Coincidance - Principia Discordia

150 COINCIDANCE
7. Second sequel: Margaret Green, of London, was riding a train and
reading Arthur Koestler's The Roots of Coincidence. When she came to
Koestler's account of Freud's noisy bookcase, the window of the train
suddenly smashed as if somebody had thrown a rock at it. Note that even if
there were a rock thrower, it is eerie that he launched his missile just at that
time, as if to prove "the roots of coincidence" are everywhere.
8. I was discussing the Harvie and Green sequels to the Jung-Freud
incident with my wife in a restaurant. I thought it was amusing that I had
discussed this and written about it many times without triggering anything
explosive. At that point, my wife spilled her water. The waiter rushed over
to mop the table—and accidentally knocked over my water.
UNEXPECTED PRESENCE
9. Jung had a patient who was telling about a dream in which an Egyptian
scarab beetle appeared. This was of great interest to Jung, since he believed
dreams often contain images from the collective unconscious, and the
scarab beetle was sacred to the ancient Egyptians. At that point, something
banging against the window caught Jung's attention. It was a scarab beetle, a
species rather rare in Zurich, where Jung lived.
10. Jung himself later had a dream about Liverpool, England, that he
considered so important that he analyzed it and wrote about it at length.
(Liverpool was a pun on pool of life, he decided, and signified rebirth.) Years
later, Peter O'Halligan, of the World Coincidence Center in Berkeley,
analyzed the dream more carefully and decided the details fitted only one
street intersection in Liverpool. At that place was the cafe where the Beatles
first performed. And on the same spot, later, was the Science Fiction
Theatre of Liverpool, where my play Illuminatus appeared. A large part of the
play takes place aboard a yellow submarine, inspired by a Beatles song. And
Jung himself is a character in the play.
11. Novelist William Burroughs, while living in Tangier in 1958, had a
conversation with a Captain Clark, who mentioned that he had been sailing
23 years without an accident. That day, Captain Clark had his first serious
accident. In the evening, while thinking about this, Burroughs flipped on the
radio and heard a bulletin about a crash of an airliner. The flight number
was 23 and the pilot was also a Captain Clark.
12. Sequel: Burroughs later decided to write a screenplay about the
Prohibition Era gangster Dutch Schultz. In researching it, he found the
number 23 over and over again. Schultz had put out a contract on a rival,
Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll, and Coll was shot on Twenty-third Street in
Manhattan when he was 23 years old. Schultz himself was shot to death on
October 23, 1935.