The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions

Master Minkowski’s Wild Ducks (Zen and the Glass Block Universe)

Probably because I am thinking about (and trying to finish a book on) precognition and retrocausation and the glass block universe they seem to imply, I keep finding my thoughts returning to a famous Zen koan from 8th-century China. You will have heard it: Master Ma and his student Pai Chang were walking along when they encountered a flock of wild ducks. “What is that?” Ma said. “Wild ducks,” Pai Chang answered. “Where have they gone?” Ma asked? “They’ve flown away,” Pai Chang said … at which point Master Ma grabbed his student’s nose and gave it a painful twist: “When have they ever flown away!”

There are many versions of the story, and many translations of the different versions. R.H. Blyth’s version spells out Ma’s meaning a bit, in case we are confused (which we are): “When did they ever fly away?” Ma says, “They have been here from the beginning!” Blyth’s Games Zen Masters Play (where this appears) probably was a strong influence on J.D. Salinger when he was writing The Catcher in the Rye; Holden Caulfield’s constant obsession with where the ducks at the lake in Central Park go in wintertime is an allusion to this koan. (Indeed, the whole novel is sort of about it, and about the young narrator’s gradual coming to a slightly more Zen-like understanding of questions of life and death, permanence and change.)

This “public case” (the original meaning of koan) has many layers, and it is important not to think that Pai Chang, just because he got his nose twisted, was wrong in saying that the ducks were gone. In their play-by-play commentary on these ancient dharma battles, some writers declare Pai-Chang the victor, not Ma. There’s Zen virtue in telling it just like it is. But the significance of this story that is obviously relevant to my obsession with precognition is this notion of permanence that Master Ma’s words imply: “When did they ever fly away?” is like an assertion of Hermann Minkowski’s argument, based on his student Einstein’s theory of relativity, that things in the past are still here, and that things that haven’t happened yet are here already.

If Pai Chang, with his sore nose, is a bit like Heraclitus, who found that you can’t step in the same river twice, Ma is a bit like his counterpart in these debates, the shaman/mystic Parmenides, and also his later interpreter Zeno, asserting the permanence within apparent impermanence.

I’ve always been a Heraclitus man myself, and a couple years ago on this blog I rebelled against the glass block and the Eternalism it entailed, even going so far as accusing outspoken Eternalist Alan Moore of being a hoarder: Minkowski glass-block-ism, where “every condom, every syringe, every beer can is preserved in Jerusalem’s gutters,” seemed to me like a hoarder’s cosmology. I’ve changed my mind in the intervening time. I think that, like many people when confronting these questions, I allowed my knee-jerk, heavily culture-bound assumption of free will and the open-endedness of things to prevent me from considering the possible reality, realism, and even spiritual satisfactions of Minkowski’s glass block.

The Bird is the Word

Compare “Master Ma’s Wild Ducks” with a painfully beautiful anecdote from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People about the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christiantiy. In the 6th century, the Northumbrian king Edwin was confronted by pressures to renounce his paganism and embrace the new religion; uncertain what was right, he took counsel with his “ealdormen and thegns” (advisors and nobles) on this question, and one of them stated his own opinion using the metaphor of a sparrow:

This is how the present life of man on earth, King, appears to me in comparison with that time which is unknown to us. You are sitting feasting with your ealdormen and thegns in winter time; the fire is burning on the hearth in the middle of the hall and all inside is warm, while outside the wintry storms of rain and snow are raging; and a sparrow flies swiftly through the hall. It enters in at one door and quickly flies out through the other. For the few moments it is inside, the storm and wintry tempest cannot touch it, but after the briefest moment of calm, it flits from your sight, out of the wintry storm and into it again. So this life of man appears but for a moment; what follows or indeed what went before, we know not at all. If this new doctrine brings us more certain information, it seems right that we should accept it.

I’ve always thought about the cold harsh uncertain life of those men in that hall—the same people who sang stories of the monster Grendel lurking in the wild wastes and muscular heroes like Beowulf who could bring temporary peace to their windswept fragile little kingdoms. For Edwin’s counselor (and for centuries of the Venerable Bede’s English readers), Christ was a kind of hero who could save us from the cold uncertainty of what awaited us beyond this mortal life—a solace the poor sparrow could not enjoy.

I also always think about that sparrow, flying in one door of a fire-warmed Anglo-Saxon hall and out the opposite door back into the cold. It is just like the wild ducks in the Chinese story: Not only has it flown away and gone, but it’s also (at the same time) there permanently, indelibly etched in the mind of every reader of Bede’s passage, frozen in mid-hall. Its flickering transit is eternal; it has always been there and always will be there.

Having been raised in an atheist household, I couldn’t understand the spiritual appeal of a sad-eyed man tortured and nailed to a piece of wood. It helped my understanding greatly to eventually read Bede’s account, and much later to realize that Christ, with His redeeming retrocausal tachyon blood, may have been offering the exact same solution and the same hope to those grim Anglo-Saxons that Master Ma was offering Pai Chang: a way out of time, yet within time. Thanks to Bede, and Master Ma, I get it.

Through a Glass Block, Darkly

The Ming Dynasty Zen master Han-Shan recorded a direct enlightenment experience of the glass block. According to Guo-gu Shi:

Han-shan came across the stories of a Bramacharin who had left home in his youth and returned when he was white-haired. When people saw him, the neighbors asked, “Is that man [whom we know] still living today?” The Bramacharin replied, “I look like that man of the past, but I am not he.” On reading this story “Han-shan suddenly understood that all things do not come and go. When he got up from his seat and walked around, he did not see things in motion. When he opened the window blind, suddenly a wind blew the trees in the yard, and the leaves flew all over the sky. However, he did not see any signs of motion. When he went to urinate, he still did not see signs of flowing. He understood what the text spoke of as, “Streams and rivers run into the ocean and yet there is no flowing.” At this time, Hanshan shattered all doubt and existential concerns about birth and death.

Han-Shan might want to ask his doctor about the “no signs of flowing.” But in my own humble Zen practice, I too have had these brief altered perceptions that “nothing is really happening” even when things are visibly in flux in front of my eyes. I think there’s real truth to what those guys were experiencing back on their misty Chinese mountainsides (and are still experiencing).

The biggest surprise of pursuing this whole business of precognition is discovering that it was never really about expanded human potential in the sense of developing some superpower. Experiencing precognition invariably brings you face to face with the limitations of mortal life and the futility to change your fate (or wyrd, as King Edwin would have called it). It has thus, unexpectedly, acted for me as a kind of koan, reinforcing again and again these spiritually surprising experiences of stasis-within-flux.

There is real liberation in letting go of the weighty idea that we Westerners always carry around with us, that our actions are open-ended and thus that we bear responsibility for the world. They aren’t. And we don’t. Again, at least on some deep, hard-to-describe level. Paradoxically, in a Zen way, this realization makes you more free, not less, as well as more responsible for the world around you.

It is an evidence-based Zen realization. The considerable evidence of precognition (and more generally, retrocausation) points to the reality of something like the glass block, the already-ness of the future and the persistence of the past. Whether the block is really sturdy glass or something a bit more viscous, like tree sap, or possesses a variable viscosity, is an open question. For now, we must just say that the mysteries of the glass block passeth understanding and our vision of time really is through a glass, darkly.

No Impossible Futures

To hold firm that it really is a Minkowski universe has implications for parapsychology in addition to spirituality. I think many investigators of precognition who argue that we precognize “possible futures,” on an analogy with the quantum wavefunction, are barking up the wrong tree. If the quantum neuroscience model I’ve been advocating is right, we precognize actual futures, but obliquely, unclearly, and in ways whose non-paradoxical-ness only becomes clear in hindsight.

For example, you are never going to have a completely accurate and clear precognitive dream about an outcome you would or could intercede to prevent. It’s not that the causality police will swoop in in their flying saucers to stop you; it’s just that, from a future vantage point farther along your world-line in the block universe, it didn’t happen. No amount of searching in hindsight will find spent causal arrows for an impossible event. Things that couldn’t happen, never did.

According to this view, premonitions of dangers averted don’t necessarily represent those dangers per se, but the troubled thoughts and emotions experienced in their aftermath. For instance, in a case recorded by Louisa Rhine, a woman had a vivid dream in which her baby was crushed to death by a chandelier that had been hanging over the crib. Defying her husband’s urge to just ignore the dream and go back to sleep, she went and got their baby and brought her into their bed to sleep. Two hours later, they heard a crash in the nursery.

It was not that the woman’s premonition accurately showed her an event in a possible future, “a timeline not taken.” Rather, it accurately showed her her own horrified imagining of a terrible possibility, a “what if” (what if she’d ignored her dream); and because of her action, this premonition became part of a “time loop” formation in the glass block universe. Thankfully, because her mental image refluxed in time and caught her awareness two hours earlier, and she acted on it, her baby was with her and not in the nursery when the chandelier crashed onto the crib. But I really doubt there’s an other, parallel universe where the baby was in the crib when it happened.

We should not confuse our imagination, our ability to picture many nonexistent worlds, or our ability to picture the universe from an imagined vantage point outside history, with real perception. It’s all a brain-generated hologram, a creation of Zen’s biggest frenemy, Solaris Mind.

We can imagine “many worlds” all we want—it makes for fun thought experiments—but if I am right, the interpretation of quantum mechanics that leads to the many worlds idea is an effect of denying the future’s influence on the past. Once retrocausation is fully embraced, many worlds may look less appealing or realistic. Black holes might really create new universes; but I suspect our choices from moment to moment, or the seemingly random “choices” of every particle at every instant, do not. (Talk about a hoarder’s cosmology!)

Remembering Past Life

As I’ve argued many times in these posts, the brain seems to be a tesseract, a tunnel from birth to death, bringing us oblique information about our already-existing future and dressing up that information in sometimes realistic but often quite deceptive and obscure costumes. More generally, all living organisms, and systems within living organisms, seem to metabolize time, utilizing quantum biological processes to converge on optimal and efficient courses of action more than chance would predict.

The emergence of complex forms has variously been attributed to some extra feature of matter, such as “morphic fields” or “syntropy.” The latter is probably pretty close to the reality, although it is not a cosmic liking of order per se, so much as a molecular and cellular tendency to organize by post-selecting on efficient outcomes, creating an overall illusion of a kind of cosmic Platonism (seen from our now-bound point of view).

I find the possibilities of Minkowski-ism increasingly inspiring and exciting. The future doesn’t look like the past, for one thing. The looping formations of chemistry and cause that are tantamount to life (and possibly, consciousness) take on increasingly subtle and beautiful forms as you scroll forward through the glass block. This is what the second law of thermodynamics and even the theory of complex systems cannot quite predict or describe.

The fate of the universe does seem to be toward a kind of super-intelligence, perhaps a super organism, that can actually reach back and remember itself and even remember “past life,” its pre-superconscious formations. Intelligent life in our epoch could be an early adumbration of what intelligence will become and the kinds of increasingly fractal causal loops it will manifest.

Thus if there is a higher consciousness, and a collective (un)conscious, it is in the future. What we call our consciousness may be memory of our lives from a distant future viewpoint.* I suppose it is all along what Christians back in the day meant. The afterlife really was something “after” all our lives—a resurrection occurring in the Not Yet, at the end of days.

Postscript: Me Go Zen™ in Your Coke Forever

As I imagine Han-Shan trying to empty his bladder in(to) Minkowski’s glass-block universe “with no signs of flowing,” my inner 2nd-grader can’t not think of a really racist schoolyard rhyme that was “going around” the playground one week at Kendrick Lakes Elementary School, circa 1974. Maybe you know the one. It was somehow the punchline of a really hilarious (to a Watergate-era 2nd-grader in racially homogeneous Lakewood, CO) story that I can no longer recall. But I’ll never forget the rhyme: “Me Chinese man, me play joke, me go pee-pee in your Coke.”

This image provoked, in addition to mirth, no small amount of reflection on human malice, as I tried to wrap my 7-year-old head around the horror of a monstrous Asian urinating in a person’s beverage, and the horror of drinking said beverage. I didn’t have that many friends, so I probably didn’t serve as a vector of this rhyme, merely an appreciative audience. But now I wonder: Was Han-Shan that Chinese Man?

Is Han-Shan still and forever pee-peeing in my Coke? When did he ever stop!

Whether or not he was Han-Shan or somebody else, that Chinese man is real … especially now that he is in your mind. Zen would ask you to take the Chinese man’s pee-Coke as a koan and see where it gets you.

NOTE

* In one of my early “glass block” moments, in the mortality-dread haze not long after 9/11, I was meditating on the DC Metro on my way to work, on the elevated tracks somewhere between Vienna and West Falls Church, and I suddenly realized that “this” was all being remembered, and thus that death—at least in the near future—was impossible. “I” (or something remembering me) was clearly “still alive” at some future time point from which I was remembering that moment on the train.

** Perhaps right now, writing this, was the vantage point from which, on the train 16 years ago, I was still alive. That would make the ‘time to afterlife’ roughly 16 years … if it is a constant, and the afterlife is merely lived memory.

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What Was Your Original Face on Mars?—Zen and the Prophetic Sublime

The famous “Face on Mars,” first photographed by the Viking orbiters in 1976, was the object of much speculation in the 1980s and 1990s and continues to be. After it was identified by Richard C. Hoagland, the Face became the central icon in a narrative of ancient global destruction—perhaps nuclear war—that, some suggested, may have tragically rendered our nearest cosmic neighbor a dead world, aeons in the past. The Face, staring out at the universe, seemed like it could be both a monument and a warning to our species … if it was a face.

Later NASA photographs (such as the one below) revealed greater erosion, less symmetry, and a much less human visage than Viking’s low-res cameras; it’s not a face at all, most now agree, just an oddly eroded mesa. Yet what matters for me is the meme, the haunting idea sparked by those original pictures, which captured the imagination not only of the public but also of many scientists for years.

Even the ever-skeptical Carl Sagan felt the Face deserved study, having himself always suggested the possibility that we might find alien ruins in our solar system. Although he distanced himself from wilder speculations about the feature, the dreadful possibility of a civilization destroying itself in a nuclear war was one that was close to his heart as a disarmament activist; it also happened to be Mars’s dust storms that gave him his first model of “nuclear winter.” Later writers like Mac Tonnies and physicist John Brandenburg elaborated on the ideas of a Martian apocalypse in prehistory, and the Mars Anomaly community retains a belief that the Face is artificial and that NASA and/or its contractors have manipulated later images to make it look otherwise.

The Face on Mars “meme complex” falls into a very specific aesthetic-psychological category, that of the sublime. The sublime was named by philosophers and aestheticians in the 18th Century (like Immanuel Kant, Edmund Burke, and Joseph Addison) to describe the specific feeling evoked by landscapes and works of art that suggest immensity and destruction. Towering thunderclouds and storms at sea, scenes of massive destruction on a Biblical scale, and wild landscapes with ruins in them all fit into this category. (Originally, the sublime was elevated above the merely beautiful as something that mainly men were able to savor and enjoy; the ‘weaker sex’ was believed to prefer pleasant domestic scenes, flowers, and other images that were not so existentially challenging.)

The sublime is highly relevant to psi, I believe. It happens to be precisely these kinds of sublime scenes and situations—including fires, shipwrecks, natural disasters, and haunted ruins in a dead landscape—that have always dominated people’s spontaneous accounts of ESP experiences. The many dreams and prophecies of the Titanic or 9/11 are examples, as are many of the “phantasms of the living” catalogued by the Society for Psychical Research in the 1880s. Thus it is not surprising that at least two prominent artists notably seem to have precognized the Face on Mars, the most famous “space ruin.” The best known, thanks in large part to Chris Knowles, is comic artist Jack Kirby, who wrote and illustrated a story called “The Face on Mars” in 1958—in which astronauts to the Red Planet explore a massive stone face and one of them receives a mind-transmission hologram showing the interplanetary war that laid waste the planet long ago. Kirby not only “saw” the face, in other words, but the whole meme-complex that formed around it (ancient planetary war and destruction).

Eleven years earlier, in 1947—almost three decades before the Face was imaged by Viking—the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi created a one-foot-square sand model for an earthwork called “Sculpture to be seen from Mars” and took a photograph of his model. All we now have is that photo, and it looks uncannily like Viking’s photograph, including the tilt at which it appears in the artist’s photo. The proposed dimensions of the earthwork, to be built in some “unused area” like a desert, are of a similar scale (Noguchi’s face was to be ten miles long, its nose a mile in height; the actual “Face” mesa in the Cydonia region on Mars is a little over a mile long). But more uncanny than the physical resemblance is the purpose of Noguchi’s earthwork: to signal the human presence to the cosmos in the aftermath of our species’ demise in a nuclear holocaust. It was, Noguchi said, “a requiem for all of us who live with the atom bomb.” At the time, following the destruction of two Japanese cities by such weapons, Noguchi worried that a world-destroying conflict was inevitable.

So here again, an artist seems to have prophesied not only a famous object/photograph but also the sublime meme complex surrounding it—although in Noguchi’s version, Mars and Earth swapped roles.

Noguchi was still alive and active in 1976, and right up to his death in 1988. He was intensely interested in science and technology all his life, including both nuclear weapons and space exploration. His 1970 granite sculpture Re-Entry Cone (right) is clearly based on an Apollo Command Module; one of his last works was a Miami monument to the astronauts killed in the Challenger disaster. So there is no doubt in my mind that he would have been aware of and interested in the Viking missions as well as the resurgent concerns about nuclear war during the Reagan era, when the ‘Face on Mars as remnant of a destroyed Martian civilization’ meme took shape. My regular readers will know that I think precognition centers on future exciting encounters and learning experiences during an individual’s lifetime. Kirby too was still alive and active at the time of the Viking missions and through the 1980s, dying in 1994 (and his comic would not have been influenced by Noguchi’s proposed sculpture, since the latter only existed in a single unpublished photograph).

