Coincidences
by James Plaskett

Reviewed by Jonathan Rowson

Tamworth Press, 2000, 256 pp., £10.00 

It’s a rare pleasure to review a book by a chess player written about something other than chess. So above all else, I congratulate Plaskett for the gumption required to write and self-publish this unusual book. To make further sense of my pleasure in reading and reviewing this work, I offer some personal thoughts on the subject matter, and its importance, before saying what I think of this book in particular.

            I should say that the notion of ‘coincidences’ that we are concerned with here are types of experiences imbued with meaning for the person who experiences them. They tend to be ‘events’ (broadly conceived) that seem uncannily helpful, suggestive or relevant to the person (or people) who experience them at that point in space–time without them seeming to have any identifiable causal antecedent to make sense of their relevance. Such coincidences are felt to be meaningful because they are connected to other happenings which matter to the person, so in general when we talk about meaningful coincidences, we are talking about sets of events which appear connected but cannot be shown to be causally connected. That said, in Synchronicity and You, subtitled ‘Understanding the role of meaningful coincidence in your life’ by Frank Joseph, there is a classification of no less than 17 types of meaningful coincidence, so in general we are dealing with a wide variety of experiences, in which it is not easy to say what is, and what isn’t a ‘coincidence’. This is a problem perhaps not fully attended to by Plaskett, who uses the term rather liberally, but it’s not clear to me that it can be adequately resolved in any case, because the whole area is highly personal and frequently fleeting and amorphous. Indeed, what might seem ‘objectively’ to be two unrelated and random events might be felt to be highly significant and intimately linked for the subject who experiences them. 

            Perhaps because of this, many people shirk from attributing ‘meaning’ to anything outside of a dictionary, and the evangelical atheist oft delights in belittling the claims of those who find significance in subjective phenomena. So Sally the Spiritualist wants to say that she felt closer than ever to God while feeding the ducks, but Simon the Scientist dismisses this as sentimentality, and explains the experience away as wishful thinking with no objective merit. The bastard. Yet more often than not, the views of the bastard prevail.

            Simon is not alone, and indeed seems to be supported by mainstream thinking on such matters. I am reminded of acclaimed physicist Richard Feynman, in one of his brilliant lectures, teasing the audience with the rhetorical question:

 ‘Have you ever had that experience when you’re thinking of your mother and then the phone rings... and it’s your aunt?...No of course you haven’t because there’s nothing striking or exceptional about that, but it happens all the time...But now if you have the same experience and it’s your mother on the phone...well then we’re inclined to get really excited...but in the context of all the other times you’ve picked up the phone there’s nothing improbable about that and so to give up some sort mystical significance seems absurd to say the least.’

 (This is not a direct quote by the way and I haven’t found the source – but I know that Feynman said something very much like this).

            This type of reasoning and quick dismissal of Plaskett’s subject matter is painfully difficult to address, but can be done, I think, on a different level of explanation, which I’ll come to in a sec. The simple fact is that conveying personal experience, which is a challenge at the best of times, becomes unbearably frustrating when you try to argue that such experience is in some way meaningful, or suggestive of the nature of reality. What Feynman is getting at is that we put the meaning into events and that it is statistically inevitable, given a large set of events, that we will connect some and not others, and find meaning in those connections.

            This is all well and good, and keeps Simon the Scientist and his mates carefully tucked up in bed with their electric blankets and vitamin C, comfortably reading their latest books on evolutionary psychology by Dawkins or E.O. Wilson, untroubled by the spectre of irrationality or forces greater than mathematics. Actually, I owe myself a slap at this point, and I should be more careful with such caricatures, serving as they do to entrench a partisan approach to reality. Indeed, by the same degree of exaggeration, Sally the Spiritualist would no doubt be blowing out her incense in a tent not far from Glastonbury, saying goodnight to the stars and asking the moon to protect her.

            Yet such a divide, following the residue of an out-dated science/religion debate, is sadly not far from the way we tend to align ourselves on such issues. For many, ‘meaningful coincidence’ is but a few sniffs away from a more general ‘spirituality’, which is often felt to be too close for comfort to religion, which in turn smacks of the implausible, war, paedophilia, and social control. I firmly believe that such foolish and stubborn associations need to be named and shamed before we can look upon the phenomenon of coincidences without prejudice.

            Furthermore, I should say that I have had many striking coincidences in my life and although it has never been crystal clear to me what I should infer from them, they invariably contain a burst of vitality and a renewed lust for life. Without going into the issue too heavily, I think anyone dismissing the significance of such experiences would do well to consider the foundations on which they unwittingly rest their arguments. Indeed, what do we assume about reality while we think about coincidences?

            Until we have a coherent theory of consciousness, a convincing account of the workings of causality and the nature of time, and a theory of quantum gravity, there are too many unanswered questions to be anything other than open-minded. Coincidences, if nothing else, suggest that there may be a principle or force at work in the universe that is currently unacknowledged.

            Jung referred to this principle as ‘synchronicity – an a-causal connecting principle’. It’s difficult to make sense of this in Jungian thought without getting embroiled in ‘Archetypes’, ‘The Collective Unconscious’, and, perhaps, numerology, so we’ll leave that for now. Suffice to say that one of the intellectual giants of the century and perhaps the most famous psychologist ever after Freud was a great believer in coincidences, and spent a good part of his career trying to make sense of them.

            Further support for the meaning behind coincidences can be found in Chinese thought, which has long seen connections between events that are not causal. Indeed, if you throw the coins of the I Ching (Chinese Oracle of Changes) and get a reading that relates to your situation, you do not get that reading because of the way you tossed the coins but rather because of the ‘chance’ of the moment. This ‘chance’ however, is not thought of as random, but uniquely significant to the moment. Whereas we think of a coin toss as random because we focus on the coin in the air, the Chinese are inclined to see the most important thing about the coin toss is the moment it lands, for only then is the unique quality of the moment revealed, and it is then up to us to adapt to that as well as we can. Similarly, coincidences can be seen as ‘chance’, but that’s not to say they are purely random, or without meaning.

            These asides may beg a few questions, but I hope at least that I have set Plaskett’s book in a favourable context, because I am trying to show why his subject matter is so stimulating, and now I want to say why I found this book to be so valuably provocative.

            The provocation is most in evidence in the plentiful supply of Plaskett’s arguments against Darwinian evolution, but may also be seen in some of the striking coincidences throughout the book, including many involving chess players. I particularly like the momentum of the first fifty pages, where, if nothing else, we can see why Plaskett’s ICC handle is Parsifal! More generally, I like the humour strewn throughout the book, and admire Plaskett’s desire to pursue, even hunt, for the meaning behind some of the coincidences, which many of us would have smiled at and brushed aside. A further strength of the book is the years of research into parapsychology which Plaskett evidences. The storytelling is engaging and the coincidences well referenced.

            However, this book leaves a lot to be desired. The structure lacks imagination and I found the writing, even for such an autobiographical book, excessively narcissistic. One could perhaps also criticise a few of the more tenuous coincidences, but this meets the defence I gave above about the difficulties in communicating such experiences.

            All in all, the boldness of the approach is to be commended. This is an interesting book to reach for if you are generally curious to know more about coincidences, and contains some fascinating aspects. You may be less than enthralled by some of the contents, but at the affordable price of £10, this is good value for money.