Precognition
Precognition is the ability to know things ahead of time. Nostradamus is one famous example of a person with precognitive powers. However, there are many psychics who claim they can tell the future. The more precognitive power you have, the greater your chances will be of knowing about events before they happen. Precognition can come in many forms. One of the most common and reliable of these is through dreams. Dreams can sometimes provide very credible information about future events; however, this form of precognition can often be hardest to believe and interpret. Perhaps this is because your dreams don't seem as real or tangible as knowledge that comes to you while you're awake. That's not to suggest that all dreams are predictions of the future - far from it. Most dreams have nothing to do with precognition. Still, learning to use your dreams as guides, and becoming able to discern which dreams anticipate future events, can be very valuable skills.

Even people who have not honed their precognitive abilities sometimes have episodes of precognition. For example, an old woman named Judy awoke one morning with a strong feeling that her long-lost son would show up that afternoon. As she ran her errands that morning and visited with her friends, she told all of them that her son would be visiting that day. They reminded her that he had up and left years ago and told her she was crazy to think he was coming. Even with their doubt and ridicule, Judy was so sure of her precognition that she turned down other afternoon plans so that she could sit home and wait. That afternoon a car pulled into her driveway. It was her son whom she had not seen in 12 years. Even Judy was amazed that her intuition had been correct. She was thrilled to tell her son that she had been waiting for him.

How to increase your skill:
No matter how strong your precognitive abilities are, there is always room to strengthen them. For most people, the best way to access precognitions is through dreams. However, the challenge with dreams is that they're often hard to evaluate at the time you have them. They're also hard to remember during your waking life. By keeping a journal near your bed and writing down your dreams just after you've had them, you give yourself the opportunity to go back and check what you've dreamt from time to time. You can weigh your dreams against real-life events to see if you've made any valid predictions.

It could take months before something comes true, or it could happen somewhat quickly. Sometimes the clue in your dream will be something small, and oftentimes it won't be literal. For instance, one morning a second grade teacher named John woke up after having the strangest dream. There were lots of different parts to it. It seemed that in his mind he had traveled to the jungles and the tops of mountains all in one night. But the part of the dream that really stuck with him was the end. In his dream, he walked into his kitchen to get some coffee and found Betty Crocker there - the woman from the famous baking goods company - surrounded by pies and cakes. John awoke having no idea what this dream meant and went off to work. That afternoon in school, he was leading a discussion about what his class could do to raise money for an upcoming fieldtrip. One of his students suggested having a bake sale. There was great support for the idea from all the other students and the bake sale was decided on. John had to laugh to himself when he was surrounded by cookies and baked goods at their fundraiser the following week.

Remote Viewing
Remote viewing is the ability, while staying in one place, to "go" somewhere else with the power of your mind and visually see what is there. Space is not a limiting factor for individuals who have strong remote viewing capabilities. Interestingly, there has been substantial experimentation using remote viewers to examine whether or not this type of ESP truly exists and can be relied upon. One example is the government-funded "Stargate" project that had psychics attempt to remotely view foreign targets for intelligence purposes. The viewers' results were good enough that this program received government support for many years. Today it's even the subject of a number of books. However, that doesn't mean that remote viewing has been determined to be foolproof. Although indisputable evidence exists regarding the legitimacy of remote viewing, it's still difficult to rely on this kind of information. Nearly everyone makes mistakes at times, even excellent remote viewers.

How to increase your skill:
No matter how solid your remote viewing skills are, this is a difficult ability to master. Obviously some people will always be better remote viewers than others. However, with practice, whatever skills you do have can become more refined over time. In psychic experiments, remote viewers practice their skills systematically. The tester determines the latitude and longitude of a particular place or building, and then the person being tested takes that information and goes to that place in their mind. Once they feel like they have an image of the location, they describe or write down whatever they're picturing. It's most effective to do this kind of experiment using three people, so there is an impartial middle person between the tester and the person being tested. That way the tester can't influence the remote viewer with their thoughts. By using the third person, it's easier to make certain that the ESP ability being displayed is truly remote viewing and not mental telepathy.

