The Metaphysics of Persistence

The familiar saying "never give up" whispers an esoteric truth

“A new heaven is begun”: William Blake’s Satan, pencil and ink, c. 1790.

Motivational philosophies repeatedly emphasize perseverance. Next to a definite aim, “sticking to it” is the central theme of such programs. Aside from the commonsensical, if not seemingly banal, nature of this advice, what, if anything, backs it?

I am not about to cite social-science studies, which routinely bungle such questions, often due to cultural prejudice and poor structure / definition. I cast my bucket into deeper waters.

In short, I consider perseverance lawful. It is the single best guarantor, barring extreme countervailing conditions (which do exist), of personal deliverance. I received this insight from the work of twentieth-century spiritual philosopher G.I. Gurdjieff (1866-1949). Gurdjieff constantly pushed his students to surpass their limits of perceived strength.

In his posthumous memoir, Meetings with Remarkable Men, the teacher recalled episodes from when he and a band of followers fled civil war-torn Russia. In an epilogue, “The Material Question,” he addressed their desperate need for money.

In the summer of 1922, following a dangerous flight across Eastern Europe, Gurdjieff and his students reached Paris with razor-thin resources. Procuring an old estate, the Prieuré, to function as living quarters and school, Gurdjieff used every means possible to foster his circle’s financial survival.

“The work went well,” he wrote, “but the excessive pressure of these months, immediately following eight years of uninterrupted labours, fatigued me to such a point that my health was severely shaken, and despite all my desire and effort I could no longer maintain the same intensity.”

Seeking to restore his strength through a dramatic change in setting as well as fundraise for the institute, Gurdjieff devised a plan to tour America with forty-six students. The troupe would put on demonstrations of the sacred dances they practiced and present Gurdjieff’s lectures and ideas to the public. Although intended to attract donors, the ocean voyage and lodgings entailed significant upfront expenses. Last-minute adjustments and unforeseen costs consumed nearly all the teacher’s remaining resources.

“To set out on such a long journey with such a number of people,” he wrote, “and not have any reserve cash for an emergency was, of course, unthinkable.” The trip itself, so meticulously prepped and planned for, faced collapse.

“And then,” Gurdjieff wrote, “as has happened to me more than once in critical moments of my life, there occurred an entirely unexpected event.” He continued:

What occurred was one of those interventions that people who are capable of thinking consciously—in our times and particularly in past epochs—have always considered a sign of the just providence of the Higher Powers. As for me, I would say that it was the law-conformable result of a man’s unflinching perseverance in bringing all his manifestations into accordance with the principles he has consciously set himself in life for the attainment of a definite aim. [emphasis added]

As Gurdjieff sat in his room pondering their troubles, his elderly mother entered. She had reached Paris just a few days earlier. His mother was part of the group fleeing Russia but she and others got stranded in the Caucasus. “It was only recently that I had succeeded,” Gurdjieff wrote, “after a great deal of trouble, in getting them to France.”

She handed her son a package, which she told him was a burden from which she desperately wished to be relieved. Gurdjieff opened the package to discover a forgotten brooch of significant value that he had given her back in Eastern Europe. He intended it as a barter item to pass a border or secure food and shelter. He assumed it was long since sold or otherwise traded and never again thought of it. But there it was. At the precipice of ruin, they were saved.

“I almost jumped up and danced for joy,” he wrote. This was the lawful result of “unflinching perseverance.” As with all Gurdjieff wrote and said, there is at the back of his statement a level of gravitas and lived experience that makes this teaching warranting of deep pause. Things that might appear homiletic in the mouth of a lesser figure took on life-and-death seriousness from this teacher.

I suspect a metaphysical underpinning to Gurdjieff’s story that contains two (though not only two) prospects: 1) our concept of linear time is illusory, and 2) because of the first, what appears lost can be gained; what appears settled is anything but.

No Regrets

We often rue the 20/20 nature of hindsight as though it provides no payoff beyond melancholic wisdom of what could have been. But time, rather than an arrow moving in a sole direction as classical physics dictates, is, in fact, a matrix of infinitude through which we may, and always do, step in any direction via measurement, perception, observation, and continuance of effort after presumed fact.

Keep in mind that “feeling” something—such as personal independence or, for that matter, the earth’s motion, proves a poor guide to actuality. Writing in his second epilogue to War and Peace—in the concluding lines of the work itself—Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) noted humanity’s earlier necessity of acknowledging heliocentrism to save itself from absurdity, which he compared to modern man’s psychological predicament:

In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an unreal immobility in space and to recognize a motion we did not feel; in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious.

I believe that Western culture occupies a similar position today, more than a century after Tolstoy’s death. In order to save ourselves from absurdity, there must soon come acknowledgment of nonlocal and extraphysical aspects of existence and with it acknowledgment that time is not the restrictive linearity it appears.

