Mirror Coincidences
A discussion of the phenomena with examples including one I synchronously read about on Medium today and the writer did not see it for what it was
In my story that describes this publication, What is ChannSpirations and Coincidences, I provided this example of a mirror coincidence:¹
In Bell’s book,² he recounts the story of a management-level employee’s retirement and the not proverbial gold watch he received that stopped running at precisely the time the retirement party ended.
Upon spotting such a coincidence in a story I read today, I realized that I had not written much about the concept nor distinguished it sufficiently from the more popular concept of directional coincidence.
In Carl Jung’s forward to Richard Wilhelm’s translation/depiction of the Ancient Chinese text on a method of divination,³ the I Ching,⁴ Jung writes:
Synchronicity takes the coincidence of events and in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance, namely a peculiar interdependence of objective events among themselves as well as within the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers.
Bell explains the imperative of Jung’s passage thusly:
What is significant here is Jung’s recognition that coincidental events possess a peculiar interdependence with the subjective state of the observer. This is the central and singular most important fact about coincidences. A coincidence is always appropriate and relevant to the person(s) encountering it and often is a reflection of the psychological state of the person at the time it occurs.[Emphasis added]
Discussing the mirror coincidence of the retiree’s watch I mentioned above, Bell explains:
In a mirror coincidence, the coincidental events — often in dramatic fashion — reflect or mirror a current dominant concern of the psyche (the conscious and unconscious mind)….The watch’s stopping provided no direction or guidance. It merely reflected a part of my stepfather’s (conscious and unconscious) mind that was highly charged with energy.
Bell further explains, appropriately considering synchronicity and coincidence as synonyms:
Jung made an important statement about synchronicity….He said ‘Synchronicity designates the parallelism of time and meaning between psychic and psychophysical events.’ …By psychic event, Jung means one that occurs in the psyche, which is the totality of the psychological self, consisting of the conscious mind and the very vast, sometimes turbulent reservoir of the unconscious. The physical events of a coincidence are identified as being not merely physical but psychophysical; in other words, meaningfully related to the psyche or psychological self.
Bell gives another example to illustrate this phenomenon. While she serves other passengers, one passenger keeps impatiently tapping the flight attendant on the shoulder. Upon reaching him, she takes his order, rotely reaches into the cart for his soda, and serves him. When he cracks the can, it explodes on him as if she had shaken it. She had not. Bell elaborates:
If we assume the pent-up force in the can of soda reflected the pent-up agitation of the flight attendant toward the passenger, then the eruption of the soda may be considered a psychophysical event. The psychological state of the flight attendant, in being meaningfully connected to and reflected in the physical event, made the latter a psychophysical event — and the set of circumstances a coincidence.
The Mirror Coincidence I Spotted in a Story Today
Technology Hits included Brandi K McMurry’s My Real Life Glitch in the Matrix Moment in its most recent retrospective of stories previously collected by ILLUMINATION. Brandi tells the story of her being alone in her car and agitated and exclaiming to herself loudly the intense feelings she was experiencing and then moments later her cell phone rang and the call, from a third party business, was closely related to what she had exclaimed. I don’t want to provide more specifics as I hope you will read Brandi’s story and then you too will see that as opposed to her questioning whether big brother was listening in on her, this occurrence was a mirror coincidence — psychophysical event — caused by her state of mind.
Bell writes: “Psychic centers tend to behave like an electromagnet. When the power is turned on — when charged — it tends to attract things.” This occurrence was not a glitch in the matrix and no one was spying on her. It was a mirror coincidence — Brandi’s charged psychic center attracted the phone call, which was not a call she wanted. Please, no one should deem this to be proof of the nonexistent “law of attraction.”⁵
After reading this, I hope that my readers will have their eyes open to mirror coincidences and write about them and submit them here for publication. If you would like me to add you as a writer, please say so in a comment.
In Rama I create, with soul-energy surging through my body, inspiring me and breathing wind into my sails,
Endnotes (Special thanks to a great and intellectual writer, David Todd McCarty for teaching me how to create the superscript for endnotes)
- My readers need to understand that the word coincidence is often misused and misunderstood as meaning happenstance as evidenced by phrases like “no mere coincidence” and “I don’t believe in coincidence.” When the user understands the proper definition of coincidence, the speaker of the latter phrase absolutely believes in coincidence. When I moved from NYC to New Hampshire in December 2020, I found a huge dictionary in the house i rented, the 1968 Edition of the Webster International Dictionary, which contains this definition of coincidence: “Noteworthy event, circumstance, or series of such, which occurs in conjunction, or synchronously, with others, and is of such a character as to suggest a connection of cause and effect, although apparently no connection of the kind exists.” I had not read Bell’s book in many years. Leafing through it today in preparation for this essay, I saw that coincidentally he cites the Third Edition of the Webster New International Dictionary for this definition: “the concurrence of events or circumstances appropriate to one another or having significance in relation to one another but between which there is no casual connection.” I don’t know if “casual” was a typo for “causal” but either work. Casual connection means by chance so “no casual” means “causal.” If “not causal” was meant, that means no physical (as opposed to metaphysical) cause and effect, what Jung describes as “acausal” in his definition of synchronicity as an “acausal connecting (togetherness) principle,” “meaningful coincidence”, “acausal parallelism” or “meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved.”
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2659080-comprehending-coincidence At the start of my yellow brick road back in 2012, which path I left in 2014 until I found my way back in 2020, this book and another were instrumental. See this response as a story, i.e. unmetered, as Medium does not permit such to count for MPP: https://readmedium.com/ae079ff2f900
- “The art or practice that seeks to foresee or foretell future events or discover hidden knowledge usually by the interpretation of omens or by the aid of supernatural powers.” — Source
- https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/78341
- This is not a law but a gross generalization and new age bull shit transformation of what sometimes happens into a “law” that proponents, in order to preserve their law, then create the victim-blaming nonsense that if something bad happens to someone it’s because they were vibrating negatively and attracted the bad event or person to them. Just like the nonsense of original sin was created to explain how a loving God, which God is (https://readmedium.com/god-loves-us-unconditionally-45c54c297e52), allows evil to exist and hurt good people. https://readmedium.com/339a2a07cc4f [3/19/23 edit. I recently saw the best and most concise definition of karma and realized that it also describes what could be called the law of attraction. “Here, we would like to add that we do not agree with karma meaning you have to ‘pay’ for what you did in another lifetime. That is a very human perception, of life being a court system meting out reward and punishment. Karma is a vibrational level that draws the experiences needed for healing and growth to a soul. Nothing more.” Thus, at most the law of attraction describes the vibrational pulls of our soul contracts, not what we humans consciously or subconsciously emit. See https://readmedium.com/revisiting-karma-and-the-law-of-attraction-997965601b65]
