Episode #38 Meaningful Coincidences with Bernard Beitman, MD
Dr. Bernard Beitman is a psychiatrist, author, and founder of the Coincidence Project. Throughout his life, he has observed and documented the patterns of meaningful coincidences.Coincidences, says Beitman, are an expression of the mind's relationship with the environment, and he offers ways to make use of them when they occur.
According to Beitman, all individuals experience meaningful coincidences, and the frequency of those experiences grows with increased attention.
Drawing on his career and the work of Carl Jung, he explains why he believes coincidences are more than statistical probabilities or acts of fate. Instead, he suggests that coincidences, “illuminate the hidden currents that connect and unite us.”
On this episode, Dr. Weil, Dr. Maizes, and Dr. Beitman examine the differences and similarities between coincidences, synchronicity, and serendipity. They discuss common examples and draw from personal experiences.
Please note, the show will not advise, diagnose, or treat medical conditions. Always seek the advice of your physician or healthcare provider for questions regarding your health.
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Dr. Victoria Maizes
Hi, Andy.
Dr. Andrew Weil
Hi, Victoria.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
Today we are going to be speaking with an old friend of yours, an old medical colleague of yours. And we are going to be speaking about coincidences.
Dr. Andrew Weil
Yes, it's Dr. Bernard Beitman or Bernie, as I know him, a psychiatrist who has really been instrumental in creating this new field of coincidence studies.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
And we actually know him from years back because he spoke at our 2010 mental health conference. And at that time, he was speaking about a much broader way of thinking about depression. So he continues to be at the leading edge.
Dr. Andrew Weil
Great.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
Let's welcome him.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
Exactly. There we go. Dr. Bernard Bateman is the first psychiatrist since Carl Young to systematize the study of coincidences. A graduate of Yale Medical School. He completed his psychiatry residency at Stanford and then served as the chair of psychiatry at the University of Columbia of Missouri, Columbia for 17 years. He writes a blog for Psychology Today and coincides it's.
And his new book, which was published in September, is called Meaningful Coincidences: How and Why Synchronicity and Serendipity Happen. Welcome, Bernie.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
Thank you, Victoria. Thank you very much.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
It would be great to start with some definitions. So tell us what is how do you define a coincidence?
Dr. Bernard Beitman
A coincidence is the coming together of two apparently independent events in a surprising way that sometimes looks like it has an explanation, but it doesn't. What the fun thing about coincidence is for much of human existence is that we look at coincidences and find underlying causality that help us understand how reality works.
Dr. Andrew Weil
However, I think most people that I know throw coincidences into a mental wastebasket. You know you'd say that's a coincidence and you dismiss it and don't attach any significance to it.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
Well, that's the people, you know.
Dr. Andrew Weil
Well, you're trying to change that.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
I am trying to change that. And you're helping me do that. But it's interesting that you say that most people and I think it's true because I get a lot of emails.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
They want to tell me their story. There's a lot of that because they feel isolated because of what you just described.
Dr. Andrew Weil
Well, I would say in the medical profession and probably among scientists particularly, there is that tendency to dismiss coincidences as just, you know, something that's funny or but has no real significance.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
So, Andy, what do you think is the significance of a coincidence?
Dr. Andrew Weil
To me, they're remarkable that, you know, when I look at them carefully and I want to make them happen more frequently, they make me generally make me feel good or act as kind of signposts. I think that's what Bernie is trying to emphasize.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
Yeah. As you just said, they help you feel like you're on the right path. You're in some kind of flow and that's what they do for you and do for a lot of other people.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
And are they all meaningful?
Dr. Bernard Beitman
No. That's why there's the word coincidence. And then there's meaningful coincidence. And there's just a coincidence. The adjective makes the adjective makes a difference.
Bernard Bietman
You have to talk about the anatomy of a meaningful coincidence. For example, statisticians like to say random for every for all of it.
And I say, well, there's mystery involved here, too. And in between is your own agency that has something to do with it. Meaningful coincidences, which are simply not just serendipity, synchronicity, it's usually connections between mind and environment.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
Mm hmm.
