by Eric Wargo
“I have always been overcome with that,” Mailer told the interviewer. “It made me decide there’s no clear boundary between experience and imagination. Who knows what glimpses of reality we pick up unconsciously, telepathically.” 42 There’s that T word again. But telepathy does not fit the facts of Mailer’s case at all. He did not live or work in that building when he was writing Barbary Shore ; at that point in his life he had never seen or interacted with “Emil Goldfus.” When gripped by the Communist spy character “McLeod,” who took over the novel-in-progress he was wrestling with at the end of the 1940s, Mailer is more likely to have been influenced by his own unsettled and shocked reaction to a New York Times cover story he would encounter seven or more years later—at least, as long as we do not chalk it up to chance.
Banging furiously at a typewriter and the other skilled activities I mentioned are all forms of rewarding physical engagement, for which Tyrone Slothrop’s compulsive amorous activity (i.e., sex and seduction) is a perfect metaphor. The fact that Slothrop’s “gift” is rooted in conditioning is thus highly realistic (even, as I suggested, prescient 43 ). In fact, given precognition’s connection to arousal, excitement, and athletic or creative flow states and the fact that it seems to operate almost entirely outside of conscious awareness or control, it may be fruitful to take a reductive, even behaviorist approach to defining it—or perhaps, “prehaviorist” might be a better term: Fundamentally, precognition seems to be not seeing or knowing or even feeling the future; rather, it seems to be a matter of producing a behavior that is tied to a forthcoming reward . The behavior could be a physiological response such as a movement or an emotion; it could be a dream, or an utterance, or a drawing, or a novel. The reward might be physical, as in sex or the gratification of other biological and social needs; or it could be the gratification of successfully accomplishing a task. In an ESP task, it could simply be the satisfaction of being right. 44 The reward could be intellectual, as in learning something new and exciting—such as reading a news story about a volcano eruption or the unmasking of a Russian spy. As we will see later in this book, the reward may often be existential: finding out we (will) have survived some chaotic or entropic threat to our survival.
Whatever the mechanism, this influence by future emotional rewards would be the basis of the intuitive guidance system that takes over whenever we follow our gut or whenever we act skillfully and instinctively in any domain. A premonition or hunch or creative inspiration that pays off in a confirmatory action is part of a reward loop, entraining the attentional faculty on those meaningful experiences coming down the pike. Engaged flow states may not only open the door to precognition by focusing the senses and busying the critical, conscious mind with other matters, they may also condition the precognitive apparatus, providing constant payoffs that propel us forward to the next reward in an ongoing chain—like feeding sardines to the dolphin of intuition. 45
In this model, a presponsive behavior needs to be seen as one half of a two-part system, the other half being our everyday actions and experiences unfolding in linear time that serve to confirm it and thus give it meaning—for instance, Norman Mailer’s encounter with the New York Times headline about the spy downstairs. The crucial role played by confirmation is part of what makes the whole topic suspect for skeptics and even for many parapsychologists open to other forms of ESP. Since hindsight is biased by a kind of selection, it is difficult or impossible in many cases to prove that ostensible precognition is not either memory error or “just coincidence.” The difficulties go even deeper, in fact. As we will see later, a retrospective tunnel vision on events, especially after surviving some trauma—ranging from the most extreme, death and disaster, to minor chaotic upheavals like reading about a plane crash or a close brush with international espionage in the newspaper—seems to be precisely what people precognize or pre-sense in their future. We precognize our highly biased hindsight , taking us deep into a kind of recursive or fractal, M. C. Escher territory.
This fractal quality, coupled with our ignorance of precognitive or presentimental processes working in our lives, creates the causal circularity or time loops I have mentioned. Such loops may be a universal feature of a world that includes precognitive creatures who are unaware of their precognition. For instance, just imagine how weird it would have been for Mailer to read the headline about the spy in his building, as well as its vaguely unsettling subhead: “A NINE-YEAR PLOT—Suspect Said to Have Used Brooklyn Studio to Direct Network.” Mailer noted that he probably shared the elevator with this KGB Colonel many times, without ever suspecting who he was. But the source of the headline’s shock, and thus the whole reason Mailer would have been “inspired” by it years earlier, was not merely that the agent happened to be in his building, but the fact that he had already written about that exact situation: a KGB spy working in a Brooklyn Heights building full of artists and a novelist like himself. (We’ll see another, oddly similar example of this kind of fractal literary time loop, also involving a bizarre encounter with a new neighbor a writer seemingly had “written about” years earlier, when we come to the story of Philip K. Dick later in this book.)
Remember my earlier warning about quagmires. There are way more wrinkles and nuances in this notion of hindsight and “selection after the fact” than has hitherto been supposed in simplistic “yes” versus “no” debates over the existence of precognition.
