#  Video: Pop Apocalypse: Episode Eight: Dreams, Creativity, and Precognition, a talk with Eric Wargo 

 





November 01, 2024

 

 

Pop Apocalypse, hosted by Matthew J. Dillon, postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School, explores the mystical and the mythic, the paranormal and the psychedelic in popular culture.

For episode 8, we welcome the author Eric Wargo to the show. Eric is perhaps the world’s foremost expert on precognition. His most recent book, From Nowhere, examines precognition in its relationship to creativity in the lives of major authors and artists. We discuss the nature of time, dreamwork, memories from the future, and the four-dimensional brain. Along the way, we discuss figures like Virginia Woolf, Philip K. Dick, Andrei Tarkovsky, Sigmund Freud, and the sculptor, Michael Richardson.



 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

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MATTHEW DILLON: Greetings, listeners, and welcome back to another year of the Pop Apocalypse. I'm your host, Matthew Dillon, and I'm a researcher in the TNT Initiative here at the Center for the Study of World Religions, which is part of Harvard Divinity School. This is my fourth year at the center. And oh, my goodness, is it ever going to be the busiest? The center has an enormous amount of both in-person and online events, almost all of which are free and open to the public.

Now, I can attest they're all going to be good, but I want to especially recommend Sherah Bloor's poetry reading series. Nina Parmigiani's wonderful Gnosiologies speaker series, and you can sign up to watch those live on Zoom, as well as an event I could not be more excited for-- a conference on the life and work of the incalculably influential mystic, G. I. Gurdjieff, who has come up on this show any number of times. So as always, the best way to stay on top of all that's going on here is to sign up for the bi-weekly CSWR newsletter. And of course, can stay tuned to this show as well.

On to our show. Today, we welcome the author, Eric Wargo, to the show. Eric is the world's foremost expert on precognition. And if you haven't heard the term before, it's just the more paranormally way of saying what we commonly call prophecy or predicting the future. Now, in the vernacular or in the folk sense, we tend to think of precognition or prophecy as a kind of special ability, a super power or something that's only gifted to X-Men.

But as Eric has made clear over the course of his three books on this very topic, Time Loops, Precognitive dream Work And The Long Self, and now his most recent book, From Nowhere. What we call precognition is universal. This takes some time to understand, and it's a little tricky. So let's start small.

Think back to a time when you were dreaming. And somehow, someway, the dream ended with the appearance of something that in the real world outside the dream wakes you up. Now, this is weird. Somehow the dream that you are dreaming in the moment is building towards a certain end and culminates in a sound, let's say a family member drops their breakfast plates on the floor, that based on our notions of linear causal time, much less the differences between dream and waking could not have been known to the dreaming mind. But somehow the dream forms itself narratively to culminate in an event that quote unquote wouldn't know was happening. That's weird.

Or, what about those times when you feel like you've met somebody, and you've known them your whole life already? George Harrison captured this feeling the best way I've heard, and I'm going to be paraphrasing because I don't have the exact quote in front of me, but if you want to watch the great George Harrison biography movie by Martin Scorsese, it's in there.

So when the Beatles were looking for a new drummer, Ringo Starr showed up for the audition. And as Harrison described it, again, paraphrase, it was having a character who was always written into the script of your life step onto the screen for the very first time. And I feel like many of us have had that feeling. Now, sometimes it's easy to brush off these instances of seeming precognition. In his work, Eric recognizes them as part of a continuum with more elaborate let's call them examples, and we will be talking about any number of these from famous people in the course of our interview.

But I want to give an elaborate example, a more personal one, just because I think it's helpful. So back in 2021-- I'm going to commit the cardinal sin of talking about my own dreams-- back in 2021, I dreamed that I was in Boston. I looked across the St. Charles River towards Cambridge when I was suddenly transported into a classroom at Harvard. I had not been to Cambridge or Harvard at this point in my life.

I was teaching a course, as I understood it, titled Mystical Metaphysics, and the unit was on Jane Roberts and Helen Schucman to 20th century channels or spirit channels whom I was researching about for my second book on the afterlives of the divine double in the 20th and 21st century. So I wake up the next day, not thinking much of it, and as I want to do, bleary eyed while I'm grinding the coffee beans, I checked the academic job ads.

And right at the top of that page, apparently posted overnight, was a new ad for a postdoctoral fellow in transcendence and transformation at, as you know, Harvard University. In the ad, TNT was presented as the study of mysticism and metaphysics. And the leader of that Initiative was Charles Stang, the author of the book Our Divine Double on which my own second book is modeled. And now, of course, are listening to me describe that dream as a member of the TNT Initiative here in Cambridge. Weird.

So what I love about Eric's work, though, is that he theorizes such precognitive experiences and dreams in a way that both avoids the sort of dull skepticism that it's just meaning that we impart to them while also steering clear of any sort of fluffy spiritual notions of the universe conspiring to a specific end, as if this gigantic galaxy, much less the universe, has enough time to focus on our own particular desires for employment.

Wargo offers instead the idea of the long self. According to his theory, which he backs up with rigorous research into psychology, physics and philosophy, our sense of self in the present moment is just a cross-section of this long self, which already exists from birth to death. The future, then is just as much there for the long self as are our pasts. We remember, or in Eric's clever neologism, remember our futures because they already exist.

The implications of this idea are vast. Wargo's most recent book, From Nowhere, shows how precognition and the long self are involved in the creativity of great artists and writers. In case studies of Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, Andrei Tarkovsky, Warner Herzog, or the sculptor Michael Richardson, not Kramer, Eric shows how creatives often predict their own futures, sadly, are often their own deaths and their illnesses that lead to their death within their art.

At other times, they seem to receive their creations from nowhere as if they already exist and are just now being downloaded into the mind of the artist. Maybe they do. Anyway, it's time to let Eric Wargo take us through the implications of this model of precognition in our interview. But you already knew that. Or maybe you just premembered it.

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And it is our great honor to have author Eric Wargo on the podcast today. So, Eric, how are you doing?

ERIC WARGO: I'm doing excellent. I'm really happy here. Thank you, Matthew.

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah, so happy to have you on. So we will definitely be getting into your books and precognition, et cetera. But I always start the podcast with the same question because I think it's pretty interesting to know where people come from in order to frame what their interests eventually become. And since we're in the shadow of Harvard Divinity School over here at the CSWR, want to ask, what was your religious upbringing? Did you have one, or did you sort of-- were you raised unaffiliated? What was relationship to organized or traditional religion?

ERIC WARGO: Yeah, that's a great question, and it's a very easy answer. I had no relationship whatsoever to organized religion of any kind. My parents are both very much were very much of a scientific mindset. My father was a psychologist, a scientific psychologist. My mother was trained in psychology as well. And my father, my mother's family was not. I mean, they were I don't even remember what they were. They were some sort of \[AUDIO OUT\] group, but it was not a strong influence in her upbringing.

And my father was raised in a very working class Catholic family in Dearborn, Michigan. And when he left home, he wanted nothing more than to escape anything to do with the church and Catholicism. And he's one of those Catholics that just was fed up with it when he left home. And it's not that they were atheists.

I mean, I think if you pinned them down, they would say they were atheists, but it just did not come up. We did not-- there was no religious traditions, no church going the first time. The first and only times I ever attended church were at funerals. The funerals of my grandparents when I was in my teens. and it was like-- it was the weirdest thing in the world.

MATTHEW DILLON: What is happening inside here?

ERIC WARGO: Yeah, and I still feel that way. I feel church is like whenever I attend a service or I've attended a few synagogue services with my wife's family over the years, and it's like it's just so weird, and it's like it's something that's not part of my upbringing. That said, I think maybe that absence, it made me incredibly spiritually curious and seeking. And even as early as high school, I was reading books about Zen, Zen Buddhism and--

MATTHEW DILLON: You're reading Alan Watts, D. T. Suzuki, or--

ERIC WARGO: Yeah, yeah, yeah, those, the beginner entry stuff that people encounter. And in fact, at one point, I didn't read Alan Watts until college, but I remember there was a space of about a month where I read everything by Alan Watts and devoured that stuff. And I was too-- we were talking before the show about my ADHD brain. Well, ADHD keeps you from applying yourself in meditation or being able to do that.

So it was not until years later. It was not until years later that I really developed a meditation practice and that and then read deeply the classics the classical Chan literature and the earlier Zen classics and used that. That enriched a meditation practice that it was then informed, and it was more focused and I had a bit more maturity and focus at that point, and I guess that would have been in my 30s.

And so my tradition now is Zen Buddhism, but I still don't attend a Zen center. I've never had a physical teacher. I get it all from books and from my own practice. But that's, I guess, what I consider now my spiritual tradition. But yeah, I had zero background background, background or upbringing in any kind.

MATTHEW DILLON: Cool. It's super interesting just hearing people who grew up in the outside of it and how it's weirdly fascinating or just plain weird. Like, you go into a church service, you're like, what? What is happening here? This is very strange. But the material that you would eventually be interested in, I mean, religious traditions have been looking at this forever. So it's a very interesting dynamic there.

ERIC WARGO: One of the books I read in high school or a part of the book I read in school was William James' Varieties of Religious Experience. And I think part of what drove me towards Buddhism was that interest in the religious experience itself, the mystical experience. And I think was always that, that especially fascinating.

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah, and there's a bunch of interesting stuff on D. T. Suzuki reading James and adapting Zen in order to speak to a Western audience. So that's a whole different topic. But so given all this, what inspired you to go get a PhD in anthropology?

ERIC WARGO: Yeah, that's-- I'm one of those people who didn't have much guidance in college, and I didn't really know what I-- In hindsight, I should have gone in a different field. But I think I got captivated by interpretive anthropology. It would have been late '80s, and the writings of Clifford Geertz really inspired me. I'm not sure why. I mean, he was a really good writer. I think maybe that's part of it. I ultimately became a writer.

I think it was the writing. I gravitated to some really good writers in the field of anthropology. And the subject of symbolism certainly was the appeal there. And I wound up leaving academia after I finished my PhD because that world was not for me, and I was not suited to succeeding in that world, and I became a writer.

But that interest in symbolism, I think, that I got from anthropology carried forward into my side projects and my side interests. And that included not only Eastern religions but also alchemy. I got very interested in alchemy in the mid '90s because I was living-- I lived for about two years in Prague in the mid '90s, and Prague was of course, the capital of alchemy in the Middle Ages.

And at the time I was there, this was a few years after the Velvet revolution, and there was an awakening of this hermetic alchemical history and tradition in Prague. And in fact, there was a big alchemical conference going on while I was there, and there was an exhibit of the reign of Rudolf II, who was the sort of great patron of alchemy. And that really, I wound up meeting some alchemists or and alchemical researchers, and this was hugely interesting. And so that kind of-- then, that interest led me naturally toward Carl Jung, as it does, and then, yeah, so.

MATTHEW DILLON: So you said this is happening in the mid '90s. And if I remember right from your books, that's about the same time that you started the dream journal, if I remember, or started journaling your dreams? So did you get to dream journaling through Jung, or was that something that was spawned in another way?

ERIC WARGO: Yeah, no, I actually was dream journaling even before I went to Eastern Europe. One of my advisors at Emory University was a psychoanalyst actually, and a lot of what I was steeped in my graduate work and that I found most interesting was psychoanalytic approaches to anthropology. And so I read a lot, a lot of Freud and Lacan, too.

And it was, I think, that-- I mean, I'd always be interested in dreams. My dad was a psychologist, and so he had books on dreams on his shelf, and he'd ever read-- I mean, he was more of a scientific, hard-nosed psychologist. But there were pop psychology books on his shelf on dreams and Faraday's The Dream Game. I was a really excellent book on dreams.

And so I was always interested, and then being steeped in Freud, I started recording my dreams, and I was an early adopter of laptop computers. I had a big clunky-- I forget the brand. it was maybe a Toshiba or something like that.

MATTHEW DILLON: Oh, my goodness.

ERIC WARGO: Kind of early mid '90s, there's this monster brick of a laptop. But I got it like, so I could not only do creative writing, but to keep a dream journal. And so I started a dated dream journal, like writing out my dreams in great detail, and yeah, and that was a practice that I recommend to anybody. It's incredibly, incredibly useful in so many ways for tapping into understanding yourself, tapping into the unconscious, and then I went through various phases in my approach to dreaming and dreams, Freudian, Jungian, and so on.

But yeah, that was important. I've still got old, old volumes of my dream journal that are inaccessible to me because they're on old floppy-- the little floppy disks that are, and they're like WordPerfect files that I can't open anymore.

MATTHEW DILLON: Oh, no.

ERIC WARGO: It's like \[AUDIO OUT\].

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah, oh, that's so interesting. The little 3 and 1/2-inchers?

ERIC WARGO: Yeah, the half.

MATTHEW DILLON: Oh, beautiful. So you go through these phases where Freud, Jung, you're taking various psychoanalytic approaches to the dreams. At what point did you decide to start looking at dreams or did you find yourself start looking at dreams for precognitive data, that, wait a minute, there's something precognitive about the dream world?

ERIC WARGO: Yeah, much, much later. And I've said this on other podcasts. You probably know I had a UFO sighting in 2009, which was the tipping point toward my current phase of life and research because it got me reading. I had no idea until that point that there was a ufological literature and that there were serious scholars and serious people, even scientists writing about UFO encounters.

But as one does, one encounters the work of Jacques Vallee, who is writing about psychic phenomena along with these UFO encounters. And as a scientifically trained person, especially in psychology-- in fact, I was working as an editorial director for a scientific psychology organization at that point-- I was like very skeptical about psychic phenomena. Psychologists are the most hostile to psychic phenomena of all academics and of all people, probably.

And I inherited that attitude that UFO is no problem, but ESP, I just thought, well, this is pseudoscience, right? But reading smart people who were talking seriously about psychic experiences forced me to-- It gave me some cognitive dissonance, and I guess, I did my due diligence in reading up on the topic. And also, because I had been keeping a dream journal all those years, I was able to go back and realize, oh, you what? I've had these experiences. And I just swept them under the rug, as one does.

If you don't have a conceptual framework for an unusual experience, you're going to tend to ignore it. And that's what I've done. But in fact, I'd had precognitive dreams. And the moment I started paying attention, paying more attention, I was having them a lot. And so that was hugely important.

And then, around that time, well, this was in 2011, two years after that, Daryl Bem, the emeritus Cornell University psychologist, came out with his really landmark paper called Feeling the Future, which was the results of some large studies he'd done with Cornell undergraduates showing precognitive effects in the laboratory. And this was-- there are two major psychology organizations, both of which are in the DC, Washington DC area where I live.

And I was working for one of them, the more scientific of them, and our rival was publishing Daryl Bem's paper in one of their top journals. And the higher-ups in my organization were prepared to write a letter in protest that findings like this should not be published because they taint the reputation of psychology and all that. And wow, this was a huge wake up call to me that, first, scientists should not be behaving like that. They should not be censoring the scientific spirit is inquiry. And when findings violate our expectations, well, then we leave it up to other scientists to falsify those findings or not. But you never censor.

And so this was I guess, offensive to my-- even though I found these findings baffling, I found the censorship impulse by scientific psychologists really, really troubling. And I guess that gave further impetus to delving into this area and finding out what it was about and what was there and what the evidence was. But probably more than anything else, I mean, I think it was my own experience that whatever the science says, and it does say very clearly that precognition exists.

If you actually look at the science, it's very robust, and there's a lot of it, and it all points in the same direction. But it's ignored, swept under the rug by mainstream scientists. But my own experience, I couldn't deny my own experience. That was the biggest thing, and I was having these precognitive experiences and able to see, and there was consistency to them. Not only was I having the experiences, but I could actually see real similarities from instance to instance.

And then I can read. The more I read in the literature, the more these consistencies appeared. There was a real-- I felt that it was obvious that you could really do science on this if you had the will and the resources. The best I could do was citizen science. But yeah, so that's how I got into doing my-- that's how I got into my current research.

MATTHEW DILLON: Very cool, so cool. So there's a couple of different ways to go with this. But as long as the term "science" has been brought to the table, I thought I might ask and get into time loops, so your first big book on this topic. And one of the things that is really interesting and important about the first part of that book is how it looks critically at some of the ways scientific interpreters will brush this stuff off.

So the first one has to do with time, this idea that linear time is the nature of reality, for lack of a better term, and you take that in a different direction. And more importantly, what you call them, and make sure I get this term right, folk causality as opposed to the idea of causality itself that we are tempted to want to read things as being caused in this certain chain. So how do you dismantle the notions of linear time and folk causality in order to clear the brush in a way to start talking about precognition?

ERIC WARGO: Yeah, I see it as very helpful. First of all, to give the context, to give the historical context, the why. Why do we dismiss experiences that violate that linear and causality? And there are good historical reasons. This isn't just people being stubborn or scientists being stubborn. It's intrinsic to the scientific tradition, which formed in the Enlightenment about three-plus centuries ago.

One of the central tenets, I guess, or just the bedrock of the scientific method or the scientific worldview is you have to remove God from the equation. It doesn't mean you have to be an atheist, but you but God cannot enter into your explanation of natural phenomena. And at the time.

Any notion of causation going from future toward the past, that was called teleology. And teleology was assumed to mean God's plan. OK? And so when they booted out God out with that bathwater, they threw out any notion of causes going in reverse. The mechanistic cause-preceding effect was the strong presumption underlying all of science as it was forming during the lead-up to the industrial world industrialism, and it was really industry that drove science as much as science drove industry.

I mean, it was machines that informed the sciences as they were taking shape. And that linear mechanistic causation certainly served very well in that first phase of science as we know it. I mean, it really got us a long way. But about a century ago, exactly a century ago, the new field of quantum physics realized that nature isn't perfectly mechanistic. There is this looseness at the smallest scales, at least, in nature.

And this provoked a whole new realm of thinking in physics that was centered on the idea that, well, this looseness, we can't explain it, so it must be randomness. It must be this intrinsic randomness to appear at the smallest scales, and it has various-- it goes by various names, uncertainty, indeterminacy, things like that.

But the most influential of the quantum physicists of the first generation of quantum physics as we know it a century ago was Niels Bohr, and he was a very powerful personality. And his opinion was that we just have to accept randomness. There's no explanation for it. Nature is just fundamentally uncertain until you make until the physicists make measurement. And then, it then what is called the wave function collapses to a definite state. And this was the prevailing interpretation. It's called the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, and it prevailed for a century, essentially, but mainly because of the force of Niels Bohr's personality.

There were always dissenters. There were dissenters even in his circle. And since then, there have always been voices in physics that do not accept the Copenhagen interpretation. And one of the counter-views is what is now goes by the name retrocausation. In fact, you'll sometimes hear that-- lately, you'll sometimes hear the term "superdeterminism," which is kind of an umbrella for a few new theories that include retro causation. And retro causation is the idea of essentially teleology without there being a God behind it. It's just the idea at the smallest scales. Causation goes in both directions.

And there's a lot of new research coming out just in the last two decades, really, that is affirming this idea and strengthening it and also hinting that it could be scaled up and could transform quantum computing and so on. And Meanwhile, in biology, quantum biology is a new thing, and people are looking at the brain as a possible quantum computer.

And so I'm just putting the I'm just drawing these trends together to say, look, what was once, even until two decades ago, thought to be preposterous, the idea that you could get information from the future or from events that haven't happened yet, no longer is it preposterous. There is the potential for a solid materialist, to use a bad word these days, scientific framework that can potentially explain these things. So we cannot just brush it aside because it just sounds absurd to our ears.

There's a way this can work. So that's actually how I attack the skeptics more than anything else. And just pointing out that there's no scientific evidence against precognition, all they can throw at the data and the studies is the suggestion that these are poorly designed studies or that the scientists are biased or that the people experiencing it are biased or misguided or bad at understanding statistics.

The law of large numbers is the most frequently used counterargument, the idea that, well, coincidences are going to occur by chance anyway. And so when they occur, we forget all the instances when they didn't occur, and then we somehow think that something special happened. But the law of large numbers presumes that the large numbers are in the denominator of the fraction when they're in the numerator, as I show in my books, you can't use that argument. I mean, precognition is not only this little icing on the cake of our experience.

I mean, when you look seriously at it, it's pervasive. People who do precognitive dream work find that oh, they're precognitive dreaming constantly. And people have these experiences in waking life. They have these experiences whenever they do art or writing, which is the subject of my most recent book.

So that's how I approach it. I'm not-- I think the parapsychologists, people who call themselves parapsychologists or work in laboratories and do laboratory experiments, they tend to not be very convincing, I find, because they focus too much on scientific data, which often doesn't sound very impressive, and they almost it comes off sounding apologetic almost because they don't want to make claims beyond what the science shows. And so that's why I make a case, and I make this case in time loops that we have to we have to be empirical, but we also have to apply reason if it exists at all.

Reason alone says this must be pervasive. I mean, if this arose in the natural world, it's not some thing that is used occasionally. This must be basic to how we adapt to the world, how we survive. And you can bet that given four billion years life has found a way to do this, and, yeah, I really believe that precognition was probably possibly the earliest guidance system of micro-organisms in the primordial soup. I mean, this I think back to the roots. This is not some-- I do not see these precognition as some new superpower or some new ability that we are evolving toward.

That's, I think, a Victorian kind of framing of psychic abilities that I think has been taken up by more recent writers in a way who have an evolutionary view of this, that an evolutionary in the Theosophical sense that we're moving toward this golden future where godlike beings. I don't think that's the case at all. I think this is the earliest this is guided us from the beginning. And so we should look at it with that assumption and test that hypothesis.

MATTHEW DILLON: And one of the-- it's a very simple example, but you bring it up in the book, and it's completely pervasive. Like, everybody has had this experience, where you're dreaming, and the dream is going in this certain direction for whatever reason, dream logic, and then it hits the climax or it bleeds directly into the moment that you wake up, whatever that noise happens to be or whatever light flashing through the window, whatever it is, those points meet, and it's easy to shrug off. But then, why do we shrug it off? That's uncanny. The moment you start to put that under the microscope, it's a very bizarre thing.

And again, if you want to take one example, you might set it to the side. But again, universal, like we all have that particular experience. So one of the things--

ERIC WARGO: Yeah, there's a great book. One of the real pioneers of-- not really precognitive dream research because he wasn't a researcher, but he was a Russian theologian, and he's also a polymath, Pavel Florensky. I don't know if you know him. Yeah, he wrote a wonderful book on this called Iconostasis in, I think, 1922, I want to say, and that dream is his kind of core datum for this idea that dream logic and dream time is turned inside out. That was how he put it, but yeah, these dreams that lead inexorably, where the narrative leads inexorably to allow some event that wakes up the dreamer in the environment.

Yeah, that's exactly as you say. How can that not be precognitive? The thing is skeptics can always come along and say, well, the dream narrative was formed after the fact in your memory. This was Freud's way of explaining away precognitive dreams and so on. But that's special pleading, honestly.

MATTHEW DILLON: I hear you. All right. So in a sense, there is a history of people studying precognition. But right now, I see you as the torchbearer. Like, you're the person who's writing the most about it and thinking it through. And with that comes the need to develop new language and new concepts because other people aren't writing about it as much.

So when I'm reading through your works, there's all these really interesting and generative ideas, basically, and concepts. So I want to go through those one by one a little bit, just to give audiences a sense of what you're after, here. In the one that comes straight to mind because it's behind the mall is the long self. So what do you mean by the long self? And I suppose you'd have to talk about the block universe in order to get to the long self, but maybe not. Up to you.

ERIC WARGO: Yeah, so the-- yeah, talk about the block universe just briefly. So this is an idea that arose in the early 20th century with the finding or the innovation, I guess, theoretical innovation of Einstein, which was relativity theory. And his teacher, Hermann Minkowski, his math teacher, worked out that well, what the implication of Einstein's special relativity is that we live in a four-dimensional spacetime? That is to say, there are the three dimensions of space that we understand.

But the fourth dimension is time, and that they're all essentially the same. And then, Einstein's later work on general relativity nuanced this. And so he found that gravity, the force that we call gravity, is really just the curving of those three dimensions of space into the dimension of time caused by massive objects. So what that means is that in thinking about everything, you need to think-- you need to try to envision a four-dimensional universe. And the way you do that, we can't think in terms of four dimensions. It's just-- we're cognitively not able to do it.

So what you do is you sacrifice one of the space dimensions and just picture a brick picture a brick, make it a glass brick, so you can see inside the brick. But picture a glass brick, the two, the width and height, that's the space. That's space, and then the length of the brick is time. So any object in space, whether it be a particle, a photon, or an electron, or a human being, or a planet, whatever, is a world line snaking through that brick.

And this has huge implications. One of the implications of it is that the future already exists in a sense. That is to say, it's there in the brick, and if it exists there, that means that it can potentially influence the past the same way the past can influence the future. And Einstein's equations perfectly allow time travel, and there are various ways time travel can potentially work.

We can talk about that or not, but that's a huge implication right there of his work. Well, precognition really validates that block universe. In fact, I think that honestly, at this point, the block universe is not easily provable using scientific devices and particle accelerators and things like that.

But the human brain, I think, is the kind of particle accelerator that really validates that block universe because if you take precognition and precognitive dreams seriously, what it points to is that already existing future ahead of us, and two events-- the uncanny way in which a precognitive dreamer can dream precise details about an event that not only may be the next day or the next few days but sometimes over a span of decades.

I mean, these are that could never be imagined or predicted using our ordinary inferential capabilities. There is an already existing future where maybe decades from now where you are doing some random, unpredictable thing, and your brain now may get a signal of that and work it into a dream. That's incredible, and it's incredible validation of what Einstein was saying.

So my-- and that really, I think, is the most-- when you think about that, that's the most, I think, mind blowing and important entailment of working with precognition, I think, because precognitive dreams are a reminder of that fact that you have a future, and your future is influencing you in all kinds of ways. And it means that your experiences today influenced who you were and what you were and how you got to this point, even if you weren't aware of it3 that is mind blowing.

The fact that you right now are influencing, exerting an influence, a causal influence, a retro causal influence on who you were yesterday and who you were a decade ago and who you were maybe as a child and when people do precognitive dream work who fortunately had been keeping a dream journal for decades, like I did, and there are a lot of people. I've now met a lot of people like that who've been keeping dream journals for decades.

It is freaking mind-blowing to see examples of how decades in your past when you were a kid or a young adult or whatever were having dreams about totally unpredictable turning points in your life decades later. It's just mind blowing to have these experiences. And so based on that, based on that understanding of the human being as a world line or even like a wire, that is exchanging information in both directions across that wire, not just one direction through memory, but in the reverse direction as well. That is my-- it's a paradigm shift in how you understand your own biography.

And so that's where that term long self comes from is that I think of the human being as a biography. You can talk about it as a story. It really-- it's a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and you're in the middle somewhere. But there's a whole segment of that story still ahead of you, and where you are now has influenced the first part of that story. So I just think for me, at least, it's been hugely spiritually affirming, honestly, to have that realization. In one of my books, I call it a gnosis. And I really think it's a gnosis to have this awakening to the self as a four-dimensional thing.

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah, very well put. So I can hear potential audience listeners, and I'm sure that you've had people who have written you outside your blog or something like that ask the same question, "Well, I'm not having a precognitive dream that is clear. I am not witnessing something that's happening 5, 10 years from now."

One of the things that I found really interesting to go back to your talk about psychoanalysis earlier, is the way you reread Freud in order to bring him in line with this idea of the long self. And I just want to set you up on it because it's your baby, and it's so interesting, but how do you see Freudian dreams and dreamwork involved in the process of precognition and how these things come across in dreams.

ERIC WARGO: Yeah, great question. And yeah, you're right. This is the core. For me, this is the most interesting part of this whole topic. And there's so much to say about Freud himself and also his theory and how we can return to Freud in a way that really helps us understand precognition and precognitive experiences, especially dreams.

So Freud-- in a nutshell, I think Freud was very wrong about why dreams present information so symbolically and in a distorted fashion. I mean, his presumption-- or not presumption, his theory was that we are repressing unwanted thoughts, painful thoughts, things that we can't abide, and that it's repression that forces the mind to express things indirectly and in symbolic fashion. I think he's wrong about that.

He did not believe in precognition for one thing. I mean, he was a skeptic about precognition. He thought that you could explain away these experiences by talking about memory, distortion and stuff like that. But I think when you accept the reality of precognition, and I think that as we talk about reason, it's reasonable to think that all dreams are probably doing this.

All dreams are probably bringing us information about our future. I mean, why would we have this ability. Why would we have this guidance system if we weren't constantly using it. So my working hypothesis-- and there's no way you could ever prove this or test it adequately-- but I think a working presumption is that assuming all dreams contain precognitive information.

But as you said, people seldom dream in a kind of video quality clear way about a future experience. It's always distorted in one way or another, not always. But most of the time, it's distorted to a greater or lesser degrees, and it's full of symbolic representations and drawn from personal associations.

And it's why free association is an essential part of precognitive dream work. And this was Freud's great discovery, was the power of free association to-- at the time in the 19th century, psychologists had already discovered that the brain works on associative principles and the memory works in associative principles. But Freud really deepened that understanding because the moment you start free, associating on a dream is like oh, my God. It leads you very quickly to see that there's real meaning in the dream that's about your life.

I mean, it's very clear that this random, strange, bizarre scenario is one step away. Each element is one step away from something pertinent to you, either in recent life or in some unresolved issue in your past. And so that was the core of his dream method. What I think is that, in fact, the reason that dreams represent things associatively and symbolically is that this is the only way information from the future, from a future outcome, can reach us in the present, in a distorted way, if we are freely willed beings who would act to prevent that outcome if we saw it directly.

And one of Freud's correct insights is that we thwart the things that would most reward us, I mean, because they make us feel guilty. So even if we had, a precognitive dream about some great reward, if we really saw it clearly, we would do something to thwart that, and that would create a grandfather paradox, and especially if the outcome is something very obviously negative that we want to avoid, we would try to avoid it and evade it. And so that would prevent that information from ever reaching us because there would be no future event to send the information back.

So I think this what I call the curvature of the spacetime of our biography is what creates these deviations and symbolic distortions in our dreams. So yeah, that's I think it's a neat new way of flipping Freud and applying I think, his correct insights about dreams to the long self and the reality of precognition as I think a core to our mental life.

MATTHEW DILLON: It's one of the more interesting ideas I've come across in years. I'm really excited by it. And it ties into something that you work through, both in time loops and in your more recent book about we always-- if you're a psychoanalytic thinker, you're trained to think about obsessions and neuroses as things that are a working through of what has already happened.

But one of the ways you flip it, if we're able to premember, this prememory, there could also be preobsessions and preneuroses, these ways of basically like working through what is to come. So one that's just a really cool idea. But two, do you have a textbook example of how you would see that in terms of trying to work out a neurosis for something that's coming down the pike?

ERIC WARGO: Yeah. So I don't have a-- I guess I don't have a textbook example of that. But I think the way that premonitions typically arise, at least over the short term, show this principle, I think, that a person will get a feeling and start feeling bad or disturbed about without really any visible reason, and this is a very typical experience in psychoanalysis.

But you'll have a anxiety and is often manifests anxiety. It's fear without a real cause or a known cause. And then, later in the day, some crisis happens. Someone just the other day was telling me a story about how they suddenly start feeling something awful had happened, and they were really scared, and they hurried home, and they found there were ambulances in front of her home.

These kinds of experiences happen all the time, and I think-- so. No, I don't have a good textbook example of a neurosis of a neurotic kind of symptom oriented to a later event. But I think premonitions and the way premonitions work are a tiny little model of what I'm talking about.

MATTHEW DILLON: Makes sense.

ERIC WARGO: As we're talking, an example might come to mind, but I'm not prepared with one.

MATTHEW DILLON: Oh, no, all good. Yeah, it's a big question, too. And a number of the ones that it's not neuroses, but I'm thinking the obsession one. One Tarkovsky is basically my favorite director. So hearing you talk about stalker was just heavenly for me. But seeing the ways in which what would eventually happen to him. And what would eventually happen to his friends and the way that played out in stalker. I don't want to step on. It's your book. If you want to unpack Tarkovsky, that's great. But that's the one that really struck with me.

ERIC WARGO: Well, that's a beautiful example, right. I mean, this is the whole topic of my new book is how this works out in the lives of artists. And it often. Yes, I mean can call that a neurotic-- you can call that an obsession. Exactly. You can call that a neurotic obsessional neurosis that in the lives of someone who has the talent and the fortune to be able to express that talent in art, that's how it's going to express itself often. And yes, Tarkovsky is a beautiful, tragic example of that. Another example that people are less aware of is Michael Richards, not the comedian Michael Richards.

MATTHEW DILLON: Not Kramer, yeah.

ERIC WARGO: Jamaican sculptor Michael Rolando Richards, who he's the subject of part one of chapter 1 of my new book. He over the course of several years in the 1990s was clear-- unfortunately, we don't a lot about his life, but we have his works, and we have certain things he said to friends and so on. He was working through issues, let's call it that. He was working through issues that he understood as having to do with race, being Black in a white-dominated art world that constantly felt like was cutting him down and inhibiting him and thwarting him in various ways.

And he was working through that plus a lot of other anxieties and symbols that just kept obsessing him, having to do with flight and crashing and falling to the ground and explosions but all centered on aviation in various ways. So he created a series of sculptures that were all sculptural self-portraits of himself as a Tuskegee Airman, specifically. These were the Black aviators in World War II who distinguished themselves in their aviation but were still subject to discrimination and so on.

And he would just picked himself in the flight suit of a Tuskegee Airman, but always in some way in which he was crashing or had fallen to the ground, with a parachute or whatever. But now, his most famous paint-- sorry, sculpture is called Tar Baby vs St. Sebastian. and it's a sculptural self-portrait that he created in 1999 while he was in Miami, and it's of himself standing vertically erect and levitating off the ground. And he's being impaled by all these airplanes.

Well, two years later, on the basis of the strength of his work, including that sculpture, undoubtedly, he was granted a studio space for six months in Tower One of the World Trade Center. The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council gave out 15 or-- yeah, gave like 15 artists each half year, five months of studio space in the towers to create whatever art and then had an exhibition at the end. Well, he was one of the cohort in the summer of 2001. And he was in his studio when the plane hit and was killed on that morning.

And that one sculpture alone, but all his whole body of work leading up to that day represents to me a neurotic obsession, that kind of artistic obsession that you're talking about that, again, has a tragic outcome. But I think that there are plenty of examples where it's not the outcome isn't tragic, but nevertheless, it's something strange in one's future that one is working through one's art. So yeah, those are great. Those are perfect examples about what you're talking about.

MATTHEW DILLON: The Michael Richards one is so interesting. I'm definitely-- we'll put links to his works in the show notes because that's really like literally mind blowing. Like, it feels literally mind blowing. So it took me a while to get to this particular one, but time loops, what precisely do you mean by a time loop here? Because this-- I understand it, but it's also very hard to put language around because it's moving in a circle and language wants to go in an arrow, but you know, you're the author. You can probably explain it much better than I can.

ERIC WARGO: Yeah, well, we sort of-- I think we kind set it up well with that talk about how dreams distort information coming from the future, because our freely willed actions on the basis of that dream need to lead us to that experience. So a time loop, basically, is what physicists call it a closed timelike curve. They have a technical term for it. But a time loop, it's a causal circularity or a causally circular formation in that block universe where some event in the future somehow causes something in the past, like a dream, and then the freely willed actions of the dreamer lead somehow to that future event.

And again, if that future event is something we want to avoid and being incorrigibly stubborn beings, we always want to avoid something we've seen in the future if we know it's there. Even if it's a reward, we'll try to avoid it. That information is distorted, and we misinterpret it. And on the basis of that misinterpretation, we then have the experience in the future.

I'll just mention-- one of the reasons I love Freud's role in all this is the centrality of Oedipus in his thinking. He reduced the Oedipus story to simply the patricidal and incestuous dimensions of the story, killing your father and marrying your mother. But Oedipus is really a story about prophecy. It's about fulfilling a prophecy in the effort to evade it. And that's really the core, the key, I think, to how prophecy does work. We get these signals, but we inevitably misinterpret them.

And through our actions, our freely willed actions, we fulfill them. So my favorite example of a time loop is actually Carl Jung's famous story of the scarab that showed up at his office. So he had a patient who was hyper rational, closed off to what he was offering a kind of more open and mystical approach to the psyche. But she came to him one day in his clinic having had a dream the previous night of somebody handing her a golden piece of jewelry in the shape of an Egyptian scarab. OK?

So as she's telling him this dream, he hears a tapping on the window and he turns around and it's a rose chafer beetle, which is a common European relative of the scarab beetle. And so being the kind of therapeutic shaman that, he saw an opportunity. And so he opened the window, cupped the beetle in his hand, and gave it to this patient and said, here's your scarab.

Well, Jung didn't see exactly what had happened there. I mean, he saw this as synchronicity, as there was a simultaneity between hearing this story from his patient about the scarab and him, the event in the office with the scarab showing up at the window. But really, what it was a classic precognitive dream on the part of his patient. She dreamed about a transformative moment in her therapy the next day.

And Jung happened to be the one who helped fulfill that time loop. But the thing is, see, what makes it a time loop is that had she not been telling-- had she not told her dream to Jung when she did, he would not have handed her the scarab. He would not have fulfilled that time loop. So his so this was a causally circular formation. Being handed the scarab caused the dream the previous night, but the dream caused her to tell Jung the story which caused him to notice the beetle and hand her the scarab. So it's a circular formation.

And I think what the advantage, or what one advantage of thinking of this in terms of precognition and time loops, is that it illuminates whole dimensions of this, that Jung's synchronicity theory can't help us very well with, for instance, that symbolic transformation thing that I was talking about with Freud. This was not I don't see this as an archetype. This is not like some platonic archetype of Egyptian religion hovering over us and puppeteering events in our lives. I mean, this was-- we actually the patient's name.

Her name was Maggy Quarles van Ufford, and she was an aristocratic Dutch woman in his clinic. Anyway, she was-- and she had other precognitive experiences we now know om her therapy, too. So this was a regular occurrence for her. But her brain took that event, the basic event of being handed an insect or handed a wriggling beetle.

