14

The Arrival of Meaning and the Creation of the Past

With trembling hands, I made a tiny breach in the upper left hand corner … widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in … at first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle to flicker. Presently, details of the room emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues and gold—everywhere the glint of gold. For the moment—an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by—I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand in suspense any longer, inquired anxiously “Can you see anything?”, it was all I could do to get out the words “Yes, wonderful things”.

— Howard Carter, diary entry (November 26, 1922)

I n the 2016 film Arrival by director Denis Villeneuve, based on “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is part of a scientific team summoned to Montana to help decipher the language of visiting extraterrestrials, known as “heptapods,” so that their intentions can be clarified. She starts to have frequent visions of a dying girl that she cannot place—she fears she may be going crazy from the strain of her assignment. The audience naturally assumes that these are flashbacks, memories of a child she lost in her past.

As Louise begins to realize that her increased understanding of how the aliens communicate is helping liberate her cognitively from linear time, she begins having visions that aid in her work, including reading from the definitive book on the aliens’ written language that she herself is destined to write and publish in her future. From the book’s dedication, she realizes that the girl in her visions is a daughter she is going to have and who will eventually die of a rare disease. And at a key moment, when the world is on the brink of war with the visitors, she is able to contact a Chinese General on his private cell phone and talk him out of his belligerence after she “premembers” his phone number, which he will show her at a celebration months or years in the future—an event celebrating international unification in the aftermath of humanity’s first contact with extraterrestrial beings, made possible thanks largely to her intervention.

It is a story about time loops, in other words. And what “arrives” at the climax and at various turning points—excitingly in some cases and sadly in others—is the meaning of Louise’s baffling experiences.

The heptapods, with their circular language, feel at home in the block universe of Minkowski spacetime, where past, present, and future coexist. In Chiang’s short story, the scientists attempting to crack the code of their language get an important clue from Fermat’s principle of least time (Chapter 6), which suggests a kind of teleological interpretation of light’s behavior—it needs to know where it is going right from the start, in order to take the fastest possible route to get there. Chiang resolves the perennial questions about precognition and free will by suggesting that knowledge of future outcomes causes a psychological shift in the experiencer: an “urgency, a sense of obligation” ¹ to fulfill what has been foreseen. “Fatalism” would be one word for it but inflected more positively—perhaps not unlike how Morgan Robertson and Phil Dick may have seen it: as absolution rather than restriction.

In the film, one of the heptapods sacrifices its life to save that of Louise and her team members from a bomb planted by some soldiers, even though it clearly knows its fate well in advance. Their race even knows that in 3,000 years, humanity will offer them some needed assistance, and thus their visit is just the beginning of a long relationship of mutual aid in the block universe. At the end of the film, Louise chooses to have her daughter, even knowing that the girl will die. It is a sublime, albeit melancholy, vision, one that not all people are capable of withstanding. Louise’s physicist husband, the father of their daughter, divorces her because he cannot accept her choice and her foreknowledge of its outcome.

Precognition is seldom as clear as it is depicted in Arrival or “Story of Your Life,” for all the reasons we have explored throughout this book. Information refluxing from the future will always be largely oblique and unrecognizable, misunderstood, and more often forgotten completely until events transpire to make sense of or confirm it. But of all films that have been made about precognition, Arrival probably is closest to “getting it right,” and Louise Banks’ experience can serve as a useful template for understanding the unconscious and its looping relation to time, meaning, and causality. ² Until unfolding events make sense of our anomalous experiences, any meaning we give them will be premature and will inevitably falsify them.

As I argued, the main difference between precognition and what we usually think of as memory is that information from the Not Yet must lack meaning until precognized events come to pass. Unlike the past, the future does not speak a language we can recognize. Rich sensory experiences (such as where you were and what you were doing when you learned something new) provide the context for much of what we know from past experience, enabling us to place that information in our personal chronology and even providing rich associations that help recall facts and events—for instance the famous power of smells and places to evoke a recollection. Information from our future will by definition lack any context that could give it meaning or, in most cases, even allow us to recognize it as meaningful. Like finding letters in our mailbox with no return address, we might toss aside our strange dreams, visions, and weirdly non-sequitur passing thoughts as junk mail. If we do not discard them, we may make up inaccurate stories about where they came from (those source-monitoring errors).

