One of the central questions in our book on precognition, Sensing the Future, is whether the future you experience in a precognition can be changed. The book begins with this story:
A few years ago, we were driving on a narrow mountain road in the Andes, outside of Quito, Ecuador. A wall of rock rose on our left and a cliff plunged several hundred feet on our immediate right. There wasn’t any guardrail. Just ahead, a sharp turn was visible. As Rob tapped on the brakes, we both experienced a powerful feeling that we should stop. It was an illogical thing to do on this narrow road, but the feeling was nearly overwhelming. Rob slammed on the brakes and seconds later, a car barreled around the curve, swerving well into our lane. If he hadn’t taken the action he did, we would have been in the car’s path, and possibly plummeted into the abyss.
This is how precognition usually works. The warning signal was involuntary, unexpected, and thrust suddenly into our awareness. We had motored around numerous curves on this road without stopping. But in this instance, we somehow had pierced the veil of time and glimpsed the future. By taking the action we did, we changed the future.
Dr. Bernard Beitman, one of the people to whom we sent a PDF of the book, is a visiting professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia and the author of a fascinating book on synchronicity – Connecting with Coincidence. He’s also the first psychiatrist since Jung to undertake a serious study of synchronicity – what it is, what it isn’t, what it may be. He asked a provocative question: Is the future “fixed?” Are only some future events fixed? If so, which ones? If not, why not?
He feels this is an essential problem surrounding precognition. And he’s right. On that road in the Andes, did we change our future by pulling off the road when we did? Or were we meant to survive and the precognition was a visceral reminder of that?
Sometimes, the future SEEMS fixed. You have a dream, experience a synchronicity that appears to point to a particular event or experience that’s headed your way – and then something else happens instead. I think this is where free will and choice enter the picture. Even when I do people’s natal charts, I can clearly see an event headed the person’s way – and then it doesn’t happen. But something else does. Or when I’ve gone to a psychic – not all predictions come true, but the ones that do are the ones that are MOST PROBABLE at that moment in time.
In Carl Jung’s 1949 introduction to the Richard Wilhelm translation of the I Ching, he wrote that “whoever invented the I Ching was convinced that the hexagram worked out in a certain moment coincided with the latter in quality no less than in time. To him, the hexagram was the exponent of the moment in which it was cast – even more so than the hours of the clock or the division of the calendar could be inasmuch as the hexagram was understood to be an indicator of the essential situation prevailing in the moment of its origin.”
In other words, when you ask a question of the I Ching and toss coins or yarrow sticks, a moment in time is frozen. The hexagram you get, as Jung said, is “the exponent of the moment in which it was cast.” It depicts the pattern most prevalent in your life at that instant. When changing lines create a new hexagram, it tells you how the situation may evolve in the future.
Could that second hexagram be the equivalent of a precognition?
In the example of our experience in the Andes, our “hexagram,” our pattern, changed rapidly and dramatically because of the strong impulse to pull to the side of the road. But not all precognitions are warnings. In the dreaming chapter, I recounted a precognitive dream I had that took some digging to understand:
From Sensing the Future:
In the early 1990s, we experienced several changes in our careers that resulted in a search for new publishers. Since we write full-time, this sort of change meant that no income was coming in. We were scrambling.
Our agent was sending out proposals, but no one had made an offer. One of the publishers considering Trish’s proposals was Hyperion, a Disney company. Trish felt increasingly anxious about the situation and asked for a dream that would shed some light on the situation. On January 16, 1992, she dreamed she was floating to earth in a hot air balloon or on a parachute, she wasn’t sure which. She realized she was actually looking at a photo taken by a reporter. It was one the front of a magazine and said NIKE in big red letters.
The next morning, Trish did some research on Nike. She was the Greek goddess of victory, known specifically as the Winged Goddess of Victory. In some references, Nike and Athena were supposedly once considered to be one and the same. Trish took this to mean that she would be “victorious” in finding a new publisher, a comforting reassurance. But which publisher?
