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Meaningful Coincidences: How and Why Synchronicity and Serendipity Happen
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About the author
Bernard D. Beitman, MD
3 books8 followersBERNARD BEITMAN, M.D., is Founding Director of The Coincidence Project which encourages people to tell each other their coincidence stories. His book, Meaningful Coincidences: How and Why Serendipity and Synchronicity Happen (September 13, 2022) comprehensively describes their wide range of uses and explanations. The book serves as a personal guide to using synchronicities and serendipities.
He is former chair of Psychiatry at the University of Missouri-Columbia and has a private practice in Charlottesville, Virginia.
His manual Learning Psychotherapy received two national awards for its unique interactive training program for psychiatric residents. He is internationally known for research in panic disorder and chest pain and has edited several books about how to integrate pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy.
He went to Swarthmore College, Yale Medical School, and did his psychiatric residency at Stanford. He was captain of the baseball team in high school and college. He was scouted by the Oakland Raiders pro football team, tried out for the Pittsburg Pirates pro baseball team and played rugby at Yale and in San Francisco.
The stories in his first book Connecting with Coincidence (2016) illustrate how meaningful coincidences can be useful in most aspects of life.
He is former chair of Psychiatry at the University of Missouri-Columbia and has a private practice in Charlottesville, Virginia.
His manual Learning Psychotherapy received two national awards for its unique interactive training program for psychiatric residents. He is internationally known for research in panic disorder and chest pain and has edited several books about how to integrate pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy.
He went to Swarthmore College, Yale Medical School, and did his psychiatric residency at Stanford. He was captain of the baseball team in high school and college. He was scouted by the Oakland Raiders pro football team, tried out for the Pittsburg Pirates pro baseball team and played rugby at Yale and in San Francisco.
The stories in his first book Connecting with Coincidence (2016) illustrate how meaningful coincidences can be useful in most aspects of life.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 8, 2022
Adventures in the Psychosphere
Dr. Beitman shares a wealth of experience and investigation into the topic of coincidences, synchronicity, and serendipity in his book, "Meaningful Coincidences." What is it about synchronicity that so touches our imagination, hearts, and souls? This universal experience has the power to spark a sense of reverence and deep curiosity in anyone who experiences it. While those who experience synchronicity for themselves can truly know how profoundly moving and life-changing it can be, Beitman's examples of synchronicity inspire us to feel a sense of awe and wonder that there may be something much greater than ourselves.
Swiss Psychologist Carl Gustav Jung coined the term synchronicity to signify "the simultaneous occurrence of two meaningful but not causally connected events," or as "a coincidence in time of two or more casually unrelated events which have the same or similar meaning... equal in rank to a causality as a principle of explanation." Jung found ways to work with synchronicity and clients he worked with, as it seemed to introduce evidence of a higher order of consciousness operating in our lives--such as the time when a scarab beetle, unusual for that area, came to tap on the window exactly when Jung and a client were discussing how the young woman had dreamt of being given a golden scarab.
Synchronicity is the occurence of a physical event in the world which occurs at or near the same time that it is being discussed or thought about. The essence of synchronicity is felt, for there is often personal significance and meaning associated with it. When you consider that this kind of interplay is one way that your eternal spirit and your physical self engage in dialogue, you may find yourself looking forward to experiencing more frequent synchronicities in your life.
Beitman emphasizes that the fundamental lesson of meaningful coincidences is that each human mind is much more connected to other minds and its environment than current scientific thinking would have us believe. By tracking coincidences, we can construct maps of our mind environment relationships to develop a cartography of the psychosphere. (p. 115) The heart of Beitman's concept of 'psychosphere' is the idea of a mental atmosphere surrounding us in much the same way as the air in our atmosphere, in which all beings are immersed. Beitman credits earlier authors for having contributed to the idea of a pychosphere, including the psychiatrist, Ian Stevenson, who had a different name for it, and also French philosopher and Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin and the bio geochemist Vladimir Bernatsky, who talked about the 'noosphere,' meaning a sphere of mind.
While some people may consider the notion of instantaneous interpersonal connection to seem far-fetched, Beitman shares examples of how people have gleaned insights as to how simultaneous discoveries can be made of remarkable breakthroughs by different people in different places on the planet at roughly the same time--such as the idea of biological evolution. This is far from an isolated incident: in 1922, Two investigative authors, William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas, documented 148 major scientific discoveries that were simultaneously made by two or more people at around the same time.