Additionally, precisely because precognitive information lacks sense when we receive it, and because the psyche abhors a vacuum of meaning, we may have already imposed some suitable (but false) framing on such experiences by the time confirmation arrives—further abetting the unseeing of their precognitive nature. If you already assume that a dream symbolically represents recent preoccupations, or unresolved wishes from childhood, or archetypes relevant to your individuation—or more likely, just assume dreams are the deranged product of the sleeping brain—why bother looking for any additional meaning in the dream, even when events unfold that oddly resemble its contents?

The depth psychologies examined earlier, Freud’s psychoanalysis and Jung’s analytical psychology, were bold in their recognition that something about us transcends our ordinary understanding—that there is much more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy. But if those traditions celebrated humanity’s mysterious richness, they also redirected our inquiry toward their founders’ favored past-oriented psychology or transpersonal metaphysics. ³ By insisting on a prescribed set of hermeneutic coordinates for our dreams and symptoms (the Oedipal situation; archetypes of the collective unconscious), Freud’s and Jung’s frameworks prematurely satisfied their own and their followers’ hunger for meaning and thereby falsified our true relation to time. Wishing into existence a dream life (and universe) already pre-saturated with meaning, we will never have the opportunity to discover, or even imagine, that we could sometimes be in the astonishing presence of wishes and thoughts we ourselves will consciously have at some later point down the road.

Not waiting for meaning’s arrival—not waiting for the sugar to melt ⁴ —can come back to haunt us. With three decades of hindsight, the dream of Irma’s injection showed the 67-year-old Freud, obliquely and in a fashion he probably couldn’t accept, his belated, better-informed perspective on the turning point that led to him becoming the “answerer of riddles” celebrated by his colleagues. From that late vantage point, I suggested, he tried to wish away a nagging realization that he might have been wrong about dreams —at least, wrong in his rejection of their prophetic possibility. It was in the same stroke a reproach to himself for ignoring his friend Fliess’s warning about his smoking that, had he heeded it, might have averted what turned into 16 years of pain and drastically compromised quality of life. Again, at the time he had the dream, it was not a “warning” he could have heeded; but as an ordinary irrational mortal, he might naturally have blamed himself anyway for not treating it as a warning. It is our confused belief in free will and an open-ended universe subject to our shaping that naturally leads to such (possibly quite erroneous) retrospection. How entangled our neuroses and regrets are with our cosmology is a rich topic awaiting some future quantum psychoanalysis. ⁵

The Unconscious of Matter

Both the hermeneutic moment in the psychoanalytic clinic and the act of measurement in a physics lab create a state of knowing by giving meaning to what until then lacked it, in a way that has decisive effects for the object of knowledge—who, in the former case, is also a subject. ⁶ According to most mainstream descriptions of what happens in the double-slit experiment, the photon in its unmeasured state is a lot like an ambivalent neurotic, taking both paths simultaneously through two available slits because it cannot make up its mind or commit to taking one slit or the other. This ambivalence, literally a kind of self-interference, shapes the observed behavior of matter on a fundamental level. When the wavefunction “collapses” to something definite, it is like making that photon’s unconscious conscious. “Where it (the unconscious) was, there will I (the conscious ego) be,” in Freud’s famous phrase. Where the wave was, there the particle will be . The world of self-interfering wavefunctions is essentially the unconscious of matter.

Richard Feynman’s “path-integral” (or “sum over histories”) approach to quantum problems is especially Freudian. Instead of viewing light as consisting of waves, he visualized a photon as a little ball taking every possible path through space to get to its destination; most “wild” paths destructively interfere, but those in the vicinity of the most efficient path reinforce each other, producing the ray-like behavior we observe. This is how he explained Fermat’s principle of least time, in his lectures published as QED : The path taken by the light ray is the last man standing, so to speak, after all other possible vectors cancel each other out. ⁷ In other words, it is just like the existing-yet-not-existing, agonistic virtual realm of the unconscious, where every possible motive and dark desire battles for supremacy without us ever being the wiser. Off-stage, perpetually unseen, is a bloody battlefield strewn with matter’s slain possibilities and intentions. (As James Gleick put it in his biography of Feynman: “The seemingly irrelevant paths are always lurking in the background, making their contributions, ready to make their presence felt in such phenomena as mirages and diffraction gratings” ⁸ —nature’s parapraxes and dreams, one might say.)

