(I typed this article from the pages of Mysteries of The unexplained by Readers digest)
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed." - Albert Einstein.
Beyond the Walls Of Time.
The present is our only point of reference for the past and for the future, and our awareness of any happening must obviously occure somewhat after the actual event. What, then, are we to make of the time warp that allows some people to prophesy that which will happen in the future? Anomilies and coincidences are related phenomena in that they are both depatrures from the expected time frame. That some prophecy's do come true, that some anomalies of many kinds exist, and that coincidences abound - all this is without question. The (as yet)fathomless mystery is what force or forces are powerful enough to bring them into being.
The Intermediate Present
Most theories of prophecy concentrate on what are professed to be ambiguities and uncertainties in our conventional notion of what the future is and claim that the future unfolds in or coexists with the present. A somewhat novel approach to the problem, focusing on ambiguities in what we call the present, was preposed in 1934 by H.F. Saltmarsh. Saltmarsh begins by pointing out that what we conventionally name the present is nothing of the kind. For when we percieve something - The fall of a leaf, the prick of a pin, we regard our perception and what it reveals as occuring simultaneously in time. But sensory impressions do not occure all at once We feel the pinprick an instant after it happen; the leaf touches the ground an instant before we register the landing. For in addition to the time it takes for sensory impressions to reach our brain is the time it takes our brain to process the signals when they arrive. Thus, based on Saltmarshes proposal, our perception of anything happening is inevitably a bit later then the event itself.
Consequently , we have two kinds of present. The interval between these two presents might well be considered a third level, or intermediate present, in which events can occure or begin to occure. We can further conjecture that it is in this third level of time that certain people recieve intermations of the future.
Because all transitions take time, we can hardly suppose that the contents of the intermediate present pass into our awareness intact or unchanged. We can therefore say that the intermediate present, like the real present, is unavailable to ordinary consciousness and that its contents can never be quite the same as those of our noraml awareness. It is in this nether area between an event and the perception of it that precognition might occure.
Cognition of the Future
Attempts to explain prophecy must make suppositions about the future. The most fundamental supposition is that events in the future do not yet exist and cannot, therefore,produce effects in the present. The path of explanation that stems from this view leads , of necessity, to various ideas of the future as a potential that somehow exists in the present.
In there simplist form these ideas form the analogy of the seed and the flower. A gardener can examine a seed and predict what flower it will produce.
Some premonitions may indeed stem from clues scarcely noticed in a conscious way. An unfamiliar noise in a car, for example, may give rise to an accurate premonition of danger.The weakness of the theory, in this form, is that it requires of the precognizer an uncanny ability to analyze signs and indications that are not only imerceptable to the ordinary eye but impossible to deduce theoretically. What clues in a dreamers environment could prompt an accurate precognition of a disaster six months and 3,000 miles away? Some extraodinary suggestions have been made to explain how the future may be unrealized but cognizable in the present.
One such suggestion,by Gerhard Dietrich Wasserman,a mathematical physicist at the university of Durham in England, is that all events exist as timeless mental patterns, which every living and non-living partical in the univers is associated.
This idea owes something to the ancient belief that the universe-the macrocosm-contains innumerable microcosms, each recapitulating the features and order of the large whole. Thus man was seen as a microcosm of the Earth, his veins and arteries corresponding to streams and rivers, and so on.
By the end of the 17th century the idea had undergone many transformations but was still potent. The great philosopher and mathematician Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von leibniz , for example wrote :
All the different classes of being which taken
together make up the universe are, in the ideas
of God who knows distinctly their essential
gradations , only so many ordinates of a single curve
so closely united that it would be impossible to place
others between any two of them, since that would imply disorder
and imperfection.
Accordingly , the various orders of beings, animate and inanimate, so gradually approximate each other in their attributes and properties that they form a single chain, "so closely linked one to another that it is impossible...to determine precisely the point at which one ends and the next begins."
In this concept of a "chain of being", then , the animate , and therefore the spiritual or psychic, are connected with the inanimate by a gradation of shared attributes. For leibniz the implications was that someone with enough insight "would see the future in the present as in a mirror."
Another version of the idea that the future lies hidden in the present was advanced by Adrian Dobbs, a mathematician and physicist at the university of cambridge, in 1965. As events unfold, he proposed, they actualize a relatively small number of the possibilities of change that exist at a subatomic level. In the process disturbances are caused that create, in another dimension of time, what Dobbs calls psitronic wavefront. This wavefron can be registered by the brains neurons, at least in certain especially sensitve people, and interpreted. A metaphor may help to clarify the proces:
Imagine a pond, at one side of which a toy ship is launced. At the other side of the pond is a very small person. He is unable to see the ship, but as the ship travels foreword, the waves it makes reach the shore on which he stands. As they travel across the pond, these waves pass around certain objects- weeds, leaves, a log-that are fixed or slowly drifting on its surface. The objects thus create disturbances in the wavefront, which the small person, who has alifetimes experience in these things, is able to note in fine detail. From what he learns of the wavefronts he not only obtains an image of the objects that produced them but calculates how long it will be before they drift to shore
In this metaphor the toy ship represents an event unfolding in time. It's course across the pond represents one of many paths it might have taken and the dimensions of time it occures in. The pond itself represents another dimension of time in which other factors are having an influence. The ship's bow wave represents Dobbs's "psitronic wavefront", and the small person is, of course, the neuronal apparatus that recieves the wavefronts and converts it to a prediction.
Granting that Dobbs's theory is purely hypothetical and that no psitronic wave has been discovered, the difficulty is in suggesting a neuronal mechanism by which the observer distinguishes the wavefront of a particular event from the presumable maelstrom of wavefronts produced by simultaneously unfolding events. Again, the farther away the event is in the future, the more numerous the wavefronts and the more complex the problom.
Such,are some of the theories that regard the future as being, in some way, a potential implicity accessible in the present, and such are the difficulties and limitations attending them.