Sat Mar 23, 2024 11:33 pm by globalturbo
Confessions of a Precog
Wednesday, October 31st, 2012.
RealitySandwich
by Mark Heley
Although acceptance of psychic phenomena has become much wider during
the last twenty years in western society, some aspects of psychic
experience are still either completely ignored, or inhabit a liminal
zone at the margins of psychic study. Precognitive experience is one of
these. One of the significant aspects of precognition that distinguishes
it from directed psychic activity is that it is involuntary.
Precognition happens to the precog. Normally, the experience is
unsought and the recipient is passive. Experientially it feels like an
awareness shift towards incoming data and images that are coming from
‘elsewhere’.
For example, one of the more common forms of precog that I have
experienced fairly often is the ‘just around the corner’ type of event
such as ‘seeing’ a deer running onto the road around a bend that you are
about to drive around. In these cases, the images are clear and
unequivocal. I see the deer run onto the road in precog. I slow the car
down and then as I corner the bend, I see the deer again. Only this
time, the deer is just stepping onto the road because I have slowed
down; it sees the car and bucks and springs away. This interests me.
Where is that image coming from? I see the deer as it will be if I don’t
slow down, running into the middle of the road. Does that exist
somewhere? Then, I respond to the image, slow down and that imminent
reality changes. The deer springs away. In some senses the image I saw
in precog didn’t happen. In some senses, it changes what happens. And in
another sense, both the precognition and the actual reality are
inseparably embedded.
I wish that when I first started having precogs about twenty years
ago that I had someone I could have talked to about what was happening.
Much the same as other forms of psychic ‘awakening’, the awakening
precogs experiences many, or all, of the symptoms of a ‘spiritual
emergency’ in Dr. Stanislav Grof’s terminology. But whereas directed
psychics (those that experience their abilities under their rational
control and direction) have a much more clearly defined community and
even a profession, those who experience a strong sense of precognition
are much more likely to see the experience as invasive, confusing and
even disturbing. I certainly did. Try explaining to a girlfriend that
you are mad about something that she is going to do, but hasn’t even
thought about doing yet! It’s not easy. And yet, for the precog the
‘fact’ that the other person is going to do something, is
‘known’ to the precog. There’s no thinking, or speculation, involved in
precognition. You either know, or you don’t know. Sometimes the knowing
is accompanied by images, sometimes not. It can be confusing for the
‘precog’ and even more confusing for those around them. I am sometimes
woken instantaneously from deep sleep states by a precog. I know
something. I can’t do anything about that knowing, I didn’t ask for it,
it just happened. It can be awkward.
Once I was awoken from a deep sleep state into a total lucid
awareness that a person I only knew via the internet, who was on the
other side of the world, was planning to make a personal and
professional attack on a teacher of mine. I emailed the teacher right
away. Fortunately, the teacher was open and receptive enough to just
receive the information without judgment. Within a couple of hours, the
attack happened, but the forewarning meant it didn’t come as a surprise
and it was swiftly dealt with. I’ve learnt not to ask ‘what does it
mean?’, when I receive a precog. I just accept the incoming data and
imagery without analyzing or judging it. This is because it just doesn’t
help to do so, this is something that is happening to me, not that I am
causing to happen. This can be amply illustrated by the fact that
precogs contain information that I do not, and in many cases, could not
know. Analysis and judgement just tend to result in the precog being
dismissed, whereas the point of precognition seems usually to be to take
some sort of corrective, or anticipatory, action. This isn’t always the
case. Short-term immediate precogs like the deer on the road, usually
result in an immediate, even sometimes reflexive action, but more
general precogs that aren’t specific messages to an individual relating
to something happening immediately, or in the near future, often result
in a change of attitude or disposition, rather than an action.
In my experience, precognitive activity is pretty much exactly how
they are depicted by Philip K Dick in his masterful short story
‘Minority Report’. Events that are highly relevant in the short term to
an individual, warning of unseen or unsuspected dangers, are usually
very sharp, definite and image driven. Just as in the movie of the
story, the precog ‘awakens’ to the precognition. It can be startling,
powerful, and even painful. Sometimes it comes with an accompanying
adrenalin surge. On the other hand, events that are more long term and
don’t relate to a single individual are often more ambiguous, less
literal and even ‘mythic’ in their imagery. A recent precog I had was
the combination of two images. One was a politician joking with an
adviser about stealing the election. The other was a ‘mythic’ vision of a
state of stasis. I saw a series of images, rooms with dust settling on
them, traffic jams at standstill, people immobilized and even paralyzed
in a frozen moment of time. Am I seeing something that is literally
happening? No, but as I demonstrated in the example of the deer running
onto the road, this is not what is happening even in ‘ordinary’
short-term precogs. What links these two seemingly different types of
experience is the mode of perception. These images, emotions and
information are experienced by the perceiver as entering, even taking
over, the ordinary, directed mode of perception. This is something I’ve
come to terms with now, but early on, I really didn’t like this aspect
of precognition. It felt weird, even a little nauseating to have one’s
apparently sovereign perception hijacked in this way. After a number of
precogs turned out to be potentially life saving and also turned out to
be absolutely accurate, I changed my disposition toward them. Now, I
just pay attention. I don’t dismiss them, but I don’t encourage them
either. In my experience, they are incoming information, my attachment
to them in any way doesn’t seem to be useful, or productive, so I just
let them be; I pay them attention, definitely note them, even when they
seem to be ambiguous or confusing.