Dr. Andrew Weil
Let me tell you one. I remember waking up one morning in Tucson, and the phrase Sinn Fein was in my head. I didn't even know what it meant. And I looked it up. And that was the name of the Irish Republican movement. And about 6 hours later, I was driving in downtown Tucson and on a wall was written, Sinn Fein.
Dr. Andrew Weil
Okay. So and that makes me feel, wow, this is something, you know, the universe telling me that I'm in the flow.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
Yeah, a lot of people use it that way. But let's talk about in medicine, because I'd like to be able to encourage your use of synchronicity in your discussions, in your teaching of residents and your integrative medicine program, because I think they can play a role in medicine. What do you think?
Dr. Andrew Weil
Can you give an example of that?
Dr. Bernard Beitman
The discovery of penicillin is one of the most outstanding serendipity in modern medical pharmacology. A lot of pharmacology has taken place and discovered by accidents, happy accidents.
Dr. Andrew Weil
But that's serendipity. That's not the same as synchronicity.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
If you look at the title of my book, Meaningful Coincidences How and Why Synchronicity and Serendipity Happen. What I'm trying to do is say both of them are forms of meaningful coincidences, and they have and they have overlap.
Dr. Andrew Weil
Mm hmm.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
So can you define serendipity?
Dr. Bernard Beitman
Happy accident is a very simple way of talking about it. That a little larger way of saying is looking for something and finding in a way we're unexpected, which is what Alexander Fleming did. In 1921 is he had a running nose and a drop from his nose, fell on a petri dish with some bacteria on it.
And then he saw a halo of inhibition where that drop fell. And that led to discovery of lysozyme, something that could lice cell walls. He was he was very much looking for something to stop the major infections that happened in World War I because a lot of people died from the infections, not from the actual shells.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
What about the common occurrence? It seems to me, where scientists sometimes across the world from each other are coming up with the same discovery. So you have hundreds of years of effort, nothing. And then suddenly, somehow in the same two week or one month period, two different scientists discover the same thing. Is that a synchronicity or serendipity?
Dr. Bernard Beitman
It's whatever you want to call it. It's a coincidence. And what I look at, a meaningful coincidence and the term simultaneous independent discovery is the term applied to them, and they happen a lot. In 1923 book on the subject had hundreds of them, and they keep happening often more and more often as one about February 14th, since we just had Valentine's Day 1876, two guys walk into the US Patent Office with the same almost diagram of the telephone.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
Interesting.
Dr. Andrew Weil
You know, it also seems to me that one principle is that similar things tend to happen together.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
I think you're right.
Dr. Andrew Weil
And it seems to me that the experience of coincidence or synchronicity hints at some underlying structure of the universe.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
Yes.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
You mentioned that we should watch for this in our medical training, and we've given some examples of how scientific research progresses. But what about in the clinical practice of medicine?
Dr. Bernard Beitman
In the clinical practice, sometimes, as I had one example, I was doing a CME thing. I'm a psychiatrist and for some reason I looked up a thing on sleep apnea.
So I did the CME and the next day a guy walks in with a thick neck and a big belly who is having some depression problems and he fit the criteria of sleep apnea, which I just read about the day before.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
Hmm. And otherwise, you feel like you might not have recognized that syndrome.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
I think I would have had a lot more trouble. It helped that they help. I mean, I had to have some basic idea about it. And there's another version of this that I wonder if happens to you that's a little more subtle than that. There's an experience reported by many people of experiencing the pain or distress of a loved one at a distance.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
Mm hmm.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
This was the original definition of telepathy. Terror at a distance. Parsi feeling. But then it became more cognitive. So I call this time opacity. Just have a different name for it.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
Mm hmm.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
And sometimes physicians, therapists, primary care physicians with close connections with patients can find that they're feeling something or dreaming something about a patient who may be in distress. And what I'm suggesting is that this intuitive capacity that we all have, because the data that I have has shown that this capacity exists in a lot of people, that physician should be encouraged to look at themselves, to know maybe there is something going on with one of their patients that they need to pay attention to.