“Cycles,” said esoteric Egyptologist R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz (1887–1961), “are the only way to beat time and space. Yes, the only way to beat those two is on their own ground. And cyclical consciousness places it there. Time is not like a river that flows by and in which you cannot step twice. Time is a spiral, and space as well, a spherical spiral. Can you imagine a spherical spiral? Try!”

Schwaller’s point is further suggested by the Tao Te Ching, in a passage at once familiar and elusive: timing is everything. Likewise, the symbol of the ouroboros or spherical serpent biting its tail. And the cyclicality of the I Ching (itself an esoteric time­ keeping device) as well as the Mayan Long-Count calendar.

I quote Schwaller from the extraordinary 1987 memoir Al-Kemi: Hermetic, Occult, Political, and Private Dimensions of R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz by André Vanden Broeck. I encountered this book in 2005 at a transition in my life. It fortified my conviction that occultism, at its subtlest, is intellectually sound. I was not always certain. In his 1947 essay, “Theses Against Occultism,” Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor W. Adorno wrote, “Occultism is the metaphysic of dunces.” He was wrong—yet he opened me to an idea that has expanded despite not being dwelt on: how intellectuals I admired growing up were, like the most ordinary minds, locked into judging category of query versus scale of quality.

I reencountered Al-Kemi nearly twenty years later and the day before my fifty-ninth birthday; the book evokes strange memories filled with vulnerability. Its mysterious author, Vanden Broeck, was then living in retirement at a hotel in Mexico managed by his son. His publisher gave me his fax number. “I do not participate in the internet,” Vanden Broeck wrote me. He sent a friendly fax in response to my initial outreach noting that he used to live on New York’s Hudson Street where my publishing company was then located. Thereafter he went silent. I had the impression, perhaps retrocausal in nature, that he did not wish me to write an expository appreciation of his book. His publisher, too, previously friendly, went silent. My path is not theirs. It is one of exposition.

Ancient logic is splitting one to get two. Modern logic is adding one to get two. Exposition is not l’expérience (which can also mean experiment) but, as Schwaller observed, it is next best. “The reason for this lack of contact,” André wrote in Al-Kemi, “holds no mystery: he [Schwaller] did not believe in language. Yet it is through language, both his and mine, that I discovered him.”

This article attempts—with clinical data of its own—to offer the language of Schwaller’s ineffable truth of time as “spherical spiral” versus progressing line. It is my effort to drag the ineffable into what literary critic Irving Howe—another intellectual hero growing up—in his 1986 The American Newness called “the shallows of the explicit.” That is the job I have assumed. It was offered and I accepted it.

Backwards Causation

The rational world we know quietly changed in 2011. This change came at the hands of Cornell psychologist Daryl J. Bem. The parapsychologist Bem is the reverse-­image of the founder of pseudoskepticism, stage magician and MacAruthur fellow James Randi (1928–2020). Both men grew up Jewish-misfit-boy magicians. Following a childhood of humiliation by bullies—forcing Daryl’s Denver family to move homes—he, like James, took refuge in stage magic. But unlike the faux-­skeptic, the grown Bem determined not to bleed the world of mystery but to study its contours.

After a long and distinguished research career, Bem suffered unprecedented professional and media evisceration when his 2011 paper in a scholarly journal detailed a decade of clinical evidence for precognition and retrocausality, in which future events cognitively impact present ones. [1] Bem seemed fated to repeat his early years, now at the hands of media bullies, from Slate to the New York Times, who, absent evidence and ignoring their critics (like me), deemed him the poster child for bad science. Their logic? The unfalsifiable hypothesis that precognition cannot exist because precognition cannot exist.

A decade on, however, the unthinkable occurred: Bem’s findings were widely replicated and proven confirmatory in a large-scale meta-analysis. [2] His work is physics­-meets-alchemy as evidence demonstrates that actions you take in the future affect the present. Just as Einstein, Schrödinger, and innumerable mystics taught: 1) time is not linear, and 2) all events are infinite at once. Professional skeptics, like a clunky Soviet bureaucracy, endure; but in 2011 the dialectics (if I may) of immateriality turned: realities of interdimensionality, psi, and humanity’s ineffable existence are the genie that cannot be rebottled.

Here are basics. For about ten years prior to publication, Bem conducted a series of nine experiments involving more than 1,000 participants into precognition or “time reversing” of widely established cognitive or psychological effects, such as memorization of a list or predicting / responding to negative or erotic stimuli flashed as images on a screen. Bem’s discoveries demonstrated the reach of cognition across boundaries of linear time.

