Category: Paranormal

When Larry Dossey was in his first year of medical practice, he experienced a week of premonitions about patients, all of which came true. He later became intrigued by patients who were blessed with “miracle cures,” remissions that clinical medicine could not scientifically explain.

Searching for an understanding of the interaction between mind, body and spirit, Larry Dossey embarked on a life-long study of religion, philosophy, meditation, oriental literature, parapsychology and quantum physics.

Today, he is a respected leader in bringing scientific understanding to spirituality and an internationally influential advocate of the role of spirituality in healthcare and wellness.

During his distinguished career as a practitioner of integrative medicine, he helped establish the Dallas Diagnostic Association and served as Chief of Staff of Medical City Dallas Hospital. The author of eleven books, including the New York Times bestseller Healing Words, he is executive editor of Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing.

Dr. Dossey has lectured all over world and at major medical schools and hospitals in the United States – Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and the Mayo Clinic, among others. A native Texan, he lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

In the following interview, Dr. Dossey introduces his latest book The Power of Premonitions: How Knowing the Future Can Shape Our Lives, taking readers through documented cases of premonitions, an examination of recent science, and practical techniques for inviting premonitions.

 

What’s your book about?

Larry Dossey (LD): Premonitions – knowing what’s about to happen.

What’s a premonition?

LD: “Premonition” literally means “forewarning.” Premonitions are a heads-up about something just around the corner, something that is usually unpleasant. It may be a health crisis, a death in the family, or a national disaster.

But premonitions come in all flavours. Sometimes they provide information about positive, pleasant happenings that lie ahead – a job promotion, where the last remaining parking place is, or, in some instances, the winning lottery numbers.

A favourite example of yours?

LD: Amanda, a young mother in Washington State, was awakened one night by a horrible dream. She dreamed that the chandelier in the next room had fallen from the ceiling onto her sleeping infant’s crib and crushed the baby. In the dream she saw a clock in the baby’s room that read 4:35, and that wind and rain were hammering the windows. Extremely upset, she awakened her husband and told him her dream. He said it was silly and to go back to sleep. But the dream was so frightening that Amanda went into the baby’s room and brought it back to bed with her. Soon she was awakened by a loud crash in the baby’s room. She rushed in to see that the chandelier had fallen and crushed the crib – and that the clock in the room read 4:35, and that wind and rain were howling outside. Her dream premonition was camera-like in detail, including the specific event, the precise time, and even a change in the weather.

Why are premonitions about unpleasant things? Why don’t we have premonitions about winning the lottery, the right stocks to pick, or when to bail out of the stock market?

LD: Most researchers believe premonitions are trying to do us a favour. They are mainly about survival. If you know that something life-threatening is approaching, you have a chance to avoid it. This would increase your chance of staying alive and reproducing – our evolutionary imperative. That’s probably why premonitions are often about threats to our existence, why they have become built into our biology, and why probably everyone has a premonition sense to some degree.

Why did you write this book?

LD: I actually tried not to write it. I largely ignored this stuff for years, but this didn’t work very well. My own experiences of premonitions grabbed me and wouldn’t let go.

During my first year in medical practice as an internist, I had a dream premonition that shook me up and made me realise the world worked differently than I had been taught.

Briefly, I dreamed about a detailed event in the life of the young son of one of my physician colleagues. It turned out to be so accurate it scared me. There was no way I could have known about the event ahead of time.

Then patients of mine began telling me about their own premonitions. Even my physician colleagues would occasionally open up and share their premonitions with me. So I decided this was a well-kept secret in medicine that needed telling.

The time is right for this book because science has come onto the premonitions scene. There are now hundreds of experiments that confirm premonitions, which have been replicated by researchers all over the world.

So there’s a new story to tell. It’s no longer only about people’s experiences, but it’s also about science. Many people still think this stuff is just mumbo-jumbo and that there’s no science to back it up. It’s the “everybody knows” argument – “everybody knows” you can’t see the future, so proof of premonitions cannot possibly exist.

That’s wrong. We now know we can see the future, because that’s what careful scientific studies show.

If people can see the future, why don’t they get rich playing the stockmarket?

LD: Some do. Bill Gates says, “Sometimes, you have to rely on intuition.” Oprah Winfrey says, “My business skills have come from being guided by my inner self – my intuition.” Donald Trump says in The America We Deserve, “I’ve built a multibillion empire by using my intuition.”

George Soros, the billionaire investor, has all sorts of theories to back up his decisions. But according to his son, “At least half of this is bull… [T]he reason he changes his position on the market or whatever is because his back starts killing him. He literally goes into a spasm, and it’s this early warning sign.”

Researchers have tested CEOs of successful corporations for their ability to see the future, such as predicting a string of numbers they will be shown later. The CEOs who are good at this are usually those who are also highly successful in running their corporations. In other words, their precognitive ability correlates with their corporate success. CEOs who did not have this ability tend to have mediocre success rates in their corporations. So business success and premonition ability seem to go hand in hand.

In one study, experimenters were able to predict in advance the most successful corporate balance sheets by how well the CEOs did on tests that measured their ability to predict the future, such as a string of numbers they’d be shown later.

This ability was not dependent on reason or logic or inference. You can’t “reason” and “analyse” what a randomly chosen string of numbers is going to be.

Interestingly, these CEOs were shy about owning their premonition sense. They didn’t call their abilities premonitions, but good “business sense.” The polite word for premonitions in business is “business intuition.” There’s a growth industry in teaching business intuition. Google “business intuition” and you’ll come up with nearly a half million hits.

Do premonitions work for people in business who are not CEOs?

LD: Yes. I discuss several experiments in which people used their premonitions to make large sums of money in the silver futures market. One of these experiments was featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

So what keeps people from getting rich?

LD: The limiting factor seems to be greed. When the subjects focused on making modest sums of money, the experiments worked; when they got greedy and tried to break the bank, the experiments flopped.

This reminds us of what happened on Wall Street beginning in the fall of 2008. Nearly all the pundits say the primary underlying reason for the crash was unbridled greed.

You talk about “evidence” for premonitions. But isn’t the evidence just anecdotes and people’s stories?