Physicists have been more careful than psychoanalysts not to reify or hypostatize their metaphors—Feynman, for instance, did not assume that his signature path integrals were necessarily anything more than a mathematical predictive trick. (Thus, it is sometimes said that quantum physics really has no theory; the Copenhagen Interpretation is really an injunction not to interpret but just “shut up and calculate.” ⁹ ) But it is hard not to make assumptions about reality based on our metaphors, even mathematical ones. This is known in the social sciences and linguistics as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, another crucial touchstone for the scientists in “Story of Your Life”: The words and symbols we use affect how we think. We may not be able to unlock greater precognitive ability simply by learning a different kind of language, one with a nonlinear grammar. But it could be that it is our language of cause and effect that keeps us from seeing that those uncollapsed wavefunctions and “buried” unconsciouses don’t already exist as something off-stage or invisible. We need some new metaphors, and, again, a new “backwards” way of thinking, to see how factors relevant to the present may be spread out in time, in both directions.

Over three centuries ago, Enlightenment physics and the natural philosophy and psychology that flowed from it walled off that whole half of time, entombing the Not Yet behind a thick stone barrier. Causes pushed from the past, and effects were theoretically predictable just from that pushing. The world subsequently forgot all about teleology, the quaint old idea that where we are going might exert some kind of complementary influence, pulling or nudging us in certain directions. Then a century ago, physicists realized there was something about matter’s behavior—a lot, in fact—that those pushing causes couldn’t tell them. Since then, a resignation to uncertainty has served as a Band-Aid, and made careers for brilliant mathematicians like Feynman, who refined quantum physics into the most powerful predictive theory ever created. Much of the technology we now take for granted depends on the startling accuracy of equations that predict matter’s statistically “random” behavior. But mysteries have remained. Basic problems remain insoluble (like reconciling quantum physics with Einstein’s theory of gravity, for instance). And with new technology that can zero in on ever smaller scales, the weirdness just gets weirder.

A few bold explorers have realized that that whole half of time the Enlightenment walled off may hold part of the answer, and they have begun to pierce it with their drills. What is gleaming in their torchlight already is, as Howard Carter whispered when he peered for the first time into King Tut’s tomb, “wonderful.” With all due respect to a brilliant teacher, Feynman’s world of particles taking every possible path is an effortful, indeed “exhausting” picture of reality. ¹⁰ The retrocausal alternative offered by Yakir Aharonov, John Cramer, Huw Price, and others seems much more elegant, not to mention less wasteful of God’s effort. The path of light is the fastest possible simply because the destination has exerted its own backward influence—pulling the light ray taut , you might say. What looked like the “capricious” randomness of identical particles is really an inflection of particles’ behavior by their differing future histories. ¹¹ The future may be an equal participant in determining the present moment.

Again, it is not that measurement simply reveals something about already-existing reality that was hitherto unknown (the old-fashioned realist view) or that it causes some magical transition from waviness to definitiveness, helping the universe make up its mind, or even bringing it wholly into being. Rather, the measurement is partly responsible for shaping the particle’s previous history. A particle’s behavior is unpredictable, “uncertain,” before it is measured because the experimenter’s measurement will turn out to have been the missing piece of the puzzle of the particle’s behavior in the first place. Not only is it teleological; it makes the behavior of matter on a fundamental level tautological —time-looping.

If the retrocausal interpretation does prevail, quantum physics may one day come to be characterized as a set of rules governing what can be known, when, and with what degree of certainty within a physical world that is already shaped by our present interpretations—a kind of hermeneutic engagement with the material past that is perpetually constructive of that past. The “entanglements of matter and meaning” ¹² described by Karen Barad in her work may turn out to be the contours of space, time, and knowledge that constitute natural firewalls against paradox. In other words, forget “nonlocality”; what entanglement and its secret alter-ego uncertainty really reflect is the limits around the ability of intentional precognitive creatures to make meaning from noise prematurely . “Free will” may simply be what it feels like when fated beings make decisions under uncertainty, bounded by those firewalls.

As Barad underscores, we cannot change an already-existing past—create a different timeline from the one we know. (How would we even know we had done so?) But there is so much we still don’t know or correctly understand about the past in the block universe we do inhabit that we can discover anew, at every moment, how our present choices were already included in and even actually shaped that past.

The hermeneutic moment that seems to give rise to preceding dreams and symptoms in clinical contexts—at least in some very suggestive cases like Maggy Quarles van Ufford’s precognitive seduction of Jung or Herr P.’s “foresight/Forsyte” obsession—exactly mirrors what is being shown in physics laboratories, and thus suggests an interesting reframing of clinical causation to parallel the retrocausation paradigm in physics. When anomalies point toward new paradigms, those anomalies often become universal and expected features within the new worldview. Are the rare precognitive events caught inadvertently in the amber of clinical writing perhaps revealing a universal principle and not the exception? Again, could it be that neuroses, the secret saboteurs of happiness, might often be premonitory formations, back-acting echoes (or “prechoes”) of future realizations and epiphanies both traumatic and rewarding?

