The Premonition Code Quotes

“The thing is, your unconscious mind is smart. There’s usually a reason when absolutely nothing at all comes up; having absolutely no feelings, thoughts or sensations is actually a very unusual state. Your mind has to try hard to make that happen. So, if it keeps happening, this might suggest that controlled precognition is not for you, not right now at least. Your unconscious mind, particularly your superconscious or what we call your “higher self”, might know that getting involved in controlled precognition would be destabilizing for you. Likely because you would learn about parts of yourself that are not great for you to access without some kind of safe help. So maybe it’s saying “no” in the way it knows how to do that. This is fine, and you should listen. If you still want to pursue controlled precognition, seek a mental health professional that you trust and start exploring what might be hiding in your subconscious. Odds are, once your unconscious mind feels like controlled precognition is safe for you, you’ll come back to it and it will be much better for you and less destabilizing than it would have been before seeking help. Usually, however, the problem is the reverse: so many seemingly random images, thoughts and sensations come up that people feel overwhelmed and end up with garbage in their controlled precognition sessions. That’s why the six-step controlled precognition protocol was created, so you can learn to carefully perform controlled precognition, learning to weed out the fantasy thoughts and concentrate on those impressions that are delivered to you without further elaboration by story telling. What if I don’t remember any of my dreams? That can happen for many reasons. One is that you might have had a traumatic experience, and you might not be ready to re-live it in your dreams. If this is the case, I would say don’t worry about remembering your dreams. You can use controlled precognition to sense the future, and if you want to work with a mental health professional to work through the trauma to make it safe to remember your dreams, then you can do that independently. If you’re sure you want to remember your dreams, here’s a list of things to try. When we’re lucky, life is long … try them all! • Write down your dreams every morning, and when you don’t have any, write down, “I don’t remember my dreams right now, but I might later. And if I do, I’ll record them.” That gets you in the daily habit, and it sets an intention that tells your subconscious that you’re ready to start remembering dreams. • Make sure you get enough vitamin B-6, found in eggs, nuts, vegetables, wholegrains and milk, as it seems to enhance dream clarity as compared to a placebo. • Try to go to bed at a time that feels good to you. • Turn off wi-fi at night in your house, if you have a router. • Don’t look at any screens within one hour of going to bed.”
― Theresa Cheung, The Premonition Code: The Science of Precognition, How Sensing the Future Can Change Your Life

“When it comes to an internal sense of truth, what develops for some Positive Precogs could be called faith, and for others a sense of awe and humility in the beauty of the universe. Regardless, this internal sense of truth is not at odds with actual reality. It is just a very personal way of understanding and being in relationship with the universe. But wait, weren’t we talking about health and wellbeing? Yes! So why all this talk of self-transcendence? Well, that’s because the two are intricately linked. Having experiences of self-transcendence are directly related to your health and wellbeing. People who more regularly work toward something beyond themselves, who connect authentically with others, and who have an internal sense of truth – in other words, people who score higher on a scale of self-transcendence – have better physical health and more positive moods.c In fact, psychiatrists feel that self-transcendence is so important for wellbeing that the World Psychiatric Association released a statement in September 2015 asking all psychiatrists and psychological professionals to discuss spiritual, religious and self-transcendent ideas and experiences with their patients.d This recommendation has thus far been slow to catch on, as is any major change in protocol. Yet it is clear that many people would be better off with mental health professionals who were aware of the benefits that self-transcendence can bring to wellbeing.”
― Theresa Cheung, The Premonition Code: The Science of Precognition, How Sensing the Future Can Change Your Life

“Selftranscendence involves working toward something positive that is larger than yourself and your individual concerns, connecting with others in an authentic way, and fostering an internal sense of truth. Moving beyond yourself is a natural outcome of the shift in your sense of self that we have already talked about – you will naturally see the connections between yourself and others. Working toward something positive that is larger than yourself follows easily – once you are clear about the connections between yourself and others, it is so much easier to see how the wellbeing of others affects your own.”
― Theresa Cheung, The Premonition Code: The Science of Precognition, How Sensing the Future Can Change Your Life

