On the Validity of Premonitions

So what if you think of someone but instead of them dying the next morning, one of their parents dies within the week? Maybe their parent's cousin? What if it is their parent's cousin's childhood friend's middle school basketball teammate? What if you think of someone sick surviving the week but they do not? What if you think of them dying, but they survive and recover instead? What kind of thought would not qualify as a premonition to an event, and what kind of event would not qualify as one pre-cognized by a thought?
These are all questions one would have to ask and answer, lines one would have to draw, if one were to set out to test for premonitions, and the list is by no means exhaustive - in fact, if anything, I'm being rather profoundly generous, if I may say so myself...

As for legitimacy, I shall keep it pragmatic: It is not necessary to understand whence premonitions come or how they work, if they do. If there is a subset of people who tend to sense the incoming of an important event, we can expect a great number of entities paying large sums to capitalize on a gift of this sort. Criminal investigation, insurance national security, medical practice, to name a few, would stand to gain more than they could hope to expend, and the law of the land should encourage, even incentivise strategies involving premonitions, because every law abiding citizen and even some of the rest would stand to benefit from them. And yet what we see instead is the opposite.
I needn't be saying that premonitions are "not real", what ever that means. But claims of premonitions are unfalsifiable in that they are incorrigible, and as such, in every place where any intellectual rigor is demanded, they are largely disregarded for that reason. Premonitions are not a reliable path to predictions of any sort. In fact, intuition in general doesn't only not add anything in our search for predictive models, it actually would lead us astray more often than not. There need not be a second reason to reject it when ever our goal is to reliably predict future events.

Wescli Wardest wrote: Premonitions are real. They happen. And usually for a reason. In my life I have had premonitions ranging from there is a dog in the street around the corner to knowing when a relative has passed on. Sometimes they seem to be nothing more than a passing thought to a deep emotional disturbance that you just know what has happened.

I have meditated extensively and studied and practiced a multitude of religions and practices trying to find a way to have these better serve me in my daily life. But, I have never found what it is that gives me any kind of control over them. What I have learned is that when you have one, it is for some reason… rather you realize it or not.

Another thing I have discovered is that most people will not believe you. And why should they. The premonition is for you and you are the one that has to know what to do with it.

experience is very much like this (minus the dog lol)

i believe that meditation helps. i think smoking pot before meditation helped me to become sensitive to attention when i was a teenager, but i dont really know that it was necessary. i explored lucid dreaming and reiki and i think they also helped, especially the reiki (but i never had the belief that its working if you cant feel it, i always felt it and i almost always got feedback about the heat. after about 30 minutes of treatments i was very usually attuned to my clients, often even sharing thoughts with them,or "thought space" which is .... difficult to explain)

i believe that attention is the "vehicle" for a lot of the legitimate cases of "premonitions."
when you think about someone, your attention is directed towards them. when they think of you, their attention is directed towards you. attention can be felt, and it is a medium through which information can be transmitted and/or exchanged

techniques for facilitating sensitivity to attention, I THINK, have to do with developing sensitivity to ones own body and (for lack of better word) ones own Being, and "the cultivation of inner silence" which for me basically meant learning how to let myself stop thinking in an active, articulated way.
to relax mentally, allowing perceptions to come to me, and to try to experience them without putting them into words.

heres an article on shutting off the internal dialogue . im not suggesting that everything the article says is "gospel truth," only that the exercise and the ideas were useful for me and i believe they played a major role in the many moments i have had of "premonitions" (and id add that "premonitions" are now a perfectly normal part of my life)

Gisteron wrote: So what if you think of someone but instead of them dying the next morning, one of their parents dies within the week? Maybe their parent's cousin? What if it is their parent's cousin's childhood friend's middle school basketball teammate? What if you think of someone sick surviving the week but they do not? What if you think of them dying, but they survive and recover instead? What kind of thought would not qualify as a premonition to an event, and what kind of event would not qualify as one pre-cognized by a thought?
These are all questions one would have to ask and answer, lines one would have to draw, if one were to set out to test for premonitions, and the list is by no means exhaustive - in fact, if anything, I'm being rather profoundly generous, if I may say so myself...

