Coincidence, Connection and the Uncanny Unity of All Things
“A rainbow is not only in the sun and the clouds, but in the eye.”
Over the course of my life, I have had experiences, sometimes with psychedelics, sometimes without, that left me with a deep sense of the unity of all things. At times this has come in the form of uncanny coincidences or even “omens”, the kind that seem to demand attention and interpretation. These experiences sit uneasily beside my naturalist outlook, which grounds itself in science. I could dismiss them as private delusions, and sometimes I have, but often they are salient enough that I have learned not to turn away so quickly.
For many, panpsychism offers a bridge. This is the claim that consciousness is a fundamental feature of the universe, and that our individual awareness taps into a universal field of consciousness. I have never found this convincing. If such a field has no causal effect on the physical world, it explains nothing so why posit it at all? If it does, then wouldn’t it contradict what physics has confirmed again and again about lawful behavior? To me, this makes panpsychism an unnecessary detour in our quest to understand the universe.
And yet I remain drawn to the sense of connection that shamanistic traditions cultivate. The difficulty is how to reconcile it without stepping outside the bounds of natural law. My resolution, provisional though it may be at this point, is to think of the universe not as a static object but as a process: an unfolding through time. From the Big Bang onward, matter and energy have evolved into ever more elaborate structures. Entropy increases, but in many places (like our own Earth), complexity has also grown.
That complexity, especially in living systems, is almost impossibly rich. Within it, connections run in ways we cannot easily perceive. My intuition (maybe it’s insight, or maybe it’s delusion) is that the strange coincidences I sometimes notice are glimpses of these hidden connections. And they need not be supernatural. They may simply be the marks of a network of relationships too deep and intricate to fully map, surfacing for a moment in ways that feel like signs.
Coincidence, in this sense, is like a rainbow. It exists in the world, but only from the standpoint of an observer in the right place. The rainbow is not just light and water molecules; it is the triangle that includes the perceiver. A coincidence is the same. It is only real because it means something to someone. The network that produces it must include the observer and not just the events.
Maybe they are reminders that we inhabit a universe whose unfolding exceeds what any model can contain. In the final chapter of this book, I argued that when systems turn back on themselves, when self-reference folds one layer of the hierarchy back into a lower layer, the mapping complexity can no longer be followed. The subjective experience of consciousness may be one such case. Those strange, uncanny moments when I perceive coincidences or feel like something is an “omen” may be another. Maybe they are brief flashes of a network so entangled that it resists reduction, yet still shapes what I experience.
Either way, they leave me with the same conclusion: that wonder and magic belong beside science, as part of the experience of being human.