AIRCRAFT REGISTRY

AIRCRAFT REGISTRY

I have spent many hours hunting for lost aircraft. California is an especially dangerous environment. The state contains extremely rough country in between highly developed areas. A small aircraft that goes down in the rough may not be found for a long time. In many places rescuers would almost have to step on the remains of the plane to know it was there.

Moreover there are anomalous pieces of metal scattered everywhere. They include empty stock tanks, abandoned farm equipment and junk cars. A smashed aircraft can look like a heap of common industrial debris.

Therefore I have decided to create an Aircraft Registry. I can make a psi transponder. It is keyed to an individual aircraft and should be affixed to a structural member. If an aircraft is lost the owner will contact me and I will activate the transponder. It will act as a beacon for me or anyone else who has remote viewing skills or just a good intuition.

I will do the search myself at no charge. The subscriber must provide the maps (USGS if possible) and all the information available about the flight.

There is a one-time fee of $250 to place an aircraft in the Registry and obtain the transponder. There is no annual fee. The owner will be responsible for notifying the Registry if the aircraft goes missing.

Transponders can’t be moved from one aircraft to another, but the transponder from a previous aircraft can be exchanged for a new one for no charge.

If you own an aircraft you are well aware that $250 is small compared to the cost of maintenance. Think about the areas you fly over. Are they mountainous? Wooded? Would you like to be able to make your plane brightly visible to all remote viewers in case it needs to be found? It can be done.

Please direct inquiries to sthomson@dailyremoteviewer.com.

STORIES

STORIES

SOMETHING FROM NOTHING

When I was a student of magical practice my teacher recounted the following incident: he had gotten a job doing security at a coin fair. He strolled around the fair in plain clothes. Coin collectors had booths, and quite a bit of wheeling and dealing went on privately as well.

My teacher noticed one man badgering people and making unfair offers for their coins. He bullied them. A certain amount of this is normal, but my teacher thought this case extreme.

“There is one coin I know fairly well,” my teacher said. It was a Netherlands coin, a gold and copper mixture that was then worth about three thousand dollars. He identified it precisely but at this remove I can’t remember the name.

“I reached into my pocket and materialized one,” he said. “I rubbed it between my fingers until it was good and solid. Then I picked my moment, strolled up to him [the offending dealer] and showed him the coin.”

“This has been kicking around in the family for awhile. Is it worth anything? And I held it out to him.”

The dealer examined it and said “No. Look at this red here. It’s nearly all copper. There is hardly any gold. But I’ll give you twenty dollars for it as a curio.”

My teacher considered the offer and replied: “see that charity booth over there? Give them the twenty dollars, bring me the receipt, and I’ll give you the coin.”

The fellow did and they completed the transaction. Then he went away.

About forty-five minutes later he was back. He was livid. The coin had vanished. He accused my teacher of having cheated him, but he could not explain how. My teacher had not been anywhere near him. And, before the coin had disappeared he had shown it to his friends.

I thought about this, and then posed the following question: “If you had made a bridge in the same way you made the coin, could someone have driven a car over it during the time it was, ah, operational?”

My teacher thought about this for awhile. “I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t know.”

A long time has passed since then and I know the answer to that question.

The answer is yes. An object consists of all of its interactions with other objects. If you create an object you must make those interactions as well. During the time the coin lasted, it could have been weighed, assayed and photographed.

SHIPS

I once worked a nautical hit and run. It so happened that four fishermen took their boat out to fish in the waters off northern California. At the end of the day they dropped anchor and went to sleep in their bunks. During the night a shock woke them up. They made it to the lifeboats and survived, but they lost their ship.

It was insured, but this did not end the matter in the fishermen’s minds. The idea that another vessel struck them and did not stop to render aid bothered them. It was a horrific crime.

They hired a lawyer and set about trying to find the guilty ship. At the time the lawyer contacted me they were trying to sue the US Navy, which was engaged in war games only about 80 nautical miles away at the time of the sinking. The idea of a huge, blacked-out warship streaking hell-for-leather through the night, heedlessly ramming the little fishing boat, was grimly plausible. For its part the Navy denied everything.

I made contact with the fishing boat. “It was the Liberian,” it said. “The Liberian struck me.” I got a fragmentary image of the larger vessel. It was enough.

I moved my attention onto the other ship. It proved to be a large container ship of Liberian registry. The captain was a Panamanian.