Dr. Andrew Weil
Yeah, I think that doctors are discouraged from using intuition. I probably most people are in schools and we're taught to pay attention to objective data. But in my experience is that all great diagnostician is relying on intuition.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
Absolutely. Absolutely. And how are you doing that in your program? Increasing people's confidence in intuition.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
Andy you regularly speak of that. We suggest that our fellows pay attention to their intuition because it is a source of important information. So you counter the predominant message with that message.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
Do you give examples?
Dr. Andrew Weil
I give some case examples for my clinical experience.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
The place that shows up most often, I would say for me is more with loved ones than patients. I'll be thinking about somebody and thinking, “Oh, I should call them.” And the phone rings and it's that person. And I feel like that happens way more than one could say by chance alone.
Dr. Andrew Weil
There's been some actual research on that done by Rupert Sheldrake controlled experiments showing that it's not random, that the chance of people getting it right on who's calling is is higher than chance.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
That seems to point to that relational aspect that when it's someone who you are particularly close to. So that could be perhaps in a psychotherapeutic relationship, a patient you're feeling especially connected to, it could be a loved one, it could be a friend. That perhaps happens more frequently.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
The data show that just what you're saying.
Dr. Andrew Weil
Bernie where is the field of coincidence studies, which you've been instrumental in developing?
Dr. Bernard Beitman
Well, tomorrow we are launching the Coincidence Project website. And we have something called the coincidence Cafe, which occurs from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. each third Saturday of the month, and we're getting more and more people coming to that more people seem to be getting into this idea.
Maybe it's because I'm in the middle of it, so they contact me, but I'm getting a lot of people very interested and wanting to be able to come together to recognize and utilize meaningful coincidences.
Dr. Andrew Weil
So is there a field now of coincidence studies?
Dr. Bernard Beitman
You know about fields and you have to have it in your own mind first. And of course, it's been on my mind for quite a while now. Right now we have a board. We have a board of very good people. We have programs coming up once a month.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
And we are ready to launch into a larger venue. So what we need is cash to be able to do the research after we get the administrative foundation solidified. And I've got ideas about future research.
Dr. Andrew Weil
Can you give us an idea for research?
Dr. Bernard Beitman
There are hundreds and hundreds of coincident stories that we've collected, including ones like you with the sign.
What I want to do is have people look at the stories and look for patterns in them and then have artificial intelligence. Look through the same stories, which they can do now to see if they can find patterns that human beings can't find.
Dr. Andrew Weil
Do you think that if you focus on coincidences, they tend to you tend to experience them more often?
Dr. Bernard Beitman
Yes, do you have any idea why that happens? What makes you say it? Because you it's.
Dr. Andrew Weil
Well, that's my that is my experience. And I think it's that they're probably happening all the time. But if you don't pay attention to them, they go away.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
You're absolutely right. I mean, that's the kind of data I want to gather to confirm it. But yes, that when I'm asked, how do you increase coincidences, people want to cultivate them, just keep paying attention to them and they'll keep happening.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
You wrote something in a paper. You said, coincidences are clues to the mysterious hiding in plain sight.
It's such a beautiful sentence to consider. What do you think we can learn?
Dr. Bernard Beitman
We can learn how reality works, which is what's been going on with coincidences for much of humanity. Two things, come together and say, Why is that?
Dr. Bernard Beitman
You know, it's really funny because astronomers look for anomalies.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
Mm hmm.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
That's what they study. But here on Earth, you get an anomaly like this stuff and you don't look for it. You don't look into it. And that's what I'm trying to encourage people to do. And what will we discover? Well, I think we live in something called the Psychosphere. Our mental atmosphere. And this mental atmosphere is partly explanation for that simultaneous independent discovery.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
Thing that you mentioned Victoria, we feed off the same ideas collectively. It's a collective consciousness. It's not just the deep unconscious of Yung. There's a lot of stuff running around in that psycho sphere and that gives me a way of explaining telepathy. Nobody knows how telepathy works, but if you use this idea of Tyler de Joe de Chardin, had a lot of people have used the term psychosphere.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
Andy do you have talked about our conception of reality being maybe just one way of seeing the world? And there's a tremendous interest right now in psychedelics and in seeing the world in very different ways. So do psychedelics increase our experience of coincidences or synchronicity or serendipity?
