Premonitions

The Case of the Exploding Church 

On Wednesday evening, March 1, 1950, an extraordinary event erupted in the quiet prairie town of Beatrice, Nebraska, that stunned the locals, riveted the nation, and raised fundamental questions about the nature of consciousness.8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22

Beatrice—“bee-AT-tris,” as the residents call it—is a peaceful, friendly, no-nonsense kind of town of around 12,000 folks. It is located near the geographic center of the continental United States. The town is the county seat of Gage County, a fertile piece of American heartland in southeastern Nebraska, on America’s Great Plains.

The area is rich in history. The town was founded in 1857 by a group of hardy pioneers who called themselves the Nebraska Association. They traveled up the Missouri River from St. Louis on the steamboat Hannibal, disembarked, explored the surrounding area, and found a hospitable township site where the Big Blue River is joined by Indian Creek. The community got its name from Julia Beatrice Kinney, the eldest daughter of Judge J.F. Kinney, the Nebraska Association’s first president. The county itself was named in honor of Reverend William Gage, a Methodist minister who was chaplain of the first territorial assembly in 1856. Between 1855 and 1882, the southern half of Gage County served as the Otoe-Missouri Indian Reservation.23

The Oregon Trail cuts through Gage County, over which more than 300,000 settlers went west in covered wagons in the mid-1800s. They often stopped in Beatrice to buy supplies. Just four miles west of Beatrice, the first homestead claim under the National Homestead Act of 1862 was made by pioneer Daniel Freeman. Freeman’s cabin is still there, preserved as part of the Homestead National Monument of America, run by the National Park Service.

During the heyday of the Wild West, Wild Bill Hickok, the legendary army scout, lawman, and gunfighter, was tried for murder in Beatrice (he was acquitted on a plea of self-defense). Clara Bewick Colby, Nebraska’s leading suffragette, was from Beatrice. In 1883, she founded the Women’s Tribune in Beatrice, which became the leading women’s suffrage publication in the nation. The town also gave America the movie actors Harold Lloyd and Robert Taylor.

Beatrice was still in winter’s grip that eventful Wednesday evening in March 1950. It was so cold that pastor Walter Klempel went early to the West Side Baptist Church on West Court Street to light the furnace before the 15 choir members arrived for practice. His task completed, he went home, planning to return to the church with his family when the choir members began to arrive. He knew they’d show up at 7:15 pm for practice at 7:20. They probably would not be late. Over the years a tradition of punctuality had arisen, because no one liked to sit around waiting for stragglers.

At 7:25 pm, the church blew up. Its walls exploded outward and the heavy wooden roof crashed straight down. The cause, fire experts said later, was natural gas leaking from a broken pipe, which was ignited by the flame in the furnace.

Windows in nearby homes were shattered and a radio station was knocked off the air. The blast was heard throughout the town, and citizens wondered in dread who had been injured or killed. It was certain to be someone they knew—a friend, a neighbor, a relative—because Beatrice is a small, intimate community where people know and care about one another. But when the townspeople scurried to the demolished church, they realized that something astonishing had happened; no one was hurt when the church exploded, because nobody was there. No one could believe it. A complete no-show at choir practice had never happened before. The fact that this occurred on the same night that the church exploded was uncanny.

Rational explanations didn’t add up. There was no bad weather, except for the cold, that might have prevented choir members from going to church that night. There were no competing events in town that might have lured them away. When a reporter from Life magazine showed up a few days later, citizens told him they believed 15 lives had been saved by “an act of God.”8

It wasn’t just the townspeople who marveled. The incident captured the attention of Warren Weaver, one of the 20th century’s foremost experts on probability theory. In his book Lady Luck: The Theory of Probability,24 Weaver used the Beatrice event as an example of a highly improbable happening. He calculated that the chance of all 15 choir members being late on this particular night was a staggering one million to one. The Beatrice incident also fascinated biologist and author Lyall Watson, who wrote about it years later. He placed the odds even higher, at one in a billion.9

