Old man and the sea, in a rowboat or skiff paddling and fighting the waves of the ocean.
Precognition – glimpsing the future – has always fascinated me. My favorite movie about precogniiton is Minority Report, where those three precogs were kept in a pool of water, connected to electronic gizmos that recorded their dreams and visions.
I was thinking about precognition when I recalled a dream I had in 1973. I was in between jobs and living at home with my parents in Boca Raton. In the dream, I was rowing a boat toward the Bahamas because South Florida was underwater. The Atlantic and the Gulf had converged and covered the peninsula. Now why I would be rowing toward the Bahamas – which are as low or lower than Florida in most areas, is a total mystery. BUt that was my dream and this was long before the words “climate change” had entered the popular vernacular. I’ve thought about that dream a lot lately.
It wouldn’t take much to submerge Florida. Right now, Miami Beach floods at high tide. There has been idle talk about building a seawall along the east coast of the state, but ot much conversation about halting the endless construction that has destroyed natural barriers. All it would take is a powerful Category 5 hurricane.
But what is precognition exactly?
Rather than “seeing” actual future events, people who sense the future may be anticipating events that might unfold. That’s a concept expressed by physicist David Bohm in a conversation with author Michael Talbot.
Bohm was quoted as saying: “When people dream of accidents correctly and do not take the plane or ship, it is not the actual future that they were seeing. It was merely something in the present which is implicate and moving toward making that future. In fact, the future they saw differed from the actual future because they altered it. Therefore I think it’s more plausible to say, if these phenomena exist, there’s an anticipation of the future in the implicate order in the present.” Bohm referred to the implicate or hidden order as nonlocal reality and our everyday world at local reality.
In Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership, Joseph Jaworski describes the impact that a chance meeting with Bohm had on his dream of creating a training program for visionary leadership that focused on serving others. During a four-hour conversation with the physicist, Bohm told him, “You cannot think of existence as local . . . Your self is actually the whole of mankind. That’s the idea of implicate order—that everything is enfolded in everything. The entire past is enfolded in each of us in a very subtle way. If you reach deeply into yourself, you are reaching into the very essence of mankind.”
Think about that for a moment. It means that any time you’re engaged in something that prompts you to look within, to delve into your own psyche, your own consciousness, you’re diving into that primal soup, that collective, where we’re all connected.
We talk a lot about precognition in our book Sensing the Future. I think it’s time for me to revisit it and update it!
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Interesting thoughts.