PROPHECIES AND CRYSTAL GAZING

By Elmano Dias

In the life of man, the future looms inconsistently uncertain. There is always the hope for the best but also the apprehension of the worst. Hope gives impetus to life and influences the many decisions that we take. Yet it is the cloud of uncertainty, which undermines this hope and prompts us to hesitate in taking any bold strides. By nature, humans are an impatient lot and this drives them to look ahead and foresee what the future holds in store for them. It is from this tendency that the various arts of foretelling have perhaps evolved and thrived. Astrology and palmistry for instance are big business everywhere, attracting people from all walks of life. Different techniques have been used in the art of foretelling. One such art is scrying, more commonly known as crystal-gazing. Among the well known persons who mastered this art were Nostradamus (1503-1566) and later on Jeane Dixon. Crystal gazers regard the crystal with attention until they perceive the thing that they wish to announce. The diviner looks fixedly at the surface until a fog-like curtain interposes itself between his eyes and the crystal. On this curtain the shapes that he desires to see form themselves. Using her crystal ball, Jeane Dixon was able to foresee the assassination of President Kennedy, eleven years before it actually took place. Ruth Montgomery in her book A Gift of Prophecy narrates innumerable prophecies predicted by Jeane, which always came true accurately. On President Kennedy, Jeane had a vision of a dark cloud hovering over White House and slowly moving down on it. Something very tragic is going to happen to our President soon. Its every place I look, she had predicted. Jeane had accordingly sent a message to the President through a friend of hers, warning him of the impending danger. The President was warned to cancel his trip to Texas, but he had gone there anyway. And now I see death rocking in his rocking chair. If only he could keep himself invulnerable to bullets for the next few days!, Jeane had thought. The next day Jeane went for Mass and later clasped her hands and sighted: This is the day it will happen. On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, at 12.30 pm, after a motorcade. Jeane Dixon also had to her credit some predictions on India. During the course of a newspaper interview, a reporter asked for a forecast about Jawaharlal Nehru, who had then been Prime Minister of India since 1947. Jeane consulted her crystal ball and replied that he would be succeeded within approximately seven years by a man whose name would begin with the letter s. On May 27, 1964, death claimed the great Indian leader and Parliament chose as his successor Lal Bahadur Shastri. Shastris name, as foreseen slightly more than seven years before, did indeed begin with an s. One of the strangest predictions ever made by Jeane Dixon, who had never been outside of the continental United States, concerned the partition of India. In 1946, at a reception given by Sir Girja Shankar Bajpai, the Agent General for India, and Lady Bajpai, a man introduced himself to her a new member of the Indian contingent in Washington and requested a private reading. Jeane received him the next day and after consulting her crystal ball said that a partition of India would be announced within two years. Shocked the official exclaimed: No, no Mrs. Dixon. There will never be a partition of India. Jeane calmly declared that such a division would be announced on Februrary 20, 1947. Further, she said that her questioner himself would leave India to join the other side. Never!, he shouted, I will live out my days in an undivided India.

The Dixons continued to see the same gentleman from time to time at parties, and on the morning of February 20, 1947, he telephoned to twit her about her mistaken prophecy. Jeane confidently retorted that the day was not over. The next mornings newspapers headlined the partition announcement and the Indian, volunteering to eat crow, invited friends to a dinner party in Jeanes honour. On a humid midsummer evening in 1947, a management consultant dropped in at the Dixons to talk over with his friend, his forthcoming trip to the Far East. Seated across the room, Jeane was following with attention, as he described his itinerary. As he mentioned New Delhi, a vision appeared before her and she blurted: Mahatma Gandhi will be assassinated. The two men turned to stare but Jeane insisted: Its true. Just as you spoke of India, I saw a vision of the Prime Minister and he was lifting up his arms to a religion that is too pro-western for some of his people to tolerate. Hell be killed within six months by someone they least suspect. Within six months on January 30, 1948, the great spiritual leader of India met an untimely death. His assassin was a Hindu fanatic who belonged to the Mahasabha politico religious group. Jeane Dixon fascinated investigators of psychic phenomena because her pre-recognition revealed itself through so many different channels. Sometimes she merely tipped the fingers of a person and instantly knew what the future held for him. She could often pinpoint events in the past and future for people she had never seen, merely by learning the date of their birth. Although her most frequent revelations came through perusal of the crystal ball, her forecasts often came through unsought visions. Nostradamus is another well known prophet. He was a scholar and a prolific writer and published widely read almanacs, drew horoscopes and concocted cosmetic preparations for wealthy patrons. (He was a skilled physician too). His major world predictions were published in 10 volumes each containing 100 four line prophetic verses known as quatrains. The books are referred to as Centuries. The prophecies were made in French, Latin, Greek and other languages and were quite obscure and confusing (a proper interpretation was necessary). Either he had wanted to avoid being accused of witchcraft by the inquisition or he wanted to camouflage his secrets so that they could be understood only by the initiated. Whatever prompted Nostradamus to present his predictions in confused verses, many of the predictions came to be uncannily accurate. By night will come through the forest of Reines, Two partners by roundabout way; The queen, the white stone, The monk king dressed in grey at Varennes, The elected Capet causes tempest, fire and bloody slicing. This was what Nostradamus wrote about the flight, capture and execution of Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette. On the rise and fall of Napolean he wrote: An emperor will be born near Italy, Who will cost the empire very dearly. The great empire will soon be exchanged for a small place which will soon begin to grow. A small place of tiny area in the middle of which He will come to lay down his sceptre. Once when he as a young man was travelling in Italy, he fell on his knees before a passing monk named Felice Peretti. To the astonishment of all including the monk, Nostradamus declared: I kneel before his Holiness. In 1585 the monk became Pope Sixtus V. On another occasion, a French nobleman asked him to predict the fate of two suckling pigs he had in his yard. Nostradamus said that the nobleman would eat the black one and a wolf the white one. The nobleman instantly ordered the white one to be killed for dinner that night. His attempt to confound Nostradamus prophetic powers was shattered when he was informed, while dining with the prophet that night, that a tame wolf cub had carried off the meat of the white pig and that he was after all , eating the black one.

Nostradamus predicted his own death in 1566 and before he died he had a date engraved on a small metal plate, instructing that it should be placed with him in his coffin. In 1700 the coffin was taken from the grave, where it had lain for 134 years and was moved to a more prominent site. The plate bearing the date 1700 was resting on the prophets skeleton.

All of us experience flashes of prophetic insight at one time or another and we call them intuition or hunches. Only in some people this esoteric gift is endowed in a vaster scope. In his Prophecy in our time, Martin Ebon, a prolific writer on paranormal subjects gives a simple analogy about prophecy: If you are in a helicopter, circling over a mountain and you can see two trains on opposite sides of the mountain but heading towards each other than you can foresee a collision as if you had superhuman knowledge, at least in contrast to the passengers and engineers on the two trains. It is a neat analogy. It does not demand basic readjustments of traditional concepts of time and space. But can we achieve helicopter like perception of our own future? Yes, certainly, to the degree to which each of us gains greater insight into himself because we are not so much masters, as unconsciously, the magnets of our fate. ~ First published in 1988.