Precognition & The Psychic Ability Of Future Sight

Precognition is believed to be the ability to see or know about events before they actually happen. This isn't about making educated guesses based on current knowledge, it's said to be a direct insight into the future, without any present or past information to back it up. Those who experience precognition describe it as a strong gut feeling, a vivid dream, or even a flash of a scene that later unfolds exactly as they 'saw' it.

This acquired knowledge can be very specific, including details about the when, where, and how of a future event. Individuals who experience precognition might describe it as having a clear vision of the future, whether it's through dreams, thoughts, or a sense of knowing. In this respect, it differs slightly from a premonition, which is more about having a strong feeling that something is going to happen without necessarily knowing the specific details.

Insights in precognition can come to individuals in various ways, but perhaps the most common channel for precognitive insights is through dreams. Some individuals experience very vivid dreams that depict events in great detail, which then occur in real life. These dreams can sometimes be symbolic rather than literal, requiring interpretation to understand their true meaning.

Precognition falls under the broader category of extrasensory perception (ESP), which refers to the ability to acquire information without using the known human senses or logical reasoning. Other forms of ESP include telepathy and clairvoyance, the latter is perhaps the most directly related to precognition.

Clairvoyance means 'clear seeing' and refers to the ability to gain information about an object, person, location, or physical event visually but beyond the usual five senses. For some, precognition is a form of clairvoyance where the information obtained relates specifically to future events. Insights might also come in the form of waking visions that can be flashes that pop into the person's head, often without warning. Visions can be clear and detailed, or they might be vague and fleeting.

Sometimes, a person reports just 'knowing' that something is going to happen. This knowledge can come suddenly and with certainty, without any logical reason for it. This falls under another ESP ability known as claircognisance, which means 'clear knowing' and refers to knowing something without knowing how or why. Someone who experiences precognition may be getting their insights through claircognisance, simply 'knowing' that a certain event will occur.

Some individuals receive precognitive insights through emotional feelings, such as unexplained anxiety, sadness, or happiness, that are later understood to be related to a future event. This is an example of clairsentience, or 'clear feeling,' which is the ability to obtain insight through physical or emotional sensation.

Many with precognitive abilities say they experience these insights without any prior effort to develop their abilities and often describe having had these experiences from a young age, suggesting that for some, precognition is an ability people are born with. However, others believe that precognition can be developed with practice and training.

Various methods are used to attempt to develop or practice precognition abilities. Meditation can help calm the mind and increase awareness, which is said to be beneficial for tuning into psychic abilities. Mindfulness practices help in being present and may enhance sensitivity to subtle intuitions or insights that could be precognitive.

Since many precognitive experiences are reported to occur in dreams, keeping a dream journal can also be useful. To do this, write down everything you can remember from your dreams as soon as you wake up, no matter how trivial or nonsensical it may seem. Over time, review your entries to see if any correspond with future events.

There might be ways to develop precognitive abilities, but exactly how precognition is supposed to work is a mystery, one that sits on the fringe of science and the supernatural. Some suggest that time isn't as linear as we experience it, but instead all moments—past, present, and future—exist simultaneously. This could mean that precognitive individuals can somehow tap into a broader timeline. Others believe it could be a subconscious piecing together of tiny, unnoticed details, leading to a 'future memory'.

Some have suggested that precognition could be a latent human trait that allows us to sense future dangers. This would mean that precognition could be a form of extremely advanced intuition, where the brain processes subliminal cues from the environment and projects potential future scenarios based on this data.

If precognition were as simple as making subconscious calculations about future events based on natural cues rooted in the environment, then why haven't governments looked into harnessing this power to predict their future events, especially those impacting national security or the economy?

Well, there are examples of governments, particularly during the Cold War era, showing an interest in various forms of ESP for intelligence purposes. Although they didn't specifically look into precognition, a secret US Army project established in 1978 called the Stargate Project did carry out experiments to determine the feasibility of using extrasensory abilities such as remote viewing in military settings. Remote viewing shares similarities with ESP phenomena like clairvoyance and could include precognitive elements if viewing a target across time as well as space.

These programs were shrouded in secrecy, but several details have emerged over the years, particularly after the declassification of related documents. However, the results and effectiveness of using ESP in intelligence operations remain controversial. The Stargate Project was officially terminated in 1995, with the CIA concluding that it never produced actionable or operationally useful information.

The scientific community remains skeptical about the existence of precognition, after all, the concept of receiving information from the future does have a few issues. If precognition were possible, it would mean that someone could know the result of an event before it has occurred. This undermines our basic understanding of the universe that every event occurs as a result of preceding events, a cause. Conventional physics does not support the idea of information travelling backwards in time to provide future knowledge to the present.

Being armed with the sort of foreknowledge that precognition is said to deliver could also lead to paradoxes, which further complicate things. The classic example is the "grandfather paradox," where a person travels back in time and prevents their grandfather from meeting their grandmother, thus preventing the time traveller's own birth. If precognition allows for knowledge of the future to change the present, similar paradoxical situations could arise. For instance, if someone were to act on information from the future to prevent a predicted event, then the future from which the information came would never exist.