Dr. Andrew Weil
Well, I don't have data for that, but certainly in my experience that they do.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
Of course they do. I interviewed a woman was doing psilocybin psychologist in London for depression, and I asked the same question Victoria did. And not only the patients after they have psilocybin tell them have a lot of coincidences, but also the therapists who are involved. But you know what happens when I said, well, to report this, they said too woo woo, Wow.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
But yes, Andy and I both know that on Haight Street in the late sixties, there were signs or feels like signs that said synchronicity spoken here.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
What happened? We had Carl Young, who was so intrigued and wrote about it so frequently and in depth, and then a very long period of time until you lifted it up. Is it just to woo or was there some other reason why the interest has perhaps turned a side.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
Too woo woo. I mean Jung was afraid to write about it because he was afraid that people would make fun of him and he'd only did it toward the end of his life that he published, it, and I did it because I had a first coincidence when I was eight or nine
I was weird enough to pay attention to what I saw rather than believing what people told me. And I just needed to write about them. And I started with doing a little research project to find out how often do these things happen?
Dr. Bernard Beitman
And they happen quite often and they're quite common, and I got the data to be able to show it.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
Now, is this your weird coincidence survey?
Dr. Bernard Beitman
Yes, it is.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
Can you tell us what you learned from that survey? Because I know you have had more than 3000 people contribute.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
Yes I wanted to know the most common ones and Victoria you picked out the most common. You think of someone and they call you. Rupert has shown that you that that happens. Another frequent one is being in the right place at the right time. So I've come up with an idea called Human GPS or Internal GPS where we can get to where we need to be without knowing how we got there.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
But this internal guidance system gets us where we need to be. And another one is looking for ideas and then having our answers to questions and having them appear on the internet or somebody saying something or on in some kind of newspaper that you're looking for it and it shows up in a weird way.
Dr. Andrew Weil
One that I used to have very frequently when I was younger that has just started to reappear is I have a word pop into my head, often a word that I don't know the meaning of. And then within hours I encounter that word in a book I'm reading or an article that I'm reading. Yeah. Now it's reappeared.
Dr. Andrew Weil
I began to disappear as I got older, but I loved to do acrostic puzzles and recently words in the acrostic puzzle. Really odd things turns up in something I'm reading, you know, within a very short time.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
I think. Dr. Weil those are hints that for your active mind, you might get curious about.
Dr. Andrew Weil
I am I love it.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
It's so interesting.
Dr. Andrew Weil
As I said, it hints at some underlying thing structure of the universe in which what's inside our heads and outside our heads is connected.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
And when you say that, that's a fundamental principle, what's inside our heads is connected to what's outside our heads, which makes it obvious if you pay attention to it that our minds are part of our environment. They're not just in our own skulls.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
So that you both have such a positive stance on this internal G.P.S. being in the flow. I mean, there's a lot of positivity. Is it ever a bad thing? Does this ever cause people I mean, you're a psychiatrist, Bernie. Does this ever create difficulty for people?
Dr. Bernard Beitman
It does. A researcher in San Francisco who was studying neuroblastoma, she had been involved with prayer and helping AIDS patients at a distance. And the data were pretty good enough for NIH and IMH to give her money to do the same thing with neuroblastoma. So as she got started with it, she came to be diagnosed with a neuroblastoma.
