A friend of mine who is not religious and has no interest in spiritual matters recently called to tell me about a conversation he’d just had with his mother’s neighbor—a woman in her sixties, whom he trusted—who had helped care for his mother in the years leading up to her death. The woman told him she had been to see a medium who told her that by her next birthday, although she wouldn’t be wealthy, she would receive a windfall that would be enough to support her through retirement. Then she met another medium who said, “I wouldn’t normally tell anyone this, but you should know, within a year your husband will die of a heart attack.” As predicted, shortly afterward her husband died of a heart attack, and by her next birthday probate had been granted, which left her with enough money for the rest of her days.
In No One’s Dead: The Jesus Messages, I recount a premonition reported by Sugar Ray Robinson. In June 1947, the legendary boxer arrived in Cleveland, Ohio, to fight twenty-two-year-old welterweight Jimmy Doyle. Days before the fight, while staying at a friend’s home, Robinson had a dream. In his autobiography Sugar Ray, he wrote:
“In the dream, Jimmy Doyle was in the ring with me. I hit him a few good punches and he was on his back, his blank eyes staring up at me, and I was staring down at him, not knowing what to do, and the referee was moving in to count to ten and Doyle still wasn’t moving a muscle and in the crowd, I could hear people yelling, ‘He’s dead, he’s dead. …’ Then I woke up.”
He told his trainer, who brushed it off, saying, “Forget it, Robinson. That’s a dream, that’s all.”
Despite his fears, the fight went ahead, and in the eighth round Doyle was knocked out. Robinson recalled:
“I stood over him, transfixed, seeing my dream come true, horribly true … You warned me, God, I was thinking; you told me.”
Doyle was taken to hospital and died soon after.
If the account by Robinson is true, it’s evident that he foresaw a future event. It appears that beyond our three-dimensional-plus-time world, in certain instances, the future can be seen—but it seems to be a potential future rather than a fixed future—with free will allowing us to change our own part in it. An analogy might be that of a passenger in a car hurtling toward a cliff. One can foresee him being driven over the edge, and the closer he gets, the more certain the outcome appears—yet the driver still has the free will to turn or stop before they reach it. This could be an indication of why those who claim to see the future or have precognitive dreams are sometimes uncannily accurate and at other times completely wrong.
We don’t know whether Robinson had had anxiety dreams in the past in which he’d killed his opponents, but what we do know is that he had knocked out many of them before but never killed any, and this time, days before the fight, he dreamed Doyle would die at his hand—and he did.
In Spirit World and Spirit Life (1922) by Charlotte E. Dresser, the subject of humans being guided or influenced in the physical world came up, and a spirit communicator was asked by Dresser, ‘Was the “daemon” of Socrates his spirit guide?’
The reply came:
“His guide took the form of a spirit and was near to protect him, but did not suggest any course of action. That was left to Socrates’s own judgment. That is where free will comes in.
“There are influences from here, but they are not strong enough to sweep human life into them. The spirit within each life is the deciding power as to which influence shall be received. Otherwise, life would lose its power of choice, its free will, and its responsibility.
“There are influences constantly going out toward humanity from here. There are inspirations toward good; there are sinister suggestions toward evil; and it is the inherent choice of the individual that decides which shall rule his life.”
‘Just how much can you foretell?’
“Not much. We can see circumstances and the probable results, and many are able to tell the future somewhat from them. But I do not think I am gifted in that way. Some people seem to have a gift of prophecy; yet it is a psychic gift, or possibly a keen intuition, that can foresee results from certain conditions.
“We are not creatures of fate. Set that down as a truth not to be denied.”
In his 1973 book Dream Telepathy: The Landmark ESP Experiments, coauthor Alan Vaughan reported an incident of his own in which he watched one of his favorite writers, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., on a television talk show one evening and had a dream about him two nights later. On March 13, 1970, he wrote to Vonnegut to tell him about his experience:
“… You appeared in a dream I had this morning. We were in a house full of children. You were planning to leave soon on a trip. Then you mentioned that you were moving to an island named Jerome. (As far as I know, there is no such place, so perhaps the name Jerome or the initial J has some related meaning.)
“Vonnegut’s answer came back in a letter dated March 28, 1970: “Not bad,” he replied. “On the night of your dream, I had dinner with Jerome B. [an author of children’s books], and we talked about a trip I made three days later to an island named England.”
One scientific objection to extrasensory perception—or the broader term PSI—is that for it to occur, thoughts must travel faster than the speed of light, as is the case with telepathy. The current scientific consensus is that faster-than-light travel is impossible in our physical universe, meaning mind-to-mind communication must also be impossible unless minds are somehow connected—a concept not currently accepted by mainstream science.
If someone in New Zealand has a dream, vision, or just a hunch that someone died in a car crash in New York—and then discovers that, at that very time, the person did die in a car crash in New York—if it’s not a coincidence, it suggests connectivity between minds. Materialists will tell you there’s no scientific evidence for PSI—meaning it hasn’t been measured, isn’t repeatable on demand, and there’s no accepted hypothesis or theory to explain it—therefore it doesn’t exist. At the other end of the spectrum, orthodox religions tell us we should have faith and not ask questions, for fear the devil might corrupt us. Meanwhile, the evidence keeps piling up.
Currently, physicists are suggesting that time and space might not be fundamental, and multiverses and simulation theories are being posited in a bid to explain the TOE—the theory of everything. As of now, the TOE remains elusive, and reality is up for grabs.
In 1878, German physicist Philipp von Jolly reportedly advised the young Max Planck—who would later become the pioneer of quantum physics—not to go into theoretical physics because it was a “highly developed, almost fully matured science.” How wrong he was. Quantum theory and Einstein’s theory of relativity did what science does best: rather than settling for the two-century belief that the Newtonian worldview explained reality, they demonstrated that it was incomplete—just as our current materialist model appears to be incomplete. Maybe in another hundred years, physicists will have figured it out.
