Harmonic Convergence

You've heard of it. Three inventors come up with the same idea within a day of each other, even though they are thousands of miles apart. Two businesses that do the same seemingly unique thing are launched at the same time. A succession of movies comes out and they're all eerily similar to each other. Perhaps nowhere on the planet is harmonic convergence more in effect than in Hollywood. This is a place where ideas flow like rivers. Now that I'm becoming more and more aware of the phenomenon, I'm also more wary of it.

Let me say this part first: I'm a skeptic. I don't believe in a God, at least not one with a face and not one who cares about what goes on in our meager little lives. I believe in physics and energy. I guess that makes me prone to belief in the unseen and so, for all practical purposes, I should believe in a God. But I don't. Probably a reaction to a good protestant upbringing. I believe in a common pool of human experiences. I believe in pop-culture and media contamination. And I believe in the fallibility of the human animal, willing to destroy his own kind for the most petty reasons. I think this pretty accurately describes Hollywood, don't you? Godless, petty, contaminated...yeah, we're livin' the good life out here.

Well, this morning I was talking to a friend on the phone as she described her current relationship breaking up. She mentioned the words 'reality check' at exactly the same moment I picked up a hat with that exact logo on it's front. This happens to me all the time. Two days ago I came up with an idea for a screenplay based upon a name which sounded catchy. That name was based upon a word which I just happened to be chanting like a mantra that day. Why that word? I don't know. Maybe it was part of the media-infected aether. I haven't heard that word for years. Anyway, no sooner had I written a quick treatment for it than I heard the word uttered on two separate occasions by two random and completely unconnected people. It's hard to accept you inner skeptic saying "it's a stupid coincidence" when external events are so obviously in alignment. So I finding myself uttering in the back of my head, "Coincidence? I think Not!" (one of my favorite lines from The Incredibles).

The question is, does this actually exist or is it just our ability to selectively hear, interpret, and free-associate that makes it seem like everything is connected.
And if nothing is connected, is it mere random activity, improbable as that may be, that leads to the expression of ideas in synchronicity? I think it's something else. Ideas are weightless and without physical form. As such, they are not subject to the ordinary laws of physics and logic. This makes sense to me. We are logical beings in an illogical world and it is precisely our lack of understanding about it that allows for all of the mysteries of the universe. Maybe we're all accessing a gigantic reservoir of collective knowledge. The Venn diagram of that scenario suggests that sooner or later we're going to overlap in our sampling of ideas. But I don't actually claim this notion as my own. In fact, I'm certain someone else already has.