Living Dangerously - Issue 37

But even in our distracting universe, seeing the future is far from impossible. "When I speak to successful businesspeople," says Radin, "they say that they rely on their intuition. They are constantly making judgments based on 'vision.' One venture capitalist told me that he could tell when he was 'on': Key people would pop into his life, for example. He could also feel when that stopped. He learned to trust this strange behavior."

What brings on such behavior? "If you pay an enormous amount of attention to the creation of a goal, you can gear every perceptual filter that you have to that goal. Because there is so much unconscious processing going on all of the time, it will feel as though you're magically getting impressions of what you intend to do."

How do intuitive hunches manifest themselves? "Say that you're coming to an intersection that you've driven through a hundred times. You slow down for reasons that you don't understand. Suddenly, a truck zooms through a red light. You've saved your life because you felt something was wrong. What if you woke up that morning and thought, 'I don't feel very good about that stretch of road'? That's a transfer of information from your future back to your present."

"So," I ask Radin, "does trusting our visions mean believing in a redefinition of time?"

"Yes," he says. "We have to give up the notion that time is an arrow that flies straight from the past to the future. A few hundred years ago, people thought that space had one absolute direction. Throw a ball, and it would fall down. Newton showed that there is no absolute direction of space; instead, there are relationships between different bodies of mass. By analogy, we are beginning to think that the arrow of time is drawn toward larger bodies of information. The second law of thermodynamics says, 'Energy tends to spread out, to diffuse, to become less concentrated in one physical location or one energetic state.' Everything is running toward greater entropy, toward greater and greater randomness.

"But a lot of things are not running toward randomness. If life were not constantly regenerating order, you'd be dead. A stream looks like it's flowing in one direction, but there are little eddies and currents that move water in different directions. If that metaphor were applied to a psychic experience, you could imagine that there are pressure waves that ripple backward through time. When people get an impression that something is wrong on the road, they may be getting information trickling backward. An event in your future may be like a boulder in a stream: It will affect the flow of water around it. The flow of information is your emotions. That future event causes your own stream of life events to change."

Radin wants to find a theoretical model for understanding such developments. If he succeeds, that opens a door to huge applications: "We could enhance doctors' ability to diagnose problems intuitively before they become manifest." He also sees a strong application in better intelligence methods. "What represents the biggest threat to national security? Small terrorist groups with weapons. There is no conventional way to track their movements. Using psychic abilities may be an unusually effective way to track them."

And Radin's work has philosophical implications. If he succeeds in scientifically proving the existence of precognitive vision, the definition of the self will change dramatically. "Classically, the self is related to the brain. It's you by yourself, alone, right here and now. What these phenomena suggest is that we need a complementary view of what the self is. Modern physics has faced the same crisis with particles and waves. We are particles in one perspective, and waves in another. And, ultimately, there is only one wave.

"It's as though life were an ocean. We think of ourselves as standing above the wave; we have our own existence. Yet we're part of the ocean; we're connected. For a short time -- a mere lifetime -- we are different. But our consciousness is the wave. From an evolutionary point of view, it makes a lot of sense for us to pay attention to the here and now. Otherwise, the predators out there will eat us. But sometimes, such as when we eat or sleep, our awareness drops to a preconscious level. We feel a part of everything, a part of the wave. This view is radically different from the Western perspective. Our whole economy is based on the notion that we are individual particles. But there are complementary ways of thinking."

Those ways lead to a new physics of the mind: "Vision and psychic phenomena don't fit in with Western views, yet the evidence proving their value is quite good. The topic is so taboo that it almost can't be talked about. Yet, at the same time, movies like The Sixth Sense and books like those in the Harry Potter series are wildly successful. One reason why this topic is taboo may be that we have an intuitive sense that if we understood this stuff better, that would redefine what human beings are and force a change in society."