Telepathy
Mental telepathy is the ability to know what another person is thinking or visualizing without being told anything about their inner thoughts. Statistically speaking, telepathy is a relatively more common way to exercise your sixth sense. Perhaps that's because it can be easier to get information by reading another person than by trying to obtain information from things like one does with clairvoyance. In some cases, the connections between people seem to somehow support telepathy.

Perhaps you've experienced telepathy in your own life by knowing who is on the line as soon as the phone rings, even if there's no special reason to expect that person to call. You might also have had telepathic experiences where you thought about someone you hadn't talked to in ages, only to have them contact you later that same day. In this latter case, you don't really know whether it was you who experienced the telepathy or if it was the person who did the calling that did. You can check with them to try to straighten it out, but the fact of it may never be clear.

How to increase your skill:
Even people with great telepathic abilities have room to hone their skills. The easiest way for you to do this is to pair up with a friend so you can both practice. Try this: Sit down together with your friend and spend a few minutes calming your minds and relaxing into a quiet, meditative state. Once you're both relaxed, take turns doing the following exercise. One person deliberately thinks about something, like a day that had special significance to them or a particular scene of some kind. The other person tries to connect with what the first person is thinking and then describes what they're picking up. With practice, over time you'll likely get a better sense of when you are picking up a true "signal" from your friend's mind versus simply imagining what they might be thinking or visualizing.

Clairvoyance
Clairvoyance is the ability to know something that is currently taking place without reliance on any of your five senses to obtain that knowledge. For example, sometimes an individual will suddenly see in their mind's eye an event that is currently transpiring; only later will they get confirmation that what they envisioned truly happened. At other times, clairvoyants will not see the whole picture but will simply sense that something happened. Mostly, clairvoyance is the ability to get information about things: "mindless objects." Take this story of a woman who lost the stone in her wedding ring.

One afternoon during lunch, a woman looked down at her hand only to realize that one of the three diamonds in her wedding ring was gone. She was extremely upset because had no idea when or where she'd lost the stone. She was certain it was gone forever. After breaking the news to her husband, the two began to look all through their house for it, not having any idea where the stone might be. Then suddenly, the husband had a vision that his wife's diamond was on the ground underneath the movie-theater seat she had occupied the night before. He didn't tell her about this vision at first, in case he was mistaken. Instead he told his wife he was going to the store and returned to the theater to look for the diamond. Sure enough, when he reached the spot where they had been sitting, the stone was there, just like he had pictured it. He brought the diamond back to his wife to her great delight and told her about the mental picture that led him to it.

How to increase your skill:
No matter how clairvoyant you believe yourself to be, this is a skill you can always advance further. To become more clairvoyant, you need only to pay more attention to your hunches. Day-to-day life provides many opportunities to test yourself. However, you may also want to experiment with some cards or dice.

Here's a good exercise to try: Roll a die but don't look at it once you've rolled it. With your eyes closed, try to imagine the number on the die you just rolled. Once you "see" it in your head, say the number out loud and open your eyes. Were you correct? Take a piece of paper and write down the number you rolled and whether you were correct or not. The more you do this, the better you'll become at recognizing when your visions are accurate and when they're not.

Retrocognition
Retrocognition is the ability to look into the past and get information that is not otherwise available to you through one of your five senses. For some people, this information comes spontaneously. For example, one woman with strong retrocognition skills reported that she was standing by the side of the road one day and flashed upon of a scene of a car accident. This vision had a disturbing effect on her. In fact, it was so compelling and realistic that she set out to determine if a crash had actually taken place there. Upon investigation, she found that indeed, a terrible accident had occurred just days before, exactly as she had envisioned it. However, not everyone with retrocognition experiences these spontaneous flashbacks. Certain individuals with this skill use meditation or purposeful visualization to look back into the past.