“we included a section about scientist Bruce Damer’s experiences as a child? In one of the stories, his “future selves” appeared and he asked them to sign a contract to only send positive energy back in time. As you keep track of your spontaneous precognitive experiences or if you pursue controlled precognition as a practice, this kind of thinking will become commonplace. In other words, you will start to think of yourself as not just this version of your body that exists right now as you read this, but instead, as all past and future versions of your body and mind. As a result of this shift, your sense of self can feel more permanent and connected in both time and space. Imagine a line drawn through time, where each point in the line is wherever you have been and wherever you will be, from birth to death. Physicists call this your “world line” – the map of your entire existence in space and time. Similar to this world line, as you become more comfortable with your own precognitive experiences, you will probably start to include your past and future selves as part of your definition of yourself. This is a reasonable response to having first-hand experience with accessing information from the future. It doesn’t mean you always know what your future self will do, or that the future is necessarily determined at the present moment. But thinking of yourself as all of yourself – through time and space – is a shift that is likely coming your way as you continue your training as a Positive Precog. Fortunately, connecting with yourself in this way is likely to make you more compassionate with yourself (the “C” in the REACH principles) – and, as a result, more compassionate with others (also the “C” in the REACH principles). In addition to embracing connections in time, this shift in your sense of self will probably also embrace connections in space. That’s because, as you practise controlled precognition, you’ll notice that not only are you able to sometimes perceive uncannily accurate information from the future, but also this information can be from locations that are distant. You might end up thinking about these connections in space like the Iroquois, a Native American Indian tribe, have done. They speak of a long body. Your long body would include your mind, your body, the minds and bodies of people with whom you have relationships, the tools you use, and the places you live.a Again, this feeling of connection can be very positive. Any feelings of compassion you have for yourself as a result of extending your sense of yourself over time will also extend to those in your long body. And guess what? When compassion is passed around to others, it turns out that the originator of the compassion is more resilient to stress.b That brings us nicely to the changes you can expect in health and wellbeing as a result of your Positive Precog practice.”
― Theresa Cheung, The Premonition Code: The Science of Precognition, How Sensing the Future Can Change Your Life

“REACH” PRINCIPLES • Respect for the unknown • Ethics in our use of precognition • Accuracy of our precognitive skills • Compassion for ourselves and others • Honesty in all our dealings How to truly practise the REACH principles How can James or anyone in an unsupportive environment practise the REACH principles? It’s an important question to ask – not just for James, but for anyone who has already run into disorientation or destabilization as a result of their spontaneous precognitive abilities. We have heard from some of these people, and they tend to be desperate to control their abilities so they do not feel like “freaks” at the mercy of their gift. As we explore what James could do, we are also exploring what anyone could do to turn their relationship with precognition in a positive direction if they feel it has become disorientating for them. The first change would be to take a thorough inventory of your relationships – are they supportive of who you are and the gifts you have to offer? If not, the first change you need to make is to find one or two people whom you trust, and talk with them in confidence about your practice of controlled precognition. Tell them about your intention to be a Positive Precog and share with them what that means to you. Tell them why it is important to you to try out your gifts in this area. This will be a different conversation for each person, but the basic idea is that you need a few people in your life who accept and love you for who you are, especially when who you are is someone who has something controversial to offer. If precognition is a big part of your life, you need to tell them about that. You can expect three responses – scepticism (from science-minded people who haven’t read the literature about precognition or don’t believe it), concern (from people who fear you are messing with things you don’t understand), and support (from people who are open enough to support what you are interested in). Dealing with scepticism is easy – don’t try to convince anyone. Just let them know that controlled precognition is important to you, you feel that it is likely to be real, and you would like their support in trying this out. If they don’t support you, move on to the next person. Concern is a little tricky, because anyone concerned about you is already in your corner, so that’s a start. But if their concern is so great that they can’t be supportive, consider thanking them and moving on to the next person. Your goal is not to find someone who agrees with you about precognition, but someone who is supportive of you pursuing controlled precognition responsibly.”
― Theresa Cheung, The Premonition Code: The Science of Precognition, How Sensing the Future Can Change Your Life

“Step 2: Reverse the polarity In this step, you write down an intention that supports you in “reversing the polarity” – shifting the focus from acting to receiving. For so much of our lives, we are in a “doing” mode. We feel we need to take action to get things done, and of course in many cases action is the only way forward – but not always. Sometimes we have to reverse the polarity and just receive. This is one of those times. The idea is first to reverse the usual polarity of making effort in your daily life and thinking you are in control of the outcome. Next, replace that habit with receptivity to whatever appears. This “reverse the polarity” practice is the essential next step in a controlled precognition session, because it allows your superconscious or higher self to communicate with your conscious mind. At first, it isn’t always easy to “let go” and enter a receptive mode, so it works best to create an intention designed to help you reverse the polarity. This intention should also contain a summarized version of the Higher-Self Handshake (Chapter 4). Go ahead and write down this combined intention, right under where you wrote about your mental and emotional state. I am letting myself go into receiving mode to receive exactly the right information about the target during this controlled precognition session. I allow my conscious mind and my higher self to do exactly their correct jobs and only their correct jobs.”
― Theresa Cheung, The Premonition Code: The Science of Precognition, How Sensing the Future Can Change Your Life