LD: This field used to be only about stories, but that’s changed. There’s now a science of premonitions. For the first time in history, we can now use “premonition” and “science” in the same sentence.

Take the “presentiment” experiments that have been pioneered by consciousness researcher Dean Radin. Briefly, a person sits in front of a computer, which will make a random selection from a large collection of images that are of two types – calming or violent. Calming images may be a lovely scene from nature; violent images deal with death, carnage, grisly autopsies, and so on. The subject has some physiological function being measured, such as the electrical conductivity of the skin or the diameter of the pupil. The bodily function begins to change several seconds before the image is randomly selected by the computer and shown on the screen. Here’s the shocker: the physiological change occurs to a greater degree if the image to be shown is violent in nature. How is this possible? How does the body know which image is going to be shown in the future?

Dozens of these studies have been done by various researchers. They show that we have a built-in, unconscious ability to know the future. Somehow the body knows before our awareness kicks in.

There’s a charming quotation in the book The Secret Life of Bees that captures this. Fourteen-year-old Lilly says, “The body knows things a long time before the mind catches up to them.”

Another type of experiment is called “remote viewing,” in which people can consciously know highly detailed information up to a week before it happens. These studies were pioneered at Stanford Research Institute and have been replicated at Princeton University and elsewhere.

How can we know when to take a premonition seriously?

LD: If the premonition is about your health or if it involves images of death, it’s wise to take it seriously. You might not get a second chance.

A patient of mine had a dream premonition of “three little white spots” on her left ovary. She feared this meant she had ovarian cancer. We checked it out. Her sonogram showed she was accurate; she indeed had three little “white spots” on her left ovary, but they were benign ovarian cysts, not cancerous. She did the right thing; she had a health-related premonition, and she checked it out.

If the premonition is extremely vivid – if it seems “realer than real” – take it seriously.

A cardiologist I know had a vivid dream that a patient of his had a stroke while he was doing a cardiac catheterisation, which was scheduled for the next day. He wondered whether he should cancel the study, but he told himself that dreams mean nothing and pressed ahead. The next day, while actually doing the catheterisation, his patient had a stroke in precisely the same pattern he dreamed. It shook him up and completely shifted his attitude about premonitions. Now he takes them seriously.

People can become very skilled in knowing when to take a premonition seriously. They develop a refined sense over time. Practice makes perfect.

What do your colleagues in medicine think about your book?

LD: Nearly all of them are supportive. I’ve discussed premonitions with hundreds of physicians in lectures at medical schools and hospitals all over the country. I was hesitant at first, thinking they’d all probably get up and walk out. The opposite happens. They open up and share their own stories.

Following a lecture at a Harvard-sponsored conference, one female internist told me, “I see numbers in my dreams – the actual lab values of my patients’ tests – before I even order them.”

Dr. Larry Kincheloe, an OB-GYN in Oklahoma City, knows ahead of time when his patients are going to deliver because he gets strange feelings in his chest when the time is near. It’s like an alarm goes off. This is so reliable that the OB nurses caring for his patients have learned to ask him how his chest feels, as a guide to when a patient will deliver.

This is like the presentiment experiments, in which the body knows something is going to happen and starts reacting before awareness kicks in. It’s a premonition in the form of physical symptoms.

Nurses have been very supportive of my ideas. They are more open to premonitions than just about anyone. They spend more time at the bedside than doctors do. Over the years, nurses often become very precognitive. Many of them say they “just know” when a stable patient is going to have trouble, such as a cardiac arrest.

The subtitle of your book is “how knowing the future can shape our lives.” How can it?

LD: Knowing the future can help you have a future. Premonitions are often about survival. They warn us of future dangers – health problems, impending accidents, disasters, and so on.

For example, research shows that people often avoid riding on trains the day they crash, compared to normal days. On days of the crash, the vacancy rate on the train is unusually high.

This type of premonition is usually unconscious. People don’t say, “The train is going to crash. I’m cancelling my reservation.” They usually report a vague sense that something is wrong or doesn’t feel right, and they find some reason to change their plans.

People may avoid doomed planes as well. The vacancy rate on the four planes that crashed on 9-11 was 79 percent. This suggests that lots of people found some reason not to travel on those planes that day. (We don’t know for certain what this means, however, because the airlines won’t release vacancy rates for travel on the same flights for the preceding months, so there’s no way to know for sure how unusual these high vacancy rates actually were.)

But perhaps the main way premonitions affect our lives is by giving us a different way of thinking about our own consciousness, our own mind.

I discuss experiments in which consciousness can operate both into the future and into the past. This suggests that time does not limit what our consciousness can do.

This raises the possibility that our consciousness is timeless. This opens up the possibility of immortality and the survival of some aspect of our consciousness following death.

Can we learn to have premonitions? Can we cultivate them?

LD: Yes. The main thing is not to try too hard. Premonitions usually come unbidden. They largely “do” us; we don’t “do” them. So the trick is to invite them, not compel them, into your life.

First, simply realise that these experiences are extremely common, and that it’s likely that you will experience them.

Second, keep a dream journal, because premonitions occur most frequently during dreams. Record your dreams as soon as possible on waking. Most people find that premonitions become more frequent when they do this.

Third, learn to quiet your body and mind. Sit down, shut up, be quiet, and pay attention. Some people call this meditation; others simply call it “getting quiet.” Research shows that skilled meditators perform better on premonition experiments than just about anyone. Meditation opens a door to premonitions and helps us notice them when they occur.

Fourth, read about premonitions. What are they like for other people? This will help you recognise your own premonitions, and when to take them seriously.

You say that most premonitions are unconscious?

LD: Yes. Most premonitions occur in dreams. Dreams by definition are unconscious. And many experiments show that people’s bodies react to future events even before they happen, without their being aware of it.

But if premonitions are largely unconscious, how can we make use of them?

LD: Premonitions don’t have to be a detailed snapshot of the future, of which we’re fully aware, to be helpful. They can be just a hunch or a gut feeling that we act on without consciously knowing why.

Some researchers believe unconscious premonitions are the most valuable kind.

If we unconsciously know something is going to happen, we can react without processing this information by thinking about it. Thinking takes time. In dangerous situations we need to act quickly, immediately, without wasting time through reason and intellectual analysis.

