Out of the blue, the year my father turned 81, I inexplicably fell into depression. I cried every night, and lost 20 pounds,  grieving for what seemed to be no reason at all.  After two weeks of this, my mother told me that my Dad, who long had entertained perfect health, would stay overnight in the hospital for his yearly exam. We went to church on the way to pick him up.  During Mass, I sobbed so loudly people seated in our pew moved away, disgusted by my lack of decorum.  Later, at the hospital, as we prepared to go home, my father died.   Would you call my grieving coincidental?

One morning before school, my college room-mate Gloria told me of her disturbing dream.  “Last night,” she said, “I dreamed that in spite of all I could do to help, grandma couldn’t climb stairs because of a pain in her leg.  She wanted to get to a bed at the end of the hall upstairs, but died before we could reach it.” Gloria went off to classes shaking her head, for she had never dreamed of her beloved grandmother before. Later that morning came the news that grandmother had died overnight from a blood clot that formed in the leg and traveled to the heart. But the dream was just coincidence-right?

Since we lived near a mining community, I heard stories of mine disasters, and the amazing way people and animals knew of them before they were announced. It became impossible for me to dismiss these experiences as mere coincidence, and I came to believe we have powers we neither can control or explain away.

Have you ever seen a dowser work-or better yet, have you held in your own hands a make shift coat hanger rod or a professional tool, watching/feeling it twist and point at a water pipe or aquifer?  Try it-you may be surprised. And if it happens to you, you might even put a new name to coincidence, perhaps naming it instead, for psychic gifts of sensing, seeing, hearing or knowing (clairsentience, clairvoyance, clairaudience or claircognizance).

The media is deluged with mysterious stories, an example is the series “Weird or What” on the Discovery channel.  The host William Shatner weighs psychic and scientific theory, but some people will be afraid of what the wierdness means and label it as evil.   Others seek out exercises to develop their intuitive powers, hoping to use them for the good of humanity.  And you, what do you think? Do you watch for omens: a lone bird in the sky, a four leaf clover, a shooting star; do you take special note of a sudden chill sensation, a tingle, a feeling of dread; perhaps you concentrate on the ‘here and now’, becoming mindful of your thoughts and receptive to intuition? What are your stories that some might label coincidental but you think might be a personal experience of the sixth sense or the supernatural?