The idea that the cure is the retroactive cause of the symptom and the interpretation the cause of the dream is not that far from what Jacques Lacan proposed already in the early 1950s. Lacan had departed from Freud’s resolutely past-centered way of picturing the psychoanalytic project, emphasizing instead the performative dimension of human life—the ongoing making of meaning in speech and cultural interaction. The individual unconscious for Lacan was not some buried stratum whose contents sometimes pressed up, breaking the surface, like the ruins of Rome. It was part of an unfolding continuum resembling a Möbius strip, a geometrical object with a single surface. When you travel along it, you pass or overtake yourself before returning to your original starting point. Symptoms and dreams confronted in psychoanalysis reflect the traverse of this Möbius in time, and human life takes on a looping, self-overtaking character as a result. (In the 1960s, Lacan also became interested in the geometry of knots and objects like Klein bottles having a single surface, as models for what transpires in analysis.) And Lacan’s version of the “collective unconscious” was similarly both flat and looping: It was simply language , the Symbolic order, which precedes us and within which we struggle more or less successfully to find our place and our voice.

With his flat ontology, Lacan saw that the apparent senselessness of a neurotic symptom or a bizarre dream is a real function of the fact that no meaning exists “in” it yet; its sense must emerge in lived acts of communication and interpretation. “What we see in the return of the repressed,” he wrote, “is the effaced signal of something which only takes on its value in the future, through its symbolic realization, its integration into the history of the subject.” ¹³ Once again, meaning must arrive —and that arrival will be seen to have had a decisive impact on what went before.

Slavoj Žižek built a whole philosophy on the Möbius-like temporal self-overtaking suggested by Lacan’s work, tying it to Hegelian and Marxian dialectical thinking as well as the European idealist tradition more generally (e.g., Schelling). In his early work, Žižek liked to invoke the typical science-fiction trope of a time traveler visiting himself in the past to illustrate how some baffling symptom is actually caused by its cure. He later defined an event (in either individual or collective history) as an occurrence that creates its own causes, in hindsight. ¹⁴ He has even applied this idea to the question of free will versus the determinism implied by contemporary neuroscience, such as Libet’s discoveries about the lag of conscious will behind the initiation of motor actions. For Žižek, freedom consists not, as V. S. Ramachandran argued, in a kind of belated veto power (“free won’t”), but more subtly in the ability to choose the causal arrows that led to our actions—a kind of hermeneutic engagement with our own past. ¹⁵ Even if our actions are dictated unconsciously, our freedom consists in the way we define them after the fact.

However, careful to avoid rocking the prevailing materialist boat and courting dreaded “New Age obscurantism,” Žižek has always held that this is only a retroactive reordering of the symbolic universe, the way we reframe things retrospectively. ¹⁶ What looks like prophecy is really just a kind of revision of memory. One way to describe much of Žižek’s work, in fact, would be as an analytic of hindsight bias .

I am arguing that we should go farther and not fear the obscure: Symptoms might really, literally, be time-loop formations built around our ambivalent “enjoyment” of salient epiphanies and traumas ahead. Those loops tie meaningless behavior in the present with meaningful future experiences, but in a way that indeed can only be accurately discerned in hindsight. The “twist” in the Möbius reflects that we traverse this loop doubly, both as cause and as meaning, giving rise to wyrd’s “symbolic” (but maybe in fact just oblique) character.

It would mean that we can no longer assume that past experiences are safely tucked away in the folds of memory, untouched and unchanged by our reflection on them in the present. In the flux of our lives, we continually are updating our knowledge, but that updating exerts (or really, exerted ) an effect already in creating the conditions that led to it. In this book I have presented evidence that people sometimes precognize not only their future thoughts but their future remembrance of past thoughts. Although we cannot create a different past, which would foreclose our own being-there in the present—the self-destructive fantasy-slash-anxiety expressed in time-travel stories—our active engagement with history and memory can disclose anew at every moment how our present realizations about our past were already included weirdly in that past, in ways that were not quite recognizable or comprehensible until this very moment . We are always at the center of a radiating (and converging) web of causes and effects, a shifting vantage point constantly disclosing and uncovering new information not only about how our history shaped our conditions of being in the present but how our realizations about that shaping shaped our history in turn. This is what I mean by a precognitive hermeneutics: ongoing excavation of the retrocausal links between present and past .

