it by her table in the living room by her chair, goes back into the kitchen and starts clearing the table and doing like the after dinner breakdown. Her and her husband are in there and they hear this loud crash. So they run into the living room and this 30 by 12 foot section of plaster had fallen from the ceiling right on top of her chair, right where she would be sitting. And it would have crushed her. Basically, I guess the point here was she had a very strong religious belief and her belief is what saved her. And they use a quote here that the author quotes Albert Einstein as having said belief is more important than knowledge. Now, for me, I'm not a religious person. I'm not really in favor of organized religion because of things like meanings changed to fit a narrative. It happens in religious texts. It happens in the Bible. It happens in books about coincidences. Albert Einstein did not say belief is more important than knowledge. What Albert Einstein actually said is imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. I'm not combining the meaning of belief and imagination. If somebody else wants to do that, that's up to you. But the correct quote is imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. He said nothing about belief. A small point, but I just wanted to point it out. As soon as I saw that quote, it's one of those things where my brain sees it and says, is that right? I'd never heard that quote before. I looked it up and found out it is not correct. So the last big story in this book that I took note of, it didn't really seem to have religious twists that I remember, but it's about a woman who gets set up on a blind date and decides to bail out at the last minute and goes to a party with friends. While she's at the party, I guess she just had dental work done. She had a temporary crown and I think she was eating something or drinking something. And she saw the crown fly out of her mouth and it goes across the room and goes under a table. So she's kind of horrified. She goes under the table looking for this crown and she spots it. And as she's going to get it, this hand reaches under, grabs it. And then this guy looks under and says, is this what you're looking for? And they kind of laugh about it. And I guess he reattaches it because he's a dental assistant or he's in dental school, dentistry school. And so they have a good laugh about it. They start talking, they hit it off. And he says, yeah, I'm actually glad that I'm working tonight. I wasn't supposed to, but my date backed out and it said, come to work. And she laughs and she says, well, I was supposed to be on a blind date and I backed out because I didn't know much about the guy and I was a little nervous about it. So I didn't go. And then they realized that they were supposed to be on a blind date together. It was them. Laughter ensues. They get married. And at the time of the writing of the book, they were celebrating their 10 year anniversary. So kind of a cool story. And the rest of them throughout the book are your typical coincidence stories. Like someone's getting on an airplane and they decide to get off because they get this really bad feeling and the flight doesn't crash, but they have this massive medical event like an hour later where they would have been in the air. And if they were on a plane, they probably wouldn't have been able to get the treatment they needed to survive. So that one, I, when I read that, I thought, was that coincidence? Was that like a bad feeling about the flight or was whatever was happening, whatever the medical event was, was it starting to happen? And that's what you were feeling. Not so sure that one's a coincidence. And then there's another one of like two doctors deciding to go to some event and then they're not going to go. And then they are going to go and then they're not going to go. And then they are going to go and then they talk each other into going. And then when they get there, someone has a heart attack. And then they are the only people that can save them. It's very typical kind of stories you hear when people talk about coincidences. After that, it started leaning heavy into the religion. Very, became a little preachy. I mean, and that's okay. I have nothing against people's beliefs. Believe what you want. If I'm reading a book about coincidences, though, I don't mind her being, if that's, if you believe that's all hand of God, then that's fine. Talk about that aspect of it. But there was a lot more in there and it just kind of started to put me off to the stories that were in it. Again, that book was, there's no such thing as coincidence by Jan Woltman. Link will be in the show description and the show notes. So check it out if you want to. Again, not a bad, not a bad book. Just be ready for a little bit of preaching in the book. The second one. Now I, this one, I was getting ready to go on a weekend trip and real quickly, I wanted to have another book downloaded because I was pretty sure I wasn't gonna have signal where I was. So I looked real quick. I was still researching coincidence and I found this book. I saw the title and I saw like a little description of it about detectives looking into something and it's called the coincidence