Of course another question that the precog has to ponder is why
doesn’t this happen all the time? Why doesn’t precognition protect me
from anything bad happening at all? Why didn’t I have a precog about
that bag being stolen, that trip and fall in the street, even the
traffic accident that causes the death of a friend? This is really quite
a profound question. My conclusion is that the ordinary state of
wakeful consciousness is actually a ‘clear screen’ that indicates, as
Eckhart Tolle might say, that whatever is happening to us is exactly
what should be happening to us for the purpose of evolving our
consciousness. It may not be fun, it may not be pleasant, but it is part
of the necessary life experience that we must pass through in order to
evolve. In fact, I would go further than that and say that precognition
is a form of temporal radar that may be constantly scanning the
possibility matrix of the ‘future’ and subtly adjusting and rearranging
the potential futures that we interact with at a threshold below the
usual state of consciousness. Then, on unusual occasions and when
required, precognition erupts from this quantum ocean of the possible
and invades our ordinary, directed states of consciousness.
This may seem a far-fetched and extreme rationalization of psy
phenomena, but precognition raises many interesting and significant
questions for theories of consciousness and, indeed, for the theories of
time in physics, which precognitive phenomena seem to blatantly
violate. Most of these questions are unanswered and precognition has
proven a notorious difficult field of study. Whereas directed ESP
phenomena can be relatively easily tested by double-blind, placebo
methods, most experiments testing and assessing genuine precognitive
ability would involve a lot of waiting around for something to happen.
One possibility is that precognition is merely a subset of directed
psychic phenomena. When I have been traveling with a friend who is a
professional psychic working for police forces in the UK doing things
like hunting for missing persons, leads in murder cases, and related
things, she would amuse us by nonchalantly announcing what her ‘psychic
GPS’ was telling her. A lot of these predictions were typical ‘around
the corner’ precog phenomena, like ‘be careful, there’s a cyclist around
the next bend.’ And there always was. And this was normal, everyday
experience for her. And unremarkable to us because of her nonchalance.
This seems credible, but it ignores one of the most intriguing
epistemological aspects of precognition; the associated feeling that
this isn’t coming from ‘your’ mind. The ‘otherness’ of a big
precognitive hit to me is palpable. It would be convenient to ignore
this aspect of precognition, because it would allow the idea that
psychic activity is itself a subset of conscious brain activity more
credibility. This in turn would allow these experiences to be more
easily viewed as congruent with most contemporary theories of mind that
view consciousness as essentially a biophysical process. Unfortunately
from the precog perspective, this just doesn’t feel right at all. It is
not as if the deer around the corner is an archetype, or a projection.
It’s an image of the exact deer, in detail. There’s nothing symbolic, or
mythic about it. It just can’t be argued away by suggesting a ‘resonant
feedback loop’ exists between your brain and an external reality.
There’s a picture of a deer in your mind and then 15 seconds later you a
viewing the same deer. Any coherent theory of precognition is going to
have to deal with this. Anyone who has actually experienced precognition
just isn’t going to buy it otherwise. That doesn’t seem to be much of a
problem for most researchers investigating the nature of mind. A
pervasive skeptical attitude to psychic phenomena exists, at least in
the west, in most academic circles. In most cases, skepticism itself
seems sufficient to deflect resources away from areas that are
troublesome and difficult to study. That omission may well turn out to
be the Achille’s Heel of modern neuroscience and consciousness research.
Liminal areas like precognition repeatedly turn out to be the awkward
exceptions that not only don’t prove the rule, but thoroughly undermine
it in the long term.
As an alternative, I suggest that any coherent theory of
consciousness has to deal with the fact that consciousness is
distributed throughout space and time in ways that confound the idea
that it has a biophysical origin in the brain. Perhaps, indeed,
consciousness is at its root a little more like precognition than the
rational skeptics would ever be comfortable with. That is to say,
consciousness is a localized field phenomenon that concentrates around
what we call the event horizon of the present moment. From this center,
it radiates in probabilistic quantum waves we call the ‘future’. And
this is what we see when we have a precognitive experience. It is
literally the ‘future’, but it the ‘future’ is no longer a place, or
destination, but a partially viewable probability matrix which we are
forever surfing into on the surfboard of the ‘now’.
This is a theory of mind that would horrify the 19th century
empiricists, but doesn’t seem so counter-intuitive in a post-quantum
world. After all, isn’t it more compelling to develop a theory of
consciousness that describes its actual observable qualities, rather
than ignores them? If instead of building a theory of consciousness that
was congruent with the dogmas of contemporary science, what if we were
to build one from the human experience of consciousness outwards and see
where the common ground lies? It may be that this ‘quantum theory of
consciousness’ is merely the next theoretical frontier in the slow
motion collapse of scientific materialism.
People who use, or develop, their psychic abilities are often
described as being ‘gifted’, or even ‘cursed’. I think this can be a
very misleading way of perceiving what is happening. It is often as if
the psychic or precog is thought of as having an ‘extra’, or ‘sixth’
sense of perception that others, the non-psychic, don’t have. Although
some psychics seem to encourage this sense of specialness, I think that
this is often more of a commercial dispensation than a philosophical
one. To me, in my experience, what is happening to me is clearly
something that is latent in all people. It is not as if the precog has
an extra set of eyes. It is just that we are open — whether we like or
not sometimes — to a different form of seeing. That what we ‘see’ is not
viewed as ‘real’ is just a matter of opinion from those who haven’t
experienced precognition about what is a matter of fact for us. To
understand precognition our theories of mind have to open as much as our
minds do, if we are to actually describe the reality of precognition in
a theory of consciousness that isn’t just cherry picking the facts. At
least we ‘precogs’ can joke about it. Whenever a skeptic says
precognition is just a projection, we’ll just say “I knew you were going
to say that.”
–More from Mark Heley HERE
+++
[Hat tip: RHitt]
www.zengardner.com
Like!
