Lattice Of Coincidence

: MILLER: A lot of people don't realize what's going on. They view life as a bunch of unconnected incidents and things. They don't realize that there's this like, lattice of coincidence that lays on top of everything. I'll give you an example. Show you what I mean. Suppose you're thinking about a plate of shrimp. Suddenly, somebody'll say like, plate, or shrimp, or plate of shrimp. Out of the blue. No explanation. No point looking for one either. It's all part of the cosmic unconsciousness.
: OTTO: Did you do a lot of acid, Miller? Back in the hippie days?
: -- From the film "Repo Man"

More related accounts and puzzling evidence:

: There are few persons, even among the calmest thinkers, who have not occasionally been startled into a vague yet thrilling half-credence in the supernatural, by coincidences of so seemingly marvellous a character that, as mere coincidences, the intellect has been unable to receive them.
: -- Edgar Allen Poe, The Viking Portable Poe
: Chains of more-than-coincidence occur so often in my life that, if I am forbidden to call them supernatural hauntings, let me call them a habit. Not that I like the word 'supernatural'; I find these happenings natural enough, though superlatively unscientific.
: -- Robert Graves, The White Goddess
: And once again Fate fixed the scales for shocks and surprises, arrivals and departures. And all the while these two solitary strollers did not for a moment think on coincidence, that unswum stream which lingers at man's elbow with every crowd in every town. Nor did they ponder the fact that if man dares dip into that stream he grabs a wonder in each hand.
: -- Ray Bradbury, A Medicine for Melancholy
: When I pray, coincidences happen; when I don't, they don't.
: -- Archbishop William Temple
: What I found were "coincidences" which were connected so meaningfully that their "chance" concurrence would be incredible. By way of example, I shall mention an incident from my own observation. A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window pane from outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since, and that the dream of the patient has remained unique in my experience.
: -- Carl Jung, in his essay, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle

Hold on a second... The woman is telling Carl Jung about her dream while he has his back to the window... Have we not all seen TheUsualSuspects?

I was surprised at that too; I kept expecting Jung to qualify it somehow: "...and there was no way she could have seen the window either..." But... of course he hadn't seen the movie. ;-)

From VideoAddiction: Did you know some fish hatch their eggs in their mouths? And the parasitic catfish have learned to drop their eggs into those mouths, so the baby catfish hatch in the same mother fishes mouths? How did they learn to do that, being just dumb fish?

This just made me wonder whether the LatticeOfCoincidence could have had a hand in evolution? Like, "helping" the fish to be in the right place at the right time, somehow feeding back with evolution . . . 'Course in that case I suppose it could be just as much of a "coincidence" to have the catfish genome just have spontaneously mutated to produce that interesting behavior.(?)

It didn't happen in one fell swoop, overnight. It happened in small steps, like the catfish sharing nests before the other fish took up mouth breeding, or the parasitic catfish that laid eggs in other body parts not having surviving eggs.

[Success survives, failure disappears. There's no coincidence to it. It's brute force.]