theory, the hidden truth by Ben Rhodes. I thought this was going to be phenomenal. I thought this guy was going to find some new theory about coincidence and it's mind control or something. Like, I don't know what I was thinking. It was not that at all. Not what I was thinking it was going to be with a name like the hidden truth. This was written like a fiction novel. Maybe it wasn't. I'm pretty sure it was a fiction novel and it was just one story, but it took three chapters to get to the first coincidence. And I'll, I'll, I'll sum that up in a nutshell. Detectives, also bikers. They're on a weekend motorcycle trip. So they're a little scruffy. They're at a bar. The, the main character is chronically single. And while they're at the bar, I guess he's the only one who's not with, who's not paired up while they're at the bar. This woman comes in, makes a beeline for him, sits down next to him, makes a comment about his bike, and then says to him, kiss me like you mean it. So he immediately thinks it's his friends pulling a prank and they're trying to, you know, get one over on him. So he's like, whatever, if this is a prank, I'll go along with it. So he kisses her and she kind of looks around real nervous, says they're after me. I wish I could explain and gets up and runs out the door. They're trying to figure out who she is. They try to follow her. She's gone. No one knows what's going on. So it becomes this whole story. Next day, he goes to work. The captain pulls him in, him and his partner. He's like, this case just came down from the higher ups. You got to look into it. It's like it should be an open and shut murder case. Him and his partner are kind of bummed because it's this kind of throwaway case and they're getting put on it when they got other things to do. And the captain says to his partner, you go out and you canvass the area and you talk to the, you know, the doctor that was involved in this and looks at the main character and says, you stay here and start the paperwork. And wouldn't you know it, as the partner's out talking to the doctor, he takes a bullet. He's in really bad shape. He's in the hospital. This guy's feeling like, you know, survivor's guilt, you know, he should have been there. Maybe he could have stopped it. Maybe he'd been shot too. Who knows? That's not even a coincidence. Now he's going on about all these things he's got to do. And, you know, it's very convoluted about other detectives having to take other work. And then it gets to the point where the captain comes in and says, we found you another partner to work with while your partner's in the hospital. And they go back into the precinct and sitting at his partner's desk is the woman who kissed him in the bar. It took three chapters to get to that point. And it lost me. I was like, what am I reading? This isn't a story about coincidences. This is a coincidence in a murder mystery. This isn't what I thought it was going to be. So I said, you know, let me skip through. Maybe it's because it did say something about the first 4% of the book is a lead up to another story. And I was at about 4%. So I'm like, OK, maybe this is just a lead in. And there's a lot of coincidences that tie into it. So I skipped ahead a couple of times and looked and it was just the same story told the exact same way. So I went to the end of that one and I'm pretty much done with that one. It might be a really good book. It's just not what I was looking for. I was looking for stories about coincidence, like real life stories about it. Not it. So that was The Coincidence Theory, The Hidden Truth by Ben Rhodes. Maybe check it out if you're looking for a detective story about coincidences. Might be good. I'll keep it in my Kindle library. Maybe I'll finish it up. And if it turns out being something better than what I think it is and what it looks like it is, maybe I'll touch on it again. But instead of that, let me go into some of my own coincidences here. So the first is two separate times, two completely different jobs, two completely different hire dates for those two different jobs. And while I was in each of those jobs, I had met a woman. We started dating. Turns out that her birthday, each of their birthdays coincided with the start date of the job that I was currently in. That happened twice. That's weird enough for it to happen once, but twice. And it's not like I knew this going into the relationship. It just so happened that when it came time, oh, when's your birthday on such and such a date? And the first time I was like, wait, that was my start date for this job. The second time it happened and it, you know, she's like, oh, my birthday is this day. And I was like, wait, that's my, no, that couldn't have happened. So two times, two different people, two different jobs, two different start dates. They all matched up. The second work-related coincidence is happening right now. As a matter of fact, when I started season four, I had just started working at the job I have now as a part-time job. No sooner did I start season five, I just recorded, I recorded episodes one, two, and three of season five within a few days of each other, got them recorded and uploaded. So I had time to research and prepare for the next