“To be reasonably convinced that genuine precognition has occurred in your daily life, you would need to meet all of the following criteria: • Two or more correspondences between the precognition and the event. • A reasonably short delay (less than two weeks) between the precognition and the event (more than two correspondences between the precognition and the event should be required for longer delays). • No way of predicting or causing the event yourself in the normal course of your daily life, even using your unconscious mind. • Extra credit if you record the experience before the event occurs (so you don’t fool yourself with false memoriesh).”
― Theresa Cheung, The Premonition Code: The Science of Precognition, How Sensing the Future Can Change Your Life

“And, 37 years later, in 2013, his breakthrough moment came in another thought experiment, which revealed a system of cycling protocells capable of evolving but also sharing innovations, thereby able to lift ever more complex forms into being. Was this vision simply a motivation for his life’s work, driving him on for decades? Or was it a precognition sent by his future self or from some other mysterious time-shifted source? However you might interpret it, a causal temporal loop seems possible. A clue to this loop came from another point in the interview when Dr Damer told Dr Mossbridge that he had had an even earlier vision, suggesting that future versions of himself were able to communicate back through time. When he was about to turn ten, he wanted to mark that milestone, so he went on a long walk in his neighbourhood. He found himself at the edge of a slough, and asked, “What could I do right now that would have a really positive effect on my future?” Suddenly a vision opened up in his mind’s eye, a line of all his future selves extending to the horizon. They were all busy doing slightly different but interesting things. He felt pleased and began to look forward to this future. Showing remarkable maturity and awareness, the young Bruce decided it would be a good idea to make a deal with these future selves, then and there. He asked them to agree to a written contract, which he held up on an imagined piece of paper. It said: “You will all agree to not send negative thoughts back to the prior, littler selves because they did their best at the time.” One after the next, the future selves each “signed” the only-positive-thoughts contract. Once this was completed, he described experiencing a rush, a sort of force pulling on him as all the doors to the future swung open. He then saw his future path as one flowing, forward movement with no turbulence returning back down to his present. Given this earlier experience, it’s no surprise that just four years later he experienced receiving a clue from the future, setting his life’s work. From a very young age, Bruce felt he was in communication with his future selves and that he also possessed an intimate relationship with some kind of bigger, guiding system. This gave him an abiding sense that his life’s path was somehow mapped out through his intentions toward destinations lit by delivered visions. We don’t all have to have visions like Bruce Damer’s to connect with our future selves or to develop our precognitive abilities. Each of us will do this in our own way, as we discuss in detail in Part 2. But Dr Damer’s experiences illustrate just how incredibly powerful it can be to take seriously messages and visions that seem to come to us from the future.”
― Theresa Cheung, The Premonition Code: The Science of Precognition, How Sensing the Future Can Change Your Life

“And, 37 years later, in 2013, his breakthrough moment came in another thought experiment, which revealed a system of cycling protocells capable of evolving but also sharing innovations, thereby able to lift ever more complex forms into being. Was this vision simply a motivation for his life’s work, driving him on for decades? Or was it a precognition sent by his future self or from some other mysterious time-shifted source? However you might interpret it, a causal temporal loop seems possible. A clue to this loop came from another point in the interview when Dr Damer told Dr Mossbridge that he had had an even earlier vision, suggesting that future versions of himself were able to communicate back through time. When he was about to turn ten, he wanted to mark that milestone, so he went on a long walk in his neighbourhood. He found himself at the edge of a slough, and asked, “What could I do right now that would have a really positive effect on my future?” Suddenly a vision opened up in his mind’s eye, a line of all his future selves extending to the horizon. They were all busy doing slightly different but interesting things. He felt pleased and began to look forward to this future. Showing remarkable maturity and awareness, the young Bruce decided it would be a good idea to make a deal with these future selves, then and there. He asked them to agree to a written contract, which he held up on an imagined piece of paper. It said: “You will all agree to not send negative thoughts back to the prior, littler selves because they did their best at the time.” One after the next, the future selves each “signed” the only-positive-thoughts contract. Once this was completed, he described experiencing a rush, a sort of force pulling on him as all the doors to the future swung open. He then saw his future path as one flowing, forward movement with no turbulence returning back down to his present. Given this earlier experience, it’s no surprise that just four years later he experienced receiving a clue from the future, setting his life’s work. From a very young age, Bruce felt he was in communication with his future selves and that he also possessed an intimate relationship with some kind of bigger, guiding system. This gave him an abiding sense that his life’s path was somehow mapped out through his intentions toward destinations lit by delivered visions.”
― Theresa Cheung, The Premonition Code: The Science of Precognition, How Sensing the Future Can Change Your Life

