The Cassandra Complex

In Greek mythology, Cassandra was Princess of Troy, the daughter of King Priam.

A legendary beauty, Cassandra promised to be the god Apollo's consort, but at the last minute she refused his attentions.

As punishment, Apollo gave Cassandra the gift of prophecy but withheld the capacity to convince anyone of her predictions.

In other words, she was given the ability to predict disaster, but not the ability to prevent it.

This dubious gift of knowledge drove her mad.

Cassandra's prophecies grew more and more garbled and abstract. so that eventually she barely made any sense at all. It was only in retrospect that others were able to look back at her words and, post-disaster, recognize their precognitive nature.

I think sometimes that such is the nature of all prophecy. Taking prophecy literally leads to error, but ignoring it isn't a good idea either. That leaves us with the problem of interpretation, a task most people refuse because it is 1) scary, 2) uncertain, and 3) difficult.

Most people want to believe that the world is a known entity and that life will go on as it is, or better, indefinitely. We love the illusion of control. Deep down we all know that it is an illusion. But who wants to dwell on disaster if you can't prevent it? Such an orientation would drive anyone mad.

In some modern circles where psi ability and the symbolic content of dreams are taken for granted as valid, the refusal to pay attention is referred to as "The Cassandra Complex."

You have a strong intuition that some specific thing will come to pass, but you ignore it because it doesn't make logical sense. Then the damned thing happens, and you look back and think, "Oh bloody hell."

You should have listened to your gut.

In the Greek scheme of things, sophia or wisdom, is the feminine face of knowledge, whereas logos or word, is male.
In modern terms, we might say that intuition and logic are meant to be used together, married--but in fact what we have now is a rational domination of intuition which denies it even exists or which mechanically contests its validly.

This, in spite of the fact that some of the most famous scientific minds of the past centuries (Einstein, for example) have credited intuition for their greatest scientific achievements.

We may not know the way back to our balanced knowing selves, but I think we have to brave the confusion and the dark to find it. We have to get out of our societal Cassandra Complex.

A good place to start might be Socrates answer when told that the Oracle at Delphi had named him the wisest man in all of Greece.

He defended that verdict, noting that, "he, at least, knows that he knows nothing."

What Remote Viewers Say About Earth's Future

Recently I watched The Men Who Stare at Goats on cable. I expected to enjoy it immensely. After all, I love George Clooney. I love weird psi stuff. I love to laugh. So I expected a lot from this movie.

I momentarily forgot: The secret to happiness is low expectations.

Or no expectations.

So it turned out the movie wasn't that good, and it wasn't all that funny either. The film tells the mostly true story of Ingo Swann and a U.S. government undercover operation that delved briefly into 'remote viewing,' a psychic visualization technique in which trained intuitives focus on a set of anonymous coordinates and sketch or report what they see.

For awhile, the U.S. government thought the Soviets were hotly pursuig remote viewing (and more) as a form of military reconnaissance, and so on the basis of that rumor alone, the intelligence community decided that the U.S. better jump on the psychic research bandwagon and pronto.

The oddest part was that it turned out that reports of Soviet involvement were incorrect. Basically, the U.S. entered into a psychic intelligence race that was totally imaginary: a race with itself.

That part, I admit, is pretty delicious.

The biggest irony of all is that remote viewing does seem to actually work quite well under certain controlled conditions, especially if the viewers are trained in the technique and start out with a natural gift.

No one knows why remote viewing is so accurate, although it seems to draw some theoretical support from recent quantum physics experiments and from a view of the universe that is more multidimensional-dimensional and less linear.

Despite its unexpected effectiveness, the government claims to have dropped the program entirely and now, instead of spying psychically, Hollywood-type people make money making movies making fun of remote viewing and psychic spies.

Maybe the government really no longer does this. Maybe it does it all the time. Maybe it's remotely viewing this blog right now! (OK, probably not.)

Who knows?

It's fascinating stuff though, and I think not all that hilarious. For instance, I also just finished Jim Marrs wacky but fascinating book, Alien Agenda, which features an entire chapter on remote viewing. It seems that not only can remote viewing provide accurate information about geographic coordinates, it can also be used to explore different locations in time, deep space, and parallel dimensions.

In one carefully controlled experiment, remote viewers who were given planets as targets (without being told that's what the targets were) came up with remarkably consistent and accurate descriptions of phenomena that had not yet been discovered by astronomers--phenomena like the rings on Jupiter or the color of the sky and the molten landscape of Mercury.

Initially this 'incorrect' info was taken as 'proof' that remote viewing is total rot. Then, later, the viewers turned out to be spot on.

Remote viewing isn't fool-proof: Viewers have to be trained to filter out their own interpretive tendencies and to distinguish between their own thoughts and actual target info, but some people get amazingly good at this, providing accurate information that should not be possible to obtain using nothing but the human mind.

And yet it is possible to obtain info this way. Possible and, with practice, reliable and likely.

When remote viewers are given targets involving the far future here on planet earth, the 'hits' are also remarkably consistent and detailed--and more than a little bit scary.

Most of the remote viewers asked about earth's future predict that:

• Starting around the year 2015, the earth will be hit with a series of volcanic eruptions that will cause major climate changes and crop failures. Many people and species will die.
• These volcanic eruptions will distract the human race from very serious problems involving environmental pollution. By the time the eruptions stop being an urgent problem consuming all human attention, the environmental destruction of the planet will be so out of control that earth will become for all practical purposes uninhabitable. 
• People will slowly be pushed underground to survive. These underground communities will evolve into domed cities that look a bit like terrariums. Life outside them will be impossible. People will grow all their food and satisfy all their survival needs inside these enclosures. Violence and war will become rare to nonexistent because humans will be forced to use all of their energy on survival issues.

Will this really happen?

I guess we'll find out.

It reminds me of the bit about life being what happens while you are making other plans. We spend so much time these days worrying about what we think will be the catastrophic outcome of our own current behavior as a society, that it would be kind of darkly funny if while we are busy obsessing about THAT, some other catastrophe  were to happen that we weren't even considering.

Really, that's how life usually goes at the personal level, doesn't it?

BTW I really don't want to see George Clooney kill another goat by staring at it.

But I might try to teach myself remote viewing.

I'm not doing anything else at the moment.

And time's a wastin'!