I often wondered that with my mother’s cat, who jumped onto the couch to peer out the window, moments before I heard my mom’s car pull up to the house. My father told me about a family dog that followed them halfway across the country to be with them on their vacation. I can easily explain away the cat’s behavior–exceptional hearing or an awareness of time. But the dog? How would she know where to find my father’s family, especially at such a great distance?

Rupert Sheldrake has written a book about such cases, entitled Dogs That Know When Their Owners are Coming Home. Sheldrake believes that domestic animals can communicate telepathically with people and other animals with whom they have emotional bonds. That’s putting it simply, without the science speak. He isn’t alone in his curiosity about this phenomenon.

Alex Tsakiris of OpenSourceScience is hosting a contest to see whether dogs have psychic ability. The prize for the dog who can demonstrate psychic talent is $1,000. Find out more about this contest by visiting Dogs That Know.

Cosmic Ordering is a recently published book which supposes you can gain whatever you want by “ordering ” it from the “cosmos”.

The idea is that the universe wants you to have everything you desire, but has to balance out other people’s wants with yours. The terms, “Cosmic” and “Ordering” don’t quite hit the spot, though, and two other books contain similar ideas, perhaps better expressed.

In his book, The Voice of Knowledge, Don Miguel Ruiz, distils the entire tradition of the Toltec people of Mexico into four principles, or Agreements, as he prefers to call them. At first sight, they could be taken for a boy scout’s creed : tell the truth; don’t take things personally; don’t jump to conclusions; and do your best. But this would be to miss the point. Used as talismans of action, the Four Agreements become a powerfully transformative path to happiness.

1. Be impeccable with your word.
2. Don’t take anything personally.
3. Don’t make assumptions.
4. Always do your best.

Deepak Chopra’s fascinating book, SynchroDestiny runs on the same lines, but from an Eastern philosophical viewpoint. The subtitle, “Harnessing the infinite power of coincidence to create miracles”, was probably written by the marketing department rather than Chopra himself.

There are two facets to his thesis: synchrodestiny, a state of infinite potential, and nonlocal mind, or the virtual domain.

The second part of the book presents a programme of practice and activity for attaining synchrodestiny and knowledge of nonlocal intelligence, whereby you can make your deepest wishes come true.

These three books are coming from the same place and have struck chords with many people. It’s a truly supernatural universe.

Rosalind Heywood was an author and life-long member of the Society for Psychical Research in London. She was a well-known psychic who recorded many of her experiences in her autobiography, The Infinite Hive, which alas is no longer available on Amazon, but can sometimes be found in library stacks. Here is one of her experiences :

Soon after our arrival at Okehampton [in Devon, England] my husband and I went out to catch the tail-end of the sunset. It was one of those evenings when the whole world holds it breath. The moor towered in shadowed contours between us and the sinking sun, and above it the western sky was green and gold like glacier water. Suddenly, without warning, the incredible beauty swept me through a barrier. I was no longer looking at Nature. Nature was looking at me. And she did not like what she saw. It was a strange and humbling sensation, as if numberless unoffending creatures were shrinking back offended by our invasion, and it struck me like a blow that even the windswept little tree against the skyline seemed to be leaning away from us in disgust. “What shall we do?” I whispered to my husband. “They loathe us. We can’t gatecrash like this.”

He did not laugh at me. He, too, felt an intruder. So I said, should we not stand quite still and explain mentally that we came as friends, with humility, and would be grateful for permission to walk quietly on the moor? I thought, too, of the old days when simple souls linked themselves to wild nature by the ancient magic of oak, ash and thorn.

Writing as experient, not as investigator, there is, thank goodness, no need to invoke sophisticated explanation like autosuggestion for the astonishing experience that followed this gesture of apology. It was as if, like a wheeling flight of dunlin, all those visible and invisible creatures swung round as a unit to inspect us, and I seemed to feel their sigh of relief as they came to a group decision. We were not dangerous or cruel. Our apology was accepted. We might come on ~ and “in”. At the time I did not even think it odd that the little windswept tree was now leaning towards us in a friendly fashion.