The impact jarred the big ship. The captain, who had been in his bunk, came up to the bridge and inquired about it anxiously. “Did we hit something?” The crew said they didn’t see anything.

I reviewed the moments before the collision. Standing with the observers, on the bow, I found the little fishing boat nearly impossible to see even when I knew it was there. There was a momentary twinkling of tiny lights low in the water, lost in the glassy glitter of the waves. And then it was gone.

The waters off northern California are full of floating debris, including large logs. The Liberian’s captain supposed they must have hit something of the kind. If he had known his vessel had hit another ship, he would have stopped to search for survivors.

I gave this report to the lawyer, who passed it on to a

detective with a specialty in nautical affairs. And a discovery was made.

The place where the fishermen had dropped anchor was on the great circle route between Yokohama and San Francisco. The fishermen did not know this because they only had local charts. In effect they had dropped anchor and gone to sleep in the middle of a busy freeway.

A beacon collects the name of every major ship passing through the region. The detective obtained a list of names. If memory serves there were around 300.

I asked the lawyer to put each name on a separate 3x5 card, turn them over and shuffle them until he did not know which was which.

In his office he handed me the deck. I shuffled it again for good measure (name side down), and then reviewed each card. I suppressed the internal dialogue and pinned attention to the card and to the chain of events that caused it to be in my hand. The ship was connected to the name, and so I saw the ship. I had a kind of conversation with each ship.

It took some time, but I found the guilty ship and two other ships that knew about it.

By this time the Liberian had progressed down the coast to Central America.

The fishermen declared themselves satisfied and decided not to pursue the matter further. I would like to have had a photograph of the Liberian and to have seen the transcript of an interview with the captain, but the ending was satisfactory. It was an interesting experience.

For years after that when the ships I had visited came to local port, they would say hello to me.

Ships are sentient. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

THE FRIGHTFUL THING

Quite a few of my telephone conversations start with “I’m going to tell you something that sounds crazy, but please don’t hang up on me. I’m not crazy.” Often people sound frightened, and they usually break into the story periodically to plead with me to hear them out.

One of my most interesting cases began this way. A young couple contacted me. They sounded traumatized and had a tale of woe.

They had married against the wishes of the girl’s father. He belonged to a fundamentalist Christian church. Soon after the marriage the couple felt that the congregation was harassing them with bad thoughts and hostile prayers.

They found a book on helping yourself with white witchcraft. It had a method that was supposed to relieve a psychic attack. It involved consecrating a doll in the name of the abuser, wrapping it in red ribbon while saying a chant, and burying it in the earth.

They followed the directions carefully. “Then things really fell apart,” the boy said dolefully. They were besieged by nightmares and unnerving synchronicity. Life became increasingly bizarre. It was terrifying.

I knew what their problem was. At that moment I was eye to eye with a gigantic bird with eyes of lightning. Its feathers were brown and cream. It was a formidable being.

How had this happened? I walked them through a list of diagnostic questions. Had they profaned any Native American shrines or holy places? No, we would never do that. Had they traveled outside the country? No. Had they offended any sorcerers or brujos? No, we try not to offend anybody.

Stumped, I finally asked “well, where did you bury the doll?’’

“On the Apache reservation.”

There must have been rather a long pause. Then the voice on the phone said timidly “Did we do something wrong?”

Many people do not know that Native American consecrated ground is powerfully protected against any foreign magic. And while westerners think it natural to bury corpses in the ground, this is by no means a universal custom. Numerous tribes interred their dead on scaffolding raised above the Earth.

The couple had buried a symbolic little Anglo corpse with a piece of working Anglo magic attached to it (the restraint embodied in the red ribbon and the chant) on consecrated ground. It was hard to imagine a more comprehensive trespass.

I talked with Thunderbird. What they had done was bad, but these harmless kids were hardly the kind of problem he had been charged to deal with.

We worked out a few days’ truce. The couple threw a shovel in the back of their van and drove back to New Mexico to dig up the doll. I told them to fill in the hole and sprinkle a few turquoise bits by way of apology.

“But shouldn’t we stay there for a while and try to make friends with the spirits?” they asked.

Thunderbird and I both flinched. “No,” I said. “Just do it and leave before anything else happens.”

PENTECOSTAL FOLLIES

Once I was contacted by a man who, if memory serves, was actually a Pentecostal minister. He explained that he had belonged to a small congregation. His sexual orientation became an issue and he left the group. They started sending him abusive and destructive thoughts. It made his life miserable and he was desperate to have it stopped.