Zapped in a Parking Lot

I have drawn on psychoanalytic writings and applied these ideas to the psychoanalytic situation (and a couple of highly neurotic writers) not because I think the main relevance of this is in psychotherapy—I am not a therapist or even (currently) a patient. Apart from the light psychoanalytic theory sheds on the self-ignorance that facilitates precognition, it is because the clinic serves as a useful “toy model” for precognitive social causation more generally. It helps us think about what Rice University religion historian Jeffrey Kripal calls the “sociology of the impossible.” ¹⁷ Because here’s the thing: It would not only be our own past we are creating through our hermeneutic efforts. We would be shaping each other’s pasts, too.

As I was nearing completion on this book, Jeff Kripal invited me to read a draft of a book manuscript he had co-written with Elizabeth Krohn, the lightning-struck precog mentioned in Chapter 1. I had already been aware of Elizabeth from other writings Jeff had shared, but in reading the full story—including her side of the story—I couldn’t help but be “struck” by how vividly this case seemed to illustrate the way people’s actions in the present may actually shape not only their own histories but also the histories of other people they meaningfully interact or collaborate with.

Jeff’s own backstory is relevant. He had transitioned mid-career from a focus on Hindu mysticism to studying the history of the human potential movement and then, more recently, the paranormal as a marginalized dimension of modern religion. As he has described in a few books, the crucial turning point toward this latter trajectory was a chance encounter with a piece of trash in a Sugar Land, Texas movie theater parking lot one hot summer day in 2006. ¹⁸ He had just seen X-Men 3: The Last Stand and was feeling, he said, “perplexed” at the similarities between this superhero mythology and the “evolutionary mystical system” of one of the pioneers of the human potential movement, Michael Murphy, co-founder of the Esalen retreat in Big Sur, California.

As he approached his van, Jeff spotted a “golden and shining” X on the pavement next to it. He initially thought it was a cross, but it turned out to be an X-shaped piece of cheap costume jewelry. Like the overdetermined symbols in Freudian dream interpretation, this X connected to much more than just the X-Men mythology. It also replicated one of the most storied moments in modern science-fiction folklore, Phil Dick’s “zapping” by the fish pendant worn by the girl delivering painkiller to his house in early 1974. It was also a lot like the beetle tapping at Carl Jung’s office window on that day in 1920, a perfectly timed material sign pointing toward some kind of breakthrough. For Jeff, the X in the parking lot catalyzed an awareness of the new direction he needed to take in his career: taking seriously, as religion, the really far-out (yet, as he would come to find, astonishingly common) stories of people who experience events that transcend everyday understanding, making them the motor of their creativity and spirituality thereafter.

The X-Men comics Jeff had loved in his youth were tales of misfit, superpower-endowed “mutants” who find acceptance and guidance in understanding and applying their new talents under the mentorship of their schoolmaster, Professor X. Jeff saw Esalen, where he had spent much time over the previous eight years hosting symposia and researching the history of the institute/retreat, ¹⁹ as a kind of real-world “X School.” Esalen was founded in 1962, a year before Stan Lee and Jack Kirby envisioned their Westchester, New York, school in the X-Men comic. (If you aren’t familiar with X-Men , or Esalen, think Hogwarts in the Harry Potter series—same idea. Or if, like me, you were more of a Dune kid, think the training academies of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, alluded to throughout Frank Herbert’s series.)

In his monumental study that resulted from the gleaming X , Mutants and Mystics , Jeff identified several “mythemes” found throughout the lives and works of Dick and many other science fiction and comic book writers. One is mutation : People are transformed by their experience, and elevated—perhaps toward the next stage in their own development, or toward the next stage in human evolution—and they sometimes develop new powers as a result. Another is radiation : Light and energy are common experiences—just as happens in comic books, people are literally zapped (or communicated with) via light. And there is alienation : These individuals may experience contact with nonhuman entities or intelligences, as well as find themselves suddenly marginalized and denigrated, “othered” or alienated. Jeff developed these ideas further in The Super Natural , a collaboration with the writer Whitley Strieber, whose famously strange experiences beginning with an “abduction” (by whom or what he still cannot say) in 1985 set off a series of amazing, troubling, and baffling experiences, and a series of controversial books, beginning with his 1987 bestseller Communion . ²⁰

