Free Beyond Coincidence by Martin Plimmer Page B

illusion, what’s left? Energy is left—lots and lots of it. That’s something we all know is abundantly packed inside every atom. Physicist Max Planck said, “Energy is the origin of all matter. Reality, true existence, is not matter, which is visible and perishable, but the invisible, immortal energy—that is truth.”
    We are made of atoms, which are made up of tiny packets of electromagnetic force, all of them interrelating and communicating with each other in highly complex ways. These charged elementary particles can transform into each other and carry all the information necessary to explain all of existence. Our bodies are made of the same stuff as Mount Everest and the Pacific Ocean. If you look at us on an atomic scale then we and the universe comprise a seamlessly integrated web; it’s all energy and information swapping back and forth. As the astronomer James Jeans put it, “The universe looks less and less like a great machine and more and more like a great thought.”
    The question is: whose thought? Aliens? Leonard Nimoy? Albert Einstein said, “After years of thought, study and contemplation, I have come to the conclusion that there is only one thing in the universe and that is energy—beyond that is a Supreme Intelligence.” It should be pointed out that Einstein’s supreme intelligence, whom on other occasions he hasn’t been shy to call “God,” was nothing like an angel-and-trumpet deity, but something more akin to a perfectly crafted physical law. According to the Wall Street Journal, however, modern science is sufficiently tolerant of transcendental ideas for 40 percent of American physicists, biologists, and mathematicians to declare without embarrassment their belief in God.
    Spirituality is an important trigger in coincidence experiences, because it is exactly that kind of subjective response that brings converging events to meaningful life. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer saw coincidences as a reflection of the “wonderful preestablished harmony” of the universe. Writing in 1850, he expressed the idea that we were not just motivated by physical causality. He said coincidences constituted a “subjective connection” to the environment. They were important because they were tailor-made to fit individuals, and only relevant to those who experienced them.
    So there is nothing new about the idea that all things in the universe have some kind of correspondence and sympathy one with the other. In fact Hippocrates got there way before Schopenhauer, in the 5th century B.C. He believed hidden affinities held the universe together. “There is one common flow,” he said, “one common breathing, all things are in sympathy. The whole organism and each one of its parts are working in conjunction for the same purpose … the great principle extends to the extremest part, and from the extremest part it returns to the great principle, to the one nature, being and not-being.” Or, as the astronomer Carl Sagan put it, “In order to make an apple pie from scratch, first you must invent the universe.”
    The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung was influenced by Schopenhauer and Kammerer, and also by Eastern religions and philosophies, which have similar ideas about the universal interconnectedness of things, and which see the material world as maya, an illusion. True contentment in life can only come by shedding the prison of the ego and surrendering unconditionally to the great flow. For many years Jung had been intrigued by the coincidences related to him by his patients, though the word “coincidence” seemed increasingly inappropriate as many of them were “connected so meaningfully that their ‘chance’ concurrence would represent a degree of improbability that would have to be expressed by an astronomical figure.” Like Kammerer and Schopenhauer, he too saw them as a reflection of