Your Nostradamus Factor: Accessing Your Innate Ability to See Into the Future

You've probably had a day when you said to yourself, "If I had known it was going to be this kind of day, I never would have gotten out of bed!" You may have gone through times when you felt, "If I had known life was going to be like this, I never would have been born!" Those of us who accept ideas such as precognition and reincarnation know the irony of such statements. Somewhere during the night our sleeping selves did know what kind of day was coming. Somewhere in the heavens our unmaterialized souls did know what life held in store. Why then do we forget? Some have speculated that it is exactly because the foreknowledge would discourage us from going through the experience. If so, then why do we sometimes get brief breaks in the amnesia, allowing us glimpses of the future? What is this game? I'm pondering these paradoxes because I've just read a book that has fascinated and shaken me more than most I've seen lately. The book is, Your Nostradamas Factor: Accessing Your Innate Ability to See into The Future (Simon & Schuster). The author, Ingo Swann, is a prominent psychic, learned and influential in the field of parapsychology. He has participated in countless experiments, projects his own creative wit helped make more interesting than the average statistics-gathering routine. By inventing the term, "remote viewing," a techno-speak metaphor for clairvoyance, he prompted a new line of research that has achieved one of the best track records demonstrating the psychic abilities of the average person. In his newest book he turns his talents to what he calls "future-seeing." He presents the mental dynamics responsible for future-seeing as well as for blocking future-seeing. He repeatedly emphasizes diagramming one's ideas to foster the psychic process of visualizing. He gives many hints on how to release our inner Nostradamus factor from the triple-walled prison of ignorance, prejudice, and expectation. One of the propositions in his theory, refreshing to someone who lives in a community where being psychic seems to pass for an education, is that it is easier to correctly see the future for subjects about which you are knowledgeable than for subjects about which you are totally ignorant. Knowledge creates a range of feasibilities for the future, focusing psychic sensitivity on anticipating the unexpected. To test his theory on eliciting the Nostradamus factor, Mr. Swann conducted his own experiment, the "American Prophecy Project." For somewhat over a year, he