Bem, as with other researchers, including the aforementioned Dean Radin of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), identified factors that seem to correlate with precognition, such as the body’s response to arousing or disturbing imagery. As Bem wrote of previous experiments in presentiment of stimuli: “Most of the pictures were emotionally neutral, but a highly arousing negative or erotic image was displayed on randomly selected trials. As expected, strong emotional arousal occurred when these images appeared on the screen, but the remarkable finding is that the increased arousal was observed to occur a few seconds before the picture appeared, before the computer had even selected the picture to be displayed.”

In one of Bem’s trials, subjects were asked to “guess” at random erotic images alternated with benign images. “Across all 100 sessions,” he wrote, “participants correctly identified the future position of the erotic pictures significantly more frequently than the 50% hit rate expected by chance: 53.1% . . . In contrast, their hit rate on the nonerotic pictures did not differ significantly from chance: 49.8% . . . This was true across all types of nonerotic pictures: neutral pictures, 49.6%; negative pictures, 51.3%; positive pictures, 49.4%; and romantic but nonerotic pictures, 50.2%.” You will note the slender but statistically significant effect referenced here, which is typical of parapsychology experiments. The measurable impact is not like Zeus throwing lightning bolts at earth but rather a detectable “signal in the noise,” which requires precise measurement and circumstantial cultivation.

Bem’s horizons, however, extended further. In the most innovative aspect of his nine-part study, the researcher set out to discover, in experiments eight and nine, whether subjects displayed improved recall of lists of words that were to be practice-­ memorized in the future:

Inspired by the White Queen’s claim, the current experiment tested the hypothesis that memory can “work both ways” by testing whether rehearsing a set of words makes them easier to recall—even if the rehearsal takes place after the recall test is given. Participants were first shown a set of words and given a free recall test of those words. They were then given a set of practice exercises on a randomly selected subset of those words. The psi hypothesis was that the practice exercises would retroactively facilitate the recall of those words, and, hence, participants would recall more of the to-be-practiced words than the unpracticed words.

Bem found a statistically significant improvement of recall on the lists of words studied in the near future: “The results show that practicing a set of words after the recall test does, in fact, reach back in time to facilitate the recall of those words.”

In experiment nine, this retroactive effect heightened when researchers added a refined practice exercise. (“A new practice exercise was introduced immediately following the recall test in an attempt to further enhance the recall of the practice words. This exercise duplicated the original presentation of each word that par ticipants saw prior to the recall test, but only the practice words were presented.”) The results improved: “This modified replication yielded an even stronger psi effect than that in the original experiment.” In general, future memorization heightened current recall.

Within a year of Bem’s publication, a trio of professional skeptics published a rejoinder. Playing off of Bem’s “Feeling the Future,” their paper sported the media-­ friendly title, “Failing the Future.” [3] The skeptics reran Bem’s ninth experiment. They wrote in their abstract: “Nine recently reported parapsychological experiments appear to support the existence of precognition. We describe three pre-registered independent attempts to exactly replicate one of these experiments, ‘retroactive facilitation of recall’, which examines whether performance on a memory test can be influenced by a post-test exercise. All three replication attempts failed to produce significant effects . . . and thus do not support the existence of psychic ability.”

The authors omitted a critical detail from their own database. By deadline, they possessed two independent studies that replicated Bem’s results. They made no mention of the opposing studies despite their preset ground rules for doing so.

As even his critics noted, Bem opened his database and software and provided instruction manuals free to anyone who wished to rerun his experiments. As of July 2020, Bem’s experiments (including the original trials) showed replication in a meta- analysis encompassing ninety experiments in thirty-three laboratories in fourteen countries. “To encourage replications,” Bem and his coauthors wrote in the abstract of their follow-up paper, “all materials needed to conduct them were made available on request. We here report a meta-analysis of 90 experiments from 33 laboratories in 14 countries which yielded an overall effect . . . greatly exceeding” the standard for “‘decisive evidence’ in support of the experimental hypothesis.”

Scholar of Western esotericism Richard Kaczynski further clarifies the matter in his impeccable 2025 study Mind Over Magick:

Bem and colleagues subsequently published a meta-analysis of ninety replications of his research, taking place in thirty-three laboratories in fourteen countries, resulting in the calculation of a small but significant effect size of 0.09. In statistics, effect sizes are often classed as small (0.30), medium (0.50), and large (0.70). Thus, the effect of psi is quite small, but statistically significant: p = 1.2 × 10^−10 (in other words, the odds of the results from so many studies falling this far from zero due to chance alone is one in 8 billion). [4]

Use It

I offer two anecdotes that suggest potential uses of backwards causation.

