Recalling the future

 There's hardly a man who wouldn't want that. However, this is a paradox: if you give a person such an opportunity, he will very likely decline this offer, saying: "No, I'd rather not…" Inexplicable desire and deep-rooted fear that it will come true live inside us in a very strange combination. Honey is sweet, but the bee stings. The desire to know the future is not really that simple.

 "The future exists already, that is why, it's no wonder that you can see it right now".
 Professor N.A.Kozyrev

Being skeptical about astrologists, we, nevertheless, put secretly their contradicting predictions on ourselves. When in a newspaper we come across revelations of another palmist, we involuntary open our palms and peer into them looking for an ominous "cross", "island" or an alarming interruption of a line. Somewhere inside our souls roughened by materialism there is a faint belief that one can know the future. Is that really so?

There's a score of stories and tales about the predictions that came true, prophetic dreams, fortunetellers who many years in advanced were absolutely precise in their prophecies to many famous people. We know about predictions to Vasily III, Ivan the Terrible, Pavel I, Muravyov-Apostol, Pushkin, Lermontov, Bukharin, Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, Robert Kennedy and others that came true. However, from the point of view of classical science the majority of predictions cannot bear criticism: usually there are no verified documents, therefore they are impossible to check!

As we have seen, time is not a direct and horizontal highway, but a winding road in a cross-country terrain. It also has one more, not less important quality: this road is rich in side-roads. Many small and big paths run in different directions from crossroads – future has many variants. There are convenient and more likely "paved" roads, there are less likely "country roads" and even almost unlikely "paths". Our future destiny (where and when we will come and what we will reach) is usually decided precisely at these crossroads. These "forks" or, as mathematicians call them, "points of bifurcation" have a very important quality. The most insignificant event there (a quick glance at a road sign, a passenger's advice, a traffic-controller's motion) can be crucial for the choice of our future and will determine how quickly we will get to our destination, if we get there at all.

According to this model of time, the destiny of each of us resembles a tree with a lot of branches, and we somehow resemble ladybugs that move higher and higher in order to fly into the sky from the highest point. We live in the very same way: we never return, we only occasionally look back, but we steadily move along the tree of destiny till our final "take off".

Ancient wise men of the East believed that every man comes into this world with his own destiny, which has at least six variants ranging from the worst to the best. The ideal way would, of course, be to choose the best self-actualization - the road leading to the very top of the tree of destiny. But how can one do it without the most important thing – "the map of life"? How can one resist the temptation of choosing at "the point of bifurcation" an attractive, but hopeless "side" branch? How can one look into the future and learn where this or that road, this or that branch at the tree of destiny goes?

Some people start the brainstorm, but this rarely gives the best result: usual clear-cut logic requires a lot of data and falls apart like a card house if some elements are missing.
 Others rely on their intuition, which is not the worst variant. Intuition is the voice of our supreme "ego", which, unlike primitive logic, has access to "the archives of the Universe" and often have presentiment about future events. This "inner voice" can warn you against a possible danger (and a passenger suddenly returns his ticket for a "doomed" ship or airplane) or it can prompt you a paradoxical solution leading to maximum success.

A third category of people, like A.S. Pushkin, are extremely attentive to omens (which very often are also signs from above) and they are saved by their knowledge of traditions and "superstitions". 

Some other people resort to fortune telling – the oldest method to strengthen one’s inner voice and make it visible. Having concentrated on a problem, they bring themselves into "the altered state of mind" in this or that way (cards, runes, Chinese sticks, crystal balls, mirrors, staring at intricate patterns, etc.), hoping that another, virtual, reality will open for them.

In our computer age scientists have started mastering untraditional ways of telling the future. Academician E.A. Faidysh, candidate of biological sciences, believes that contemporary mathematical methods and latest discoveries in physics (especially in the field of thermodynamics of misbalanced processes) "open up previously inaccessible opportunities for tuning on various images of the virtual future". The scientist's team has learnt to use in fortune telling (or, scientifically speaking, "scanning of the future") computer generated intricate patterns, whose elements have the same structure as the pattern (fractal) itself. Predictions obtained in the link between a man and a computer (on commercial projects' management, on family problems, etc) and observation of the development of predicted events give grounds to consider this direction exceptionally perspective.

 Curse that tongue of yours!

What's in common for all the above ways – both logical and intuition-based - is that a man tries to see the variants of his future himself. He makes his own choice and, taking a decision (the right or the wrong one), assumes all the responsibility for his destiny.

