There's hardly a man who wouldn't want that. However, this is a paradox: if you give a person such an opportunity, he will very likely decline this offer, saying: "No, I'd rather not-" Inexplicable desire and deep-rooted fear that it will come true live inside us in a very strange combination. Honey is sweet, but the bee stings. The desire to know the future is not really that simple.

"The future exists already, that is why, it's no wonder that you can see it right now".
Professor N.A.Kozyrev

Being skeptical about astrologists, we, nevertheless, put secretly their contradicting predictions on ourselves. When in a newspaper we come across revelations of another palmist, we involuntary open our palms and peer into them looking for an ominous "cross", "island" or an alarming interruption of a line. Somewhere inside our souls roughened by materialism there is a faint belief that one can know the future. Is that really so?

There's a score of stories and tales about the predictions that came true, prophetic dreams, fortunetellers who many years in advanced were absolutely precise in their prophecies to many famous people. We know about predictions to Vasily III, Ivan the Terrible, Pavel I, Muravyov-Apostol, Pushkin, Lermontov, Bukharin, Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, Robert Kennedy and others that came true. However, from the point of view of classical science the majority of predictions cannot bear criticism: usually there are no verified documents, therefore they are impossible to check!

As we have seen, time is not a direct and horizontal highway, but a winding
road in a cross-country terrain. It also has one more, not less important quality: this road is rich in side-roads. Many small and big paths run in different directions from crossroads v future has many variants. There are convenient and more likely "paved" roads, there are less likely "country roads" and even almost unlikely "paths". Our future destiny (where and when we will come and what we will reach) is usually decided precisely at these crossroads. These "forks" or, as mathematicians call them, "points of bifurcation" have a very important quality. The most insignificant event there (a quick glance at a road sign, a passenger's advice, a traffic-controller's motion) can be crucial for the choice of our future and will determine how quickly we will get to our destination, if we get there at all.

According to this model of time, the destiny of each of us resembles a tree with a lot of branches, and we somehow resemble ladybugs that move higher and higher in order to fly into the sky from the highest point. We live in the very same way: we never return, we only occasionally look back, but we steadily move along the tree of destiny till our final "take off".
Ancient wise men of the East believed that every man comes into this world with his own destiny, which has at least six variants ranging from the worst to the best. The ideal way would, of course, be to choose the best self-actualization - the road leading to the very top of the tree of destiny. But how can one do it without the most important thing v "the map of life"? How can one resist the temptation of choosing at "the point of bifurcation" an attractive, but hopeless "side" branch? How can one look into the future and learn where this or that road, this or that branch at the tree of destiny goes?

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