An unexpected story in the Financial Times, “Why Writers see the future,“  falls in line with the empirical idea that every event has a cause and because events are essentially a series of causes and effects,  that one thing does leads to another.  Accordingly, to someone who is aware of the many causes and effects the future is foreseeable.  Simon Kuper, author of the article, argues that  Orwell and Kafka weren’t seeing the future, but as writers  they were openly expressing latent angst or dreams, and in that way they were forecasting the future because others shared these ideas, which  essentially manifested the untold truth into a future reality.  From the article:

Why writers have this gift was best explained by George Orwell. Discussing a favourite novelist of his boyhood, H.G. Wells, he wrote: “A decade or so before aeroplanes were technically feasible, Wells knew that within a little while men would be able to fly. He knew that because he himself wanted to be able to fly, and therefore felt sure that research in that direction would continue.”

When writers are in the creative process, and the writing flows from the collective awareness directly through the pen and to the paper, without having to be channeled through the interference of what I call the interpretative device and all its filtering controls, (the brain) and all the requirements of social and cultural constraint are quieted, it is then that truth is written, time is lost and hope, love and despair know no boundary.

Writing from the collective unconscious, as Jung calls it, connects to the good and the evil and the many truths that are possible. The writing reveals the awareness of the writers of their greater existence and the timelessness of their thoughts, ideas and deeds. For those who wrote with particular clarity we shouldn’t doubt they did so in a natural state of Dzogchen lucidity; Hemingway and  his Old Man and The Sea to name one.