Knowing Things You Shouldn't: A Confession

I need to tell you something I don't usually admit publicly: I've known things I had no way of knowing since I was a child.

Not vague intuitions. Not lucky guesses. Specific, verifiable information that I had no conventional access to.

I've known when volcanoes were going to erupt before they happened. I've known about events happening to people hundreds of miles away. I've known details about strangers' lives that I couldn't possibly have learned through normal means. I've had information arrive that later proved accurate in ways I couldn't have predicted or deduced.

This isn't spiritual posturing. It's just what my experience has been for as long as I can remember.

And here's the problem: I'm also a researcher at Cambridge studying plasma physics and quantum entanglement. I'm Chair of The Philosophical Society: Oxford. I'm trained in rigorous thinking, empiricism, and intellectual honesty.

Every fiber of my scientific training tells me that what I'm experiencing shouldn't be possible. And yet it keeps happening.

So I'm caught between two incompatible realities: the certainty of my direct experience and the absence of any adequate explanation for it.

Knowing the unknowable can feel isolating

What Knowing Actually Feels Like

Let me be specific about what I'm talking about, because 'knowing things you shouldn't know' can mean a lot of different things.

It's not thinking about someone and then they call. Everyone has that experience occasionally, as that's just coincidence playing out over enough instances.

It's not reading body language or picking up subtle cues. I'm sure some of what people call intuition is just being very attentive to non-verbal communication. That's not what I'm describing.

It's not even having strong hunches that sometimes pan out. Pattern recognition and unconscious processing can produce what feels like intuition but is actually just your brain making connections you're not aware of.

What I'm talking about is more specific and more unsettling.

Here's an example from childhood: I was seven years old, playing in my room, when I suddenly knew, with complete certainty, that a neighbour was going to die. It was not a feeling of worry or anxiety. Just clear knowledge: it's happening, right now.

I told my mother. She looked at me strangely and said that the neighbour was fine and was not even sick. She said it was all in my imagination.

Twenty minutes later, the phone rang. Our neighbour had died of a sudden heart attack. The time matched exactly when I'd told my mother.

This wasn't the only time. Throughout my childhood and into adulthood, information arrives that I have no conventional explanation for. Sometimes in dreams. Sometimes in waking awareness. Often in shamanic journey. Always with a quality of clarity that's different from imagination or speculation.

And when I can verify it, which isn't always possible immediately, it's accurate far more often than chance would allow.

The Temptation of Quantum Explanations

As someone who studies quantum entanglement and non-locality, you can imagine how tempting it is to reach for quantum mechanics as an explanation.

Entangled particles exhibit correlations that transcend space. Information seems to travel faster than light (though it technically doesn't; ask me about the no-signaling theorem if you want the physics explanation). Observer effects matter. Non-locality is real.

So surely, quantum mechanics explains non-local knowing, right? Consciousness is quantum! Our energetic bodies are entangled! The observer effect means thoughts affect reality!

No.

And this is where I have to be intellectually honest, even though it leaves me without a comfortable explanation for my own experiences.

Quantum effects don't scale up to the brain level in ways that would enable telepathy or clairvoyance. Decoherence kills quantum superposition too quickly in warm, wet, noisy biological systems. Entanglement doesn't allow information transfer, as far as we know. The observer effect requires specific measurement contexts that do not map onto conscious perception.

Every time I get excited about a potential quantum explanation for what I experience, I remember the actual physics. And the actual physics doesn't support the mystical interpretations. I often wonder if it's the physics that is lacking.

So I can't honestly claim that quantum mechanics validates shamanic knowing. Even though I desperately want it to. Even though I study the very phenomena that seem like they should explain my experiences.

The Isolation of Anomalous Experience

Here's something nobody tells you about having experiences that don't fit the dominant paradigm: it's profoundly isolating.

In scientific contexts, I can't talk about this. If I mention anomalous knowing in academic settings, I'm dismissed as unscientific or irrational. My credibility may evaporate. So I stay quiet and let colleagues assume I'm a conventional materialist. (However, at both Cambridge and Oxford, I have to say that more and more of the scientific community are less judgmental and genuinely interested. Thank goodness!)