She took that experience. Her brain took that future experience along with the lecture on Egyptian religion that he offered to explain this and help her understand its significance. Her brain took those facts plus the value of that moment in her life. and turned it-- what Freud called her primary process thinking condensed it into this lovely symbol of a golden piece of scarab jewelry, a very precious object in the shape of an item of Egyptian religion.

She turned that living insect into this symbol, this wonderful dream symbol, that condensed all those facts about it. And those facts were important in her biography, especially at that time in her life. And I think that's the way you need to interpret these kinds of experiences, and it's another reason why I gravitate to Freud versus Jung, as many people who study these things do.

I think that emphasis on the personal biography and the uniqueness of an individual's associations to experiences and the way their brains make meaning, it's always very idiosyncratic, and I think Jung preferred the universal, the symbolic universals, and so on. But I think it's that dimension of the individual biography, bringing the emphasis back to the individual's biography through time. Again, that long self idea is what know why I like the time loops framing, or I prefer that to the synchronicity framing. But I think that to me is a beautiful example of a time loop right there.

MATTHEW DILLON: Very well put. And I'm with you on the Freud over Jung. Having just taught a whole semester long seminar on Jung, so I feel I'm outing myself on that. But I mean, then, you can reread Jung with a more personalistic bias, and then it becomes much more interesting because we know what he read, we know his personal relationships, and then you can start to find all sorts of easier language time loops. And what was happening with him as opposed to trying to think in terms of these universals.

In any event, one of the things that I can imagine people listening, noticing is how often you're using the term "brain." So we're talking about brains, we're talking about brains, we're talking about brains. And usually, when we're talking about four dimensions, et cetera, we're talking about-- people like to talk about consciousness as being separate from brain or disembodied. So one of my favorite little phrases that pops up often in your work is the 4D tesseract brain. So how is it that you understanding the brain to work so that it's navigating past and future at the same time?

ERIC WARGO: Yeah, right, I've got a love-hate relationship with that word "consciousness." It's being thrown around a lot these days, and it's impossible to be rigorous with the word "consciousness" because no two people agree on what it is. I just recently saw someone-- this was on Twitter-- I saw someone had produced a map, like a p-diagram of theories of consciousness, and there were like hundreds there, hundreds of theories of consciousness.

So it's very much fast forwarding, inappropriately fast forwarding, or hastening to conclusions, leaping to conclusions, I guess, to talk about consciousness is somehow fundamental in reality or as underlying whatever mystery we want to explain. I just don't think it's helpful. I think it's a distraction, honestly.

And I wish-- I'm OK. So I'm a two brains or multiple brains-- multiple minds, I guess, on this question of consciousness and its relation to the brain. But ultimately, I'm a monist. I'm not a dualist. I don't think that there's a separation between what we call the material universe, even though physicists no longer think in terms of matter as solid balls of things hitting each other on a billiard billiards table.

But nevertheless, that's the kind of reductive way that anti-materialists are framing it. They're creating a straw man to attack materialism or science or something. I don't agree with that. I think that certainly the sciences need some overhauling. Their paradigms have to shift and so on. And I think of materialism is just the very high resolution vocabulary of things in the natural world that are measurable and that we can control and measure in scientific settings, and it has become over the past few centuries very divorced from the level of-- or the semantic level of human experience.

And so you have terms like consciousness, which are very good for describing human experience. But you can also talk in a much more fine-grained way about processes in the brain and processes that may give rise to this experience of consciousness. And I'm not saying I'm 100% assuming that that's all consciousness is. But nevertheless, I don't think we should be creating this dualism where there isn't a dualism. There's simply two semantic-- two dyad discourses that are operating in tandem and that they don't always mesh well with each other.

So yeah, I talk about the tesseract brain because, again, I'm trying to appeal to people who are maybe like me, have maybe a scientific background or are enough steeped in scientific culture that just talking about New Age terms about consciousness is not going to be persuasive. I also, again, to get back to what I said at the beginning, I totally can see a future theory of how precognition works. That is rooted in the brain. I mean, it requires levels of understanding that we don't yet have, but it's not purely promissory in the sense that we're just blindly assuming science can get us there.

I mean, I think there are real-- there's a roadmap to getting there. I mean, we are already learning that processes within neurons are incredibly important that the brain is not just neurons interacting with each other in circuits and so on. There are probably quantum processes going on inside neurons and conditioning how they relate to each other.

That's where consciousness, if you want to call it that, is probably lurking, and it certainly where precognition-- how precognition is operating. So yeah, I think that I'm hopeful for a brain-based theory of precognition. I think that that's going to happen, but it requires an understanding of the brain as a four-dimensional information processor, or I like to use the word "tesseract" from science fiction. It's a four-dimensional information tunnel through time. It's really a time machine. And that to me is incredibly exciting. I don't find that reductive at all. I find that really super exciting.

Honestly, in the end, I'm not so interested in consciousness because I don't think we know what it is. I'm persuaded by many of the different theories of consciousness out there. We can't jump on any one any one theory at this point. At this point, it's just seems like everybody's personal preference, and it's not a helpful term.

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah, you get lost in the weeds really, really quick, and people start talking past one another, and it does it, loses utility. But speaking to take a long view of what we've discussed so far, talking in terms of brains and scientific approaches and dreams, what is it that led you or how were you led, If we're talking pre-cognitively, to write a book on artists and writers and the ways in which precognition pops out there?

So from nowhere, your new book out in 2024, we'll put it in the show notes.

ERIC WARGO: Yeah, well, so when I wrote Time Loops back in 2017, 2018, the last section of that book delved into, well, two writers, Philip K. Dick being one of them and also Morgan Robertson, who wrote a famous novel in the late 1900s that seemed to foretell the Titanic disaster.

And when I wrote the book, honestly, that's the direction that I was really most interested in pursuing, precognition's role in creativity and in the creative life, looking again at the biography of the artist and how they're sort of living through that. Yeah, that obsessional relationship to events in their future was really fascinating. And I started reading-- I've always read artists and biographers-- artists and writers' biographies and been fascinated by the creative life anyway.

But I was starting to go back to the lives of artists that I admired and started seeing how this was operating really universally. And also, I was very influenced by Jeff Kripal's Mutants and Mystics. I mean, that's-- I think you were a student of.

MATTHEW DILLON: Yes, he was, yeah.

ERIC WARGO: And Mutants and Mystics really takes this approach, a time lapse approach to science fiction writers and comic book authors. But I was seeing. Now, this is a universal thing. This isn't just a function of writing in these the trash stratum, as Phil Gaedeke put it, these marginal genres. I mean, this is an across-the-board feature. It's in it's in Kafka, I mean, Kafka's life. He was every bit as precognitive as Phil Dick. And in fact, my next book has a big section on Kafka.

But anyway, the way precognition operates in the creative life was honestly the direction I wanted to go. I kept getting bombarded, though, by emails from people wanting to know about dreams and their own dreams, and I kept hearing the same concerns and confusions about dreams. And people, I think, a failure to understand precognition and how it works is creates a lot of distress in people's lives when they have these experiences. So I saw the need for a guide of to precognitive dreams and dream work.

And so that was my second book. I took a year and dealt with that topic. But really artists and creativity was where I wanted to go all along. And so actually, my new book From Nowhere, honestly, is actually just one half of a larger project that I've been working on for six years now on looking at writers and artists and their biographies and how precognition operates in the creative life.

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah, so there's a lot of different ways to go with this. So you mentioned Philip K. Dick, and anybody who's listening to this show is going to know about Philip K. Dick in 2/3/74. So one of the ways to unpack what From Nowhere Does, what is your reading on whether it's Dick 2/3/74 or thereafter, what sort of new perspective are you bringing to Dick studies by using the theoretical apparatus that you've developed?