I considered his story and checked via remote viewing to see whether it was true. It was. The malign intention projected by the group was piled up around this man’s space like deep drifts of black snow.

The idea of Pentecostals practicing black magic was novel. I asked him what they did.

He explained that when someone left the group, the custom was to place that person’s picture (or some token associated with him or her) in the center of the group. Everyone would focus on it, praying for horrible things to happen to him so that he would turn back to Jesus.

Well.

I told him how to dispel the ill-wishes they had sent and defend his space against any of that in the future.

What they had done offended me. I advised him to reverse the effect, which would punish the group for their behavior. He declined. Shame-facedly, he admitted that he himself had participated in group cursing rituals in the past.

THE OWL

Owl medicine is strong and dark. And so it proved to be in this instance.

When I meet with students, our calendar includes some items we do for simple curiosity. Sharing the awareness of a selected animal is something we often do. It is possible to have all the thoughts, sensations and emotions of the animal, without the limits of human senses.

On the evening I refer to, someone wanted to visit an owl. I concurred. I wanted to experience how the owl felt when it ate a mouse. The student who had proposed the owl, who would be the pilot for that sequence, agreed.

When it was time for that item the pilot took over and projected our awareness into the owl. I remember it as being feathery— bristling, actually--and focused in a one-dimensional way on predation.

It spotted a mouse about the time we climbed aboard. The owl struck like a thunderbolt. That mouse did not have time to wonder what had happened to it.

Then the owl swallowed the mouse. That moment is what I had specifically asked to experience.

I had thought to share a moment of feral triumph. But it wasn’t that way at all. Instead I experienced the owl’s orgiastic pleasure in the sensation of wet mouse sliding down its throat.

It was the most disgusting sensation I have ever had. If I want to kill my appetite all I have to do is recall that memory.

Be careful what knowledge you wish for. Especially where owls are concerned.

ACTS OF WAR

Imagine my surprise late last year when I essayed a minor act of remote viewing and discovered that I could not do it.

Someone had psi-blocked me. I was dumbfounded.

The block was levels below my effective capability. I saw who had done it, how and why. The perpetrator, whom I will not name, was an abrasive egotist with whom I had had many arguments on an email list. Unable to tolerate intellectual competition, he finally had me kicked off. I had forgotten all about him until recently when he surfaced as a consultant on a project in which I had an indirect interest.

I wasn’t pleased when he turned up but it never occurred to me to make a pre-emptive strike. My philosophy is live and let live.

His presence was irritating but it wasn’t a threat.

Now he had done this.

After due consideration I removed the block and slapped it down over the perpetrator.

He was quite unhappy. I endured astral whining by his wife (“Why are you doing this to us?”) and visits by some of his friends.

One of them was noteworthy. He had a strong psychic presence with a Native American resonance. He appeared on the astral to assess the situation. I pointed out that it was a shooting (psi) war and I had not started it. Did he want to join in? Take a number.

He declined to take part. It was a parochial squabble and he felt he had better uses for his time.

The perpetrator has had my email address all along. He could have contacted me with an apology for the psi block and a promise never to trespass again. If he had done that I would have had to at least think about taking the block off.

He hasn’t. Instead he’s spreading the news far and wide about his misfortune. He was innocently strolling the astral, minding his own business, and then¼

Perps often do that, which is the reason it is a good idea to check the facts before accepting a case.

A HAUNTED HOUSE

Years ago when I lived in Texas I rented a room in a house. The owner was an elderly woman who had been a widow for some years.

Soon after I moved in I discovered that the house was a zoo of astral life forms. Things that weren’t rodents squeaked and went bump in the night. There were black moving shapes that vanished when you looked at them directly. Something infested the attic that made me unwilling to go up there even in broad daylight.

They began harassing me, popping out of the astral in front of my face and screeching. They did small acts of mischief in the kitchen. They woke me up at night by making noise on the astral.

You may have read about the ghostly sound of invisible feet walking down the hall. I was treated to this too. It was a man’s heavy tread, not very fast. It started outside the landlady’s bedroom and went down the hall toward the living room. The floorboards creaked under the weight. It was an eerie feeling to look into a fully lighted hall and see absolutely nothing while the phantom visitor passed by.