Recent to this writing, I heard from a professional Thai kickboxer, Spencer Hanley. Spencer’s fights appear all over digital media. At the time, he was training for a match outside Houston, Texas. He had nine days before the bout and wrote seeking advice on sharpening his mental game. Spencer felt good about his training but needed guidance to stay “on” mentally.

I suggested a simple exercise called the 30-Day Mental Challenge. It appears here. The challenge requires writing and signing a contract committing you for thirty days to directing your thoughts along progressive, positive, and productive lines. Spencer said he would do it. But his fight was only nine days away. He needed something more immediate. This is immediate, I explained. A trick appears in this exercise that allows you “to beat time and space.” And I guaranteed him that no one in the opposing corner was even thinking about it.

In short, I continued, there exists an entirely real prospect that what you do in the future, i.e., following a given event, may improve your cognition and performance during the event itself. Referencing Bem’s study, I noted that the clinician supplied recent, juried, and replicated data to support a retrocausal effect in cognition. As demonstrated in his lab experiments—and confirmed in largescale meta-analysis—future actions benefit present cognition. This is “impossible” insofar as super-position is impossible; particles (e.g., positrons) traveling backwards in time is impossible; surpassing lightspeed (e.g., quantum entanglement) is impossible; and, of course, ESP, so widely validated in bulletproof data, is impossible. If we eliminated everything that classical and Newtonian physics (if not Newton himself) deems impossible, we would erase world-class science, including quantum computing.

It must be noted that Bem’s trials focused exclusively on cognition. I consider it a reasonable experiment (or l’expérience) to seek similar benefit in physical or athletic ability. Plus, Spencer was seeking help with his mental-­ emotional preparedness, which is not unrelated to cognition. In any case, tendrils of connection are not strictly linear and experiments with retrocausality may evince results that violate standard perceptions of past, present, and future. Spencer vowed to try.

He won the fight. He dominated the match and appeared relaxed, good natured, and respectful toward his foe. Of course, he might have won anyway. But I like this wrinkle: for his entry song, rather than the usual death metal or drill rap many fighters choose, Spencer selected the pop classic “Heaven Is a Place on Earth.” One of the ringside announcers said: “The fact that he’s coming out to Belinda Carlisle makes me so happy.” Several weeks after the match, and before my writing about it, I received DM voicemails from someone I had never met or followed: singer-songwriter Belinda Carlisle. Other than a high-school crush (Jones Beach Theater on Long Island, summer of ’82) and enduring love for her music, I had no currency with the artist. In two detailed and thoughtful messages, she said she was reading my books and was a fan. Dying happy in 3, 2, 1 . . .

More recently, a friend wrote to say she was applying for a deeply needed and desired job at a New York City religious organization. She recounted:

I was on unemployment insurance and stressed TF out on a real first chakra level, the whole thing being on the same wavelength as shit I’ve been dredging and clearing for WAY too long. . . When I had that thought about the job, it felt like “that’s for me.” Or more like “I WANT THAT,” with maybe a twinge of “Why can’t I have that?”

In short, she was hopeful but nervous. Time passed and for some reason the job went to another person. She felt despondent. I offered the same basic advice given to Spencer with the wrinkle that she continue to hone her skills and presentation, and actively burnish her qualifications for the position. (She also gamely applied for other openings.) If it did not help, certainly it could not hurt. She agreed.

About a week later, she wrote me ecstatic. The boss “emailed me again and said that he had what he hoped was good news. It was the same job but with more hours. Amazing Grace Attack!!”

Pruning Shears

This episode calls to mind an exercise prescribed by twentieth-century mystic Neville Goddard (1905-1972), “the pruning shears of revision.” Neville advised revising a regretful event by imaginatively reliving it “from the end” of how you would like it to have gone. Hence, a disappointing encounter could be transformed into a positive one through entering and experiencing the “feeling state” and imaginative scene of a happy outcome.

Assuming the efficacy of Neville’s method, and in the light of the factors I have a cited, what is actually occurring? What if the antecedent event and its alternative each proceed in real but different dimensions? Your alteration forms or perceives another dimensional strand or string—try to imagine reality as an endlessly and concentrically expanding ball of twine—with the “anchor strand” from which you first experienced the event circumstantially untouched. Perhaps your perception “leaps” to or weaves another strand, every bit as real and contextual as the anchor strand. This occurs without upending your sense of self, history, or location because it is as real as the other outcome. But it is now localized and experienced by you as solid, solitary, and unchanging. You may no longer recall the negative event.

