Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious
Time Loops is a landmark survey of the evidence for one of the most taboo topics in the sciences, the purported ESP ability known as precognition—seeing, knowing, or being influenced by the future.
In this comprehensive examination of the topic, Wargo shows that the evidence gathered over more than a century in laboratories is more than compelling, despite skeptical claims to the contrary. Moreover, over just the past two decades, the idea that the future can affect the past is gaining ground in physics. So-called retrocausation might be a constituent of ordinary reality that has been misrecognized for a century as randomness (quantum uncertainty) at the smallest scales. At the same time, trends in biology are showing how weird quantum effects are central in some biological systems, including possibly the brain.
Drawing widely on scientific literatures as well as clinical psychology and psychoanalytic theory, Wargo builds a case that we should think of the brain as a tesseract, a four-dimensional information processor. It gives individuals oblique but valuable information about upheavals and learning experiences in their future, both in dreams and in waking life via intuition and artistic inspiration. The new understanding of precognition as a kind of “memory for things future” also offers a 21st-century reframing of older occultist and depth-psychological ideas like Carl Jung’s concept, synchronicity. One of the major implications of this reframing is that it shows how our biographies may be shaped by causally circular situations—the “time loops” of the title. Some dream or inkling unintendedly leads to the future experience that was foreseen.
Uninformed skeptics of ESP phenomena no longer have much basis to dismiss precognition. It does not go against physics, the evidence for it is overwhelming, and it could even help make sense of a wide variety of common but “paranormal” human experiences that mainstream psychologists have ignored until now because they seemed too strange.
“I consider Time Loops to be the most significant intellectual work on a paranormal topic in the last fifty years …”
– Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of How To Think Impossibly
“[Wargo] succeeds gloriously in providing this century’s first historical and analytic overview of precognition and its causes.”
– Mitch Horowitz, author of Modern Occultism
“Time Loops is the definitive inquiry into cases of people who remember their future. Eric Wargo is the Sherlock Holmes of retrocausation.”
– Nick Herbert, author of Quantum Reality
“This book could be a Newton-plus-apple moment in the understanding of many currently way out there phenomena that we have investigated with frustrating lack of progress for many years …”
– Jenny Randles, Magonia
First published in 2018 by Anomalist Books, this first Cup+Saucer Press edition has a new Foreword by Jeffrey J. Kripal.
Eric Wargo has a PhD in anthropology and is the author of several acclaimed books on time, the unconscious, and creativity, including From Nowhere, Precognitive Dreamwork and the Long Self, and Where Was It Before the Dream? He also writes about science fiction and parapsychology at his popular blog, The Nightshirt.
Jeffrey J. Kripal holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. He is the author of several books, including, most recently, The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
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