Why you should take a chance on chance

‘Meaningful coincidences can provide clues to how reality works including existential questions like why we are here and what happens after the body dies.’ Bernard Beitman MD.

Synchronicity offers help to our troubled species, says American psychiatrist Bernard Beitman in his captivating new book, as we become increasingly disconnected from each other and the natural world.

‘The quiet powers of synchronicity and serendipity can aid our healing by creating experiences of connecting us to each other, to trees, to animals, and to other beings,’ he writes in Life-Changing Synchronicities: A doctor’s journey of coincidence and serendipity (Park Street Press, May 2025).

His earnest conviction is that recognising synchronicity and serendipity can help us find our life purpose and enhance spiritual and interpersonal development. ‘Life for me is an adventure in figuring out how reality works,’ he says.

Believing that each of us has more to do with creating coincidences than we realise, the ground-breaking Beitman proposes the existence of a ‘mental atmosphere’ which he calls the ‘psychosphere’. This surrounds us like air and everything is immersed in it, including the collective unconscious and, through it, meaningful coincidences show us that human minds are much more connected than mainstream scientific…