As for legitimacy, I shall keep it pragmatic: It is not necessary to understand whence premonitions come or how they work, if they do. If there is a subset of people who tend to sense the incoming of an important event, we can expect a great number of entities paying large sums to capitalize on a gift of this sort. Criminal investigation, insurance national security, medical practice, to name a few, would stand to gain more than they could hope to expend, and the law of the land should encourage, even incentivise strategies involving premonitions, because every law abiding citizen and even some of the rest would stand to benefit from them. And yet what we see instead is the opposite.
I needn't be saying that premonitions are "not real", what ever that means. But claims of premonitions are unfalsifiable in that they are incorrigible, and as such, in every place where any intellectual rigor is demanded, they are largely disregarded for that reason. Premonitions are not a reliable path to predictions of any sort. In fact, intuition in general doesn't only not add anything in our search for predictive models, it actually would lead us astray more often than not. There need not be a second reason to reject it when ever our goal is to reliably predict future events.

you know Gis, i had a feeling you were going to say something like that :laugh:

OB1Shinobi wrote:
experience is very much like this (minus the dog lol)

i believe that meditation helps. i think smoking pot before meditation helped me to become sensitive to attention when i was a teenager, but i dont really know that it was necessary. i explored lucid dreaming and reiki and i think they also helped, especially the reiki (but i never had the belief that its working if you cant feel it, i always felt it and i almost always got feedback about the heat. after about 30 minutes of treatments i was very usually attuned to my clients, often even sharing thoughts with them,or "thought space" which is .... difficult to explain)

i believe that attention is the "vehicle" for a lot of the legitimate cases of "premonitions."
when you think about someone, your attention is directed towards them. when they think of you, their attention is directed towards you. attention can be felt, and it is a medium through which information can be transmitted and/or exchanged

techniques for facilitating sensitivity to attention, I THINK, have to do with developing sensitivity to ones own body and (for lack of better word) ones own Being, and "the cultivation of inner silence" which for me basically meant learning how to let myself stop thinking in an active, articulated way.
to relax mentally, allowing perceptions to come to me, and to try to experience them without putting them into words.

heres an article on shutting off the internal dialogue . im not suggesting that everything the article says is "gospel truth," only that the exercise and the ideas were useful for me and i believe they played a major role in the many moments i have had of "premonitions" (and id add that "premonitions" are now a perfectly normal part of my life)

man this post was terrible lol

to begin with, i meant to say "my experience is very much like this (minus the dog)"

also i was in a hurry and wanted to use an outside reference to explain the idea of "shutting off the internal dialogue," a concept i learned from reading the work of carlos castaneda

this one is better as it quotes directly from the original material

castaneda was an eccentric and id even say manipulative person, and id advise people to be wary of the kool aid, but id also say that his work was either extremely insightful, to the point of being brilliant (if he just made it all up) or he was genuinely taken as an apprentice to a sophisticated sorcery tradition- which i think was the case

lastly, i forgot to mention another source that was really important in my own personal development with attention, a book called the celestine prophecy

a lot of whats in that book is whats been lately referred to as "woo lol, but the ideas that attention is a form of energy that enlivens people during social interaction, and the concepts of control dramas and the competition for energy/attention, all have some basis in reality, in my experience and opinion.

and you can see it when you learn to really pay attention to people as the book suggests, by giving your full and undivided attention in a wholly supportive and "loving" or at least accepting and uncritical way; people open up and seem to become energized, and it is tiring/draining to you if youre the only one giving the attention.