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Wednesday, October 31st, 2012. Filed under: Alternative Knowledge Amazing Universe Consciousness Esoterica Spirituality The Awakening
RealitySandwich
by Mark Heley
Although acceptance of psychic phenomena has become much wider during
the last twenty years in western society, some aspects of psychic
experience are still either completely ignored, or inhabit a liminal
zone at the margins of psychic study. Precognitive experience is one of
these. One of the significant aspects of precognition that distinguishes
it from directed psychic activity is that it is involuntary.
Precognition happens to the precog. Normally, the experience is
unsought and the recipient is passive. Experientially it feels like an
awareness shift towards incoming data and images that are coming from
‘elsewhere’.
For example, one of the more common forms of precog that I have
experienced fairly often is the ‘just around the corner’ type of event
such as ‘seeing’ a deer running onto the road around a bend that you are
about to drive around. In these cases, the images are clear and
unequivocal. I see the deer run onto the road in precog. I slow the car
down and then as I corner the bend, I see the deer again. Only this
time, the deer is just stepping onto the road because I have slowed
down; it sees the car and bucks and springs away. This interests me.
Where is that image coming from? I see the deer as it will be if I don’t
slow down, running into the middle of the road. Does that exist
somewhere? Then, I respond to the image, slow down and that imminent
reality changes. The deer springs away. In some senses the image I saw
in precog didn’t happen. In some senses, it changes what happens. And in
another sense, both the precognition and the actual reality are
inseparably embedded.
I wish that when I first started having precogs about twenty years
ago that I had someone I could have talked to about what was happening.
Much the same as other forms of psychic ‘awakening’, the awakening
precogs experiences many, or all, of the symptoms of a ‘spiritual
emergency’ in Dr. Stanislav Grof’s terminology. But whereas directed
psychics (those that experience their abilities under their rational
control and direction) have a much more clearly defined community and
even a profession, those who experience a strong sense of precognition
are much more likely to see the experience as invasive, confusing and
even disturbing. I certainly did. Try explaining to a girlfriend that
you are mad about something that she is going to do, but hasn’t even
thought about doing yet! It’s not easy. And yet, for the precog the
‘fact’ that the other person is going to do something, is
‘known’ to the precog. There’s no thinking, or speculation, involved in
precognition. You either know, or you don’t know. Sometimes the knowing
is accompanied by images, sometimes not. It can be confusing for the
‘precog’ and even more confusing for those around them. I am sometimes
woken instantaneously from deep sleep states by a precog. I know
something. I can’t do anything about that knowing, I didn’t ask for it,
it just happened. It can be awkward.
Once I was awoken from a deep sleep state into a total lucid
awareness that a person I only knew via the internet, who was on the
other side of the world, was planning to make a personal and
professional attack on a teacher of mine. I emailed the teacher right
away. Fortunately, the teacher was open and receptive enough to just
receive the information without judgment. Within a couple of hours, the
attack happened, but the forewarning meant it didn’t come as a surprise
and it was swiftly dealt with. I’ve learnt not to ask ‘what does it
mean?’, when I receive a precog. I just accept the incoming data and
imagery without analyzing or judging it. This is because it just doesn’t
help to do so, this is something that is happening to me, not that I am
causing to happen. This can be amply illustrated by the fact that
precogs contain information that I do not, and in many cases, could not
know. Analysis and judgement just tend to result in the precog being
dismissed, whereas the point of precognition seems usually to be to take
some sort of corrective, or anticipatory, action. This isn’t always the
case. Short-term immediate precogs like the deer on the road, usually
result in an immediate, even sometimes reflexive action, but more
general precogs that aren’t specific messages to an individual relating
to something happening immediately, or in the near future, often result
in a change of attitude or disposition, rather than an action.
In my experience, precognitive activity is pretty much exactly how
they are depicted by Philip K Dick in his masterful short story
‘Minority Report’. Events that are highly relevant in the short term to
an individual, warning of unseen or unsuspected dangers, are usually
very sharp, definite and image driven. Just as in the movie of the
story, the precog ‘awakens’ to the precognition. It can be startling,
powerful, and even painful. Sometimes it comes with an accompanying
adrenalin surge. On the other hand, events that are more long term and
don’t relate to a single individual are often more ambiguous, less
literal and even ‘mythic’ in their imagery. A recent precog I had was
the combination of two images. One was a politician joking with an
adviser about stealing the election. The other was a ‘mythic’ vision of a
state of stasis. I saw a series of images, rooms with dust settling on
them, traffic jams at standstill, people immobilized and even paralyzed
in a frozen moment of time. Am I seeing something that is literally
happening? No, but as I demonstrated in the example of the deer running
onto the road, this is not what is happening even in ‘ordinary’
short-term precogs. What links these two seemingly different types of
experience is the mode of perception. These images, emotions and
information are experienced by the perceiver as entering, even taking
over, the ordinary, directed mode of perception. This is something I’ve
come to terms with now, but early on, I really didn’t like this aspect
of precognition. It felt weird, even a little nauseating to have one’s
apparently sovereign perception hijacked in this way. After a number of
precogs turned out to be potentially life saving and also turned out to
be absolutely accurate, I changed my disposition toward them. Now, I
just pay attention. I don’t dismiss them, but I don’t encourage them
either. In my experience, they are incoming information, my attachment
to them in any way doesn’t seem to be useful, or productive, so I just
let them be; I pay them attention, definitely note them, even when they
seem to be ambiguous or confusing.