In spiritual contexts, people expect me to validate their quantum mysticism or energy healing or manifestation beliefs. When I say, "I experience non-local knowing but quantum physics doesn't explain it," they're disappointed. They wanted scientific credentials to validate their worldview.

In some religious contexts, there are those who view such knowing with suspicion or even as diabolical. The irony is that the same traditions often honour seers and prophets from the past who claimed similar knowledge; yet, they struggle to accept contemporary experiences of the same phenomenon.

In skeptic contexts, sharing these experiences gets me labeled as deluded or dishonest. Skeptics assume I must be either lying or failing to recognise coincidence and pattern-matching.

So I exist in a strange space: experiencing something that feels absolutely real, but having no community that can hold both the reality of the experience and the absence of a good explanation.

What I Actually Know (And Don't Know)

Let me be precise about what I can claim with confidence:

What I know:

• I've had experiences of knowing things I had no conventional access to

• These experiences have been verifiable often enough that coincidence doesn't adequately explain them

• The phenomenology of this knowing feels qualitatively different from guessing, imagining, or deducing

• Many other people across cultures and throughout history report similar experiences

• Whatever is happening, it's real in the sense that it produces accurate information

  
  

What I don't know:

• How this works

• Whether it's actually non-local or just accessing information through channels I don't understand

• Whether quantum mechanics is relevant at all

• Whether there's something about consciousness we fundamentally misunderstand

• Whether this will ever be scientifically explicable

  
  

What I'm certain of:

• Quantum mysticism is intellectually dishonest

• My experiences don't prove anything about physics

• Not having an explanation doesn't invalidate the experience

• The mystery is more interesting than premature certainty

  
  

The Burden of Unexplainable Experience

There's a cost to living with experiences you can't explain and can't share without risking your credibility.

You question your own 'knowing'. Regularly. But then it happens again. And again. The information arrives, proves accurate, and you're back to: this is real, I just don't understand it.

You become careful about what you share. I've learned to mostly keep quiet. To let people assume I'm either a conventional scientist or a conventional mystic, depending on the context. To hide the ways my experience doesn't fit either framework.

You live with cognitive dissonance. My scientific training says this shouldn't be possible. My direct experience says it keeps happening. Holding both these truths simultaneously is uncomfortable.

You resist easy explanations. It would be so much easier to just accept quantum mysticism or divine intervention or psychic powers as the explanation. But intellectual honesty won't let me settle for explanations that don't actually explain.

What Knowing Revealed

When I began seriously accepting my 'gift', something shifted. The knowing that had been sporadic and uncontrolled became more accessible and intentional.

In meditation, I can seek information. I can ask questions of helping spirits and receive answers that later prove accurate. I can shamanic journey on behalf of clients and learn things about their situations that I couldn't have known conventionally. Or I can get information spontaneously when I least expect it.

This should have made me more certain about how it works. Instead, it made me more uncertain.

I may spontaneously get facts at any time, such as the neighbour dying. In shamanic journey, however, the information doesn't arrive as facts. It arrives as symbols, as encounters with entities, as visions and sensations that I have to interpret. The spirits and spirit animals I work with: are they autonomous beings? Aspects of my own consciousness? Archetypes in the collective unconscious? Metaphors my mind creates to process information arriving through some unknown channel?

I don't know.

What I know is: the practice works. Whether through shamanic journey or when I'm just taking a walk, information arrives. Healing happens. The 'knowing' is consistent and gives guidance that proves valuable to others, even life-saving guidance.

But knowing it works and knowing how it works are very different things.

Why I Won't Claim Quantum Physics Validates This

Here's why I resist the temptation to use quantum mechanics to explain shamanic knowing, even though I study quantum physics and practice shamanism:

It would be intellectually dishonest. The physics doesn't actually support the mystical claims. Using scientific-sounding language to validate spiritual experiences when the science doesn't actually apply is just sophisticated lying.

It would undermine both domains. Science loses credibility when misused. Spirituality loses depth when it needs scientific validation instead of standing on its own experiential ground.

