If you haven’t yet, please familiarize yourself with part one so you’re reading this within the context it was intended. :)
Where to start? This subject is so intricate and I’ve been studying it off and on for so long, it’s difficult to know where to begin.
I suppose I should begin at the beginning. I’ll share with you a couple of personal experiences that I’ll never forget, which really opened my eyes to the existence of this… phenomenon, whatever it is.
When I was about 10 years old, Mom and I were driving from Elkton to Cottage Grove in her little yellow 80-something Honda Civic. We were on the freeway just south of the Cottage Grove exit and Mom was following a double-trailer semi truck in the slow lane, maneuvering the corners. A motorcycle passed us, then passed the semi and moved into the right lane in front of the truck, most likely preparing to take the exit. Mom merged into the left lane, blinker on, readying to pass the truck. The feeling was immediate and INTENSE and the words were out of my mouth before I knew what I was saying. “MOM!” I blurted. “Stay in this lane but slow down. SLOW DOWN!” I screamed. Just before it happened.
As we rounded the corner, she hit the brakes and backed off of the truck in response to my bellowing. Just then, a deer bolted out from the right hand side of the freeway and ran right into traffic. In all happened in a flash. The motorcycle attempted to miss it and fishtailed, losing control, skidding down the asphalt on its side and hitting the median strip. Meanwhile, the semi slammed on its brakes and jackknifed, its rear trailer swinging violently into the left lane.
Because Mom had listened and slowed down right when I screamed, we were spared being crushed BETWEEN the two trailers as she attempted to pass.
I remember the truck being stopped in the middle of the road and traffic piling up behind us. We didn’t move again until the emergency vehicles arrived. The last thing I remember seeing as we were finally allowed to drive past was the motorcycle rider’s hand. He was covered in a blanket, his arm reaching to the sky and his hand bent in a pale, agonized claw.
A couple of years later, I was attending junior high school in Cottage Grove. One morning, I went to school and everything started out fine, but about an hour into the school day I began feeling very… doomy. It’s the only way I can describe it. I felt anticipatory, like something dreadful was coming closer with every breath. The feeling persisted for hours, and became so intense that I found myself crying in my seat in class. I said I didn’t feel well and asked to go to the nurses’ office. There, I simply told the nurse I felt horrible and wanted to call my Mom.
When I called Mom, I told her the truth, sobbing. “Mom, something horrible is going to happen. I need to come home. I can’t keep it together.” I remember she was irritated with me, saying, “Autumn, you can’t leave school every time you have a bad feeling.” I persisted, becoming increasingly upset, and finally she relented. I begged her to be careful on the drive over.
As we drove through town towards home, we stopped at the intersection on Main where the Goodwill was at the time. Suddenly, the feeling became OVERPOWERING and I started to panic. Pictures were flashing through my head and I told Mom what I saw, crying uncontrollably: a light blue van, a chrome bumper, and a bent bicycle tire lying on its side, spinning… I was HYSTERICAL, overwhelmed by the terror of whatever this feeling was.
About a mile later, we were home. Nothing had happened. I went immediately upstairs and fell asleep, exhausted, feeling a little sheepish.
A couple of hours later, Mom woke me up with a weird look on her face. “Autumn, come downstairs,” she said.
I followed her groggily downstairs and my sister was standing in the dining room. “Tell Amber what you saw earlier today,” Mom said to me. I explained what I’d felt and seen and watched all of the blood drain out of Amber’s face. Mom looked at me.
“Amber came home about an hour ago and told me that she and Dale were going on a bike ride.” Mom told her to be careful. “Autumn’s had one of her ‘feelings’, ” she said. Amber, of course, had rolled her eyes and muttered, “Whatever.”
Amber told me then that as she and Dale had begun to cross the crosswalk at the intersection next to the Goodwill with their bikes, a light blue van with a chrome bumper shot out of a parking spot along the street and almost hit them.
I was also in junior high school when this final event took place. I was 13, and had gotten into a car with a couple of older boys who wanted to go for a drive out by Cottage Grove Lake. It was a summer evening and I was in the passenger seat. Bill was driving and Tom was in the seat behind him.
We were driving on a Weyerhauser logging road in his friend’s Nissan Sentra wagon, listening to the radio, talking, singing, having a great time. “La Bamba” came on, and as the first notes of guitar played and I sang along and bebopped in my seat, I was hit with a certainty. “I’m going to DIE listening to this song.” The feeling came out of nowhere and was so intense that I physically shook my head, reached up and put my seat belt on.
Seconds later, Bill rounded a corner too fast, hit a patch of gravel on the road, fishtailed, and lost control of the car. We flew off the road just before the bridge, plowed through the blackberry bushes and nose-dived into the creek bed, coming to a stop in mid-air when we hit an old cement bridge support head-on.
There is little question that I would have been thrown through the windshield and died in that crash had I not put my seat belt on in that moment just before we rounded the corner. As it was, I escaped with a broken back, L-3, and was nearly paralyzed.
What all three of these precognitive experiences have in common is an intuition – a feeling – preceding the onset of some sort of imminent danger. These are not the only experiences I’ve had like this, but they are the ones that stand out the most, because the feeling occurred blatantly BEFORE any sign of the danger that was imminent and the alternative outcomes could have been horrific.
Having a naturally skeptical mind, I’ve analyzed these experiences closely over the years, taking a hard look at them to be sure that I was not confusing simple coincidence, or some other subtlety that I subconsciously picked up on, with something stranger. Was there any indication that a deer would run out on the freeway? No. Was there any “logical” explanation for the details I saw regarding the near-miss bicycle accident? None that I could think of. The details were too accurate to simply chalk up to coincidence. Was there any other reason that I felt COMPELLED at that particular moment to put my seat belt on, effectively saving my life?