The Sublime Semiotics of Prophecy

The sublime, or aesthetic pleasure in signs of destruction, is essentially identical to the Lacanian notion of jouissance and to the older Freudian notion of “death drive.” It was Freud who most brilliantly theorized these childhood roots of the sublime. In his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud described watching his toddler nephew repeatedly throwing a spool over the side of his crib and exclaiming “fort” (gone), then pulling it back and enjoying its return, “da” (there), and then doing the same thing with his own reflection in a mirror. Playing with loss and recovery is a way of conceptually mastering the idea of nothingness/annihilation. Paintings of sublime scenes stage this same pleasure at annihilation-and-return, losing and finding again, but on a grander scale.

As I argued in the context of Thomas Pynchon’s prescient-about-prescience novel Gravity’s Rainbow (about an American officer whose sexual response anticipates V2 strikes during the Blitz), the “psi reflex” really orients to rewards, not only sexual rewards (as in Daryl Bem’s and Dean Radin’s presentiment experiments involving erotic pictures) but also the reward of surviving some chaotic or entropic threat. Although psychical phenomena and ESP have always been linked to “trauma,” this notion masks the fact that they really seem to key in on signals of survival: Implicitly, if you’re traumatized, then you’ve survived. If psi, as precognition, is a biological function, it has to have emerged and prevailed as an adaptive trait, orienting the organism toward its own future survival/reproduction or that of its kin.

This sense of “but I survived” is the basis of the aesthetic sublime: Enjoyment of the fact that I’m still here, even amid these signs of ruin. It is why the sublime perfectly describes the semiotic language of prophecy. Some of those on the Star Gate remote viewing project, such as Edwin May and Dale Graff, have argued that our psi faculty keys in on actual entropy gradients like fires, explosions, and nuclear reactions. The accuracy of remote viewers when assigned such targets is a crucial fact, but it misses the important point that signs of entropy in the past, or symbols of entropy that never really existed, may be just as vivid to our psi eyes as the real thing.* I suspect psi, as precognition, is a fundamentally semiotic phenomenon, involving a sensitivity to associatively encoded information refluxing from the brain’s own future and not entropic ripples through spacetime.

It was a big aha moment in my own study of precognitive dreams when I realized that sublime signifiers like ruins, as well as fossils and other “subterranean” images, which in Freudian and Jungian dream interpretation are easily taken as signs of past-ness, actually seemed to be pointers of a precognitive or future meaning. (I strongly recommend others engaged in precognitive dreamwork check to see if this holds for them as well.) It makes a counterintuitive sense: Ruins and fossils and bones and caves and other “buried” things are things awaiting discovery. They are fragments of some story still latent in the landscape, and thus they lie in one’s future, not one’s prior history. Our “unconscious minds” (whatever that means) understand this, even if our conscious selves don’t.

Culturally conditioned assumptions about time and memory, the persistence of the past, and the metaphoric likening of remembering to excavating traces left in the earth, have always distorted our perception of cognitive processes and only helped obscure the precognitive dimension of mental functioning. Centuries of psychology and philosophy have focused on how we are ruled by our past, without considering how the memory and history might be masks concealing our prophetic nature.

Another aspect of the sublime is extreme contrast: Pictures or stories conveying enormity versus smallness, eternity versus the immediate, and extreme age versus newness/futurity provoke this uneasy fascination with our own finitude. Noguchi’s work was sublime in exactly this sense: It savored the contrast between immensity and intimacy, alienness and familiarity, technology and nature. Hayden Herrera suggests that, in addition to being a memorial for humanity, bringing two planets and two ideas, the new and old, into juxtaposition, the face may also have been meant as a monument to Noguchi’s father, Yone Noguchi, who had died that same year (1947) in Japan. I would suggest that these immediate inspirations—grief over his father and the possible demise of humanity—acted as a concrete nucleus “constellating” a sublime premonition of the Face on Mars.

The Face on Mars was eminently psi-worthy, a kind of cosmic ‘fort-da’ in which humanity seemed to find, impossibly, its own reflection but also a distressing mirror of its own mortality, on a distant world. Multiple artists’ encounters with this haunting image seem to have rippled back in time along the resonating string of their creative jouissance.

A Religion of the Void

The Face on Mars always reminds me of one of the most famous Zen koans: “What was your original face before your mother and father were born?”**

Credit for bringing Zen to America is always given to Daisetz Suzuki, who in turn influenced popularizers like Alan Watts. As Kay Larson notes in her wonderful book Where the Heart Beats, the musician John Cage also did much to explicate Suzuki’s ideas for the art world, not only in his music but also in his books and lectures. But I think it was Cage’s friend Noguchi who probably deserves even more credit for the silent Zen transmission … to America and to science fiction. Zen, with its emphasis on Void and Nothingness, is the most sublime as well as the most science-fictional of religions.

Zen is famously a wordless transmission: According to legend, the disciples all gathered to hear Sakyamuni Buddha deliver a sermon, but all he did was pick up a flower and twirl it in his fingers. Just one disciple, Kashyapa, “got it” and made a little smile. This was the birth of Zen. (In Japanese, the “Flower Sermon” is called nengemisho, literally “pick up flower, subtle smile.”) Every aspect of mid-century design in America was influenced by Noguchi’s work and is thus a wordless transmission of Zen not unlike the Buddha’s holding up of the flower. His techno-organic minimalist coffee tables and his Akari lamps are way more Zen, in a truly sublime way, than the famously Zen-inspired designs of Apple products, and America “got it” without even knowing. Noguchi’s designs were hugely influential. My apartment was full of cheap Ikea Akari-inspired lamps, for instance, long before I knew about Noguchi.

They were partly influential through the vehicle of science fiction. I think Noguchi shaped the iconography of mid- to late-century SF more than anybody realizes: His sculptures from the 1940s (such as Remembrance, right) are direct precursors of Richard Powers’ pulp sci-fi covers of the 1950s and 1960s for example—they are the same techno-organic forms, rendered solidly in metal and stone instead of paint. Noguchi’s furniture, such as his classic coffee table (below), could be models for alien furnishings used throughout the original Star Trek series. And several of Noguchi’s stone and clay sculptures could easily be the model for the aeons-old star gate in the iconic Star Trek Season One episode “The City on the Edge of Forever.” If H.R. Giger’s “biomechanoids” came to define alienness post-1979, it was the more enigmatic and cerebral Zen-inspired forms created by Noguchi and transmitted via Star Trek and SF book covers that defined it prior to that.

Science fiction has always been the genre most suited to expressing the sublime. One of the most, if not the most, characteristic motifs in sci-fi is the idea of traveling to the ends of the universe (via the most futuristic technology) and finding something of our own that we have lost or forgotten, something belonging to the past, even something impossibly ancient. How many Star Trek episodes had this basic premise: finding some relic of Earth’s spacefaring past, encountering (impossibly) some figure from Earth’s history or a planet whose civilization is based on some Earth society, or meeting some simulacra of a lost love? When Dave Bowman travels through the Jovian stargate only to find himself in a French Rococo hotel suite, or when Kris Kelvin travels all the way to Solaris only to find his dead ex girlfriend, these are all expressions of this same idea.

Whenever a Noguchi exhibition comes to one of the Smithsonian museums in Washington DC, like the “Archaic/Modern” exhibit currently at the American Art Museum, I walk among his sculptures and pottery and lamps and furniture with a sense of familiarity; this is the sublime sci-fi aesthetic of my childhood. It is precisely the comfort of that aesthetic (and not the ever-nauseating autumn leaves and sand gardens and bald kneeling monks) that led me to Zen when I was an adult. Zen is a sci-fi religion, totally portable and baggage-free, thus the perfect religion for space travel—a religion of the Void.

Zen is also a psi religion. Zen comes from dhyana, which just means meditation; meditation (along with dream recording) is an essential practice for developing an awareness of our precognitive functioning. As I’ve hectored you before: If you don’t have a meditative practice (whether Zen or Dzogchen or TM or something), what are you waiting for?

Ancient Faces in the Clouds of Causality

Although it is more speculative, another artist who might join Kirby and Noguchi in the MFC, the Mars Face Club, is Ron Walotsky, an illustrator best known for doing most of the covers for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction as well as many SF book covers from the late 1960s through the end of the millennium. His cover for a 1970 Pyramid Books edition of Arthur C. Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night shows a cracked landscape with an enormous upturned face earthwork on the horizon.

Clarke’s novel, originally written in 1953, is about a young man’s journey outside his protected city on a far-future Earth, long since devastated by an interplanetary war. There is no face in the story like the one on the cover—Walotsky, in the tradition of Powers, was embellishing—yet the whole novel is clearly on the same themes as the Face on Mars meme: the sublime contrast of ancient and futuristic, distance and intimacy, as well as dim memory of an ancient aeons-ago conflict. An ancient face gazing up at the stars seems to suggest a remnant of a civilization that once looked outward (and forward) but long since withdrew and stagnated.

Revitalizing human civilization after untold years of stagnation in some protected enclave or a global dark age is nearly as common a motif in SF as far journeying only to find one’s past, and the motifs are often found together. The end of Planet of the Apes or Logan’s Run come to mind here, of course. Walotsky died in 2002; whether he was precognizing the Face on Mars when he did his illustration or was simply inspired by somewhat similar images in then-recent SF, such as the Statue of Liberty on the beach in Planet of the Apes, is impossible to say.

But the more I delved into Walotsky and his life and work, the more interesting I found him. His work is full of images of masks, for one thing, and his most interesting fine-art works were real masks made from the shells of horseshoe crabs. He described that his initial inspiration for this series, which he called “Ancient Warriors of Lost Civilizations,” came from staring at one of these shells one day, and it appeared to him like a face—in other words, the same pareidolia that led people to see a face in an eroded Martian mesa.

Walotsky honored this vision with his masks from the late 1980s up until his death, perhaps not consciously recalling the very real “source” for this idea that, as someone with a love of space and science fiction, he would undoubtedly have seen: Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series in 1980, specifically the segment in Episode Two about the Heike crabs of the Inland Sea in Japan. The 1185 battle of the Heike clan against the Genji clan was fought on the shores of this sea, and a species of crab with a wrinkled carapace occasionally produced specimens that seemed face-like. These were preferentially saved from the fishermen’s nets, tossed back into the water (fort-da again!) … and thus an inadvertent selective breeding, over the centuries, led to a prevalence of crabs with a samurai grimace, believed in folk tradition to be ghosts of the Heike warriors.

The Heike crabs, with their warrior faces, are more than a bit like the Face on Mars—living monuments of an ancient destructive war. But these “ghosts” have also been shaped, sculpted, precisely by generations of human selection. There are no real ghosts, in other words, only a subtle and accelerated Darwinian process, abetted by pareidolia and forgetting—just as Walotsky may have seen and forgotten a fascinating/haunting segment in a PBS series and taken inspiration from it in his art.

Since it is only ever confirmed in hindsight, skeptics can always make a similar argument against the reality of precognition: It is the retrospective view on the past, inevitably reframed by salient events, that produces seeming prophecies, faces in the clouds of causality. The first task in the study of prophecy is establishing the extent to which our own activity in the present, scouring the past for precedents and selecting them out of a larger mass of irrelevancies, actually produces alleged coincidences instead of simply discovering them. When assessing Walotsky’s cover illustration for Against the Fall of Night, I lean toward “mere coincidence” rather than precognitive inspiration … but there is never any way to be sure.

NOTES

* Here’s a good example. One night in the Summer of 2013 (August 9, to be exact) I recorded in my dream diary: “hypnagogic vision of an old but crisp/unread paperback from the 70s about some esoteric science-fictioney topic, with a dark blue or black, orange, and red starburst cover.” The concentric colorful radiating circles suggested an explosion of light or perhaps consciousness; the next morning I went to my bookshelf to pull out an old pulp collection by Alfred Bester called Starburst, but the cover showed a moon of Mars and a rocket, nothing like in my vision.

For some, the jury is still out on what the Face on Mars is. But all of it, the whole meme, including the uncertainty, should help solve the koan about your original face. Be like the face on Mars: ancient, impassive, alien, and empty—and possibly, no actual “face” at all.

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Zen, Signs, and the Arrival of Meaning

Even though they were widely panned when they came out and have now been mostly forgotten, I have a soft spot for M. Night Shyamalan’s films from the early 2000s—Unbreakable, Signs, and The Village. Signs, especially, I thought was a satisfying, intimate-scale sci-fi film about alien invasion, but it lost many of its viewers by the end because the aliens were a bit cheesy, as was the ultimate message. This is always Shyamalan’s problem: He frequently has interesting paranormal premises but can never quite pull off making them believable; you kind of have to see through the faults to appreciate what he’s attempting.

“Synchronicity” is the ideology of most Hollywood cinema, and Shyamalan is blatant about pushing belief in it as the moral of the story in Signs. After his wife’s death, Mel Gibson’s character (a former Episcopal priest) has lost his faith, no longer believes anything has meaning, etc. His kids and his younger brother (Joaquin Phoenix) hate him for this. But in the end, he rediscovers his faith in “signs” (i.e., synchronicity) when his family is threatened. He beats the alien intruder in his home by piecing together the random flotsam of his family members’ foibles into a coherent, life-saving message that the universe was all along trying to send him: his wife’s dying words that his brother, a former failed baseball player, should “swing away,” plus his daughter’s constant annoying habit of leaving half-drunk glasses of water around the house. He realizes his brother just needs to splash the alien with a glass of water using his baseball bat and then go to town on it. (I suppose, when you put it that way, it is kind of dumb.)

Denis Villeneuve’s recent masterpiece Arrival reminds me of all the best things about Signs minus the overreach, cheesiness, and problematic message. For one thing, Signs’ slow, suspenseful opening act, centered on one family’s experience, via the media, of the ominous appearance of UFOs over major cities, might as well be the template for the first act of Arrival. The structure of both films—telling the story of a tense and uncertain “first contact” via a character living under the shadow of loss—is the same; both films tack back and forth between the present alien conflict and “flashbacks” of the death of a loved one. And nearly identical to Signs is the way Louise Banks (Amy Adams’ character) in Arrival solves the problem facing her and humanity by realizing the true meaning of her random thoughts, which she had previously overlooked or misinterpreted.

In other words, Arrival is like a permutation of the same set of thematic elements or mythemes (including even somebody’s wife’s dying words playing a key role), but they are rearranged into a much more compelling narrative in which the “meaningful events” that seem like the standard tragic Hollywood backstory (dying family member, etc.) in fact emerge as a story the character chooses, warts and all, in her future—a forestory. As I mentioned in my previous post, I don’t agree that precognition could ever be so conscious or clear as depicted in Arrival; but I admire the effort and the fact that Villeneuve told a much more interesting cinematic story on these themes than most other directors would have. The “uplift” at the end of the film is just right: a brief and inspiring peek into a world where we realize that we are prophetic beings but just don’t know it. I obviously really believe this is true—there is abundant evidence for it, both experimental and anecdotal.

These similarities, but crucial differences, between Signs and Arrival are really instructive for clarifying the difference that I have tried to persuade people about on this blog: between the Jungian “everything is (already) meaningful” idea—which can only ever ultimately amount to a kind of reassuring but empty metaphysical oatmeal or, at worst, the basis for manipulation and religious dogma—and the more challenging, more thought-provoking, and more liberating perspective of Arrival, that meaning always is something that arrives from the future. We make our lives meaningful, and renew those meanings in our actions; and our best and most creative insights seem to come from reaching into the Not Yet in obscure and subtle ways.

Going in Circles

The fact that our moral and spiritual lives must be a constant active project, not just finding meaning ready-made, is a deep irony, given the objection most often raised against a universe in which fate and foreknowledge exist: If everything is predestined, why get up in the morning and do anything? Why lift a finger, since everything will happen anyway?

A moment’s thought reveals the fallacy there: If you don’t reach and pick up your spoon, your oatmeal will not magically levitate to your mouth. The predestined future includes all your “freely willed” actions that bring it about. There is no escaping the responsibility of action. The notion of ‘just lying in bed because what’s the point’ is to be beguiled by an image, a stage-representation of passivity, not anything real.

Predestination, the Minkowski block universe, fate, wyrd, post-selection, whatever you want to call it, presents a koan, forces us to confront the real meaty question: Instead of “do I or don’t I have free will?”—a canard—the more pertinent thing you should ask yourself is, “who am I to even ask this question?” … as well as “what should my attitude be?” Hint: In my Twitter feed, the wonderful @BabaRamDass is always advising that we adopt a spectatorial role in our lives, to identify with the witness of our actions and not the “actor.” He’s right. When you really make a practice of this, it has a transformative effect. Mysteriously, it doesn’t make you any more “passive”—the opposite, in fact.

It seems no accident that (as my wife pointed out when we saw Arrival) the heptapods’ glass screen is the same dimensions as a movie screen, and the whole experience of the film is staged to express the idea that we are basically spectators of something. This seems like a nod to Kubrick, who did the same thing in 2001—the slab is like an up-ended movie screen, and many of that film’s major moments are also spectacles or demonstrations that are watched or witnessed. “Witnessing” seems indeed to be the attitude of the heptapods toward their own existence; “If they’re scientists, they don’t ask very many questions,” as Jeremy Renner’s narration puts it during the montage.

