Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

by Eric Wargo, Jeffrey J Kripal (Foreword by)

Overview

Time is not what you think it is. Neither are you.

Welcome to a world where participants in psychology experiments respond to pictures they haven't seen yet ... where physicists influence the past behavior of a light beam by measuring its photons now ... and where dreamers and writers literally remember their future. This landmark study explores the principles that allow the future to affect the present, and the present to affect the past, without causing paradox. It also deconstructs the powerful taboos that, for centuries, have kept mainstream science from taking phenomena like retrocausation and precognition seriously. We are four-dimensional creatures, and sometimes we are even caught in time loops-self-fulfilling prophecies where effects become their own causes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798992405231
Publisher:	Cup + Saucer Press
Publication date:	02/25/2025
Edition description:	3rd ed.
Pages:	454
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.01(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: Beyond Folk Causality (or, One Damn Thing Before Another) 1

PART ONE: WELCOME TO THE NOT YET

1. The Size of the Impossible—Disasters, Prophecy, and Hindsight 17

2. “If I Were You, I’d Stay on the Ground for a Couple of Days”—Victor Goddard, J. W. Dunne, and the Block Universe 43

3. Postcards from Your Future Self—Scientific Evidence for Precognition 63

4. The Psi Reflex—Presentiment and the Future- Influencing-Present Effect 79

PART TWO: “HOW CAN THIS BE?”

5. Catching Precognitive Butterflies—Chaos, Memory, and Premory in the Thermodynamic Universe 99

6. Destination: Pong (or, How to Build a Quantum^TM Future Detector) 121

7. A New Era of Hyperthought—From Precognitive Bacteria to Our Tesseract Brain 147



PART THREE: TIME’S TABOOS

8. Sometimes a Causal Arrow Isn’t Just a Causal Arrow— Oedipus, Freud, and the Repression of Prophecy 175

9. Wyrd and Wishes—Metabolizing the Future in Dreams 201

10. Prophetic Jouissance—Trauma, Survival, and the Precognitive Sublime 233

PART FOUR: LIVES OF THE PRECOGS

11. A Precognitive Seduction—Maggy Quarles van Ufford, Carl Jung, and the Scarab 255

12. Fate, Free Will, and Futility—Morgan Robertson’s Tiresias Complex 279

13. “P.S. What Scares Me Most, Claudia, Is at I Can Often Recall the Future”— The Memetic Prophecies of Philip K. Dick 295

14. The Arrival of Meaning and the Creation of the Past 317

Postscript: A Ruin from the Future 335

Notes 345

References 395

Index 421

Editorial Reviews

“I consider Time Loops to be the most significant intellectual work on a paranormal topic in the last fifty years …. Not only does Eric Wargo show us how strong the evidence for precognition really is—already a major accomplishment. He gives us scientific, psychological, and interpretive tools for thinking about these phenomena in strikingly original ways.” — Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of Secret Body

"...this is the most interesting and well-argued book about a paranormal topic I have read in several years...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

"What Wargo has done is to present a closely argued case for the reality of precognition ... I strongly recommend this well written and very interesting book to psi-sceptic and psi-believer alike as essential reading on this subject." — Robert A. Charman, Society for Psychical Research

"If I don’t make you want to buy Time Loops [in this review], I’ve failed...With his well-researched magnum opus Time Loops, it seems that Wargo hopes to drive forward the field of parapsychology from a scholarly position...The book itself is inspiring overall for the obvious time, effort, and scholarship put into its pages, as well as the clear commitment to cross-disciplinary thought...Time Loops made me consider that perhaps causal loops are not only responsible for precognition, they are responsible for us having any continuous sense of self at all. While it almost certainly serves a survival function, precognition may also serve to make this contiguous relationship with ourselves over time more apparent to us...Wargo presents the hypothesis that what is in the unconscious mind at the present moment is in fact what consciousness is in the next moment—that the unconscious mind is consciousness displaced backwards in time." — Julia Mossbridge, Journal of Scientific Exploration

“Eric Wargo writes with epic breadth, keen observation, deep rigor and—above all—great integrity on a topic of innate controversy. He succeeds gloriously in providing this century’s first historical and analytic overview of precognition and its causes.” — Mitch Horowitz, author of The Miracle Club

“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

“For those who wonder if experiences of precognition are real, or perhaps just coincidences or mistakes of memory, Time Loops provides a well written, balanced overview of the latest scientific interpretations of these mind-bending phenomena. Spoiler alert: Based on an increasing body of experimental evidence, yes, precognition is real.” — Dean Radin, author of Real Magic

From the Publisher