Precognition. What is Precognition
Precognition
Precognition is the direct knowledge or perception of the future,
obtained through extrasensory means. Precognition is the most frequently
reported of all extrasensory perception (ESP) experiences, occurring
most often (60 percent to 70 percent) in dreams. It may also occur
spontaneously in waking visions, auditory hallucinations, flashing
thoughts entering the mind, and the sense of "knowing." Precognitive
knowledge also may be induced through trance, channeling, mediumship,
and divination.
Usually the majority of precognitive experiences happen within a
forty-eight hour period prior to the future event, most often it is
within twenty-four hours. In rare cases precognitive experiences occur
months or even years before the actual event takes place. Severe
emotional shock seems to be a major factor in precognition. By a ratio
of four-to-one, most concern unhappy events, such as death and dying,
illness, accidents, and natural disasters. Intimacy is also a major
factor, 80 to 85 percent of such experiences involve a spouse, family
member or friend with whom the individual has close emotional ties. The
remainder involves casual acquaintances and strangers, most of whom are
victims in major disasters such as airplane crashes or earthquakes.
The difference between precognition, premonition, and prophecy:
premonition generally involves knowledge of a future event while
premonition involves the sense or feeling that something is going to
happen; whereas all prophecy is precognition, but not all precognition
is prophecy.
The reliance upon precognition reaches back to ancient times, when
prophets and oracles were sought for their access to the future. The
Greeks considered the future immutable. Free will, however, can change
the perceived future, as seen in the many incidents of individuals
saving their lives and escaping disasters by changing their previously
formed plans based on precognitive information. Psychical researchers
estimate that one-third to one-half of all precognitive experiences may
provide useful information to avert disasters.
This apparent ability to alter the perceived future makes precognition
difficult to understand. If precognition is a glimpse of the true or
real future, then the effects are witnessed before the causes. Such
conditions do occur in quantum physics. The most popular theory holds
that precognition is a glimpse of a possible future that is based upon
present conditions and existing information, and which may be altered
depending upon acts of free will. That theory implies the future can
cause the past, a phenomenon called "backward causality" or
"retro-causality."
A different and controversial theory contends that the precognitive
experience itself unleashes a powerful psychokinetic (PK) energy, which
then brings the envisioned future to pass. Such self-fulfilling
prophecies were examined in the 1960s by the London psychiatrist J. A.
Barker, who contended in his book, Scared to Death, that people who died
in the manner and at the time predicted by fortune-tellers were
literally "scared to death" and contributed somehow to their own demise.
Barker studied more precognitions surrounding the coal slide disaster in
1966, at Aberfan, Wales, which killed 144 people. He established the
British Premonitions Bureau, which collected precognitive data in order
to avert disasters. Barker succeeded in finding a number of "human
seismographs" who tuned in regularly to disasters but were unable to
accurately pinpoint the times.
Despite the difficulty in understanding precognition, it is the easiest
form of extrasensory perception to test in the laboratory. J. W. Dunne,
a British aeronautics engineer, undertook the first systematic study of
precognition in the early twentieth century. In 1927, he published the
classic An Experiment with Time, which contained his findings and
theories. Dunne's study was based on his personal precognitive dreams,
which involved both trivial incidents in his own life and major news
events appearing in the press the day after the dream. When first
realizing that he was seeing the future in his dreams, Dunne worried
that he was "a freak." His worries soon eased when discovering that
precognitive dreams are common; he concluded, that many people have them
without realizing it, perhaps because the do not recall the details or
fail to properly interpret the dream symbols.
Dunne's Theory of Serial Time proposes that time exists in layers on
dimensions, each of which may be viewed in different perspectives from
different layers. The origin of all layers is Absolute Time, created by
God. Needless to say, the scientific community rejected Dunne's theory.
J. B. Rhine and Louisa Rhine began the next significant systematic
research of precognition in the 1930s at the Parapsychology Laboratory
at Duke University. J. B. Rhine's original goal was to prove telepathy,
but his experiment with ESP cards also revealed precognition and PK;
however when other perused psychical researchers Rhine's work,
precognition continued being an ongoing research project.
One peculiarity concerning precognition is that one rarely perceives
one's own death; perhaps one explanation is the trauma it too great for
the ego to accept. Some notable exceptions do exist: Abraham Lincoln
dreamed of his own death six weeks before his assassination. However,
his dream was not of being shot and dying, but of being an observer
after the fact. He saw a long procession of mourners entering the White
House. When he entered himself and passed the coffin, he was shocked to
find himself looking at his own body. American presidents John Garfield
and William McKinley experienced foreknowledge of their deaths.