“The basic point of all the scientific ideas we threw at you is that there is a lot of disagreement about how the flow of time works and how or whether one thing causes another. If you take home one idea out of all of these, make it that the everyday feeling that the future has no effect on the present is not necessarily true. As a result of the current uncertainty about time and causality in philosophical and scientific circles, it is not at all unreasonable to talk in a serious way about the possibility of genuine precognition. We also hope that our brief mention of spirituality has opened your mind to the idea that there may be a spiritual perspective as well. Both Theresa and Julia treasure the spiritual aspects of precognition, because premonitions can act as reminders that there may be an eternal part of us that exists outside of time and space. There may well be a scientific explanation for this eternal part, and if one is found, science and spirituality will become happy partners. Much of Part 2 will be devoted to the spiritual and wellbeing components of becoming a Positive Precog, and we will continue to marry those elements with scientific research as we go. 1 Here, physics buffs might chime in with some concerns about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Okay, physics rock stars! As you know, the Second Law states that in a closed system, disorder is very unlikely to decrease – and as such, you may believe this means that there is an “arrow of time” that is set by the Second Law, and this arrow goes in only the forward direction. As a result, you might also think that any talk of a future event influencing the past is bogus. We would ask you to consider four ideas. 2 Here we are not specifically talking about closed timelike curves, but causal loops in general. 3 For those concerned that the idea of messages from the future suggests such a message would be travelling faster than the speed of light, a few thoughts: 1) “message” here is used colloquially to mean “information” – essentially a correlation between present and future events that can’t be explained by deduction or induction but is not necessarily a signal; 2) recently it has been suggested that superluminal signalling is not actually prohibited by special relativity (Weinstein, S, “Superluminal signaling and relativity”, Synthese, 148(2), 2006: 381–99); and 3) the no-signalling theorem(s) may actually be logically circular (Kennedy, J B, “On the empirical foundations of the quantum no-signalling proofs”, Philosophy of Science, 62(4), 1995: 543–60.) 4 Note that in the movie Minority Report, the future was considered set in stone, which was part of the problem of the Pre-Crime Programme. However, at the end of the movie it becomes clear that the future envisioned did not occur, suggesting the idea that futures unfold probabilistically rather than definitely.”
― Theresa Cheung, The Premonition Code: The Science of Precognition, How Sensing the Future Can Change Your Life

“Circles in time A causal loop (also known as a closed time loop or predestination paradox)2 is a sequence of looped events where an event causes another event, which in turn seems to cause the first event. In a nutshell, each event in the loop is one of the causes of the next event and at least one of the later events causes an earlier event.p It is possible that understanding the general idea of causal loops is absolutely essential to understanding how precognition might work. But the problem with causal loops is that you may start to think of everything as a causal loop, and that can drive you nuts. Let’s take the coffee-cup dropping example. Sure, we can say that one event is dropping the coffee cup and the other is the shattering of the cup on the floor. But what about the initial act of picking up the cup? And then there’s the sweeping up of the shattered remains. Maybe those are really the pushing/pulling events? Oh, but go one more step back into the past and one more step forward into the future, and now let’s look at the idea that you wanted coffee and the disposal of the shards of ceramic followed by finding an unbreakable, plastic mug in your cabinet. Maybe the plastic mug search pulled forward the original desire for coffee? This kind of game is never-ending, and in time you start to go a little crazy and see that your birth pushes your death and your death pulls your birth. You can take any point in time and choose events on the left and the right of the timeline, centred around that event, and create a causal loop, depending on how you think of things. This kind of thinking leads quickly to what we call “fantasy thinking”. When you are engaging in fantasy thinking and at the same time trying to understand precognition, you can take every dream and every thought that you have and try to find the future event that is pulling that dream or thought. For example, you dream you are in a plane crash the night before you go on a flight, and the next day you feel lucky that your flight doesn’t crash. But you decide your dream was precognitive, and you start obsessively combing the news for a plane crash. Within about four months, a plane crashes. So you decide that plane crash was the one you were dreaming about, even though there were no other correspondences between your dream and the crash. While fantasy thinking is vitally important to creativity, it is not helpful when developing your precognitive skills. Even in the forward direction in time, most causes and effects are not understandable in a simple way. Trying to figure out possible causal loops for everything is futile, and, more importantly, unnecessary.”
― Theresa Cheung, The Premonition Code: The Science of Precognition, How Sensing the Future Can Change Your Life