Although the choice faced by Louise Banks at the end of Arrival is particularly stark (for the purposes of telling a good story, you have to make these choices stark), and although, again, precognition would never be as vivid and clear as it is portrayed, I agree with the Zen message of the film: Life is in the enjoying of it, however things turn out. This is I believe precisely how precognitive creatures would approach life, and why I do believe Zen is the religion of our future precognitive (or, somewhat more precognitive) selves. When we step out of the world of desire (aims, goals, ambitions, cravings), which is linear and ultimately the source of frustration and suffering, we enter the world of enjoyment, which is circular/directionless and takes immense pleasure in things just as they are. I’m sure it was intentional that the Heptapods’ written language as portrayed in the film so closely resembles the brushstroke circles that are ubiquitous in Japanese Zen art and Zen book covers.**

Postscript: The Alien and Death

On his blog, David Halperin has a great post on Arrival, reading the story in terms of its interesting similarities to the UFO abduction literature, e.g., Strieber. He rereads the future events in Louise Banks’ visions as really past events (the way the viewer assumes throughout the first half of the film). Although I’m all for deconstructing paranormal stories by removing the paranormal element and seeing what you are left with, in this case it is only an interesting thought experiment; there is no evidence this is (at all) what the filmmaker, scriptwriter, or Ted Chiang had in mind.

Halperin doesn’t want to believe in precognition (or the paranormal in general) and thus finds the precognitive aspect of the story silly. Obviously I don’t agree, and I would cite ample experimental evidence in my defense here (and recommend he actually take the J.W. Dunne challenge before he dismiss precognition). But I do like his insights about the relationship of “the alien” and death, as part of the secret equation in these narratives. Somehow UFOs and aliens may be manifestations of our desperate denial of death, he suggests, and I think this is spot-on. Both Signs and Arrival draw the equivalence vividly. However, I think misrecognized precognition may be precisely what enables the brain to turn our denial of death into a paranormal experience.

For Halperin, the alien is the dead (imagined, conjured into being). What if the alien is instead the dying … ourselves, or our loved ones, in the future? Death is an “alien” thing, as Halperin says, and it is always by definition from the future that it arrives for us. Could some “alien encounters” be precognitive of a diminutive, frail, pallid, bald loved one dying of cancer, or ourselves in such a condition, seen in the mirror?

In Strieber’s collaboration with Jeff Kripal, The Super Natural, he acknowledges his recognition that the weirdly erotic feminine alien for which he is so famous was really somehow related to his wife Anne. It makes me wonder whether his “visitor experience” could have been informed partly by premonitions of Anne’s struggle with cancer decades later, and whether experiences of “greys” more generally are not precognitive of a distinctly new (in the late 20th Century) experience: caring for family members undergoing chemotherapy/radiation treatments. It can only be a hypothesis—the only way to examine this would be to look at family histories of “abductees,” both prior and subsequent histories. A tall order, I’m sure.

There is much in the abductee literature and Strieber’s own writings resembling the Victorian construct of hysteria, and in their classic 1895 text on the subject, Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud noted that the origin of hysterical symptoms is often a period of caretaking in a patient’s past. For example in one case study, “Fraulein Elisabeth Von R.” developed hysterical leg pains after feeling sexual attraction for a man, which she denied expressing because she was then busy caring for her dying father. The conflict between the grave, self-denying business of caring for a mortally ill family member and sexual or otherwise life-affirming feelings that feel morally incompatible with that situation precipitates a “symptom.”

Precognitive symptoms originate from similar scenes, and similar conflicting emotions (which I have sometimes called “jouissance“), in a person’s future. The conflict might not only be sexual feelings, but also the most basic reward signal, “but I survived,” which is unbearable in the context of grief for a loved one (or shock at the loss of anonymous others, as in a disaster like the Titanic or 9/11). As I’ve argued elsewhere, it is precisely that sublime reward signal of survival in the context of loss or destruction that appears to become “displaced in time.” Because no one believes in precognition, those displaced emotions and experiences will almost always be misunderstood and misinterpreted.

I wonder if it is our fear of death that leads us to fear and thus deny that our synchronicities and OOBEs and other paranormal experiences are really precognitive. Death is the ultimate bad thing lying in wait for us in our future. Among other tactics for beating death is simply killing (or ignoring) the messenger.

NOTES:

Just pay attention—precognition is a constant process in our thoughts. And yes, by the very nature of the beast, it is usually impossible to prove that it’s not hindsight bias. Usually, but not always.

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Altered States of Reading #6: Stories of Your (Future, Past) Life

Few films could better illustrate the workings of precognition than Denis Villeneuve’s excellent new film Arrival, based on a 1999 story “The Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang. If you’ve seen the trailers, it will give nothing away that it is about a first-contact situation, and the attempt of a linguist, played by Amy Adams, to communicate with the visitors. It is only a slight spoiler to say that cracking the aliens’ code requires thinking differently about time. But do not read the rest of this post if you have not seen the film, as much depends on the twist ending that I am going to discuss.

The minor spoiler is that thinking in the aliens’ written language, “Heptapod B,” gives Amy Adams’ character an altered, precognitive vantage point. The big, very satisfying plot twist in Arrival rivals that in The Sixth Sense: The linguist’s realization about time reveals that what seems (at least to the viewer) like memories of her past are really visions of what is to come. That theme should be very familiar to readers of this blog.

One of the things Arrival gets right about prophecy is that it is not about events in some generalized future history, but about emotional upheavals, both major and minor, in our own future timeline. Future emotional experiences reflux backward and subtly inform our actions and our thoughts in the present. Adams’ character gets a crucial clue to her present situation from a vision of herself reading the book on Heptapod B that she is destined to write in her future. (In several of my posts I’ve described this “reading our own future writings” as a motor of creativity.) In the film’s climactic scene, she proves herself to the Chinese general by telling him his wife’s dying words, something she is able to do because he will remind her of this event, and of those words, months or years later at a gala in her honor. (This is the exact mechanism—producing information we will learn later—by which mediumship works, as I described in my recent post on that subject.)

However, linear human language is not the only (or even the main) thing standing in the way of accessing a broadened view of our own relation to time. For one thing, even if the future is set in stone, our awareness of it could only ever be oblique until events come to pass and it becomes clear in hindsight. Prophecy occurs in the future perfect tense: What we will have known, what will have turned out. It is an unconscious phenomenon.

My only slight quibble with Arrival is that, once Adams’ character understands that she is seeing her own future, that future remains too clear to her, and thus theoretically too open to her intervention. She chooses it anyway, despite knowing it will have a sad outcome, and thus no harm done from a paradox point of view. In Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life,” the parts of the story that lie in the narrator’s future are told in the simple future tense: She feels compelled to fulfill her knowledge of what will come, because with the altered mindset of thinking in Heptapod B, outcomes take on a new kind of psychological necessity; it is satisfying to fulfill them. But by the necessary logic of post-selection, it really wouldn’t—and in my experience doesn’t—work that way.* Prophecy is a quiet, unconscious signal of reward on a noisy channel; you only really know it was prophecy, and see exactly how your actions had operated to fulfill it, after the fact. Future perfect, in other words, not simple future.

Whether we possess “free will” (and thus prophecy must remain an unconscious process because of that), or whether consciousness itself is an illusion, I don’t know. Those seem to some like the only philosophical options in a universe that includes retrocausation. I’m not so sure if that is the case, but I’m not that bothered by the problem: As a Zen-ist, I think both “free will” and “consciousness”—at least, as the terms are being used in the current culture scuffles around scientism and materialism (boo, hiss)—are MacGuffins. It doesn’t matter how we choose to talk (or write) about the human experience: Whether we say “the mind is material/based in the brain” or whether we say “it’s all consciousness,” doesn’t matter. Either way, we’re still here, the sun still rises in the morning, nothing has changed. Ceci n’est pas une pipe. No hay banda. It’s all a recording.

Simple Past Lives or Past Perfect Lives?

In an earlier installment I argued that supposed memories of past lives are more profitably thought of as prophecies of things we will learn in our future, using the fictional example of Max Ehrlich’s 1973 novel The Reincarnation of Peter Proud; the story works just as well, and indeed is just a tad more intellectually satisfying, thinking of it as a story about misrecognized precognition. (Phil Dick thought so too.)

A vivid, real-life example susceptible to exactly such a reframing is police detective Robert L. Snow’s memoir of his own presumed past-life regression experience and his subsequent startling discovery of its meaning, Portrait of a Past Life Skeptic. At the start of the book, the past-life-curious Snow had read Coming Back by Raymond Moody, and while intrigued, was skeptical, given all he knew from his own work about the susceptibility of hypnosis subjects to false memory implantation.** But after a fortuitous encounter at a party with a therapist friend who told him her colleague conducted past-life regression in her practice, he accepted his friend’s dare to give the process a try and see for himself what he thought of it.

During the 45-minute, $60 session, which he tape recorded, Snow was stunned to find himself mentally transported back to the late 1800s, in the body of a painter, with vivid scenes of some of the art he had created, including a portrait of a woman with a hunchback. The vividness and “reality” of the experience was startling to him, and this compelled him to take the experiences seriously. He decided it should be a simple matter to scour art books at his local library and find the paintings he had seen, to gain verification that the experience was really based on cryptomnesia, artworks he had somehow seen and forgotten in his past. But weeks of investigation turned up nothing.

Then, a couple months later, Snow and his wife took a trip to New Orleans, where they idly visited some antique shops and art galleries. In the back of a small store, Snow was stunned to find the very portrait of the hunchback woman he had seen himself paint in his regression:

Whirling around, I stared open-mouthed at the portrait, reliving an experience I’d had once when I grabbed onto a live wire without knowing it, the current freezing me in my tracks as huge voltage surged up and down my arms and legs. Very similar to that experience, I simply stood frozen in the art gallery for what seemed like a long time, electricity racing up and down my arms as I stared at the portrait of the hunchbacked woman. …

Police officers don’t like to encounter startling coincidences, such as the finding of this painting, because we so very often find that these events are actually staged events made to look like coincidences. Yet I didn’t see how that could be the case in this situation.

The gallery owner was able to tell Snow the name of the artist, James Carroll Beckwith, along with a bit of information about his life. Snow then made Beckwith a “case,” uncovering considerable more information that corroborated details remembered and recorded in his regression experience, including where and when Beckwith had lived and died, awards he had won, and his general attitude to his career.

On a visit to the Indianapolis Museum of Art to gather more information on the artist, Snow encountered a second painting he had also seen during his regression, and experienced the same electric sensation. At every turn, each new discovery eroded further his initial conviction that he had simply produced those memories from some past encounter with Beckwith’s art that he had forgotten. For instance, during his regression he had found himself arguing with someone about the bad lighting on one of his paintings in an exhibition. He then found, reading Beckwith’s diaries, nine separate incidents of the artist “having a row” over bad lighting or display of his pictures. There was no way that, as someone with no prior experience or knowledge of art, he could have known about Beckwith in this degree of detail.

“It all fit,” Snow writes. “There was no one startling and gigantic fact, just one small confirmation after another.”

Thus the experience in the hypnotist’s office and the subsequent research project became for Snow much more than a case; it became something akin to a religious—or at least, metaphysical—conversion. Unable to imagine another explanation for the veridical nature of his “regression,” the detective braved potential ridicule and career hassles by writing and publishing a book on his experience as the basis for his newly-won conviction of the reality of past lives.

But even if it is less easy to wrap our heads around, there is another, even more parsimonious explanation for his experience, and it is precisely that of the plot twist in Arrival: All the information he assumed was a “memory” a previous existence over a century earlier was really information he would later discover or uncover in the course of a very exciting personal journey that was ahead of him in this lifetime. His book is a chronicle of these discoveries, and is perhaps even analogous to Amy Adams’ character’s future definitive study The Universal Language: Translating Heptapod B, which she consults in a key scene. Snow’s narrative, at every turn, is one of confirmation—of extracting and piecing together a “story latent in the landscape” he traversed. There were few details in his hypnosis session that were not confirmed in some way, which should to us be a tip-off that those confirmations were really possibly the source of his experiences during the hypnotic trance.

Prophetic Jouissance

Snow’s “confirmations” of material he had precognized were strikingly both unsettling and rewarding, the “jouissance” we see again and again with confirmations of psi experience. Unfortunately, because precognition is so hard to think, the mind naturally grasps at the easier, linear-causal explanation: that a past life is being remembered in this one. But we must not forget that that “past life” can only be confirmed in books and paintings and other sources of information the individual will encounter in the here and now—altered states of reading, yet again.

What we need to assume as part of this is “time loops,” the crucial, paradoxical-seeming but in fact necessary PhilDickian nuance to the precognitive life. Snow might have encountered the hunchback portrait on his own, but he would not have done the subsequent research on Carroll had it not been for the regression experience that made the initial hunchback portrait encounter so uncanny. His research produced information that would pre-appear in that experience, and the journey was rewarding and thus precognized in a trance because of the unfolding excitement of solving a detective story … a detective story about a person he gradually came to believe was himself. As long as precognition is misrecognized as something else (e.g., “synchronicity” or “past lives”), and as long as it focuses on rewards, as I argue it always does even when it seems to be about “trauma,” then it will have a self-confirming tendency and thus not be paradoxical. No grandfathers harmed.

Some jolt toward personal growth is part of the excitement seen again and again in the most compelling synchronicity narratives, and it is the most basic kind of reward that precognition operates on. Carl Jung’s story of his patient’s precognitive dream about the scarab is, so to speak, the “archetypal” example. We are oriented toward exciting and validating discoveries in our future; the reward of a therapeutic insight or moment, suddenly feeling like a bigger, more complete and whole person, with greater self-knowledge—or what Jung called “individuation”—is a very powerful reward. This is why, as open-minded psychoanalysts like Jule Eisenbud noted, psi (as precognition) manifests so consistently in the therapeutic encounter; patients precognitively orient toward their own growth, not to mention pleasing their therapists by validating their theories.

In Snow’s case, already in the first chapter of his book we have a significant detail about why this particular figure of James Carroll Beckwith might have resonated so strongly, and thus been so rewarding to learn about over the course of his detective adventure.

Snow, who is the author of several other books about police work, says he wanted to be a writer when he was young, and that he never had an aspiration to be a police officer. Yet life often has other plans for us, and his life took him down probably the most diametrically opposed path imaginable: into the military and then, because police work was a growth career at a time he needed a job, toward being a police detective.

The life of a portrait painter, delving into each sitter as an adventure in representation rather than a crime scene, reflects the same interest in the minutiae of human life as detective work, including its tragedies and pains (e.g., the woman with a hunchback), but it does so from an aesthetic point of view that Snow’s life path had never allowed him to express. We would note that, in the course of his investigation of and writing about Beckwith, Snow literally actualized or realized this other, softer—we might say “more right-brained”—side of his personality. (Snow also discovered that Beckwith, like him, had harbored certain disappointments and misgivings about his career, thus delving into this 19th-century artist’s life might have been like gazing into a strange kind of mirror, indeed almost a “bizarro” version of himself.)

Snow’s “past life regression” was thus, in all likelihood, really a precognitive experience of a richly rewarding midlife journey of personal growth and conversion toward an exciting—as well as reassuring—new way of thinking. Besides opening him to his previously unexpressed artistic side, it carried along with it the implication of immortality, which is something that everyone in midlife becomes highly concerned with. But we should not miss here how prone to (self-)deception and manipulation the therapeutic context may be around issues of anomalous memory, particularly when it involves techniques like trance. As has been shown by Jack Brewer in his recent The Greys Have Been Framed, the whole field of alien abduction “research” also has a lot to answer for, in this regard.

The fact that Snow was effectively “converted” by his experience to a new metaphysics (that of reincarnation) suggests to me that misrecognized precognition could be a powerful, hitherto unexplored model of religious conversion and conviction, a possibility I will explore in future posts.

Postscript

Detective Snow made an unfortunate mistake in his investigation: failing to purchase the hunchback painting (which the gallery owner promised he could have “for a reasonable price”). Even if it were expensive, it would have been worth it, establishing an essential habit I have discussed in previous posts: honoring and commemorating your psi (or more generally paranormal) experiences, even when it entails some kind of sacrifice.

When you establish a habit of honoring your psi experiences—in my case, it often involves a usually inexpensive purchase of some dreamed-about book on eBay, or taking the time to watch a dreamed-about TV show or movie—you are in fact creating the conditions for precognitive events to manifest more and more. Commemoration is part of the reward and “post-selection” that the precognitive faculty orients toward. Being a prophet means habitually or even ritualistically honoring your prophecy when it is fulfilled; that moment of “honoring” is frequently the temporal terminus of the time loop, the wellspring of prophetic jouissance.

NOTES

* An interesting detail in Chiang’s story that is left out of the film is that the crucial clue to unraveling the heptapods’ mindset and language comes from Fermat’s principle of least time, according to which light always takes the fastest possible path to its destination. It is the rule that accounts for refraction of light through different mediums like water or glass, and it is another example of a physical principle that makes no sense in the absence of retrocausation, since photons need to “know” where they are going in order to take the right path. Had I known about Fermat’s principle, I would have listed it among the various examples of retrocausation-suggestive phenomena in my last post. The sure tip-off of such phenomena is that they compel us to ask how particles or photons “know” what to do before they do it. (Thanks to Chris Savia, a real-life heptapod, for encouraging me to read Chiang’s story.)

