Serendipity and the Arrow of Time
Okay, regarding serendipity. In psychiatry, what happens is someone experiences a load of coincidences that apparently defy probability. They don’t actually defy probability. Then that person is so freaked out by the weirdness of it all that they get pre-occupied with the experience, and when associated things occur from then on at the usual rate of probability the new occurrences are noticed when they wouldn’t normally be. The thing to remember is it’s no big deal. Every now and then in somebody’s life something unlikely is bound to happen! For example say, you hear the song Money, Money, Money seventeen times in different places in a couple of days. Something like that. It’s not really that unusual, but it makes you wonder what strange force is going on, when really there isn’t one. In fact it would actually be very unlikely for coincidences like this not to occur.
There is another form of serendipity which a Taoist would see it as clear evidence that the universe is doing something which it knows is right. When one-off coincidences occur which help us along our way. It’s what other people might call “God working in a mysterious way”. For example, an ecopsychologist wandered around inside a pub, got chatting to another person who also just happened to be an ecopsychologist. The probability of that is extremely remote, yet it was the universe helping those two people by bringing them together. It is a different form of serendipity to the multiple coincidence form. It is real, observable, it happens a lot when we are not aware of it, and again, it really is no big deal. This phenomenon was known and recorded by the ancient Chinese Taoists (see Tao of Pooh, Benjamin Hoff), and also by modern day psychologists (see The Road Less Travelled - M Scott-Peck ), and has been applied successfully by Gandhi, Madonna, Freddie Mercury, amongst others. Science and the spirit converge.
Now, to anyone else who has experienced serendipity, please reject this if you feel so inclined, it is nothing more than a mind wondering, and what is about to written may not be anywhere near the truth. Also this particular experience of it will be very different to other people’s so this hypothetical explanation probably doesn’t apply to many other cases, if any. And even if it is true, it does not necessarily mean it is anything to get bothered about. But…consider the nature of causality and the direction of flow of time in relation to serendipity. It seemed in one particular case of serendipity that a whole load of coincidences were coming together and giving the person involved knowledge and apparently power. It seemed the person was being steered. In retrospect it was easy to see how those coincidences caused future events. A series of unlikely serendipity events may be common in the build up to a more significant event. Consider how serendipity would look if time were flowing backwards. There is a notion that after the universe has finished expanding, it will be pulled back together by gravity towards the Big Crunch. Now, the direction of