In October, 2015, Jeff was invited to comment on a near-death-experience case at an event at Houston Medical Center. The individual concerned was a 55-year-old mother of three, Elizabeth Krohn. Back in 1988, at age 28, Elizabeth had been struck by lightning in the parking lot of her synagogue while on her way to a service that would honor the memory of her grandfather, who had died one year before. She said that after the flash of lightning, she continued to walk into the synagogue only to realize that no one was noticing her, and that she was floating a few inches off the ground. She looked outside and saw her own inert body on the wet pavement and the smoldering soles of her brand-new (and expensive) black and white pumps. She then had an experience of the afterlife in a kind of extraterrestrial garden that lasted, she thought, about two weeks, although in Earth time it was only a few minutes. Someone called for a doctor, and this being a big city synagogue, there was no shortage of those to attend her.

Physically, Elizabeth was mostly unhurt except for burns on her feet—she did not even require a hospital stay—but after her “reentry” into her body she was never the same. She describes that she went from thinking like her shoes, in shiny, crisp, black-and-white terms, to seeing shades of gray. She went from never remembering her dreams to having and recording startlingly specific, accurate dreams about imminent events, including dreams of disasters (or news reports thereof). This metamorphosis meant a new trajectory in her life, which included dealing with her new superpower. Although exciting and intriguing on one level, it also depressed her—it was in some ways a curse because she could do nothing with her premonitions except excitedly/nervously check the news afterward to find out if what she’d seen had come to pass.

Elizabeth struggled confusedly with her new life and new experiences, tentatively trying out giving psychic readings in another city so that her increasingly “New Age” identity wouldn’t jeopardize her husband’s career. Eventually she and that husband divorced, and she married someone better suited to her new life. And eventually, fortuitously, she met Jeff, who worked in an office at Rice University just three blocks from the synagogue where she’d been zapped, and who had over the previous decade become literally the world expert in real-life zapping by super-natural energies and the “mutant” paranormal powers often acquired as a result. Elizabeth provided the most vivid, concrete, and uncannily close example yet of everything he had been studying and writing about since the X in the movie theater parking lot. She was not some author encountered via a text or a comic book; she was a real, flesh-and-blood person right in his own community.

They quickly agreed that they needed to collaborate on a book, published in 2018 as Changed in a Flash . ²¹ In the process of their collaboration, Jeff invited Elizabeth to Esalen, where she met Strieber and many big lights of the human potential movement. The experience helped her gain greater peace with and understanding of her gifts. In keeping with Elizabeth’s belief in the afterlife, she now sees herself as a kind of flesh-and-blood “spirit guide” able to heal the rupture between the living and the dead. So in a very real way, Jeff played Professor X, helping a real-life “mutant” come to grips with and learn to use her powers in a rewarding and constructive way.

In other words, in Elizabeth Krohn, Jeff Kripal met an almost too-perfect example of everything he’d been studying and thinking about since his own zapping in a local movie theater parking lot. If he were a novelist, Elizabeth is the character he would create. Although in fact, a writer deeply influential on him already wrote it. During the course of their collaboration, Jeff lent Elizabeth a copy of the novel Youth Without Youth , by the Romanian religion scholar Mircea Eliade, about an aging suicidal intellectual struck by lightning behind a church on Easter, who then develops precognitive ability. She returned it to him saying “That’s not fiction.” Also in the course of their collaboration, Elizabeth and Jeff bonded over the movie Arrival , since it seemed so nicely to illuminate Elizabeth’s own struggle toward finding meaning in her precognitive experiences.

Whether her lightning strike physically altered Elizabeth’s brain circuitry in some way, jarring loose some restraining bolt on latent precog talents, or whether it just altered her perspective on life and its precariousness in a way that made her more receptive to the precognitive sublime (as I would cautiously hypothesize), she became much more aware of her responsiveness to events and experiences in her future. If what I have been proposing is correct, those occasional dreams about air disasters and other crises would be just the tip of a largely unconscious iceberg of precognitive orientation to future rewards in Elizabeth’s life. The rewards of the air disaster dreams would be the repellant jouissance of survival. But behind them may have been the reward of meeting and reading and collaborating with Professor X, Jeffrey Kripal, which led to her making greater peace with her abilities thanks to the community of other experiencers and experts he linked her with (at Esalen for instance). Jeff and his world, and the book he helped her write, were big rewards looming in her future. All the rewards of this adventure may have echoed back along her timeline—or her “brain line” as Dunne would put it. “I knew that I already knew him,” Elizabeth said of her first meeting with Jeff, “and I knew that we would write a book.” ²²

And it would have been a two-way street. Encountering and collaborating with Elizabeth was a major reward for Jeff, a fruitful collaboration and friendship, not to mention professional validation (the perfect “case study”) that happened to be latent in his own future and backyard, and which he may have been attuned to precisely in the creative flow state he seems to enter when he engages with these topics.