** Recovery of repressed memories through hypnosis is total BS, as hopefully most anomalists are by now aware … although I suspect they aren’t. First, there is little evidence that ordinary traumas are “repressed” in the way that Freud suggested; people who have been sexually abused as children and whose abuse can be corroborated typically remember these events spontaneously, for instance after seeing a news report that puts a new “adult” framing on what until then had been a baffling and hard-to-understand childhood event. “Memories” recovered in hypnosis, on the other hand, are typically much less easily corroborated, suggesting they are not memories but something else. Critics of regression therapy point to a robust research literature in memory distortion and creation of false memories: Trance-induced experiences may be the product of a collusion—likely unconscious and unintended but nevertheless extremely dangerous—between the subject and the therapist. But trance is also a highly psi-conducive state, leading me to suspect that much of the supposed abduction material produced in hypnosis may be precognition of future events given a sci-fi-inflected framing by the therapist’s or their own cultural expectations.

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The Time Eye: Nuts and Bolts of a Biological Future Detector

Rubbing my temples and squinting, I foresee that no less a science writer than James Gleick will very shortly be publishing a book called Time Travel. Unlike his most famous book, Chaos, which was incredibly forward looking—introducing a whole generation to a really cool new concept, “the butterfly effect” (i.e., the way a butterfly flapping its wings in Hong Kong influences the weather in New York a week later)—Time Travel is … er, will be … oddly backward looking, a retrospective view of H.G. Wells’ sci-fi trope and its impact on our culture. It will only barely, glancingly, remark on the emerging science that is destined to make time travel, or at least time-traveling information, a reality.

I foresee that despite brief obligatory musings on John Wheeler and wormholes, Gleick will use the word “retrocausation” only once in the book: “Retrocausation is now a topic,” he will say, and leave it at that. Mostly, he will reiterate again and again how time travel is obviously impossible, and that it’s only a meme, a literary device, a metaphor for our increasingly sped-up and time-obsessed society. Causes precede effects, and that’s that.

I’m a big admirer of Gleick, but this will be a pretty unfortunate oversight on his part. Retrocausation is indeed a topic, one that is about to sweep over our culture like a tidal wave. How did he miss it?

The idea has been there from the beginning in modern physics’ upper echelons: Effects can theoretically precede their causes. But only in the past decade or so has the technology finally existed to test the idea. An increasing number of truly mind-blowing experiments are now confirming what Yakir Aharonov, for example, intuited already in the 1960s—that every single causal event in our world, every single interaction between two particles, is not only propogating an influence “forward” in the intuitive billiard-ball fashion but also carrying channels of influence backward from the future to the present and from the present to the past.

Until now, physicists have misinterpreted this whole half of causation as “randomness”—quantum indeterminacy. But Einstein never liked randomness as an inherent property of nature, and Aharonov wasn’t satisfied either. Newly developed experiments utilizing methods to “weakly measure” particles at one point in time and then conventionally measure a subset of them at a second, later point in time—or “post-selection”—are showing Aharonov was right and that Einstein’s intuitions were on the mark: God really doesn’t play dice; he’s truly a master archer instead, a divine Legolas who can swiftly turn and shoot causal arrows in both directions. Every interaction a particle has with its environment or with an experimental measurement apparatus perturbs seemingly “random” aspects of its behavior, such as its spin, at earlier points in its history. In 2009, a team at Rochester University actually used measurement of a portion of a laser beam at time point B (post-selection) to deviate those photons when measured, weakly enough to not disturb them too much, at an earlier time point A—retrocausation, in other words.

Other hints of causality’s two-faced-ness have been staring physicists in their one-way faces for a long time. Take for example the curious phenomenon known as “frustrated spontaneous emission.” It sounds like an embarrassing sexual complaint that psychotherapy might help with; actually it is a funny thing that happens to light-emitting atoms when they are put in surroundings that cannot absorb light. Ordinarily, atoms decay at a predictably random rate; but when there is nothing to receive their emitted photons, they get, well, frustrated, and withhold their photons. How do they “know” there is nowhere for their photons to go? According to physicist Ken Wharton, the answer is, again, retrocausation: The “random” decay of an atom is really determined retrocausally by the receiver of the photon it will emit. No receiver, then no decay. As in the Rochester experiment, some information is being passed, via that emitted photon (whenever there eventually is one), backward in time.

Or consider entanglement, every anomalist’s favorite quantum quirk. When particles are created together or interact in some way, their characteristics become correlated such that they cannot be described independently of each other; they become part of a single entangled state. If you then send these two particles—photons, say—way far away from each other, even to the ends of the universe, they will behave identically when one of them is measured. If you measure photon A and find that it has certain spin or polarity, the other one is guaranteed to have an identical or corresponding value, as if they somehow communicated with each other long-distance to get their stories straight. This phenomenon was originally a prediction made by Einstein and two of his colleagues, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen (collectively known as “EPR”), as a way to show that quantum physics must be incomplete. Entanglement seemed paradoxical, and thus impossible, because somehow it would involve information traveling between those particles at a speed faster than light (i.e., instantaneously), thus violating the theory of Relativity. Yet in 1964, a CERN physicist named John Bell published a theorem proving that the EPR prediction actually held; subsequent experiments supported the existence of such states.

As told by David Kaiser in his fascinating book How the Hippies Saved Physics, Bell’s theorem lies at the heart of today’s revolutions in quantum computing, telecommunications, and cryptography. However, no one has ever been able to explain how entanglement works; it is just another of those many quantum bizarreries that are supposed to be just taken on faith. But Cambridge University philosopher and specialist in the physics of time, Huw Price, thinks the answer is to be found, once again, in retrocausality: The measurement that affects one of the two entangled particles sends information back in time to the point when they became entangled in the first place; thus that future event in the life of one of the particles became part of the destiny of the other particle—a kind of zig-zagging causal path.

Every time a photon bumps into another photon, that bump doesn’t just alter or nudge the properties of those particles in a forward direction; it is a transformation and an exchange of information in both directions. To shift to the quantum computing idiom of someone like Seth Lloyd, it “flips bits,” correlating the measurable properties of those photons and sending information also into the past of both photons, to influence how each behaved the last time it interacted with another particle, and how those other particles behaved in their previous interactions … and so on, back to the beginning of the universe.

It is really important to think about all this correctly. It does not mean that, tucked away safely in a few laboratories there are funny, exceptional situations where trivial eensy weensy effects precede trivial eensy weensy causes. No, the entire “way things go” is a compromise or handshake agreement between the ordinary, easy-to-understand “one thing after another” behavior of things that Newton said was all there is, and another opposite vector of influence interweaving with and deflecting and giving shape to events, a vector of influence that Newton’s brilliantly persuasive Laws effectively hid from our view for three whole centuries. It took the first generation of quantum physicists to detect that Newton’s Laws were flawed, that there was something else going on; it took nearly a century more of research and theorizing to begin to confirm that maybe this thing they had been calling “indeterminacy” all along was hiding the missing retrocausal link to our understandings of cause and effect.

A Future Detector

Now, if it is possible to detect the future in apparatuses in laboratories, you can bet that life, too, has found a way to build a future detector on the same principles, and that it is possibly even basic to life’s functioning. Post-selection, as Paul Davies has suggested, is possibly the basis for the arising of life; I argued in a previous post that it is responsible for the basic skewing or “queering” function of life, the way it “tunnels” toward order and complexity more often than bare chance of randomly jostling chemicals would predict. A biological future detector using weak measurement and post-selection would have been the first sense, the basis of all later organismic guidance systems.

Consider: A single-celled paramecium can hunt and learn from its experience without anything we would recognize as sense organs or a nervous system. Humble slime molds too can learn and solve mazes—their behavior is nonrandom, yet they lack a “brain” or any complex sense organs to give them information. You can bet that in both these cases there is some more basic intelligence at work than mere trial and error, and that it is precisely the cellular pre-sense I have proposed. Indeed, as if to confirm my speculations, a study reported by Fernando Alvarez in the Journal of Scientific Exploration shows that our friends the planarian worms are actually precognitive of noxious stimuli up to a minute in advance. If this is the case, they are truly little prophets.

The microtubules that were long thought to be just structural features in cells have for a few decades been suspected by forward-thinking biologists to be somehow the basis for a cellular nervous system, and although the quantum computing processes outlined by Stuart Hameroff in his publications with Roger Penrose are above my pay grade, I’ll wager the cellular pre-sense I’m proposing is subserved by these structures. Microtubules are perfect tubes of molecular proteins, each shaped like a pocket able to hold an electron at distances that would enable entanglement. Recent research has confirmed that these constantly expanding and contracting tubes, which form star-like, possibly brain-like “centrosomes” at the heart of single-celled organisms, do transport energy (which is just information) within cells according to quantum principles. It is surely no accident that they are especially abundant and complexly arrayed in neurons.

Basically, a quantum computer is a lattice or matrix of quantum-coherent atoms or particles. The most famous property of quantum computers is their greatly enhanced capacity for complex calculation by using the magic of superposition; the computer can simultaneously take multiple paths to the right answer to a problem. But increasingly it is becoming clear that quantum coherence is the same thing as entanglement; and one property of entanglement is that, insofar as entangled particles are sequestered from outside interference, time is irrelevant to the system: A measurement of one particle or atom affects its entangled partners instantaneously. Theoretically, using post-selection and weak measurement, you can even send information into a quantum computer’s past. In a previous post I described one method for doing this devised by Seth Lloyd, using quantum teleportation—essentially a version of “quantum tunneling” in the temporal rather than spatial dimension. But there may be even simpler ways of achieving this, along the lines of the Rochester experiment.

Conceptually, it is not unlike a simple eye, but in the time dimension instead of space.

Imaging the Future

Consider the most basic type of eye in the animal kingdom: an enclosed pit with a photoreceptive retina at the bottom. In the absence of such a pit, there is very little a photoreceptor array can determine about the environment: It can tell you the presence of light and its intensity or frequency, but it cannot “image” the environment. This is a bit analogous to how the back-flowing influence of future interactions is interpreted by us as randomness or chance—generally we can’t say anything more specific about it, so it appears as a kind of noise that, at most, can be quantified (i.e., probability).

But when you do what evolution gradually did (many, many independent times), which is set photoreceptors inside a recess that is mostly enclosed except for a small pupil-like opening overhead, akin to the aperture in a camera, you actually gain much more information from the in-falling light even though you have eliminated most of that light in doing so. Even in the absence of a magnifying lens (which came later and improves the photon-gathering capacity), a narrow aperture acts as a pinhole camera to project an inverted image onto the photoreceptive cells. All the sudden, you have the ability to capture a picture, a re-presentation, of what is outside in the environment, such as a predator or prey.

The pupil, the aperture, is a “selector” of light rays—by selecting only a small bundle of rays, it generates much more coherent information about energetic events unfolding in space, facilitating what Alfred Korzybski called space- and energy-binding (i.e., finding food). The basic pre-sense subserved by intracellular quantum computing would be, in contrast, a temporal sense, a time eye, which amounts to an ability to skew behavioral options in the direction of a “right answer”—a reward that lies ahead of the organism in time. It is a “right answer detector”—in other words, a post-selector, and thus a time-binder. To understand how it works, just turn the simple optical eye sideways, along the x-axis of time instead of the y-axis of space. Instead of a rain of light being constrained by a narrow aperture to form a coherent image on the surface below it, the rain of future causal influence in a sensitive quantum computer needs to be constrained at time point B to form a coherent “image” at the earlier time point A. Suddenly that random noise of future influence becomes coherent and carries information that is meaningful for the organism.

In other words, to create a time eye, evolution needed to do do exactly what the experimenters at Rochester did: create a system that weakly measures some particles and then measures a subset of them a second time. This requires the system to have a “measuring presence” at two points in time, not just one, the same way a primitive eye requires bodily tissue at two different distances from the external “seen” object (the retina and the pupil). That is no problem at all for an organism that is continuous in time just as it has extension in space.

Most minimally, the constraint, the “aperture” in this system, would be another measurement at a later time point, which is only possible if the organism has survived that long. Survival at time point B causes a detectable perturbation or deviation of a particle’s behavior at a prior time point A inside a microtubule quantum computer. A single such temporal “circuit” would not provide much useful information; but an array of such circuits representing multiple options in a decision-space, operating in tandem, would be a meaningful guidance system, orienting the organism toward that positive outcome: for instance, moving to the left versus moving to the right. If a move to the left sends an “I survived” message back a few microseconds in time, by causing a detectable perturbation or deviation in an electron’s spin, whereas a move to the right causes no such a deviation, and the organism is wired to automatically favor the option with the deviation, then this system—multiple precognitive circuits or “future eyes” linked together to guide behavior—will tend to produce “the correct answer” at a greater than statistically random frequency.

My guess is this is probably (at the crudest level) how microtubules are working as a cellular guidance system. All later “precognitive” systems, such as in the planarian brain or the human brain, are built on this basic platform. It is the basis of all intuition, for instance, and as I’ve suggested, the real nature of the unconscious: The brain, via 86 billion classically linked neurons, each controlled by myriad little quantum computers, is a mega-quantum computer that computes literally four-dimensionally, across its timespan, detecting (faintly) the future at multiple temporal distances out from the present, via post-selection. The “future” that each neuron is detecting is its own future behavior, nothing more—or, perhaps, those microtubules are conditioning the signaling at specific synapses, such that it is really individual synaptic connections that either tend to “survive” (by being potentiated/reinforced) or not. In either case, when assembled into a complex array of interlinked neurons, whole “representations” of future emotions and cognitive states can potentially be projected into the past—or at the very least, the behavior of neural circuits can be mildly conditioned or perturbed by those circuits’ future behavior in response to external stimuli, just as they are strongly conditioned or perturbed by past behavior in the form of the long-term potentiation that subserves memory.

In a complex brain where countless circuits compete for influence in various opponent systems, “reward” has replaced “survival” as the most relevant signal. Right neuronal/synaptic answers are rewarded. This basic orientation toward reward, coupled with its largely unconscious functioning, is why time paradoxes are not an issue for this future detector: There is no tendency to act to foreclose an unconsciously “foreseen” or fore-sensed outcome. Also, as in the experimental systems using weak measurement, the future signal remains noisy, more a “majority report” than anything coherent and unmistakeable. There is lots of room for error, and thus no grandfathers were harmed in the making of this precognitive biological guidance system.

The Planarian Effect

Although this theory has its hand-wavy elements—we still don’t know exactly how quantum computing works in microtubules—it is a lot less hand-wavy than “syntropy” and “morphic resonance” as accounts of how complex systems orient toward orderly future outcomes. We need not imagine anything intrinsic in the fabric of space, time, and causality that gives rise to “attractors” in the future. Order and complexity are mediated by precognitive cellular intelligence, and at higher levels, by brains. The already unimaginably complex classical interconnection of neurons that we can crudely study with today’s imaging tools is just one level of information processing, but it is built over a more fundamental level of quantum computing that we still have not even begun to map.

And if I am right, we will no longer need to appeal to even hand-wavier notions of “transcendent mind” or “extended consciousness” to explain our basic pre-sense. As I’ve said again and again on this blog, consciousness (whatever it is or isn’t) is a big maguffin, the fake rabbit all the dogs are chasing around the racetrack. But we should applaud the chase, and even place bets, because the search for quantum consciousness will, as an unintended byproduct, fill in the nitty-gritty details of how the basic biological future-detector, the time eye, works … and thus make all the psi-skeptics eat crow.

Peering into my future-scope, I can see that “post-selection,” the causal Darwinism that makes the time eye possible without paradox, is going to be the concept du jour of the next decade, the way Gleick’s “butterfly effect” was the concept du jour of the late 1980s. Maybe they will call it the “planarian effect,” for the way a loud noise at 3:00 PM affects the waggle of a worm at 2:59.*

NOTE:

*The previous most interesting discovery about planarian worms was made by memory researcher James McConnell back in the 1960s: If you subject one planarian worm to conditioned learning, then grind it up and feed it to another unconditioned worm, the cannibal worm acquires the first worm’s memories (see “Memory Transfer Through Cannibalism in Planarians“). Don’t try this at home. Unfortunately, McConnell’s methods and findings were subsequently criticized, but recent studies do show that decapitated planarians can grow new heads with their old memories intact, suggesting that their memories may indeed somehow be chemically rather than neuronally encoded, and not entirely in their wee brains.

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The Ancient Art of Memory & the Modern Science of Dreaming

Check out my essay on dreaming and the ancient art of memory (hint: they operate on the same principles), the lead article in this month’s special issue of New Dawn magazine.

You can also read the essay with its graphics by downloading a copy of Special Issue Vol 10 No 4 (PDF version) for US$5.95. The issue also contains articles by Bernardo Kastrup, Ervin Laszlo & Kingsley L. Dennis, Michael Grosso, Micah Hanks, and many others.

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Stories Latent in the Landscape: Spirits, Time Slips, and “Super-Psi”

An alternative explanation sometimes given when mediums provide veridical information about deceased persons is “super-psi”—the idea that the medium is actually obtaining the information clairvoyantly and/or telepathically (i.e., from the heads of their sitters). Super-psi has also been used to account for cases of apparent reincarnation: A child psychically acquires information about a dead person and identifies with that person, producing the appearance of actually being that person in a new life and body. Super-psi explanations satisfy the modern rationalist wish not to appeal to life after death as an explanation for these kinds of phenomena; but as Stephen Braude notes in his fascinating study of the evidence for survival of bodily death, Immortal Remains, it can produce highly convoluted explanations that fail the test of parsimony in comparison to the frankly simpler survival account.