As a battalion surgeon in Vietnam, I knew many soldiers who swore they had some sixth sense that kept them alive by alerting them to danger. They’d react instantly without thinking, as if “on automatic.” I suggest they were using premonitions.

I discuss an event in which an entire group of church members were late for choir practice one weekday night at a little church in Beatrice, Nebraska. The church exploded, and would almost certainly have killed them had they been there. The odd thing is that none of them had any conscious premonition that the explosion would occur, but they stayed away nonetheless. Being late was an unconscious behaviour, and it saved their life.

This sort of behaviour is very common among mothers. They often have “just a feeling” their baby is headed for trouble, and they act on this impression without knowing why. The term “mother wit,” once very common, captured this idea.

Is there a downside to premonitions?

LD: Yes. Anything can be taken to extremes. I’ve known a few individuals who won’t make major decisions without consulting a psychic. They become slaves to somebody else’s premonitions about the future.

Premonitions can be false. The mind plays tricks – sometimes dirty tricks. Hallucinations happen. Just like we can have false memories of the past, we can have false impressions of the future.

So how can we avoid being misled by premonitions?

LD: It’s pretty simple. Premonitions are a single way of knowing the future, not the only way. Whenever possible – in non-emergencies – we should rely on multiple sources of information – logic, reason, and analysis, plus intuition, hunches, and premonitions. Multiple strands of information help guard against bad decisions. When we rely on only one source of knowing, we can get into trouble. This is common sense: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Skeptics say we can’t know the future. When we appear to do so, it’s just a chance happening. What about this?

LD: The skeptics have a point. No doubt some premonitions that seem to come true are nothing more than chance happenings or lucky hits.

But to say that all the billions of people throughout human history who have experienced premonitions that turned out to be valid are deluded seems highly unlikely.

Skeptics often single out examples of premonitions that are silly or nutty, then generalise to condemn all premonitions. This is irrational. Or they say that people have selective memories. They only remember the premonitions that come true, and forget those that don’t. This is simply not true; people often recall premonitions that don’t pan out.

But even if valid premonitions are statistically unlikely, as the skeptics claim, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are false. Many things that are rare are nonetheless real. It is extremely unlikely that any particular individual can run a four-minute mile. But a few people can. It’s unfair to use statistics to dismiss rare events.

Most skeptics are poorly informed. They simply ignore the experiments showing that people can sense the future, because these studies create huge holes in their arguments. Many skeptics will not be persuaded that premonitions are real, no matter how compelling the evidence is. Personal experience is probably the best argument against the skeptics of premonitions.

I give several examples in which a skeptical spouse profoundly disagreed about whether or not his or her partner’s premonition should be taken seriously. But when the premonition came true, the skeptical spouse came around to a different way of thinking. An example is Amanda’s precognitive dream that a falling chandelier would crush their baby in its crib. The husband dismissed it as silly. But when she removed the baby from the crib and the chandelier actually fell and demolished the crib, precisely as she had dreamed, her doubting husband changed his tune.

Cases like this suggest that the best evidence for premonitions is not argument or even experimental evidence, but personal experience.

OK, so there’s evidence that premonitions are real. It’s still mind-boggling. How could these things possibly happen?

LD: I agree that premonitions seem impossible – but only if we hold onto our common-sense beliefs about how the world works.

Most people believe that our minds are confined to the present and to the brain and body. To make a place for premonitions, we have to go beyond these core beliefs. True, it seems as if we’re locked into our individual brains and bodies and the present, but the evidence from hundreds of experiments shows that this is an illusion.

Scientists don’t really know what time is. We assume it flows in one direction, which prohibits premonitions. But no experiment in the history of science has ever shown that time flows in one direction, or that it flows at all. Alternative views of time are downright cordial to premonitions.

For example, physicists talk about “closed time-like loops” that can carry information from the future into the present. This is one way premonitions might work.

Others suggest that the future is already present, already laid out, in what is called a “block universe.” During premonitions, we might gain access to this already-present information.

Other researchers suggest that the mind is nonlocal, which is a fancy word for infinite. According to this idea, consciousness is present everywhere in space and time. This means that we have access to all the information that has ever existed or will exist – past, present, and future. This opens the door for premonitions.

These are all hypotheses, of course. The main point is that our common-sense ideas about time, space, matter, and our own minds are flawed. The universe works differently than we supposed.

In view of our ignorance, we need to stay open to the evidence for premonitions and not fall back into our prejudices, as when skeptics say, “Everybody knows premonitions are impossible.”

Often in science and medicine we know that something happens before we understand how it happens. Explanations sometimes come much later. So it may be with premonitions.

If I can see the future, doesn’t that mean it is already in place and is fixed? Don’t premonitions do away with free will and freedom of choice?

LD: No. Just because you glimpse how the future is likely to unfold does not mean you can’t act to change it. When Amanda dreamed that the chandelier fell and crushed her sleeping infant, she removed the baby from the crib. The chandelier did fall, but the baby’s life was saved. She exercised her freedom of choice, and it made a life-and-death difference. There are thousands of similar examples.

Philosophers often argue against premonitions because they say premonitions destroy freedom of choice. But people who have premonitions usually don’t see it that way. Like Amanda, their personal experiences with premonitions say they do have a choice. They can act, and they do, to change the future they’ve glimpsed.

I agree with the idea that the future is probable, not fixed. According to this view, the future is fluid and subject to change. So a premonition is not inevitable.

Probability varies, of course. This means that some futures may be easier to change than others. It was easier for Amanda to act on her premonition and remove her baby from danger than for an individual to prevent an earthquake she dreamed about. Some futures may be so probable they will happen; others, perhaps most, are malleable.

What’s the Big Lesson from premonitions?

LD: Premonitions are an incredible gift. Although they are an aid to our physical survival, their main contribution is in providing us with an expanded vision of who we are and what our destiny may be. They show that we’re more than a physical brain and body. Brains can’t operate outside the present or beyond the body. But our consciousness can, as premonitions show.

Premonitions reveal that we’re not slaves to the body or to the present. We can operate outside of time; something about us is timeless. The implications are quite wonderful, because they imply immortality. Not a small contribution.