How to increase your skill:
No matter how skilled you are at retrocognition, there is always room for advancing your ability. The best way to improve is to go to new places and see if you get any feeling about what has happened there in the past. The more you're able to quiet your mind and focus your attention on where you are, the more likely you'll be able to connect. You may get a particular feeling, have a vision, or just experience a kind of "knowingness" about what has happened there before.

Most times, however, you probably won't have a sense about a place. Therefore the more places you go, and the more times you check in with yourself regarding whether you're having any particular reactions to a place, the better chance you'll have of identifying moments of retrocognition. When you believe you're on to something, try to get feedback and validation by asking others what they know about a location's past. You may be surprised to find that you've picked up on a piece of history. Yet at other times, even if your hunches are correct, you may have trouble finding others to confirm them. This is especially true if the events you are sensing happened a very long time ago.

Although bats are seldom seen in Wind Cave there are a few here and throughout the area. Bats are shy creatures and want to avoid you as much as you might want to avoid them.

Bats are the only mammals that can fly.
Bats are NOT flying mice. Bats belong to a separate order of mammals called Chiroptera.
Bats come in all different colors, shapes and varieties. Some are red, have huge ears, or have very unusual faces. Many of these attributes are related to their navigational system. One quarter of all mammal species are bats. Worldwide there are almost a thousand species of bats!
In the US alone there are 39 species of bats.
In some parts of the world, bats take the place of bees in pollinating plants.
Little brown bats have life spans that may exceed 32 years.
A bat will eat half its weight in insects in a single night.

In the 1930s scientists discovered that bats use a kind of natural sonar that allows them to "see" with their ears. This amazing system is called echolocation.
Most sounds that a bat uses can not be heard by humans.
A bat knows where an insect is because the sounds bounce off of it and return to the bat's ears. A bat can hear the footsteps of a walking insect!
Most bats send signals through their mouths, others use their noses.
Not all bats use echolocation. Fruit bats use sight and smell to locate their food. All bats can see.
Bats can use echolocation even when there are distracting noises. Hundreds of bats can fly out of a cave within range of one another's sound.
The Chinese view bats as symbols of good luck and happiness. They symbolize health, long life, prosperity, love of virtue and natural death.

A colony of big brown bats can eat 18 million cucumber beetles.
Plants such as bananas, mangoes, cashews, dates and figs rely on bats for pollination and seed dispersal.
Tequila is produced from agave plants. Seed production drops to 1/3000 of normal without bat pollinators.
Nectar-feeding bats are primary pollinators of giant cacti such as the organ pipe and saguaro.
Bat droppings (guano) support entire ecosystems of unique organisms, including bacteria useful in detoxifying wastes, improving detergents and producing gasohol and antibiotics.

Bats are in serious decline nearly everywhere. Forty percent of the bats in the US and Canada are endangered or candidates for such status. Even small disturbances in their habitat can seriously threaten their survival.
Loss of plant and animal diversity may be the most serious long-term global problem we face.

The relationships between insects, their predators, and the plants they pollinate is tenuous. Disturbances with one species can seriously change the balance in entire systems of plants and animal life.

In January of 1692, the daughter and niece of Reverend Samuel Parris of Salem Village became ill. When they failed to improve, the village doctor, William Griggs, was called in. His diagnosis of bewitchment put into motion the forces that would ultimately result in the death by hanging of nineteen men and women. In addition, one man was crushed to death; seventeen others died in prison, and the lives of many were irrevocably changed.

To understand the events of the Salem witch trials, it is necessary to examine the times in which accusations of witchcraft occurred. There were the ordinary stresses of 17th-century life in Massachusetts Bay Colony. A strong belief in the devil, factions among Salem Village fanatics and rivalry with nearby Salem Town, a recent small pox epidemic and the threat of attack by warring tribes created a fertile ground for fear and suspicion. Soon prisons were filled with more than 150 men and women from towns surrounding Salem. Their names had been "cried out" by tormented young girls as the cause of their pain. All would await trial for a crime punishable by death in 17th-century New England, the practice of witchcraft.