I think the problem is that making psi “super” precisely sets it up to fail. I am starting to think that the more different things we allow psi to be, and the more omniscient we pretend psychics are, the less compelling psi is as an explanation for anything. The current vogue for nonlocality as an explanatory framework in parapsychology ignores basic questions of information search and retrieval: How is it that a psychic (or anybody, insofar as we are all psychic) can select a specific piece of information in a whole universe of information and recognize it as the right answer? A much simpler and more powerful explanation for some mediumship cases is the reductive, even Pavlovian framework I proposed in the context of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow: What may seem like telepathy or clairvoyance or any number of other ESP or spiritualist phenomena could be simply producing behaviors or descriptions that are tied to future rewards. Those rewards could include future exciting feedback and other learning experiences.

I have written about this in literary contexts, but other forms of learning, including the consulting of archives or just “learning the truth” through some vivid interpersonal disclosure, should have the same effect. If there is a vivid and emotionally powerful story lying in wait for us, some past dramatic or tragic event just waiting to be learned about or pieced together in our near future, it may elicit a precognitive experience that we will mistake as “synchronicity” or perhaps interpret as a past-life experience, or construct in some other culturally less taboo way than precognition.

The story of “Runki’s leg,” for example, is a nice example from the late 1930s in Iceland, which some take as compelling evidence for survival. It seems to me instead like a vivid case of prophetic jouissance, the engagement of a talented Icelandic “precog” with a compelling and culturally potent story latent in his community and landscape. It is a perfect illustration of the power of ancient myths, archives, and geography to intersect and generate, almost like a hologram, precognitive experiences in a gifted psychic sleuth who, quite naturally and according to his cultural tradition, thought of himself as channeling a dead spirit.

Super-Psi Me

The story is told in a 1975 A.S.P.R. article by Erlandur Haraldsson and Ian Stevenson and examined at length by Braude in his book. Hafsteinn Bjornsson was a noted trance medium who, in a series of Reykjavik seances beginning in Fall 1937, began channeling a “drop-in” personality who complained that was looking for his missing leg that was lost in the sea. (A typical feature of “drop-in” personalities is that they are unexpected and display a strong motive for communicating with the living.) This personality was unwilling or unable to further clarify what he meant, or even give his real name, but he persistently appeared during Hafsteinn’s trances asking for his leg over the next year.

Then on January 1, 1939, when a fish merchant named Ludvik Gudmondsson (previously unknown to Hafsteinn) joined the seance circle, the mysterious legless personality announced that his missing leg was in Ludvik’s house, in a town called Sandgerdi (about 36 miles away). Ludvik indeed had purchased a large house there, but knew nothing about a missing leg. After Ludvik demanded to know who the communicator was, the legless drop-in fell silent for some months, but eventually reappeared and told his whole story: His name, he said, was Runolfur Runolfsson, “Runki” for short, and in 1879 he had drowned after passing out drunk on the shore; his body had washed out to sea and then washed up some time later, but was found picked apart by animals with the thigh bone missing. The bone had, he said, washed up later in Sandgerdi, and after being “passed around,” ended up in Ludvik’s house.

“Runki” said his story could be confirmed by checking the records of a church in a town just a few miles from Sandgerdi, which were then housed in Reykjavik’s national archives. The sitters did this, and found that the drop-in’s narrative partly corresponded to the records: Runolfur Ronolfsson had been a tall Sandgerdi local who disappeared in 1879 and whose decomposed and partially dismembered body had been found on the beach over a year after his disappearance. Ludvik meanwhile inquired among elders in the town about a mysterious femur. Older residents recalled that indeed such a bone had been “going around” during the 1920s. In Norse communities, as in many European societies, a person (or an animal) could not be resurrected intact without their skeleton being whole (more on this detail below), so the townspeople wouldn’t just dispose of a human bone. Eventually, the townfolk said, a carpenter had placed the femur in an interior wall of the house that Ludvik eventually purchased. When they opened the wall in 1940, they found the bone, and gave it a proper burial in the same cemetery where Runolfur Runolfsson had been interred, although his exact gravesite had been forgotten. “Runki’s leg” was thus finally laid to rest. It is important to remember that, although the femur was long, corresponding to a tall person fitting Runki’s description, there is no proof that the bone was really Runki’s.

What was going on here? Assuming the medium had not done extensive research and then somehow maneuvered Ludvik to join his seance circle, how could he have known about Runki or the femur, other than through Runki’s departed spirit actually speaking through him? Haraldsson and Stevenson and Braude weigh this assumption against the super-psi alternative, that the medium was really obtaining telepathic information from the sitters. They naturally find the super-psi explanation wanting: Until they consulted the archives to confirm Runki’s story, none of Hafsteinn’s circle (as far as anyone knows) could have possessed the necessary information to enable the medium to telepathically extract it from their heads; and nobody present, even Ludvik, knew about the mysterious femur or how it ended up in Ludvik’s wall, and this detail was not part of the records at all.

But they do not consider that the source of Hafsteinn’s information could have been nothing other than information he would come to read or hear about in his own future. It seems reasonable to me that the arc of his channeling of “Runki” represented his own excited engagement with a really cool mystery, a story latent in his landscape, that his own research and that of his sitters was helping piece together and finally “lay to rest” over the course of 1937-1940.

Leg Work

A directly pertinent fact is that Hafsteinn’s name appears in the visitor register of the national archives, where the church records were kept, but several months after the drop-in personality revealed who he was and how he died. Those church records are crucial parts of that latent story awaiting being pieced together by the medium. Crucially, when “Runki” revealed his life story, he told the group that he died at age 52. This was an error—he was shy of 51 when he died—but the same error appears in the church record. J.W. Dunne’s brilliant forensic work in An Experiment With Time showed how clues like number errors can reveal the true precognitive source of psychic dreams that look on the surface like telepathy or clairvoyance or even encounters with the departed. The errant age in this case reveals that Hafsteinn was most likely precognizing the records in the archives, which he may well have visited precisely to gain insight into the information he had previously channeled.

Even if Hafsteinn had read the records beforehand, it would still not discredit him as a fraud, because they told only part of the story. The records did not mention the missing leg (only saying that Runki’s remains were dismembered), nor did they say anything about the femur that found its way into the walls of Ludvik’s house. That had to be revealed by Ludvik, doing his investigative “legwork” (so to speak). Importantly, Hafsteinn began producing this information over a year before Ludvik even arrived in his circle, and we can imagine that the initial communications about the missing leg were a kind of precognitive performance dimly adumbrating the future arrival of a man who would ultimately prove to be a key to a mystery somehow involving a leg and the sea.

The detail of a corpse minus a leg bone has particularly mythic resonances in Norse culture, a detail not mentioned by Haraldsson and Stevenson or by Braude. In his 12th Century prose Edda, Snorri Sturluson described how Thor and Loki, while staying for the night with a farmer, slaughtered Thor’s goats for a meal; the farmer’s son secretly reserved a thigh bone for himself and broke it open for the marrow. In the morning, Thor waved his hammer over the goat carcasses and they came back to life … except, one was now limping. Claude Lecouteux, discussing this story, writes that it is a widespread shamanic belief that the soul resides in the bones of a person or animal. (It is a belief that, according to Rene Schwaller, also has deep alchemical roots in Ancient Egypt, where the femur was regarded as the site of the fixed salt or seed, the true substrate or carrier of the individual’s unique and immortal consciousness.) The “skull and crossbones,” which we now use as a warning on poison bottles, was originally a symbol of the capacity for rebirth; the “crossbones” are femurs.

Bracketing the question of survival and the afterlife, It is only a time-displacement between Hafsteinn’s utterances and their real or apparent confirmation that makes this (or many mediumistic performances) a paranormal phenomenon. A wonderful puzzle about a drowned man and a missing limb, awaiting being pieced together among various textual and oral history fragments, seems to have echoed back in time along the resonating thread of this talented psychic’s performative jouissance. “In character,” he produced bits and pieces of a puzzle, and only gradually did the larger picture take shape—which must be the great joy and fascination of being a medium, and is precisely why mediums’ information comes in fragments and why they sometimes are caught haunting archives where they can acquire needed confirmatory data. In other words, Hafsteinn’s “paranormally” gained information intermixed with information gained in the usual way, but that real-world confirmation was a necessary part of his performance, and probably the real target of his psi eyes. There seems no reason to doubt that in this case as in so many others, the medium genuinely believed he was channeling spirits, because that was his culture’s construction of mediumistically produced information.

All artists, when they are ‘cooking,’ have the experience that there is some “other” working through them. Writers feel it, singers feel it, sculptors feel it. And, duh, actors feel it. Mediums were the original actors, long before it occurred to anybody to neutralize the practice by calling it “art” and imagining it had no more significance than an evening’s entertainment. Spiritualism and occultism have preserved that special role, providing a safe haven for shamanism in the modern world, at least in some more open-minded cultural contexts like Iceland. Whether you want to think of channeled personalities like the “drop-in” Runki as authentic spirits of the dead or, like the somewhat more skeptical me, as actors’ personae, mediumship is a skilled performance that opens a real psi channel. Under pressure, any skilled performer like a medium is cooking, left brain fully occupied with the physical task, creating the necessary space for the right brain to summon tantalizing bits of information from the precognitive unconscious.

Thus a culture that makes a place for spirit mediumship has arguably created an open channel of precognitive information, even if it is interpreted differently, and even if that information inevitably comes amid a lot of misleading or useless debris.

Stonetapes

Not only bones but also stones and other landscape features can be the sites of “resurrection” of the dead or past events. One of the implicit cultural models of the paranormal is the metaphor of the earth as a recording surface: When something tragic, violent, or sad occurs in a place, it is like making a groove in a record, storing the experience so that it can be replayed again. The right set of circumstances, according to this metaphor, is like putting that record back on a turntable, or popping a tape into the tape deck; a sensitive person is like a phonograph needle or tape playhead enabling the playback.

Some version of this metaphor is implicit in ghost stories and in the way we construe the possibility of the past to haunt the present: For instance, a person dies a premature or violent death and then their spirit is re-encountered in the vicinity of where they died. It might as well also be a template for “time slip” experiences, such as the Roman soldiers on a buried piece of Roman road seen by Henry Martindale in a York cellar, the aristocrats at Versailles reported by Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain (the famous “ghosts of the Trianon”), or my personal favorite, the aftermath of the Battle of Nechtansmere seen by a 55-year-old woman named E.F. Smith one snowy evening in 1950, on her way home from a cocktail party near the Scottish village of Dunichen.

The idea that spacetime and stone can store memories of events is appealing and “easy to think,” because it is based on technological metaphors of the modern period. But that alone is reason we should be skeptical of the idea. I’ve argued in the context of precognitive dreaming that when premodern philosophers believed the world was structured by an occult system of correspondences (aemulatio, coniunctiatio, analogia, convenientia, etc.), they had unknowingly identified instead the deep structuring rules by which the brain makes meaning by linking things in memory. Another crucial “similitude” between premodern cosmology and the neurobiology of memory is the role of place as a memory framework. Just as the classical art of memory ties to-be-learned material to real or imaginary “loci,” the sensory richness of environments serve as powerful memory associations; this is not because space stores events but because the hippocampus, the brain’s archivist, contains our neural place representations, our maps of space.

The linkage of paranormal phenomena and geography may thus reflect the role of space and place in our mnemonic functioning: If psi is really precognition, and precognition is “just” our memory for the future, then just as place activates memory, it should also activate “premories” of future experiences either in or about that place. What is often left out of ghost encounters and time-slip cases, but can occasionally be extracted or inferred, is the final “revelation” part of the story, where the witness learned “what it was” he or she saw, or learned some detail that provides a forensic clue that the true source of the vision is that scene of confirmation, not the actual historical event.

For instance, the Scottish spinster, Miss Smith, knew, as did all residents of her village, that the plain beneath nearby Dunichen Hill was the traditional site of the lake called Nechtansmere and the battle fought on its shore between Picts and Northumbrians in 685 AD, described by Bede. When her case was investigated by an SPR member named James McHarg in 1971, she claimed she had only delved more deeply into the local history after she had her baffling experience. One of the specific details of her vision, a certain roundabout path the Pictish soldiers took as they skirted the ancient mere (long since drained and vanished), corresponded to a spur of the lake as it had been reconstructed by an archaeologist in a journal article Smith admitted reading during her research after the vision. Most tellingly, though, later scholarly consensus has moved the site of the battle to another place entirely; it is no longer thought to have occurred near Dunichen at all. Thus, Smith, perhaps rendered vulnerable by a combination of cold and drink, appears to have precognized historical and archaeological journal articles she read in her avid excitement to confirm or lend insight into her experience, rather than retro-cognizing a bloody battle that was inscribed record-groove-like in the Scottish landscape.

Lost in the Mall

This model, precognizing material or intellectual rewards awaiting us in libraries or in the ground, would also explain how “radiesthesia” or dowsing works. You could even look at “Runki’s leg” as an elaborate case of dowsing: The femur was a mystery awaiting discovery in Ludvik’s wall, just as Ludvik himself was an unknown, unmet person awaiting arrival in Hafsteinn’s seance circle. “Runki” was, in effect, the character and the story that linked the two together. (I am about as poor a psychic as Hafteinn was a skilled one, but I have noticed that psi dreams take this same form: providing puzzle pieces that are the missing connection or short circuit between two latently related things.) Thus even if psi is not about direct “nonlocal” connection to other minds in the present, or to spirits, it is about future physical confluences, the imminent linking of things and people and places IRL, in real life, as well as relevant texts that tie them all together.

This raises many interesting possibilities. For example, if hauntings and other paranormal phenomena don’t relate to past events and past lives but to our own future learning or reading experiences about those events or lives, what is to limit this effect to true stories? Could you effectively create paranormal phenomena by strategically planting made-up stories about places and people in archives?

A great experiment for some enterprising young parapsychologist would be to invent a story about a tragedy tied to a particular location, such as a spectacular suicide or murder with some unresolved element, and seed local archives with pieces of this story, ready to be “discovered” by anyone trying to get to the bottom of an uncanny experience. Would people start reporting hauntings in that location, because they spent time in the place and then “stumbled upon” a compelling uncanny story that pertained to it?

It would be a kind of retroactive hypnosis, and there is an analogy to be drawn here with the well-established protocol developed by U.C. Davis psychologist Elizabeth Loftus for creating false memories in research subjects—most famously, false childhood memories of being lost in a mall and rescued by an old woman. Loftus is no friend of paranormal researchers; her body of work has been deployed in the service of debunking abduction claims, precognitive dreams, and other paranormal phenomena. But her work, and especially her famous “lost in the mall” paradigm, is something all anomalists are wise to confront. Would a similar array of story fragments and corroboration by local expert confederates (the caretaker, the maid, the elderly gift shop clerk) have the effect of creating a ghost? Has something like this already been done, for instance as part of MKULTRA?

It helps—or indeed, is probably necessary—if the myth has a hole or incompleteness in it that can be filled imaginatively by the reader himself, acting a part in the drama. The most powerful stories and myths are those that lack resolution, leaving a sense of something incomplete and thus haunting, something that might return, not unlike an unfinished chord progression … or Runki’s missing thigh bone. (More on this idea in a future post.)

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The Wyrd of the Early Earth: Cellular Pre-sense in the Primordial Soup

Stand brave, life-liver, bleeding out your days in the river of time.
Stand brave: Time moves both ways …
—Joanna Newsom, “Time, as a Symptom”

The philosopher Alfred Korzybski, who influenced Phil Dick, Frank Herbert, Robert Heinlein, and other science-fictional minds of the mid-20th Century, named “time binding” as a characteristic human activity. He was referring to humans’ ability to plan and pursue goals, including ones of long duration, even transcending the span of an individual’s lifetime. Time binding was implicitly higher than space binding, the activity of animals who live in an eternal present and are dominated by the imperative to forage and hunt for food in their environment, and energy binding, the activity of plants that convert energy from the sun.

Korzybski was not thinking in terms of precognition, but essentially the argument I have been making in this blog is that we literally bind time through our engagement with the future. Peering into my future-scope, I see post-selection, more than any other new concept, as revolutionizing how we think about time, time-binding, and causality in coming years. Post-selection is the quantum-computing parameter that allows backward-flowing influence from the future to assume a semblance of meaning in the present, but at a cost: a partial but not total “hardening” of causality around pre-sensed events, a narrowing of outcomes available to be exploited precisely in situations where it would improve the organism’s outcomes by some tiny margin. Previously I’ve explored how this affects prophecy and prescience in a human context. I don’t see an expansion of prescience as the next phase in human evolution (Frederic Myers’ “imaginal”); rather, it may have been one of the early thresholds in the evolution of life on earth and throughout the universe.

Physicist Paul Davies speculates that post selection, applied to the vast quantum computer that is the universe, could explain the arising of life:

Perhaps living systems have the property of being post-selective, and thus greatly enhance the probability of the system “discovering” the living state? Indeed, this might even form the basis of a definition of the living state, and would inject an element of “teleology without teleology” into the description of living systems.