When the event was reported in Life, one of America’s most popular magazines at the time, the country became aware that something extraordinary had taken place in tiny Beatrice. But, as always, memories gradually dimmed and the incident receded into the past. In the decades that followed, some critics who heard about the event dismissed it as a tall tale, an urban legend. But recently Snopes.com, the well-known Web site dedicated to investigating urban legends, probed the historical record and declared the story true. The sleuths at Snopes, like earlier investigators, were impressed by the sheer improbability that no one was harmed. Their report states, “It is impossible to calculate precise odds for all these events occurring at once. But past performance indicated that each person would be late for practice one time in four—producing a one-in-a-million chance that the entire choir would be late that night.”25

The citizens of Beatrice may have seen the hand of God in the event, but Weaver and other probability experts didn’t. For them, it was a chance happening, which by definition is meaningless, “just one of those things.” Highly unlikely events are bound to occur sooner or later, the experts contended. For example, even though the odds against dealing a perfect hand in bridge is 79 billion to one, some bridge player somewhere in the United States accomplishes this feat roughly every three or four years.

Yet, the Beatrice event seemed different from a perfect hand at bridge. For one thing, the stakes were not the same. The exploding church was a life-and-death situation in which 15 people could have been blown to smithereens but weren’t. Moreover, card dealers don’t have a choice in which order the cards fall, but the Beatrice choir members did have a choice whether to go to the church on time that night. This suggests that the incident was not a mindless, meaningless happening, but was somehow connected with the conscious—or unconscious—decisions made by the 15 tardy choir members.

When the reporters who invaded Beatrice began asking questions, they discovered that none of the choir members had any conscious premonition that a potentially lethal event was about to happen. They gave a variety of reasons why they didn’t show up on time, all of them mundane.

After lighting the furnace, Reverend Klempel, as mentioned, went home to dinner. When it was time for him to return to the church at 7:10 with his wife and daughter, a problem arose. His daughter’s dress was soiled, and the family was delayed while his wife ironed another.

When it came time to leave home that night, Royena Estes’s car would not start. So she and her sister called fellow choir member Ladona Vandergrift, who always arrived early at the church, to pick them up. But Ladona, a second-year high-school student, was doing homework and was absorbed in a geometry problem, which she stayed to finish.

Car trouble also sabotaged Sadie Estes. Her car had been acting up all day long, and that night it simply refused to start.

Harvey Ahl, a machinist, was taking care of his two boys because his wife was away. He intended on taking them with him to choir practice, but he got to talking and by the time he glanced at his watch he discovered he was already late.

Marilyn Paul, the pianist, took a nap after dinner. She customarily arrived 30 minutes early, but by the time her mother woke her up it was already 7:15. Although she tidied up and dressed hurriedly, there was no hope of getting there on time.

Mrs F.E. Paul, the choir director and Marilyn’s mother, was late on account of her sleepy daughter. She had tried to wake her daughter twice, and this made her late too.

Ms Leonard Schuster ordinarily arrived at 7:20 sharp with her daughter Susan in tow, but she was late because she had to go by her mother’s home to help her get ready to attend a missionary meeting.

Joyce Black, a stenographer, felt “just plain lazy” that night. It was cold outside and she stayed in her cozy house too long. She was about to leave when the explosion occurred.

Lathe operator Herbert Kipf usually arrived early but was tied up writing a letter that for some inexplicable reason he decided to finish before departing.

High-school students Lucille Jones and Dorothy Wood were neighbors who usually went to choir practice together. But Lucille dithered to listen to a radio program that wasn’t over until 7:30, making both of them late.

Were the probability experts correct in declaring the scenario meaningless? In taking this stand, they were relying on a venerable principle in science called Ockham’s razor, which says that the simplest explanation is always the preferred one. Putting God into the details, as the Beatrice populace did, complicates things needlessly and should not be done.

Yet, scientists do not uniformly share this view. Many mathematicians, for example, believe in Platonism, the doctrine that the objects of perception imitate or participate in an independent realm of immutable essences, ideas, or logical forms. According to this view, something behind the scene influences what we see and experience. If so, perhaps there was indeed a deeper meaning behind the absence of the choir members when the church exploded—what the citizens of Beatrice considered to be divine order, which resembles the Platonic realm of philosophers.

