Mr Touchdown | Hippie elder | Romantic Dancer | Coincider | Recovering academic | Tree communicator |Dr. Coincidence |
Bernard Beitman
In 4th grade we constructed paper log cabins, log by log, with each book adding another. Barry Rich had a bigger one so I came in second. I told the teacher that a word had been spelled wrong in one of our textbooks. She challenged me to prove it, knowing I was wrong. I showed her the other spelling in the index.
Books told me new things. I was and am immensely curious about how the world works. Swarthmore College accelerated that drive by being able to read across Pre-Socratic Greek Literature in Translation on the one hand (The only constant is change. Women with thick ankles are no good). Organic chemistry, physics, economics, probability theory, logic and, Shakespeare. The world was broad and wide but I felt there was more. The books on this list expanded my map of the world beyond what Swarthmore’s liberal education foundation could tell me. Reality is not what they were implying.
These books broadened my understanding of reality by becoming maps for the hidden territories that school was restrained from showing me. The list was easy to construct. Each rings with vibrating patterns alerting me to the mysterious hiding in plain sight.
Bernard Beitman, M.D., is the first psychiatrist since Carl Jung to systematize the study of coincidences. A graduate of Yale Medical School, he did his psychiatric residency at Stanford University. The former chair of psychiatry of the University of Missouri-Columbia medical school for 17 years, he writes a blog for Psychology Today on coincidence and is the coauthor of the award-winning book Learning Psychotherapy. His latest book is Meaningful Coincidences: How and Why Synchronicity & Serendipity Happen. The founder of The Coincidence Project, he lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. | https://coincider.com/
My 10 Best
Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
The imagination of childhood, the symbols of adulthood, the influence on Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane (one pill makes you taller, one pill makes you smaller). I adored the jabberwocky so much that I memorized it in high school and later made up a tune for it which, with a little persuasion, I am willing to perform at no charge. The word play, the making up of new words as combinations of old words, showed a flexibility to the English language that loosened my writing. And the story of how a school teacher wanted to entertain three little girls while punting on an English river created it. Seeing a rabbit in a hurry, late for a very important date and the enduring use of going down a rabbit hole as a worrisome thing. Alice had a great adventure! How very polite was Alice until she lost her temper in such a ladylike way, always curious and responding truthfully and getting herself in trouble for that sometimes, as we children have been known to do.
And You are Old Father William gave me increasing confidence that old age need not be accompanied by infirmity. And the Walrus and the Carpenter were so musically nasty. Such characters. Such characters. I did not like the Queen. She was no fun. Off with their heads, indeed.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
by Tom Wolfe
As a medical student having spent a summer in Los Angeles and taken LSD, I became entranced with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. The now defunct New York Herald Tribune ran a series by Tom Wolfe describing the LSD culture blooming up around San Francisco. Every week, I trotted over to the Yale library to read the next installment. When I arrived in the City by the Bay in 1968, I was prepared to meet the future.
The series in the Tribune became this book. Tom Wolfe writes so vividly well. Want to relive those sometimes glorious days of yesteryear? Visit the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test.
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
by Edwin Abbott Abbott
Our views of reality are highly limited. Using the analogy of 2 dimensional creatures (triangles, polygons, circles, as well as points and lines), Flatlanders are introduced to a point that becomes a circle that recedes into a point and then into a circle. The Flatlanders had to then comprehend it. The person who suggests there is another dimension is imprisoned. Sound familiar? Perhaps meaningful coincidences are like the sphere for us. Some of them are 4th dimensional objects passing through our 3 dimensions. Or, more accurately, when we include time as part of our dimension, some synchronicities are like the sphere passing through a 4th dimension from the 5th dimension.
This little book stretched my mind. It will yours. And if you prefer cartoon variations, try this Dr. Quantum take on Flatland. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEVEKL1Fbx0
Childhood’s End
by Arthur C Clark
How can humanity prevent itself from self-destruction? Arthur C. Clarke brings us the beneficent alien who forces humanity to get along. You may be surprised by the look of the alien. Then boredom seems to set in without there being conflict. What will the children do? They run off into the forest, communicate telepathically, then form a circle, dance, blend with each other and shoot off into the sky. What the rest of humanity does is left to our imagination.
Clarke later withdrew his interest in telepathy and became more “scientific”. I was glad not to learn of his defection until many years later. Childhood’s End inspired my imagination to dream of perhaps more likely solutions to the current drive for humanity to self-destruct by destroying each other and our habitat. Is there another intelligence or set of intelligences interfering in our earthling activities?
The Book of Thoth
by Aleister Crowley
Thoth is Egyptian for Mercury or Hermes. A few years after my first experience with LSD in Los Angeles, 1965, I received a Xerox copy of the cards making up this unique tarot. I cut out each card, created a deck, and put them in a simple leather holster over my belt to take them out for doing readings. In a concrete room off the garage of a house in the Berkley Hills, across the bay from San Francisco, I studied the cards without text, intuiting the need to make connections between the card numbers, astrological signs, Hebrew letters and the details of each image, especially the major arcana composed of 22 cards. Then the Book of Thoth was published and I had the opportunity to compare what I has figured out with what Aleister Crowley had intended.
