Incredible Coincidence: The Baffling World of Synchronicity (Mass Market Paperback)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

A prophetic dream. An answered prayer. A lucky break. A chance encounter that leads to a long-term relationship or an unexpected career opportunity. We have all experienced or heard of incredible coincidences. But what are they really, and what do they mean? Is there a way to prepare for them? Can we prepare for them? Can we use them to our advantage?

Synchronicity -- meaningful coincidences that have no apparent cause -- is one of the most thought-provoking concerns in the field of psychic phenomena. Alan Vaughan has compiled more than 150 actual case histories to prove that there is more to incredible coincidence than meets the eye:
-- A woman in Berkeley, California, is locked out of her house; the postman walks up, holding a letter from her brother... inside is a spare key.
-- A hurricane in Galveston, Texas, sweeps Charles Coghlan's coffin out to sea; eight years and two thousand miles later, the coffin is found just offshore from the town where Coghlan was raised.
-- A Londoner takes the wrong bus, not realizing his mistake until he passes the house of a friend he hasn't seen in years; smelling gas at the door, he prevents a suicide.
-- Incredible Coincidence

A fascinating exploration into the strangest things that can happen every day.

From the Inside Flap

A prophetic dream. An answered prayer. A lucky break. A chance encounter that leads to a long-term relationship or an unexpected career opportunity. We have all experienced or heard of incredible coincidences. But what are they really, and what do they mean? Is there a way to prepare for them? Can we prepare for them? Can we use them to our advantage?

Synchronicity -- meaningful coincidences that have no apparent cause -- is one of the most thought-provoking concerns in the field of psychic phenomena. Alan Vaughan has compiled more than 150 actual case histories to prove that there is more to incredible coincidence than meets the eye:
-- A woman in Berkeley, California, is locked out of her house; the postman walks up, holding a letter from her brother... inside is a spare key.
-- A hurricane in Galveston, Texas, sweeps Charles Coghlan's coffin out to sea; eight years and two thousand miles later, the coffin is found just offshore from the town where Coghlan was raised.
-- A Londoner takes the wrong bus, not realizing his mistake until he passes the house of a friend he hasn't seen in years; smelling gas at the door, he prevents a suicide.
-- Incredible Coincidence

A fascinating exploration into the strangest things that can happen every day.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 130 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books (November 13, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345359720
• ISBN-13: 978-0345359728
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.3 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #744,857 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Synchronicity: A Meaning-filled & Joyous Cosmology of Mind, February 4, 1999

By A Customer

Alan Vaughan's "Incredible Coincidence: The Baffling World of Synchronicity" is my all-time favorite book in this field. Vaughan's book is hugely entertaining (a real page-turner! with a wealth of case studies of many categories) as well as scientifically and spiritually perceptive. The book will motivate the reader to awaken to what our Spirit may be nudging us to pay attention to: how to design the patterns and meaning in our life's conscious and unconscious evolution.

In a lively, intelligent style, Vaughan explores how we can apply in our own lives the personal and the transpersonal significances of these strange, wonder-filled and meaning-filled 'coincidences' that Jung termed 'synchronicities.' When we encounter synchronicities, we are awakened from our dogmatic slumbers, since they can be sometimes awe-inspiriting and other times downright cosmicly humorous.

For skeptical, mechanistic moderns, synchronicities are often a wake-up call to begin suspecting that we are more than our physical bodies and economic-oriented left-brain awareness. For synchronicities present us with a trickster joker in Life's card game. Not only are they

(1) baffling and anomalous to our exclusive rational materialist paradigm of Reality,

but also

(2) undeniably meaning-filled: resonating with significance and often signally us to look deeper into the pattern of what our lives really 'mean.'

After he presents 15 chapters, brimming over with some 150 cases of synchronicity, that are arranged into thought-provoking categories (e.g. meaningful 'chance' encounters with People, Things, and Information, including the "Library Angel" or bookstore angel who, against all odds, guides us to wonderfully meaningful books or other information), Vaughan devotes the last 4 chapters to speculating on the underlying scientific and metaphysical meaning of these Meaning-filled phenomena. Here he shows exciting and thought-provoking correlations connecting our Consciousness and the nature of Quantum physical Reality.

Our universe and our personal lives show patterns of meaningfulness because all of reality is created by consciousness: the underlying secret is that we live in a Cosmology of Mind. If so, then perhaps we can engage in some creative thinking to accelerate the constructive patterns of meaningful connections? Perhaps, to the extent we become Self-aware, our psyches can shape and direct all the events in our lives to have the life-affirming Meaning we choose?

This Meaning-filled Cosmology of Mind vision implies what Gerald Heard called the "Psychological Revolution": "We are the first generation of self-conscious beings who have become self-conscious of the non-self-conscious [or creative subconscious/super-conscious] power that we can now intentionally direct." Vaughan (Chapt. 19) lays out some tentative assumptions that suggest the power of using synchronicities to personally design and freely choose our life's scenarios or blue-prints to create masterpieces of living:

1. Your life has meaning.

2. The events in your life have meaning.

3. The events in your life are telling you something.

4. Developing awareness of your life's events is the best way to hear what they are telling you.

5. By doing what the events in your life tell you to do, you will be fulfilling your inner life's destiny.

Vaughan's inspiring tour of synchronicity, "Incredible Coincidence," may well stimulate the reader to track down his other books where he analyzes his insights about how to reinvent our Life's blue-prints for more joy-filled and ecstatic growth and transformation of soul.

Among these other books from Vaughan's imaginative mind, the reader may find the following fascinating second-courses of delightful reading:

*Doorways To Higher Consciousness

*The Edge of Tomorrow

*Patterns of Prophecy

The "Doorways" study introduces the reader to the psi connection between the 'gifts of the spirit' and how we can channel our Higher Self, along with wise dialogues with several trance entities, most notably Vaughan's own truly wise entity, "Li Sung.'