Truth be told, the scientific community and the townspeople of Beatrice shared more beliefs than either group realized. A survey of the religious beliefs of contemporary American biologists, physicists, and mathematicians was published in 1997 in Nature, one of the world’s leading science journals.26 Thirty-nine percent of them said they believed not only in a supreme being, but the sort of supreme being who would respond to prayers. The highest percentage of believers was among the mathematicians, which is especially interesting because mathematics is considered our most precise science.

There need not have been conflict between the explanations preferred by probability experts and the citizens of Beatrice. Even though the experts assigned a one-in-a-million likelihood to the event, this does not necessarily mean that it was nothing but a statistical fluke. For all anyone knows, the eternal, omnipresent Divine might choose to mediate an event such as this quite infrequently—perhaps as a warning shot across our bow of reality, designed to amaze, inspire, or wake us up. Who are we to use the frequency of any happening as an absolute criterion for denying the workings of the Almighty, for whom time and therefore timing may be irrelevant? Premonitions, then, may be a way in which the Almighty nudges human beings. This is not a stretch for many religious folk, who see in premonitions a biblical echo—those Old Testament prophets who foresaw all manner of things. For individuals of this persuasion, premonition may merely be a gussied-up term for what used to be called prophecy.

Scientists, statisticians, and probability experts have no “meaning meters” that can give them a direct readout of the intrinsic significance of any event. Many scientists, often very great ones, concede this. An example is Albert Einstein, who reportedly had a sign hanging in his office at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study that said, “Everything that counts cannot be counted, and everything that can be counted does not count.”27 Because meaning cannot be counted, measured, or calibrated, assigning meaninglessness to any happening is an arbitrary point of view.

Another example is Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), the founder of modern secular nursing.28 Nightingale was a genius who mastered the statistics of her day and pioneered their use in healthcare.29 She considered the regularities of statistics not as evidence of meaninglessness, but as a way in which the Divine revealed him/her/itself. As historian Lynn McDonald states, “Nightingale’s passionate commitment to statistics was based on her faith in a god of order, who created a world that ran by law. God’s laws could be known through research, as a result of which suitable interventions to better the world could be applied.”30 One is reminded of the observation a century later by Nobel physicist Paul Dirac that “God is a mathematician.”31, 32

Einstein’s sign, Nightingale’s views, and Dirac’s comment imply that the perennial dust-up between science and religion may not be as unbridgeable as both sides seem to believe. I want to emphasize this before exploring premonitions further. I hope Charles Darwin won’t mind if I cannibalize his comment about his incendiary book On The Origin of Species: “I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of anyone.”33 Just so, I see no reason why a discussion of premonitions should shock the scientific feelings of anyone, because there is a backlog of empirical evidence, as we’ll see, supporting premonitions, which has been virtually ignored by those who insist that these phenomena can’t happen.

But unfortunately, when the dust in Beatrice cleared, there remained a standoff between the hardcore skeptics who considered the citizens’ belief that “God did it” a silly superstition, and the locals who believed there was a higher meaning behind the event.

Setting aside the question of where they may have originated, I believe it’s likely that unconscious premonitions saved the skins of those 15 tardy choir members at West Side Baptist Church that night in Beatrice. Premonitions that are sensed upfront and consciously may tell a better story and make headlines, but it is in the delicate, faint traces of awareness that future knowing most commonly presents itself. Perhaps there are good reasons for this backstage presence. Premonitions are so vital for our existence that they may have become deeply engrained in our mind and body. They serve us silently, invisibly, and autonomously, like our breath and heartbeat.