I think Davies probably has hit on the correct alternative to more Platonic theories like Rupert Sheldrake’s “morphic resonance” and even syntropy theories that posit future “attractors”—or at least, post-selection is a more productive idiom for describing the in-forming pull of the future. Yakir Aharonov’s work, which provides the quantum-mechanical justification for post-selection, strongly suggests that the entire “randomness” aspect of quantum physics is actually an illusion, that we simply cannot know, except in special circumstances, the future entanglements that dictate a particle’s present behavior.

This is where the distinction between information and meaning becomes crucial: In particles’ present behavior there is information about the future, but we are mostly hamstrung trying to interpret it, that is, make it meaningful. Giving it meaning takes specific experimental setups or entanglement shenanigans in quantum computer circuits such as described by Seth Lloyd, or what is probably going on in the brain. The ability of a molecular quantum computer, such as a microtubule, to “tunnel” through time and thus be, in effect, a little precognitive circuit, could be the key to this. Microtubules do appear to have quantum computing properties; recent findings lend support to this argument originally made in the 1980s by Stuart Hameroff. They could serve as the nervous sytems, sense organs, and brains of cells. Hameroff and Roger Penrose think that quantum coherent behavior centered on microtubules is the basis of consciousness.

All complex cells, not just neurons, contain microtubules. Lynn Margulis argued that eukaryotes (complex single-celled organisms) formed when simpler prokaryotes (like bacteria) engulfed each other: Mitochondria, etc., were originally independent-living organisms; she argued that microtubules were originally spirochete bacteria that were likewise absorbed. There is some dispute about the latter idea; but regardless of their origin, if microtubules, through quantum entanglement a la Seth Lloyd’s time-travel theory, endow cells with a sensitivity to their future in addition to their present environment, then time-binding might be nearly as basic an activity of complex life as space- and energy binding. Microtubules might have given some cells a decisive edge, enabling them to “preact” in their own interest, conferring a crucial selective advantage.

What arose at some point in the early Earth, then, was life that both time-binds and space-binds. A eukaryote is a daisy chain of presponsiveness and preactivity to its own near-future. There is now even evidence for microtubule-like structures in earlier prokaryotes as well, meaning that quantum computing might even have been a basic, very early activity of our archaean ancestors. Earth’s primordial soup, in other words, was possibly a precognitive soup.

Simple molecular quantum computers that presponded to the near future (even on the order of microseconds) would be favored in the pre-life margin of organic chemistry. Could tubulin itself, a protein and not anything living as such, be the missing link between (dead) chemistry and biology? Is life, at bottom, a molecular quantum computer’s way of making more molecular quantum computers?

The Bargain

The emergence of cells able to bind time would have been a decisive threshold or horizon for the universe. Prescience—or on the cellular level, “pre-sense”—effectively creates a thin margin of less-alterable future or “predestination” around living things. Because of post-selection, early eukaryotes could have effectively enfolded or nestled themselves in a protective temporal horizon, like a thin causal shell. You might say post-selection effectively created a protective Calvinistic crust on the open-endedness of molecular destiny.

Post-selection is a really good term, because it reminds us of Darwin. An event “survives” when some agent’s prior foreknowledge has not resulted in a deliberate or inadvertent action that forecloses it. In other words, an outcome survives if it does not allow itself to be prevented; it only survives if it is cloaked from past perception or if potentially preventing agents’ perception of it is sufficiently dim and oblique. It calls to mind the idea of ghost universes or bubble realities that have fallen by the wayside, “extinctions” as a result of paradox, incapable of affecting the course of history.

An enhanced ability to see and orient toward certain acceptable outcomes (basically, the outcome of survival, surviving to send information to itself in the past) entails the narrowing of freedom around those outcomes, a diminished ability to defy our fate, our Wyrd. Another way of saying it is that precognition requires traction in the future. Here is an analogy: If an ice-dwelling organism evolved wheels for locomotion, it would have to simultaneously evolve a nozzle on its head that shoots salt out ahead of it so it could move forward; that’s kind of what I mean, but applied to time. Wyrd is the narrowing of our options corresponding to the stretching of the temporal frame of our prescience. The magic frog that lives in my coat and advises me on quantum matters tells me that the trade-off I am describing would correspond to “weak measurement,” the method devised by Aharonov and his collaborators to test his theories about retrocausality.

Even at this early stage, prescience—or pre-sense—needed to orient “positively,” toward reward and “the good.” The actions of these cells oriented toward their own (surviving) future; orienting toward threats would cancel them, and cancel any such precognitive function. This is the implicit Darwinian meaning in post-selection after all: What prevails is what has lived to prevail. We still live with the shadow of this: Prescience is positive, yes-saying, and reward-oriented. It serves as an alarm for threats because some basic cognitive or pre-cognitive function pairs pleasure with destruction and trauma—Freud’s “death drive,” Lacan’s “jouissance,” or Eugene Wegner’s “ironic process.” This is where the ironic Tricksterish aspect of Wyrd comes in: Foresight is purchased at the expense of degrees of freedom.

Or think of it another way: The future, older, bearded you who has survived gives the younger you some information that will only be usable in helping younger you get eventually to where older you is. It doesn’t determine everything about younger you’s actions, and in fact it is so open to multiple and incorrect interpretations that it almost guarantees younger you can’t act differently than to become older you. Younger you will arrive where older you is with a sense of surprise. (Practically everything Slavoj Žižek has ever said about neurosis in relation to the psychoanalytic cure as a “time loop” is contained in that idea.)

Precognitive beings are in this bind when it comes to free will and predestination. Insofar as their prescience navigates the landscape of time, it is at the expense of a kind of binding to fate, a kind of straightjacketing of Wyrd: Its degrees of freedom are narrowed in order to correctly interpret and utilize—which means, not foreclose—a future situation. The more an organism feeds its past with useful information, the more constrained its “free will” (in the past) is. But that sacrifice gives it a marginal survival advantage over an organism that lacks any preactive capacity, because the sacrifice is not total. (Also the pre-sense of one individual may benefit its kin or community and thus also contribute to its fitness indirectly.)

Put yourself in the shoes of a slime mold or bacterium. Would you rather have a future version of yourself leaving a breadcrumb trail toward the exact future it inhabits, even if it isn’t the best future and forecloses possibly better other options? Or would you rather gamble that there’s a future at all (i.e., you could be killed at any moment and thus not survive to become older you). Maybe to you, a human being, it sounds like an iffy proposition, since you probably figure your chances of arriving at some future unaided by psi are pretty decent (because even if you believe in psi you still probably think of it, erroneously, as a “significant but small effect”); but it might be a different story if you were a simpler being. That slightly constrained free will is to that organism’s existence in time what its enclosing membrane is to its existence in space: both a container and armor.

The Jouissance of Constraint

In other words, simple life made a deal with its future, that it would accept certain constraints and non-optimal outcomes in order to secure for itself a promise of survival long enough to reach that outcome. We are talking microseconds and milliseconds here, a thin veneer on life’s temporal envelope. But as life complexified, it found ways of prying open or widening this margin by small increments, turning it into more of a shell. Complex cellular assemblages of microtubules (neurons) and nervous systems made of them were a decisive step, enabling those precog circuits to recruit classical-causal interactions in the meat-sphere to “hold” precognitive information associatively for longer and longer periods.

A brain such as ours, with trillions of microtubules organized in 86 billion neurons with trillions of synaptic connections, can create the necessary noise of a system within which post-selection and something like “weak measurement” can operate on a much bigger scale. An accurate precognitive signal is a “majority report” within a relatively noisy chatter of relatively inaccurate assessments of the future. It may be this ability to preserve future information in highly oblique, associative form that enables future information to be contained and preserved for a long time—over months and years in some cases—in our “premory.” An unconscious—a tendency to compute across long timespans or even the whole life of the brain—is a necessary entailment of this.

So is jouissance, which looks out for our survival by binding pleasure to constraint as well as to threat. The best painter of this aspect of jouissance was H.R. Giger, whose “Space Jockey” in Alien is the most perfect icon of endosymbiosis.* When future humans are nothing more than endosymbiotes in machines we created, it may be precisely our precognitive ability, our ability to enter the dreamworld, that makes us indispensable to our engulfing machine progeny. The ability to dream may give the organic brain vast natural advantages over technological precognitive circuits.

One wonders whether prescience and its necessary tradeoffs could have shaped our regular physical senses as well. There is an old, mostly forgotten theory that vision, for instance, is actually limited by the eye rather than enabled by it—the “clairvoyant theory of perception.” I’m skeptical of clairvoyance as such—I think it is one of the many masks of prescience—but it seems like there could be a grain of truth in this theory anyway: What if the senses emerged in such a way as to constrain or create the needed blind spots to enable prescience (or in the dim oceanic past, our primordial pre-sense) to operate? What if a tradeoff with prescience exerted pressures constraining our ability to navigate space, limiting our degrees of perceptual freedom, just as brains became structures to elaborately limit our cognitive freedom while reaching into the future?

Causal Sclerosis

On the surface, post-selection seems to imply some version of eternalism, the Minkowski glass-block universe I discussed some time ago in the context of Alan Moore’s forthcoming novel Jerusalem, a universe in which the future always already exists, which seems deterministic and claustrophobic—a hoarder’s cosmology (sorry, Alan Moore, you’re a hoarder). Determinism can make deliberate action seem pointless and life bleak. But causality, as I’ve argued (a propos of Moore and Phil Dick) may have a variable viscosity, open/loose/indeterminate in large swathes but given structure by islands of relative inevitability. It could be the case that the only history relatively “locked in stone” (or glass) and thus less subject to alteration by our free will, is precisely those events that are precognized by a sentient agent.

It could be that life itself actually injects a kind of novel calcification, stalagmites of determinism, Parmenidean inevitabilities, into the more free-flowing contours of causation, because of this precognitive functioning that dates back to our eukaryote ancestors. The arising of sentience in a post-selected universe may have introduced a radically different causal regime from what prevailed in the first several billion years post-Big Bang. Life opened a window onto its future only by placing itself in a bit of a straightjacket. Viewed four-dimensionally, those time-binding organisms are creating a kind of causal viscosity or solidity around them and in front of them, an ability to “preact” but at the expense of a certain boundedness or limitation on their freedom. That would be paradoxical if it were an all-or-nothing, black-and-white thing, but it isn’t.

We always think clumsily about fate and foresight, in terms of chickens versus eggs. The point is, the chicken and egg arise together, there is no precedence. Thus we cannot say that because we foresee something, causality police will arrive to see that it happens, or that a future becomes locked in and then we can see it, er, beforehand. It is all of a piece, a landscape feature in the four-dimensional topography of spacetime. (In this sense, it is probably ultimately wrong to think about precognition or prescience or pre-sense at all without also accounting for PK phenomena or some kind of gaming of future probabilities. I precognize that PK will be a recurring theme in my speculations during the upcoming year.)

Beings with precognitive organelles, especially when organized into big brains, actually are shaping the contours of causality and the universe’s unfolding in radically more profound ways, by creating novel acausal formations: those ‘acausal’ (but really, dual causal/retrocausal) feedback loops, which amount to an actual calcification or fossilization of history. (For hermeticists: I wonder whether this Wyrd, this selective hardening of causality around prescient beings, is not precisely the calcification or “styptic” function Rene Schwaller referred to as the function of alchemical salt; it’s just the salt we shoot from our heads to give our psi-wheels traction on the icy mountain road of Time.)

To some higher-dimensional walker on the cosmic beaches, these formations, closed timelike curves created by our quantum brains, may be like seashells, the discarded remnants of intelligence persisting after their soft fleshy creators are long dead.

Postscript: Dark Materialism

When all the metaphysical and theological systems have come and gone there remains this inexplicable surd: a flurry of breath in the weeds in the back alley—a hint of motion and color. Nameless, defying analysis or systematizing: it is here and now, lowly, at the rim of perception and being. Who is it? What is it? I don’t know. — Phil Dick, Exegesis

The future intrudes on the present as a void or absence that nevertheless shapes our thought and behavior in subtle ways. Meaning always awaits us in the future, forever deferred and postponed, as French poststructuralists like Lacan and Derrida always insisted. Thus when I argued a few posts back that there is no matrix of meaning giving some kind of secure sense-structure to the universe, I should have been more precise: the universe has no meaning in the present; meaning is always in the future.

The closest thing to meaning in the present is that perturbation and deflection we feel subtly in our lives. It is Lacan’s Real and Phil Dick’s “surd,” and really, I think, we can place the whole Freudian “unconscious” (and the Buddhist “substrate consciousness”) in the Not Yet as well: It is the place where unthought thoughts are thought. The Not Yet also takes the form of elusive flickering anomalies, maybe even all of the almost-but-not-quite meaningful phenomena that button-down minds dump into the wastebin labeled “the paranormal.” As I suggested in the last post, PK phenomena could even be manifestations of causality’s immune system against paradox. The noönic envelope of the earth, the interpenetration of the future with the present, creates deviations, causal perversions, and anomalies that are both manifestations of “hardened” fate (or Wyrd) and debris of a powerfully time-binding biosphere. It sounds awfully lot like a control system. Are UFOs themselves part of the “long Earth’s” causal immune system?

Unlike many of my friends and fellow anomalists, I’m obviously not done with materialism. Opening physics and psychology up to retrocausality has much more traction as an explanation for psi and other paranormal phenomena (and chaos magic) than waving our hands about consciousness fields and matrices of meaning; it also (to me at least) satisfies the need to restore an excitingly science-fictional richness and surreality to the world made bleak by the dull-minded Dawkinses and other unimaginative science-stops-here skeptics. “Materialism” isn’t the equivalent of that sclerotic, skeptical point of view. It doesn’t mean there’s nothing but matter; for a century, nobody (at least in the hardest of the hard sciences) has believed that. It just means being mentally rigorous, critically minded, and not giving free passes from causality; but it is necessary to radically enlarge our picture of causality, and thus we need a more “elaborative” kind of materialism to replace the reductive one that currently dominates. Mainstream science will get there sooner or later; for now, we anomalists are doing advance scouting of the terrain.

The mystery of dark matter is emblematic of that need to enlarge our picture of matter rather than replace it with some simplistic idealism. A few years ago I speculated that dark matter might be made of knowledge. I was corrected by some readers more knowledgeable in information theory and computing that even very massive ET data collection would not be “big” in mass, because information storage ever tends toward the minute in scale. ET big data would be enfolded in the fabric of space or stored in black holes; it wouldn’t take the form of big Toshiba or Seagate hard drives floating around in space and perturbing the rotation of galaxies. But that throwaway idea was not valueless, because it led me to a better hypothesis, and this one is not idle: Dark matter could really be the perturbing effect of the future, or the Not Yet, at the galactic and intergalactic scale.

In other words, the large-scale perturbation or deviation from our gravitational predictions, which looks (to cosmologists who cannot countenance any future influence) like extra matter shaping the behavior of galaxies, could really be a nonrandom tendency in matter as a result of the causal “pull” of the future. Dark matter might, in other words, be the “missing meaning” of the classical-causal universe, the unconscious of spacetime, and not missing mass as it is presumed to be.

Readers, thoughts?

NOTE:

* Yes, please pretend the dumb prequel, with its moronic reimagining of Space Jockeys as steroid-pumped Woody Harrelson lookalikes, does not exist.

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Wyrd, Post-Selection, and the Quantum Trickster

English is blessed with a large and fascinating family of w-r words connoting twisting, turning, and turning-into (in the sense of becoming)—think writhing wriggling worms and the wrath of wraiths. (See my ancient post about “werewords” if you are curious.) My favorite of this family is Wyrd, which comes from the Old English weorthan, “to become,” but with a sense of turning or spinning—as in, the “spinning” of the thread of our life. Wyrd (or in Norse, Urthr) was one of the three sister-goddesses, the Norns or Fates, who together wove a man’s destiny and could thus foretell it. Wyrd, as becoming and as turning, represents “what has turned out” or “what will have turned out” or “what you will have turned into.” It is a kind of future-perfect tense, a retrospective view from a future vantage point that can look back and survey the ironic (or even warped) paths a life has taken.

Other than through a common appearance in fantasy novels, including the Discworld series of Terry Pratchett, Wyrd survives now in English solely via the wonderful word weird, and this is thanks entirely to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The “weird sisters” were three prophetic witches living alone in the wilderness, inspired undoubtedly by the Norns, but their role in Shakespeare’s tragedy is far more interesting. Weird didn’t simply mean “strange” as it does nowadays; it meant more a force of compulsion related to prophecy—forcing things to happen because a prophetic person said it. Frank Herbert keyed in on this ancient usage in Dune, where “weirding words” had a compelling force over the hearer.

The concept of Wyrd can thus help us understand post-selection, the quantum physics concept that allows time travel—including time-traveling information (prescience and prophecy)—to exist without producing causality-offending paradoxes. The term comes from quantum computing, where it is simply a filter on the outcomes of a computation: Set a computer to perform calculations and exclude all the various solutions that do not arrive at a desired, “selected” answer. This leaves a range of allowable paths to get to that answer—a certain limited range or degrees of freedom within which information accessed in the past, at time point A, accurately pertains to the future event at time point B. In a way it is analogous to quantum “tunneling”—a particle’s ability to simultaneously take multiple paths to a destination in space—but applied to the time dimension instead.

Applied to the larger universe of causality, which is information by another name, post-selection just means we live in a possible universe, and outcomes are those that have “survived” (think Darwin). Specifically, they have survived any possible precognitive detection by an agent capable or desirous of preventing them, or else have been actually facilitated by prophecy (those feedback loops I’m fond of). Under post-selection, a degree of foresight is purchased at the expense of some degrees of freedom of action and interpretation.

