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Thinking Allowed, conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery, with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove.
Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we'll be exploring the topic ofHello and welcome.
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I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we'll be exploring the topic of precognition and creative inspiration. My guest is Eric Wargo, who received his doctoral degree in anthropology. He is author of Time Loops, Precognition, Retrocognition, and the Unconscious.
Also, Precognitive Dreamwork and the Long Self, Interpreting Messages from Your Future, and most recently, From Nowhere, Artists, Writers, and the Precognitive Imagination.
Eric has been a guest three times previously on New Thinking Allowed. I'm going to linkEric has been a guest three times previously on New Thinking Allowed.
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I'm going to link to our first interview on Time Loops. I think you'll find it interesting and relevant to today's discussion as well. Eric is based in Washington, D.C. and now I'll switch over to the internet video. Welcome, Eric. It's a pleasure to be with you once again. It's been a couple of years since our last interview and I see you're still pursuing your passion for precognition. Yeah, always. Thank you, Jeff. It's great to be back on your show. You're now looking precognition.
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Yeah, always. Thank you, Jeff. It's great to be back on your show. You're now looking at the relationship between precognition and creative inspiration. You've gone through, as I recall in your introduction, a number of the most obvious theories about creativity. It's a subject that psychology has been interested in for a very long time. The interesting thing is that the idea that precognition might be part of the creative process doesn't show up in the literature, to my knowledge, before you. Right. That's kind of amazing.
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There are obvious reasons why people in the field of scientific psychology would avoid the issue of precognition entirely. It's just not on their radar for all kinds of reasons, to which we can talk about or not. It felt like this obvious connection. Even back when I first started writing about precognition, I wound up going down the rabbit hole of dreams because people had so many questions about dreams and I was getting so many emails. I was getting inundated people had so many questions about dreams and I was getting so many emails.
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I was getting inundated with emails about dreams. The direction I always wanted to go, as far back as my first book, was the creativity connection. Not just in art. The new book is focused on artists and writers, but scientific innovation. In general, the idea of cognition and thought. Are our metaphors of wheels turning in the mind and computation really what is going on in our heads when we have an original thought? Or could this be part of this larger precognitive phenomenon that I've been writing about and that more and more people are writing about? It was an obvious topic.
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I've been working on this book since Time Loops came out in 2018, so for about six years now.
There's more to come. Actually, there's a sequel in the works. It's a big topic and it feels like it's untapped. I would agree. It's a big, untapped topic. Even not just psychologists, but philosophers have a tough time with precognition. I recall interviewing one philosopher who simply said, precognition can't occur because the future hasn't happened.
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Yeah. You get these presumptions that have a history. Like I said, if you wanted to go down that, that's its own conversation. It's the history behind the presumptions that create a blind spot or create almost a force field around this topic because it just goes totally against the way we understand how things work. That's changing. It's changing in physics. I think when that happens, when people become more aware of these developments happening in physics, when physicists become more comfortable talking about them, I think it's going to trickle down, but it has to sort of hack off, really. Well, let me start out by giving you an example but it has to sort of hack off, really.
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Well, let me start out by giving you an example of a case that I was personally involved in. It wasn't in your book, but it would have fit in perfectly. Now, I'm referring to Michael Talbot, who is the author of a very popular book, The Holographic Universe. Michael was a friend of mine. He died several decades ago of a rare form of leukemia. He was a young man. I remember visiting him in the hospital at his final illness.
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At the time, I think he could have been in his late 30s, early 40s. It was a tragic loss. His book is still regarded very highly by people. But before he wrote The Holographic Universe, he wrote some novels. One of his novels, which was actually a popular novel, was a vampire novel in which he wrote about vampirism as a rare form of leukemia.
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Right. Then he was struck by a rare form of leukemia himself.
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There are so many examples of this. Franz Kafka would be another example. He ultimately contracted tuberculosis several years before he died in his early 40s.
Tuberculosis really mainly affects the lungs. It's not a disease that you starve from.
But in multiple stories, he wrote about characters dying of starvation. A couple months before his death, his infection spread to his throat. A very rare and dreaded outcome of tuberculosis.
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It prevented him from eating. He was literally starving to death when he was correcting the proofs of his story, The Hunger Artist, in a sanatorium outside Vienna. It's just stunning the way his works prefigured his own death. Unfortunately, there are a lot of stories like this. But unfortunately, it biases people into scaring people off of this topic of precognition.
I want to reassure people right off the bat that the vast majority of cases of artistic prophecy and so on are not about terrible, tragic deaths. There are those, but it's a much broader spectrum.
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That's a beautiful, beautiful example. Well, you bring up the case of Sigmund Freud.
I think it's interesting for multiple reasons. One, of course, is his theories of psychoanalysis and how they might relate to precognition. But also, Freud's whole career was launched on the basis of a dream he had, which he didn't particularly believe in precognitive dreams, but it appears to have been one. Exactly. Yeah, the ironies around Freud's story are just so but it appears to have been one.
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Exactly. Yeah, the ironies around Freud's story are just so layered that I never get tired of telling it. But yeah, just for your viewers, the dream that gave him the solution, or what he thought was the solution to the nature of dreaming occurred in 1895. He was on vacation at a villa outside of Vienna, where he and his wife were staying for the summer. He has this dream about this former patient, or a current patient who he staying for the summer.
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He has this dream about this former patient, or a current patient who he hadn't seen in a couple months because she also was on vacation. It was an old friend of his. He was treating for hysteria, essentially, or melancholy. She was depressed because she was a recent widow. Anyway, he had this dream. Some of his doctor friends were present in the room.