Presentiment 

Researcher Dean Radin, cofounder of the Boundary Institute and senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, California, has found that our central nervous system senses and responds to future events.34 (I briefly discussed Radin’s findings in this column in the previous issue of Explore.35) Radin’s experiments demonstrate what he calls “presentiment,” which he defines as a vague, noncognitive sense that something good or bad will occur. His results may be the most serious challenge ever to the assumption that our consciousness is limited to the present.36

An impetus for Radin’s investigations was the experience of a friend of his who was fond of firearms. After cleaning his pistol and replacing the bullets, he would always leave the last or sixth chamber empty. However, after one particular cleaning he had a strong sense of foreboding. Yielding to this vague dread, he also left the fifth bullet aside. Several weeks later, in a drunken argument at his cabin, his father-in-law grabbed the gun and attempted to shoot him. Radin’s friend would probably have died had the fifth bullet been in its chamber. To this day, he keeps the bullet “with his name on it” in a safety deposit box.37

In his experiments, Radin took advantage of the well-known “orienting response,” which is displayed by an organism in a fight-or-flight situation. When humans face a crisis or fearful situation, there is a characteristic response of the autonomic nervous system: the pupils dilate, the brain waves alter, there is an increase in sweat gland activity, an increase in the heart rate, and blanching of the extremities as blood vessels constrict. These physiological changes make biological sense, because when we are in danger these modifications sharpen our perceptions, increase our physical strength, reduce the danger of external hemorrhage, and in general make it more likely that we’ll survive whatever threat we face.

Subjects in Radin’s experiment sat in front of a computer screen. On the subject’s left hand, Radin and his team measured three physiological responses that indicate physiological arousal: heart rate, the amount of blood in a fingertip, and electrodermal activity or skin conductance, which is an indicator of sweating. In their right hands the subjects held a computer mouse. When they pressed the mouse, the computer randomly selected an image from a pool of 120 high-quality digitized photographs that were of two types, calm and emotional. The calm photos were pleasant images of natural scenes, landscapes, and cheerful people. The emotional photos were disturbing, shocking, or arousing, such as erotic, sexual pictures and grisly autopsies. After the mouse was pressed, the computer waited five seconds while the screen was blank, and then showed the randomly selected image for three seconds. Then the screen went blank for five seconds, and this was followed by a five-second rest period. Then another trial would begin. Twenty-four subjects participated, viewing a total of 900 pictures. During the five seconds after the subjects pressed the mouse and the screen was blank, their electrodermal activity began to rise in anticipation of the subsequent photo—nothing surprising there. The stunning finding, however, was that the electrodermal activity increased more if the future picture was going to be emotional. In other words, the participants “preacted” to their own future emotional states before the emotional pictures were seen. Radin and colleagues38 called this a presentiment effect, meaning “a prior sentiment or feeling.”

In summarizing these studies, Radin states, “[These] physiological presentiment experiments…suggest that under certain circumstances we can consciously or unconsciously respond to events in our future, events that we have no normal way of knowing.”38

It is interesting that the two future stimuli that most aroused Radin’s subjects were photos that were sexual and violent in nature. This makes biological sense. If an organism were aware that sexual opportunity lay ahead, he/she could prepare to procreate; or if violence or danger were about to happen, he or she could prepare for it. This foreknowledge would be an advantage in meeting our evolutionary imperative, which is to stay alive and reproduce.

Kary Mullis, a Nobel Prize–winning chemist, became fascinated with Radin’s findings and decided to give the experiment a try. “It’s spooky,” he said “I could see about three seconds into the future. You shouldn’t be able to do that.”39

Dick Bierman, a professor of psychology at the University of Amsterdam, replicated Radin’s results, using the same photos.40 So have other researchers. Bierman says, “We’re satisfied that people can sense the future before it happens. We’d now like to move on and see what kind of person is particularly good at it.”41

Brian Josephson, a Nobel physicist at Cambridge University, says of these findings, “So far, the evidence seems compelling. What seems to be happening is that information is coming from the future. In fact, it’s not clear in physics why you can’t see the future. In physics, you certainly cannot completely rule out this effect.”42 Josephson is referring to the fact that the basic formulas that describe the physical world seem to work equally well forward or backward in time.

Those who confront these experiments for the first time often find them upsetting, shocking, or “spooky,” as Mullis put it. Somehow the body knows what’s going to occur before it happens; an effect precedes its cause; the present and the future appear to change places—all of which can cause “reality vertigo,” as one observer put it (S.A. Schwartz, personal communication, December, 2006).