Dr. Larry Dossey’s website is www.dosseydossey.com. The Power of Premonitions: How Knowing the Future Can Shape Our Lives is available from all good bookstores.
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This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue 9 (Sept 2009)

It is a little known fact that, prior to their occurrence, the Fatima apparitions were predicted on the pages of at least four of Portugal’s most prominent daily newspapers. In the Lisbon newspaper, Diario de Noticias (Daily News), they were predicted on March 10th, two months prior to the first apparition on May 13, 1917. In Porto’s most important newspaper of that time, O Primeiro de Janeiro (The First of January), a front-page story dated two days before the occurrence of the apparitions was published on May 13th. In addition, it has been confirmed that bulletins published on May 13th in two more Porto newspapers, Jornal de Noticias (News Journal) and Liberdade (Liberty), announced that something “big” would be happening on that date.

There are those who have pronounced these peculiar press releases to be part of a massive hoax, one perpetrated by the very parties that would ultimately benefit from the apparitions, presumably the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and devout adherents to the faith. We find this conclusion to be as unsatisfactory as it is trite. It simply makes no sense that a mystification of this nature, and on such a scale, would be announced in such a manner, in several daily newspapers.

An investigation into the origins and the content of these announcements suggests that they were what they appear to be, the work of two different self-described “spiritualist” groups of psychic individuals, located in the cities of Lisbon and Porto, both of which predicted that an event of historic significance would take place on that date. In one case, the prediction was made over three months before the events happened.

Both groups felt so strongly about their premonitions that they decided to document them (so as to later prove their accuracy) by publishing their statements in the national news. There is no evidence linking these two groups of psychics with the events of the apparitions themselves. No connection has been found between these psychic groups, who were from the cities, and the rural child witnesses of the Fatima apparitions. Nor, for that matter, is there any trace of involvement by any other organised “cabal” in relation to the actual events witnessed by the three young shepherds.

One of the only things absolutely clear about the mysterious apparitions of Fatima is that the unconventional, “psychic” methods by which these predictions about them were obtained are utterly offensive to conventional sensibilities. Atheists and devout Catholics alike disdain all things “psychic.” This stance lies at the heart of the confusion and controversy surrounding these curious news dispatches; it explains why the remarkable fact of the existence of these published predictions has languished in the twilight of neglect and obscurity for almost a century.

We are talking about separate predictions of an “impressive event” that would occur on May 13, 1917, published in the national press of Portugal. The existence of these published announcements is not a matter of religious faith. Though relating to Scripture and interpretations thereof, the fact that these predictions appeared in print remains incontrovertible, however inconvenient and uncomfortable this may be for many people to accept. Whether or not one believes in the Fatima apparitions, the truth remains that these events were prognosticated in the newspapers, and can be easily verified today.

The First Prediction

I felt a heat throughout my arm, up to my shoulder… I had the impression that they were trying to get my attention. Without knowing why, I picked up a nearby pencil and piece of paper. My hand began to write in a script that was not my own.
– Madame Keech

The description above refers to a particular extra-sensory or “psi” phenomenon, well known to devotees of the occult as “automatic writing.” But what is astonishing is that Madame Keech’s hand had achieved a truly remarkable feat that evening. She wrote the words of the message that she dictated from right to left and inverted, so that they could only be read by placing the note in front of a mirror. Wait a minute, when and with who did this happen?

In his booklet A Ray of Light on Fatima, published in 1974, Filipe Furtado de Mendonça describes the scene of this extraordinary event. He writes that on February 7th, a group of “spiritualists” was engaged in one of its regular meetings. This group included Carlos Calderon, a trance medium famous in Lisbon at the time. According to the tract, on this particular evening, one of the members of the group received a “message” by way of “automatic writing.” In the transcript, reproduced by Furtado de Mendonça together with facsimiles of the original pages of backwards script, we read that “one of the assistants (presumably that of Carlos Calderon) asked for paper and pencil and wrote automatically, from right to left, a message that could not be read unless it was placed in front of a mirror or bright light so that it could be read through the page.”

It was by this unconventional means that this group of psychics received three months’ notice that something transcendental, with far reaching implications, was to occur on the coming 13th of May. But the content and the concrete significance of this message were rather inscrutable. It read:

Judge ye not. He who would judge you would not be pleased with your prejudice. Have ye faith and be ye patient. It is not our custom to predict the future. The mystery of the future is impenetrable, though at times God permits a corner of the veil to be lifted over that which it covers. Have ye confidence in our prophecy. The day of May 13th will be one of great happiness for the good souls of the world. Have ye faith and be ye good. Ego Sum Charitas (“I am Love”). Always at your side shall ye have your friends, who will guide your steps and who will assist ye in your work. Ego Sum Charitas. The brilliant light of the Morning Star will illuminate the path. – Stella Matutina

As can be seen in the photocopy of the original script published by Furtado de Mendonça, most of the message was written by the same hand, from right to left, and backwards. The message is for the most part transcribed in Portuguese, except for two repeated expressions, “Ego Sum Charitas,” as well as the signature, “Stella Matutina,” both of which appear in Latin. The last phrase and the signature, however, appear to be written normally, requiring no need for a mirror in order to be read. In addition, it should be noted that apparently this last phrase was written in different handwriting.

It is no leap of faith to accept that this “automatic writing” session was in some way connected to the apparition events at Fatima, which, as predicted by the script itself, began on May 13th of that year. There is no other event in the history of that time and place that could be considered relevant or extraordinary enough to be identified as the occurrence that the gathering of psychics’ “revelation” referred to.

Furthermore, this group was motivated to put notices in the press about their experience, and well in advance of the events of May 13th. An examination of the script shows that this is not an anonymous message from an unidentified, disembodied “dead guy.” The signature, “Stella Matutina,” is actually quite pompous. Who is Stella Matutina? Over the centuries, the “Morning Star,” or “Stella Matutina” in Latin, has referred to Venus, as well as to the Virgin Mary.

