Why do premonitions exist? What if all of our decisions were emotional and we only justified and rationalized them analytically in our brain?
"Nothing happens unless first a dream." Carl Sandburg
"Premonition" comes from the Latin prae, "before," and monere, "warn." A premonition is literally a forewarning, usually of something unpleasant, such as a looming natural disaster or an impending threat to our health. Premonitions, therefore, help us survive, and survival is the great theme running through the premonitions that people experience.
Thomas L. Friedman wrote "The Inflection Is Near?" in the New York Times on March 8, 2009: "What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it's telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last fifty years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall--when Mother Nature and the market both said: "No more." But as environmentalists have pointed out: Mother Nature doesn't do bailouts... We must grow in a different way.
When biologists want to understand why a trait has arisen, they always ask, "What is it good for? What purpose does it serve?" If a trait helps us to stay alive and reproduce, it is likely to become embedded in our genes and passed down through succeeding generations.
A premonition is not unusual.
Surveys show that about three-fourths of Americans experience what the call ESP, or extrasensory perception. Common among these events are premonitions, which often occur in dreams. They also happen in waking hours as a hunch, an intuition, or a gut feeling that something is going to happen.
The actual premonition may be nothing more than a subtle feeling that something is not quite right, leading them to cancel a plane trip the day of its crash; or to anticipate a road hazard lying around a bend in time to avert it; to schedule a medical test that leads to the discovery of a problem that might have been fatal had it gone undetected; or to take innumerable other intervening actions.
Premonitions also reveal a "feeling side" to the world.
Studies reveal that premonitions frequently link people who love each other--parents and children, siblings, twins, lovers and very close friends. Love, empathy, compassion, and a sense of connectedness are an integral part of the pattern of premonitions.
Premonitions operate at an unconscious level and they may be present to some degree in everyone. As such, they are not optional but are part of our natural endowment, as innate as our heartbeat. As 14-year-old Lilly says in The Secret Life of Bees, "The body knows things...before the mind catches up to them."
Premonitions in general suggest a timeless, eternal dimension to the mind.
The implications of this temporal infinitude for cherished concepts inn biology are profound. As Nobel biologist George Wald says, "Mind, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth in the evolution of life, has existed always....the source and condition of physical reality."
By linking minds across space and time, premonitions suggest that in some sense we are infinite or nonlocal in space and time. When we deeply sense this, we may become "transparent to the transcendent," as mythologist Joseph Campbell put it. The profound spiritual contribution of premonitions often goes unnoticed by those who regard them only as a nifty tool to glimpse the future.
It is not important how we language the transcendent. What matters is that we recognize our identity with it. As physicist Freeman Dyson put it, "There is evidence...that the universe as a whole is hospitable to the growth of mind....therefore it is reasonable to believe in the existence of....a mental component of the universe. If we believe in this mental component of the universe, then we can say that we are small pieces of God's mental apparatus."
Today, most scientists claim that our brain somehow produces consciousness, which, they say, is confined to our physical body and limited to the present moment. Premonitions say otherwise; they suggest that our consciousness may work through our physical brain but that it is neither produced by the brain nor confined to it. Like a fish that considers his watery environment to be the full extent of his world, we have come to believe that the here and now defines the limits of our existence. The past, we say, has already happened and no longer exists; the future has yet to unfold. The present is all there is. To this, premonitions say, "Wake up. The evidence for a larger world is staring you in the face."
Source: Larry Dossey: The Power of Premonitions: How Knowing the Future Can Shape Our Lives