I have had the opportunity to discuss these findings with researcher Radin. When I asked him how presentiment actually happens, he said he did not know. “This makes my brain hurt,” he confessed with a smile. Mine too.

Entropy 

Why are premonitions of disasters, tragedies, and death so frequent? Why not foreknowledge of job promotions or falling in love?

In his important book Opening to the Infinite, Stephan A. Schwartz, whose “Schwartzreport” column appears in each issue of Explore, discusses in detail remote viewing, a field he pioneered. Remote viewing is the acquisition of information about objects or events that are remote in space and/or time, bypassing inference and the use of the physical senses. Schwartz’s discoveries shed light not only on remote viewing, but also on premonitions, because the remote viewing of a future event is in essence a premonition. Both remote viewing and premonitions are expressions of nonlocal mind—mind operating outside the constraints of space and time.

Schwartz has taught thousands of individuals the skill of remote viewing. He finds that people are more adept at viewing certain types of images remotely than others. “They are particularly good at describing targets when some kind of energetic change [is] taking place,” he says. “[The] movement towards disorder is called entropy…. Things changing are in disorder. The higher the disorder, the more entropy”43(p104)—a Greek-derived word meaning transformation inside.

During a long series of remote-viewing sessions that Schwartz ran in the early 80s, one of the targets was a photograph of the USS Enterprise, the world’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. In several hundred remote-viewing sessions, this particular image was randomly selected 27 times by Schwartz to be the target image and was selected correctly by subjects 23 times. “Many targets were aesthetically more compelling,” says Schwartz. “Yet it became obvious there was something about Enterprise that made her special in remote viewing….”43(p105)

Why was this target so easy for viewers to describe? One thing the viewers commented on again and again in describing the ship was its nuclear reactor. This surprised Schwartz, a naval veteran who knows ships firsthand. How could civilians know that this ship was nuclear powered instead of petroleum fueled, simply by looking at a photograph with no caption? “Not that the viewers identified it as a reactor,” explains Schwartz, “…but they commented over and over on the energetic transmutation that was occurring within the ship—even though this was invisible in the target photograph. Typical comments: ‘There is a little star inside this target.’ Or, ‘Something very hot and fierce is inside this thing.’ Or, ‘It’s like a sun inside a metal box.’”

In the hundreds of sessions, only one other target evoked similar results—a commercial solar generating station in Arizona. The solar station was a tall tower with a boxlike structure at the top, onto which a large array of mirrors on the ground focused the sun’s rays, which turned water into steam. This energy transmutation captured the attention of the viewers with ease.

Nuclear physicist and consciousness researcher Edwin C. May, director of Cognitive Sciences Laboratory in Palo Alto, California, while doing research on remote viewing funded by the U.S. military, was occasionally asked to “look in” on suspected nuclear weapons–testing facilities, rocket tests or launches, or some other system requiring sudden, massive changes in energy.43(p107) Like Schwartz, he also found that these kinds of targets seemed particularly easy for viewers to describe.

The possible relevance of this finding to premonitions is striking. Consider the demolished church in Beatrice, Nebraska, in which a sudden change in entropy occurred as “the system” suddenly became highly disorganized—that is, destroyed—by a massive change of energy via the natural gas explosion. This impending entropic event appeared to be unconsciously grasped with 100% sensitivity, as all 15 of the potential victims steered clear of it.

Intuitions of imminent disasters exemplify the general principle that sudden disorder, such as a health crisis or a natural or manmade disaster, can trigger premonitions. One of the most dramatic examples of this pattern is the plethora of premonitions that were reported surrounding the terrorist attacks of September 11. These were highly entropic events involving crashing airplanes, jet-fuel infernos, falling buildings, and horrific loss of life. Many of these premonitions have been documented by Dr Sally Rhine Feather and Michael Schmicker in their fascinating book The Gift.44 For decades, the Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina, founded by the legendary J.B. Rhine, Dr Feather’s father, has served as a clearing house for reports of premonitions. Feather reports that September 11 generated the largest outpouring of premonitions ever received at the center related to a public, national catastrophe.44(pp165-181)