Anyway, he examined this patient. First, she wouldn't open her mouth because it reminded himAnyway, he examined this patient.
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First, she wouldn't open her mouth because it reminded him of someone with dentures who is reluctant to open their mouth. Finally, looks inside her mouth, sees white patches in the back of her mouth, scabs, and can see the bones inside her nose, the turbid bones of the nose, but inside her mouth. Anyway, a number of other things happened in this dream. He wakes up and goes, oh my God, I know what, I've figured it out. I've figured out in this dream.
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He wakes up and goes, oh my God, I know what, I've figured it out. I've figured out what dreams are. Because a lot of those characters in the dream represented his own doubts about his medical practice at that point, including worries about malpractice, essentially. Some of the characters in the dream who were close friends of his had, one had nearly killed a patient recently.
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There were a lot of iffy things going on. Some of his friends were, frankly, quacks.
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He wasn't that far from being a quack at that point. There was a lot of anxiety. He realized, well, this dream was absolving him of responsibility in these essentially malpractice cases. He devotes something like 14 pages of his landmark book, The Interpretation of Dreams, to free associating on all the elements in this dream and showing how they connect to these thoughts that he was having in waking life. He was truly a pioneer. We should talk more about thoughts that he was having in waking life.
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He was truly a pioneer. We should talk more about Freud and his importance, because he's been dismissed or people think he's been debunked or whatever. That's really not the case. People need to go back to Freud, because he had some really important things to say. He did not believe in precognition. It was a common part of folklore at that time, as it is in every culture, that dreams sometimes foretell the future.
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But he believed, no, dreams are the symbolically disguised fulfillment of repressed wishes, was his nutshell formulation of what dreams are. He writes a book and then builds a career on this idea. Well, fast forward, I think, 28 years, if I'm getting the numbers right.
His doctors looked in his mouth and saw exactly what he saw in that patient's mouth in his dream, white patches. It was a precancerous condition called leukoplakia. It turned cancerous. They white patches.
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It was a precancerous condition called leukoplakia. It turned cancerous. They removed large sections of his mouth, which then caused enormous scabs to form.
And ultimately, later that year, they had to remove his palate. Terrible surgery under local anesthetic. It was just brutal. He was without a palate, which meant that if you looked in his mouth, you could see the bones of his nose. It's exactly what he was seeing in his looked in his mouth, you could see the bones of his nose.
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It's exactly what he was seeing in his patient's dream from 28 years earlier. And then he wound up for the last 15 years of his life having to wear this enormous wooden denture. It kept him from opening his mouth, kept him from talking. So again, just like this character in his dream. So the dream that put Freud on the map was a precognitive dream. What I especially love about Freud's story is that his single key to the was a precognitive dream.
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What I especially love about Freud's story is that his single key to the unconscious was the archetype of Oedipus, the Oedipus myth. It was central to his psychology.
It's part of what people dismiss nowadays. But the idea that the central thing in our heads is that we carry through life is this repressed, forgotten love for our opposite sex parent and desire to kill our same sex parent, just as what happens in the Oedipus story.
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But I think the amazing thing is Oedipus is really a story about disbelieving prophecy and fulfilling a prophecy because you disbelieved in it, or you disbelieved it or tried to evade it, or thought you could evade a prophecy. Because that's what Oedipus really does. There's this prophecy that he's going to kill his father and marry his mother. And so he flees Corinth and prophecy that he's going to kill his father and marry his mother.
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And so he flees Corinth and winds up killing his father at a crossroads, not knowing it's his father, and then marrying his mother and becoming king of Thebes. And discovering belatedly that, oh my god, I fulfilled that prophecy precisely because I was trying to evade it. Well, that's exactly Freud's story.
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So it's just so fractal and loopy that I just love this story. I mean, it's a sad story, although fortunately Freud did not actually die of this oral cancer. He wound up dying 15 years later of probably complications related to his treatment. But anyway, yeah, Freud's is an amazing story for all kinds of reasons. I think it would be useful at this point, Eric, if we refresh for story for all kinds of reasons.
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I think it would be useful at this point, Eric, if we refresh for any of our viewers who haven't watched your earlier interviews, the concept of the time loop is very important here. And it would be good to go over it right now because I'm sure half of our audience probably hasn't encountered that concept yet. Right. And this is to me the most, it's the audience probably hasn't encountered that concept yet.
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Right. And this is to me the most, it's the thing I have hardest time getting across to people. People can, okay, they get the idea of precognition and seeing the future, being influenced by the future somehow. But the implication of that in a self-consistent universe, okay, I mean, precognition is a kind of time travel, right? It's information, it's not a person getting in a spaceship and traveling backwards in time, but it's information from the future, from an already existing future in what's called the block universe of Einsteinian cosmology. It's information from a future point block universe of Einsteinian cosmology.
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It's information from a future point going back in time and influencing the past. Now, the moment people think about that, they realize, okay, wait, wait, there's a possibility here of what is in science fiction called the grandfather paradox, right? You somehow influence the past in such a way that it changes the future and like, what happens if, the example people will give is, well, what if you got this clear premonition of a terrorist attack and you called the police or called the military and told them, hey, there's going to be this terror attack and they prevent the terror attack. Well, then from what future going to be this terror attack and they prevent the terror attack.
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Well, then from what future did that information then come from in your dream? That's a paradox, the same as going back in time and killing your grandfather and not being born, okay? It's the same kind of paradox. Well, the universe is in fact self-consistent and this is something that physicists back in the 80s really kind of, because they were kind of starting to get interested in these questions, they kind of did the math. One of them was Kip Thorne, actually, a very famous physicist who they kind of did the math.