Orienting Toward Meaning
My likening of precognition or presentiment to a biological reflex might not have raised eyebrows in the Rhines’ day, but it is a somewhat contrarian position now. Many parapsychologists today link psi abilities to the “extended mind”—that is, to some larger or higher consciousness that transcends the body, being metaphorically if not literally “entangled” with everything and everyone else. 46 Psychic ability is widely seen today as the ultimate disproof of the materialistic reductions of mainstream psychology and neuroscience. Consciousness, as something potentially irreducible to brain processes, assumes center stage in a what is seen by some as a new paradigm that will unseat and replace materialism. 47
Disaffection with materialism, and the claim that it disenchanted the world with its insistence on physical mechanistic causes for all phenomena including mental phenomena, dates back to the Romantic period, and again, it was a driving motive for the earliest psychical researchers in the Victorian era. Frederic Myers saw telepathy as part of an enlarged, transcendent “subliminal self.” The philosopher Henri Bergson argued for a kind of panpsychism , in which matter is itself a manifestation of mind and vice versa. Later, J. W. Dunne, as we saw, viewed precognition as reflecting our higher mind, “filling all space,” equivalent to the higher consciousness of mystics. And in the middle of the 20th century, Carl Jung saw psychic phenomena as manifestations of the collective unconscious, which he suggested had a transpersonal (or even what today might be called “nonlocal”) dimension. James Carpenter similarly sees first sight as a phenomenon resulting from our embeddedness in a universe of meanings that are found and not simply made by us, that extend beyond the body, and that are responsive to our intentions. 48 He sees first sight as much more than a mere reflex in the mechanistic sense most experimental psychologists might understand the term. 49
As a cultural anthropologist by training, I agree that meaning is central. I do not agree, though, that perennial questions about consciousness in relation to materiality need to be resolved to explain ESP. (We will come back to the reasons why later, in Part Two.) Nor do I believe we need appeal to anything like a universe pre-saturated with meanings to explain these phenomena. Information encoded in material forms of language, art, artifacts, folklore, mythology, science, and the various “lived texts” that make up culture (as anthropologists understand the term) do precede and surround us—but information is different from meaning. Meaning is really what is made when intentional actors engage with that information, assign value to and internalize it, and use it to achieve their aims. Meaning is
the value of information, in other words, and it is what we as humans constantly create and recreate as part of our social and cultural experience. 50 Rather than hovering over and above us, animating us, or exerting its own transpersonal causal (or, in Jung’s paradoxical formulation, “acausal”) force, meaning is constantly fashioned and refashioned by real embodied people in real physical interaction or physically mediated interaction. I suggest it is precisely such interactions that our first sight (as precognition) often orients us toward and that belatedly supply the meaning of our precognitive experiences. 51
I am thus arguing for a hermeneutic (interpretive) approach to studying precognition, but I mean something specific and counterintuitive by this: Meaning may be precisely what is lacking in a dream or reflex action or other behavior that is inflected by our future, until the future inciting stimulus that will enable us to make sense of it. In other words, it seems to be that it is the future, physical arrival at meaning that causes the prior behavior, and the prior behavior may often or even necessarily be part of the causal backstory of that future arrival—time loops, in other words. This time-loop framework not only offers a new way of looking at precognition in creativity and dreams but even has interesting implications for rethinking psychoanalytic models of symptoms and neuroses. Instead of being rooted solely in past traumas and unresolved conflicts, it may partly be our baffling relationship to our future that makes us “sick” (at least in the psychoanalytic sense). And it offers, I think, a more compelling way of looking at “archetypal” phenomena like Jung’s synchronicity too. If materially encoded cultural symbols exert some of their causative force or power backwards , through social actors’ unconscious precognitive engagement with them, it would help explain why the universe often seems pre-saturated with meanings that, upon scrutiny, boil down to meanings actual concrete human beings have made themselves. These are possibilities we will explore in the second half of this book.
A hermeneutic orientation to precognition has specific implications for how we approach studying the phenomenon. If precognition orients us toward meaning, the purely scientific perspective—including even the rigorously acquired experimental data supporting its existence with astronomical p -values—cannot tell us the whole story, and thus cannot be taken in isolation from the anecdotal data: individual human beings’ accounts of their anomalous experiences and what those experiences mean to them. 52 It has long been argued that ESP abilities of whatever sort would be unlikely to manifest strongly in sterile laboratory conditions where there is little personally at stake for the individual. What’s more, the precognitive unconscious of the experimenter and of the test subjects may create effects that cannot be accounted for and that may be misinterpreted (a very interesting and potentially far-reaching argument made by Edwin May in the context of PK research 53 ). Thus the “feeling the future” studies by Bem or the psychophysical studies by Radin and other researchers, with their impressive statistical significance but small effects discernible over milliseconds or seconds, may provide only an incomplete picture of precognition’s scope. Individuals’ personal accounts and recollections of anomalies lack the reliability and replicability that are essential to the scientific method, and they cannot be supported by significance tests, but they can reveal the character of precognition as it shapes our lives in a way laboratory experiments cannot.