Premonitions of limited personal catastrophes also mirror sudden entropic transformations. Feather and Schmicker describe the forewarning of Amanda, a young mother living in Washington state. One night she woke up at 2:30 am from a nightmare so terrifying she aroused her husband and told him about it. She dreamed that a large chandelier that hung above their baby’s bed in the next room fell into the crib and crushed the infant. In the dream, as she and her husband stood amid the wreckage, she saw that a clock on the baby’s dresser read 4:35 am. The weather in the dream was violent; rain hammered the window and the wind was blowing a gale. On hearing her nightmare, her husband laughed, told her the dream was silly, and urged her to go back to sleep, which he promptly did. But the dream was so frightening Amanda arose, went to the baby’s room, and brought the child back to bed with her. She noted that the weather was calm, not stormy as in her dream. Amanda felt foolish—until around two hours later, when she and her husband were awakened by a loud crash. They dashed into the nursery and found the crib demolished by the chandelier, which had fallen directly into it. This time, her husband was not laughing. Amanda noted that the clock on the dresser read 4:35 am and that the weather had changed, with howling wind and rain. Amanda’s dream was cameralike, including the specific event, the precise time it would happen, and a change in the weather.44(p2)

Physicist May further tested the idea that entropy could be the information-carrying mechanism for successful remote viewing. He amassed a huge pool of target photographs and graded them according to the entropy present in the image and how it changed spatially across the photograph. This resulted in a spatial gradient for each image, a technical term for how change moved across the face of the photo, independent of the actual nature of the entropy itself.43(pp111,112) According to May’s hypothesis, it should not matter if the photo were of a nuclear-powered ship, an exploding church, crashing skyscrapers, or an earthquake. The rate of entropy change was the crucial thing.

So far, five experiments with remote viewers have been conducted to test this idea, four by May and one by a different researcher. All five confirm May’s hypothesis: the higher the entropy gradient, the better the remote-viewing accuracy. He found, too, that this correlation applied to different parts of the picture. People could correctly remote view certain components of the image and not others, depending on the entropy gradient involved.45, 46, 47, 48

May’s breakthrough idea may explain why people often have only partially correct premonitions. For example, many individuals had limited premonitions of September 11 in which planes exploded after flying into something, somewhere, at some time. It was primarily the entropic aspect of the event they saw—something going from an organized, stable state to chaos and disorder—not the specific time and place of the event.

These limitations are not absolute, however. Premonition prodigies—individuals who “get the whole thing”—do exist, such as Amanda in the above example of the crashing chandelier.

Numinosity 

A related concept involving premonitions is numinosity. Numinous is derived from Latin words roughly meaning divine power. It was coined by the German theologian Rudolf Otto in his 1917 book The Idea of the Holy.49 If something is numinous, it has a strong spiritual quality, a sense of being connected with “something higher” than the individual self. Over the years, numinous has come to mean something that has an emotional impact, extraordinary clarity, or special meaning for an individual.

Schwartz describes how numinosity captured the attention of remote-viewing researchers in the 1970s and 80s. Charles Honorton, of the Psychophysical Laboratory, then at Princeton University, was the first experimentalist to report that images that evoked strong emotional responses, such as those containing violent or sexual content, were quite easy for viewers to perceive remotely.48(p114) Researcher Caroline Watt, at Edinburgh University, also found that target images that carried an emotional wallop and that contained movement, novelty, and incongruity were also more likely to be identified as the distant targets in remote-viewing experiments.50 Although movement and change are part of May’s insights on entropy, emotional factors are not. So in addition to the idea of entropy in physics, an additional component that allows for numinosity should be added to our understanding of premonitions and remote viewing.

Meaning 

The best descriptor for this component may be meaning. In order to acquire information remotely, whether through premonitions or remote viewing, it helps if the target embodies some special meaning, some emotional significance and personal importance for the individual.