I love the way Beitman provides both his own viewpoint of how some synchronous events occur, as well as the perspective of those who were experiencing them. For example, one woman described how she had found information that she needed at the right place and at the right time to help save her father‘s life thanks to the universe. Beitman shared his belief that this woman had subconsciously registered her father‘s distress at a distance, and then as she was reading a book was able to know that she had found information that fit her father‘s situation. Beitman acknowledges that she may also have been aided by an intelligence outside of herself
I love the way Beitman provides many different perspectives, and insights as to a mechanism behind meaningful coincidences, sharing an abundance of research and theories.
Dr. Beitman shares a wealth of experience and investigation into the topic of coincidences, synchronicity, and serendipity in his book, "Meaningful Coincidences." What is it about synchronicity that so touches our imagination, hearts, and souls? This universal experience has the power to spark a sense of reverence and deep curiosity in anyone who experiences it. While those who experience synchronicity for themselves can truly know how profoundly moving and life-changing it can be, Beitman's examples of synchronicity inspire us to feel a sense of awe and wonder that there may be something much greater than ourselves.
Swiss Psychologist Carl Gustav Jung coined the term synchronicity to signify "the simultaneous occurrence of two meaningful but not causally connected events," or as "a coincidence in time of two or more casually unrelated events which have the same or similar meaning... equal in rank to a causality as a principle of explanation." Jung found ways to work with synchronicity and clients he worked with, as it seemed to introduce evidence of a higher order of consciousness operating in our lives--such as the time when a scarab beetle, unusual for that area, came to tap on the window exactly when Jung and a client were discussing how the young woman had dreamt of being given a golden scarab.
Synchronicity is the occurence of a physical event in the world which occurs at or near the same time that it is being discussed or thought about. The essence of synchronicity is felt, for there is often personal significance and meaning associated with it. When you consider that this kind of interplay is one way that your eternal spirit and your physical self engage in dialogue, you may find yourself looking forward to experiencing more frequent synchronicities in your life.
Beitman emphasizes that the fundamental lesson of meaningful coincidences is that each human mind is much more connected to other minds and its environment than current scientific thinking would have us believe. By tracking coincidences, we can construct maps of our mind environment relationships to develop a cartography of the psychosphere. (p. 115) The heart of Beitman's concept of 'psychosphere' is the idea of a mental atmosphere surrounding us in much the same way as the air in our atmosphere, in which all beings are immersed. Beitman credits earlier authors for having contributed to the idea of a pychosphere, including the psychiatrist, Ian Stevenson, who had a different name for it, and also French philosopher and Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin and the bio geochemist Vladimir Bernatsky, who talked about the 'noosphere,' meaning a sphere of mind.
While some people may consider the notion of instantaneous interpersonal connection to seem far-fetched, Beitman shares examples of how people have gleaned insights as to how simultaneous discoveries can be made of remarkable breakthroughs by different people in different places on the planet at roughly the same time--such as the idea of biological evolution. This is far from an isolated incident: in 1922, Two investigative authors, William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas, documented 148 major scientific discoveries that were simultaneously made by two or more people at around the same time.
I love the way Beitman provides both his own viewpoint of how some synchronous events occur, as well as the perspective of those who were experiencing them. For example, one woman described how she had found information that she needed at the right place and at the right time to help save her father‘s life thanks to the universe. Beitman shared his belief that this woman had subconsciously registered her father‘s distress at a distance, and then as she was reading a book was able to know that she had found information that fit her father‘s situation. Beitman acknowledges that she may also have been aided by an intelligence outside of herself
I love the way Beitman provides many different perspectives, and insights as to a mechanism behind meaningful coincidences, sharing an abundance of research and theories.
November 4, 2022
If you have read books on synchronicity this will add a few new thoughts and scientific rationale for their occurrence. Multiple anecdotal experiences are integral to the story. The extensive bibliography provides future reading possibilities. The author is the founder of The Coincidence Project, “to help people recognize the interconnectedness of all life through appreciating and sharing coincidence experiences”, and there was perhaps a bit too much space allotted about this project.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews