Time Loops

by Eric Wargo

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

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

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

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

  Zapped in a Parking Lot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Through the Wall of Time

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

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