The Future-Influencing-Present Effect
As mentioned earlier, in 1963 the playwright J. B. Priestley solicited viewers of a BBC program to send him examples of their precognitive experiences. He was inundated with roughly 1,500 letters. More interesting to Priestley than the hundreds of precognitive-dream reports in that pile were a smaller number of stories suggesting a more general and hard-to-define influence of future events on people’s actions, thoughts, and emotions in waking life: “Somebody is in a queer state of mind, perhaps behaves oddly, and no reason for this can be discovered at the time. Later—a month, a year, 10 years—the cause of this effect reveals itself. Because of where or what or how I am now, I behaved in such a fashion then.” 54 Priestley called this the “future-influencing-present effect”—not unlike what later researchers would call presentiment but unfolding in many cases across a much longer timeframe of an individual’s life.
In his 1964 book Man & Time , Priestley described several examples. One letter-writer was a WWII veteran with what we would now call PTSD, who experienced a “breakdown” during the war and relapses of his condition thereafter. He credited his recovery to a somewhat older woman with children whom he met and married after the war and, by the time of his writing, had a teenage daughter with. But “for a year before he met his wife or knew anything about her, he used to pass the gate of her country cottage on the local bus. And he never did this without feeling that he and that cottage were somehow related.” 55 Another, older letter writer recalled being a girl during the First World War and when out walking one night in London, “found herself looking up at a hospital, quite strange to her, with tears streaming down her cheeks.” Years later, she moved in with a woman friend, and they remained partners for 25 years. “This friend was then taken ill and she died in that same hospital at which the girl so many years before had stared through her inexplicable tears.” 56
Priestley also gives an example from two acquaintances of his own:
Dr A began to receive official reports from Mrs B, who was in charge of one branch of a large department. These were not personal letters signed by Mrs B, but the usual duplicated official documents. Dr A did not know Mrs B, had never seen her, knew nothing about her except that she had this particular job. Nevertheless, he felt a growing excitement as he received more and more of these communications from Mrs B. This was so obvious that his secretary made some comment on it.
A year later he had met Mrs B and fallen in love with her. They are now most happily married. He believes … that he felt this strange excitement because the future relationship communicated it to him; we might say that one part of his mind, not accessible to consciousness except as a queer feeling, already knew that Mrs B was to be tremendously important to him. 57
Skeptics will immediately dismiss such stories as memory distorted by hindsight. Almost certainly, the woman who lost her partner did not write down that moment of tearfulness on her walk all those years earlier; it was recollected long afterward—so how can we be sure it really happened? Even if it did happen, how can we be sure she didn’t break down crying before many buildings, all the time, and just remembered this one instance after her partner died at that particular hospital? Same with the shell-shocked man who said he felt an inexplicable connection to the cottage of his future wife. Similarly, Dr. A and Mrs. B (one wonders if she was a “Mrs.” at the time of the official communications)—as well as Dr. A’s secretary, abetting his memory—could have reframed their story in hindsight, shaping it into something much more fated-seeming. But while retroactive revision of memory must always be taken into account as a possible factor in such stories, it begins to appear simply stubborn and uncharitable to reject such accounts solely on the basis of that possibility, especially in light of the masses of similar and better-documented individual cases, not to mention the masses of experimental data also suggesting the possibility of something like Priestley’s future-influencing-present effect.
And once again, hindsight arguably works against us noticing these phenomena more than it encourages us to notice (let alone report) them. We rarely become aware of the future-influencing-present effect, Priestley notes, for the same reason J. W. Dunne argued precognitive dreams so often escape notice—because we do not habitually record our “queer feelings” and thus can only reflect on them with the benefit of hindsight. It will seldom occur to people to make a connection between their thoughts or feelings at some time point A and an event occurring at a later, perhaps much later, time point B:
[T]hough I describe this effect in terms of the future influencing the present, it can never be understood in the present that i
s being influenced by the future; it can be understood only when the effect is well into the past and the future that influenced it is now in the present or the immediate past. It has now to be discovered in retrospect, and this makes it less dramatic and memorable, much harder to trace, than the precognitive dream. 58
There is also an additional inhibiting force: the fact that such an effect seems so often to manifest in the highly meaningful but private context of love and romance. Sex and love, of course, are the most rewarding human experiences, toward which we might expect an adaptive presentimental ability to particularly orient us. But they are also the most intimate. Thus, among the many barriers to noticing presentiment’s operation in our lives is the fact that it may so often be connected to the most private and unshareable dimensions of our experience. 59 This is one reason why the psychoanalyst’s couch, a context where individuals are enjoined to discuss these intimate relationships along with their dreams and private thoughts, is the perfect place to study the future-influencing-present effect, as we will see later.
The anomalies produced when we engage precognitively with the world, including synchronicities, mystical or paranormal experiences, and so on may be the most profound and meaningful experiences in a person’s life. Fortuities and coincidences are the basis of every love story, for example. It is when we fail to “wait for the sugar to melt,” in Bergson’s phrase—that is, when we try to force some sense out of our “queer feelings” without waiting for their meaning to arrive in the natural unfolding of events—that that “connection” (for that is what meaning really boils down to) will seem like something pre-existing, enveloping and surrounding us in the universe like some Platonic-Jungian amnion, or even like “the Force” in Star Wars . Instead, I suggest that our most meaningful connections to others and to ideas traverse the Not Yet, made possible by the 4-D nature of our meaning-making brain.