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One of them was Kip Thorne, actually, a very famous physicist who did the work for the movie Interstellar and stuff. He's a black hole guy and wormhole guy.
He and some of his students, as well as a Russian physicist named Igor Novikov, sort of did the math and figured out that it's a self-consistent universe and that can't happen.
You can't have a self-preventing, you can't have a paradox effectively. What happens is that,You can't have a self-preventing, you can't have a paradox effectively.
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What happens is that, say in our example, information from the future influences the past precisely in a way that leads to that future. Now, so that's a time loop. You have an event in the future which somehow refluxes back in time. I think we don't know how it works in the brain, but I think we can, I have some ideas. We can get close to an idea. I think strong emotions of certain kinds carry images, ideas.
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We can get close to an idea. I think strong emotions of certain kinds carry images, thoughts from our future into our past. We are influenced by them in various ways, dreams being an obvious one but not the only one. Then our actions are freely-willed actions, if you want to put it that way, lead to that future. That means because we would always act if you want to put it that way, lead to that future.
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That means because we would always act to prevent a foreseen outcome that we don't like, the information that reaches us in the past is never clear, never video quality, never quite actionable in the way we would want. It's symbolically distorted in various ways. This is my re-reading, honestly, of Freud's theory that I elaborated a lot in Time Loops. I return to this idea in my subsequent books. He thought that elaborated a lot in Time Loops.
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I return to this idea in my subsequent books. He thought that dreams disguised things in symbolism, sort of the way a spy would disguise things in code when they were trying to smuggle a message, say. I think that's wrong. I think his idea of repression is wrong. The idea is that the information from the future is disguised, distorted, misinterpreted always in such a way that we wind up fulfilling that foreseen future in some way. It makes complex always in such a way that we wind up fulfilling that foreseen future in some way.
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It makes complex the idea of trying to use precognition as some sort of forecasting tool. I do believe that that is possible, but it puts a little bit of a monkey wrench and makes it a little bit more complex than people who are just thinking of this as some sort of superpower where they're going to scope the future and get rich on the stock market or whatever. It's a little more complicated than that.
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But yeah, so again, this is a way in which it ties back to Freud. It ties back to his basic ideas because he was right about how you have to read a dream, that you have to use free association because dreams do consist of associations, personal, very personal associations based on our life experience and so on. He was just wrong about the function of dreaming, but he was right life experience and so on.
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He was just wrong about the function of dreaming, but he was right about the way information in a dream is disguised because he didn't realize where this information was coming from. But again, yeah, right. It just goes back to the importance of Freud and all this.
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Well, also I'm reminded of our second interview in which we focused on the work of, from I think around the 1920s, J.W. Dunn, his experiment in time where he demonstrated, and I think you repeated the experiment yourself, that roughly half of the information in our dreams comes from the future and perhaps half from the past.
Well, that was Dunn's sort of hypothesis, that dreams kind of reached both into the past and the future. At that point, Freud was the sort of god of dream interpretation and Dunn didn't sort the future.
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At that point, Freud was the sort of god of dream interpretation and Dunn didn't sort of challenge Freud's basic presumptions. So there's a great passage in his book that I always quote that, I'm not so interested in the function of dreaming, which again, he's accepting maybe the disguise from one of the repressed wishes. I am interested in where the dream tower gets its disguise from one of the repressed wishes.
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I am interested in where the dream tower gets its bricks from. He's saying it's getting its bricks both from the past and from the future.
Now, I think he was too humble in that formulation. I think he was really closer to getting at the true function of dreaming. Because obviously, it's putting the cart before the horse to say that dreams have this ability to reach our future, but they only do it to borrow some symbols to disguise. It's obvious that if dreams are precognitive, then this is hugely important to disguise.
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It's obvious that if dreams are precognitive, then this is hugely important for our survival and so on. That precognitive part of dreaming is central to its function.
So the way I see it is that what's really happening in dreams, and I don't think there's any way you could ever prove that every dream is precognitive. But my presumption, my sort of working presumption when I'm working in dreams is that there's going to be precognitive content here. This is somehow about a future thought, a future experience, a future trauma, something here.
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This is somehow about a future thought, a future experience, a future trauma, something like that. But it's a future thought that's being represented using the bricks of our past experience.
So anytime you look closely at a dream, you're going to find things from recent daily life, some element pulled from some experience you had a few days ago in a coffee shop or whatever, and then stuff from your farther, more distant past and so on. I sort of see all that stuff, and then stuff from your farther, more distant past and so on.
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I sort of see all that stuff, you could say it's the bricks building a tower, or you could say that these are kind of the action figures in a little diorama that the dream is sort of representing and putting on a little play to represent some idea, some thought, some worry or whatever that's really from something that's going to happen in your future. But it's using these elements drawn from your past life.
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I mean past life in the sense of your life here on this earth, not past lives, but your life leading up to now. So we can't say how much of the content in a dream is past versus future. I think that that's kind of probably the wrong question. I think that the hypothesis, again, is that the thought in a dream, the dream thought is how Freud put it, is something in the future, but it can't, because it's not the future yet, we can't really represent it or contextualize it. So but it can't, because it's not the future yet, we can't really represent it or contextualize it.
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So the dream uses stuff in memory to dramatize it and represent it.
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And I'm saying, and the new book, to build a bridge in the new book if you want, the new book is saying that's what art does. That's what art is too.
