Preface / PREFACE
Where Does Prophecy Come From?
Introduction
Prophets all say they “heard” something: in a dream, during prayer, or just before death, someone told them what lay ahead.
Did that voice really come from outside, or did it rise from somewhere within us? Across East and West, antiquity and modernity, this essay brings together accounts of people who said they heard a voice.
It does not seek to deliver a verdict. It follows the depth of a similar experience through the different names that eras and cultures have given it.
Socrates’ daimonion: a voice that only held him back
The roots of the word “daemon” lead to Socrates. In Plato’s Apology, he says that since childhood he had heard a divine voice, the daimonion.
This voice had a distinctive quality. It never told him to do anything; when he was about to take a wrong turn, it only warned him, “Do not.”
On the day of the trial that condemned him to death, Socrates took the absence of any warning as a sign that this path was right. It was a voice that sensed a misstep, rather than one that foretold events.
Those who heard the voice of God
Joan of Arc, a village girl in fifteenth-century France, testified that she had heard the voices of saints since her teens. Following those voices, she led an army and changed the course of a faltering war.
Korean history also offers a striking example. In 1860, while practising at Yongdam in Gyeongju, Su-un Choe Je-u recorded that his body suddenly shook and he heard the voice of Heaven from the air.
The words were 吾心卽汝心: “My mind is your mind.” A divine voice heard from outside was saying, “I am within you.” This insight later developed into the idea of in-nae-cheon (人乃天), “Humanity is Heaven.”
A ‘third presence’ at the limits of survival
Mystics and saints are not the only people to hear voices. Explorers, climbers and pilots—people engaged in practical tasks—have recorded similar experiences on the boundary between life and death. Writer John Geiger called this the “Third Man Factor.”
| Person | Situation | Experience |
|---|---|---|
| Ernest Shackleton | 1916 Antarctic ordeal; crossing the mountains of South Georgia | All three walkers sensed that a fourth person was with them |
| Frank Smythe | 1933 solo climb on Everest | Turned to share his cake with a presence beside him |
| Charles Lindbergh | 1927 solo Atlantic flight | Presences appearing during exhaustion offered navigational advice |
| Joe Simpson | 1985 Peruvian Andes; fell into a crevasse after breaking his leg | Survived by following a detached voice telling him to keep crawling |
| Ron DiFrancesco | September 11, 2001; South Tower of the World Trade Center | Someone seemed to lift him up in the smoke and lead him toward the stairs |
The common feature is clear: exhaustion, isolation and fear had reached an extreme, and the ordinary sense of self had broken down.
Science calls this a “sensed presence.” Neuroscientist Olaf Blanke’s team stimulated the temporoparietal junction and induced a feeling that “someone is behind me” even in healthy participants. One interpretation is that the brain in crisis activates an emergency mechanism of its own.
Ancient people who heard divine voices
In 1976, American psychologist Julian Jaynes proposed a bold hypothesis. Until about three thousand years ago, humans lacked the inwardly thinking “I” familiar to us today; judgments made by one part of the brain were heard by another as a god’s voice. He called this the “bicameral mind.”
Jaynes saw traces of it in the Iliad, where heroes act on divine instructions rather than deliberate for themselves. As society grew more complex, the voice gradually became “my thought.” People who had lost the gods’ voices then sought oracles and prophets, he argued.
This is not an established academic consensus, but few answers to the origins of prophecy reach so deeply. Under this hypothesis, a prophet is someone who has not yet lost the voice that ancient humanity once heard.
A self that already knows: Anthony Peake’s daemon
In his 2006 book Is There Life After Death?, British writer Anthony Peake put forward an unusual theory. At death, subjective time expands without limit, allowing a person to relive an entire life from its beginning. Outside, only an instant passes; within consciousness, a whole lifetime plays again.
Peake proposed that two selves exist within us.
- Eidolon: the ordinary self that believes it is living this life for the first time
- Daemon: a deeper self that has already lived this life many times and knows what lies ahead
In this framework, déjà vu, ominous premonitions and inner voices during crises are signals from the daemon to the eidolon. The possibility of choosing differently with each repetition distinguishes it from Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence of the same.
From this perspective, prophecy is not “seeing” the future but “remembering” what has already been experienced. Science does not recognize this as a testable theory, but as a meditation on prophecy’s origins it is among the boldest answers.
Peake’s book has not yet been translated into Korean.
An Eastern answer: the voice was within all along
Where Western accounts described a voice arriving from outside, Eastern traditions understood it from the outset as the original self. Parallels to Peake’s two selves appear across these traditions.
| Tradition | Everyday self | Deeper self |
|---|---|---|
| India’s Mundaka Upanishad | The bird that eats fruit, weeping and laughing (jiva) | The bird that watches quietly (atman) |
| Yogacara Buddhism | Surface consciousness | Alaya consciousness, where past-life experiences are stored like seeds |
| Daoist inner alchemy | The discriminating spirit moved by desire and distinctions (識神) | The original spirit present before birth (元神) |
| Wang Yangming’s thought | The mind obscured by selfish desires | Innate knowing that recognizes right and wrong without learning (良知) |
| Anthony Peake | Eidolon | Daemon |
Laozi goes a step further. The Dao of the Daodejing has no personality that speaks to us. Instead, by reaching utter emptiness and holding firmly to stillness, one sees all things returning to their roots (致虛極 守靜篤 … 吾以觀復).
For Laozi, the point was not to hear a voice but to empty oneself. Learning adds something each day; the Way takes something away (爲學日益 爲道日損).
In closing: emptiness as the doorway to a voice
What follows is reflection. Please read it for its depth, rather than as a question of right or wrong.
Follow the watching bird to the end and nothing is there. Precisely because that place holds no thoughts, memories or emotions, it can observe them all. It is the place Huineng described as “Originally, not a single thing” (本來無一物), and the emptiness that, in Laozi’s account, makes a vessel useful.
Socrates’ daimonion likewise added nothing; it only took things away. Might the daemon, then, be another face of emptiness?
Consider again those who heard voices in extreme situations. Shackleton and Joe Simpson had been stripped of desire, calculation and concern for appearances. A crisis of life and death had pushed them into a state that practitioners deliberately cultivate through meditation.
Something emerges in that empty place. Western accounts wrote, “Someone spoke to me”; Eastern accounts wrote, “The original mind revealed itself.” The Heaven that Choe Je-u heard said, “My mind is your mind.”
Where does prophecy come from? Perhaps neither from outside nor from within, but from a place emptied out. The voice of God, daemon, innate knowing and original spirit may be different forms in which that emptiness appears to a human being.