In his book, Fatima, Antero de Figueiredo, unfamiliar with the “automatic writing” message described above, referred to Our Lady as “the Morning Star.” The alchemist Fulcanelli affirms, “the Celestial Virgin is still called Stella Matutina, the morning star,” because “it is c1ear to see in Her the splendour of a divine signal.”

For the millions of people around the world who believe that it was Our Lady, Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ, who physically appeared at Cova da Iria on May 13th, we cannot help but wonder how the undeniably miraculous existence of the published predictions of these historic apparitions has remained completely below radar. Why has there been no apologetic book, nor any ecclesiastical sermon, nor any Episcopal document, to take up an argument either for or against this circumstance? Is it because the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and the dominant culture characterise spiritism as a “pseudoreligious practice”? Would Our Lady use a means of communication refuted by the very religious hierarchy that venerates her? All of these questions are quite perplexing; they touch on so many suppositions that have been accepted during the almost nine decades since the Fatima incident occurred.

According to Furtado de Mendonça, “in order for there to be no doubt as to the veracity of the occurrence,” the group of psychics determined to set it down in the minutes of the meeting. It was also decided that a small announcement about the event should be published in the Diario de Noticias. If one views a copy of this newspaper from March 10, 1917, the announcement appears on page 4, column 13, with the headline “135917,” which indicates “13 May 1917.” As we all now know, it would transpire on that day that an apparition of a “Lady,” reportedly about three-and-a-half feet in height and appearing to be 15 years of age, would initiate the most important series of Marian apparitions of the 20th century.

The Message Received In Porto

The announcement in the March 19, 1917 edition of the Lisbon daily newspaper, Diario de Noticias, is by no means the only historic proof of a precognition of the phenomena that would visit Fatima. As it turns out, another group of psychics in Porto also received the same distinct foreknowledge that “something transcendental” was about to occur on the 13th day of May.

In fact, this prediction was not revealed in unimportant newspapers with small circulations, but in the editions of the major dailies of that city and, indeed, throughout Portugal – including O Primeiro de Janeiro (which at that time had the largest circulation in Northern Portugal), the Jornal de Noticias, and Liberdade – on May 13, 1917. On that day, these three newspapers (perhaps there were others) published a text dated two days previously, signed by a psychic named Antonio, a resident of Porto. The essence of his prediction was: “On the 13th of this month, there will occur an event, with respect to the war, that will strongly impress all the world.”

In the Jornal de Noticias, the treatment is that of a “Sensational Revelation,” written in bold black letters, with text relating the events of the world war to events occurring on the “Spiritual Plane.” In the other newspapers, the journalists make humorous commentaries. (As can be seen, psychic prophets were as unacceptable to the mainstream pundits of that era as they are to today’s professional skeptics).

In the newspaper Liberdade, it was said, with a tone of mockery, that on the 13th of May, something important “with respect to the war, of great transcendence and great consequences, would occur. If this does not take place, then the psychics and their material incarnation will be discredited!” The unsuspecting journalist had inadvertently read more into the posting than he professed. In addition, he revealed himself to be a prophet, in his own right, by adding his own words, “great transcendence and great consequences” to the posting, which is, in actuality, what did come to pass in the apparitions of Fatima!

A well-known journalist of the time, Guedes de Oliveira, who wrote for O Primeiro de Janeiro, commented in depth on the content of Antonio’s posting. In this newspaper, the revelation comes on the front page, under the headline, “Spiritualism.” It is an in-depth feature article, eerily commensurate with the magnitude of what eventually came to pass.

Guedes de Oliveira (Henrique Antonio, 1865-1932) is a personage whose biography can be read in the Grande Enciclopédia Portuguesa e Brasileira (Great Encyclopedia of Portugal and Brazil). An anticlerical Republican during the time of the monarchy, he was a dramatic writer, an award-winning and internationally acclaimed photographer, and the Director of the School of Fine Arts in Porto. He had a degree in architecture, and a house that he built still stands, inhabited by his descendants, in the town of Rio Tinto, where both a street and an alley were named after him.

After publishing the bulletin, as transcribed previously from the Jornal de Noticias, preceded by the words, “I have just received the sensational information,” the renowned journalist gave shape to the ideas that follow. We have taken an extract of his words and italicised certain portions, to highlight the strangeness of certain words, which appear to transcend the significance of the received message:

Today is the 13th and I do not know if, as of yet, our readers have set their compassionate eyes upon the words of the spiritualist, Mr. Antonio. The predicted event will have taken place and all of us will be so deeply impressed, as if an abyss had opened up beneath our feet. The intervention by those who exist beyond matter, in that which over the crust of the Earth is now occurring, cannot be of no consequence to us, and it is with true alarm that I receive this information from a zealous promoter of the truth. I never thought that we could be in such close communication with beings from another world.

Guedes de Oliveira confirms that he had received the magazine, Luz nas Trevas (Light in the Darkness), edited by a spiritualist group. Take note that the journalist never refers to the world war, as written in the news bulletin, but always to another event. He emphasises:

But now with the letter from Mr. Antonio, I confess that all I lack is the announced event, in order to also create a light in the darkness of my soul. What mysterious forces would these be who act upon terrestrial things, with their inexplicable influence? How are they able, for example, to levitate a cast iron table, without any physical contact?

Later on, in a postcard, Guedes de Oliveira expresses ideas, which are, at the very least, curious, and which we would judge improbable for someone with anti-clerical leanings to have written:

Is it not an accepted truism that the end justifies the means? Who tells me that this principle, so German in nature, waited until the 13th, which is today to manifest, as announced by Antonio, in a manner that will strongly impress all the world? What kind of table will we see raising itself?

Almost a century later, we see that the events of Fatima continue to “strongly impress all the world,” regardless of what belief or interpretation we project on them. “What kind of table will we see raising itself?” he asks. In the end, we did not see a table raise itself, although de Oliveira uses the term “table” in a figurative sense, preceded by the expression “kind of.” But on this day, in an obscure little village, we did, indeed, see an altar of world renown raise itself, “The Altar of the World,” as Fatima is popularly known.

Could this web of circumstances be the product of mere chance? Independent from the conjectures about the origins of the phenomena – and of the supposed and implied “agents” involved – could one possibly consider that this chain of events corresponded to a logic, which was ultimately informed and programmed, down to the tiniest details, by non-human “beings,” distinct from cultural representations of “disincarnate spirits” or the Marian model of Catholic thought?

