Eric Wargo’s 2018 book Time Loops had the effect on me that I can only describe as what a profound psychedelic experience has for a newbie: Being led to see the physical world and consensus reality through an entirely new lens. As Wargo himself explains:
My argument in Time Loops is that our future thoughts and emotions in response to upheavals ahead get displaced in time and influence us in all the ways Freud attributed to “the unconscious.” It is best understood in dreams: Whereas Freud thought dreams symbolically represent repressed wishes and wholly relate to our past, I argue that they really represent responses to positive and negative turning points on the road ahead. However, since there is no way to fully grasp the meaning of information refluxing from our future—because only the future could give it context—the dreaming brain reaches into its grab-bag of memories and pre-existing associations to help it pre-present those alien-seeming thoughts. Dreams are thus like effigies of future thoughts sewn together from scraps of past experience, or “ruins” of future structures built from past bricks.
Wargo is strongly advocating for keeping a dream journal which acts as a record keeper for information coming from the future. So near in the future, in fact, he claims that in his experience, most information comes from 2-3 days ahead of present time.
I love that Wargo explores the role that emotions play in retrocausality, where our emotional reaction to a future event is what affects the earlier one, and that it’s not pure data from the future but our emotional reaction in the future that loops back in time. That emotional information edges out data has been central to my past lives work.
BUT…. I had a flash of insight this morning about retrocausality. The idea of the the Future influencing the Present is still based in linear time: Classical physics sees time as moving from past through the present and into the future. I have been dragged… pulled…invited to wrap my mind around a new concept of time with a capital T, where events in our Other lives — Past, Present & Future — are occurring simultaneously. In this realm, it’s not that an event from the future is influencing the present; rather, it is past, present and future all influencing each other. Simultaneously.
I call this Adjacency. “noun: the state of being adjacent; nearness.” In this case, all of our Other lives influencing each other, which means that our actions and decisions in the present can have an effect of the Adjacent lives, and vice versa. Complicating this notion is that the degree of influence from our Other lives is not consistent; it appears to vary according to some unknown force (or Hidden Hand?) yet to be determined or quantified.
I have come to the conclusion that some of us are much more aware of this information flowing back from what seems like the future. And since time is simultaneous in both directions, the same information can be flowing from our past into our present. As an example: Since our progress through Time is not linear, it is possible we are being influenced by our Adjacent Self that has already achieved the goal that we strive for.
Of course, Wargo’s book is called “Time Loops” so he recognizes the back and forth that occurs, but it doesn’t have to be the future “refluxing” into the present.
The brain may well turn out to be an organ that extracts meaning from an otherwise noisy, but constant, informational reflux from the Not Yet.
(I had to look it up to be secure in his meaning. Reflux: noun, a flowing back; ebb. Wargo uses it as a verb - refluxing - often in Time Loops.)
In Wargo’s description, the Not Yet is something that is on its way, about to arrive, and that brings with it understanding. But that is still working from linear time, and the idea from scientific materialism of the “block universe”: the idea that the future is set and unchangeable. The deeper I explore this, the more I see that ANY interaction with an Other life — past, present or future — alters that timeline in mysterious ways.
I have seen what seems to be to be retrocausality in my TimeLine Journeying sessions. But in digging deeper, I realized that this Parallel Influence or Adjacency is at work and needs to be examined. (See my 8/18/20 post on Michael Talbot’s “Your Past Lives” and the awesome stack of coins analogy.*) Obviously there is an enormous leap to be made to grasp all of this new information, which is what I am exploring with my new TimeLine Journeying process.
*https://robert-baranowski-rge5.squarespace.com/config/pages/5eae0c58efe4090cec85bc6c