She looked up Hyperion and discovered that in ancient Greece, he was known as Helios Hyperion, the sun god. Over time, he gradually became identified with Apollo, the god of light. Trish reasoned that since Athena and Apollo were two of the twelve Olympian gods and were allies, she had a good shot at selling her proposal to Hyperion.
Sure enough, Hyperion made an offer five weeks after she had this dream. Even though the dream was metaphorical and complicated and required some research to understand, it qualifies as precognitive. It also illustrates what can happen when we incubate a dream—direct our dreaming self to answer questions posed before falling asleep. This practice dates back to the ancient world.
I knew the dream was important and precognitive because of the emotional intensity I felt about it (and because I had requested a dream). But if I hadn’t bothered researching it, it would have flown right past me – and maybe the outcome would have, too. Precognitions also aren’t always clear cut – I mean, why couldn’t that hot air balloon have said HYPERION on it?
So what do you all think? Is the future fixed? Are only some mass events (911, for instance) fixed? How’s this all work, anyway?
In response to Blah’s comment: In the Book of Matthew, New Testament, King James version: “For a man’s days are numbered as the hairs on his head”. This also appears in
the Book of Mark and in the Book of Luke, virtually word for word.
hey rob…you know what’s interesting about numbers and the length of a man’s life? Hmmm… well A clue is in the bible!!
Don’t have a bible handy at the moment. What’s the clue?
it’s there ya just gotta see it…..
Good point!
Over several decades of extensive, intensive research, including seven-thousand test cases to determine the accuracy of a specific equation, I have written an enormous text based on the Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Egyptian alpha-numeric language systems and their applications. (My text isn’t published but probably will be, posthumously.) From the results of the research, I have had no choice but to develop the conviction that prior to a Soul’s entering a new incarnation, the detailed blueprint for that life is created by The Higher Self using free will. In the number frequency of each individual, there is an unlimited source of virtually EVERY experience that the incarnate Soul will encounter, including illnesses and including the time the Soul will allow itself to remain in the lifetime before returning the Spirit. The original title of this text was THE DEATH FACTOR. Trish and Rob know about this, but it hasn’t been something I’ve shared publicly for obvious reasons, nor will I. It is THAT equation, The Death Factor, that has kept me from publishing the book. It is THAT equation that sent me worldwide, gathering the test cases, trying to DISPROVE its validity. But it stands. Our time of death is in our numbers when we are born.
I do not know WHY this equation was given to me, because I will not use it except to check it for its presence, thus, the 7,000 test cases of dead people taken from persons in all walks of life and from every type of death, even suicide. Here is its statement: THE TIME OF DEATH IS INHERENT IN THE NUMBERS OF THE NAME AND THE NUMBERS OF THE BIRTH DATA, COMBINED IN A SPECIFIC EQUATION, WITH VARIABLES. I have changed the title to the text, and am currently attempting to delete the DF information while maintaining the continuity and cohesiveness of the Whole. It’s a challenge. I will not give ANYONE the equation itself. As said, I have tried to disprove it in every possible way, but have been unsuccessful. Bottom line….it seems that we DO determine our experiences before we arrive.
Out of the 7,000 test cases, I have ONE where the equation was absent, and the only reason I was able to draw a conclusion in that one, was that the person involved was somehow apparently saved by some kind of Grace. Hate to take more time, but this is what happened in that situation while we were still in GA: One of our best friends was out drinking in Atlanta, by himself, was speeding around a curve in a Mustang, crashed, literally died, was on life support. His wife was devastated. I found her in the hospital chapel, sobbing, begging God to allow him to live. The couple had been attempting for several years to have a baby, but they didn’t. She begged God to let him live so they might have the baby they so desperately wanted. Miracles of miracles, he not only survived but survived completely intact.