We reflect on all of this – but always keep in mind our own “bias.” In any case, we feel comfortable conceding victory to the Lisbon psychics, who “channelled” a prediction of the events of May 13th. Their victory is of a kind that transcends simple acceptance or rejection, regardless of their subjective beliefs – and regardless of our feelings about their beliefs.

Adapted from Chapter 1 of Celestial Secrets: The Hidden History of the Fatima Cover-up by Joaquim Fernandes and Fina d’Armada.

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Around Christmas of 1992, a man named Gary Renard, living in the remote backwoods of Maine in the northeastern corner of the US, came out of a meditation to find two stylish, good-looking people, a man and a woman apparently in their thirties, sitting on his couch. He had never seen them before and had no idea of where they had come from.

“There was nothing threatening about them,” Renard would later recall; “in fact, they looked extraordinary peaceful, which I found reassuring. Looking back on the event I would wonder why I had not been more fearful, given that these very solid-looking people had apparently manifested out of nowhere. Still, this first appearance by my soon-to-be friends was so surreal that fear somehow didn’t seem appropriate.”

The man and woman called themselves Arten and Pursah. They said they were ascended masters who had come to teach Renard some lessons about life, the universe, and Jesus Christ.

So began a strange series of episodes that would continue off and on for the next nine years and would culminate in Renard’s first book, The Disappearance of the Universe, published in 2003. The story would grow stranger. Arten and Pursah soon identified themselves as later incarnations of the two disciples of Jesus that we know as Thaddeus and Thomas respectively. They began to tell Renard about the true nature of the teaching of Jesus, whom they call ‘J.’

The portrait of ‘J’ and his times as drawn by Arten and Pursah will be more or less familiar to readers who have some familiarity with the historical Jesus as unveiled by scholarship over the past 200 years. The Gospels were not written by Jesus’ disciples or indeed by anyone who knew him personally (the one exception, Arten and Pursah say, is Mark, who met the master as a small child). The Gospels, composed some forty to eighty years after Jesus’ time, contained some authentic sayings and deeds of his as well as many admixtures and alterations to suit the developing Christian theology. “Don’t you find it a little strange that not one complete original copy of J’s own words in his own language survived the rise of Christianity?” Pursah asks.¹ “Do you really think that was an accident?”

Pursah is of course right. There are traditions of early collections of Jesus’ sayings compiled in his native Aramaic, including Q (a lost source hypothetically used by Matthew and Luke), but none of these works have survived. The Gospels in the New Testament were all written in Greek. “Incredibly,” adds Pursah, “even the later Gospels were changed over the next few centuries. The ending of Mark was completely changed” – a fact that a reader can verify by looking in practically any contemporary version of the New Testament. The authentic text breaks off extremely abruptly at Mark 16:8. There are several alternate endings, none of which is believed to be authentic. The fact that Mark is regarded as the oldest and historically most reliable Gospel – and that this lost ending must have dealt with what Jesus did and said after his resurrection – makes this realisation all the more disturbing.

What, then, of the famous Gospel that is attributed to Thomas himself – the cryptic collection of sayings that first surfaced in complete form in 1945 as part of the Nag Hammadi scriptures? “You haven’t really read it, have you?” Pursah chides Renard. “Except for that time you browsed it in a bookstore – when you spent half your time looking at that beautiful woman down the aisle.” (This kind of banter characterises the dialogue between Renard and the masters, the result, they tell him, of his own sardonic sense of humour. “When you don’t need it, then we’ll no longer need it in order to get through to you,” Pursah says at one point.) According to Pursah, the Gospel of Thomas as we have it today is authentic, although it was left unfinished by Thomas himself, who was martyred in India, and it was supplemented later on. “What I will affectionately refer to from now on as Thomas is a Jewish-Christian Sayings Gospel that predated Gnosticism,” Pursah adds.

The reference to Gnosticism is significant because Thomas is generally regarded as a Gnostic Gospel, a text representing a movement of early Christians who believed that gnosis, or enlightenment, is the key to salvation. Thomas is not a Gnostic work, says Pursah. “Gnosticism was a combination of many earlier philosophies mixed in with some of the things J said or that people thought he said. Yes, you could certainly say that J had what might be described as Gnostic tendencies, but they were not all new. Some of them go back to archaic forms of Jewish mysticism.”

God “Did Not Create the World”

One of the chief points of similarity between J’s teaching as presented by Renard’s masters and that of the Gnostics is “that the world is very much like a dream and God did not create it…. God did not create duality and He did not create the world,” Pursah says. “If He did He would be the author of ‘a tale told by an idiot’, to borrow Shakespeare’s description of life.”

This is an uncomfortable idea even for the comparatively enlightened. A few days before writing this article, I was at a conference chatting with a woman who is extremely (and deservedly) well-known and admired in New Age circles. I remarked that I didn’t find this world particularly engaging and didn’t want to come back to it after this lifetime. “Come on!” she said. “What about the beauty and complexity of the universe?”

I said nothing, but Arten might have replied as he did to Renard: “As for the so-called beauty and complexity of the universe, it’s as though you painted a picture with a defective canvas and inferior paint, and then as soon as you were finished the painting started to crack and the images in it began to decay and fall apart. The human body appears to be an amazing accomplishment – until something goes wrong.”

The notion of a defective, unreal cosmos – what Pursah calls “psycho planet” – created by someone or something other than the true, good God, should be familiar to anyone who has explored Gnostic thought. But the ideas of Arten and Pursah also bear more than a faint resemblance to those in A Course in Miracles, and in fact the pair urge their pupil to obtain a copy of this work and study it seriously.

A Course in Miracles

A Course in Miracles, while familiar to many students of esotericism, remains a mysterious and elusive document. Its story is by now comparatively well-known. It was begun in 1965 when a New York psychologist named Helen Schucman heard an inner voice telling her it would dictate “a course in miracles” and that she should take notes. She complied (with some reluctance), and over the next several years took down material that would amount to some 1,200 printed pages, including a Text, a Workbook containing 365 daily lessons, and a Manual for Teachers.

