(eerie synth music)
- [Narrator] On the 28th of July, 1900,
Umberto Ranierio Carlo Emanuele Giovanni Maria
Fernando Eugenio Di Savoia, the King of Italy,
was dining in a restaurant in Monza.
He had come to the city to attend a gymnastics competition.
That night, the owner of the establishment
came over to welcome him and to their surprise
they noticed they looked incredibly alike.
Intrigued, they began to discover a series
of extraordinary coincidences.
Both were named Umberto.
Both were born on the 14th of March, 1844
in the city of Turin.
Both were married on the same day
to women named Margherita.
And both had a son called "Vittorio."
If that were not enough,
King Umberto's coronation had taken place
on the exact same day that the other Umberto
first opened his restaurant.
The monarch was so taken aback
that he decided to invite his double to join him
at the gymnastics competition the following day.
Unfortunately, whilst the king was at the event,
he was informed that his doppelganger had died
a few hours earlier in a mysterious shooting accident.
Minutes later, as the king climbed into his carriage,
he himself was assassinated.
Shot three times by an Italian anarchist.
You have probably experienced coincidences
at some point in your life.
But when they are linked together
in a seemingly irrational and incomprehensible way,
it is because of a phenomenon called "synchronicity."
The notion of synchronicity has,
for a long time, fascinated humankind.
But it was the psychologist, Carl Jung,
who coined the term in the 50s.
"The coincidence in time of two or more events
"which are closely related in an acausal,
"but meaningful, way."
The coincidence in time of abnormal and significant events
is what happened in 1973,
when Anthony Hopkins was hire to play a part
in the film, "The Girl from Petrovka,"
based on the novel by George Feifer.
To familiarize himself with his new role,
Hopkins visited several different bookshops in London
looking for the book, but he was unable to find it.
Disappointed he decided to return home.
While waiting for the next train at an underground station,
he noticed an abandoned book near him.
Hopkins picked it up and was astonished to see
that it was the very book he had been looking for.
Sometime later, when Hopkins was immersed in the filming,
George Feifer, the author of the novel, dropped by the set.
Hopkins related the unlikely story about
how he came across his novel and Feifer admitted
that he himself did not currently have a copy
as he had lent the only one he had,
which happened to contain important notes in the margin,
to a friend who had subsequently lost it.
Hopkins brought out his copy of the book and dumbstruck,
he and Feifer discovered that it was indeed
the author's own copy.
Incidents such as these are complex
and incomprehensible happenings
which manifest themselves as riddles
to those who dare to explore them.
Synchronicities can be a very soul-lifting experience
or a truly disturbing one.
Do they make you feel like the heavens are watching
and tampering with the story of your life,
as if they were harboring a special plan for you?
Do they make you feel like you are attached
to strings handled by an invisible puppeteer
who makes fun of you?
Feeling trapped in some sort of rigged, cosmic board game?
Take the case of a woman named Maureen Wilcox.
In 1980, she bought two lottery tickets at the same time.
One for the Rhode Island Lottery
and one for the Massachusetts.
When the numbers were pulled out,
she was amazed to discover that both numbers
had come out as winners.
Though the number for Rhode Island was
the winning number in Massachusetts
and the Massachusetts number was the winner in Rhode Island.
Synchronicities feel like a glitch in the operating system.
A reminder that the universe is not random chaos
made of disparate bits but a whole,
in which everything is interwoven with different realities.
Where each element makes up part of a larger fabric,
unique and interconnected.
Synchronicities occur continuously and everywhere.
They orbit around you like enigmatic triggers
ready to set off the chain reaction.
Indeed, think of the large number of events
which had to take place in the past,
so that everything in your life now
is exactly the way it is and not some other way.
So that it is me narrating this video about synchronicity
and that you, and not someone else, is watching it
in this precise moment in time.
It cannot just be an exotic phenomena.
Or can it?
(mysterious synth music)