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You've probably had a day when you said to yourself, "If I
had known it was going to be this kind of day, I never would have gotten out of bed!"
You may have gone through times when you felt, "If I had known life was going to be
like this, I never would have been born!"
Those of us who accept ideas such as precognition
and reincarnation know the irony of such statements. Somewhere during the night our
sleeping selves did know what kind of day was coming. Somewhere in the heavens our
unmaterialized souls did know what life held in store.
Why then do we forget? Some have speculated that
it is exactly because the foreknowledge would discourage us from going through the
experience. If so, then why do we sometimes get brief breaks in the amnesia, allowing us
glimpses of the future? What is this game?
I'm pondering these paradoxes because I've just
read a book that has fascinated and shaken me more than most I've seen lately. The book
is, Your Nostradamas Factor: Accessing Your Innate Ability to See into The Future (Simon
& Schuster). The author, Ingo Swann, is a prominent psychic, learned and influential
in the field of parapsychology. He has participated in countless experiments, projects his
own creative wit helped make more interesting than the average statistics-gathering
routine. By inventing the term, "remote viewing," a techno-speak metaphor for
clairvoyance, he prompted a new line of research that has achieved one of the best track
records demonstrating the psychic abilities of the average person. In his newest book he
turns his talents to what he calls "future-seeing."
He presents the mental dynamics responsible for
future-seeing as well as for blocking future-seeing. He repeatedly emphasizes diagramming
one's ideas to foster the psychic process of visualizing. He gives many hints on how to
release our inner Nostradamus factor from the triple-walled prison of ignorance,
prejudice, and expectation. One of the propositions in his theory, refreshing to someone
who lives in a community where being psychic seems to pass for an education, is that it is
easier to correctly see the future for subjects about which you are knowledgeable than for
subjects about which you are totally ignorant. Knowledge creates a range of feasibilities
for the future, focusing psychic sensitivity on anticipating the unexpected.
To test his theory on eliciting the Nostradamus
factor, Mr. Swann conducted his own experiment, the "American Prophecy Project."
For somewhat over a year, he distributed a newsletter to a select mailing list in which he
published his predictions. He accurately predicted the U.S. economic downturn of 1990 and
Margaret Thatcher's resignation, both of which were contrary to general expectations at
the time he published them. In other areas where he was less knowledgeable, such as
concerning geological events (e.g., earthquakes), his predictions were less than stunning.
The book concludes with a solemnly guided tour of
the future. Swann challenges us to form our own predictions and to act accordingly. His
own predictions are quite sobering and yet different from what we might expect. Most of us
have been exposed to enough fuss about "end times" to become numb to the future.
Such numbness is exactly the opposite of what Swann intends. He wants us, in fact, to wake
up to our own sense of the future, to begin to anticipate it more consciously.
Swann proposes that future-seeing properly belongs
to us as a daily tool for "right living." It is not just the ability to see
around the corner but also the ability to anticipate the consequences of our actions. What
kind of future are you creating now? Can't you see it?
I wonder what it would be like to awaken in the
morning and see flash before me what my day will be like, and watch that prognosis change
as I shift to put my right foot down first instead of my left. Yes, every wiggle, every
thought, has its ripple effect. As chaos theory shows, the flap of a butterfly's wing can
lead to a hurricane thousands of miles away!
We can know all things, but can we handle all that
information? No wonder we play ostrich with our future-seeing ability. Sometimes, however,
our Nostradamus factor does try to get our attention, to prompt us to get our head out of
the sand. How then do we respond to these occasional wake up calls?
Take violence, for example, whether in the form of
guns, earthquakes or financial calamities. Violence is a wake up call that Swann
highlights as an ominous portent of things to come. Violence is a last resort reaction to
inertia. If you have ever been so frustrated with your inability (AKA unwillingness?) to
change a bad habit that you got angry with yourself, perhaps you can intuit how violence
is born. Violence signals us there's conflict about change.
There is a war brewing, Swann says, a war where
the future tries to save itself from the past. Today's cigarette smoker is experiencing a
precursor to this war. A private habit has become a public nuisance and the extermination
campaign attracts zealots. Smokers are the target of aggressive attempts to extinguish
their habit. If you feel righteous about society's right to clean air, think about how
righteous your children's generation may feel one day about their right to survive, even
if it means extinguishing those people whose private habits contribute to ecological or
economic malaise.
"If you don't like the future, change
it!" Such is our enlightened response to prophecy. Perhaps. Although our inner
Nostradamus can alert us to the future, Nostradamus alone can't help us change it.
Something else seems required. Swann describes a force for change that will release us
from the past. His techno-speak image for it is the "energyinformation
intelligence" of the universe. It is evolving us into the future. We can go
gracefully or kicking our feet, but we will go.
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