Do psychic powers exist? (Yikes!)
About five summers ago, I was at a red light waiting impatiently to make a left turn from LaSalle Street onto Erwin Road (Duke University campus, NC). When the light turned green and the straight traffic from the opposite side cleared, I was ready to go. But at the very last minute, just as I eased off the brakes, a thought crossed my mind.
“Nah, I shouldn’t go just yet. I’m going to sit here just a bit longer.” This made no sense. The light was green, the coast was clear, and I was a teenage driver. Why would such a thought ever even cross my mind?
So after a few seconds had passed, I shrugged it off and put my foot on the gas. I immediately slammed on the brakes as I saw a woman run through the red light at 35-45 mph (see figure). If I hadn’t been delayed those couple of seconds by that peculiar thought, she would have crashed right into my driver’s door, and things would have gone to hell for both of us. If I was lucky, I would have broken a couple of bones. But I don’t think I would have walked away.
Do I have psychic abilities? (That got your attention.) Well, it probably depends on what you define as a “psychic ability.” Society and the media have made psychics out to be quacks. But are they, really? Maybe we all have some kind of innate psychic abilities, kind of like a sixth sense, that most of us just haven’t been able to put our fingers on.
I have a friend in California who has a similar story. She was reading a book at a table one day, with her back against a window. All of a sudden, for no reason at all, she had a feeling that said, “I should get up and walk over there [away from the window].” After taking just a few steps, she heard the loud, violent shattering of glass behind her. A couple of mischievous teenagers had thrown a boulder through her window and run away. If she had stayed where she was, she would have been hurt badly. (She later had a good talk with the teenagers about the incident.)
Were these “precognitive” incidents “psychic”? You could argue they weren’t, because we didn’t exactly know what was going to happen. But we had these weird thoughts that came out of nowhere that told us what we had to do to avoid an incident. What did these thoughts sound like? Were they in English? Chinese? Male? Female? We couldn’t tell you. They were none of them. They were pure thoughts, not in any language, not in any voice.
Let’s say for a second that these were events in which we really did manifest “psychic abilities.” Are we full-time, full-blown “psychics”? No. And I think that’s a frequently made mistake. Just because it happened once doesn’t mean it will ever happen again. I’ve never had another one of these bizarre episodes since then, and I don’t know if I ever will.
But I don’t think the idea of a “psychic” is a myth or a joke. From my very own experience, I know that psychic abilities are at least possible. I also know a guy who, during his lifetime, knew too much to not be called a psychic. He is known as The Great “White Water” Predecessor (白水老前人, pictured), and he lived to the ripe old age of 95.
My aunt once visited him. Not having seen her once before or knowing who she was, he immediately told her, “You have 141 shirts and 87 pairs of pants — too much!” When she got home, she started counting, thinking, “Do I really have that many?” So she counted, and the numbers came up short. Then she saw that she had another pile of clothes that she was getting ready to donate, and so she counted those too. She couldn’t believe it when she was done — the numbers had matched exactly. As she told my mother, “I can’t believe he even included the clothes I was about to donate!”
There are also hundreds, if not thousands, of other occurrences of this guy “knowing” the weather months/years ahead of time, “seeing” events on the other side of the world before they even happened, stuff like that. Pretty amazing guy – I can share more about him in another post.
So yes, from my experiences, and from what I know, I can say with unquestionable certainty that humans at least possess some kind of ability for “psychic” cognition. I think it’s within us, and we just have to find it.
But as for who is and who isn’t a psychic, well… that’s a whole other story. (Miss Cleo? Hmm…)
I had a psychic episode a few years back that, to this day, I am still trying to understand. With a setup like that, it probably seems like some sort of huge story, but it’s really not.
When I was around 19 or 20 years old, I had fallen asleep at my girlfriend’s house after a long day of swimming at the pool at her complex. I’m not one to ever really have nightmares or, for that matter, to ever remember my dreams. But while I slept, I had a dream that I was driving around my neighborhood late at night– and the streets were really empty. I had pulled over to the curb on one of the main streets and parked under a streetlight. While I was stopped there, I saw a dark figure approach my car and, although I quickly rolled up my window, he was still able to reach into my car through the roof. He was grabbing at my CD player, which was sitting on my lap, and I was so terrified that I could only lean back and try to stay away from his hand.
At this point I woke up, very shaken as the terror in my dream had stayed with me into consciousness. As I said, I almost never have nightmares and so never wake up in that state. My girlfriend told me that I had been stirring and making noises, which we both knew was very unlike me.
I was so captivated by the effect that the vivid dream has on me that I directly went home and wrote a 4-5 page short story about the events in the dream. This was the first time I has ever written about a dream. I left a copy on the counter for my Dad to read.
The next day, just before I left to go to my girlfriend’s house again, my Dad told me that he read the story and that he liked it. Shortly after that, I arrived at my girlfriend house, where I was to meet her at the pool along with some other friends. (It was the start of summer, so that’s why we went swimming so often). I parked on the street outside of the gated complex, got out of the car and walked to the pool.
We were at the pool for a couple of hours until people started leaving. My girlfriend and I decided to get something to eat, and I volunteered to drive. We walked out to my car and my girlfriend noted that the door was unlocked and she got in. I too noticed that the driver’s door was unlocked, and got in. I knew right away that the situation was suspicious because I remembered locking my door. I looked in a pocket accessory that I had in my car, were I normally kept my CD player– and it was gone!
