Precognition: Some Curious Trails

If you looked for a thinker who has expended serious thought on precognitive dreaming—and did so before this 2011—the one name that would surely surface is that of John William Dunne (1875-1949). Since publishing his book, Dreamer, Andrew Paquette joins Dunne as another.

J.W. Dunne, born in Ireland, worked as an aeronautical engineer in England. His book, in multiple (and drastically-changing) editions, is An Experiment with Time (1927) arose from multiple experiences of his own in which he dreamt of events that, later, actually took place—both private and very public events. His theory, Serialism, was an attempt to explain it.

Paquette is an artist of some renown, with multiple achievements in comic books, video games, teaching, the fine arts, and as an author and teacher in computer graphics. He is also a psychic of obviously high gifts—a very well-written report of which experience is his book, Dreamer. He discovered these talents following a precognitive dream, the first of many (see my last post here).

I could, but almost hesitate to, add a third name to the list, that of the Russian, P.D. Ouspensky (1878-1947), who developed his own theory in A New Model of the Universe. Ouspensky did not address the subject of precognitive dreams narrowly, but his model, presented in the book mentioned above, appeared at about the same time as Dunne’s book (1931).

The first two (Dunne, Paquette) both assume that the future we see in dreams actually exists, with the implication that free will is at minimum problematical. Ouspensky provides a model of time in which this preexistent future is potentially present, but its manifestation (actualization) is due in part to choices. Therefore in Ouspensky’s scheme, the future we dream can be changed—if we make other choices—but the event that we actually live was also there, hiding in potential right alongside the more painful alternative that we avoided by acting differently. We’re dealing here with very original people; therefore it may not come as a total surprise that Ouspensky believed in eternal return, thus that he lived the same life, over and over again—a fact to which he attributed his experiences of déjà vu, whereas others in turn explain that sensation by saying that we’ve dreamt the future the night or the week before but just don’t remember the dream. Sorry, but that’s the nature of this subject…

Dunne and Ouspensky both think in terms of geometrically arranged times. Dunne projects a serial succession, one time existing above the other—so that from T2 you can see the entirety of T1; thus from T2 the observer sees T1’s life all at once, from childhood to death, all at one glance. Dunne imagined an infinite regress of times—and staunchly defended this heterodoxical view. Ouspensky’s model, presented on pages 343-406 of his book (Vintage, 1971) presents an infinite time in which a multi-dimensional matrix contains an infinite number of lines, each linking points of possibility. One life is thus a single branching line traced through this (to the human mind unimaginably complex) matrix of possibilities. The line is what we actualize; other possibilities, other lives we might have lived, remain in the matrix. (One is reminded of the many-world theory we owe to physicist Hugh Everett (1957)—with the difference that in Everett’s scheme, each world tangibly exists.)

Alas, precognition is a genuine problem. If we see the future, something must be there to see. Is it a tangibly existing hard real something? Ouspensky avoids the problem of free will—the existence of which we assert from experience—by moving preexistence to a quasi-real matrix of potential. You might say that he reifies Aristotle’s potential. But if we accept hard preexistence, we must find another explanation for free will. One solution Paquette presents is that we choose to live a life, a life shown to us, in the sublime world, and in great detail, before we’re born. Thus we exercise choice outside this life but not in it. But Paquette is no doctrinaire; his focus is on rich actual experiential data. He reports precognitive dreams that come out almost, but not precisely, as dreamt; thus choice is exercised here. Sometimes he says that everything’s fixed; he also asserts that we are here to develop. He does not resolve the contradictions that thus sprout here and there; no coherent cosmology has yet (I’m still not finished with his book) emerged that might explain how we can possibly learn anything in a life in the midst of which the most crucial element of agency, choice, is denied us except as an illusion.

The fully worked-out models all reflect a modern form of thought in which it is not at all common to ponder such divine powers as omniscience—or to take them seriously. At the same time, the actual experience of precognitive dreams frequently features instances showing that (1) they do indeed happen, (2) are confirmed later in very large part, but (3) then sometimes do not end tragically, as they did in the dream. This would suggest that the assertion of a fixed future must be opened up in some way, thus minimally as Ouspensky opened it. Another way to do that is to suggest that agencies may be involved—other than ourselves, that precognitive dreams may be in the category of communications. Let me flesh that out a little more.

The best way to do this is to imagine that the future may actually be visible—thus projected to the eyes of minds—without being tangibly there. At some resolution all events and things are energy in motion, at all kinds of levels of coarseness and subtlety, mental and physical. Our reality may be more transparent to higher beings than ourselves. God, of course, is omniscient, but angels (not least guardian angels) may be multiscient, or much-knowing, just eyeballing the vast energetic flow and, furthermore, communicating instantly with one another. And if you hate the very notion of an angel, why not every human being but not in our ordinary waking selves but genuinely near-angelic when we are asleep. Either way, the future may already be here, in projection, and the distant future as well as the near—but the nearer the more detailed. And our sleeping selves may see it (or may have it framed as dreams by guardian angels). And some of us are more gifted, alert, or open to these things than others—and the dramatic is more likely to catch our attention than the ordinary.

What we are seeing, then, are patterns of the future, not the actual rooted and cemented tangible reality of it. Therefore it remains open to change, certainly at the level of personal detail, which is what matters to individuals. It is simply a general kind of communication of reality, in projection, which is present quite naturally based on the very design of reality. And if apprehended can sometimes be a source of help in need.

One of the more interesting aspects of the paranormal, and Paquette notes this fact in his book, is that willful attempts to produce psychic results tend to fail dramatically. A prominent explorer of this phenomenon is J.E. Kennedy (for some of his papers, see this link). One aspect of this well-documented observation is that paranormal phenomena may possibly be a means of communication, form beyond the borderzone, to humanity here, to indicate that something more exists than we can actually see. It’s there like water, but nobody is forced to drink. And precognition may be a means of signaling that fact to many people in times when great disasters loom ahead—already clearly visible from “over there,” not fixed in every detail, but visible, from patterns already forming now.

Remembering Self-Remembering

The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread…
     [Milton, Lycidas]

I encountered the writings of P.D. Ouspensky roughly in the 1970s and soon learned about George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, who was Ouspensky’s inspiration. Both men were Russians born in the nineteenth century; both died in the late 1940s. Gurdjieff was the leader of a spiritual teaching movement; Ouspensky, while part of this grou for a while, was more broadly speaking a philosophical writer. Much later I discovered that Gurdjieff had latched on to his ideas from Sufi sources and turned a narrow slice of these into the foundations of his work; he himself characterized what he taught as esoteric Christianity and never acknowledged his debt.

I found Ouspensky’s (and later Gurdieff’s own) writings fascinating but strange. The essence may be rendered by saying that people are asleep; they have selves but not a genuine core self. That self, the real one, develops after arduous practice; the central technique for producing this initially absent self is self-remembering, thus becoming conscious of self, separating oneself from the flow of mentation, seeing the multiple personalities that constitute us (per G&O) as unreal, and gradually reaching genuine humanity.

I found this strange because I was only too aware—and indeed from childhood on—that I did too have a core self. My roots are in Catholicism, and you don’t go very far from those roots before you’re only all too aware that you have a conscience. But in truth I already knew that as a little child before I’d ever heard of anything like the catechism. Therefore, in the 1970s, the notion that I was an automaton sleep-walking through life was odd. I knew what it referred to, by and large, namely inattentiveness, absorption, passion, and the like, but the notion that you somehow created this self—and in its absence were sort of dismembered after death and blown into the void like dust, as Gurdjieff suggested—seemed illogical. How could you remember the self if there was no self there to do the remembering in the first place. Quite early on, of course, I’d learned Goethe’s famous saying: “Two souls, alas, reside within my breast.” True enough, of course, but Goethe, the third soul, as it were, knew this fact. Later yet I encountered the modern evolutionary doctrine that we are automata—and that our personalities are nothing but discrete (and ever changing) structures of nerve cells engaged in a Darwinian competition. But while that description also fits the G&O model of the ordinary, unenlightened common human, neither of these men came from that modern tradition.

The fascinating aspects of such doctrines is their narrow focus on some aspects of a teaching which, entirely legitimately, uses techniques to nurture human development. The very narrowness of focus is what makes bodies of teaching such as this one cult-like—thus with but marginal influence. The Sufis have developed many techniques of disengaging the human attention from the flux of ordinary life. The repetition of a single phrase, the zikhr—also known to us from the Hindu mantra—was another. Catholicism has both. Self-remembering has the same function as the examination of the conscience; and there is also the repetition of the Holy Name. But what makes a particular practice valuable is the comprehensive structure in which it is embedded. Some teachings tempt people because they promise success by some kind of recipe or formula. Therefore such groups attract those seeking power and—much more poignantly—whose who have been starved of meaning.

The core self is, indeed, enveloped in the material dimension—and, unless cultivated, can readily habituate itself to live in the continuous flux of stimulus that life produces. The proper preparation of the human takes place by nurture in a home and a comprehensively formed society. The vast number of religious and quasi-religious movements that have characterized the twentieth century testify to the failure of homes—and society as a whole—to assume the burden of nourishing the higher aspects of the soul. Then the hungry sheep look for almost anything that seems to offer help.

Castaneda

What follows is a diary entry of mine from a while back. I thought it might be of some interest here. At the end I’ll enlarge on the initial reference, which I expect is obscure for most who haven’t read, or no longer remember, the book.

*   *   *

I found today the chapter in which a mountain lion plays a role in Carlos Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan; reading it I was reminded again of the mastery of the author. His knowledge is very advanced—and these days I’m experienced enough to recognize that. Therefore the various scholarly critical dismissals of his work, not least that he was simply writing fiction, thus imagining the content, I reject. No doubt the presentation is fictionalized; no doubt a good deal of his knowledge was acquired from books, but I am fairly sure that he was in touch with a living shaman tradition. Oddly enough my conviction arises because I see so very many similarities with Sufi traditions, most pointedly the one that Gurdjieff had tapped into and exploited and Ouspensky “took to market,” as it were.

All harsh forms of mysticism seem derived from a cosmology in which the divine is conceived as indifferent to—but not unaware of—individual entities. These tend to be pantheisms. The discovery prized by their devotees is a kind of crystallization that takes place under extreme conditions of inner training. Castaneda’s cosmology fits into this class. There is no love relationship between creator and creature. The survival of death, in my definition of it anyway (as holding on to memories and to identity) is denied to all but the tiny minority of sorcerers

The cosmology doesn’t interest me. What strikes me forcefully, however—and much more now than it did when I read Castaneda more than thirty years ago—is the force and correctness of the methods used and the accuracy of the psychological descriptions. Castaneda’s vantage point—from what he claims is a “primitive” position, pre-Christian, unaware of Judaism, blind to Islam, ignorant of Hinduism, and so on and so forth—is now, and has always been, for me, very original and refreshing. The motivation for action is direct and entirely free of the vast overhang of cultural forms, rituals, traditions, dogma, and unsavory history that, in truth, completely suffocate spirituality in the West. Here you find the hard basics—and find it easy to ignore the primitive framework, anchored in nature, which is the teaching’s outward support. This sort of thing attracts the adventurer, the solitary, the “I-want-to-do-it-my-way” personality

Much of this originality really comes from having different names for everything—while the relationship of concepts to real life remain the same. The authenticity of this teaching shines through, however. This is not just a verbal exercise. Castaneda’s stuff comes from people who got there the hard way, by doing, experiencing, and thinking things through in an environment quite different, back when their patterns were laid down, than that of any other tradition on earth.

*   *   *

The mountain-lion episode appears in Chapter 11 of Ixtlan, entitled “The Mood of the Warrior.” This mood is composed of contradictories, iron control and total abandon. Castaneda guide into sorcery, don Juan, arranges an experience in which Castaneda encounters a mountain lion by night. Moved by fear, he acts with a great deal of skill and yet with total abandon, and this don Juan later explains is the warrior’s mood. It can be invoked at will—not merely by fright.