Of course another question that the precog has to ponder is why
doesn’t this happen all the time? Why doesn’t precognition protect me
from anything bad happening at all? Why didn’t I have a precog about
that bag being stolen, that trip and fall in the street, even the
traffic accident that causes the death of a friend? This is really quite
a profound question. My conclusion is that the ordinary state of
wakeful consciousness is actually a ‘clear screen’ that indicates, as
Eckhart Tolle might say, that whatever is happening to us is exactly
what should be happening to us for the purpose of evolving our
consciousness. It may not be fun, it may not be pleasant, but it is part
of the necessary life experience that we must pass through in order to
evolve. In fact, I would go further than that and say that precognition
is a form of temporal radar that may be constantly scanning the
possibility matrix of the ‘future’ and subtly adjusting and rearranging
the potential futures that we interact with at a threshold below the
usual state of consciousness. Then, on unusual occasions and when
required, precognition erupts from this quantum ocean of the possible
and invades our ordinary, directed states of consciousness.
This may seem a far-fetched and extreme rationalization of psy
phenomena, but precognition raises many interesting and significant
questions for theories of consciousness and, indeed, for the theories of
time in physics, which precognitive phenomena seem to blatantly
violate. Most of these questions are unanswered and precognition has
proven a notorious difficult field of study. Whereas directed ESP
phenomena can be relatively easily tested by double-blind, placebo
methods, most experiments testing and assessing genuine precognitive
ability would involve a lot of waiting around for something to happen.
One possibility is that precognition is merely a subset of directed
psychic phenomena. When I have been traveling with a friend who is a
professional psychic working for police forces in the UK doing things
like hunting for missing persons, leads in murder cases, and related
things, she would amuse us by nonchalantly announcing what her ‘psychic
GPS’ was telling her. A lot of these predictions were typical ‘around
the corner’ precog phenomena, like ‘be careful, there’s a cyclist around
the next bend.’ And there always was. And this was normal, everyday
experience for her. And unremarkable to us because of her nonchalance.
This seems credible, but it ignores one of the most intriguing
epistemological aspects of precognition; the associated feeling that
this isn’t coming from ‘your’ mind. The ‘otherness’ of a big
precognitive hit to me is palpable. It would be convenient to ignore
this aspect of precognition, because it would allow the idea that
psychic activity is itself a subset of conscious brain activity more
credibility. This in turn would allow these experiences to be more
easily viewed as congruent with most contemporary theories of mind that
view consciousness as essentially a biophysical process. Unfortunately
from the precog perspective, this just doesn’t feel right at all. It is
not as if the deer around the corner is an archetype, or a projection.
It’s an image of the exact deer, in detail. There’s nothing symbolic, or
mythic about it. It just can’t be argued away by suggesting a ‘resonant
feedback loop’ exists between your brain and an external reality.
There’s a picture of a deer in your mind and then 15 seconds later you a
viewing the same deer. Any coherent theory of precognition is going to
have to deal with this. Anyone who has actually experienced precognition
just isn’t going to buy it otherwise. That doesn’t seem to be much of a
problem for most researchers investigating the nature of mind. A
pervasive skeptical attitude to psychic phenomena exists, at least in
the west, in most academic circles. In most cases, skepticism itself
seems sufficient to deflect resources away from areas that are
troublesome and difficult to study. That omission may well turn out to
be the Achille’s Heel of modern neuroscience and consciousness research.
Liminal areas like precognition repeatedly turn out to be the awkward
exceptions that not only don’t prove the rule, but thoroughly undermine
it in the long term.
As an alternative, I suggest that any coherent theory of
consciousness has to deal with the fact that consciousness is
distributed throughout space and time in ways that confound the idea
that it has a biophysical origin in the brain. Perhaps, indeed,
consciousness is at its root a little more like precognition than the
rational skeptics would ever be comfortable with. That is to say,
consciousness is a localized field phenomenon that concentrates around
what we call the event horizon of the present moment. From this center,
it radiates in probabilistic quantum waves we call the ‘future’. And
this is what we see when we have a precognitive experience. It is
literally the ‘future’, but it the ‘future’ is no longer a place, or
destination, but a partially viewable probability matrix which we are
forever surfing into on the surfboard of the ‘now’.
This is a theory of mind that would horrify the 19th century
empiricists, but doesn’t seem so counter-intuitive in a post-quantum
world. After all, isn’t it more compelling to develop a theory of
consciousness that describes its actual observable qualities, rather
than ignores them? If instead of building a theory of consciousness that
was congruent with the dogmas of contemporary science, what if we were
to build one from the human experience of consciousness outwards and see
where the common ground lies? It may be that this ‘quantum theory of
consciousness’ is merely the next theoretical frontier in the slow
motion collapse of scientific materialism.
People who use, or develop, their psychic abilities are often
described as being ‘gifted’, or even ‘cursed’. I think this can be a
very misleading way of perceiving what is happening. It is often as if
the psychic or precog is thought of as having an ‘extra’, or ‘sixth’
sense of perception that others, the non-psychic, don’t have. Although
some psychics seem to encourage this sense of specialness, I think that
this is often more of a commercial dispensation than a philosophical
one. To me, in my experience, what is happening to me is clearly
something that is latent in all people. It is not as if the precog has
an extra set of eyes. It is just that we are open — whether we like or
not sometimes — to a different form of seeing. That what we ‘see’ is not
viewed as ‘real’ is just a matter of opinion from those who haven’t
experienced precognition about what is a matter of fact for us. To
understand precognition our theories of mind have to open as much as our
minds do, if we are to actually describe the reality of precognition in
a theory of consciousness that isn’t just cherry picking the facts. At
least we ‘precogs’ can joke about it. Whenever a skeptic says
precognition is just a projection, we’ll just say “I knew you were going
to say that.”
