How Mindfulness Brings Meaning to Experiences

Box of Meanings

Source: Joseph Mazur

Day-to-day incidents have more meaning than we might expect. Serious meaning is different when it comes to the kind that touches the psyche, alters body chemistry, stirs a mood to contract muscles, and shakes some emotions that constrict or enlarge some blood vessels in the brain. These incidents communicate an emotional state archetypally packed in the history of one’s own experience.

Whenever I bite into a croissant, or even see one, I have a flashback to where I was when I first had one: at a café in Paris, a student in 1963 very tired from a long flight to London, ferryboat crossing to Calais, and train to Paris. For another example, there is a place in New York that I rarely come to (the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park), that triggers a sharp memory of a girl whom, in all the years that have passed, I seldom think about, except when I pass the fountain on my walks through the park from west to east and back.

Of course, some experiences pass without emotional flashes of every moment of the day, even those that seem trivial, such as the times we spend brushing our teeth, play roles that might seem immaterial and play parts in the moving time of one’s life. I bring trivialities to the forefront because almost everything we do shifts events further along our spacetime lines in directions that change the oncoming events. Such events could pass as seemingly uneventful, lacking in meaning, or assumed to be a coincidence.

Experiences shape our expectations. Anticipation sculpts surprises.

Coincidences in the small range of farfetched possibilities do not always strike consciousness with a resounding archetypal connection. The meaning of a coincidence is not simply the semantics in the vocabulary of its narration. Every story has linguistic meaning, and some, more than others, have suggestive ideas of more than trivial meanings; however, when we say that a coincidence means something, we expect its story to engage subconscious references that evoke experiences in the depths of memory.

For the best brief definition, a coincidence is a surprising, nonapparent concurrence of two or more occurring events. The adjectives surprising and nonapparent are critical, but their semantic strength crosses the landscape of observance, for the objectiveness of surprise and apparentness blurs the definition of coincidence. When we ask for meaning, there must be a cause, apparent or not.

Are most experiential incidents just meaningless random events?

Carl Jung saw coincidences as collections of meaningful events related by their significance, not as causally connected. For him, life was not a collection of random events but rather manifestations of an innate order of psychic phenomena connected to the collective unconscious. He called it synchronicity, a simultaneity of time with space and mind where something other than chance is involved. He used the example of someone noticing that the number on a theater ticket he bought one day was the same as that on a bus ticket he bought that same day. His point is that the coincidence is in the noticing.

Others think of coincidences differently. Ralph Lewis, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, tells us in his 2022 Psychology Today essay, “It is a human habit to infer deliberate intention to events in self-referential ways. We are also a storytelling species. The brain’s language centers have a natural proclivity for coherent stories—grand narratives with an overarching point and a satisfying end. Things must happen for specific reasons; they must have a point. The brain is not satisfied with pointless randomness."

But coincidences don’t happen unless we notice them. When we do, we search for meaning. Why not look for meaning in seemingly non-coincidental experiences? Shouldn’t they have meaning, too?

Send me a sign.

Perhaps Jung and Lewis are both right. I offer the following example of a meaningful concurrence without an apparent cause, at least not apparent to me. A week before my wife’s 90-year-old mother died, my mother-in-law announced that she was ready to join her deceased husband. My wife said, “Send me a sign.” On the day she died, after a heavy rain, the most sharply defined, brilliant double rainbow appeared, and moments later, the two rainbows gradually joined together as one.

It was, what we might call, a coincidence that could not have happened without the particular timing of my wife looking out the window to notice the event. Rainbows don’t last long, and their periods of sharpness are very limited. Was it the promised sign? It is a case of evident meaning without an apparent cause. It surely touched us, even tingled our spines. For a few moments, that rainbow and its archetypal connection gave meaning to the entire concurrence.

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Aside from those amazing incidents of accidentally meeting your next-door neighbor while traveling in a strange country (97 percent of such being in that category), they are just connecting events of learning, which in most cases are about putting two or more ideas together. The world and the world of ideas are much smaller than we think they are. A basket of croissants at a café table in Paris brings together many thoughts for anyone first learning about a strange breakfast treat to go with a French coffee, and opens the mind to many observations years later. So, yes, new events, random or not, will collide with reason, meaning, and the collective consciousness. Isn’t that how we learn and mature as we grow older?