few, you know, the next batch of episodes. As I'm thinking about what I'm going to do for this episode and I start researching it, I go into work, find out the company I work for got bought out, our location, 99% sure it's closing. So starting season four, I just started there starting season five. That place is closing like the very next day after I launched the first episode, really, really bizarre. It doesn't seem like a lot. And that's the funny thing about coincidences. They don't mean a lot to other people, but to the person that's happening to it, they stand out. The next one, I'm going to ask you to bear with me on this one. This is a little bit hard to explain. I'm going to start by saying that I know from diagnosis that my brain works differently than a lot of people's. I've been told I have the capability of determining patterns before patterns exist. And, you know, I mean, back when I was little, people didn't look at it this way, but I learned differently. My brain will fixate on puzzles and not to the point where I can't do anything, but it kind of takes that puzzle and puts it in the back and works on it. And maybe you've had the experience where sometimes you're trying to remember a name or a piece of information and the less you think about it, all of a sudden, it just kind of flirts out at some point. You wake up at two o'clock in the morning and you're like, I'm a Mormon. And you're like, oh, yeah, that's the answer I was looking for. My brain does that with all kinds of stuff. And it doesn't have to be information I'm searching for. It can be something that I've seen just in passing. And all of a sudden, I'll have to go back and be like, that's not right. And I fix it. It's really bizarre. So this can be a good thing and a bad thing. In this particular instance, I saw a picture of a woman, very pretty, caught my attention. And it wasn't like of someone I would ever meet. It was just a picture of this woman. And on the picture, there was a one word name, very unclear, one word name, very uncommon. I'm not going to mention what it is. I'll just say it's a very uncommon name for a first or last name, not one that I never met anybody with this name before. And I don't think I've ever even heard anybody saying that they've known somebody with this name. So very uncommon. That gets stuck in my head. In the background, my brain is just kind of going over this. And at one point, a full name pops out first last name for this woman. No idea if it's, if it's correct. I have no clue, but it just stuck there. And every once in a while, that name would just pop out. This name would pop out. No reason why I'd be working. This name would pop out. I'd be working. This name would pop out again, very uncommon, the first name and the job I had at the time. I was making, it was for work clothes and the work clothes are, they get a barcode on them so that all the company has to do when they go to clean them is scan them. It knows exactly how it's supposed to be cleaned, where it came from, where it goes to, all of that. So it's just one barcode scan, but the name is printed on it. So as I'm doing this order, I always would look down and just see names and whatever. And, you know, during the course of a day, you might see a few thousand names, you know, and never had seen this name before because his name kept on popping out this, this random name, super uncommon first name. So I'm going through and I look down and I see this super uncommon first name come up on an order. And all I can see is the first name. So I got to flip the page and go back and look. Cause just out of curiosity, I'm like, what are the chances that this super uncommon first name that I've never seen before, the first time I see it, it's going to have the same last name that my brain came up with like two months ago. And I flipped through and sure enough, first name, last name match. I don't know what it meant. It was just really bizarre. I don't know if that counts as a coincidence. I mean, I think it would have to, it was more of a synchronicity cause it, it was just something that kept on popping out in my head. And then there it was. And I had no idea what to do with the information, no clue what to do with it. I just kind of was like, huh, well that's weird. And I put it in a box and I send it out. I know that one's, that was a tough one to kind of explain, but yeah, I mean, that kind of thing will happen. Recently I had another coincidence and it was a coincidence because I had just started researching coincidences. I was on a hiking trail. I'd done a quick overnight camping trip. A trail that I know well in a forest that I know well. I came out, I wasn't sure which way I was going to go when I left the camp. I come out, I get to an intersection where it's the trail or a forest road. And that forest road could take me to any number of other trails or other ways to get back to where the car is. And as I'm kind of going through the options and I'm like, well, I can go up here and make it left and then go up that trail. I can go up here and go straight and and then I look at the trail that goes through. I'm like, or I can take that trail. It was cloudy all morning. It looked like it wanted to rain. As soon