In June of 1692, the special Court of Oyer (to hear) and Terminer (to decide) sat in Salem to hear the cases of witchcraft. Presided over by Chief Justice William Stoughton, the court was made up of magistrates and jurors. The first to be tried was Bridget Bishop of Salem who was found guilty and was hanged on June 10. Thirteen women and five men from all stations of life followed her to the gallows on three successive hanging days before the court was disbanded by Governor William Phipps in October of that year. The Superior Court of Judicature, formed to replace the "witchcraft" court, did not allow spectral evidence. This belief in the power of the accused to use their invisible shapes or spectres to torture their victims had sealed the fates of those tried by the Court of Oyer and Terminer. The new court released those awaiting trial and pardoned those awaiting execution. In effect, the Salem witch trials were over.
As years passed, apologies were offered, and restitution was made to the victims' families. Historians and sociologists have examined this most complex episode in our history so that we may understand the issues of that time and apply our understanding to our own society. The parallels between the Salem witch trials and more modern examples of "witch hunting" like the McCarthy hearings of the 1950's, are remarkable.

As early as cavemen, the Gods of Wicca have been around. Cave drawings depicting a horned god and a pregnant female with over-emphasized genitalia were common. Through the years, as we moved forward in our evolution, these gods became associated with the seasons of the year, the moon especially with the female Gods. As Agriculture was the center of attention, it only made sense that both the male and female Gods were recognized in Sun, Moon, and Earth.

The main origin of Wicca is to be found in the Celts' history. Four major Sabbats are derived from the Celts: Samhain, Imbolic, Beltaine, and Lughnasadh (for more information on Sabbats, visit the Wiccan Sabbats page).

For hundreds of years, Pagan religions existed without conflict between them, many being based on the same ideals and roots. The advent of Christianity by the Romans, however, was the beginning of the end for those happy in their religion. Christian believers turned paganism into something evil, as they were intolerant of any way but theirs. Pagans became Satan worshipers and Gods of the Old Religions were depicted as demons. Many pagans were put to death, refusing to conform and be "Baptized" by these rulers.

However, the Church didn't quite have the full faith they believed. Many converted Christians still worshiped the old Gods and Goddess'. To try and supplicate these followers, the church officially venerated the mother of Jesus as Virgin Mary, not Goddess, not just human, but "blessed by God" to offer a female deity.

The Church continued to condemn Paganism and Witchcraft for the next few centuries, even officially declaring Witchcraft (the practice of any religion not Catholic) as heresy. This allowed the prosecution of Witches to begin in Germany and soon flooded across Europe and the USA as well. With the blessing of the Church, thousands were put to death without real trials or proof and their possessions divided among the accuser and persecutor.

Pagan traditions still lingered, regardless of the suppression by the Church. Things such as Mayday, mistletoe at Yule, "Easter" eggs from Ostara, and many other examples of paganism blended into Christian Celebrations. In the 15th century, Paganism began to grow once more in the intellectual circles of Europe via the secret societies, such as the Illuminati, the Freemasons, and the Rosicrucians.

Beginning in 1899, published books began to appear... "Ariada or The Gospel of Witches", "The Witch cult in Western Europe; A study in anthropology" up through the first book to truly bring Modern Wicca about, Gerald Gardner's 1954 "Witchcraft Today" and it's sequel, "The Meaning of Witchcraft" in 1959. Today there are more than 500 books available on the Wiccan religion, Paganism, and the worship of the Gods and Goddess' of old.

Though our religion has been around for thousands of years, Gardner is considered the grandfather of Modern Wicca. His books began the revolution of Wicca that took it out of hiding and made it available, once again, to so many. Gardnerian and Alexandrian witches have become the backbone in today's Wicca.