Dr. Andrew Weil
That's not a coincidence. You want to have happen to yourself.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
A longer answer to your question is that when you start examining them, as they do in my book, sometimes a coincidence is great for one person and terrible for another person right at the beginning. Sometimes it's the opposite. Sometimes it's good just for one person and then bad later in the end
Dr. Bernard Beitman
So sometimes you have to pay attention to the time sequences of coincidences. For example, one of the primary fun things of coincidence for people is romance. People love to say, Oh, it's meant to be because we just met in this far out and groovy way. It's just got to be. And I've talked to people who had that happen and they just rely on that synchronicity of coming together.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
Well, so thank you so much for joining us on the podcast for these wonderful ideas about how we might stimulate the thought process of our fellows and students and for bringing this leading edge to medicine that is society.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
Thank you very much, Victoria and Andy.
Hi, Andy.
Dr. Andrew Weil
Hi, Victoria.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
Today we are going to be speaking with an old friend of yours, an old medical colleague of yours. And we are going to be speaking about coincidences.
Dr. Andrew Weil
Yes, it's Dr. Bernard Beitman or Bernie, as I know him, a psychiatrist who has really been instrumental in creating this new field of coincidence studies.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
And we actually know him from years back because he spoke at our 2010 mental health conference. And at that time, he was speaking about a much broader way of thinking about depression. So he continues to be at the leading edge.
Dr. Andrew Weil
Great.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
Let's welcome him.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
Exactly. There we go. Dr. Bernard Bateman is the first psychiatrist since Carl Young to systematize the study of coincidences. A graduate of Yale Medical School. He completed his psychiatry residency at Stanford and then served as the chair of psychiatry at the University of Columbia of Missouri, Columbia for 17 years. He writes a blog for Psychology Today and coincides it's.
And his new book, which was published in September, is called Meaningful Coincidences: How and Why Synchronicity and Serendipity Happen. Welcome, Bernie.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
Thank you, Victoria. Thank you very much.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
It would be great to start with some definitions. So tell us what is how do you define a coincidence?
Dr. Bernard Beitman
A coincidence is the coming together of two apparently independent events in a surprising way that sometimes looks like it has an explanation, but it doesn't. What the fun thing about coincidence is for much of human existence is that we look at coincidences and find underlying causality that help us understand how reality works.
Dr. Andrew Weil
However, I think most people that I know throw coincidences into a mental wastebasket. You know you'd say that's a coincidence and you dismiss it and don't attach any significance to it.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
Well, that's the people, you know.
Dr. Andrew Weil
Well, you're trying to change that.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
I am trying to change that. And you're helping me do that. But it's interesting that you say that most people and I think it's true because I get a lot of emails.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
They want to tell me their story. There's a lot of that because they feel isolated because of what you just described.
Dr. Andrew Weil
Well, I would say in the medical profession and probably among scientists particularly, there is that tendency to dismiss coincidences as just, you know, something that's funny or but has no real significance.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
So, Andy, what do you think is the significance of a coincidence?
Dr. Andrew Weil
To me, they're remarkable that, you know, when I look at them carefully and I want to make them happen more frequently, they make me generally make me feel good or act as kind of signposts. I think that's what Bernie is trying to emphasize.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
Yeah. As you just said, they help you feel like you're on the right path. You're in some kind of flow and that's what they do for you and do for a lot of other people.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
And are they all meaningful?
Dr. Bernard Beitman
No. That's why there's the word coincidence. And then there's meaningful coincidence. And there's just a coincidence. The adjective makes the adjective makes a difference.
Bernard Bietman
You have to talk about the anatomy of a meaningful coincidence. For example, statisticians like to say random for every for all of it.
And I say, well, there's mystery involved here, too. And in between is your own agency that has something to do with it. Meaningful coincidences, which are simply not just serendipity, synchronicity, it's usually connections between mind and environment.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
Mm hmm.
Dr. Andrew Weil
Let me tell you one. I remember waking up one morning in Tucson, and the phrase Sinn Fein was in my head. I didn't even know what it meant. And I looked it up. And that was the name of the Irish Republican movement. And about 6 hours later, I was driving in downtown Tucson and on a wall was written, Sinn Fein.
Dr. Andrew Weil
Okay. So and that makes me feel, wow, this is something, you know, the universe telling me that I'm in the flow.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
Yeah, a lot of people use it that way. But let's talk about in medicine, because I'd like to be able to encourage your use of synchronicity in your discussions, in your teaching of residents and your integrative medicine program, because I think they can play a role in medicine. What do you think?