In other words, your hypothesis here is that there's a precognitive element possibly to all creative inspiration. I like to take the most reductive and extreme form of a hypothesis and push it as far as I can go, throw it at the wall, see if it sticks. And that's what I'm doing and push it as far as I can go, throw it at the wall, see if it sticks.
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And that's what I'm doing here. I don't think there's any way empirically, I don't know how you could test this idea exactly. But when I look at a dream or when I look at an artwork or a work of literature now, what I'm looking for are, can this be fit into this model? Does it plausibly work in this hypothesis? How far can we push this hypothesis? So that's, yes, that's my hypothesis, but I admit that it's an extreme hypothesis. Some people are just going to have a knee jerk, but I admit that it's an extreme hypothesis.
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Some people are just going to have a knee jerk, well that's ridiculous. I do think that precognition is central in cognition. I mean, how could it not be? I think we have this presumption, this cautious presumption, living as we do in this kind of scientific world that has always rejected these kinds of things, always rejected ESP, that, okay, well, maybe it exists here and there, or in rare occasions, or with something awful like 9-11 that somehow bends space-time, and okay, maybe you'll get a precognitive dream. I think that's a real fallacy. If it exists at all, maybe you'll get a precognitive dream.
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I think that's a real fallacy. If it exists at all, it is central. It is everywhere. I'm trying to get people to take a fresh look at their own inner experience, their own dream life, and their own creative life to see, wait a second.
The thing is, when you do take this fresh look, it's pretty amazing how pervasive it does appear.
I've talked to so many artists, even just since my book came out in the last month and a half, I've talked to so many artists like, oh my God, this is so true. They can give me a million I've talked to so many artists like, oh my God, this is so true.
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They can give me a million examples of writing about something and then having this experience manifest in their daily life. It's the same with dreams. When people start doing precognitive dream work, they find, oh my God, I am precognitively dreaming all the time. It's an extreme hypothesis. I get that.
I think it's important to get out of this mindset that, well, if this exists, we need to be apologetic about it and say, oh, it's just this little icing on the cake. I don't think it's that apologetic about it and say, oh, it's just this little icing on the cake.
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I don't think it's that way at all. Well, I'm a little puzzled by one thing in relationship to your hypothesis.
That is, I know you devote a whole chapter to the ancient cave art and the importance of the cave art and many other pages outside of that chapter. You bring up the idea of the caves and what a role they play in the creative process. Maybe I missed it. I didn't really find what a role they play in the creative process.
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Maybe I missed it. I didn't really find precognition in any of that art. It's not as if the beautiful illustrations of animals were animals that didn't exist back then. That would have been. They didn't start painting automobiles in the ancient caves. Yeah, but I also don't think precognition, you can precognize things beyond your death either. These wouldn't have been precognitive of far future things.
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But yes, of course, we can never point to a given cave painting and say, oh, this was the vision that this shaman had was something they were going to see the next day. But I use it to introduce first the idea of various shamanic techniques that do very clearly provide precognitive experiences, including experiences of sensory deprivation in the dark, in caves. This was experiences, including experiences of sensory deprivation in the dark, in caves.
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This was hugely important practice in the ancient world. Undoubtedly, it was hugely important to cave painters as well. Dream incubation, very possibly use of psychedelics. We don't know. But those experiences too, from the literature, there's so much precognitive stuff that comes out of those kinds of experiences. I think it's, yes, we can't say for sure that a given horse on a cave wall kinds of experiences.
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I think it's, yes, we can't say for sure that a given horse on a cave wall was precognitive of something that a shaman was going to see the next day.
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But this was a milestone. It's setting up that chapter. It's setting up the argument in the very last chapter of the book about cultural traditions as prophetic traditions, not just carrying information forward, transmitting information from the past to the future.
But also, when you have a recording tradition, especially a dream or vision recording tradition, which I think is what was happening in caves in the Paleolithic era. When you have that, which I think is what was happening in caves in the Paleolithic era.
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When you have that, you suddenly can sort of entrain this kind of precognition in experiencers and members of a community. You suddenly have, you open this spigot of potentially precognitive information that does transcend the individual lifetime in the form of what Jung called archetypes, frankly. The sort of information flowing from the future into the past of a society. That's sort of what that information flowing from the future into the past of a society.
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That's sort of what that chapter on caves is setting up as much as anything else.
One of the things about your book that really excited me the most is that you write about experiences of many of the people who have been on the New Thinking Allowed channel or the prior Thinking Allowed TV program that I hosted. One of them who is really, I think, central to your work Thinking Allowed TV program that I hosted.
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One of them who is really, I think, central to your work is Jeffrey Kripal.
Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, Jeff is a good friend of mine. I think the work he's doing is so, so important for a number of reasons. I mean, he's bringing academic legitimacy to a range of topics that have been rejected for so long. He's saying, look, people, these are real. Whatever topics that have been rejected for so long.
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He's saying, look, people, these are real. Whatever they mean, whatever they are, we've got to listen to real human beings who report amazing things.
This stuff cannot be reduced to the standard debunker claims, whether you're talking about precognition or UFOs or near-death experience, whatever. I mean, these are real. They're hugely important in human experience. They're central in his own study of religion and religious traditions.
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Religious traditions always trace back to these kinds of experiences, whether it's powerful synchronicities like I'm talking about, or precognitive experiences, or what we would now call UFO encounters or whatever. These lie at the heart of religious traditions, so we have to take this seriously. Another reason I love Jeff's work, though, so many people see these phenomena as somehow scientific. Well, we need to throw the sciences at them, you know, psychology and physics somehow scientific.