in small groups, if youre able to really give your attention youll find people do compete for it, although the tactics they use are broader than the four "control dramas" mentioned in the book

mostly it was a lot of new age mumbo jumbo and pop psychology, but learning to pick up on how people respond to attention helped to cue me in to attention itself

and i always give the "homework assignment" of looking really closely at peoples butts when they walk by, and see how often they pull up their pants when they feel themselves being watched lol which i consider evidence that we do actually sense each others attention

what does this have to do with premonitions? well that depends on which kinds of premonitions youre talking about

i once was in a shower when i knew that a room mate had stolen a radio from me - i just knew that it happened, from a distance, while in the shower.

thats extremely specific and arguably falls in the category of "premonition" but it was really just awareness of and sensitivity to attention and intuition

ive got so many of those moments of "knowing" and of what i call "thought sharing" that its not even a question anymore that we are inter-connected with energy of some kind, and that attention is a major component of this energy.

the question is more like "how do we get better at noticing it and what are the limits of what we can do with it?"

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EDIT

well the link doesnt work and i dont know how to fix that - probably thats why i didnt use it the first time lol

http://essential-knowledge.net/learned-reality/the-internal-dialogue/

im sure you can figure out how to find it if you care lol

J. K. Barger wrote: Funny you post this today...

I just watched this this morning:

I also downloaded his ESP Trainer app.

Enjoy

None of these projects ever found that these abilities were valid and these projects were closed. After 35 years of research I think that's pretty good evidence that these things are not real. So, for this simple fact alone, why would you continue to believe in it after all this intense research by multiple intelligence communities that spanned 35 years and cost over 20 million dollars showed no evidence of this abilities existence?

Kyrin Wyldstar wrote:

J. K. Barger wrote: Funny you post this today...

I just watched this this morning:

I also downloaded his ESP Trainer app.

Enjoy

None of these projects ever found that these abilities were valid and these projects were closed. After 35 years of research I think that's pretty good evidence that these things are not real. So, for this simple fact alone, why would you continue to believe in it after all this intense research by multiple intelligence communities that spanned 35 years and cost over 20 million dollars showed no evidence of this abilities existence?

That arguement can be applied to a vast array of subjects, such as God, the soul, and the spirit to name a few. Even the Force, something we use as both blessings and farewell here, has yet to have any scientific evidence to back it up.

"We walk by faith, not be sight" is a verse I would go to for this type of arguement. Just because it cannot be proven does not mean it does not exist. A majority of the scientific community believes in the Big Bang, despite there being no evidence of it, nor any way to apply the scientific method to test it's validitiy.

Research can only go so far, and sometimes I feel that they give up before scraping the surface. Sometimes it is a matter of faith.

But I do see your point Kyrin, but do argue that perhaps there is something more to it than current science can measure or capture.

Kyrin Wyldstar wrote: None of these projects ever found that these abilities were valid and these projects were closed. After 35 years of research I think that's pretty good evidence that these things are not real. So, for this simple fact alone, why would you continue to believe in it after all this intense research by multiple intelligence communities that spanned 35 years and cost over 20 million dollars showed no evidence of this abilities existence?

because one day i was in the shower when i suddenly realized, without a shadow of a doubt, that my room mate stole my radio


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EDIT

just to be clear Kyrin, im not actually making reference to the video or the cia studies (im assuming thats what the cideo is about) but rather to the possibility of things like intuition and esp in general

i dont know what the cia decided about esp, i only know what my own experiences have been and they would be very tough to reproduce in a lab

Arisaig wrote: That arguement can be applied to a vast array of subjects, such as God, the soul, and the spirit to name a few. Even the Force, something we use as both blessings and farewell here, has yet to have any scientific evidence to back it up.

"We walk by faith, not be sight" is a verse I would go to for this type of arguement. Just because it cannot be proven does not mean it does not exist. A majority of the scientific community believes in the Big Bang, despite there being no evidence of it, nor any way to apply the scientific method to test it's validitiy.

Research can only go so far, and sometimes I feel that they give up before scraping the surface. Sometimes it is a matter of faith.

But I do see your point Kyrin, but do argue that perhaps there is something more to it than current science can measure or capture.