Arguably—and now I come to my main point with this story—precognition did not just cause Jeffrey Kripal and Elizabeth Krohn to collaborate; their convergence may have also shaped both of them into the past . Might Elizabeth’s entire “career” as a lightning-struck mystical mutant be seen as a premonitory “symptom” (in Lacan’s sense) of her ultimate tutelage by and collaboration with the real-life Professor X? Jeff certainly didn’t cause the lightning strike per se, any more than Carl Jung caused a scarab to appear at his window right as his patient was telling him her dream about a scarab—his powers are not that great. But had he and his work not been ahead in Elizabeth’s future timeline, her experiences after the strike, and even during the strike, might arguably have assumed a very different shape, or taken a different direction. Maybe she would not in that case have become a precog like something out of a Phil Dick novel or an X-Men comic or Eliade’s Youth Without Youth . The trajectories of trauma are many and varied, and unfortunately many paths available to survivors in our trauma-bound culture (mental illness and drug addiction being all-too-common ones) are nowhere near as inspiring or indeed enchanting as the one offered by Jeff in his writings on the paranormal. In other words, thanks to Elizabeth’s precognitive sensitivity, Jeff and his framings of the “super natural” may well have had a hand in shaping her experiences long before zapping and mutation were even glimmers in his eye.

And again, the shaping would have been a two-way affair. Like Asimov’s thiotimoline molecule, that overdetermined X in the movie theater parking lot in 2006 seems to have had at least one carbon valence bond extending a decade into Jeff’s own future, linking it not only to the glinting fish pendant in Dick’s myth (which Jeff would subsequently write about ²³ ) but especially to Elizabeth Krohn’s life-altering atmospheric-electrical mishap, also in a parking lot. How could this fact not have added to its “gleam” that day, drawing his attention, perturbing his own perception? How could that moment, and the subsequent career path that ensued, not itself be “precognitive” of his ultimate meeting and collaboration with Elizabeth? It was almost as if the work he did after that X and in the decade leading up to their meeting was destined—although fated may be a better word—precisely to supply a radical, and importantly, intellectually legitimate framing on her experience. Their fates may have been “entangled,” in other words, by their future collaboration.

Through the Wall of Time

Skeptics will dismiss this (and everything I have suggested in this book) with little more than an eye roll, as simply an attempt to redefine hindsight bias for credulous, paranormal purposes. Žižek would call it “New Age obscurantism.” That is fine, that is their choice. But I maintain that if we accept even some of the evidence for precognition that I have cited—and that anecdotes, real human stories, supply in spades—then we can no longer bracket time loops as isolated incidents, some trivial or exceptional annex to human experience (as even many parapsychologists still cautiously and defensively suggest about psi, with its big p values but “small effects”). And we also can no longer assume that these experiences exert no major influence on human affairs and the shape of social life.

The potential implications of time loops for philosophy and history are obvious from just a moment’s thought, as they are for the social sciences. The sociologist Max Weber famously stated that “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun” ²⁴ ; the anthropologist Clifford Geertz later added, “and I take culture to be those webs.” ²⁵ I think it is likely that precognition could play an important role in both the spinning of and getting stuck in those cultural webs. ²⁶ I am not aware of any sustained efforts to explore these domains yet, although there is increased willingness in some quarters to talk about “consciousness” (and quantum theories thereof), as well as an increased willingness to discuss some parapsychological phenomena on their own terms. ²⁷ A handful of researchers in or on the peripheries of scientific psychology (including not only parapsychology but also neuroscience and clinical psychology) are making inroads in discussing and publishing on precognition and other psi phenomena in more mainstream forums. ²⁸ The study of religion, on the other hand, is at the vanguard of admitting more open discussion of these and many other paranormal phenomena (thanks in part to Kripal’s work). ²⁹