With the help of her colleague, Bill Thetford, and an editor named Kenneth Wapnick, Schucman prepared the Course for publication. It first appeared in 1975, and since then has sold more than a million and a half copies. Despite this grassroots success, the Course has been given short shrift by conventional theologians. But then the circumstances of its transmission make it unlikely that the Course would be accepted in conventional circles, since the voice that dictated the material to Helen Schucman claimed to be that of Jesus Christ, correcting 2,000 years of misrepresentation of his teaching. Arten and Pursah say that the Course is genuinely the work of Jesus, and most of The Disappearance of the Universe consists of their attempt to explain the central concepts and practices of the Course.

To begin with, the Course asserts, the world is not real because it was not created by God: “There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempts to teach.” The world we see, the physical world of suffering and loss and change, is the result of a primordial separation from God – or rather, a belief that separation from God is possible. The Course says, “Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects.”

Pursah expresses the same idea in this way: “For just an instant, for just one, inconsequential fraction of a nanosecond, a very small aspect of Christ appears to have an idea that is not shared by God. It’s kind of a ‘What if’ idea…. the question, if it could be put into words was, ‘What would it be like if I were to go off and play on my own?’ Like a naïve child playing with matches who burns down the house, you would have been much happier not to find out the answer to that question,” because it would mean that our primordial innocence would be “seemingly replaced by a state of fear and the erroneous, vicious defenses that this condition appears to require.”

Here the Course diverges from classical Gnosticism. For the Gnostics, this world was fashioned by an inferior, arrogant pseudo-god whom they called the Demiurge (from the Greek word for ‘craftsman’ or ‘creator’). For the Course, the world began with a ‘tiny, mad idea’, which is the ego – the stance the fallen Son of God (which is each of us) takes in his deluded belief that he can exist apart from the Father. The apparently “real effects” include the physical world and the body itself, the “hero of the dream.”

According to the Course, the world is not fashioned by a Demiurge or a second-rate creator God (sometimes identified with the God of the Old Testament) who exists ‘out there’ in the metaphysical stratosphere. It arises out of the ego, out of what is apparently the most intimate, personal aspect of the self. Some of the Gnostic texts characterise the Demiurge in a similar way. The Apocryphon of John says of him: “And he is impious in his madness which is in him. For he said, ‘I am God and there is no other God beside me’, for he is ignorant of his strength, the place from which he had come.”

There is a curious and elusive crux here. Many investigators of Gnostic thought, including the psychologist C.G. Jung, have taken its mythology at face value: they have thought that the Gnostics believed their own myths. But it is possible that the Gnostics were not so naïve, that they were expressing truths about the human condition, but were doing so in mythological language. This would mean that the Gnostic texts are not to be taken at face value. They express certain spiritual and psychological insights that are not explicitly spelled out but which the Gnostic masters understood and explained to their pupils much as Arten and Pursah do with Gary Renard. This is a highly speculative conclusion, but we see a similar approach with contemporary Tibetan masters, who often teach by expounding highly compressed and cryptic texts to their hearers.

In this case, the Demiurge is not merely an improbable conception of God but a sharp and accurate portrait of the principle of egotism in ourselves. The ego, like the Demiurge, says “I am God, and there is no other.” Paradoxically, this very assertion shows that it is “ignorant” of its strength, “the place from which it had come” – the divine reality.² This interpretation would bring the import of the Gnostic texts far closer to the Course.

If God did not create the meaningless world we see, if there is no ultimate reality to the ego or to its chief creation, the body, then the only appropriate response is to look past these illusions. It’s no coincidence that the Course speaks of laughing at the “tiny, mad idea” of separation.

The Course also teaches that the only sane response to any form of madness in the world is to forgive it. The Course thus takes one of the chief precepts of the Gospels – forgiveness – and elevates it to a status that it does not have and cannot have in mainstream Christianity. If, as the latter teaches, the world does have a genuine ontological reality, then the evil in it is also real. Forgiveness then becomes a kind of favour bestowed upon the unworthy – an attitude that the Course calls “forgiveness-to-destroy.” By contrast, the Course teaches the undoing of the illusory phenomenal world by literally overlooking it, by seeing past its appearances to what the Course calls the “real world” underneath. This “real world” does not exist in some millennial future; it is present now, in the “holy instant.”

This is the central idea that Arten and Pursah try to teach their pupil. Forgiveness undoes the ego by undercutting its foundation – the belief in this reality of separation and isolation. Renard’s masters stress that only what God has created is real. Since God did not create this world, it is not real. Nor, for that matter, is the body; it is utterly insignificant. The crucifixion and resurrection of Christ himself were originally intended to illustrate this very point. Consequently, everything from minor gaffes to the most apparently heinous atrocities are to be greeted with one response: forgiveness.

Entwined with forgiveness is the need for a total and complete release from fear. Fear, according to the Course, is a delusion creation by the ego. Having imagined that it is separate from God (which is impossible in reality), it incurs an enormous sense of fear for having rejected God, and we identify with this fear. As Pursah expresses it:

‘Don’t you know what you’ve done?’ – the ego asks in our metaphysical story – ‘You’ve separated yourself from God! You’ve sinned against Him big time. You’re in for it now. You’ve taken paradise – everything He gave you – and thrown it right in His face and said, “Who the hell needs you?” You’ve attacked Him! You’re dead!’

But since none of this happened in actuality, God is not angry at us and there is no reason to fear. Fortunately, the instant that the “tiny, mad idea” of separation occurred, God produced an answer: the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is, in the Course’s theology, the aspect of God that is aware both of the divine reality and of the world of suffering and separation in which we think we live. To heal our minds, individually and collectively, we must turn them over to the Holy Spirit and let him guide them completely. One of the chief ways to do this is to apply forgiveness in any and all situations, not as a gesture of condescension or noblesse oblige, but as a result of a profound recognition that none of this ever really happened. Forgiveness is justified because there is no sin and no guilt and no reason to fear. We are like a child who is suffering a nightmare of horror although it remains safely in bed under the care of a loving parent. The fact that we can begin to hear the voice of the Holy Spirit – the call to forgiveness – is a sign we are awakening.

