Coincidence and Synchronicity: When Everything Becomes Possible

Copyright © 2020 by Dori Seider, Ph.D.

Library of Congress Control Number:           2020901969

ISBN:     Hardcover                            978-1-7960-8553-2

               Softcover                              978-1-7960-8554-9

               eBook                                   978-1-7960-8566-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Copyright © 2020 by Elliot Madriss: Cover Photography and Design

Also from the author:

A Place Called Happiness

Teach Me Something Real

Rev. date: 01/31/2020

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Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1     How Can This Happen?!

Chapter 2     The Story Of Scott

Chapter 3     One Year Later

Chapter 4     A Mysterious Trip To Philadelphia

Chapter 5     A Fresh New Look At Death Or

A Stale Old Look At Life?

Chapter 6     You’re Stuck Here Like The Rest Of Us

Chapter 7     Mind, Matter And Time

Chapter 8     Layers, Layers, And Hidden Layers

Chapter 9     Creating Your Own Synchronicity

Chapter 10   Putting It All Together: When

Everything Becomes Possible

Chapter 11   Afterword: So What’s Next?

Recommended Reading

Book Club Questions

To Dr. June Valley,

Friend, Colleague, Mentor, Lemon-Cake Enthusiast—Thank you for teaching me your philosophy—Just Observe and thank you for insisting that I write at least three drafts of a manuscript and several chapter outlines before I dare bring it forth. You have helped me and taught me so much, and I am so grateful to you. Thank You, Dr. J!

To You, the Reader,

May this book bring you exciting moments and new ideas. I hope you love the unusual and the unexpected and have a mind that is much more open than mine was, when I first started out on this adventure into the unknown. My wish for you is that this journey into the universe of meaning will also give you gifts of joy and of renewed purpose.

PREFACE

H OW DID THIS book come to be? Here were some elements: a sudden impulse to write, a flooded kitchen, a previous skeptic who had experiences that had become verifiable, too many coincidences to ignore, some past thinkers, the merging of time, matter, energy and mind, some ancient thinking, applying ideas from the field of psychology, a quest for human happi ness.

Please let me explain. In my earlier life, I was a skeptic who needed to be convinced that there was much more to life than I would admit. It took multiple stages of convincing, because I thought I had a well-organized scientific mind and a firm grasp on reality. So what happened? Too many coincidences to ignore began to occur in my life and they wouldn’t stop. Some were even double coincidences.

The skepticism in me evolved over time and finally left me when I could no longer deny the potency and meaning of these synchronistic events. Because you are reading these words now, you may likely have had life-changing and mind-transforming events in your own life, and may want to validate them. You may also simply want to discuss them with others, using the events in this book as a starting point.

An understanding of coincidence and synchronicity can lend a sense of order to our everyday existence. But before this calm sense of trusting the timing and patterning of life comes to exist, you can experience some very big and extremely unwelcome disruptions. The coincidences that seemed to fall on my head out of nowhere were sometimes as jolting as an electric shock.

Telling their own story, they seemed to be independent of me. The nerve! Imagine the preposterousness of leaving out reason and logic and taking over completely with their own reality and agenda! For what purpose? Just to teach me a new lesson, or confer some needed insights? Or maybe, push me in a new direction? But why did it sometimes have to be so drastic? Why couldn’t I simply be gently persuaded that life had meaning and that my own had a purpose as well?

In the case of serious coincidences, it seems that either I was so stubborn that I had to be taught everything by being totally shaken up. Or in the case of lighter coincidences, I was too organized and stuck in my thinking, so they had to be clever and funny in order to make a point in a pronounced or quirky way.

The flooded kitchen I mentioned before seems to include several of the above contingencies. It was quirky, but serious at the same time. Here’s what happened. I was sitting on our living room sofa, when I had a sudden, intense desire to write a chapter outline. But wait a minute—I had already made the decision and it had lasted several years, that writing two books was enough. I would not, definitely not write a third. So there I was on the sofa, spontaneously grabbing some small pieces of paper and writing an outline for a book I was definitely not going to write.

The writing came furiously, filling up little pieces of paper, the only ones I had handy at the time because my husband, Mac had brought them to me from our quiet and peaceful kitchen. Well, at that moment the kitchen was just a kitchen and not a disaster scene. So I continued to write quickly and ardently for an indeterminate length of time. Could have been an hour or two hours—it was one of those times when you lose track of time and just give full focus to what is calling to you with great strength.

When the chapter outline was finished, and I was more than exhausted, but very happy that the not writing of the third book had been resolved (with my cooperation or in spite of me), I yelled up to Mac: The floodgates have opened. I had felt a surge of writing and it had gushed out from my unconscious and consciousness to those little pieces of paper. It had just flowed.

Then, needing a glass of water because all of this writing had made me so thirsty, I started to walk towards our kitchen. And this same kitchen, which had been so orderly when Mac first brought me all of the paper, this same kitchen which was the picture of perfect peace and calm, was now flooding vigorously and disastrously!

What are we going to do? In a panic, we quickly called Rudy, our plumbing specialist. Of course, this happened on a Sunday, when we ran the risk of no one being available. Rudy came to our rescue with the proper equipment and a great attitude and vacuumed up all of the water that had been roaring through the kitchen. We were so grateful, having tried to remedy it ourselves, first, to no avail. The dishwasher had decided to burst its hose at exactly the moment I had been writing a book about coincidence and that I had announced to Mac that the floodgates of my mind had opened.

Anyway, this book is the result of thinking about these kinds of incidents—the ones that bring forth their finely tuned, perfectly timed surprises. If you have ever wondered what the orchestration of the universe teaches us, please join me in a series of adventures and reflections on them. But no more floods, jolts, or shocks for at least a short while, I hope. We have some serious questions to explore about matter, mind, energy and time (paradoxically interspersed with humor) and we will