meant to be

From: Reanimation Library

"While on a vacation in Alaska, a physician undergoing psychotherapy 'heard' the reassuring voice of an ill, beloved mentor in Texas, speaking to her. A few days later, she was told that the mentor had died around the time she had heard his voice. She had been reluctant to tell her psychiatrist (or anyone) about this event, as well as about many previous similar extraordinary events.
     This case report appeared in a recent lead article in the American Journal of Psychiatry. In the May 2009 issue of Psychiatric Annals, my colleagues and I reported results of the Weird Coincidence Scale (WCS-2) study, strongly suggesting that such extraordinary experiences are far more common than is generally recognized by the scientific community. Schizophrenic and manic patients sometimes present with stories of odd and impossible connections between events, and psychiatrists usually (and often correctly) attribute these associations to the illness. However, patients who are less psychiatrically disturbed also report strange connections between their subjective experiences and environmental events.  
     The analysis of these strange connections, if we do not dismiss them as meaningless, can sometimes prove useful. Jung formalized the description of these 'acausal' connections as 'synchronicity.' A rich theoretical and clinical literature on synchronicity has provided a basis for many of Jung’s speculations about the collective unconscious, archetypes and the unus mundus psychoid, from which both mind and matter are thought to emerge."
— Bernard D. Beltman, Psychiatric Annals
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"For those with a highly empirical bent, a coincidence is happenstance, a simultaneous collision of two events that has no special significance and obeys the laws of probability. 'In reality, the most astonishingly incredible coincidence imaginable would be the complete absence of all coincidence,' says John Allen Paulos, professor of mathematics at Temple University in Philadelphia, and best-selling author of Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences. 'Believing in the significance of oddities is self-aggrandizing,' he adds. 'It says, "Look how important I am." People find it dispiriting to hear, "It just happened, and it doesn't mean anything."'"
— Jill Neimark, Psychology Today
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