Other aspects of this story left an impression on me. Don Juan reminds Castaneda that his disciple simply acted, did what was necessary to escape the mountain lion. He treated the mountain lion without unnecessary, extraneous judgments—such as hating it, or imputing all sorts of fancy motives to the animal. At the time I read the story, it suddenly struck me that in most cases, dealing with individuals and with institutions, it is indeed very wise to regard them simply as natural phenomena without wasting time on all kinds of secondary interpretations of their motives. That view has served me very well. I remembered that a while back and went back to reread the account, hence that entry. The last paragraph of that chapter is interesting too:

“I know, I know,” don Juan said patiently. “To achieve the mood of a warrior is not a simple matter. It is a revolution. To regard the lion and the water rats and our fellow men as equals is a magnificent act of the warrior’s spirit. It takes power to do that.”

Now the mention of two names, G.I. Gurdjieff and P.D. Ouspensky. Both were Russian émigrés, Gurdjieff the leader of a self-development system which has earmarks of having been derived from Sufism. Ouspensky became its chief advocate. The essentials of the teaching are in the latter’s book, The Fourth Way.

Dreams: Winding Down

In that most dreams appear to be produced by autonomous activities of our brain—as it drifts off or becomes more active again—dreamland seems to be a much less promising route into the border zone than, say, paranormal phenomena or, in general, more conscious experience.

The exception here appears to be the precognitive dream—until you realize that the subject is a cul-de-sac. At best such dreams set down a marker. The marker itself is useful—but limited. It says: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Yes. But you can’t get at them. Attempts to do so produce monstrosities. J.W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time serves as an illustration; so does P.D. Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum. People like me will wander off into these thickets just to see what they might hold; but what such excursions usually reveal are the temperamental leanings of their authors. In these cases my own intuition rears up in protest. Dunne spatializes time so that he can do his engineering with neat graphs. Ouspensky imagines a kind of infinite universe, not unlike that produced by the many-worlds theory; every possible choice already preexists within a vast multi-dimensional matrix. So does every choice that derives from that one. And all others from each of the siblings. Ad infinitum. Our actual lives thus become a tracing out of one possible path among trillions. Both J.W. and P.D. produce instances of a kind of violence: they force something clearly transcendent into the narrow confines of our realm. No. Precognition is a marker. It says: There is more. But you stop here.

Carl Jung took another tack. He thought he had discovered a vast Collective Unconscious (CU) that, paradoxically, is the reality behind consciousness. The very logic of this reveals its New Age flavoring, its “emergent” sort of character, its evolutionary creation ex nihilo. In Jung’s lexicon, indeed, consciousness is somewhat inferior in character to the Unconscious which latter, in his hands, looks more and more god-like, if, to be sure a pagan god of nature.

Jung viewed dreams as ways of exploring that nebulous realm—and that nebulous realm as spewing out content, almost like lava. The problem, it seems to me, is that waking consciousness, if rendered into symbols but detached from its concrete objects—those that in our waking states render the world objective and real—that consciousness, thus uprooted, becomes a vast Rorschach blot onto which one can project, and from which one can obtain, anything one pleases. Jung used the CU in that way constantly. It became a deus ex machina for him. But there is no independent fixed point of reference from which to judge it, no court of appeals before which the CU’s strange judgments may be presented for resolution.

In summary, then, dreams appear to be, with exceptions, a form of inferior mental activity. Their magical character comes from two sources: their spontaneity on the one hand and their symbolical presentation on the other. The latter really means picture language. The magic that we project into the dream actually comes from the conscious mind and its own pleasurable marvel or its terrors. The dream itself just twirls its magical show without awareness.

The exceptions prove the rule. Significant dreams strongly suggest something transcendental, either the action of an agency (clear meaning) or of an environment beyond our grasp (time distortions). Neither kind of exceptional dream, however, lends itself to any kind of empirical explanation. They require speculative approaches.