“To make things more confusing, for most physics equations, time can go in either direction (forward or backwards, +t or -t). This doesn’t really match with our everyday experience, even though the equations work out. Suffice it to say that so far, physicists have not been super helpful in improving our everyday understanding of the flow of time, although they are working hard on it.c What about philosophers? If you think time is completely subjective or mental and does not or cannot exist in the physical world, you are in good company with the likes of John McTaggartd and St Augustine.e In contrast, if you feel that time is both a physical fact as well as a mental experience, you will be in good company with most present-day philosophers, who think of time as the thing that describes how change happens; the thing that we try to measure by using a clock.f That’s not really clear either, but it seems a bit ahead of the physicists – maybe. How about the psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists? Most of them focus their investigations on the mental experience of time as opposed to physical time. People generally agree that there is a kind of order to the events we experience in our lives, which, when put together, we call the flow of time, temporal flow, or the “stream of consciousness” as psychologist William James famously put it.g Many psychologists and neuroscientists studying time and time perception try to understand this mystery by trying to figure out how the mind and brain create a sense of temporal flow.h The subjective sense of temporal flow is all very interesting, but it won’t get us precisely where we want to be, which is to understand how precognition of actual physical future events might actually be possible. Understanding the science of precognition can be thought of as understanding how we might access information about events that occur in the future of our own personal temporal flow, relative to our own personal “now”. This sounds like mental time travel rather than physical time travel, and that is a reasonable way to think about it. It could even be completely accurate. But you can also think about the science of precognition in physical terms, as trying to understand how future physical events can influence past physical events. Either way, when we have premonitions, it feels as if the future is pulling us forward both physically and mentally.”
― Theresa Cheung, The Premonition Code: The Science of Precognition, How Sensing the Future Can Change Your Life

“Sometimes I feel compelled to do something, but I can only guess later why it needed to done, and I question whether I am drawing connections where none really exist. Other times I see an event – in a dream or in a flash of “knowing” – and I feel compelled to work toward changing the outcome (if it’s a negative event) or ensuring it (when the event is positive). At the times I am able to work toward changing or ensuring the predicted event, sometimes this seems to make a difference, and sometimes it doesn’t seem to matter. Finally, and most often, throughout my life I have known mundane information before I should have known it. For example, one of my favourite games in school was to guess what numbers my math teacher would use to demonstrate a concept, or to guess the words on a vocabulary test before the test was given. I noticed I was not correct all the time, but I was correct enough to keep playing the game. Perhaps partially because of the usefulness of this mundane skill, I was an outstanding student, getting straight As and graduating from college with highest honours in neuroscience and a minor in computer science. I was a modest drinker even in college, but I found I could ace tests when I was hungover after a night of indulgence. Sometimes I think I even did better the less I paid attention to the test and the more I felt sick or spacey. It was like my unconscious mind could take over and put the correct information onto the page without interruption from my overly analytical conscious mind. At graduate school in neuroscience, I focused on trying to understand human experience by studying how the brain processes pain and stress. I wanted to know the answer to the question: what’s going on inside people’s heads when we suffer? Later, as I finished my PhD in psychoacoustics, which is all about the psychology of sound, I became fascinated with timing. How do we figure out the order of sounds, even when some sounds take longer to process than others? How can drummers learn to decode time differences of 1/1,000 of a second, when most people just can’t hear those kinds of subtle time differences? At this point, I was using my premonitions as just one of the tools in my day-to-day toolkit, but I wasn’t thinking about them scientifically. At least not consciously. Sure, every so often I’d dream of the slides that would be used by one of my professors the next day in class. Or I’d realize that the data I was recording in my experiments followed the curve of an equation I’d dreamed about a year before. But I thought that was just my quirky way of doing things – it was just my good student’s intuition and it didn’t have anything to do with my research interests or my life’s work. What was my life’s work again?”
― Theresa Cheung, The Premonition Code: The Science of Precognition, How Sensing the Future Can Change Your Life