Dr. Andrew Weil
Can you give an example of that?
Dr. Bernard Beitman
The discovery of penicillin is one of the most outstanding serendipity in modern medical pharmacology. A lot of pharmacology has taken place and discovered by accidents, happy accidents.
Dr. Andrew Weil
But that's serendipity. That's not the same as synchronicity.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
If you look at the title of my book, Meaningful Coincidences How and Why Synchronicity and Serendipity Happen. What I'm trying to do is say both of them are forms of meaningful coincidences, and they have and they have overlap.
Dr. Andrew Weil
Mm hmm.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
So can you define serendipity?
Dr. Bernard Beitman
Happy accident is a very simple way of talking about it. That a little larger way of saying is looking for something and finding in a way we're unexpected, which is what Alexander Fleming did. In 1921 is he had a running nose and a drop from his nose, fell on a petri dish with some bacteria on it.
And then he saw a halo of inhibition where that drop fell. And that led to discovery of lysozyme, something that could lice cell walls. He was he was very much looking for something to stop the major infections that happened in World War I because a lot of people died from the infections, not from the actual shells.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
What about the common occurrence? It seems to me, where scientists sometimes across the world from each other are coming up with the same discovery. So you have hundreds of years of effort, nothing. And then suddenly, somehow in the same two week or one month period, two different scientists discover the same thing. Is that a synchronicity or serendipity?
Dr. Bernard Beitman
It's whatever you want to call it. It's a coincidence. And what I look at, a meaningful coincidence and the term simultaneous independent discovery is the term applied to them, and they happen a lot. In 1923 book on the subject had hundreds of them, and they keep happening often more and more often as one about February 14th, since we just had Valentine's Day 1876, two guys walk into the US Patent Office with the same almost diagram of the telephone.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
Interesting.
Dr. Andrew Weil
You know, it also seems to me that one principle is that similar things tend to happen together.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
I think you're right.
Dr. Andrew Weil
And it seems to me that the experience of coincidence or synchronicity hints at some underlying structure of the universe.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
Yes.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
You mentioned that we should watch for this in our medical training, and we've given some examples of how scientific research progresses. But what about in the clinical practice of medicine?
Dr. Bernard Beitman
In the clinical practice, sometimes, as I had one example, I was doing a CME thing. I'm a psychiatrist and for some reason I looked up a thing on sleep apnea.
So I did the CME and the next day a guy walks in with a thick neck and a big belly who is having some depression problems and he fit the criteria of sleep apnea, which I just read about the day before.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
Hmm. And otherwise, you feel like you might not have recognized that syndrome.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
I think I would have had a lot more trouble. It helped that they help. I mean, I had to have some basic idea about it. And there's another version of this that I wonder if happens to you that's a little more subtle than that. There's an experience reported by many people of experiencing the pain or distress of a loved one at a distance.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
Mm hmm.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
This was the original definition of telepathy. Terror at a distance. Parsi feeling. But then it became more cognitive. So I call this time opacity. Just have a different name for it.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
Mm hmm.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
And sometimes physicians, therapists, primary care physicians with close connections with patients can find that they're feeling something or dreaming something about a patient who may be in distress. And what I'm suggesting is that this intuitive capacity that we all have, because the data that I have has shown that this capacity exists in a lot of people, that physician should be encouraged to look at themselves, to know maybe there is something going on with one of their patients that they need to pay attention to.
Dr. Andrew Weil
Yeah, I think that doctors are discouraged from using intuition. I probably most people are in schools and we're taught to pay attention to objective data. But in my experience is that all great diagnostician is relying on intuition.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
Absolutely. Absolutely. And how are you doing that in your program? Increasing people's confidence in intuition.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
Andy you regularly speak of that. We suggest that our fellows pay attention to their intuition because it is a source of important information. So you counter the predominant message with that message.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
Do you give examples?