Your right, god, the soul, even The Force, none of those things can be proven to exist. And because of that I happen to not "believe" in them as anything that exists as a physical or interactive part of this reality. I do not live my life by faith, but by evidence. I want to live my life not through fantasy and wishful thinking but through truth - Even if that truth of reality is something one does not prefer. i.e. we should live our lives by how reality actually is, not how we want it to be.

In fact the big bang can be proven. The expanding universe and background radiation were all predicted in the hypothesis of the big bang. Those things were then tested and observed to be reproducably true which evolved the hypothesis to a Theory. Mind you, a theory in scientific terms is the height of a scientific structure that is backed by overwhelming evidence. This is unlike trying to test the hypothesis of God or The Force. If something cant be proven to exist because it has no tangible components of itself that affect our reality then it becomes useless. So why continue to follow that if it cant affect us in any way?

For example, I don't view The Force as any sort of physical energy source that exists as a part of physics out there... somewhere. If it were a part of the physical universe then we could measure it and if its not a part of the physical universe it becomes useless. And yes, some have tried to argue that its not part of the physical universe but it still affects the physical universe. Then I would ask by what mechanism does it do this? If that mechanism exists in the physical then it could be identified and then it reduces this otherwise esoteric energy to nothing more than a part of the natural universe and once again and we should be able to measure its effects through this mechanism. But since we don't see this in nature we must take the default stance of not accepting the claims or assertions that it does exist.

For me The Force is an idea, it is a way of living and a philosophy to follow. It is not an energy source that travels the universe and shapes our path according to its will. We are its will because we are the Force, the human condition itself. That is the evolution of my spirituality that allows me to live my life as close to actual truth as possible.

I do not live my life by faith, but by evidence. I want to live my life not through fantasy and wishful thinking but through truth - Even if that truth of reality is something one does not prefer. i.e. we should live our lives by how reality actually is, not how we want it to be.

Very much in tune with that the Jedi are all about. Ignorance, yet knoweldge, even the Tenats reflect this (Focus, Knoweldge, Wisdom). This is your viewpoint, and it is yours to have of course. I personally have expereinced things that I still cannot explain. Perhaps it is because I am still ignorant, but still we strive ever forward.

We are its will because we are the Force, the human condition itself.

That is one way of looking at it, and probably more valid than most.

because one day i was in the shower when i suddenly realized, without a shadow of a doubt, that my room mate stole my radio

oh my!

Arisaig wrote: Very much in tune with that the Jedi are all about. Ignorance, yet knoweldge, even the Tenats reflect this (Focus, Knoweldge, Wisdom). This is your viewpoint, and it is yours to have of course. I personally have expereinced things that I still cannot explain. Perhaps it is because I am still ignorant, but still we strive ever forward.

We are its will because we are the Force, the human condition itself.

Ignorance is simply the absence of knowledge, not the opposite of it. Since we are finite creatures we will never be all knowing and so we will always be ignorant and yet we dedicate ourselves as Jedi to the constant pursuit of knowledge. It is a path with no destination.

I too have experienced many things in my life that I cannot explain. But just because I don't have an explanation does not mean that one does not exist. I just dont have it. But just because we do not have it does not mean that we should just make up an explanation that makes us feel good without any evidence to back it. Its ok to be ignorant of something and say "we don't know". We don't need an explanation for everything. There is no shame in ignorance but there is shame in self deception. We should never lie to ourselves or make something up to tell to others that cant be shown to be true.

Ignorance is simply the absence of knowledge, not the opposite of it. Since we are finite creatures we will never be all knowing and so we will always be ignorant and yet we dedicate ourselves as Jedi to the constant pursuit of knowledge. It is a path with no destination.

Very well put. I am aware that ignorance is the absence of knoweldge, I guess I just didn't get that across properly in my statement. lol

There is no shame in ignorance but there is shame in self deception.

I can imagine you're refering to faiths with no evidence when it comes to this statement. What then of those that believe in something not because they're lying to themselves, but because they legitimatly belive in it? Is it still self deception? Or is it another branch on the path that one walks when pursuing knowledge?