ERIC WARGO: Well, yeah, that's an interesting question because actually, of all writers and thinkers, even Philip K. Dick was the one who actually was a pioneer in thinking exactly as I'm thinking about his work because he understood that he was a precog. He understood that his works were precognitive, and he was able to identify it in his life, and he was-- and fortunately, not only did he leave us this huge corpus of writing, a wonderful science fiction writing, but he also left us letters in which he was very open about these experiences and his thoughts he would write about these various enthusiastically to his Pen Pal, Claudia Busch, for instance, and to other friends.

So we have a well-documented-- with Phil, we have a well-documented life of a precognitive artist, and we can really use him as a case study. And so at this point, I've written two lengthy chapters on Philip K. Dick's literary prophecies or prophecies in the life of Philip K. Dick. Yeah, he's a wonderful example because he understood like with Ubik, for instance. I think he wrote it in 1966. He after the novel came out, he read an article by a Russian parapsychologist named Nikolai Kozyrev, which talked about time as a spiral and time as a pressure from the future flowing in reverse, and he felt that his novel had been influenced by his reading of that article.

Yeah one thing that's key to the way I understand precognition that's key to all this that I shouldn't have fast forwarded over is the idea that we are when we recognize things, we're recognizing our own future experiences. We're not recognizing future objective events. And that's key because Phil Dick understood that he was recognizing future experiences he was going to have in his life. They weren't always events out in the world. He wasn't recognizing, events on the news or whatever. He was recognizing, articles he was going to read. He was an avid reader.

And so he was recognizing articles in scientific magazines and that kind of thing. And in the new book, I make the case that it he was, in fact, recognizing Jacques Vallée in his novel or in the first draft of what became his novel, Valis. That there are striking similarities between that novel, especially as originally drafted in 1975, There's striking similarities between it. And the book that Jacques was working on at the same time, The Invisible College.

And there was no they had no these two figures had no contact, even though they lived near each other in the Bay Area. And then, we know that-- I confirmed this with Tessa Dick that he actually went on to get into Jacques Vallée a couple years later and read his books. So we know that he was reading Jacques Vallée later. And so I make the-- case this is one of many cases I make in the last part of my new book-- of writers being influenced precognitively by other writers or other artists because the most striking experiences in the life of a writer artist are their encounters with their contemporaries.

And I think this kind of precognitive scooping of artistic contemporaries and rivals explains so many cases of uncanny convergences among different creators. The kinds of things that typically get explained, well, it's the collective unconscious, but I think we can drill down and create a more interesting and nuanced theory of cultural influence and borrowing that goes in both directions, again, intertwining of long selves there.

MATTHEW DILLON: So is that when you use the I think you're taking the plagiarist part-- from plagiarism part from someone else. But if you-- pardon me, future plagiarism, so is that what you're referring to with the Philip K. Dick and the Vallee intermeshing, they end up influencing each other down the road? OK.

ERIC WARGO: Yeah, well, a French critic, Pierre Bayard, talked about plagiarism by anticipation. But he doesn't really mean plagiarism. I mean, plagiarism implies a kind of intent almost or at least a carelessness. And that's certainly that can't be the case when you're talking about precognitive, precognitive influence. So it's really influence, precognitive influence. Yeah.

MATTHEW DILLON: So I mean, we're talked about Philip K. Dick, and he's sci-fi. He's weird. He's out there. I mean, he's become canonized in his own certain way. But one of the figures that I was delighted to come across in From Nowhere is Virginia Woolf because when you're talking about Virginia Woolf, you're not in sci-fi land. You are in someone whose books are taught in high school English and college English, who's got this whole cottage industry of biographies and psychobiographies, et cetera. So I just want to tee it up like, what brought you to talk about Virginia Woolf, and what did you see going through her materials that made her such a ripe subject for this way of looking at things?

ERIC WARGO: Yeah, that's a great question. Of all the subjects in this book, Virginia Woolf is the one that I knew least going into my research. I mean, I've mostly focused on writers and artists who I knew really well, I knew a fair amount about their biography. Virginia Woolf, I'd only read a couple of her books. I'd read, I think some of her shorter works as well. But I'd only read To the Lighthouse in college, and I'd read A Room of One's Own. And I loved I loved those books and always had in the back of my mind that I would like to read more of her books.

But I knew enough about her as a person that I thought, she's going to be-- if any writer is going to be a precog artist, it's going to be Virginia Woolf because she was famously, her madness-- She was probably what we would now call bipolar having episodes of psychosis alternating with depression, severe depression. But she heard voices, had visions, and so on.

And so delving into her work with an eye to precognition. And the key I've discovered in doing this research is you have to look for certain keywords that are biographers. Well, they're not even code. They're just the way that biographers will fast forward over the evidence I'm looking for. But whenever you see the word "coincidence" or "synchronicity" it's like, OK. Well, her life, as one would expect, was full of that stuff.

And the example that-- a very striking example that I give in the book is her classic-- I'm trying to think of the year. I think 1926, I want to say, Mrs Dalloway, maybe a few years earlier than that. Anyway, she-- so this is really interesting. This character of Clarissa Dalloway was based on a woman that was a family friend when she was young and was a frequent visitor to her home and even kind of a mentor to her in a way when she was a young person after her mother died.

And I'm blanking on Kitty Maxse was this woman's name. Anyway, so she created this character who appears briefly in her first novel, the voyage out, named Clarissa Dalloway, but who was based on this high society friend named Kitty Maxse. Well, she revisited. For some reason, she decided to revisit the story of kitty of Clarissa Dalloway for a short story, and it was called Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street. I'm forgetting the year that this was written. But she spent the summer of that year working on this story. It's very interesting, strange story about this character, this high society in London, preparing for a party and going shopping, preparing for a party.

And it ends very perplexingly with this explosion in the street, and it's left unexplained. It's like how it ends abruptly. While she finishes a story, and so in this world, this headspace of this character, she immediately decides to turn it into a novel and make this story the first chapter of a whole novel. Well, fortunately, Virginia Woolf is another one of those people who left us not only a huge corpus of writing but left us an extensive diary, and we can track her creative life.

Fortunately, there's one biographer, Julia Briggs, did a wonderful biography, situating her creative life in her biography, and it's really helpful for teasing these things out. But yeah, I got obsessed with reading Virginia Woolf's diaries. They're just fascinating. And anyway, like the very-- so two days later, we in her diary, two days after she finishes this story, she decides to turn it into a novel, and she starts planning it out. And the idea for this novel, initially, is that it's going to be about this character, Clarissa Dalloway, and some other male character who intertwines in London, but they never quite meet. But it jumps between these two characters.

And either Mrs. Dalloway, there are two versions, she tells two versions of her origin of this novel, either Mrs. Dalloway commits suicide at the end or this other character commits suicide at the end. So on the very day that she resolves, she says, I'm going to turn this into a novel. The real Clarissa Dalloway, Kitty Maxse, falls from the banister in her home and ends up in the hospital and then dies a few days later on the very day she started the novel. And it's probably suicide.

And she gets the news like two days after that, and she's like, devastated and stunned and perplexed at how could this happen, what was going on there. I mean, the fact that it was suicide was interesting to her because she had harbored suicidal thoughts and, of course, eventually, did commit suicide. But it's just, again, something that people would just say, oh, that's a synchronicity for you. But I think this is another example of that neurotic, artistic obsession with, in this case, a sort of devastating piece of news coming down the pike toward you.

And she spent that whole summer leading up to it writing this story ends with perplexingly, with this explosion. And then, she starts then conceives this as a novel in which one either this main character or another character commits suicide, and then a couple of days later, learns that the real model for that character committed suicide, and she hadn't actually had any contact with this woman for years and years and, in fact, felt regret at that when she read the news and was feeling all kinds of complex feelings about the death of this person that had been very important to her when she was younger.