as I, in my brain thought, well, I can take this trail. The sun came out and a beam of light right on that trail sign. As soon as I thought it, boom, there it was. Well, I guess I'll listen to the coincidence and I'll take that trail. Now nothing happened. Nothing out of the ordinary happened, but would have something out of the ordinary happened in a bad way if I wouldn't have taken the trail. I thought it was more interesting just simply because the night before I started reading, there's no such thing as coincidence. So that was very kind of a unique personal experience for me because I just, no one else is around. No one else has experienced it. I was recording, but in the video, you can't see the sun hit the sign, unfortunately. So another interesting coincidence that no one else experienced with me. The next one, though, I have a witness for, and it was kind of interesting. So early twenties, living in an apartment with my girlfriend, we didn't have TV. It was a really small apartment. I'm cleaning the, I'm doing whatever. We're just doing like cleaning the apartment. We're doing whatever we're doing. And I'm in, well, there's only two rooms. There's like a kitchen and then everything else from, so I'm in the living room, dining room, bedroom kind of room. And for some reason I started singing this ZZ Top song. I don't remember what song it was. I just remember I was singing it kind of like words and like music, you know, doing like the dirt, you know, and that, that probably sounded horrible, but I can't remember what song it was. So as I'm cleaning and I'm doing that, she kind of comes in and she goes, well, why don't we just turn on music? And she turns on the radio and when she turns on the radio in the exact same spot of the song that I am at, as I'm singing that same ZZ Top song is playing at the exact same spot in the song. And she turns on and she just looks at me and she's like, could you hear that from like out the window? And I'm like, nope. I'm like, windows are closed. It's a, we're on the third floor and it's all brick. I couldn't hear anything. No clue. Don't know how, I don't know if I was picking up radio waves or what bizarre that I was singing the song and it came on on the radio in the same spot as she turned on. And then the last one is kind of a, like a synchronicity of doing, I was on the right track. I was on the right path and it sounds very mundane until you look at all the things that had to fall into place. So the end result of this one was I walked out on a trail to an overlook and as I looked out, two bald eagles just, I didn't disturb them. They were pretty far away, but they just kind of jumped out off the tree and flew out and just kind of came up in front of me. And it was right looking out over Lake Erie. Right. And they think, so you've walked out and you scared up some birds. To me, it was like a, just a sign of, I was on the right path on that trip. And this is why I think that the trip itself was a last minute trip. I had no plans of going out there. It was, oh, it was almost about this time of year. It was, if you can hear my voice is a little bit hoarse right now in our area, we have ragweed and right. Is it ragweed or goldenrod that blooms in the fall? One of those two. And then what's called knotweed, which looks a lot like bamboo. They both bloom. They start to pollinate at this time of year and it just kills my voice. I get real hoarse. I start getting scratchy throat. I feel like I'm getting sick and it's just an allergic reaction to these two plants. So that happened on this particular year. Actually, I think I wound up getting the flu. I was really sick. I felt horrible. I was taking a long weekend after that because of being sick. And as I started to feel better, I decided I'm going to look up the 25 most popular state parks in Pennsylvania. And I'm going to see how many of those I can hit, see which ones, which, which one ranks the highest. And I'm going to try to get to that one. And then whatever's near it, I can get to. So I find it's called Pima Tuning State Park. It's in the Northwest corner of the state. So two days before I leave, I decide this is what I'm doing. And I drive out, I get my campsite and I'm just looking and I'm like, where else am I going to go? And I find this little, little state park. It's one of the newest state parks or when it was one of the newest state parks at the time called Erie Bluffs. And they hadn't even started putting trails in. They had acquired the land and they had done, they had a plan and that was it. So I drove out, I drove up through the fog, not even knowing where I was going, found the spot where you could park. There was a little bit of information about where they wanted to have trails and some things they kind of had set up. So I wind my way out this, what might be a trail, might not be a trail and get there. Didn't scare the birds, didn't scare the eagles because they were, I'm up on this, on these bluffs overlooking Lake Erie and they just happened to fly out. They were just leaving as I was getting there. So many things had to line up for me to be at that exact point at that exact time from planning that trip to figuring out that that park was even there to getting a