The first siddhi—psychic ability—described by Patanjali in the ancient Yoga Sutras is the ability to simultaneously perceive the past, present and future. The present is easy. That’s right now. The past is no longer now, but still on our minds. We can go there. But how do we perceive the future?
Precognition is the least understood aspect of psychic experiences but also occurs the most frequently. As anyone who has had a premonition can tell you, coming events often cast their shadows in the present and if we’re paying attention, we glimpse those shadows.
Imagine that you’re driving along a narrow road through the mountains with a wall of rock rising on your left and a cliff plunging several hundred feet on your immediate right. There’s no guardrail. You see a sharp turn just ahead. As you tap the brakes, you have a sudden, full-blown vision of a car barreling around the curve at a high speed, and you know it’s going to crash into you and send your car over the edge of the cliff. So you instantly slam on your brakes, and watch as a car careens wide around the curve. The driver sees you in time, pulls the car back into its proper lane, and zips past you.
You’ve just had a glimpse of the future and, by your quick action, you changed it. That’s how precognition works. The life-saving vision was involuntary, unexpected, and was thrust suddenly into your awareness.
Precognition occurs most frequently in dreams, when your conscious mind can’t hurl up defenses and barriers to information about the future and your unconscious mind is completely open. “Because our dreaming self is deeper in the psyche than our conscious self—and thus closer to the primal ocean in which past, present, and future are one—it may be easier for it to access information about the future,” wrote Michael Talbot in The Holographic Universe.
It can also occur when you’re in imminent physical danger, in creative endeavors, when your life or the lives of loved ones are in crisis, when your need to know about some future event is greater than your fear of knowing. It can be triggered through hypnosis, shamanic journeys, meditation, deep relaxation, yoga, during spiritual retreats where your focus is turned inward. It isn’t an ability that can be taught or tapped into at will, but you can learn to create inner climates that are more conducive to it happening.
Physicist David Bohm theorized there’s a deeper order in reality called the implicate or enfolded order, a kind of primal soup that births everything in the universe. He believed that even time unfolded from this implicate order. The explicate—the external reality we experience—unfolds from the inner order. Could precognition – like synchronicity – be the phenomenon that occurs when the implicate and the explicate, the inner and the outer, coincide?
As Talbot noted in his book, “Bohm’s assertion that every human consciousness has its source in the implicate implies that we all possess the ability to see the future.”
But which future are we seeing?
Whenever there’s a disaster, natural or man-made, there are always stories about people who missed the doomed flight, left town the day before the quake hit, didn’t board the ship that sank, people who avoided the disaster because of a hunch, dream, or vision. Records indicate that 899 people who had booked passage on the Titanic didn’t show up. Why not?
Dr. Ian Stevenson, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia Medical School, researched the paranormal experiences connected to the sinking of the Titanic. Writing about it in 1960 in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, he found nineteen documented cases of passengers who had premonitions about the voyage. Some heeded the premonition and survived and others didn’t heed it and drowned.
“When people dream of accidents correctly and do not take the plane or ship, it is not the actual future they were seeing,” Bohm wrote to Talbot in a private communication in 1988. “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 that, if these phenomena exist, there’s an anticipation of the future in the implicate order in the present.”
So if we’re all precogs, then it’s time all of us started creating a future that works for everyone.