Vaughan's style is engaging, stimulating, intelligent, and inspiring. It will get you in touch with your own Higher Self.

Happy reading!

John Cody [e-mail]

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Whenever I get too depressed with a clock-work universe...., December 28, 2002

By	OAKSHAMAN "oakshaman" (Algoma, WI United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Incredible Coincidence: The Baffling World of Synchronicity (Hardcover)

Whenever I used to get too depressed with the meaningless, material, clock-work universe I used to read this book. It reminded my that there is far more to the universe than the scientists and accountants would have us believe.

It wasn't that the "coincidences" were so incredible or improbable that inspired me, it was the fact that so many of them were meaningful. It is impossible to explain them without positing a benevolent intelligence to the universe. If these 150 excellently documentd cases are not enough to convince you, there is an excellent bibliography for further reading.

I've heard it said that it is not uncommon for clusters of coincidences to sudden pop up around a person when they start reading about synchronicity. All I know is that if I went through my own personal journals for the last decade, I could easly come up with 150 more cases of 2nd, 3rd, 0r 4th degree synchronicity in my own life. An example of 3rd degree synchronicity would be finishing a book on an obscure topic, then setting it aside and turning on the television only to find that same topic being mentioned (first degree.) Then later on a friend brings up exactly the same topic out of the blue (2nd degree.) Then still later you are browsing in the library or book store and you unexpectedly flip to the same subject unintentionally (3rd degree.) It usually concerns a meaningful topic- at least to you. Of course sometimes the meaning seems to lie in the event itself as a kind of "tap on the shoulder" that there is more to the universe than you are letting yourself imagine.

The section on the nature and meaning of synchronicity is also excellent- this is far more than a simply "believe it or not" compilations of stories. The author suggests that in a way we, or our higher Selves, may somehow be co-creators when it comes to patterning the ground of existance. Of course, he also insists that we should also use cool logic, as well as our inner feelings, to interpret and act upon synchronous episodes.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Synchronicity: Our Meaning-filled & Joyous Cosmology of Mind, February 4, 1999

By A Customer

Alan Vaughan's "Incredible Coincidence: The Baffling World of Synchronicity" is my all-time favorite book in this fascinating field. Vaughan's book is hugely entertaining (a real page-turner! with a wealth of case studies of many categories) as well as scientifically and spiritually perceptive. The book will motivate the reader to awaken to what our Spirit may be nudging us to pay attention to: how to design the patterns and meaning in our life's conscious and unconscious evolution.

In a lively, intelligent style, Vaughan explores how we can apply in our own lives the personal and the transpersonal significances of these strange, wonder-filled and meaning-filled 'coincidences' that Jung termed 'synchronicities.' When we encounter synchronicities, we are awakened from our dogmatic slumbers, since they can be sometimes awe-inspiriting and other times downright cosmicly humorous.

For skeptical, mechanistic moderns, synchronicities are often a wake-up call to begin suspecting that we are more than our physical bodies and economic-oriented left-brain awareness. For synchronicities present us with a trickster joker in Life's card game. Not only are they

(1) baffling and anomalous to our exclusive rational materialist paradigm of Reality,

but also

(2) undeniably meaning-filled: resonating with significance and often signally us to look deeper into the pattern of what our lives really 'mean.'

After he presents 15 chapters, brimming over with some 150 cases of synchronicity, that are arranged into thought-provoking categories (e.g. meaningful 'chance' encounters with People, Things, and Information, including the "Library Angel" or bookstore angel who, against all odds, guides us to wonderfully meaningful books or other information), Vaughan devotes the last 4 chapters to speculating on the underlying scientific and metaphysical meaning of these Meaning-filled phenomena. Here he shows exciting and thought-provoking correlations connecting our Consciousness and the nature of Quantum physical Reality.

Our universe and our personal lives show patterns of meaningfulness because all of reality is created by consciousness: the underlying secret is that we live in a Cosmology of Mind. If so, then perhaps we can engage in some creative thinking to accelerate the constructive patterns of meaningful connections? Perhaps, to the extent we become Self-aware, our psyches can shape and direct all the events in our lives to have the life-affirming Meaning we choose?

This Meaning-filled Cosmology of Mind vision implies what Gerald Heard called the "Psychological Revolution": "We are the first generation of self-conscious beings who have become self-conscious of the non-self-conscious [or creative subconscious/super-conscious] power that we can now intentionally direct." Vaughan (Chapt. 19) lays out some tentative assumptions that suggest the power of using synchronicities to personally design and freely choose our life's scenarios or blue-prints to create masterpieces of living:

1. Your life has meaning.

2. The events in your life have meaning.

3. The events in your life are telling you something.

4. Developing awareness of your life's events is the best way to hear what they are telling you.

5. By doing what the events in your life tell you to do, you will be fulfilling your inner life's destiny.

Vaughan's inspiring tour of synchronicity, "Incredible Coincidence," may well stimulate the reader to track down his other books where he analyzes his insights about how to reinvent our Life's blue-prints for more joy-filled and ecstatic growth and transformation of soul.

Among these other books from Vaughan's imaginative mind, the reader may find the following fascinating second-courses of delightful reading:

*Doorways To Higher Consciousness

*The Edge of Tomorrow

*Patterns of Prophecy

The "Doorways" study introduces the reader to the psi connection between the 'gifts of the spirit' and how we can channel our Higher Self, along with wise dialogues with several trance entities, most notably Vaughan's own truly wise entity, "Li Sung.'

Vaughan's style is engaging, stimulating, intelligent, and inspiring. It will get you in touch with your own Higher Self.

Happy reading!

John Cody [e-mail]