Dr. Andrew Weil
I give some case examples for my clinical experience.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
The place that shows up most often, I would say for me is more with loved ones than patients. I'll be thinking about somebody and thinking, “Oh, I should call them.” And the phone rings and it's that person. And I feel like that happens way more than one could say by chance alone.
Dr. Andrew Weil
There's been some actual research on that done by Rupert Sheldrake controlled experiments showing that it's not random, that the chance of people getting it right on who's calling is is higher than chance.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
That seems to point to that relational aspect that when it's someone who you are particularly close to. So that could be perhaps in a psychotherapeutic relationship, a patient you're feeling especially connected to, it could be a loved one, it could be a friend. That perhaps happens more frequently.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
The data show that just what you're saying.
Dr. Andrew Weil
Bernie where is the field of coincidence studies, which you've been instrumental in developing?
Dr. Bernard Beitman
Well, tomorrow we are launching the Coincidence Project website. And we have something called the coincidence Cafe, which occurs from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. each third Saturday of the month, and we're getting more and more people coming to that more people seem to be getting into this idea.
Maybe it's because I'm in the middle of it, so they contact me, but I'm getting a lot of people very interested and wanting to be able to come together to recognize and utilize meaningful coincidences.
Dr. Andrew Weil
So is there a field now of coincidence studies?
Dr. Bernard Beitman
You know about fields and you have to have it in your own mind first. And of course, it's been on my mind for quite a while now. Right now we have a board. We have a board of very good people. We have programs coming up once a month.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
And we are ready to launch into a larger venue. So what we need is cash to be able to do the research after we get the administrative foundation solidified. And I've got ideas about future research.
Dr. Andrew Weil
Can you give us an idea for research?
Dr. Bernard Beitman
There are hundreds and hundreds of coincident stories that we've collected, including ones like you with the sign.
What I want to do is have people look at the stories and look for patterns in them and then have artificial intelligence. Look through the same stories, which they can do now to see if they can find patterns that human beings can't find.
Dr. Andrew Weil
Do you think that if you focus on coincidences, they tend to you tend to experience them more often?
Dr. Bernard Beitman
Yes, do you have any idea why that happens? What makes you say it? Because you it's.
Dr. Andrew Weil
Well, that's my that is my experience. And I think it's that they're probably happening all the time. But if you don't pay attention to them, they go away.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
You're absolutely right. I mean, that's the kind of data I want to gather to confirm it. But yes, that when I'm asked, how do you increase coincidences, people want to cultivate them, just keep paying attention to them and they'll keep happening.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
You wrote something in a paper. You said, coincidences are clues to the mysterious hiding in plain sight.
It's such a beautiful sentence to consider. What do you think we can learn?
Dr. Bernard Beitman
We can learn how reality works, which is what's been going on with coincidences for much of humanity. Two things, come together and say, Why is that?
Dr. Bernard Beitman
You know, it's really funny because astronomers look for anomalies.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
Mm hmm.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
That's what they study. But here on Earth, you get an anomaly like this stuff and you don't look for it. You don't look into it. And that's what I'm trying to encourage people to do. And what will we discover? Well, I think we live in something called the Psychosphere. Our mental atmosphere. And this mental atmosphere is partly explanation for that simultaneous independent discovery.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
Thing that you mentioned Victoria, we feed off the same ideas collectively. It's a collective consciousness. It's not just the deep unconscious of Yung. There's a lot of stuff running around in that psycho sphere and that gives me a way of explaining telepathy. Nobody knows how telepathy works, but if you use this idea of Tyler de Joe de Chardin, had a lot of people have used the term psychosphere.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
Andy do you have talked about our conception of reality being maybe just one way of seeing the world? And there's a tremendous interest right now in psychedelics and in seeing the world in very different ways. So do psychedelics increase our experience of coincidences or synchronicity or serendipity?