Another possibility is that what is touched, what is altered, is the emotional antecedent of the event. So that your anchor reality and the psyches of those you encounter within it—independent beings who crisscross within your perception of reality or intertwined strings, as you do within theirs—are leavened by alteration of experience neven though the forensics may be unchanged. Hence, if you consider a piece of evidence from the past, like an email, it may reflect the same incident, i.e., current reality evinces the same empirical160 practical magick markings. But because you wove or identified a new strand—you selected a different dimensional storyline and thus launched another among infinite timelines—there may exist a reverberation in which salving qualities either appear or are felt at the anchor point. (There is also, by this logic, another reality—one among an infinite number—where altered circumstance, either jarring or salving, is, in fact, experienced.) Within the reality of your inceptive thought point, the emotive ripple is felt. Healing can occur. The opposite is also true, so we must be careful when we consider the question of changing our past or when we idly revise, rerun, or reinforce scenes.

From the perspective of the figures in the famous Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment—the observer and the cat—they are singular, local, and concrete. But quantum laws dictate that this is only a point of view. In actuality, these figures, beyond their personal perspective, are multi-dimensional. So are you and me.

Neville equated revision with forgiveness. In his mystical reading of Scripture, to forgive does not mean to excuse but to re-vision an adversary or fractious encounter according to your ideal. I am not always emotionally or ethically certain that I want to undo or reverse an event so much as resolve it on my own terms. This is a fact of human nature with which we must honestly reckon. Do you want peace—or victory? Is one exclusive of the other? Our emotions always pull in the direction of authentic desire. Our inner or outer voices often conceal our motives; our emotions expose them.

I believe that there are times we actually want to retain negative situations, themes, or memories. For example, a perceived adversary may be someone for whom you harbor deep feelings, even love. What is love but the opposing polarity of hate? In both situations, another person shapes, marks, and even gives direction or purpose to your life. Love and hate are, in a sense, the same rhythmical and emotional continuum.

Relatedly, we may wish, without acknowledging it to ourselves, to retain, review, and even re-live a difficulty. That dynamic may also occur because the disturbing episode afforded us no emotional closure so we continually rerun it in search of resolve. Closure is a subjective feeling that arises from exiting a situation with some personally conceived degree of dignity, approval, or maturity. It is a restoration of self, objectively accurate or not.

Other times, you may savor conflict, which might provide a feeling of aliveness or even a thrill of having escaped. Such an attachment could present myriad or conflicting emotions. Fear and allure are also part of the same continuum. Finally, a trauma cycle may evoke feelings of injustice, which you fitfully, and often unconvincingly, use your imagination to fix or restore. This can lead to “what ifs?” in which you reimagine telling someone off or rescuing yourself from trouble through foresight or a quick response.

None of what I just described is revision in the manner defined by Neville. But nor am I exactly criticizing these approaches either. A wise man once said that justice is nothing but a mental idea, i.e., a necessarily limited or peripherally blind perspective based on selfishness or perceptual boundaries. I have abided his statement for years. I am unsure it is true, at least as an absolute. I believe that the mature individual possesses a valid scale of reference for how he or she is treated in life, and likewise has some conception of just and unjust scenarios pertaining to autonomy of psyche and body as well as ethical standards.

From the perspective of larger currents of reciprocity, an event may satisfy one’s thirst for justice, albeit indirectly. This may be what Nietzsche had in mind when he wrote in Beyond Good and Evil in 1886: “One has to repay good and ill—but why precisely to the person who has done us good or ill?” (From Walter Kaufmann’s 1966 translation.) This is a disquieting principle. Why should payment be extracted from an uninvolved pedestrian? To this objection the philosopher might reply: Why then should good tidings be granted to any such person?—as in the popular concept of “pay it forward.” Perhaps both consequences are unwarranted on an intimate scale but arise from matters beyond our perception. Nietzsche’s ideal may reflect the impersonal scales of life found within concepts of karma in Vedic theology.

In traditional Hinduism and Buddhism, karmic balances of equilibrium are unseeable, ineffable, not infrequently harsh, and occur across vast reaches of time. In that vein, I might reframe Nietzsche’s statement from “one has to repay” to “nature has to repay.” Both Nietzsche and the wise man I quoted earlier remind me that I must bow to limits of perspective. That said, I will venture this: When someone humiliates you, consider that it may be retrocausal from what that person is going to suffer. Time is a “spherical spiral.”

What I can conclude is that the effectiveness of Neville’s pruning-shears approach rests upon the authenticity and emotional clarity of the individual’s wish to undo knots. This is why, again and again, I emphasize self-honesty. It is the solution upon which every choice and possibility rests, at least insofar as we can be said to function independently.

Time Travel?

In season six of Better Call Saul, Walter White calls a “time machine” both a “real and theoretical impossibility.” His “theoretical impossibility” is based on the second law of thermodynamics. According to this law, backwards movement in time is a virtual impossibility. This is because molecules placed into an agitated state, or heat, cannot of themselves return to their previously static state. Just as Humpty Dumpty does not reassemble, entropy does not reverse.