I soon realized that my CD wallet, full of 200+ CDs, was gone, along with a $20 bill I had left on top of the car’s center console.
When I reflected on what had happened, I realized that I must have left the passenger door unlocked. Somebody probably walked by and saw the door unlocked and the $20 bill sitting very accessible on the console. They must have searched the car and found the music and CD player and taken off with it. Whoever took it all made off with about $600 worth of stuff. Yes, I was disappointed, but above all else, I was fascinated…
I thought about it a lot over the next few weeks and months… about how I had somehow, in my dreams, predicted the theft of my CD player from my car. Even more strange was my abnormally strong, subconscious conviction to write the details of the dream in story form and share it. It is a strange phenomenon that I still find unbelievable and unlikely. This was one of the defining moments in my spiritual development, as it marked the apex of my hunger for knowledge about those myriad things about us that are not easily explained. This point also marked what Joseph Campbell would call “crossing the threshold” into a new world, as I cite that as the place in time that I began my journey.
Anyway, Phil, you’re not alone. As hokey as it seems to talk about psychic phenomena in any context, there is no denying that unexplainable “coincidences” do occur– I wish I knew what it implies.
So Phil, you seem inactive. Be more active >:o
This seems a lot to me like drawing out of two 52 card decks repeatedly and, after a while, pulling two queens of spades.
Guichemot:
The guy I mentioned – more like taking 10 separate decks of cards, and being able to immediately “find” the queen of spades successfully each time in each deck. Unless you believe that coincidences happened every minute of his life. Being able to match the exact number of clothing in someone’s wardrobe? Knowing the weather months in advance? What’s most impressive was that he was never wrong.
As far as our three stories go (mine, my CA friend’s, and Mr. Arctic’s), I’d say coincidence is more likely, since these things didn’t happen to us as much. But I’m not about to rule out either explanation.
Dan:
I’m working on three posts that should be up by the end of the month. Thanks for reading.
Har har, so you do read comments. Three posts? Overload much..
?
Go check yur facebook, nao.
I get an email every time there’s a new comment.
Yea, I’m not about to claim I understand that one guy you were talking about although I am extremely skeptical that there is any basis to that. But what I meant was, how many times have you felt that intuitive feeling and nothing came of it? I’ve had plenty of moments where I second-guess myself (in SO many situations) and nothing special comes of it. So one time or another that feeling is bound to occur in tandem with a dangerous moment because random moments of inexplicable hesitation are pretty common.
I can definitely understand your disbelief, and I don’t think you’re wrong. But this is essentially just looking at two sides of the same coin. You’re looking at the macroscopic, statistical aspects; I’m looking at the microscopics, at the details of each event.
One of my longest held beliefs is that nothing is ever purely “coincidental.” For example – if I tell you that your thoughts can influence a random number generator, do you believe me? Of course not. I didn’t believe it either until I realized that a group at Princeton University has been doing research on this and arrived at amazing results. Prepare to be surprised. There will probably be a post on this too later. (I don’t exactly know why the website is so business-y, but it checks out.)
There is still a lot about the world that we don’t know.
That last sentence.. “There is still a lot about the world that we don’t know.”
Stating the obvious doesn’t help your argument.
Actually, that was my argument. One of them.
“You’re looking at the macroscopic, statistical aspects; I’m looking at the microscopics, at the details of each event.”
I think I’m looking at what’s likely and you are looking at what’s unlikely. That’s my point. I tend to believe what’s more likely until something else becomes more likely.
And by the way, the PEAR research institute was closed last year b/c scientists thought it was bogus. Check out a well researched review:
http://skepdic.com/pear.html
Most important point from it:
“The main fact that emerges from this data is that 71 experiments gave a result supporting Schmidt’s findings and 261 experiments failed to do so (Hansel 1989: 185). That is the beauty of meta-analysis: you can transform a failure rate of nearly 4 to 1 into a grand success.”
There is still a lot about the world that we don’t know. But for every truth that exists there are ten thousand lies disguised as it.
Good work, guichemot. Wait for my post on “miracles,” though. There’s an experiment you can try, and everyone I know that has done it has achieved successful results.
I’m glad I hadn’t gotten around to making a full-blown post about PEAR yet.
Hahah my stat major friend (Craig Reeson) told me about the largest controlled study done on praying and its results on medical outcomes; turns out that if you are being prayed for and aren’t aware of it, there’s no difference between your recovery and anyone else’s, and (here’s the best part) if you are aware that you are being prayed for, you actually experience an inferior recovery to other people. The guy who ran the study was also out to prove that miracles work medically (he was very christian), and after finding out it was nonsense, he rationalized it by saying “well, god shouldn’t be tested anyway, so these results probably aren’t real.”
Also, my psychology professor said last semester that he had reviewed a lot of the literature on faith-based medical recovery, and he claims that no study has ever revealed any significant effects of praying or other religious practices on concrete medical outcomes.
Admittedly I don’t know much else about miracle research.
Yes, I know Craig. But what I’m going to introduce has nothing to do with “faith.”
Interesting.