This produces ironic effects that go a long way toward explaining various characteristics of psi and the paranormal more generally. Post-selection is the Trickster, who might also be called the Timeline Guardian. The witches’ prophecies about Macbeth actually shape his destiny, his Wyrd, embodying the ambiguities and peculiarities of prescience in a possible universe, a universe that must sometimes take strange steps to protect itself from paradox. This may even offer a new way of thinking about psychokinetic (PK, or mind-over-matter) effects that seem to occur in the vicinity of precognition.

Misdiagnosed Informational Reflux

Folklore and tragedies from Oedipus to Macbeth to Dune Messiah show us that prophecy seldom directly and obviously helps further a person’s conscious intentions or plans; often it has the opposite effect. For instance, Macbeth neurotically finds himself striving to achieve his succession to the throne even though it has been prophesied; yet the witches’ more oblique prophecies about his downfall are fulfilled precisely because he misunderstands them until too late; had they been clearer, he would have taken action to prevent them.

Debates over prescience and its paradoxes often misleadingly turn on ideal-typical examples like receiving a premonition of a terrorist attack, which raises the obvious question of possibly using the foreknowledge to warn somebody (and thus foreclose the event). It doesn’t quite work that way in the real world, where prescience has a much more ambiguous character. Because we possess consciousness and free-will, the rule of post-selection guarantees that the vast majority of our precognitive experiences are consciously unregistered as such until after the fact, either because we totally overlook them or, if we detect something premonitory going on, it is subject to too many rival interpretations that it does not occur to us to act (deliberately or inadvertently) in a way that would prevent the foreseen outcome from occurring. Or, we can try to act on it, but the circumstances guarantee that nobody will listen or heed what we say. Nobody pays much attention to credulous paranoids and New Agers who believe in bullshit like ESP; societal disbelief in psi and prophecy must be included in our account of the universe’s immune system against paradox.

None of the nation of dreamers who dreamed of 9/11, for instance, knew exactly what was going to happen or when; even if some did, there was no possibility of preventing the attacks based on such dreams and visions (especially taken in isolation). Precognition is always slippery, always evades our attempt to interpret. It often has an ominous or uncanny flavor, for instance, yet turns out to have a totally mundane meaning once confirmed by events—or else, it seems mundane and innocuous at first glance and then turns out later to have had monumental importance. This is all, I believe, directly symptomatic of how prescience has to work in a post-selected universe.

Post-selection is sometimes described as a rule that prevents the grandfather paradox, but the way it works in practical terms is as a context that preserves a tolerable degree of uncertainty about information back-flowing from the future. One of the vexations of psi is that it has always been seen to be a weak signal on a noisy channel; protocols to enhance the signal, such as the redundancy method described in Damien Broderick’s recent book Knowing the Unknowable, cannot get rid of the noise altogether. What this means is that you can never prove that a single psi behavior (guess, dream, insight, drawing, etc.) is authentically an example of psi. You are stuck in a land of statistics and uncertain probabilities and inability to ever make definitive claims.

People always raise the paradoxical idea of having a premonitory dream of dying in a plane crash and then avoiding the flight. What, in that case, “sent” the premonition? But there’s no mystery: The premonition may really be “of” surviving a plane crash that was depicted in the dream as including you. Or if I am right, it would be more accurately characterized as being an oblique representation of your complex emotions sparked (in the future) by surviving a real or possible plane crash. We should not look for literalness in premonitory phenomena, or a direct connection to actual events; they refer to our (future) inner life. And more to the point, you can never be 100 percent sure it was “a premonition” or “a precognitive dream” in the first place and not chance coincidence, just a random dream, and your interpretation of it a hindsight-biased construct.

Don’t Think of a Polar Bear

And really, precognitive dreams and visions are not really “of” the future in any sense: They arrange material already in memory as a best-guess interpretation of unprovenanced “perturbing” information supplied by the precognitive circuit. My work with precognitive dreamwork and hypnagogia over the past two years has made this logic quite clear to me: We’re precognitively dreaming all night and metabolizing our immediate future in hypnagogia all day; but even scrutinizing these phenomena, armed with a notebook and melatonin and Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, their meaning only ever becomes apparent in hindsight or, often, precisely as the precognized event is already unfolding (thereby adding to the excitement and thus emotional salience of the realization). They largely concern very trivial events, forcing me to conclude that the traditional association of premonitions with disasters and traumas is purely an effect of hindsight bias; prescience is a constant background function (i.e., James Carpenter’s “first sight”), not a rare thing provoked by “disturbances in the force.”*

Other than dreams, prescience informs our intuitions, parapraxes like misreadings and slips of the tongue or pen, “earworms,” and other manifestations of what Freud called the psychopathology of everyday life. The associative murkiness surrounding psi not only demands that we study these phenomena within a Freudian psychoanalytic framework, as Jule Eisenbud did in the 1970s, but also links them to phenomena described in more recent cognitive psychology, such as the “ironic process theory” of Daniel Wegner. Wegner realized that, if asked, you can’t not think of a polar bear, because a vigilant part of the brain is on the lookout precisely for the undesired thought in order to prevent it. It’s essentially a Trickster function, and such a function would have arisen to orient us toward real threats (not just imaginary polar bears); it causes us to find perverse reward precisely in signs of things we don’t want to happen; the function especially keys in on signals of chaos, entropy, and death or decay.

Edwin May thinks entropy gradients actually carry the psi signal, but I think it is simply that our psi eyes are drawn to the signs of disorder and decay that hint at something our survival-minded limbic system ought to be aware of. Psi is semiotic, focused on signs, because information is; as psi-dreaming pioneer J.W. Dunne brilliantly discerned, it’s an orientation to information coming down the pike from the brain’s future, not an orientation to objective events out in the world. Wegner’s ironic process, or the Trickster function, explains the perverse linkage of reward to threat (a binding I have elsewhere called jouissance)—explaining why it is really reward and not trauma that “powers” psi phenomena, and why (again, per Carpenter) it most often operates awry of our conscious intentions.

This may seem to make precognition “useless” but it does not; it only makes it non-straightforward with respect to our conscious aims. It was a big “duh” moment for me about a year ago when I realized that this is just another way of phrasing what ritual and chaos magicians have been saying for many years, albeit in another idiom. Hence the importance (as Gordon White reminds us in his excellent recent book The Chaos Protocols) of “obliquity,” as well as the necessity of a ritualized social context in which to productively exercise psi abilities.

Blinding

The associative remote viewing setups devised by Russell Targ and others are perfect examples of psi-facilitative social ritual—where effectively the psychic him-/herself is “blinded” to the useful meaning of the information they produce until after the fact. Just as the first cells may have capitalized on quantum pre-sense by engulfing tubulin endosymbiotes (more on this in the next post), the only useful psi in the human world is “symbiotic” in the form of teamwork, a relation between, minimally, a “blind” psychic subject and an agent who is alone privy to the specific problem or question being posed—and better yet, even more intermediate layers of knowing/non-knowing.

We should not miss here the resonance to classical archetypes of prophecy. Prophets often are blind, or are blinded. Think blind Tiresias, who is really a mirror held up to Oedipus, who blinds himself upon learning the truth of how his actions fulfilled the prophecies. It is precisely the fact that prescience is always about the psychic subject’s own future enjoyment that makes the subject precisely useless or unreliable as an interpreter of his/her visions; there must be controls in place to take this unconscious foresight and forefeeling, de-bias it, and make it something actionable and useful for the welfare of the community. This is precisely why I think science is a necessary partner in psi: Actually utilizing psi effects requires the same sort of rigorousness and fussiness (blinding and controls) that enables us to capitalize on other elusive, small effects in nature and turn them into something powerful.

We also should not miss the historically well-known role of collaboration in divination and magic: The diviner often requires a more naive assistant as a conduit or reader, which performs the same function as blinding in an experimental context—creating filters to control for bias and to extract prophetic knowledge from the noise that surrounds it. Think the oddball practices like Cagliostro’s use of a child-clairvoyant, or John Dee’s use of Edward Kelly (although you could ask, who was using who, in that case). Experimenter effects are the death of divination. Blinding is really a kind of distillation or extraction operation … And wouldn’t it shock most scientists to know that the ancestor of basic experimental controls is nothing other than mediumship.

In no case can the “psychic subject” gain conscious knowledge, with any certainty, of an event such that the knowledge could be actually used by him-/herself in such a way as to prevent that outcome—kind of like the witches’ prophecy that no one “of woman born” will kill Macbeth, or that he’ll only be overthrown when Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane. I’ve noticed that precognitive dreams have a cunning range of interpretations: Until the future referent becomes clear, you can often write them off as having vague links to past events or preoccupations. They have a way of discouraging scrutiny.

Precognition could only have arisen in this “cloaked” fashion; it can only be an unconscious phenomenon. Psi and meaning do not mix, as remote-viewers have always known: There is some contradiction between psi-gained information and understanding its meaning or being able to put its meaning (accurately) into words. It also comes hand in hand with a shaping of our possible degrees of freedom, and cannot be disassociated from our neuroses and deepest motivations.

This is similarly clear on the other end of the spectrum from blinding us about fates we might rather avoid: There is also the situation of precognizing an outcome or event in such a way as to impel us to fulfill that outcome. Post-selection also explains why there can be a kind of bootstrapping in which the future seems to cause the past that causes the future, in a senseless loop—kind of like Macbeth’s desperate efforts to fulfill the witches’ prophecy of becoming king. As Macbeth shows, Wyrd entails a kind of neurotic, mechanistic or automatistic responsiveness, or pre-sponsiveness, in the face of prophecy. Generally, we would misinterpret our unconscious foresight as simply inspiration: having a thought to do or seek a thing and then being rewarded by going and achieving it. In these cases—indeed in many cases of artistic and other kinds of creativity—I suspect that “inspiration” is our classical-causal camouflage for prescience in action (what I have elsewhere called “prophetic jouissance”).

Such situations (which I described as “atemporal feedback loops” in my series on rethinking synchronicities) sound paradoxical, kind of like the grandfather effect, but actually an effect that ensures (rather than prevents) its cause is the opposite of a paradox, even if it challenges our “one thing after another” model of how things happen in a billiard-ball universe. This kind of tautological relationship between the effect and its cause would actually be an expected sort of formation in a universe containing precognitive agents. It may be precisely how complex systems like life arose, as I’ll argue in the next post.

The Hysterical Universe

Here’s where it gets really exciting: Post-selection might also help us understand PK and other tricksterish mind-over-matter phenomena that closely attend prophecy.

In my earlier post on sleep paralysis and OOBEs, I raised the question of precognition’s possible relationship to apports and other PK phenomena, such as my “astral foot” possibly knocking over a rock in my study during an OOBE … or not. My limited experience has inclined me to think that what seems like astral journeying is really very vivid precognition of a future real-life experience in the target locale … thus my astral foot was safely in my bed at the time the rock fell, and my electrified bodymind was precognizing a scene in my study precisely a year in my future—nowhere near the rock in either time or space.

The intuitive notion that the mind in an emotional state can “reach out” and muck with matter via some energy or disturbance in the “consciousness field” is, I think, an appealing, easily visualized idea but hard to square with physics as we understand it. However. according to some interpretations of post-selection, time travel—including time-traveling information—would sometimes produce anomalies, highly improbable events, precisely to protect the timeline from paradox. If you went back in time to shoot your grandfather, you would be thwarted somehow, even if it took a UFO to appear from nowhere, or bigfoot to leap out of the bushes and kill you, or (more plausibly) a manufacturer error at the bullet factory. The way precognitive information is held in our associative ‘premory’ protects the timeline, as I’ve shown, but inexplicable phenomena in our physical environment might also.

in other words, what if a powerful precognitive experience like one of those “Howitzer” long-range OOBE precognitions of an event a year in the future—an event that, because of its distance, would be particularly vulnerable to perturbation in a butterfly-effect universe—could actually “force reality’s hand” to produce an improbable or even outrageous physical effect that raises doubt about the precognitive nature of the experience and thus protects the timeline from interference?

PK, like other psi phenomena, tends to disobey our conscious intentions or yield very micro-sized effects. Its most dazzling manifestations seem to be oblique, like the bent spoons and stopped clocks (and weirder events like teleportation) that surround Uri Geller but which he cannot quite control. The tendency for weird physical manifestations like apports and poltergeists and “exteriorizations” to surround powerfully precognitive individuals—Whitley Strieber would be another example—suggests that the possible (post-selected) universe may be straining, hysterically (i.e., “acting out”), to protect the timeline. (Coincidentally or not, hysteria characterizes the personality of many of those highly psychic individuals too.)

The displacement of my specularite from its perch, for example, precisely supported the standard OOBE interpretation of the experience, distracting me from any suspicion that it had a precognitive dimension. Had I suspected precognition, I might have done more to try and confirm its target and thus potentially altered my destiny. PK may be the probabilistic recoil of psi’s big guns, in other words. No “subtle bodies” are needed, just a “queering” of ostensible randomness toward the nonrandom. I find such a hysterical-causal pathology around prescience more believable than invisible pseudopods reaching out from our bodies to bang on stuff and knock things off the shelves … but that’s just me.

This is why I tend not to think of the “supernormal” as some realm of latent powers that humans are destined to develop more fully as the “next phase in our evolution” (a la Frederic Myers). For precognition to exist, it has to be mostly hidden, protected by dense layers of psychological and social resistance that would compel us to see its effects as anything but seeing or knowing the future. Future psi wizards are not going to be X-Men or Jedi Knights waving their hands to levitate stuff; they’re going to be, basically, furtive psychomagicians and chaos magicians engaged in weird rituals to program their own unconscious in private and idiosyncratic, highly weird, ways.

A Causal Immune System

The social unacceptability of psi and the paranormal to button-down minds is not only that it involves liminal (category-defying) subjects, as George Hansen argues in his monumental study The Trickster and the Paranormal. I think it goes even deeper: It is that the real process and mechanism that (I argue) must underly some or maybe even all of these phenomena—precognition—trespasses on our most basic understanding of causality and seems to invite paradox, which is the most loathsome thing to a rational person. It is why prescience, of all psychic phenomena, is especially taboo: It is essentially a temporal analogue of incest. Oedipus, as I’ve argued elsewhere, was an ancient gedankenexperiment about prophecy and causality, linking foresight both to the (grand)father paradox and to forbidden enjoyment.

Paranormal phenomena survive in a post-selected universe precisely by introducing doubt, and mucking with our ability to settle on the right explanation. It’s possibly even their function: Some PK effects could be “high improbabilities” generated by the activity of our precognitive faculty. This may be part of precognition’s camouflage, an essential aspect of the way precognition survives as an adaptive trait in sentient, willful organisms like ourselves. When we know too much, we’re f***ed. Which also explains the link between the paranormal and paranoia: We instinctively know that this zone of taboo-defying phenomena is dangerous, and the universe’s immune system might not like us peering too closely. (It would be not too unlike the Strugatsky brothers’ wonderful novel Definitely Maybe, about a cosmic immune system against advanced science, and perhaps also not too unlike Jacques Vallee’s control system hypothesis.)

Every culture, at all times, has misunderstood the power of prescience. Even when they acknowledge that it sometimes occurs (as nearly all besides ours do), it is this repulsive paradoxicality that deters people from pondering the mechanisms, the “how.” It is precisely the line of inquiry blocked by that Timeline Guardian, the Trickster, who sends us off in every other possible direction than the future. Since the beginning, humans have talked about gods and spirits and spirit worlds and telepathy, without understanding that we are really talking about the tunneling into our own future timelines enabled by the quantum brain. The Greeks of Sophocles’ time, for instance, thought that prophecy had to be supplied by the gods, not directly perceived by the seer.

A few ancient philosophies do however veer excitingly close to a god-free vision of Wyrd, our ironic and mysterious relation to the future. The Yogacara science of mind, with its “substrate consciousness” where the seeds of Karma are planted comes very close. My friend Alex van Oss (who did the illustration at the top of this post) alerts me that in the Caucasus the concept of Kebzeh (“the law of cause-effect and effect-cause”) is very similar; one of its principles, “produce the effect and the cause will follow” could really be another way of phrasing post-selection. In Europe, Hegel articulated a similar idea, with his retrospective understanding of history; and Freud came daringly close when he mapped the unconscious and philosophers like Sartre rightly asked “where is this unthought thought occurring?” As I argued, the question should really be “when?”

NOTE:

* Here’s a particularly good example of the mismatch between triviality and significance that contributes to our nonrecognition of the precognitive nature of dreaming. One morning a couple years ago I wrote down all I could remember of a dream that felt like some Central European (Czech or Polish) New Wave film from the 1960s, black and white, about a couple on vacation, a car at an intersection, and something about a sailboat on a lake—almost more of a vague impression than anything narrative I could pin down. A moment’s reflection on waking told me it was actually a specific movie I had dreamed of: Knife in the Water by Roman Polanski. It had been many years since I’d seen it, and I really just had a fuzzy recollection limited to the images and ambience of my dream. (I’d always vaguely confused Polanski’s film with Plein Soleil, the 1960s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr. Ripley.)

Given the immersiveness of dream experiences, we also naively assume that they unfold in something like real time. In fact, the few images in my dream could have been a brief flicker of cortical activity lasting a few seconds or even just a few milliseconds. When we realize we spend a couple hours each night dreaming, and any given dream we actually remember may represent just a tiny, tiny fraction of that cortical activation, then it becomes easy to imagine how we could be metabolizing all of our daily experience—both of prior days and subsequent days—in the course of a night. Dreams are easy for the brain, not a “production” in any sense of the word.