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Well, we need to throw the sciences at them, you know, psychology and physics and blah, blah, blah. They somehow belong. There's a sense of ownership. Well, the sciences first disown them, but if they're going to be legitimate at all, we need the sciences to own them and talk about them. Jeff sees the problems with that presumption and really sees that these are as about them.
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Jeff sees the problems with that presumption and really sees that these are as much part of the humanities, if not more. I agree with that because they're about meaningful human experiences, and the sciences, including psychology, do not do well with meaning.
It's meaning and meaningful experiences are always anecdotes. They're always highly specific, individual, one-off things, and you can't replicate that in a laboratory setting. You can't repeat individual, one-off things, and you can't replicate that in a laboratory setting.
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You can't repeat and reproduce these kinds of experiences. You can sort of go a little bit of the way, like I'm thinking of the decades of Zener card studies in parapsychology that have yielded statistically significant findings, but they don't get at the heart of ESP or any of these other what we call paranormal phenomena. Putting this squarely in the realm of the humanities, I think, what we call paranormal phenomena.
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Putting this squarely in the realm of the humanities, I think, is really key. It's what Jeff has been doing and doing such a good job of doing. He has a new book out called How to Think Impossibly, but his last book was called The Superhumanities. That's a great term because it's like, let's reimagine the humanities as including these kinds of super experiences. He loves the superhero idiom there. I love that move. I think it's an important experiences.
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He loves the superhero idiom there. I love that move. I think it's an important gambit right now as we're getting legitimacy in the academy more broadly, not just in the sciences.
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Dr. Paul P. Young Another great scholar and writer that is featured in your book is Jacques Vallée, who I've interviewed several times over a 50-year period. Dr. Jeffrey N. Meyer Jacques's work has been very important for me personally. I know him. We've talked on a few occasions over the years. It's been wonderful. He's a remarkable human being and a remarkable intellect. He's been incredibly important in my own personal journey. As I may have said in an intellect.
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He's been incredibly important in my own personal journey. As I may have said in an earlier interview, my path towards studying precognition actually began with a UFO sighting.
And it was in the process of learning about ufology, because I didn't know anything about ufology at that point. I immediately, well, I very quickly discovered Jacques Vallée.
And Jacques Vallée was this very smart person talking about the interconnections of UFOs and psychic phenomena. At that time, UFOs were fine, but I had come from a psychological background.
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I had the same knee-jerk rejection of ESP and psychic phenomena that I think a lot of psychologists have at that point, or social scientists have. And so his books opened me up and said, well, they were sort of a paradigm shift for me. There's a chapter in there about him and what I consider the kind of precognitive relationship between him and Philip K. Dick, him and what I consider the kind of precognitive relationship between him and Philip K.
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Dick, because they were writing at the same time on the same themes. And I think that there was more to that than just coincidence. So that would be another aspect where it might not exactly be precognition. You often refer to synchronicity where, if I recall correctly, Jacques Vallée and P. K. Dick never met each other. But nonetheless, they're simultaneously, or roughly simultaneously, in their own way, describing similar phenomena. And there are many funny simultaneously, in their own way, describing similar phenomena.
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And there are many funny links. For example, P. K. Dick's great book, Vallée, sort of echoes Vallée's name.
Yes. Yes. I mean, my argument, that chapter is actually a rewrite of one of the early articles I wrote on my blog many years ago, which I wrote very tentatively at that point, because I thought, part of me thought, this is absurd. But on the other hand, because I thought, part of me thought, this is absurd.
(00:39:15)
But on the other hand, no, it's not absurd. Why is this book called Vallée? And in fact, if you were imagining this as a French word, you'd pronounce it Vallée. And it's about, essentially, and in fact, the original version was Vallée's system. And Jacques Vallée's Invisible College was about a Jacques Vallée control system. And then there are direct matches between passages in Vallée's book and the things control system.
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And then there are direct matches between passages in Vallée's book and the things that Phil Dick was writing about in his first draft, especially of Vallée. And yet, he could not have read this book. And I know, in fact, from talking to his wife at the time, Tessa Dick, that he didn't read Jacques Vallée until 1977. So, it's a very striking, to me, instance of that he didn't read Jacques Vallée until 1977.
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So, it's a very striking, to me, instance of this kind of precognitive relationship among authors. That if artists are precognizing their experiences, well, some of the most powerful emotional experiences in a writer's life are their encounters with other writers in their works. And there's every bit of evidence, I think, that Phil Dick was, we know he was highly influenced by and often thought he precognized other writers in his novels. His novel, Ubik, he came to feel that he was precognizing an article other writers in his novels.
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His novel, Ubik, he came to feel that he was precognizing an article that he read a couple years later by a Russian parapsychologist. I'm blanking on his name right now. But, you know, so this idea was very much part of Phil Dick's thinking. And I think that he had a precognitive relationship with Jacques Vallée, too. And interestingly, their writings converge in weird ways. You know, they did not meet personally, but Phil Dick did read a bunch converge in weird ways.
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You know, they did not meet personally, but Phil Dick did read a bunch of Jacques Vallée books in 1977 when he suddenly became interested in UFOs. Jacques Vallée wound up reading Phil Dick's ideas about Vaelis, but before his novel came out, in some letters that Ira Einhorn had shared with him. It's sort of a convoluted, weird story. But, you know, Jacques Vallée, again and again in his journals, refers to Phil Dick and how important Phil Dick's writings are to him. So here again, I feel like there's this convergence that they were both very likely are to him.