Jonathan Beecher is the author of No One’s Dead: The Jesus Messages, published by White Crow Books. This article can also be found on Substack.
Very interesting, Jon. As you may recall, there were similar forewarnings, as that experienced by Sugar Ray Robinson, in both the Titanic and 9-11 disasters. However, I doubt that physicists will have it all figured out in 100 years. I think it is part of the uncertainty and “doubt that forges the human spirit,” as it was put to Victor Hugo by the purported spirit of Martin Luther.
Mike,
I think premonitions are more common than one might imagine.
Luther railed against Catholicism and said to Hugo that because he doubted, he created a religion. However, that religion was built around Jesus, who instructed his followers to not doubt and “have faith.” I think Luther was telling Hugo to never stop questioning—to never think we have all the answers and rest on our certainties.
You might be right about the physicists but science is forged through doubt, skepticism, and curiosity, and whilst it might never come up with a TOE, it seems reasonable to think it can eventually develop a hypothesis and theory for PSI.
As an aside, the idea that thought has to travel faster than light has always puzzled me. I mean, can you imagine the difficulty of actually measuring the speed of thought transfer? What instrument could possibly measure the often vague feelings and sentiments picked up via telepathy? You’d either have to use something with better than sit second timing or somehow be extremely distant (like on a other planet) with some way of synchronising your observations to some sort of distant event at a set distance to receiver and sender, while all travelling the same.relative speed. In short, as far as I know, thought could be travelling at half the speed of light or some other fraction. I doubt we’d know it!
Ian,
Good points. I’m reminded of Albert Einstein’s statement in Upton Sinclair’s book Mental Radio, which documents telepathy experiments Sinclair conducted with his wife, Mary. In the experiments, Sinclair (and occasionally other participants) would draw pictures of objects and seal them in envelopes. Mary would then attempt to reproduce the drawings by accessing them telepathically.
Einstein wrote, “The results of the experiments carefully and plainly set forth in this book would appear to indicate that thought or images may be transferred from one person to another without the employment of the senses…. The matter is serious enough to require careful investigation. In no case should the question be dismissed as superficial or improbable.”
Despite Einstein’s open-mindedness, he said he couldn’t accept telepathy because, there was no known physical mechanism that could explain it, and it appeared to require the transfer of information faster than light. At least that’s my understanding.
Einstein must have had a very accurate stopwatch then. Unless he was referring to precognition. Then that would be more understandable, I suppose.
Enjoyed this article and thread., Jon and Mike. Of course I think about these issues as on occasion I have correctly predicted certain outcomes for clients. I never get too cocky as I have sometimes been “wrong”. Anywhere from “slightly off base” to “not even in the ball park”. But thanks for the Victor Hugo reminder; I have known of his work in that area for years but put off buying the book. Also those Charlotte Dresser quotes are impressive, how I managed to avoid her in my years of collecting the old spirtitualism texts is beyond me. They do sound like classics.
Thanks Gordon. Dave Gilmore springs to mind. 🙂
Re: thought that travels faster than light:
I remember telepathic experiments in Novosibirsk, whereby “senders” would be up to 500 km away from Novosibirsk, yet the “receivers” of the communication would sometimes get the message displayed on auluminium cilinders in which they would stand upright, sometimes accompanied with strange symbols seemingly floating in front of the alu cilinder, and sometimes arriving up to an hour BEFORE the thought was sent…. (Exp by Trovimov et all, can not find the video on youtube any more).
Other telepathy experiments have shown that thoughts can be sent through water to a submarine and from space rockets to earth.
With regard to precognition, the SPR did some experiments by which spirits were able to predict what headlines would be shown in tomorrows papers. So it seems that one can foresee things on earth from the afterlife.
Some remote viewers influenced another persons thoughts: Lynn Buchanan writes in “The seventh sense” that he tried to influence Gorbatchev to give up communism, by projecting thoughts like “communism does not work financely, politically etc” … one month later Gorbachev made the USSR obsolete. In his speech, Buchanan was amazed to find many of his sentences literally in Gorbachevs text…
Thanks Theo. Remote viewers seem to access information beyond the normal limits of time and space, so the speed of light may not even be a factor.
Jon and Theo,
I have had precognition as well as when spirits have shown me something that was going to happen. I used to call it Spirit CNN, where pictures of an event would be shown. This usually happened when I was dining with my wife and I would tell here what I was watching. One example was when I “saw” a flaming sword above the Notre Dame Church. I said to my wife Not looking good, a flaming sword above a famous church might be Michael (the Archangel, not the famous writer) preparing for battle. A few days later (April 15, 2019) the television showed the wooded spire of the church burning and it looked like a sword.
The latest one (a few months back) was a US backed missile attack Middle East with the words taking care of The Sword of Damocles.
The trouble is that glimpses of the future requires interpretation. Theo might remember Wilkins-Sherman Thoughts through space. Wilkins was an Australian officer photographer who filmed our troops in WW1. He was nearby to my grandfather when he took photos so I followed his career. Sherman was a medium who worked with Ingo Swann with remote viewing. The book was about telepathy.
Thanks
Bruce
Jon,
There was a detail in my vision “The latest one (a few months back) was a US backed missile attack Middle East with the words taking care of The Sword of Damocles” I remarked to my wife that there were different to the normal coloured big missiles (I know missiles from my Defence work). They were shiny black. I found that these were new missiles. https://www.twz.com/sea/black-tomahawk-cruise-missile-seen-for-the-first-time-in-strikes-on-iran
Thanks
Bruce