When is a coincidence a sign, and when is it just a coincidence?

About a decade ago, I was on the London Underground, when a beautiful woman got onto my carriage and sat a few seats down from me. I felt instantly drawn to her and did something I have never done before or since — I spoke to someone on the Tube.

What?? I know!! I broke the first rule of London! Never talk to strangers, never even make eye-contact with strangers. Especially not on the Tube, where merely standing on the left in escalators can provoke riots.

We got talking. Her name was Olga. Within a few stops I’d asked her if she wanted to get off with me at Angel (literally get off). I said I was meeting a friend there but we could say hello and then get a drink on our own.

She said yes. It was all so unlikely — first, I speak to a beautiful woman on the Tube, then within a few minutes she agrees to have a drink with me. Looking back, I wonder if it was a KGB sting.

We got off at Angel and walked to meet my friend, Jack. Olga gasped. Jack was a friend of hers too. In fact, it turned out that Olga had been at a party of Jack’s, which occurred a year before to the day. I had seen her there and wanted to talk to her, but hadn’t. Precisely a year later, fate had intervened on the Northern Line.

We kissed that night. There was incredible chemistry between us. Then we started going out. And then…

Then we broke up. No big reason, it just ran its course.

So was the coincidence just a coincidence then?

There are two models of the universe. In Model One, there is a God or some kind of cosmic order to the universe, and everything happens for a reason. Coincidences in this model can be significant turning-points, when God (or your soul or whatever) flashes you instructions like a neon sign. Head this way.

In this model, coincidences prove there is an overlap between your inner life — your dreams, intentions, karma etc — and the apparently random events of your life.

I once dreamt of a deer while on a Buddhist retreat, and then the next day encountered a deer while walking. The deer can be a symbol of joy in mysticism — indeed, a talking stag features in the story of St Julian, my name-saint. It was a pleasant coincidence and gave me the sense, I must be on the right path.

Coincidences, or what Carl Jung called synchronicity, give one a delightful and eery sense of a fit between one’s innermost dreams and the outer world. Reality is a text with multiple levels of meaning, God is the Author, and you, like a close reader, need to be constantly alive to these signs and correspondences.

In Model Two, by contrast, there is no God or cosmic moral order and things just happen. Coincidences occur because so many events occur all the time that, by the laws of probability, they will sometimes occur in interesting or suggestive patterns, but these are purely random. It’s like a roomful of chimpanzees banging away on typewriters — occasionally, it’s inevitable that actual words will emerge, or even whole sentences. But any meaning you infer is your own projection.

Since the 17th century, when the word ‘coincidence’ first appeared, western culture has moved from Model One to Model Two. The official MSM position is that a coincidence is just that: two events that happen to coincide. Secular thinkers have given us terms for our minds’ foolish tendency to see hidden meanings and correspondences in external events — ‘the pathetic fallacy’, ‘hyper-active agency detection’, ‘patternicity’, ‘apophenia’, ‘dumbness’.

We’ve all been trained to see the universe as a casino, so we can laugh at the dumb hippy when he loses it over a double rainbow. ‘What does it mean?’ he sobs. It means you’re deluded buddy. Then again, I bet he sells that viral video for a fortune as an NFT. So there will be a pot of gold after all!

Meanwhile, in our disenchanted landscape, we transferred our yearning for patterns, symbols and hidden meanings from religion to literature. The Divine Authority has been replaced by the Author.

We love novels for their neat symmetry and their moments of extraordinary coincidence, like in War and Peace, when Prince Bolkonsky lies injured on the battlefield of Borodino, and he sees that the man he most despises happens to be lying injured next to him.

These are wonderful moments, catnip for our mystical minds. Yet they occur in a novel. We can put the novel down and tell ourselves we’re grown-ups and don’t really believe in that sort of thing.

Some novelists play with this modern epistemological uncertainty. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera charts the extraordinary chain of accidents that lead to Tomas and Tereza being together. Are they accidents, or is it fate? We can’t ultimately be sure. That’s the unbearable darkness of knowing.

There’s a similar epistemological uncertainty in EM Forster’s Room with a View — Lucy and George come together through a series of coincidental encounters, or is it destiny? Their friend Reverend Beebe suggests that what draws the characters together is not destiny but a shared love of Italy. To which George replies: ‘It is fate, but call it Italy if it pleases you vicar’.