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So here again, I feel like there's this convergence that they were both very likely precognizing their encounters with each other's writings. And again, there's no way to prove this, but you can look at the evidence and make your own judgment. And anyway, I love the idea of juxtaposing these two figures from the 1970s, who are very important in my own, again, my own sort of development as a thinker about this stuff. I love the idea that they were in some kind of of development as a thinker about this stuff.
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I love the idea that they were in some kind of precognitive, obscure precognitive relationship to each other.
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Although you're focusing on creative geniuses, people like P.K. Dick, you're suggesting that this access to future information is available to all of us, not just the great geniuses. And you make a point of describing some of your own experiences along those lines. And if I remember correctly, you, I think it was you, reported you were ill. You had malaria. You had malaria. So, correctly, you, I think it was you, reported you were ill.
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You had malaria. You had malaria. So, you were in a, I guess, a delirium from malaria when the whole plot of a movie came to you.
You described it to your father and he said, oh, I know what you're talking about.
Right. Yeah, exactly. So, I was, yes, I had just come back from Papua New Guinea, where I failed to take, I was supposed to take my, I think, mefloquine or whatever the medicine is, for a couple of weeks after returning. And I failed to do that. And I wound up contracting for a couple of weeks after returning.
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And I failed to do that. And I wound up contracting malaria in Denver, Colorado, of all places. And yeah, in one of my, yeah, and the, you know, anyone who's experienced delirium knows that, you know, you just, these high fevers, and then these dreams that just won't end. They're just kind of like, it's like you're cycling through the same, you know, dream over and over. And it's kind of maddening, but they can be very through the same, you know, dream over and over.
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And it's kind of maddening, but they can be very interesting too, when you sort of wake up and if you even write them down or whatever. But anyway, yes, I was in this delirium and I was in this movie or I was seeing a movie. And it was actually, it was funny because the premise of this movie was that Adolf Hitler was actually not a bad guy at all. He was like just misunderstood. And this movie was this sort of this comic movie at all.
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He was like just misunderstood. And this movie was this sort of this comic movie about, you know, how Hitler was actually a really, this really nice guy who had just been misunderstood.
And, but it went on for hours, that same idea. And I can't remember the specifics, you know, the specific scenes or whatever. But, but yeah, the next morning I told my dad, who was a the specific scenes or whatever.
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But, but yeah, the next morning I told my dad, who was a psychologist by the way, about, about this, this dream, you know, and he said, oh, well, they made that movie back in the 1960s. It's called The Producers, you know. And it's like, I'd never heard, you know, I consciously never heard of The Producers, but my assumption was, well, maybe I somehow heard of it or something and I just forgotten. But anyway, I wound up renting, somehow heard of it or something and I just forgotten.
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But anyway, I wound up renting, you know, I went to the rental store the next week after I was recovered and rented The Producers.
And, you know, it's a wonderful Melbrooks, you know, if you haven't seen it, I know they did a reef make of it too, that's also good. But the original with Zero Mostel and, and Gene Wilder is just, just brilliant. It's so funny. And of course, much better than my, than my dream version, just, just brilliant.
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It's so funny. And of course, much better than my, than my dream version, but it's more or less what I dreamed. And it never occurred to me at the time that, that, that this was precognition. Again, I assumed, well, I must have somehow seen a synopsis of this movie or somehow knew, knew this movie. And it was only, you know, years, years later studying precognition and, you know, realizing, oh, I've had, you know, a lot of precognitive experiences in dreams and so on. And one of the common things that people precognize precognitive experiences in dreams and so on.
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And one of the common things that people precognize in dreams is movies. You know, they'll precognize a scene from a movie. They'll precognize, you know, you know, things in the media is our very common target of precognitive dreams. And so, you know, yeah, in hindsight, this was a precognitive dream about a movie I was going to see the next week, you know? But yeah, I've had, I've had those experiences. But like I said, see the next week, you know? But yeah, I've had, I've had those experiences.
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But like I said, you know, since I wanted, I wanted in this book not to focus on, you know, lesser known artists or people who I know personally and describe their experiences. I wanted it to focus on the big name, big name people that you can get online, you know, you know, you can see for yourself, you know, the, the work or, or whatever that I'm talking about. And, and where we have yourself, you know, the, the work or, or whatever that I'm talking about.
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And, and where we have a biographies, letters, diaries, and so on, where we have all that stuff. And I wanted to sort of, you know, to use these as public cases, essentially, for what I think all of us do when we create. And, you know, at this point, my gosh, just in the last, you know, month and a half, again, since my book came out, I'm getting inundated with emails, people telling me these, their own experiences, you know, of creativity that pans out in real life. And, and, you know, their own experiences, you know, of creativity that pans out in real life.
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And, and, you know, it's like, at this point, I could probably write a book of those, you know, those, those examples of lesser known, you know, artists or amateur artists and creators. But the idea is to create sort of a model, I think, of what happens when we have an original idea. Again, you know, going beyond art and innovation, you know, just what is thought, you know, what is it when I have an original idea, when an original idea occurs to me? What is that, you know, is that, again, is it, is it the, the wheels of cognition, just, you know, crunching our experience and churning out some, some result based on past experience? Well, that's what AI is, you know, the presumption of AI is that, is that new ideas are just remixing old ideas. But anyone who can, who looks at AI art that, is that new ideas are just remixing old ideas.
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But anyone who can, who looks at AI art right now can tell there's a big difference between what these, you know, language models and what, you know, AI tools generate. You know, they are taking, they are simply remixing other artists and, and, and, and other, you know, remixing what they've found on the internet and generating new stuff. And it's sometimes funny, but it totally lacks the soul, lacks the originality of something stuff.