She asked me to help her with the insurance forms, so I knew the exact date and time of his accident…the clock in the Mustang stopped on impact. But he survived….for TWO YEARS. They had a beautiful baby boy. In a different automobile, but on the exact same curve, he was drunk and speeding in his new Pontiac and climbed a big metal utility pole and died instantly. The DATE AND TIME of his second death was EXACTLY the same as the first date and time. Not one second of difference. I did those insurance papers, too, and recognized it immediately. The only answer that makes any sense to me, considering that this is the only case out of 7,000 in which the Death Factor wasn’t present, (it was present for the first accident he had but not for the one in which he ultimately permanently died), is that some kind of Grace must have been granted, perhaps by the Higher Self? I don’t know….
If there are lines of probability, perhaps the DF is valid only on one of those lines.
It probably is fixed, but we should live our lives like we think it isn’t.
🙂
As a clairvoyant I think all is destined especially the time of birth and death & if we think we avoided death by premonition it wasn’t our time. Favourite quote ” you meet your destiny even on the road you take to avoid it”
That’s what I think too Jane.
Thanks, all, for your comments and beliefs!
This is subject I ponder over a lot. I am reminded of something Jung said, I think in his “Meomories . . ” book, that after his years of studying the unconscious he came to the conclusion that 80% of our lives are run by our unconscious. And that the benefit he got from doing his studying was that learning about what is unconscious can save a lot of pain – not that it changes the life path.
But this doesn’t answer the question.
From my own experience dreams always tell the truth. The trick is not knowing what time frame the dream is lived in. And not always understanding the message until much later.
So many experiences in life can be interpreted as dreams.
Shadow’s comments sound really applicable to me. My older sister who lives in MO, was driving one day on a two-lane but much-used highway there. The highway had a lot of hills and valleys, much akin to a roller coaster, just the spaces between the ups and downs were more distant from each other. My sis was driving her van behind an 18-wheeler that was carrying an enormous ‘molded’ swimming pool that was chained with several chains in the back of the huge truck. Sis was an appropriate number of car lengths behind the truck, but there was nothing between it and her van. She told me that all of a sudden she had a thought “pop” into her head that the chains were going to break and the swimming pool was going to slide off the back. She immediately gradually braked until there was a LONG distance between her van and the truck.
Within a couple of seconds, the chains broke somehow, and sis watched that massive pool slide off the truck, crashing into the asphalt road and digging a wide, deep hole in the road as it slid, then stopped. If my sister had net heeded the voice that warned her, the pool would have crushed her vehicle, or, she would not have had time to slow sufficiently to avoid driving into the massive hole in the road. She would have died, either way. It’s my conviction that there were two paths being presented to her: listen to her intuition, or ignore it and suffer the consequences. I tend toward the concept that there are certain experiences that are etched in stone in our life’s plan, and they were created by our free will before we came in and WILL happen. But, we also created in that plan many experiences that would offer us various choices and decisions to make when they appeare in our lives, and those, we choose when they occur. Just my thinkin’ on the matter…..
Fascinating story!
I think, as you said, that some events are fixed, but others are not, especially in terms of our personal lives. It’s obvious to me that you and Rob had precognition on that road, because you were not meant to be killed. Although I can’t think of an event like this that has happened to me right this moment, I KNOW they have. I can feel the familiarity of the idea. And I believe that our guardian angels use this technique all the time. It comforts me to know they are there, residing outside of linear time. 🙂
Maybe a part of us resides outside linear time, too!
Definitely. Dreams exist outside of time – past, present and future showu p – pardon the expression – all the “time.”
Nicely said, Adele!
Clueless, how it works, it just does. I tend to believe that you were meant to stop at the roadside, because you were meant to avoid the speeding car, because you were meant to still accomplish, learn, teach, touch…
I lean towards the ‘end’ being fixed, but the way to it having endless variations. Which can at times, result in us ‘needing’ precognition in order to get there?
Interesting, Shadow! Hadn’t thought of it that way.