Living Dangerously - Issue 37

The most elusive and desired quality of leadership is vision. Vision is the perfume of the mind. Unfortunately, leadership gurus tend to approach their understanding of vision with a reductive method. For them, it's about scenarios, or positive thinking, or guesswork based on information. But none of those formulas can explain the fact that some people seem able to see the future. After all, don't we all know undeserving, stupid people who have made a brilliant career out of stepping in a pile of luck? Did they see it in front of them? Could they have walked that way on purpose?

I got a peek at the awe-inspiring, mysterious side of vision, and it left me with a case of the chills in the warmth of summer. In the heart of Silicon Valley, I met a man who is a scientist of intuition. But Dean Radin, 48, prefers the term "precognition" -- that is, knowing the future before it happens. He has started the Boundary Institute, a nonprofit outfit that does basic scientific research on "information transfers." Radin's partner is Ed May, 60, former director of a CIA program code-named Stargate. The program investigated remote viewing -- in other words, the ability, without the use of the ordinary senses, to gain information about objects or events from a location that is distant in either time or space.

Indeed, the subject of Radin's research invites a kind of X-Files conversation. Precognition falls under the category of psychic phenomena, which is a subset of the paranormal. Precognitive experiences transcend the boundaries of space and time. They can involve the transfer of information between people (which is sometimes called "mind reading" or "telepathy") , or they can involve the perception of something from a spatial or temporal distance.

"Psychokinesis," says Radin, "involves information travelling from people's intention back into the environment. Movies usually represent this in the form of large-scale mind-over-matter effects, such as levitation. We don't see such dramatic events in the real world, at least not under controlled conditions, though we do see changes in the distribution of random events. In an experiment, it comes down to watching a roll of a die and trying to influence the outcome mentally. You do this over and over again, and the link with mental intention is seen not in what a single die does but in the distribution of results after many trials."

Most of us have some amount of intuition, which can be defined as "knowing something without knowing how we know it," or "knowing something and forgetting that we knew it." For instance, people can have so many years of experience in a given field that they forget what they know about it. A patient walks into a doctor's office and the doctor gets an intuitive feeling that this patient has a certain disease. Even when his medical examination bears out this hunch, the doctor will likely have no idea how he got the hunch in the first place. His expertise seems mysteriously reflexive.

Radin argues that, as impressive as that sort of intuition is, there exists an even higher variety: "A large part of intuition consists of knowledge, skills, and experience that you do not consciously remember. But there may be another part. Having a genuine psychic experience is like having an intuitive hunch, except that you get information that you didn't previously have, either consciously or unconsciously. That information comes not from the 'inside' but from the 'outside.' So intuition can involve a combination of factors -- which suggests that creative acts sometimes depend not only on a person's learned skills and talents, but also on a still-mysterious ability to get information despite what common sense tells us about space and time."

Can we develop an ability to have visions? "We can give somebody a recipe of tips to improve clairvoyance," says Radin. "But will it actually improve? Most people won't improve at something if they're not suited to it. Hand a violin to a random person, and he'll probably never come near to playing like Jascha Heifetz. Can people with precognitive talent develop that talent further? There, the jury is out. We don't know."

So what's the recipe?

"An Indian sage named Patanjali got it right," says Radin. "His teachings could be boiled down to this: If you wish to be able to pay attention to things going on inside your head, you should pay attention to things going on inside your head. So how do you do that? Sit on a rock, close your eyes, quiet your mind, and pay attention. It sounds like the easiest thing in the world -- until you try to do it. Try to pay attention to what lies beyond the boundaries of ordinary awareness. We have so many bits of information that our minds are chattering about constantly. People who are talented psychically can pay attention to subtle impressions in their head."