The book and deck are crowded with details to keep in mind to then make associations, to find hidden meanings. One chart in the appendix shows the relationship between the decimal-based system of the cards and the binary system of the I Ching. They are linked as is much of our lives on this planet which we are being forced to recognize through Global Warming and the Internet. The accuracy of the cards in predicting the future demands an explanation. I think they reflect the flow of the Tao. What is your opinion?
The Observing Self
by Arthur J Deikman, MD
Human beings are endowed with the ability to reflect on our own minds. As I struggled with trying to describe this capacity, my wife presented me with this short, clear and enthusiastic travelogue of this unique form of consciousness—self-awareness. Without explicitly stating it, Deikman implies the existence of a second self-observer that tracks the activity of the subject of this book. It takes a second observer to observe the first. This book helped to lead me to a primary interpersonal question particularly relevant to the psychotherapy of High Functioning Asperger’s and narcissism: “What do you think, I think of you?”
If you are interested in studying your ability to observe yourself that incorporates meditation as well as psychotherapy, try this small volume. Easy to read and see reflections of your own mind.
Existential Psychotherapy
by Irvin D Yalom
Yalom brings clarity to the often fuzzy concepts of existential philosophy by identifying four fundamental existential concerns: death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. He emphasizes personal agency. (When you say you “can’t”, ring the “won’t” bell.) He writes beautifully, sharply, and practically encouraging not only therapists but anyone struggling for psychological and spiritual transformation. Yalom did not consider this to be a spiritual book and yet the American Psychiatric Association presented him with its spiritual award. How do I know? Irv was a wonderful mentor for me during my psychiatric residency at Stanford and afterwards. He wrote the preface to my first psychotherapy book The Structure of Individual Psychotherapy. He taught us that being authentic as a therapist is far better than being some caricature of the blank screen advocated by psychanalysts.
Through a dear friend and colleague in my residency, I have been able to keep up with news about Irv’s creative drive. He is for me a model of the driven writer who must continue to create ideas on a page for others to consider. If you want a clear description of existential concerns and how to address them, consider this lengthy and easy to read book.
Vineland
by Thomas Pynchon
A true to life description of what happened to many Hippies when their culture exploded. Marvelous collection of double entendre and puns, reflecting the fun and tragedy of post hippie California beginning in the 1980s with forays back into the 60s. I was a part time hippie in Haight Ashbury and surroundings while doing a psychiatric residency down the road at Stanford. I wanted to know what happened to all those freaks. Now I have a better idea. Most of it is not good with some magical realism woven seamlessly in (most of the time) so that telling the difference between fantasy and actual becomes challenging. If you like straight looking descriptive prose masquerading as biting social commentary, deep insight into the realm of the psyches of weird people who are mostly being only themselves, you may find yourself, as I did, averaging about three laughs per page, much of the time. The noir museum, a yuppified mall based loosely on the detective films of World War II had a boutique mineral water shop named Bubble Indemnity and the Mall Tease Flacon, which sold perfume and cosmetics. Ronald Reagan’s goon squads harassed and jailed them and now grass, as we once called weed, is getting legal. Pynchon chronicles in his absurdly accurate prose the sad part of the once glorious hippie explosion.
If you like word play and can enjoy absurdly long twisting sentences and the inner and outer world of hippie freaks, then go for it!
Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle
by Carl Jung
With great caution, Carl Jung published this monograph about meaningful coincidences late in his life. He reviews classical history and more current commentary on the subject and presents his astrological research in the hopes that it would suggest another perspective on the subject of synchronicity. A careful reading shows that Jung used the word synchronicity to describe HOW meaningful coincidences took place but not as a synonym for them. Synchronicity, to Jung, was an acausal connecting principle that linked certain mental events with objective events through shared meaning. This monograph is the forerunner of my book on Meaningful Coincidences, two psychiatrists addressing this challenging human experience more than 60 years apart. Not an easy read. Jung presents a useful summary as well which could be a good place to start. He stimulated Western interest in these ideas. I have picked up the mantle to the next level of creating a scientifically credible field of study.
The Portrait of a Mirror
by Natasha Joukovsky
Hold up your cell phone, point at your face and click. Ovid’s Narcissus did not have the portability we now have, of carrying his reflection with him, unable to move away lest his adored self, disappear. Natasha breezes through in-depth reflections of reflections on the narcissism of the upper 1% of New York City, bent upon finding and nurturing images of themselves in others. Clever, insightfully written, Natasha has lived the life of classical art and the rush, rush of high tech, high money players. Beautifully etched fractals of American narcissism
If you appreciate, as I do, seeing mythology come alive in our current reality, with wonderful touches of word play and astute observation, give Natasha a visit both in her book and in her interview with me on my podcast, Connecting with Coincidence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SB98eCnCMfw