It would be premature certainty. The most honest position is: I don't know how this works. Claiming quantum explanations just to resolve my discomfort with not-knowing would be ego protecting itself, not truth-seeking.

It would close the inquiry. As long as I admit I don't understand, I stay genuinely curious. The moment I accept an explanation, I stop looking.

The mystery is valuable. Living with genuine uncertainty, with experiences I can't explain, keeps me humble. It reminds me that reality is larger and stranger than my frameworks.

The Questions I Sit With

Instead of grasping for explanations, I sit with questions:

Is consciousness more fundamental than we think? Current neuroscience treats consciousness as produced by the brain. But what if it's the other way around? What if consciousness is fundamental and brains are receivers/transmitters rather than generators?

Are there forms of information transfer we don't understand? Maybe there are channels of communication that aren't electromagnetic, that don't require signal propagation, that we simply haven't discovered yet.

Is the subject-object distinction more porous than we assume? Maybe the clear separation between knower and known, between self and other, isn't as fundamental as our everyday experience suggests.

Is time more complex than linear causation? Maybe information can move backwards in time, or outside of time, in ways that create the experience of knowing the future or the distant.

Is there a collective dimension to consciousness? Something like Jung's collective unconscious, or Sheldrake's morphic fields, or some other way that minds are connected beyond individual boundaries?

I don't know the answers to any of these questions. But they're better questions than "Does quantum physics prove it?"

Living Between Worlds

This is what my life actually looks like:

In the lab, I work with rigorous scientific methodology. I trust data, mathematics, and empirical investigation. I don't bring my shamanic experiences into my physics work because they're irrelevant to understanding plasma dynamics.

In ceremony, I journey to non-ordinary reality. I work with spirits. I receive information that I couldn't have accessed through ordinary means. I facilitate healing using methods that have no scientific validation.

In philosophical reflection, I hold the tension between these ways of knowing without collapsing one into the other. I acknowledge that I experience something real that I can't explain. I resist both scientific reductionism and mystical inflation.

This isn't comfortable. It would be much easier to choose one framework and dismiss the other.

But I think the discomfort is the point. Reality is genuinely mysterious. Our frameworks, whether scientific or spiritual, are maps, not the territory. And sometimes the most honest position is to say: I'm experiencing something that doesn't fit my maps, and I don't need to force it to fit.

To Others Living This Paradox

If you're reading this and you also have experiences of knowing things you shouldn't know, experiences that feel absolutely real but that you can't explain and can't share without risking credibility, I see you.

You're not crazy. You're not alone. And you don't need to grasp at pseudo-scientific explanations to validate your experience.

The knowing is real. The absence of explanation is also real. Both can be true simultaneously.

You can be intellectually rigorous and experientially open. You can demand evidence in one domain while trusting direct experience in another. You can admit you don't know how something works while still knowing that it does work.

This is harder than choosing sides. But it's more honest.

The Conclusion I Can't Offer

I'm supposed to end this with some resolution, some synthesis that ties everything together.

I can't.

I still experience knowing that defies conventional explanation. I still study quantum physics.

I still practice shamanism. And I still don't have a good theory that accounts for all of it.

What I have instead is:

• Commitment to honesty about what I do and don't know

• Resistance to premature certainty

• Willingness to sit with genuine mystery

• Appreciation for the limitations of all my frameworks

• Continued practice in both scientific and shamanic domains

  
  

Maybe that's enough.

Maybe the point isn't to resolve the paradox but to live it with as much integrity as possible.

Maybe admitting "I don't know" is more valuable than claiming to know when I don't.

I know things I shouldn't know. I just don't know how I know them.

And I'm learning to be okay with that.

I'm Kathy Postelle Rixon, researcher at Cambridge studying plasma physics and quantum entanglement, Chair of The Philosophical Society: Oxford, and shamanic practitioner who experiences non-local knowing without being able to explain it. I live in the tension between rigorous science and genuine mystery. If this resonates, reach out at kathy@magicinharmony.com or visit www.magicinharmony.com.

Do you have experiences that don't fit the dominant paradigm? How do you hold the tension between certainty of experience and absence of explanation? I'd genuinely love to hear from others navigating this paradox.