This, at any rate, is a brief sketch of the Course as presented in The Disappearance of the Universe. It raises any number of questions, the most obvious being the nature of this strange revelation. Are we to take it at face value? Are we to believe that these beings, entities who were once disciples of Christ, materialised on someone’s couch somewhere in the Maine woods? The story becomes still harder to credit when we learn that Renard himself is both Thomas and Pursah: he was Thomas in a previous life (which he does not remember) and Pursah is his own last incarnation who will come in the future. Because time is part of the delusory fabric woven by the ego, it has no reality and can be elided or transcended.

The most evident fact about these claims is that they are impossible for us to verify. There is no way of either proving or disproving that Gary Renard experienced such visitations from alternate realities. The skeptic may deny this possibility, but he could only do so on the basis of common-sense reality, and we know (even if we did not have the Course to remind us) that common-sense reality is a great deal less substantial and consistent than we like to pretend. Renard taped the sessions with Arten and Pursah, but he destroyed the tapes after writing the book. Even if he hadn’t, all we would have would be recordings of Renard conversing with a man and a woman, which would prove nothing to doubters.

What, then, about the factual accuracy of what the masters say? Their conversations with Renard extend far beyond the Course. They claim, for example, that Mary Magdalene was the wife of Jesus. Arten points out: “By Jewish law at that time a person’s dead body could only be anointed by their family members, and if you look in your New Testament you’ll find that even though J’s body was no longer there, Mary Mag’dalene [sic] was allowed to go to the tomb in order to anoint it. What should that tell you?” We also learn that Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, was the real author of Shakespeare’s works and that the world came close to nuclear holocaust on September 25, 1983, when Russian computers mistook the glints of light reflected off some clouds for attacking American missiles. A counterattack was launched and failed to occur only because an otherwise unknown officer named Colonel Petrov decided it was a mistake and called it off.

Curiously, the only one of these particular claims that it’s possible to verify is the last. Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was monitoring incoming satellite data on September 26, 1983 (not September 25, as Renard’s book has it) when he received signals indicating that the Americans were launching a nuclear attack. “I had a funny feeling in my gut,” Petrov later recalled. Correctly betting that the signal was a computer error, he made a historic decision not to inform his superiors. As The Daily Mail wrote, “Had Petrov cracked and triggered a response, Soviet missiles would have rained down on US cities. In turn, that would have brought a devastating response from the Pentagon.” Instead of treating Petrov as a hero, his superiors interrogated him relentlessly and retired him on a pension that later became almost worthless.³

Other claims are far more tenuous. The Earl of Oxford has been put forward as the true author of Shakespeare’s works, but most scholars are not convinced. As for Mary Magdalene, various sources have claimed that she was Jesus’ wife, but again the evidence (despite The Da Vinci Code) is highly questionable. But if such assertions cannot be proved, they cannot exactly be refuted either.

One thing, however, can be stated more or less conclusively. The ideas in The Disappearance of the Universe, whether they were generated by Gary Renard or by his masters or by someone else, reveal a profound and highly accurate knowledge of A Course in Miracles. Indeed this book was apparently intended as a correction for the many misinterpretations of the Course that have often been put forward even by its admirers.

As a matter of fact, the Course has not been well served by its popularisers, who have tended to present it as a bland update of the American gospel of positive thinking rather than as a rigorous, difficult, but highly powerful means of spiritual development. This point, made mildly in The Disappearance of the Universe, is stressed much more sharply in its 2006 sequel, Your Immortal Reality, where Arten tells Renard, “Including yourself, you could count on two fingers the number of people who are out there on the road accurately teaching this message.” (The other is Kenneth Wapnick.) This rather harsh assessment has provoked a certain amount of hostility to Renard among a number of prominent American teachers of the Course – who are not always as pacific as one might imagine – but there is some truth in the claim.

We then face the question of whether the Course itself is authentic. Whether or not Jesus dictated it to Helen Schucman is impossible to determine. How could we evaluate the origins of an inner voice inside the head of a woman who has been dead for over twenty-five years? (Schucman died in 1981.) Nor can we make much headway by comparing the Course to conventional Christianity or for that matter the Gospels. Even the most conscientious scholars have admitted that there is an immense chasm separating Christ from Christianity and that the Gospels themselves are highly questionable as historical sources.

Despite these ambiguities, the Course remains a remarkably powerful and sophisticated (though not exactly flawless) tool for awakening the consciousness. As D. Patrick Miller, the publisher of the first edition of The Disappearance of the Universe, remarks, “The authenticity of the Course has been verified for me because it works, creating positive and dramatic change in my life and the lives of many others whom I’ve met and interviewed – but not because it purports to have a divine source.”

In cases like these, I have found it helpful to remember an esoteric maxim: Neither accept nor reject. If we can free our minds even from the dichotomy of truth and falsehood, we may be able to open them to dimensions that surpass the yesses and nos of the world we know. This may be partly what Arten and Pursah mean when they tell us the reality of the universe is nondual.
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Further Reading & Study

The website for Gary Renard: http://www.garyrenard.com

The Course in Miracles

Forbidden Faith: The Secret History of Gnosticism by Richard Smoley

Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition by Richard Smoley

Secrets Of The Immortal: Advanced Teachings from A Course in Miracles by Gary Renard

Footnotes

1. Emphasis here and in other quotations is from the original.
2. For further discussion of affinities between the Course and Gnosticism, see my book Forbidden Faith: The Secret History of Gnosticism.
3. See David Hoffman, “I Had a Funny Feeling in My Gut,” The Washington Post, Feb. 10, 1999, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/coldwar/shatter021099b.htm; Dec. 4, 2007. I am indebted to D. Patrick Miller for drawing my attention to this fact.

 

Bibliography

A Course in Miracles. Three volumes. Tiburon, Calif.: Foundation for Inner Peace, 1975.

Gary R. Renard, The Disappearance of the Universe. Berkeley, Calif.: Fearless Books, 2003.

Gary R. Renard, Your Immortal Reality: How to Break the Cycle of Birth and Death. Carlsbad, Calif.: Hay House, 2006.

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.