The thrust of much futurism since the 1950s has been toward space exploration and the prospect of colonizing Mars and exploiting the solar system’s resources. But I think the real final frontier for our species (and any intelligent, technological civilization) is going to be Time. Our destiny, if we do not destroy ourselves, is to become timefarers and something like history gardeners, sowing seeds in the past for a better tomorrow.
If you’re reading this, you too can become a History Gardener! The above quotation is from Eric Wargo’s excellent blog, TheNightshirt. I’m still reading his amazing book, TIME LOOPS, and it’s the most paradigm shifting book since Michael Talbot’s 1991 THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE. That book opened our awareness to the implications for consciousness in Quantum Physics. Wargo, in what, incredibly, is his first book, introduces so many new concepts, and accompanying phrases, that it’s going to take some time to process the implications of this for my TimeLine Journeying practice. (But I was hooked when I noticed he refers to time with a capital T.) The basic idea is presented in Chapter 1:
Information from our future somehow seems able to exert an influence over our behavior…That it so often seems to operate outside of conscious awareness suggests that precognition may be a very primitive, basic guidance system.
This concept of precognition turns the idea of of ESP as “second sight” on its head. Wargo refers to James Carpenter’s argument that it “manifests constantly in our lives as part of an always-unconscious faculty he calls ‘first sight’” that is “always at work, but always out of sight.”
Deep breath….
What attracted me to Wargo and TIME LOOPS was my recent baptism and immersion in time with a capital T. Once I entered this doorway, it not only altered every perception I had about past/present/future, it affected my awareness of “other” lives in ways I am still exploring. But Wargo sees this basic idea, that “future events exert an influence over present behavior” in EVERYTHING, from Freudian theory of the unconscious mind and neuroses, to magic, to clairvoyance and telepathy, to the creative process, to the double slit experiment that upended Newtonian physics, to ESP; AND he brilliantly explains this in a way that a non-physicist can process. Exploring any one of these areas would be mind-blowing, yet he surfs these ideas with grace and a much appreciated sense of humor.
Clairvoyance and telepathy influenced by future events and behaviors? Another deep breath…
The subtitle of TIME LOOPS sets the stage:
“Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious”
Let’s unpack:
Precognition is “the accessing of knowledge a person will acquire in his or her own future, often directly related to some rewarding or troubling learning experience ahead.” Precognition is “about our personal experiences, not about other people’s experiences or events in objective reality.” This aspect of personal experience is central to Wargo’s theory about Time Loops.
Time Loops are “baffling, causally circular situations in which a precognitive experience (future knowledge) partly contributes to the fulfillment of the recognized event.” To unpack that unpacking, an event in the future creates or adds to a present time event, creating a circular pattern between future and present. I’ve been seeing this in my TimeLine Journeying sessions. It took reading TIME LOOPS to recognize how it operates behind the scenes.
Retrocausation is reversed causality, the opposite of Newtonian physics “every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” Wargo proposes that Time is a continuum comprised of past, present and future in which the future can, and does, directly influence the present to provide awareness of a future-experience-to-come, therefore the reaction can seem to precede the action.
Some of the other terms he uses and/or introduces are:
Precognized; premember; prehaviorist; and my favorite - Premory: memory in reverse. Because Wargo is taking us to the leading edge, a new language is necessary to encapsulate these ideas. I’ve processed all of this paradigm-shifting information and I’m only 20% through the Kindle version, so I am using this blog to marinate in his wisdom as I incorporate it into my TimeLine Journeying process. Welcome to my work in progress.
I’ll leave you with this quote from an excellent interview with Greg Bishop on his Radio Misterioso podcast*:
“Just to realize that your mind is transcending the present moment, and that even if you consciously feel like you’re here in your body, sitting at your desk, whatever you’re doing in that moment… your mind is transcending that profoundly and possibly even that its … extending across your whole life. That’s the argument I’m trying to make because there are experiences, recorded experiences, that do suggest that our behavior, our thoughts right now in the present moment, could be shaped by events that will happen decades from now.”
Maybe even in a future life? Stay tuned…
*Eric Wargo interview on Radio Misterioso January 15, 2019:
http://radiomisterioso.com/2019/01/15/eric-wargo-time-loops-and-retrocausality/
PS: SquareSpace is incapable of coding superscript, those little numbers at the end of a paragraph that guide the reader to footnotes, so I’m using *. Do hipsters not use footnotes? Yeah, I know: hyperlinks. Not the same.