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Your Nostradamus Factor

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You've probably had a day when you said to yourself, "If I had known it was going to be this kind of day, I never would have gotten out of bed!" You may have gone through times when you felt, "If I had known life was going to be like this, I never would have been born!"

Those of us who accept ideas such as precognition and reincarnation know the irony of such statements. Somewhere during the night our sleeping selves did know what kind of day was coming. Somewhere in the heavens our unmaterialized souls did know what life held in store.

Why then do we forget? Some have speculated that it is exactly because the foreknowledge would discourage us from going through the experience. If so, then why do we sometimes get brief breaks in the amnesia, allowing us glimpses of the future? What is this game?

I'm pondering these paradoxes because I've just read a book that has fascinated and shaken me more than most I've seen lately. The book is, Your Nostradamas Factor: Accessing Your Innate Ability to See into The Future (Simon & Schuster). The author, Ingo Swann, is a prominent psychic, learned and influential in the field of parapsychology. He has participated in countless experiments, projects his own creative wit helped make more interesting than the average statistics-gathering routine. By inventing the term, "remote viewing," a techno-speak metaphor for clairvoyance, he prompted a new line of research that has achieved one of the best track records demonstrating the psychic abilities of the average person. In his newest book he turns his talents to what he calls "future-seeing."

He presents the mental dynamics responsible for future-seeing as well as for blocking future-seeing. He repeatedly emphasizes diagramming one's ideas to foster the psychic process of visualizing. He gives many hints on how to release our inner Nostradamus factor from the triple-walled prison of ignorance, prejudice, and expectation. One of the propositions in his theory, refreshing to someone who lives in a community where being psychic seems to pass for an education, is that it is easier to correctly see the future for subjects about which you are knowledgeable than for subjects about which you are totally ignorant. Knowledge creates a range of feasibilities for the future, focusing psychic sensitivity on anticipating the unexpected.

To test his theory on eliciting the Nostradamus factor, Mr. Swann conducted his own experiment, the "American Prophecy Project." For somewhat over a year, he distributed a newsletter to a select mailing list in which he published his predictions. He accurately predicted the U.S. economic downturn of 1990 and Margaret Thatcher's resignation, both of which were contrary to general expectations at the time he published them. In other areas where he was less knowledgeable, such as concerning geological events (e.g., earthquakes), his predictions were less than stunning.

The book concludes with a solemnly guided tour of the future. Swann challenges us to form our own predictions and to act accordingly. His own predictions are quite sobering and yet different from what we might expect. Most of us have been exposed to enough fuss about "end times" to become numb to the future. Such numbness is exactly the opposite of what Swann intends. He wants us, in fact, to wake up to our own sense of the future, to begin to anticipate it more consciously.

Swann proposes that future-seeing properly belongs to us as a daily tool for "right living." It is not just the ability to see around the corner but also the ability to anticipate the consequences of our actions. What kind of future are you creating now? Can't you see it?

I wonder what it would be like to awaken in the morning and see flash before me what my day will be like, and watch that prognosis change as I shift to put my right foot down first instead of my left. Yes, every wiggle, every thought, has its ripple effect. As chaos theory shows, the flap of a butterfly's wing can lead to a hurricane thousands of miles away!

We can know all things, but can we handle all that information? No wonder we play ostrich with our future-seeing ability. Sometimes, however, our Nostradamus factor does try to get our attention, to prompt us to get our head out of the sand. How then do we respond to these occasional wake up calls?

Take violence, for example, whether in the form of guns, earthquakes or financial calamities. Violence is a wake up call that Swann highlights as an ominous portent of things to come. Violence is a last resort reaction to inertia. If you have ever been so frustrated with your inability (AKA unwillingness?) to change a bad habit that you got angry with yourself, perhaps you can intuit how violence is born. Violence signals us there's conflict about change.

There is a war brewing, Swann says, a war where the future tries to save itself from the past. Today's cigarette smoker is experiencing a precursor to this war. A private habit has become a public nuisance and the extermination campaign attracts zealots. Smokers are the target of aggressive attempts to extinguish their habit. If you feel righteous about society's right to clean air, think about how righteous your children's generation may feel one day about their right to survive, even if it means extinguishing those people whose private habits contribute to ecological or economic malaise.

"If you don't like the future, change it!" Such is our enlighte

I am generally interested in Ingo Swann and his ideas regarding ESP and Remote Viewing however I was deeply dissapointed that Ingo puts any credence at all in ancient Astrology which he appears to in this book. There is no reliable evidence that the alignment of planets have any effect on our destiny or that we can predict the future using Astrology. The evidence claimed for such effects can be better explained by selection effects where for example, only bad events were noticed when bad events were supposed to happen and only the good events were noticed and recorded when good events were supposed to happen. Such a selection effect could have led to the creation of the whole Astrological system.

Ingo clearly states in the beginning of the book that he cannot predict the future and proved it in the end when nearly all but the most vague predictions he made did not come true. His one good prediction that the Berlin Wall would come down was made in front of a German audience when someone basically demanded he make at least one prediction. The wall did come down in the time frame he claimed but in retrospect that could have just been the obvious prediction to make under the circumstances combined with a bit of luck and no Astrology.