But the master’s conclusion, as usual, must be viewed through the lenses of both classical and quantum physics, as well as understood for its subtlety. As author L.D. Deutsch notes in her pristine 2025 study Time, Myth, and Matter: “Einstein’s theory of special relativity does imply that all moments in time exist in some permanent location along the temporal dimension of the block universe.” (I cannot say enough to recommend Deutsch’s book: if I were a hiring manager, I would require every employee to read it so they would know what reality is.)

When referring to “time” we are referencing measurement of time versus the thing itself (whatever it may be); likewise we reference the unitary “arrow of time”—itself a measurement concept—to explain the near-impossibility of unbreaking an egg (again, the second law of thermodynamics). But time is more unruly and fantastical, as seen within quantum versus classical physics; Einstein considered the quantum field open ended or at least incomplete.

A series of conferences, “Quantum Retrocausation,” convened by the University of San Diego (USD) and American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) have been exploring the question of time reversal and retrocausality. As of this writing, papers from the latest in 2017 are collected in the American Institute of Physics (AIP) Conference Proceedings volume 1841, issue 1. [5] The preface by USD physics professor Daniel Sheehan notes:

Quantum Retrocausation III is the third in a series of international symposia convened at the University of San Diego under the auspices of the Pacific Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), to discuss the inter section of time and consciousness . . . Its focus was on a specific aspect of time—retrocausation—because it is here that time and consciousness intersect to beget several of the most compelling experimental mysteries and theoretical puzzles in physics.

Retrocausation is the proposition that the future can affect the present in a manner analogous to how the past affects the present via causation. It is well known that the fundamental equations of physics are time-symmetric—that is, they possess time-forward (retarded) and time-reversed (advanced) solutions—yet this belies our temporally asymmetric experience of the world, which progresses unidirectionally toward the future. Physics almost universally adopts this prejudice by discarding advanced solutions as “unphysical”. This symposium challenges this assumption.

Various ‘arrows of time’ have been recognized by physics for more than a century . . . These presume solely causation, thus precluding retrocausation. This is understandable insofar as the former helps provide the narrative structure consonant with our experience and physical theories; however, causation itself—and, by extension, retrocausation—has been philosophically suspect since at least the time of Hume. Causes are invisible, they are inferred from events but are not intrinsic to them; correlations, by contrast, can be directly measured. Causes are reasons given to well-established correlations, signposts for the stories we tell to make sense of the world and physical theory. Thus, retrocausation may be as illusory as causation—and perhaps just as necessary.

In QRC-III retrocausation was discussed within the context of quantum mechanics, a subject, not coincidentally, also largely defined through correlations, puzzles and paradoxes, e.g., Einstein’s bubble, Schrödinger’s cat, EPR, Wigner’s friend, Wheeler’s delayed choice, quantum eraser, interaction free measurements, and many others. While this list bespeaks the depth and richness of the field, it also evidences its theoretic incompleteness; after all, paradoxes are the seeds of truth, not its fruit.

This query seems to me the most exciting facet of natural philosophy today—and the springboard for a new era in understanding. Again, as Sheehan notes, “paradoxes are the seeds of truth, not its fruit.”

“Neville, I can’t quite go along with you. . .”

In considering this material, I am further struck by the prescience of Neville Goddard’s ideas. In one of the final lectures of his life, delivered April 3, 1972 (he died October 1, 1972), the mystic recounted a remarkable story from 1949, which, as is often the case with Neville’s accounts, bears the marking of truth. It elucidates the core of this query.

I’ll go back now to 1949. I was in Milwaukee, and I gave a series of lectures on the Bible. And this couple, he was a physicist, the head physicist, of Allis-Chalmers. They’re a huge, big manufacturing firm making these turbines, sometimes bigger than this interior, and he was the head of the chemical department, where they would send waters from all over the world, who bought the turbine, and he would analyze the water to discover the problem that they faced; because the water, as it came through the stream, gathered the chemicals, and then the chemicals deposited itself within the turbine; and so they would send him samples of the water, and then he would analyze the water, and then send them the solution to their problem.

Well, being a trained chemist, and the head of the department, he didn’t take issue with me, but he said: “Neville, I can’t quite go along with you because as a chemist, it’s in conflict with my training. You tell me that I can go forward in time, that you can move backward in time, that all things are, and everything is166 practical magick now, at this very moment. And yet you are telling me that you can make things change, and it is in conflict with my training.” We have a law known, said he, and we call it entropy. And entropy means that the past is fixed and unalterable. You cannot change it. If that could be changed, it throws everything out of kilter in my lab. I must know the past is unalterable, like braiding a lady’s hair, and the braided part, that’s fixed. The rest is the future, not yet braided. We are waiting to see how it will develop from the braided part because that is completely fixed and unalterable. And you tell me it is not; that the whole vast world exists now, past, present, and future, and that you can go into these sections of time, in a world that is finished. Well, I can’t go along with that.

