When a professional psychic tunes in on future events in your life – or when you experience a precognition about something in your future – is that future set in stone?
Throughout history, there have been numerous instances of people who experienced precognitions about their own deaths and avoided the circumstances and situations they’d glimpsed and lived to talk about them. Take any manmade or natural disaster – and there have been an abundance of both since the twenty-first century started – and you’ll find these kinds of stories. Some are documented and many are anecdotal, but they suggest that the future isn’t fixed and can be changed.
“For those pondering the puzzle of precognition, the Pribram-Bohn holographic mind theory seems to offer the greatest hope yet for progress toward the sought-for solution,” writes David Loye in The Sphinx and the Rainbow.
He contends that the sticky problem of how information can be transmitted psychically is eliminated with the holographic theory. In a hologram, each part contains the information of the whole, so “…if we are each parts of a larger whole…if our minds and bodies are, in effect, holograms within the larger hologram of the universe, then there is no transmission problem, because the information is already within us!”
Loye believes there are many different holograms drifting around within the primal waters of what Bohm calls the implicate or enfolded order. When we experience a precognition or a psychic tunes in on a future event in our lives and we then act to change the outcome, what we’ve actually done is moved from one hologram to another.
This idea is similar to the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics, which says that we live within a web of infinite timelines. If an action you take has more than one possible outcome, then when you act or choose not to act, the universe splits off. The 1998 movie, Sliding Doors, plays with this idea. Gwyneth Paltrow is a young woman in London whose love life and career – and everything else – depends on whether or not she catches a train. We see the ramifications of both possibilities.
Frequency, a 2000 movie with Dennis Quaid, also plays with the Many Worlds idea. An anomalous radio signal links a father and son across thirty years and enables the son to save his father’s life. This interference creates a new timeline with unforeseen consequences.
So if a professional psychic sees you on a road trip where you’re stranded on a dark road in the pouring rain because of a flat tire or with steam pouring out from under the hood of your car, you can change that outcome. You take your car to a mechanic and have it checked out thoroughly. You buy new tires. You make sure that on your road trip, you drive only during the daylight hours.
The action you’ve taken causes reality to split off. In one reality, you may still get stranded on a dark road, but in another you arrive safely at your destination. Perhaps in a third reality, you get stranded during the day because you run out of gas or your vehicle develops some other problem. At some point, it all begins to sound like an episode from The Twilight Zone. But suppose it’s an accurate depiction of the nature of reality?
In 2011, an indie production company released a movie called Another Earth. It’s about the discovery of a second Earth that proves to be identical to this one, right down to the seven billion souls who inhabit it. It focuses on the story of a brilliant young woman whose passion is astronomy. On the day she learns she has been admitted to MIT, she celebrates with one drink too many and on the way home, hears about the discovery of Earth 2 on the radio. She inadvertently crashes into another car at the intersection and kills the driver’s wife and son and puts him in a coma.
The story follows her through prison and a release four years later. By now, scientists have communicated with their counterparts on Earth 2. They have learned that until Earth and its twin became aware of each other, everything between the two was identical. But now, certain small details have begun to deviate. And there is it, that moment, reality splitting off. Alternate worlds, alternate futures.
“…are the vagaries of life truly random or do we play a role in literally sculpting our own destiny?” asks author Michael Talbot.
Hollywood does a great job of depicting these ideas in visual stories. But they really hit home when they happen to you.
You meet your destiny even on the road you take to avoid it. So it’s possible it was actually your destiny to heed a precog warning and avoid accident or death. On the other hand having warned people ‘if you do x y z you will regret it ” they have gone ahead and regretted it!
Which leads to another interesting point sometimes we allow our desire to do something overrule a warning not to – and wish we had heeded intuition I now know not to let my desire over rule intuition because intuition proves right
Intuition is always right, I think. But I don’t think that destiny means “preordained.”