And she, I think, works those conflicted feelings, complex feelings. She works it into the end of the novel in a really brilliant and fascinating way. So again, and the thing is you find this stuff all the time when you actually read biographies and read the work of an artist against their biography with an eye to this possibility. It's just the same as dreams. I mean, people can record their dreams and be interested in dreams, and it can never cross their mind that precognition exists because we don't have a concept for it.

But once you have an eye to it, it's everywhere. And so I mentioned Kafka. He's another example. And there's so much on Kafka that I I'm devoting a whole section of my next book to Kafka. He's wonderful example of this-- fucked up-- working neurotically through traumas ahead of him in various ways. But there's so many examples of this, and it's intrinsic, I think, to the creative life.

MATTHEW DILLON: So I want to ask. So I have two final questions, and your last statement there leads into one of them. Why? What is it about the creative life that seems to draw these sorts of precognitive abilities? It's not an ability. Or, everybody has the ability. But why is it that these creative types in your reading are more open to it? Is there something about creativity itself, or is there something about their psychological constitution? Because Kafka, Dick, Virginia Woolf, these are all people who more than flirted with madness. So how do you end up coming to parse that.

ERIC WARGO: Yeah, well, there's a kind of a spectrum of on the one hand, people who are very pragmatic, rule-bound, people who are less likely-- less imaginative, yeah, I'll say, and on the other end, people who are very imaginative, maybe verging into mentally ill imaginative. Yeah, there's a dimension in psychiatry that's called schizotypy, and it's this dimension of imaginative, openness to hearing voices, having hallucinations, things like that.

And I don't know if anyone has really done a study that proves this. But it's a cliche that artists tend to be on that one end of the spectrum there, tend to be more imaginative, more open to these liminal kinds of experiences. So they're tapped in. They're just tapped in more than other people. So I think that's the explanation. I mean, it's more of a personality or cognitive-style, maybe, issue.

MATTHEW DILLON: OK, Makes sense. And we're going like way back to Myers and putting that stuff on a continuum with dreams and visions, there's these spectrum of altered states that they happen to be closer on that end too. All right, so I'm in a small office, and it's awkward because there's this giant elephant that's sitting over there in the room. And I finally have to point at it and discuss it because it's not going to leave until I do.

So it's the free will problem. So anybody who's listened and, yeah, anybody who's gotten hour and a half and is going to go, OK, this is all wonderful, and it's super interesting, and that's the way in which we encode messages to ourselves. But if it's a block universe, and there's a long self, this sounds deterministic. I don't see a place for free will. So how have you come to frame or understand this free will problem in your work?

ERIC WARGO: Yeah, so, OK, we live in a very individualistic culture. All right. And all of our myths all the myths in our culture are about free will or, let's say, the freedom of possibility, like the Wild West. It's open. We think of our lives as this vast prairie of possibilities. That's, I think, intrinsic to the way Americans especially see ourselves and our lives.

And so when people hear something that challenges free will or talks about determinism, they really balk. and you see this in physics, too. One of the barriers against the retrocausal interpretation of quantum physics is simply that it offends physicists preference for this idea of free will, which is weird because physicists are supposed to be empirical people and just go by go by what the experiments tell them or go by what the mathematics tells them. But because we all have this cultural need or hangup, it acts as a force field against these kinds of ideas.

So there are two ways. We can't get around free will as an experience. I mean, you can't avoid having or expressing free will. So in that sense, we all have free will. I'm just saying, and I think, honestly, most physicists would, in principle, agree that if you take an Archimedean point of view on the universe, yes, things are determined. And whether that's all it's determined entirely from the past or it's determined from both the future and past, that's super deterministic point of view that I talked about earlier.

Determinism, it violates that preference, but it's something that we should confront. Now, here's the thing. We started out talking about Zen, Zen background and Zen practice, and many of the Zen Satori experiences in the literature. Are precisely experiences of the block universe and of this sense of being of not liberation, but constraint, a sense of this blissful realization that transcends this idea of free will.

And I've had similar experiences in my practice, and it suddenly reach a state where. Getting rid of this whole idea of free will is paradoxically what liberates you. It's liberating. And I remind people, think of any flow state that you've ever been in, doing whatever it is you do best and most enjoy and get into that zone. For an athlete, it's doing their sport or for a martial artist, it's doing their martial arts. Or for a fighter pilot, it's piloting a plane in a high-stress situation or a surgeon performing open heart surgery or whatever, or being doing your painting or your writing, whatever.

When you're in that zone, the last thing you want to think about is your free will. I mean, you feel like you are a part of a flow. you're part of a machine that is that it transcends you. You are just a piece of you can say machinery or whatever. You are channeling this universal thing. You are just a allowing the universal flow to work through. You're not a freely willed being pondering your choices. And these kinds of experiences are famously something that Zen always highlighted, its role in archery and martial arts and so on.

But there's a sort of a paradoxical way in which when we get rid of free will and stop choosing and stop thinking of ourselves as beings who exert free will and choice, it actually liberates us and makes us into our better selves and makes us more effective. We get into a zone where we're actually expressing superpowers in a way.

So I try to-- what I tell people or advise people is to take the block universe as a koan and really don't just resist it, confront it, and keep pushing that problem, thinking about that problem, causal circularity and the block universe. And I know in my case, it led to some real profound breakthroughs in my thinking or in my-- not in my thinking, breakthroughs in my being, I guess, gnosis. It led to gnosis.

And I'm no different from anybody else, but I go through life not worrying about free will, and I'm very happy to not worry about it. I just don't think it matters, and you can go outside the Eastern tradition, too, and find similar experiences. I was just thinking earlier, actually, I wasn't consciously anticipating this question, but maybe I was precognitively anticipating it because I was thinking about Nietzsche. And everyone thinks of Nietzsche in terms of will and this emphasis upon the will.

But I think within every thinker, there's another thinker thinking in reverse, and his mystical experience in Switzerland was of, I would say, I know Jeff Kripal would slightly disagree with me on this, but I think that this was an essentially an expression of the block universe, and I'm talking about the eternal recurrence idea. This was before people could think of time as a dimension.

And so I think this idea of the world constantly on repeat and everything happening again and again through time exactly the same way it happened before, it's a way of expressing that determinism, that super determinism that nothing you do in the next time, the next turn of the wheel is going to be any different. So it's a way of stating this block universe idea that things are. And so I think we find this commonality in mystical experiences.

So I remind people that I think there's a way of seeing the world that finds this block universe, this eternalism, this eternalist viewpoint liberating, profoundly liberating, but you have to get there. You have to do the work of getting there. When I was a beginning meditator or when I was starting to meditate like in a very serious and rigorous way, I had this kind of-- if a thought came into my head that I kind wanted to set aside or dismiss gently and non-judgmentally, I would stick it on a shelf in my imagination. I would just take that, and I would put it on a shelf. So it was like I could always take that, pick it back down from the shelf when I was done, but it was like I would just get it out of the way by putting it on a shelf.

Well, think you should take these worries about free will and just put them on a shelf and go through the work of thinking through these ideas and see if you don't come out the other end happy to not worry about the issue of free will. I mean, what is it really doing for you?

MATTHEW DILLON: No, really well put, and it's an invitation to recognize that this question of free will and our triumph of agency and individualism is very culturally conditioned, and we're just this small little sliver in the block universe that there's been many different perspectives on how to cognize will and free will. And I did love coming across that, and it's made me think of your work, even though I know you and Jeff would disagree a bit.

When Nietzsche is talking about willing things to happen in the past and trying to end them, it's like, oh, OK. It's like rereading Eric Wargo, but it was Nietzsche. Well, excellent. We're almost at two hours. So we should let you go and give you back your time. But thank you so much. This has been super fun. I think people are going to enjoy it immensely. So, Eric Wargo, thank you for coming on, Pop Apoc-- I can't say the name of my own show. It's terrible. Pop Apocalypse.

ERIC WARGO: Thank you for having me on. This has been a delightful conversation and really interesting directions. I enjoyed it a lot.

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