My most recent post on coincidence has sparked lively discussion. One reader asks an important question: “I have seen people go hospital crazy, reading all kinds of signs in coincidences that just plain weren’t true. They see whatever they desire, or fear, wherever they look. How do you guard against these mistakes and get the most accurate information from the universe?”

This helps us understand why some in the psychiatric community are troubled by talk of meaningful coincidence.  Determined not to be overawed by Jung’s learned borrowings from Greek, a Swiss psychiatrst called Klaus Conrad made up the word “apophenia” to describe a psychotic condition he defined as the “unmotivated seeing of connections” accompanied by a “specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness.”

Conrad’s Greek was not as good as Jung’s. The word he wanted is apophrenia, which means “away from the mind.” But he left out the “r” in the Greek stem (phren), so his coinage — meant to categorize a kind of nonsense — is itself nonsense. The mislabeled condition (mentioned in the title of a rock song and in William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition) is a disorder of compulsive pattern recognition that produces paranoid fantasies.

There are people who find meaning and inspiration in the cracks on a wall, and people who are simply cracked. The difference between them may be as extreme as that between Leonardo da Vinci (who urged his apprentices to study cracks in the walls) and the nut portrayed by Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory.

When we navigate by coincidence, we move effortlessly into creative flow. When we project our delusions onto the world around us, we put ourselves in a place of blockage and pain. It is the release or constriction of creative flow that will tell us whether we are on the right track. Let’s note that the release may involve a necessary redirection of flow

For much more on this subject, please read Part 2 of The Three “Only” Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.