That’s perfectly all right. I’m not a chemist; I’m not a scientist, so I cannot argue the point with you. I only know my visions. And I teach vision as I have actually experienced it. And I can go into these spots. I have gone into these places and the past has not passed away. And it’s fixed, as you say, but I’m quite sure one could go back and revise that past and change it.

And I can go forward into the future that I do know and set it up to walk across a bridge of incident; when I come to that point in time where I have entered, it takes on the color, the tone, and the reality that I assumed it to be when I entered that state.

Can’t be done. But he was a very honest man, as most of these fellows are; they’re trained to be honest. How else could they achieve what they do achieve in science unless they’re perfectly honest with themselves?

Well, in the month of November, I received a letter from him and he sent me the science newsletter dated October the 15th. And it was all about the positron. And the one who wrote it was Professor Richard Feynman, he was then a professor of physics at Cornell University. Twenty years later, only last year, they granted him the Nobel Prize in physics for that paper.* It took them twenty years to recognize what he said as theory back in 1949. And if I can quote it, this is it: “The positron is a wrong-way electron. It’s ‘wrong way’ in every sense of the word. It moves backward in time. It moves from where it hasn’t been and speeds to where it was an instant ago. Arriving there, it is bumped so hard its time-sense is reversed and it moves back to where it hasn’t been.”

Now that is not Neville speaking; that is Professor Feynman. For that, he got the Nobel Prize last year. He said: “It’s not only backward in that sense, but even its charge is backward. It’s a positron; it’s positive and not negative. And yet it is an electron.” [6]

When they first observed it or rather had it as theory, they did not want to admit it, but yet it fitted in with Einstein’s theory, mathematically, so they had to in some way accept it, but no one had ever photographed it. Then came someone who photographed it in their studies of the cosmic rays, and here it was the actual positron. It seemed as though two were developed at a certain point. And it wasn’t, said he. That one coming back, which was the positron, should, if it is bounced, it should be deflected and continue on its course, but deflected course. On the other hand, if it’s bounced so hard, it’s not deflected; it’s reversed and moves forward in a normal manner to where it hasn’t been.

Well, I told him that I was sitting at home, and I would go into a section of time, even this year, for instance. This is now only April. I put myself in Christmas. I would feel the stores are all dressed for Christmas. I could hear the music of Christmas, all the carols. I’d walk through Saks Fifth Avenue in New York City, go into Best, go into the other, and I would feel all that I would feel if it were true that it’s Christmas, that it’s the month of Christmas. And then when I feel that it’s all Christmas, then I would feel that things are as I desire them to be back in the month, say, of March or July, which was certainly not Christmas season. So, take a hot, hot day in July, and I’m feeling it to be cold, and snow on the ground, and all the dressings for Christmas. And then I would open my eyes, and bounce back, and shock myself because it seems so real to me that, when I came back and opened my eyes upon July, and it’s hot, I thought, now, are you kidding yourself? No, when I went forward in time quite normally, waiting out the days, the months to the month of December, things happened as I actually had assumed that they would. I went forward and determined, predetermined, what would happen.

Well, when he sent me this, he wrote a sweet, lovely letter saying, Neville, I must confess: I didn’t see it; no one saw it until Professor Feynman in his lab discovered this. But he discovered it by theory, and you tell me you know it by vision. You’re not a scientist, and yet all that you said to me—which I could not believe, and even this moment it’s difficult for me to believe, here comes the great professor, a theoretical physicist, and he is the one who wrote this paper. For that, he got the Nobel Prize last year. He worked on our atomic bomb; he worked on the hydrogen bomb. Then he asked the government to relieve him of the secrecy imposed upon him because of his position, and he came here to Caltech and taught at Caltech: theoretical physics. He said I want the freedom of imagination. I didn’t want to be confined with the secrets of government so that I could not express myself. Leave me alone, all in theory. So, he goes blindly on with his mathematics and his theory, bringing out these concepts, all theory. Well, mine is not theory.

As a further matter of testimony—this time yours—does retrocausality or backwards causation really work? You already possess evidence that it does. The exploration you just finished reading is a product of it. When I began this passage, I worried about having sufficient time to complete it satisfactorily, to plumb the possibilities, to refine its ideas. It occurred to me: continue after the fact; invest the written exploration with its claim in action. You can judge the result.

Afterword

On May 14, 2025, I heard from a thoughtfully skeptical reader who challenged the Bem experiments, which I wrote about in an earlier article. Our verbatim exchange follows:

Robin Doermann, May 14

The best attempt to replicate these results, found here, https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.191375, was unable to do so.