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And it's sometimes funny, but it totally lacks the soul, lacks the originality of something created by an actual human, you know, which suggests that what we're doing is not what AI is doing and not what the, all the theories of cognition that have fed into AI are, you know, that, that, that that's, those models are, are wrong. There, this, this, there's this precognitive component that is, again, I think it's, it's gotta be, if it's, if it exists at all, it's gotta be central. You know, it can't just be this icing on the cake.
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Your, your point is that a, an algorithm is not capable of seeing into the future.
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Right. And it's not, and it's just not capable of being truly original. I mean, what, you know, you can see an amazing image created by AI, and sometimes they're like totally otherworldly in a sense, they're sort of alien because they're so wrong, you know, but, but they're not, I, I, I seriously doubt whether we're ever going to see something truly original and pathbreaking, like something you'd find in Kafka or, or, you know, a real flesh and blood creator who wakes up with a, this incredible idea that came in a dream, you know, and, you know, writes a novel or poem about it. It's not, we're not, you're not going to get that level of that type of, or poem about it.
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It's not, we're not, you're not going to get that level of that type of, of creativity and innovation from a machine that's just remixing stuff from the past and churning out some new synthesis, an algorithm, as you say, you're just not going to get originality. Well, I think that's the reason you brought up the ancient cave artists, because they were obviously going into the psyche in, in order to produce their, their creative products.
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The cave was sort of a metaphor.
Well, that's just it. I mean, the very, the very fact that these, these images, we find them in the deepest recesses of the earth. I mean, it just proves that they were not, you know, standing there, you know, with their thumb, you know, and, and, you know, painting what they, they saw in front of them. These were, this is, these are images from their, their memory at they, they saw in front of them.
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These were, this is, these are images from their, their memory at the very least, but from somewhere deep, you know, and, and the fact that they were probably doing, you know, making these paintings after dreams or visions accentuates that.
Another great writer you refer to as Virginia Woolf and you describe her as a shaman.
Right. I mean, she was in another, in another society, she would have been a shaman.
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You know, the, the precise nature of her, you know, she's always, she was always talking about her madness and there was, you know, she clearly had some sort of mental illness. People now think it was probably bipolar disorder. And she suffered sexual abuse as a child and, and she herself late in life traced her condition to that sexual abuse.
She was, but whatever the cause, you know, there may have been a genetic component to whatever the, whatever the cause and whatever the nature of her condition, she was precisely that type of person that is, you know, she was having visions. She was she was precisely that type of person that is, you know, she was having visions.
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She was seeing, you know, she would sort of see ghosts, hear voices. But she was also, you know, living in this sort of modern world where, you know, she didn't think she was really, these were really dead people talking to her. She had this understanding, this sort of modernist scientific side of her that was sort of in tension with this, you know, these, these hallucinatory experiences.
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And that tension, I think, you know, produced some, you know, just incredible, incredible works of literary, you know, art. Some of the most important of the 20th century, really.
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And, and, and demonstrably in at least a couple of cases, precognitive.
She was like one of the first, when I started this project, I, I knew that she would be central in the book, but she was actually the artist I knew the least well of all of the people in my book.
I had at that, when I started researching her, I had only read, let's see, To the Lighthouse and A Room of One's Own. And I think some of her essays at that point. So I did not know her work A Room of One's Own.
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And I think some of her essays at that point. So I did not know her work that well, but I just, I dived into, into her novels, especially her diary. I love writers' diaries. Honestly, I prefer, I would rather even read their diaries than read, than read their novels often. But anyway, like I dived in because I felt like I know, I know that she's, she's a novels often.
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But anyway, like I dived in because I felt like I know, I know that she's, she's a precog. I know it. And sure enough, I mean, luckily there's like really good books about her life, about her creative life and so on, where you can find this information. But of course, academic critics and biographers are like, not, you know, they will say nothing about these kinds of, you know, coincidences or whatever in a writer's life. So again, yes, like a wide open field you know, coincidences or whatever in a writer's life.
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So again, yes, like a wide open field for anyone who wants to, you know, do psychic deconstruction, as I call it.
But yeah, she's a fantastic example. And, and, and so similar to, to a lot of it, to the other, another thing I sort of like learned or discovered as I was doing, reading these biographies of artists. I mean, it's just, there's so many parallels in the lives of these highly imaginative artists.
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I mean, it's just, there's so many parallels in the lives of these highly imaginative creators. Like, you know, she's an exact contemporary of Franz Kafka and you could, and so many points in their, in their development as creators, as visionaries and so on, just align perfectly. You know, it's like you could, you could do a comparison of the two almost. But yeah, she's a fascinating, fascinating figure. Well, before we close this interview, let's yeah, she's a fascinating, fascinating figure.
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Well, before we close this interview, let's talk about a visual artist that you write about. If I recall correctly, his name is Michael Richards, the sculptor who perished at the 9-11 attack. Yeah. So, so his story is, is kind of incredible and his art is incredible. He was a sort of an up and coming black sculptor in New York in the last years of the millennium. And he produced this very striking body of work in the last years of the millennium.
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And he produced this very striking body of work about, on themes of, well, the subject of his work was sort of struggles of a black artist in a white art world that was always kind of knocking him down. Essentially, that was, that was sort of the, the central theme and he would, but he would represent this through motifs of flying and crashing. And so he had a lot, he had a lot of sculptures of planes crashing to the ground or crashing.