Dr. Andrew Weil
Well, I don't have data for that, but certainly in my experience that they do.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
Of course they do. I interviewed a woman was doing psilocybin psychologist in London for depression, and I asked the same question Victoria did. And not only the patients after they have psilocybin tell them have a lot of coincidences, but also the therapists who are involved. But you know what happens when I said, well, to report this, they said too woo woo, Wow.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
But yes, Andy and I both know that on Haight Street in the late sixties, there were signs or feels like signs that said synchronicity spoken here.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
What happened? We had Carl Young, who was so intrigued and wrote about it so frequently and in depth, and then a very long period of time until you lifted it up. Is it just to woo or was there some other reason why the interest has perhaps turned a side.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
Too woo woo. I mean Jung was afraid to write about it because he was afraid that people would make fun of him and he'd only did it toward the end of his life that he published, it, and I did it because I had a first coincidence when I was eight or nine
I was weird enough to pay attention to what I saw rather than believing what people told me. And I just needed to write about them. And I started with doing a little research project to find out how often do these things happen?
Dr. Bernard Beitman
And they happen quite often and they're quite common, and I got the data to be able to show it.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
Now, is this your weird coincidence survey?
Dr. Bernard Beitman
Yes, it is.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
Can you tell us what you learned from that survey? Because I know you have had more than 3000 people contribute.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
Yes I wanted to know the most common ones and Victoria you picked out the most common. You think of someone and they call you. Rupert has shown that you that that happens. Another frequent one is being in the right place at the right time. So I've come up with an idea called Human GPS or Internal GPS where we can get to where we need to be without knowing how we got there.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
But this internal guidance system gets us where we need to be. And another one is looking for ideas and then having our answers to questions and having them appear on the internet or somebody saying something or on in some kind of newspaper that you're looking for it and it shows up in a weird way.
Dr. Andrew Weil
One that I used to have very frequently when I was younger that has just started to reappear is I have a word pop into my head, often a word that I don't know the meaning of. And then within hours I encounter that word in a book I'm reading or an article that I'm reading. Yeah. Now it's reappeared.
Dr. Andrew Weil
I began to disappear as I got older, but I loved to do acrostic puzzles and recently words in the acrostic puzzle. Really odd things turns up in something I'm reading, you know, within a very short time.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
I think. Dr. Weil those are hints that for your active mind, you might get curious about.
Dr. Andrew Weil
I am I love it.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
It's so interesting.
Dr. Andrew Weil
As I said, it hints at some underlying thing structure of the universe in which what's inside our heads and outside our heads is connected.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
And when you say that, that's a fundamental principle, what's inside our heads is connected to what's outside our heads, which makes it obvious if you pay attention to it that our minds are part of our environment. They're not just in our own skulls.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
So that you both have such a positive stance on this internal G.P.S. being in the flow. I mean, there's a lot of positivity. Is it ever a bad thing? Does this ever cause people I mean, you're a psychiatrist, Bernie. Does this ever create difficulty for people?
Dr. Bernard Beitman
It does. A researcher in San Francisco who was studying neuroblastoma, she had been involved with prayer and helping AIDS patients at a distance. And the data were pretty good enough for NIH and IMH to give her money to do the same thing with neuroblastoma. So as she got started with it, she came to be diagnosed with a neuroblastoma.
Dr. Andrew Weil
That's not a coincidence. You want to have happen to yourself.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
A longer answer to your question is that when you start examining them, as they do in my book, sometimes a coincidence is great for one person and terrible for another person right at the beginning. Sometimes it's the opposite. Sometimes it's good just for one person and then bad later in the end
Dr. Bernard Beitman
So sometimes you have to pay attention to the time sequences of coincidences. For example, one of the primary fun things of coincidence for people is romance. People love to say, Oh, it's meant to be because we just met in this far out and groovy way. It's just got to be. And I've talked to people who had that happen and they just rely on that synchronicity of coming together.
Dr. Victoria Maizes
Well, so thank you so much for joining us on the podcast for these wonderful ideas about how we might stimulate the thought process of our fellows and students and for bringing this leading edge to medicine that is society.
Dr. Bernard Beitman
Thank you very much, Victoria and Andy.
Hosts
Andrew Weil, MD and Victoria Maizes, MD
Guest
@bodyofwonderpodcast
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