Everything that happens is a coincidence and all the purveyors of cause and logical sequence are illusion-mongers.  The event is primary; the sooner we get hold of this wisdom the richer will be the succession of instants that makes up our lives. 

Nothing that happens is probable.  Say that analysis shows you have 1 chance of running into your mother downtown and 999 chances of running into “nobody.”  Yet each of those 999 chances is distinct.  In one case my (your) attention is caught by an Indian craft shop, which I enter, seeing a boy in a purple suit smoking a cigar.  In another I get mental pictures of going swimming last year in North Carolina.  The point is, meeting my mother downtown is — objectively — no more startling than meeting no one I know and thinking about swimming in North Carolina; they are equally improbable.  Yet it is only in the mother-meeting — no more special than the others, no less unspecial — that our minds go to town and start to question the supposed plodding dullness of everyday life.
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The more indifferent we are to received (i.e., established) ideas the better we can see what’s happening.*

When was America discovered?  When was Tricia Nixon’s wedding? What is the correct chronology for the following events: the killings at Kent State University, the freeing of Huey P. Newton, the moon reaches its 73rd consecutive fullness (excluding times before 1900) without an eclipse in San Francisco, the Tupamaros capture Dan A. Mitrione in Montevideo, Jonathan Jackson tries to kidnap Judge Harold Haley and others, the earth is “created” from condensing clouds of gases/matter and what-have-you?  Who won the World Series in 1962 and in which game?

Yet nature is made better by no mean
But nature makes that mean; so, over that art
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race: this 1s an art
Which does mend nature, change it rather, but
The art itself is nature.

— Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale

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