This is the lot of strong, resolute people who can "break the situation" to their own advantage. Failures do not discourage them, but make them act even more energetic. They can afford to play the dangerous game of fortune telling. It is dangerous, because it rarely shows different variants of our future. As a rule, it offers only one "branch", one variant and by that programs us for it. It's good if the variant is optimistic. But what if "the prophecy" suddenly shows us a very unlikely negative program and we get "fixed" on it? You can't expect anything positive then. Subconscious fear and obsessions can very quickly turn this unlikely variant into a possible one. There will be no one to blame – you personally will bring it on yourself… However, I'll repeat that this danger does not concern strong people who can assume responsibility. (But even they should mind that fortune telling and hence programming oneself is something worth doing only in case of dire need, for each subsequent fortune telling disrupts the previous program).

However, it's not a secret to any one that the overwhelming majority of people even in trifles prefers to shift responsibility for their decisions (and for their destiny) on someone else. Clever people ask more experienced and wise people for advice. Naпve people go to fortunetellers of all shades and colors. A human being is a strange creature: we do not trust our intuition (or even a sign from above), but blindly entrust our fate to a chance fortuneteller. Even if she is not a fraud and is really capable of seeing the future, who can guarantee that in trance she will not tune into and program the client for an unlikely and dangerous branch of his (or even someone else's) destiny?

The main danger in fortune telling is that when we get a negative program we become its prisoners: perforce we keep thinking about the predicted event. If it concerns not only us, the so-called "new-sphere mechanism" starts to work: our thoughts go in the direction where they can materialize – into other people's heads, which provokes the events we are most afraid of.

If the prediction concerns our health, the "self-destruction program", which is hidden deep inside our organism, might start working before the due time. In this respect let me tell you a story that happened during an expedition by scientist Sven Hedins to mountain regions of Asia. A local Tibetan hermit, whose unusual faculties the members of the expeditions had witnessed more than once, predicted to one of them, doctor H., that he would die after exactly one year. Indeed, doctor H. soon started going from bad to worse. Uponhis return to Berlin he even had to go to hospital. Doctors did not find any disease, but it was clear that the patient was dying slowly. Two days before the predicted date doctor H. looked practically like a dead body. Having learnt about the Tibetan prophecy the head physician understood that that was the case of a special kind of self-hypnosis, which would undoubtedly kill the patient, if no measures were taken. Doctor H. was put to sleep for four days. When the "doomed fellow" woke up, doctors told him that he had simply overslept his death. Soon the patient was absolutely fine.

That was a typical case of programming of the client by the foreteller (he, in fact, turned him into a zombie). What can we say about that "prophet"? He may have really possessed some extraordinary faculties, but the level of his spiritual "dedication" was obviously low. There are quite many people like that, and apparently it is not a mere coincidence that in the Russian language words "to tell the fortune" and "enemy" have the same root.  

Real soothsayers, who know the laws of space, will never tell a client about the time of his death without any special reasons for that (which often determine the destinies of the state). Firstly, they understand very well that they can "grasp" not the most likely branch of his destiny and by their words program a person for a negative outcome. Secondly, even if they are absolutely certain about their prognosis, they remember about "the Free Will Law" in this world. A person always has a choice: even when there seems to be no way out, his will can do wonders and take him out of the "point of bifurcation". That is why a soothsayer who has a sense of responsibility, even if he says something negative about the future, he stresses that it is just a warning, a possible variant. He then immediately gives recommendations on how to avoid danger by taking other "paths" going in other directions.  

The same concerns global predictions about the destiny of the country or the mankind, especially at today's crucial time. "The mankind is going through the era of transition… It will not be an exaggeration to say that our modern planetary system is approaching the point of bifurcation… But we can break the unfavorable bifurcation that is currently prevailing on the Earth". These are the words of the greatest modern scientist, the Nobel Prize winner I.Prigozhin.

According to synenergetics, the science on self-organization of complex systems, our planet is currently going through the stage when its organism is extremely sensitive to punctual resonance impacts. The direction of its evolution largely depends on the psychological condition of each of us. This concerns not only social processes, but also geology and the climate of the Earth, on which the survival of the mankind depends. Today it is obvious that joint thoughts of even several dozens of people can affect the planet's organism like acupuncture: they can harmonize it or, on the contrary, increase the misbalance. Everything depends on what will the thoughts carry: pessimism and panic or hopes for better outcome. If one programs something negative, it will inevitably come true.

Today some people go hysterical, predicting another end of the world, giving even the exact date of the global catastrophe. Others circulate this hysteria causing certain people to break down: we know about cases of religious fanatics' collective suicides. Scores of lying prophets are yet to come. Although these "christs", "blessed virgins" and "prophets" point their fingers into the Bible, they forget or deliberately conceal very important biblical words about "the end of the world": "The day or the hour thereof is known to no one, not the Angels, nor the Son, but only to the Father". (Mark, 13:32).

Yes, serious changes are in store for us, but that will not be the end. What we are going through today are the last, though very painful, convulsions of the passing era. Therefore, everyone's responsibility for the future of Russia and the mankind today is bigger than ever…       

V.Pravdivtsev, "On the verge of impossible"