The New Age really goes to market on coincidences. If you look at the spiritual best-sellers of the last 30 years, they generally declare ‘there’s no such thing as coincidences’ in bold capital letters on page one.

Paolo Coehlo’s Alchemist, for example: ‘there is no such thing as coincidence’. Neale Donald Walsh’s Conversations with God: ‘There are no coincidences in the universe’. The Celestine Prophecy: ‘I don’t think that anything happens by coincidence’.

In fact, The Celestine Prophecy turned this Hallmark slogan into a marketing scheme — every time someone mentioned The Celestine Prophecy to you it’s a sign that you should buy it. That’s a classic New Age pitch: ‘You aren’t here by accident. You picked up this book / saw this advert because you’re special and the Universe is telling you to buy now’.

Why does the New Age make such a big deal of coincidence? It’s the cheapest form of miracle. At one end of the continuum you have God parting the seas or raising the dead. In the middle you have God directly appearing or a miraculous healing. And then you have a friend calling you when you were thinking of them. Everyone experiences coincidences sometimes.

The eery thrill of coincidences is relatively benign, on the whole, but it can be toxic. If your mind puts too much weight on them, you could end up making really bad life decisions.

I recently re-read my journals from a trip I took across South America back in 1995. We were 18, and everything seemed loaded with significance. The first journal ends: ‘We just got talking with this amazing guy on the bus, who’s heading to the same hostal. Coincidence or….’ The second journal begins: ‘That fucker stole our sleeping bags!’

Yes, the apophenic and their money are soon parted.

Patternicity and apophenia can lead to a conspiracy mindset, as in the Qanon shaman Jake Angeli, whose Facebook feed was full of posts about seeing weird shapes in the clouds, and Satanic symbols in street signs.

The conspiracy theorist suffers from what William James called ‘diabolic mysticism’. Everything is connected, nothing happens by chance. But every clue, rather than pointing to God, points to an evil demon, or cabal of demons, who control the world.

Having said all that, I still find myself reading reality as if it were a text, with patterns and symbols and signs relating to my life.

I’m in Mexico as I write this, looking out onto the ocean, waiting to enter the United States. I’m going to stay with a woman I met earlier this year through the most unlikely chain of events.

I happened to book a last-minute flight to Costa Rica in November, then happened to attend a retreat centre where I happened to give a talk which this woman happened to attend, then we happened to be staying in the same little surfing village a month later and happened to get together.

It’s fate, but you can call it Costa Rica if you like, vicar.

Will it work out? Or will I wipe out? Will the book I’ve been working on for the last four years work out or wipe out? Will I die? What does my life mean? What does God want from me? How does this tin-opener work? Life is full of questions.

As part of my research, I was reading a book on discernment last week. I just searched for ‘discernment’ in Amazon, and came across a book by Henri Nouwen, a Dutch theologian I’d heard of but never read.

Nouwen suggests we can discern the voice of God in the people we encounter, the books we come across, the events we see in nature. But sometimes, we have to practice ‘active waiting’, for God’s message to clarify.

That was useful to hear, as I sat waiting in Mexico. I wrote about it, and looked Nouwen up on Wikipedia, and saw he’d died 25 years ago on that very day. A sign!

I don’t know about you, but I find I move up and down the continuum of enchantment. Sometimes the universe seems a random casino. And sometimes it seems so flooded with eery signs and correspondences that it feels like a dream, or a novel.

To be a good mystic, we can try to be a good reader of our life. We can practice what Jeffrey Kripal calls ‘the mystical humanities’. We can be alive to patterns, coincidences, subtexts, metaphors, symbols and correspondences, but always with a light touch, never heavy-handed, never making too much of any particular thing.

Esalen, the spiritual centre in California, used to keep a ‘book of synchronicities’ because they happened so often in the early years. But it also had a slogan: ‘Hold your dogmas lightly’. We can hold our coincidences lightly as well. Read life like it’s a poem, not a whodunnit.

Even if you don’t believe in God or a cosmic moral order, you can still practice this sort of close-reading of your life and times. That’s what people do in therapy — sift through the signs and dreams and patterns and see if they can find the Da Vinci Code underlying it all. Or you could try to decode the ideological, cultural or economic signs of the deep forces shaping your life.

It’s all double rainbows in the end, my friend.