–More from Mark Heley HERE
+++
[Hat tip: RHitt]
www.zengardner.com
Wednesday, October 31st, 2012.
RealitySandwich
by Mark Heley
Although acceptance of psychic phenomena has become much wider during
the last twenty years in western society, some aspects of psychic
experience are still either completely ignored, or inhabit a liminal
zone at the margins of psychic study. Precognitive experience is one of
these. One of the significant aspects of precognition that distinguishes
it from directed psychic activity is that it is involuntary.
Precognition happens to the precog. Normally, the experience is
unsought and the recipient is passive. Experientially it feels like an
awareness shift towards incoming data and images that are coming from
‘elsewhere’.
For example, one of the more common forms of precog that I have
experienced fairly often is the ‘just around the corner’ type of event
such as ‘seeing’ a deer running onto the road around a bend that you are
about to drive around. In these cases, the images are clear and
unequivocal. I see the deer run onto the road in precog. I slow the car
down and then as I corner the bend, I see the deer again. Only this
time, the deer is just stepping onto the road because I have slowed
down; it sees the car and bucks and springs away. This interests me.
Where is that image coming from? I see the deer as it will be if I don’t
slow down, running into the middle of the road. Does that exist
somewhere? Then, I respond to the image, slow down and that imminent
reality changes. The deer springs away. In some senses the image I saw
in precog didn’t happen. In some senses, it changes what happens. And in
another sense, both the precognition and the actual reality are
inseparably embedded.
I wish that when I first started having precogs about twenty years
ago that I had someone I could have talked to about what was happening.
Much the same as other forms of psychic ‘awakening’, the awakening
precogs experiences many, or all, of the symptoms of a ‘spiritual
emergency’ in Dr. Stanislav Grof’s terminology. But whereas directed
psychics (those that experience their abilities under their rational
control and direction) have a much more clearly defined community and
even a profession, those who experience a strong sense of precognition
are much more likely to see the experience as invasive, confusing and
even disturbing. I certainly did. Try explaining to a girlfriend that
you are mad about something that she is going to do, but hasn’t even
thought about doing yet! It’s not easy. And yet, for the precog the
‘fact’ that the other person is going to do something, is
‘known’ to the precog. There’s no thinking, or speculation, involved in
precognition. You either know, or you don’t know. Sometimes the knowing
is accompanied by images, sometimes not. It can be confusing for the
‘precog’ and even more confusing for those around them. I am sometimes
woken instantaneously from deep sleep states by a precog. I know
something. I can’t do anything about that knowing, I didn’t ask for it,
it just happened. It can be awkward.
Once I was awoken from a deep sleep state into a total lucid
awareness that a person I only knew via the internet, who was on the
other side of the world, was planning to make a personal and
professional attack on a teacher of mine. I emailed the teacher right
away. Fortunately, the teacher was open and receptive enough to just
receive the information without judgment. Within a couple of hours, the
attack happened, but the forewarning meant it didn’t come as a surprise
and it was swiftly dealt with. I’ve learnt not to ask ‘what does it
mean?’, when I receive a precog. I just accept the incoming data and
imagery without analyzing or judging it. This is because it just doesn’t
help to do so, this is something that is happening to me, not that I am
causing to happen. This can be amply illustrated by the fact that
precogs contain information that I do not, and in many cases, could not
know. Analysis and judgement just tend to result in the precog being
dismissed, whereas the point of precognition seems usually to be to take
some sort of corrective, or anticipatory, action. This isn’t always the
case. Short-term immediate precogs like the deer on the road, usually
result in an immediate, even sometimes reflexive action, but more
general precogs that aren’t specific messages to an individual relating
to something happening immediately, or in the near future, often result
in a change of attitude or disposition, rather than an action.
In my experience, precognitive activity is pretty much exactly how
they are depicted by Philip K Dick in his masterful short story
‘Minority Report’. Events that are highly relevant in the short term to
an individual, warning of unseen or unsuspected dangers, are usually
very sharp, definite and image driven. Just as in the movie of the
story, the precog ‘awakens’ to the precognition. It can be startling,
powerful, and even painful. Sometimes it comes with an accompanying
adrenalin surge. On the other hand, events that are more long term and
don’t relate to a single individual are often more ambiguous, less
literal and even ‘mythic’ in their imagery. A recent precog I had was
the combination of two images. One was a politician joking with an
adviser about stealing the election. The other was a ‘mythic’ vision of a
state of stasis. I saw a series of images, rooms with dust settling on
them, traffic jams at standstill, people immobilized and even paralyzed
in a frozen moment of time. Am I seeing something that is literally
happening? No, but as I demonstrated in the example of the deer running
onto the road, this is not what is happening even in ‘ordinary’
short-term precogs. What links these two seemingly different types of
experience is the mode of perception. These images, emotions and
information are experienced by the perceiver as entering, even taking
over, the ordinary, directed mode of perception. This is something I’ve
come to terms with now, but early on, I really didn’t like this aspect
of precognition. It felt weird, even a little nauseating to have one’s
apparently sovereign perception hijacked in this way. After a number of
precogs turned out to be potentially life saving and also turned out to
be absolutely accurate, I changed my disposition toward them. Now, I
just pay attention. I don’t dismiss them, but I don’t encourage them
either. In my experience, they are incoming information, my attachment
to them in any way doesn’t seem to be useful, or productive, so I just
let them be; I pay them attention, definitely note them, even when they
seem to be ambiguous or confusing.