From the article here https://www.skeptic.org.uk/2023/03/the-transparent-psi-project-the-results-are-in-so-where-are-all-the-headlines/:

This study was carried out Zoltan Kekecs of Lund University and a large international team of collaborators (there are no less that 30 co-authors on their paper recently published in Royal Society Open Science). The results pretty conclusively demonstrate that the technique used in the original experiment is not capable of demonstrating precognition, if indeed precognition really exists. Strangely, I have yet to see any reports in the media of this negative finding.

The plain word summary presented in the paper is worth quoting in full:

"This project aimed to demonstrate the use of research methods designed to improve the reliability of scientific findings in psychological science. Using this rigorous methodology, we could not replicate the positive findings of Bem’s 2011 Experiment 1. This finding does not confirm, nor contradict the existence of ESP in general, and this was not the point of our study. Instead, the results tell us that (1) the original experiment was likely affected by methodological flaws or it was a chance finding, and (2) the paradigm used in the original study is probably not useful for detecting ESP effects if they exist. The methodological innovations implemented in this study enable the readers to trust and verify our results which is an important step forward in achieving trustworthy science."

Mitch Horowitz, May 15

The Bem experiments have failed—and proven replicable—dozens of times. Bottom line: his most significant trials proved confirmatory in a meta-analysis of 90 experiments (including the originals) in 33 different labs in 14 different nations, including in foreign languages such as Italian. Most of those trials, like the one you post, failed. But a substantial number cumulatively fell far below the P-value thus ruling out chance.

On a different tack, consider:

(a) no one experiment solves anything, especially in light of 90 previous reruns with an overall positive outcome;

(b) this supposedly super-rigorous new experiment had multiple errors of its own, as published here in an extensive correction (https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.231080);

(c) the raw datafile lists all of the contributed trials, and the first column in that spreadsheet is supposed to contain a timestamp; it doesn’t, meaning another aspect of the transparent study contains an error.

The purpose of this study was to develop a more rigorous methodology to study psi and other claimed phenomena. The irony is that the methodology, developed by multiple experts, still had problems of its own. So, again, no single experiment solves anything. What goes in the right direction, however, are multiple truly independent replications, because unless everyone is making exactly the same mistake, one hopes that all those replications will average out methodological problems. This isn't necessarily the optimal solution—I have my own criticisms of P-values—but it's the best approach that's been developed so far.

Notes

[1] “Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect” by Daryl J. Bem, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2011, Vol. 100, No. 3

[2] “REVISED: Feeling the future: A meta-­analysis of 90 experiments on the anomalous anticipation of random future events” [version 2; peer review: 2 approved] by Daryl Bem, Patrizio E. Tressoldi, Thomas Rabeyron, Michael Duggan, first published: 30 Oct 2015, latest published: 29 Jan 2016, last updated: 23 Jul 2020, F1000Research

[3[ “Failing the Future: Three Unsuccessful Attempts to Replicate Bem’s ‘Retroactive Facilitation of Recall’ Effect” by Stuart J. Ritchie, Richard Wiseman, Christopher C. French, PLoS ONE, March 2012, Volume 7, Issue 3

[4] Because I want constructive skeptics and general readers to have an idea of the effortful and earnest “number crunching” in parapsychology, I am reproducing verbatim an email exchange of May 27, 2025, with the author:

Richard, I am very interested in Daryl Bem's work and highlighted this graph of your excellent book. . .

Are these 1 / 8 billion odds based on the confirmatory studies (i.e., 18 out of 90); the P-value; or an overall aggregate of the confirmatory / non confirmatory studies in the sample? Or something else? Thank you!! -M-

* * *

Hi Mitch, The "one in 8 billion" figure comes from the p-value: It's the inverse of p=1.2 x 10^-10 = 8.3333 x 10^9.

I rounded to 8 billion because when you're dealing with numbers that small (or, inversely, large), we don't have many significant digits to work with. What follows the 2 in 1.2 can change the answer quite a bit in the hundreds of millions,

but that first digit, 8, is definite. All best, Richard

[5[ The table of contents appears here: https://pubs.aip.org/aip/acp/issue/1841/1

[6[ The paper to which Neville accurately refers is, “The Theory of Positrons” by R.P. Feynman, Physical Review, Volume 76, Number 6, September 15, 1949. In 1965, Feynman received the Nobel Prize for physics, shared with Julian Schwinger and Shin’ichirō Tomonaga, for their “fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles.” Neville’s talk appears in the anthology Neville Goddard’s Final Lectures (G&D Media, 2022), which I edited and introduced.

[7] Electrons carry a negative charge.