Lightkeeper-
The phenomenon you describe is nothing new or revolutionary- and you are right, it has been well documented. However, I don't think we need to change the name of this phenomenon from "coincidence" to "synchronicity".
Remember, Lighthouse, that if we want to understand the world we must first understand ourselves. We humans have very active imaginations, and we often see things that aren't there, or believe things to be true when there is little or no evidence to back them up. Think of all those witch burnings that took place over the past few hundred years. We take it for granted that old women turning into cats and flying around on broomsticks is pure fantasy- that's not what people believed back then! And we're talking about normal, rational people- people just like you and me. So we have to realize that all of us are capable of seeing imaginative things in the world that simply aren't there. What we need is good, solid evidence that follows the parameters of the scientific method of observing, hypothesizing and testing.
Let's look at synchronicity for a moment. What are the odds of finding a bottle at the beach, breaking it, repairing it, and then opening up a book of poetry that night and the first poem in the book being one of a broken bottle? The chances of all that happening are, admittedly, pretty slim.
However, not all of that had to happen for it to fit into the theory of synchronicity. Synchronicity falls into a category called pseudoscience, which isn't really science at all. It includes theories that are so loosely defined that almost ANY observed phenomena could validate its truth, yet the theory itself is completely untestable (so for example, you think of a number, TELL me the number, and I say "that's the number I was thinking of! I'm psychic!" but of course you can't test this if you always tell me the number beforehand). Theories like this can sometimes be impossible to disprove because they are so loosely defined that they could mean anything, and they never serve any practical purpose other than the metaphysical beleif itself. So for example, even though synchronicity claims to show us connections between things and even "foreshadow" events, the connections could mean so many different things that a business would never employ it as a way of predicting patterns in consumers.
So back to your experience: Would it still have been an example of synchronicity if you hadn't dropped the bottle, but the rest of the event happened? What if you hadn't repaired it? What if the first poem you read wasn't about a bottle- what if it was the second? Or the third? Or what if you read a poem the next day about a bottle? Or a week later? Or what if the poem was just about going to the beach and picking up things that drift in? Even if some or all of these variations of the event had occurred, you might still have considered it an example of synchronicity. However, this shows that there was not one, single chain of unlikely events that had to take place to demonstrate synchronicity- all that had to happen was a few out of about a billion quite possible events, and this scenario is not that unlikely to happen at all!
My point here is that so many different things could happen that might make us think of some kind of "connection" that it really isn't that unlikely for things to have a "synchronicity" to them if you're looking for it all the time. With enough imagination, almost ANY two (or more) completely unrelated events could be argued to have some sort of connection to them.
Think of all the crazy Jewish conspiracy theories, astrology, fortune telling, palm reading, people thinking there are "strategies" to winning the lottery, that the government purposely put cocaine in the cities to harm minorities....the list goes on of bunk. The scariest part of it is... smart people are often MORE likely to believe in crazy things, because smart people are very good at defending ideas even when there is no evidence to back them up, purely to satisfy their confirmation bias.
Anywho, sorry for digressing. And go science!