Of course another question that the precog has to ponder is why
doesn’t this happen all the time? Why doesn’t precognition protect me
from anything bad happening at all? Why didn’t I have a precog about
that bag being stolen, that trip and fall in the street, even the
traffic accident that causes the death of a friend? This is really quite
a profound question. My conclusion is that the ordinary state of
wakeful consciousness is actually a ‘clear screen’ that indicates, as
Eckhart Tolle might say, that whatever is happening to us is exactly
what should be happening to us for the purpose of evolving our
consciousness. It may not be fun, it may not be pleasant, but it is part
of the necessary life experience that we must pass through in order to
evolve. In fact, I would go further than that and say that precognition
is a form of temporal radar that may be constantly scanning the
possibility matrix of the ‘future’ and subtly adjusting and rearranging
the potential futures that we interact with at a threshold below the
usual state of consciousness. Then, on unusual occasions and when
required, precognition erupts from this quantum ocean of the possible
and invades our ordinary, directed states of consciousness.
This may seem a far-fetched and extreme rationalization of psy
phenomena, but precognition raises many interesting and significant
questions for theories of consciousness and, indeed, for the theories of
time in physics, which precognitive phenomena seem to blatantly
violate. Most of these questions are unanswered and precognition has
proven a notorious difficult field of study. Whereas directed ESP
phenomena can be relatively easily tested by double-blind, placebo
methods, most experiments testing and assessing genuine precognitive
ability would involve a lot of waiting around for something to happen.
One possibility is that precognition is merely a subset of directed
psychic phenomena. When I have been traveling with a friend who is a
professional psychic working for police forces in the UK doing things
like hunting for missing persons, leads in murder cases, and related
things, she would amuse us by nonchalantly announcing what her ‘psychic
GPS’ was telling her. A lot of these predictions were typical ‘around
the corner’ precog phenomena, like ‘be careful, there’s a cyclist around
the next bend.’ And there always was. And this was normal, everyday
experience for her. And unremarkable to us because of her nonchalance.
This seems credible, but it ignores one of the most intriguing
epistemological aspects of precognition; the associated feeling that
this isn’t coming from ‘your’ mind. The ‘otherness’ of a big
precognitive hit to me is palpable. It would be convenient to ignore
this aspect of precognition, because it would allow the idea that
psychic activity is itself a subset of conscious brain activity more
credibility. This in turn would allow these experiences to be more
easily viewed as congruent with most contemporary theories of mind that
view consciousness as essentially a biophysical process. Unfortunately
from the precog perspective, this just doesn’t feel right at all. It is
not as if the deer around the corner is an archetype, or a projection.
It’s an image of the exact deer, in detail. There’s nothing symbolic, or
mythic about it. It just can’t be argued away by suggesting a ‘resonant
feedback loop’ exists between your brain and an external reality.
There’s a picture of a deer in your mind and then 15 seconds later you a
viewing the same deer. Any coherent theory of precognition is going to
have to deal with this. Anyone who has actually experienced precognition
just isn’t going to buy it otherwise. That doesn’t seem to be much of a
problem for most researchers investigating the nature of mind. A
pervasive skeptical attitude to psychic phenomena exists, at least in
the west, in most academic circles. In most cases, skepticism itself
seems sufficient to deflect resources away from areas that are
troublesome and difficult to study. That omission may well turn out to
be the Achille’s Heel of modern neuroscience and consciousness research.
Liminal areas like precognition repeatedly turn out to be the awkward
exceptions that not only don’t prove the rule, but thoroughly undermine
it in the long term.
As an alternative, I suggest that any coherent theory of
consciousness has to deal with the fact that consciousness is
distributed throughout space and time in ways that confound the idea
that it has a biophysical origin in the brain. Perhaps, indeed,
consciousness is at its root a little more like precognition than the
rational skeptics would ever be comfortable with. That is to say,
consciousness is a localized field phenomenon that concentrates around
what we call the event horizon of the present moment. From this center,
it radiates in probabilistic quantum waves we call the ‘future’. And
this is what we see when we have a precognitive experience. It is
literally the ‘future’, but it the ‘future’ is no longer a place, or
destination, but a partially viewable probability matrix which we are
forever surfing into on the surfboard of the ‘now’.
This is a theory of mind that would horrify the 19th century
empiricists, but doesn’t seem so counter-intuitive in a post-quantum
world. After all, isn’t it more compelling to develop a theory of
consciousness that describes its actual observable qualities, rather
than ignores them? If instead of building a theory of consciousness that
was congruent with the dogmas of contemporary science, what if we were
to build one from the human experience of consciousness outwards and see
where the common ground lies? It may be that this ‘quantum theory of
consciousness’ is merely the next theoretical frontier in the slow
motion collapse of scientific materialism.
People who use, or develop, their psychic abilities are often
described as being ‘gifted’, or even ‘cursed’. I think this can be a
very misleading way of perceiving what is happening. It is often as if
the psychic or precog is thought of as having an ‘extra’, or ‘sixth’
sense of perception that others, the non-psychic, don’t have. Although
some psychics seem to encourage this sense of specialness, I think that
this is often more of a commercial dispensation than a philosophical
one. To me, in my experience, what is happening to me is clearly
something that is latent in all people. It is not as if the precog has
an extra set of eyes. It is just that we are open — whether we like or
not sometimes — to a different form of seeing. That what we ‘see’ is not
viewed as ‘real’ is just a matter of opinion from those who haven’t
experienced precognition about what is a matter of fact for us. To
understand precognition our theories of mind have to open as much as our
minds do, if we are to actually describe the reality of precognition in
a theory of consciousness that isn’t just cherry picking the facts. At
least we ‘precogs’ can joke about it. Whenever a skeptic says
precognition is just a projection, we’ll just say “I knew you were going
to say that.”