Wikipedia defines intuition as “the apparent ability to acquire knowledge without inference or the use of reason.”
“Intuition is a combination of historical (empirical) data, deep and heightened observation and an ability to cut through the thickness of surface reality. Intuition is like a slow motion machine that captures data instantaneously and hits you like a ton of bricks. Intuition is a knowing, a sensing that is beyond the conscious understanding — a gut feeling. Intuition is not pseudo-science. – Abella Arthur”
In the field of psychology, there is a catch-all phrase designed to describe the study of subject experiences – that is, experiences that are not directly observable by a third party. It’s called Phenomenology. While there have been some studies that support the existence of Extra Sensory Perception, including precognition, it is my contention that there are aspects of these phenomena that are difficult, if not impossible, to study and measure empirically simply because the circumstances necessary to accurately study them are difficult – if not impossible – to produce in a laboratory setting.
If my above-related experience – the one in which I screamed at Mom to slow down and effectively kept us from getting seriously injured or killed – were to be replicated for study in a laboratory, exactly how would one go about that? Is it feasible to put test subjects in VERY REAL AND IMMEDIATE MORTAL DANGER in order to study the effects on their ability to sense danger that OFFERS no conceivable forewarning? Of course not. The subjects who failed the test would be dead. *grin* The point is, phenomenological events CANNOT necessarily be replicated in a lab setting. But does our inability to replicate and measure something effectively necessarily NEGATE its existence? Emphatically: NO.
All three of the events I’ve related to you possess a pertinent common thread. I feel it’s so important that I wish to reiterate it. EMOTION was the key in each of those events. I felt emotionally COMPELLED to act a certain way which likely caused a change in outcome. The emotions were so strong in each case that they were undeniable, would not be ignored. The “proof”? I would likely be dead twice over had I not had those intense feelings of being compelled to act at the very moment in which I did.
Feelings. Emotions. What do we know about them scientifically? It has been proposed that “cognitive emotions” originate within the prefrontal cortex, whereas “intuitive emotions” originate from the amygdala – deep within the brain. Part of the basal ganglia. Part of the limbic system.
“Although the role of the basal ganglia in motor control is clear, there are also many indications that it is involved in the control of behavior in a more fundamental way, at the level of motivation. In Parkinson’s disease, the ability to execute the components of movement is not greatly affected, but motivational factors such as hunger fail to cause movements to be initiated or switched at the proper times. The immobility of Parkinsonian patients has sometimes been described as a “paralysis of the will”.[6] These patients have occasionally been observed to show a phenomenon called kinesia paradoxica, in which a person who is otherwise immobile responds to an emergency in a coordinated and energetic way, then lapses back into immobility once the emergency has passed.” Wikipedia
Huh. “…responds to an emergency in a coordinated and energetic way…” Sounds familiar. In other words, as if they are EMOTIONALLY COMPELLED to do so.
Is there a part of our amygdala then – as it resides within the locus of motivational control (limbic system) – that acts as a RECEPTOR to danger? Does it allow us to PERCEIVE as-yet unidentified cues that would, for all intents and purposes, be considered EXTRA SENSORY? There was nothing I could taste, touch, hear, see, smell or feel that would have caused me to call out, to warn, to reach for a seat belt. But apparently I perceived something that created a rapid-fire trigger of intense emotion somewhere deep within my brain which COMPELLED me to react to an impending emergency – something that was beyond the five senses.
Very literally: an “extra sensory” perception.
What on earth does any of this have to do with Bigfoot?
We’re getting there. Slowly. *grin* Please bear with me. I’ll bring you back around in a week or two. I promise.
If you look up “emotions” on Wikipedia, you’ll find any number of theories attempting to explain what emotions are and how they work. But that’s just it. They’re THEORIES. And no one theory is a complete, all-inclusive explanation, by any means.
And you’ll find this: “Emotions are thought to be related to activity in brain areas that direct our attention, motivate our behavior, and determine the significance of what is going on around us. Pioneering work by Broca (1878), Papez (1937), and MacLean (1952) suggested that emotion is related to a group of structures in the center of the brain called the limbic system…”
The limbic system? “The limbic system operates by influencing the endocrine system and the autonomic nervous system.”
“The endocrine system is a group of glands that work together and secrete many types of different hormones that regulate the body.”
“The autonomic nervous system is the part of the peripheral nervous system that acts as a control system functioning largely below the level of consciousness, and controls visceral functions…”
Are you following me here? EMOTIONS are controlled by the limbic system, which influences the HORMONES we produce, which control VISCERAL functions.
Viscera.
Your guts.
“Gut feelings”.
Intuition.
Scientific understanding is hinting at it. It simply hasn’t caught up yet.
Carl Sagan wrote a book called Broca’s Brain. In the introduction he writes: “This book is written just before… the answers to many vexing and awesome questions on origins and fates are pried loose from the cosmos. If we don’t destroy ourselves, most of us will be around for the answers… By far the most exciting, satisfying and exhilarating time to be alive is the time in which we pass from ignorance to knowledge on these fundamental issues.”
Science doesn’t have all the answers, but often possesses an arrogance that leads us to believe that if an answer is not immediately forthcoming within the limited confines of the empirical process, it simply isn’t available.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that just because scientists haven’t been able to QUANTIFY something YET that it means that it does not exist.
OK. Check in time. How are you feeling about all of this? Write to me. ;)