campsite that was the right distance away, leaving at the right time in the fog to get to this park, find a parking spot and possibly a trail that went out to the spot to see that happen. It was just, to me, that was so many things that had to line up. It was just kind of a sign of you're on the right path on this trip. And it was an incredible trip. I loved it. One of my favorite road trips I've taken to date. So just a few coincidental things that I've had happen to me. There's so many more though. And I'm not gonna get into all of them because a lot of them, no one would even get the, the meaning behind it. But speaking of the meaning, what is the meaning? What, what could possibly be the meaning of coincidence? It was just random happenings of events that somehow the law of averages and the law of randomness mesh just right. And bam, you've got a coincidence. Then it's not that impressive. It's just interesting stories and they have no meaning and that's kind of boring. And I think the universe, I think reality is far more interesting than that. If it's the guiding hand of a higher power that creates a debate on what life is, what meaning is, and do we have free will or is it all fate? If we have free will, but we're manipulated into certain situations via coincidence, can you ever avoid it? Is that what deja vu is? Have you free willed your way out of a guided coincidence? That deja vu feeling is the last attempt or another level of attempt to correct your path. And if that fails, would another person be guided into a coincidence to affect your, your disregard for the machinations of a higher power? How many chances do you get? How important is the outcome? Can it only be carried out by one person? If there's something you're supposed to do, if you're supposed to be in a certain spot and you keep bopping your way through life and ignoring coincidence and these guided synchronizations, these synchronicities, does someone else's life get diverted to take care of that? And if they don't and it doesn't happen, what happens? What's the outcome? Is it the end of the world if a coincidence doesn't happen? Like there's a lot of questions that arise when you look at it as a guided experience to put you on the right path. It gets complicated. And what if coincidence, well, more likely synchronicities, are messages from the universe or a higher power, however you want to look at it. I always look at them as the universe. I, in my belief, because I'm not religious, I like to take, I like to listen to other religions. I like to listen to different beliefs and then the good parts of things that I think fit with me, I will incorporate that into my own beliefs. So for me, I don't, I don't put a label on what a higher power is. I just look at it as universe and we're all part of that. But if these synchronicities are messages from the universe or higher power, what could that possibly mean? There's a lot of implications there. William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1940s was famous for saying, when I pray, coincidences happen. And when I don't, they don't. That to me sounds like prayers are answers from a higher power or the universe. If you ask a question and you have enough conviction, you'll get an answer. It may not be the clearest answer. You may have to really think about it or put it into context and it may only be for you, but it seems like maybe that's what's happening. I mentioned a few coincidences of my own, but like I said, there's many more smaller coincidences, things that no one else would even see or understand. And I don't mean like digital coincidences where you're talking about a thing, you're talking about a product or, or a topic, and then you look at your phone and there's an ad for it. That's just corporations with no morals using your phone to spy on you to advertise to you. That's not a coincidence. I'm talking smaller things where you're thinking about it in your head and then you see it an hour later, 10 minutes later or something related to it. I've always noticed that their frequency increases the more I acknowledge the coincidence or the synchronicity. So does that make a coincidence a part of the greater phenomenon? And when I say the greater phenomenon, I mean, UFOs and ghosts and paranormal and all that. Is it all tied together? Is it connected through reality? Is it connected through dimensions that we can't perceive? Is it all tied together? Some of them seem like they might be. And is all that just the fabric of reality and our interaction with it? That brings up a whole new question. If you can interact with the mechanism behind coincidence, increasing your frequency through acknowledgement, even through silent to yourself thought, what does it say about the nature of reality? If we can interact with it non-physically, all we really know about what's real is what we perceive. We only know we experience something that we call real, but we can't know for sure if everyone experiences the same something. Are you the listener even real? I perceive that I am. So I'm pretty sure I'm real. And that's all I really know. Or do we live in a simulation? That's something I'll talk about next week on the Primitive Intelligence Podcast. See ya.