–More from Mark Heley HERE
+++
[Hat tip: RHitt]
www.zengardner.com
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Wednesday, October 31st, 2012. Filed under: Alternative Knowledge Amazing Universe Consciousness Esoterica Spirituality The Awakening
RealitySandwich
by Mark Heley
Although acceptance of psychic phenomena has become much wider during
the last twenty years in western society, some aspects of psychic
experience are still either completely ignored, or inhabit a liminal
zone at the margins of psychic study. Precognitive experience is one of
these. One of the significant aspects of precognition that distinguishes
it from directed psychic activity is that it is involuntary.
Precognition happens to the precog. Normally, the experience is
unsought and the recipient is passive. Experientially it feels like an
awareness shift towards incoming data and images that are coming from
‘elsewhere’.
For example, one of the more common forms of precog that I have
experienced fairly often is the ‘just around the corner’ type of event
such as ‘seeing’ a deer running onto the road around a bend that you are
about to drive around. In these cases, the images are clear and
unequivocal. I see the deer run onto the road in precog. I slow the car
down and then as I corner the bend, I see the deer again. Only this
time, the deer is just stepping onto the road because I have slowed
down; it sees the car and bucks and springs away. This interests me.
Where is that image coming from? I see the deer as it will be if I don’t
slow down, running into the middle of the road. Does that exist
somewhere? Then, I respond to the image, slow down and that imminent
reality changes. The deer springs away. In some senses the image I saw
in precog didn’t happen. In some senses, it changes what happens. And in
another sense, both the precognition and the actual reality are
inseparably embedded.
I wish that when I first started having precogs about twenty years
ago that I had someone I could have talked to about what was happening.
Much the same as other forms of psychic ‘awakening’, the awakening
precogs experiences many, or all, of the symptoms of a ‘spiritual
emergency’ in Dr. Stanislav Grof’s terminology. But whereas directed
psychics (those that experience their abilities under their rational
control and direction) have a much more clearly defined community and
even a profession, those who experience a strong sense of precognition
are much more likely to see the experience as invasive, confusing and
even disturbing. I certainly did. Try explaining to a girlfriend that
you are mad about something that she is going to do, but hasn’t even
thought about doing yet! It’s not easy. And yet, for the precog the
‘fact’ that the other person is going to do something, is
‘known’ to the precog. There’s no thinking, or speculation, involved in
precognition. You either know, or you don’t know. Sometimes the knowing
is accompanied by images, sometimes not. It can be confusing for the
‘precog’ and even more confusing for those around them. I am sometimes
woken instantaneously from deep sleep states by a precog. I know
something. I can’t do anything about that knowing, I didn’t ask for it,
it just happened. It can be awkward.
Once I was awoken from a deep sleep state into a total lucid
awareness that a person I only knew via the internet, who was on the
other side of the world, was planning to make a personal and
professional attack on a teacher of mine. I emailed the teacher right
away. Fortunately, the teacher was open and receptive enough to just
receive the information without judgment. Within a couple of hours, the
attack happened, but the forewarning meant it didn’t come as a surprise
and it was swiftly dealt with. I’ve learnt not to ask ‘what does it
mean?’, when I receive a precog. I just accept the incoming data and
imagery without analyzing or judging it. This is because it just doesn’t
help to do so, this is something that is happening to me, not that I am
causing to happen. This can be amply illustrated by the fact that
precogs contain information that I do not, and in many cases, could not
know. Analysis and judgement just tend to result in the precog being
dismissed, whereas the point of precognition seems usually to be to take
some sort of corrective, or anticipatory, action. This isn’t always the
case. Short-term immediate precogs like the deer on the road, usually
result in an immediate, even sometimes reflexive action, but more
general precogs that aren’t specific messages to an individual relating
to something happening immediately, or in the near future, often result
in a change of attitude or disposition, rather than an action.
In my experience, precognitive activity is pretty much exactly how
they are depicted by Philip K Dick in his masterful short story
‘Minority Report’. Events that are highly relevant in the short term to
an individual, warning of unseen or unsuspected dangers, are usually
very sharp, definite and image driven. Just as in the movie of the
story, the precog ‘awakens’ to the precognition. It can be startling,
powerful, and even painful. Sometimes it comes with an accompanying
adrenalin surge. On the other hand, events that are more long term and
don’t relate to a single individual are often more ambiguous, less
literal and even ‘mythic’ in their imagery. A recent precog I had was
the combination of two images. One was a politician joking with an
adviser about stealing the election. The other was a ‘mythic’ vision of a
state of stasis. I saw a series of images, rooms with dust settling on
them, traffic jams at standstill, people immobilized and even paralyzed
in a frozen moment of time. Am I seeing something that is literally
happening? No, but as I demonstrated in the example of the deer running
onto the road, this is not what is happening even in ‘ordinary’
short-term precogs. What links these two seemingly different types of
experience is the mode of perception. These images, emotions and
information are experienced by the perceiver as entering, even taking
over, the ordinary, directed mode of perception. This is something I’ve
come to terms with now, but early on, I really didn’t like this aspect
of precognition. It felt weird, even a little nauseating to have one’s
apparently sovereign perception hijacked in this way. After a number of
precogs turned out to be potentially life saving and also turned out to
be absolutely accurate, I changed my disposition toward them. Now, I
just pay attention. I don’t dismiss them, but I don’t encourage them
either. In my experience, they are incoming information, my attachment
to them in any way doesn’t seem to be useful, or productive, so I just
let them be; I pay them attention, definitely note them, even when they
seem to be ambiguous or confusing.