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Altered States of Reading (5): Kirk Allen of Barsoom

What could any Other know of the up-and-out? What Other could look at the biting acid beauty of the stars in open space? What could they tell of the great pain, which started quietly in the marrow, like an ache, and proceeded by the fatigue and nausea of each separate nerve cell, brain cell, touchpoint in the body, until life itself became a terrible aching hunger for silence and for death? – Cordwainer Smith, “Scanners Live in Vain”

Central to Harold Bloom’s theory of poetic/literary revisionism is the precarious artistic ego, which feels threatened by a brilliant predecessor. But even though the Freudian paradigm it is based on (and pretty much all of Western culture) insists that good health means maintaining intact ego boundaries, the ego is actually something many souls are capable of setting aside in experiences of higher union or cosmic consciousness. These ruptures are central in the history of religions, so why not other domains like writing (and reading)? When the ego ruptures, the negative aspects of the Real and the pain of jouissance flip or transform over into a kind of bliss and inspiration that may feel like (and may indeed be—we should remain open-minded) the channeling or downloading of information from some alien source. I described this for instance in the case of Allen Ginsberg, who experienced his ecstatic experience in college as a transmission directly from the mystical artist/poet William Blake.

Jeffrey Kripal’s work (especially Mutants and Mystics) provides a good starting place for thinking about this kind of paranormal/mystical transmission in the world of literature, especially imaginative literature. Kripal uses the term “imaginal”—a word introduced by Victorian paranormal researcher Frederic Myers but made more famous by Islamist Henri Corbin—to talk about this nexus. In an a lecture that I can no longer locate on YouTube, Kripal describes a daisy chain of influence in which sci-fi and comic book writers draw on culturally-framed anomalous experiences for their art, which then shapes the anomalous experiences of their readers, which feeds back into art and re-shapes cultural framings of the paranormal, and so on—what he calls “the fantastic loop between consciousness and culture.”

I can think of no better example of such a fantastic loop than the famous case study “Kirk Allen” in Robert M. Lindner’s 1955 pop-psychiatry memoir The Fifty Minute Hour. This young man, described as a brilliant scientist working on a secret government project during the war (implicitly the Manhattan Project, which was surely a misdirection to disguise the subject’s true identity), was referred to Lindner in Baltimore because he was spending less and less time in actual reality and more and more time in an imaginary world that, it turned out, was based on an unnamed multi-volume pulp sci-fi epic popular at the time. Lindner describes how Mr. Allen, out of his obsession with this alien world and his confused belief that it was actually about him, had, after he got to the end of his “biography,” continued writing “his” story and (to do the necessary research) habitually visited this other planet in a sort of dissociative state.

The doctor was stymied at first, because there seemed to be no reason for his clearly bonkers subject to stay in the real world—there were so many fascinating rewards in that other one, where he was a heroic ruler, married to a beautiful princess, etc. Thus there was nothing to induce him to see real reality for what it was. Lindner finally hit upon a novel therapeutic strategy: By entering the subject’s fantasy himself, taking an equally obsessive interest in it and, in the process, holding an uncomfortable mirror up to his patient’s behavior, perhaps he could gradually loosen its hold over the young man.

So he did … and it worked. And in what is surely one of the most interesting instances of psychotherapeutic countertransferrence ever documented, the doctor successfully got his patient to abandon his alternate reality, seeing it as false and pointless, but in the process developed his own deepening fascination and near-obsession with the interplanetary empire where his patient had been spending so much time. In the end, Allen breaks the spell for Lindner by admitting he made the whole thing up, although it’s unclear what he really believed earlier on.

In his book The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan used this episode as a touchstone for thinking about supposed alien abductions as a kind of folie-a-deux between abductee and researcher: The abductee seduces the researcher into an alternate (and in Sagan’s mind, clearly deluded) reality or belief system, but the researcher then takes the ball and elaborates and deepens this new reality. Sagan thinks that Allen did Lindner a huge favor in the end, effectively rescuing the psychiatrist (who interestingly was an honorary fellow of the Fortean Society before his early death in 1956) from the fate of John Mack, whose reputation was damaged by credulity in a phenomenon some of his subjects too admitted to making up.

Based on the disguised description Lindner provides, it has been generally assumed that the sci-fi saga that obsessed and literally captivated his patient were Edgar Rice Burroughs’ stories about the Martian kingdom of Barsoom, which were first published in the pulps in 1912 and have remained popular to this day. But considerably adding to the interest and significance of Kirk Allen’s Martian adventures is his likely (although never conclusively proved) real identity. He is widely believed to have been, in actuality, the young Paul Linebarger, better known to generations of science fiction fans as Cordwainer Smith—one of the most interesting voices of mid-century sci-fi and a profound inspiration on younger writers like Ursula K. LeGuin. (And if his pictures are anything to go by, he was also about the least John Carter-ish person I could possibly imagine.)

At the probable time of the therapeutic relationship described by Lindner, Lineberger’s day job was as a prominent government scientist, a specialist in psychological warfare working for the Pentagon; he had had an unusual upbringing in the Far East with somewhat close correspondences to what Lindner described for Kirk Allen. A psychologist named Alan C. Elms has written numerous blog posts and articles on Linebarger and evidently has done extensive research toward a definitive biography, and he has concluded that Linebarger indeed was probably Allen. It may make some sense of the truly far-out imagination of the writer known for his elegaic future histories of The Instrumentality of Mankind that he could have cut his chops writing excessive notes elaborating Burroughs’ elaborately envisioned alien empire.

Astral Travels

Assuming Kirk Allen was indeed Paul Linebarger/Cordwainer Smith, what makes the case triply interesting to me is the method of his fugue travels to this imagined/embellished alternate reality and how they matched the mode of travel used by his fictional alter ego.

At the beginning of Burroughs’ Mars saga, in what was eventually published in book form in 1917 as A Princess of Mars, we are introduced to the series’ hero John Carter. In that first novel, Carter begins as a Civil War veteran prospecting with a compatriot in Arizona; after his companion is killed by Indians, Carter takes refuge in a cave, where he falls asleep and experiences the classic symptoms of sleep paralysis: He awakens but finds his body frozen, hearing a noisy presence behind him that he cannot see. Eventually he gains use of his body, but finds that it is merely his astral body—his physical body is still lying on the cave floor.

In his astral body, Carter goes to the front of the cave, where he sees Mars on the horizon—as a warrior, it is his personal star—and he focuses his attention and will upon it: “I closed my eyes, stretched out my arms toward the god of my vocation and felt myself drawn with the suddenness of thought through the trackless immensity of space.” Through many adventures over ten years while his Earth body slumbers in the Arizona cave, the Martian avatar of John Carter, after awakening in Barsoom, marries a princess and eventually becomes its ruler.

According to Chris Knowles (in Our Gods Wear Spandex), this detail of astral projection (as well as numerous other motifs in Burroughs’ work) betray a likely familiarity with Theosophy, which made a big deal of this exact mode of locomotion across space. Writers on the subject frequently noted astral projection’s continuity with what was then called “catalepsy”—i.e., waking up paralyzed, experiencing vibrations and frightening noises, and only with difficulty separating the astral body from the physical, just as Burroughs describes. Otherwise, Burroughs would have had to have a direct personal experience with journeying out of his body, as his account of the experience is highly “realistic,” as anyone who has suffered sleep paralysis and its occasional out-of-body sequelae knows. Also, traveling etherically or astrally is described in all the literature on the subject as a simple matter of willing one’s astral body to the location desired.

Crucially, this same method is followed by Lindner’s patient Kirk Allen in the dissociative states that led him to be referred for psychiatric help. Allen describes to the doctor how, when he got to the end of the series of novels—which had essentially (he thought) been describing his own life—he went ahead and began writing the continuation of his interplanetary life story. It started as a vivid anamnesis, a method he says he developed of distinguishing imagination and recall—literally “remembering” facts of his alter-ego’s ongoing biography as though they were his own memories. But at one point, while working on a map of the distant empire he ruled, he found himself unable to remember a significant detail from a photograph taken on one of his adventures but filed away (he knew) in a locked room inside his palace on the distant planet. He felt a sense of frustration that he couldn’t remember it accurately.

“I thought of those blasted photographs stuck away there in a place no one but I could get to. I wracked my brains trying to recall the landscape I had flown over, and the pictures I had glanced at casually before putting them away. No use. I was furious. I cursed myself for not looking at them more closely when I had them. And then I thought: ‘If only … if only I were there, right now, I would go directly to those files and get those pictures!”
“No sooner had I given voice to this thought than my whole being seemed to respond with a resounding ‘Why not?’—and in that same moment I was there.”

He describes how, finding himself fully within the body of his alter ego, he rose and went to the secret room in his palace and looked at the pictures he had been remembering.

“It was over in a matter of minutes, and I was again at the drawing board—the self you see here. But I knew the experience was real; and to prove it I now had a vivid recollection of the photographs, could see them as clearly as if they were still in my hands, and had no trouble at all completing the map.
“You can imagine how this experience affected me. I was stunned by it, shaken to the core, but excited as I had never been. In some way I could not comprehend, by merely desiring to do so, I had crossed the immensities of Space, broken out of Time, and merged with—literally become—that distant and future self whose life I had until now been remembering. Don’t ask me to explain. I can’t, although God knows I’ve tried! Have I discovered the secret of teleportation? Do I have some special psychic equipment? Some unique organ or what Charles Fort called a ‘wild talent’? Damned if I know!”

Note that “immensity of space” is the phrase used by Burroughs too to describe the psychic crossing. Here again, the method as well as the strong emotions coming with it strongly resemble accounts from psychic research of astral travel/OOBEs—specifically the astonished excitement—as well as the sense of “verification” that it brought him. In this case, of course, there is little possible or plausible objectivity to this verification, since he was traveling to a place we are to assume never existed but in the pages of Burroughs’ novels. Or did his obsession create a kind of tulpa of Barsoom?

The Fractal Geometry of Paul Linebarger

If we are not enough dizzied by the spirals of alter-egos and pseudonyms in Paul Linebarger’s (probable) life story—Linebarger believing himself to be John Carter of Mars and disguised by his therapist as Kirk Allen, ultimately to adopt the pen name Cordwainer Smith—there is also here a dizzying recursiveness of the mode of travel between real and imaginal and fictive worlds that is layer- or onion-like: a fractal geometry of reading and writing, imagination and anamnesis, influences and inspirations and revision and re/unnaming. What (the f***) are we to make of this? Is something trying to hide? Or is something trying to be born?

It does seem like Linebarger/Smith/Allen had a lot he felt he needed to hide. Besides his constant astral projecting into a fictional universe, he also appears to have had sexual hangups and gender quirks that his era was not ready for. According to Elms (in an interesting article in the journal Science Fiction Studies called “Building Alpha Ralpha Boulevard”), Linebarger alienated his first wife by assuming a female alter-ego in some of his early writing and by cross-dressing in her presence. Nothing like this appears in Lindner’s chapter on Kirk Allen, but Lindner does interpret his divorce from reality as a defense against normative sexuality in the aftermath of an adolescent semi-trauma of being used sexually by an older woman. Lindner reports that his patient had had no further sexual experiences since adolescence and that on one occasion he astrally projected to his distant planet to avoid a sexual encounter with a female scientist colleague he had been platonically dating.

Linebarger’s fiction does seem to me to be the work of a misfit very like the young Kirk Allen, comfortable with ideas and books and cats and alien cultures … and talking cats … but totally ill at ease in his own skin. For instance, his 1945 story “Scanners Live in Vain” (which would have been written not too many years after his therapy with Lindner, if he was indeed Kirk Allen) is about star pilots who endure the agony of space by severing all contact with their bodies, living like numb automata:

“The brain is cut from the heart, the lungs. The brain is cut from the ears, the nose. The brain is cut from the mouth, the belly. The brain is cut from desire, and pain. The brain is cut from the world. Save for the eyes.”

The button-down era when Kirk Allen visited Lindner was light years distant from our world of SF fandom, with its exuberant embrace of creative rewriting in the form of fanfic, as well as various forms of online and real-world role-play. At the time, the young man’s active fantasy life and lifestyle could only have been seen as full-on nuts, and Lindner is not at all embarrassed to use terms like “insane” and “mad” when describing him. The lack of any accepted cultural form or idiom for expressing his identification with a fictional (super)hero ensured that his ecstasies or reveries (or whatever we want to call them) remained an embarrassing private pathology whose intrusion on his professional or romantic/sexual life could only be damaging. Perhaps some future Foucault of the mystical could tell us whether this medicalized repression of Linebarger’s creative relationship to Burroughs’ fiction was actually ‘productive’ of something in the way of sexual desire, creative verve, or even psychical ability. Might the non-social-acceptability of his obsessions have facilitated some kind of psychic or mystical wild talent that today’s slightly more liberal atmosphere would have the effect of neutralizing?

Fitting in to one’s society is an important part of happiness, so Kirk Allen’s astral traveling to the self-created tulpa of Barsoom was certainly an impediment to his life. In Lacanian terms, his literary-imaginative jouissance had to be curtailed, subjected to the sociable logic of the pleasure principle, to restore him to health. But while we do get the sense that something in him was indeed cured, freed to progress in a more “normative” (in I suppose a good way) direction—which would enable him to thrive, have a family, pursue a writing career, etc.—one cannot read Lindner’s account nowadays and not feel that something extraordinary may have been killed in the process. We’ll never know if Lindner’s unorthodox treatment enabled the subsequent brilliant (but still too-obscure) career of Linebarger/Smith or inhibited it, and what other possibilities (or wild talents) it may have curtailed or redirected, for better or worse. Had Linebarger/Smith been able to consult a priest or a shaman instead of being referred to a psychiatrist for his habit of astral traveling to Barsoom, his life and his creativity may have turned out very differently.

I do think it may be significant that Linebarger’s stories (as Cordwainer Smith) are set during or in the immediate aftermath of a milliennia-long period of Galactic peace—really, crushing bland conformity and a despiriting absence of danger and illness—under the “benevolent” totalitarian control of “The Instrumentality of Mankind.” I wonder if, like many creative spirits, Linebarger linked his muse to his psychic pain or ‘abnormality’ and thus had an ambivalent attitude to the psychotherapeutic cure(s) that had rectified and normalized his existence.

Whatever the case, the story of Linebarger/Allen is a complex maze of hidden and deferred identities, transferrences and countertransferrences, and redirected/sublimated sexuality. There is something powerful at work here, some model of the intersections of psychosexual exploration and creativity and mysticism and popular culture that relates to but also goes way beyond Bloom’s Gnostic/Freudian theory of misreading. All I know is, there is so much more I want to know about Paul Linebarger. On his blog, Elms promises he is writing a biography, although it appears it has been imminent for over a decade. I know too well how those types of projects go…

The Martian Imaginal

We can fit the curious case of Kirk Allen/Paul Linebarger within a long, fascinating, bizarre history of psychic engagement with the Red Planet (or the “Martian imaginal”). Books have been written on Mars’s place in our collective fantasies and in popular culture. A few key points include Helene Smith’s mediumistic communication with that planet in the late 19th century, described in Pierre Flournoy’s book From India to the Planet Mars. In turn-of-the-century sci-fi, there was, apart from Burroughs’ novels, also obviously H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, which later intruded on everyday reality through Orson Welles famously realistic radio adaptation.

Then after Kirk Allen, there was comic artist Jack Kirby’s eerily prophetic anticipation of the “face on Mars” in a 1959 comic book, 17 years before the Viking probe photographed such an object. Later, thanks to Sagan, Mars played an arguably decisive role in galvanizing public attitudes toward nuclear weapons in the last decade of the Cold War, as its dust storms provided the astronomer with his idea and model of “nuclear winter.” Anomalists continue to speculate about the existence of an ancient civilization that destroyed itself or was destroyed in Mars’s watery past. Among the planets of our solar system, Mars is uniquely not only a mirror but, arguably, a psychic player in our culture and history.

But more to my point, rather than trying to erase and rewrite his predecessor Burroughs’ engagement with that planet, the young Linebarger seems to have been happy inhabiting it, and evidently was only driven to creatively elaborate or embellish it because it ended too soon, before his “biography” was complete. Thus, to what extent does “anxiety of influence” really apply here? There is no way of answering that for certain without seeing the notes he created (and that Lindner himself got lost in). But Kripal’s picture of “fantastic loops” seems more apt: It is not simply the anxious creative genius that is wrestling with and distorting his/her predecessors; it is cultural forms, created (imperfectly) out of remarkable personal experiences—and also shaped and constrained by countless other cultural forces and semiotic systems—that distort or twist some pure current, which a budding artist was really trying to do justice to and honor even though he was an imperfect vessel in an imperfect world.

In other words, I see Kirk Allen/Paul Linebarger as genuinely trying to channel something that does not belong to him, and to actually get it right, and attempting in various ways to actually efface his ego in the process. Kripal has noted that mystical and psychic phenomena like clairvoyance and precognition are intimately connected to writing. The case of Kirk Allen, like that of Allen Ginsberg, suggests it’s clearly also connected to “spirit possession” in some, perhaps not completely literal, sense.

The creative and the mystical or paranormal (or some indeterminate category where it is hard to tell what is really going on) is some kind of universal nexus in the domain of cultural creativity, and Bloom’s “revisionism” maps just one small segment of a much wider and more interesting spectrum of creative (to put it mildly) reader response.

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