The central role of meaning in premonitions was exemplified in the life of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), the Swedish intellectual giant who mastered much of the learning of his day in fields as diverse as mathematics, philosophy, astronomy, mining, and economics. In the 1740s, when his reputation and fame were already established, Swedenborg believed “heaven opened to him,” resulting in visions in which angels conversed with him. As historian Brian Inglis51 describes, he was quite aware that these heavenly exchanges existed only in his mind, because no one else could hear them. And because they spoke his language, he reasoned that it was not really the angels doing the talking but himself, by interpreting them. No one could say that Swedenborg was going crazy, because his awesome intellectual powers persisted in a variety of fields.

Swedenborg’s visions involved verified facts. In one celebrated example, the widow of the Dutch envoy to Stockholm received a bill from a silversmith for a silver service her deceased husband had purchased from him. Her husband had been a very precise individual, and she was certain he would not have left a debt unpaid, but she was unable to find the receipt. Because the sum was considerable, she asked Swedenborg to intervene. His method was to consult the spirit of her dead husband. After conversing with it, Swedenborg told her the debt had been paid months prior to her husband’s passing, and that she could find the receipt in a secret compartment in an upstairs bureau where he kept his private correspondence. Accompanied by many witnesses, she did as instructed and found the compartment, whose existence was known to no one, and the receipt.51, 52

The philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) knew Swedenborg and was especially fascinated by the most famous example of his “second sight.” This event occurred one evening in 1759 after Swedenborg arrived in Gothenburg, having traveling from England. He went to the house of his friend William Castel, where around 15 guests were gathered. As Kant describes it, “About six o’clock in the evening Baron Swedenborg went out, and returned to the company pale and disturbed. He said that at that moment there was a terrible conflagration raging in Stockholm, and that the fire was increasing (Gothenburg lies 300 miles from Stockholm). He was uneasy and frequently went out. He said that the house of one of his friends, whom he named, was already laid in ashes; and his own house was in danger. At eight o’clock, after he had again gone out, he said joyfully ‘God be praised, the fire is extinguished, the third door from my very house!’ This information occasioned the greatest excitement in the company, and the statement was carried to the Governor the same evening…. [O]n Monday evening there arrived in Gothenburg a courier who had been despatched by the merchants of Stockholm during the fire. In the letters brought by him the conflagration was described exactly as Swedenborg had stated it.”

Kant was riveted. But, not wanting to be thought gullible, he asked a highly educated British friend, Joseph Green, who was traveling to Sweden, to verify the event, which Green did by talking to actual witnesses. Kant, who was famously skeptical, conceded there could be no doubt about the accuracy of Swedenborg’s vision. He wrote, “The…occurrence appears to me to have the greatest weight of proof, and to place the assertion respecting Swedenborg’s extraordinary gift beyond all possibility of doubt.”52

Meaning may have been why Swedenborg was spot on in describing the distant Stockholm fire so accurately. Not only was a high entropy gradient present in his vision, but it was his city, his friends, his home, and his family who were involved.

A New Openness? 

On November 18, 2007, The New York Times published an article with the startling title “Mind of a Rock” by journalist Jim Holt. Holt discussed the ancient idea of panpsychism, the doctrine that mind is ubiquitous in the universe, present in varying degrees in all things, from galaxies to subatomic particles and everything in between. Panpsychism has been rejected by science as arrant nonsense, suitable perhaps for poets and mystics, but not for anyone who is actually in full control of their rational faculties. In contrast, Holt suggested that, “[T]he universe is, and always has been, saturated with mind, even though we snobbish Darwinian-replicating latecomers are too blinkered to notice.”53

The fact that one of the most prominent newspapers in the world, which prides itself on its science section, published a discussion about whether rocks are conscious suggests that a new openness toward the nature of consciousness is at hand. We may be approaching the day when nonlocal ways of knowing, of which premonitions are an example, will be seen as innate skills of humans, rather than aberrations and illusions.

For years I’ve collected premonitions from medical professionals. I am convinced that hospitals and clinics are some of the most common settings for these experiences. From what we’ve seen about the role of entropy, numinosity, and meaning in premonitions, this is not surprising. I’d be honored if you’d share with me premonitions you’ve had.

Premonitions are not becoming the norm; they already are the norm. In our understanding of them, we are catching up with the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass, who said to Alice, “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”54