Some cautious but fascinating beginnings have also been made toward studying precognition and time loops in literature and the arts. Malcolm Guite’s 2017 book Mariner , to cite one recent example, is a moving examination of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the ways his masterpiece poem Rime of the Ancient Mariner uncannily precognized (although Guite doesn’t use that term) the poet’s tortured life after he wrote the poem. ³⁰ In the efforts of Guite, of Kripal on sci-fi and comic book authors, ³¹ or of Anthony Peake on Phil Dick, ³² we may be seeing a dim adumbration, like a gravestone rubbing, of a future precognitive cultural studies, a psychic deconstruction . Unlike traditional literary criticism, which often looks for unacknowledged prior influences on a writer’s ideas, this would attend to possible subsequent influences. ³³ It would also be highly biographical, necessarily placing literary or artistic creation within the overall context of the creator’s life experiences even after the work was created.

In short, the effects of time loops could be—and would have always been —pervasive across many or most aspects of human social and cultural existence. We are only now evolving the eyes to see it. It could require radical revision of the guiding theories and paradigms in many fields that study humans and the meanings they make—“The textbooks,” as they breathlessly say in movies, “will need to be rewritten.” (Textbooks are lucrative, I hear, so why should professors object?) Among the many new questions culture historians and critics will need to ask is: Could especially prolific and influential writers, artists, and other shapers of culture—the Phil Dicks, the Freuds and Jungs, the Jeff Kripals, and so on—be literally shaping the past, almost like inadvertent alchemists of history, via their readers’ precognitive gift-slash-curse of precognition?

Like today’s quantum physicists parsing the effects of measurement in their retrocausation experiments, future investigators of meaning’s retrograde effects will no longer be able to ignore their own possible past as well as ongoing entanglements with their objects of study. They will be forced to attend closely to how each one of their own articles and books (and textbooks) in the present may have acted back on the past to co-create what they are studying and writing about. How coherent and how deep the effects of present writing and scholarship are on prior literary or cultural history is at this point anyone’s guess, but if there are still cultural historians in the 22^nd century, they may well be kept busy mapping the subtle effects on knowledge and human experience of a “geist”—literally a zeit-geist —that moves through history in temporal retrograde. Through it all, skeptics will, somewhat justifiably, become apoplectic at the difficulties of separating truth from wish-fulfillment in this (as Kripal puts it) hyper-looping “super story.”

Obviously, though, time loops have implications beyond academia and science. They are relevant to our everyday lives and relationships. For one thing, it may no longer be just a mushy New Age platitude to suggest that humans really do share an “invisible connection” with each other, as anti-materialists since Frederic Myers have always maintained; there is also a very good reason why any trace of such a physical connection vanishes when scientific spotlights are trained on the spaces between us. Instead of traversing the present, as some kind of invisible telepathic bridge across space, or some nonlocal Platonic collective unconscious, our “occult” interhuman connection traverses the fourth dimension, the Not Yet, as the real, physical encounters and interactions with other people and ideas awaiting us on the road ahead. I like to think of the secret psychic structure of social life as a kind of four-D lattice: Our precognitive, presentimental unconscious orients us to those confluences where our individual world-lines snaking through Minkowski space-time meaningfully entwine and intersect. Bernard Beitman describes it as “connecting with coincidence.” ³⁴ It’s an apt phrase, and we no longer need invoke some “acausal” synchronistic field stage-managing significant moments, or archetypal meaning-machines doing the connecting. We connect, we stage-manage, via our own amazing tesseract brains.

By paying closer, more thoughtful attention to her dreams, synchronicities, and passing thoughts, the precog ranger of tomorrow may learn to detect the bent twigs of her own passage ahead of herself in time and recognize them for what they are. She will understand how to follow them along a mostly unknown, obscure path, trusting that they orient her toward meaningful rewards (and “survival”), but she will also know that those meanings cannot be known in advance. If the traces of our future passage are like bent twigs, a “spoor” to be followed (or like cryptic notes in our own handwriting), the time loops they leave behind in our lives are in some ways even more interesting: They are like astonishing geological formations or imprints, bearing the traces of past intentional behavior by precognitive beings (ourselves) who didn’t yet realize they were precognitive, and who were thus groping for meaning in other culturally available directions. Even if the past is not subject to change, we can excavate those fossils, brush them off and hold them up for scrutiny, and come to appreciate the ironic, looping paths our lives and desires and enjoyment took through the glass block. We may find that our past, even our distant past, is a kind of mirror, and see in it ourselves, winking back knowingly, across those instantaneous years.