Time Loops
Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

by Eric Wargo

Trade Paperback, 448 Pages

$24.00, ISBN: 9781938398926

Genre(s): Psychic Abilities Speculative Science

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.

About the Author:

Eric Wargo has a PhD in anthropology from Emory University and works as a science writer and editor in Washington, DC. In his spare time, he writes about science fiction, consciousness, and the paranormal at his popular blog, The Nightshirt. Time Loops is his first book.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements 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 QuantumTM 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

What they're saying:

“I will not be shy. I consider Time Loops to be the most significant intellectual work on a paranormal topic in the last fifty years, since Jacques Vallee’s Passport to Magonia (1969), to be precise. 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. In the process—the real stunner for me—he points us toward (or looks back from) the future of knowledge, a future in which the humanities are as crucial as the sciences. Buckle up tight and get ready for the roller coaster ride of your life. And why not? As Wargo shows us with astonishing rigor and humor, these ‘time loops’ may well be our lives.” — Jeffrey J. Kripal, the J Newton Rayzor Professor of Religion at Rice University, and the author Mutants and Mystics and Secret Body and co-author of Changed in a Flash

“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, PEN Award-winning author of Occult America and 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 and Faster Than Light

“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, Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and the author of Entangled Minds and Real Magic

"...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