Imagine all the things that had to occur, not only in his life, but in everybody else's, to arrange it so on that particular night, the Big Bopper would be in a position to live or die depending on a flipping coin. I became so obsessed with that idea that I gradually became capable of seeing the specifics of everybody's death.
Peter Boyle won an Emmy for his portrayal of Clyde Bruckman in an episode of The X-Files, "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose." He played an insurance salesman who had the unique psychic ability of seeing the moment of people's deaths. The quote above is Bruckman describing how he came by this gift. The specifics of the incident are flawed: it was actually Ritchie Valens who flipped for the seat on the plane which crashed, killing him, Jiles "Big Bopper" Richardson, and Buddy Holly in 1959. Waylon Jennings, then Holly's bass player, voluntarily gave up his seat to Richardson. But I digress in the name of accuracy.
The skill known as physiognomy works by the ability to read cues in a person's facial expressions and body language to determine specifics about their character and emotional states. Nearly every human being has this ability wired into their nervous systems. Empathy works in a similar fashion. Multiple cues in a person's demeanor may lead you to deduce their emotional state and several points of their character, which may lead to further deductions concerning their life experiences. A similar train of deduction is displayed in "The Adventure of the Resident Patient," a Sherlock Holmes short story, where Holmes deduces Watson's train of thought based solely on Watson's subtle gestures. With practice and sufficient knowledge, any person can learn to do this.
The part where it becomes psychic is that at each point of decision in your deduction, you may feel an intuitive "pull" or "push" indicating either an affirmative or a negative on each decision. For most people the entire process will take place in the vast and churning sea of the subconscious, which, upon arriving at a properly intuited experience, will throw an appropriate thought or image into the conscious mind through one or more channels. It may be a simple sensory experience, such as an image or a sound or even just a smell, or it may be a more complex sequence of experiences, like a video playing out in your mind but with all five senses represented along with emotions, thoughts, world-views, and so forth. For empaths who have developed a stronger link to their subconscious through introspective meditation, the process will be less opaque, and the practitioner will be more consciously aware of the steps in arriving at the specific intuition.
Of course, the process isn't fool-proof. You need to really tune into your intuition and learn to trust it. Hopefully, my posts on meditation will help you achieve that.
