The Power of Premonitions by Larry Dossey

Author:Larry Dossey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Body, Mind & Spirit: Divination
Publisher: Hay House
Published: 2009-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

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Premonitions can be grossly misleading, and they can be used as an excuse for irresponsible, reckless, or criminal behavior. Napoleon’s megalomaniacal premonitions are classic examples. “I always had an inner sense of what awaited me …,” he boasted. “Nothing ever happened to me which I did not foresee, and I alone did not wonder at what I had accomplished.” Really? What about the Battle of Waterloo and his exile and death on St. Helena?

Premonitions can be especially treacherous when authoritarian figures use them to influence the lives of others. In 1997, sixty-five-year-old Marshall Herff Applewhite, the leader of a group called Heaven’s Gate, acted on his longstanding premonition that planet Earth was about to be “recycled,” wiped clean of human life. Applewhite believed the earth was only a stepping-stone to a greater destiny he called the Next Level. The physical body was only a vehicle to get there. The only chance he and his followers had of surviving the earth’s cleansing was to leave immediately by boarding an alien spacecraft he believed was hiding behind the comet Hale-Bopp, which had recently appeared. The ticket onto the spaceship was suicide. Thus on March 26, 1997, thirty-eight group members and Applewhite were found dead in a rented mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, California, an upscale San Diego community. Before killing themselves, they drank citrus juices to ritually cleanse their bodies. On suicide night they all ate an identical final meal and packed a small overnight bag with lip balm, clothing, spiral notebooks, and five dollars and change. They dressed identically in black shirts and sweat pants, new black-and-white Nike athletic shoes, and donned their Heaven’s Gate Away Team arm patches before reclining on their individual bunk beds, ingesting a lethal amount of phenobarbital mixed with pudding or applesauce, chasing it with a shot of vodka, and placing plastic bags over their heads. The suicides were orderly; the members “shed their containers” in three shifts over three days. They were considerate of those who would discover their bodies; before the last two members killed themselves they took out the trash. They mailed two videotapes to former members, who realized what had happened and called the police. The victims included twenty-one women and eighteen men, all white, from ages twenty-six to seventy-two. Within a few months, two former members of the group, regretting they had missed the mass departure, killed themselves in copycat suicides. It remains the largest mass suicide in the history of the United States.

There were numerous warning signs of serious psychopathology, such as the fact that six male members of the group, including Applewhite, had undergone voluntary castration as a way of adhering to their ascetic, celibate lifestyle.

Marshall Applewhite could be the poster child for the dangerous combination of mental instability and wacky premonitions. In 1970 he checked himself into a psychiatric hospital after hearing voices and because he wanted to cure himself of “homosexual urges.” After discontinuing psychiatric treatment, he had himself castrated. He believed he had once been Jesus.

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