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And so he had a lot, he had a lot of sculptures of planes crashing to the ground or planes trapped in barbed wire or whatever, as well as a lot of sculptural self-portraits where he would cast himself in bronze and he'd be wearing the flight suit of a Tuskegee airman.
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The Tuskegee airmen were the pilots, the black pilots in World War II who distinguished themselves as aviators and everything like that, but they were still subject to the discrimination of, you know, black people in our society. And the word Tuskegee also calls to mind the Tuskegee experiments that were, black men were allowed to endure syphilis without treatment, you know, it was a horrible experiment. Their government ran to see the effect of syphilis. But, it was a horrible experiment.
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Their government ran to see the effect of syphilis. But, so he made all these sculptures of his, of himself having crashed to the earth or having fallen from a great height. But he made this one very striking sculpture in 1999 called Tar Baby versus Saint Sebastian, in which he's, he depicts himself standing vertically erect, levitating off the ground in a flight, again in a flight suit of a Tuskegee airman, and his body is impaled by all these airplanes. Okay, well in 2001, early 2001, he was awarded the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, these airplanes.
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Okay, well in 2001, early 2001, he was awarded the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, award, was awarding like group small cohorts of artists, studio space in the Twin Towers for use as their studios for like six months. They would, they would, they would work in the studio and then they'd be, they'd have a showing where, you know, people would come and view, view what they'd created. And anyway, he was part of the cohort of the summer, come and view, view what they'd created.
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And anyway, he was part of the cohort of the summer, sort of 2001 cohort. And he had stayed overnight, the night of September 10th, to stay up late working on his sculptures. And they were sculptures, apparently, of course they don't longer exist, but they were sculptures of, one of them was his torso with wings as a sort of fallen angel. And another one was of himself riding a burning meteor. Okay, but anyway, he was the one angel.
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And another one was of himself riding a burning meteor. Okay, but anyway, he was the one person in this cohort who was killed on the morning of 9-11. And, you know, that one, just that one sculpture of himself being impaled by planes as a, as a martyr, as a saint who was martyred by planes is just, you know, and, and your viewers can go online and, and look at this, you know, sculpture and, and, and see how striking it is. So yeah, the first chapter of you know, sculpture and, and, and see how striking it is.
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So yeah, the first chapter of From Nowhere is, is about Michael Richards and about, you know, many, many, many artists in various ways seem to have prophesied 9-11. It's, it's, you know, that's, that's its own topic almost on, on the internet. You can, you can Google 9-11 prophecy and, you know, just you're inundated with examples from popular culture, from comic books, from, from TV shows, you know, there's so many examples of this. But Michael Richards honestly is the most, most striking and there's so many examples of this.
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But Michael Richards honestly is the most, most striking and poignant example of this because he lost his life in the attacks and depicted himself as, as being martyred in these attacks. So, or by planes somehow. So yeah, he's a, he's an amazing case.
And so I sort of, I dive deeply into, unfortunately no one has written yet a biography of Michael Richards, but there's a lot of material online. I sort of culled together and sort of of Michael Richards, but there's a lot of material online.
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I sort of culled together and sort of delved deeply into his work and, and what it might mean and the ways his precognition seemed to have been operating. And you point out there seems to be renewed interest in his life and in, in his work as, as an artist. You know, on this channel, I interviewed Christopher Robinson, who was a psychic who had a dream about the Twin Towers and was desperately trying to communicate with the US government about this situation and actually met with officials in the Pentagon. Really? Yeah, there are, well, there are a ton of examples of, you know, tons of people the Pentagon.
(01:00:37)
Really? Yeah, there are, well, there are a ton of examples of, you know, tons of people dreamed about, you know, about the events in one way or another. I had a, a, a precognitive dream about 9-11 myself. And there's a, there's a painter in, in London. I doubt he's still alive, but his name was David Mandel. He was already a retired painter at that point, or art teacher at but his name was David Mandel.
(01:01:00)
He was already a retired painter at that point, or art teacher at that point. Anyway, he would paint his dreams and he had many precognitive dreams about IRA bombings and plane crashes, stuff like that. But on September 11th, 1996, so five days, five years to the day before 9-11, he has a dream about the Twin Towers in New York crashing down and he painted it and he went to the bank, his local Barclays Bank and had himself photographed with this painting under the date clock in order to have a date stamp, essentially. He did this with all of his under the date clock in order to have a date stamp, essentially.
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He did this with all of his paintings that he thought might be precognitive because he was so, he was having these things so frequently. Anyway, so you can even find a picture of this online. And then a few months later, he had another dream about, about the same event, but involving planes crashing into the buildings.
(01:01:48)
So, you know, very, you know, very strikingly, so many people had these kinds of precognitive experiences around 9-11. And that same is true of the Titanic disaster and, you know, big kind of explosive events in popular culture or the news. You know, you'll have like lots of people dreaming, creating art, whatever, that seem to prophesy these things.
Well, Eric Wargo, what a pleasure to be with you again. I want to highly recommend your book. IWell, Eric Wargo, what a pleasure to be with you again.
(01:02:18)
I want to highly recommend your book. I think it's really a masterpiece from nowhere. And you really explore that question of, oh, what does nowhere really mean? Right, right. Multiple meanings there, that word. But thank you. This has been a fun conversation as always. Thank you for being with me. And for those of you watching or listening, thank you for being with us because you are the reason that we are here.
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Book two in the New Thinking Allowed Dialogues book series is a tribute to parapsychologist Russell Targ celebrating his 90th birthday. You can now download a PDF copy or order a beautiful printed copy of issue six of the New Thinking Allowed magazine.
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