Of course another question that the precog has to ponder is why
doesn’t this happen all the time? Why doesn’t precognition protect me
from anything bad happening at all? Why didn’t I have a precog about
that bag being stolen, that trip and fall in the street, even the
traffic accident that causes the death of a friend? This is really quite
a profound question. My conclusion is that the ordinary state of
wakeful consciousness is actually a ‘clear screen’ that indicates, as
Eckhart Tolle might say, that whatever is happening to us is exactly
what should be happening to us for the purpose of evolving our
consciousness. It may not be fun, it may not be pleasant, but it is part
of the necessary life experience that we must pass through in order to
evolve. In fact, I would go further than that and say that precognition
is a form of temporal radar that may be constantly scanning the
possibility matrix of the ‘future’ and subtly adjusting and rearranging
the potential futures that we interact with at a threshold below the
usual state of consciousness. Then, on unusual occasions and when
required, precognition erupts from this quantum ocean of the possible
and invades our ordinary, directed states of consciousness.
This may seem a far-fetched and extreme rationalization of psy
phenomena, but precognition raises many interesting and significant
questions for theories of consciousness and, indeed, for the theories of
time in physics, which precognitive phenomena seem to blatantly
violate. Most of these questions are unanswered and precognition has
proven a notorious difficult field of study. Whereas directed ESP
phenomena can be relatively easily tested by double-blind, placebo
methods, most experiments testing and assessing genuine precognitive
ability would involve a lot of waiting around for something to happen.
One possibility is that precognition is merely a subset of directed
psychic phenomena. When I have been traveling with a friend who is a
professional psychic working for police forces in the UK doing things
like hunting for missing persons, leads in murder cases, and related
things, she would amuse us by nonchalantly announcing what her ‘psychic
GPS’ was telling her. A lot of these predictions were typical ‘around
the corner’ precog phenomena, like ‘be careful, there’s a cyclist around
the next bend.’ And there always was. And this was normal, everyday
experience for her. And unremarkable to us because of her nonchalance.
This seems credible, but it ignores one of the most intriguing
epistemological aspects of precognition; the associated feeling that
this isn’t coming from ‘your’ mind. The ‘otherness’ of a big
precognitive hit to me is palpable. It would be convenient to ignore
this aspect of precognition, because it would allow the idea that
psychic activity is itself a subset of conscious brain activity more
credibility. This in turn would allow these experiences to be more
easily viewed as congruent with most contemporary theories of mind that
view consciousness as essentially a biophysical process. Unfortunately
from the precog perspective, this just doesn’t feel right at all. It is
not as if the deer around the corner is an archetype, or a projection.
It’s an image of the exact deer, in detail. There’s nothing symbolic, or
mythic about it. It just can’t be argued away by suggesting a ‘resonant
feedback loop’ exists between your brain and an external reality.
There’s a picture of a deer in your mind and then 15 seconds later you a
viewing the same deer. Any coherent theory of precognition is going to
have to deal with this. Anyone who has actually experienced precognition
just isn’t going to buy it otherwise. That doesn’t seem to be much of a
problem for most researchers investigating the nature of mind. A
pervasive skeptical attitude to psychic phenomena exists, at least in
the west, in most academic circles. In most cases, skepticism itself
seems sufficient to deflect resources away from areas that are
troublesome and difficult to study. That omission may well turn out to
be the Achille’s Heel of modern neuroscience and consciousness research.
Liminal areas like precognition repeatedly turn out to be the awkward
exceptions that not only don’t prove the rule, but thoroughly undermine
it in the long term.
As an alternative, I suggest that any coherent theory of
consciousness has to deal with the fact that consciousness is
distributed throughout space and time in ways that confound the idea
that it has a biophysical origin in the brain. Perhaps, indeed,
consciousness is at its root a little more like precognition than the
rational skeptics would ever be comfortable with. That is to say,
consciousness is a localized field phenomenon that concentrates around
what we call the event horizon of the present moment. From this center,
it radiates in probabilistic quantum waves we call the ‘future’. And
this is what we see when we have a precognitive experience. It is
literally the ‘future’, but it the ‘future’ is no longer a place, or
destination, but a partially viewable probability matrix which we are
forever surfing into on the surfboard of the ‘now’.
This is a theory of mind that would horrify the 19th century
empiricists, but doesn’t seem so counter-intuitive in a post-quantum
world. After all, isn’t it more compelling to develop a theory of
consciousness that describes its actual observable qualities, rather
than ignores them? If instead of building a theory of consciousness that
was congruent with the dogmas of contemporary science, what if we were
to build one from the human experience of consciousness outwards and see
where the common ground lies? It may be that this ‘quantum theory of
consciousness’ is merely the next theoretical frontier in the slow
motion collapse of scientific materialism.
People who use, or develop, their psychic abilities are often
described as being ‘gifted’, or even ‘cursed’. I think this can be a
very misleading way of perceiving what is happening. It is often as if
the psychic or precog is thought of as having an ‘extra’, or ‘sixth’
sense of perception that others, the non-psychic, don’t have. Although
some psychics seem to encourage this sense of specialness, I think that
this is often more of a commercial dispensation than a philosophical
one. To me, in my experience, what is happening to me is clearly
something that is latent in all people. It is not as if the precog has
an extra set of eyes. It is just that we are open — whether we like or
not sometimes — to a different form of seeing. That what we ‘see’ is not
viewed as ‘real’ is just a matter of opinion from those who haven’t
experienced precognition about what is a matter of fact for us. To
understand precognition our theories of mind have to open as much as our
minds do, if we are to actually describe the reality of precognition in
a theory of consciousness that isn’t just cherry picking the facts. At
least we ‘precogs’ can joke about it. Whenever a skeptic says
precognition is just a projection, we’ll just say “I knew you were going
to say that.”
–More from Mark Heley HERE
+++
[Hat tip: RHitt]
www.zengardner.com