One day in early afternoon I was lying on my bed reading. The landlady was napping in her room. The footsteps started back at the end of the hall. They came down the hall and then entered my room, passing through the closed door as though it did not exist. They stopped right next to the bed. There was absolutely, positively nothing to be seen.

This was the last straw.

That night I waited until the landlady was asleep and called a meeting of everything in the house. It was something like being in an auditorium where a large audience was sitting in the bleachers, mostly in shadows. They tittered, elbowed each other and made derogatory remarks about me.

I got their attention and complained about their behavior: the nightly commotion on the astral, deliberately scaring me and soforth. This had better stop, I declared, because if I have to move out on this account I will make sure that the next tenant is a hardshell Southern Baptist who will exude noxious thoughtforms and make the house uninhabitable.

Then they all went “Gee, we didn’t know you could see us.” “We were just having fun.” “We didn’t mean any harm.” “We’re sorry.”

I never had a bit more trouble with them. The ghostly footsteps never returned.

Of course, I could have done a formal exorcism and kicked them all out homeless out into the void, but it wasn’t necessary. Besides, the old lady liked them.

USING MAPS

MAPS

In COORDINATE REMOTE VIEWING geographical coordinates, a name or anything else that uniquely identifies a real thing or event is written on a piece of paper. The paper is folded with the name inside and handed to the remote viewer.

The viewer stills the internal dialogue and places attention on the difference the paper makes in his/her possible states. When I do it I think of obtaining entry to a chain of events that led to the piece of paper being in my hand. And the event or thing referenced by the coordinates appears in my mind’s eye.

Maps can be used for remote viewing in a very similar way. The practice is conventionally called map dowsing, but as I do it is really more like coordinate remote viewing.

The best maps for this purpose are accurate contour maps such as those made by the US Geologic Service.

I begin by suppressing the internal dialogue. I visualize my aura as an invisible envelope of force that surrounds my hand like a glove. I focus attention on the aura right under the tip of my index finger and brush my finger very lightly over the map, sometimes not actually touching it at all.

In mind’s eye it is as if I am skimming over the surface of the land. I can see each pebble and bush, and if I want to I can look under the ground.

I can also image past and possible states. If a given piece of land is the subject of real estate speculation, I will perceive the attention attached to that place.

The same process works with building plans, equipment schematics and engineering diagrams, provided that they are accurate representations of something that really exists or could exist. If there is a mechanical problem, such as something that causes a bad handling characteristic of an aircraft, I will be able to see the cause.

It takes time to develop the skill to a high level, but I’ve shown basic map dowsing to children and they catch on immediately

POWER EXPERIENCE

POWER EXPERIENCE

I believe that no one achieves his or her maximum psi potential without power experience.

We live in a cocoon of expected, familiar scenes and events. Power experience is a challenge to reality as we know it. It may arrive in many ways.

Most power experience is frightening and unpleasant when it is actually occurring. It is only afterward that we understand and appreciate the gift.

One achieves insight and power (the ability to perceive and do things that are impossible in ordinary reality) when something rips a hole in the cocoon. It might be anything, from a near death experience, being abducted by aliens or an unanticipated encounter with spirits. Whatever tears a hole in the cocoon liberates you from the tyranny of the known, and thereby gives you power.

One of my favorite images is an old Far Side cartoon. It’s morning at the bear household. Mrs. Bear is on the porch looking angry. Mr. Bear is standing on the walk with a hangdog expression. There is a tag in his ear. A number has been shaved into his fur and a hypodermic is stuck in his posterior.

Mrs. Bear says: “This better be good.”

Power experience is uncomfortable, it is impossible to explain to other people, and it changes your life. I have had people ask me how to undo their power experience so they can go back to living the life they led before. Alas, I don’t know how, and I don’t think it should be undone. We are here to transcend our limitations, are we not? If fate gives us the opportunity, I think we should use it.

When people consult me about such matters I teach them integration strategies and other means of coping with the avalanche of strange experience that has been dumped on them.

One of the traits power experience confers is the ability to perceive and think beyond the individual and personal. The person has had a glimpse of parts of the universe that those confined in ordinary reality never see. And nothing is the same, ever again.

THE ALPHANUMERIC ISSUE

THE ALPHANUMERIC ISSUE

REMOTE VIEWING cannot reliably produce alphanumeric information unless special protocols are employed.

Suppose the viewer locates a house where a kidnapped person is being held. The street sign will ordinarily be a blur because the street could have been named any number of different things. The viewer might be able to say that the street name is a tree and has three or four letters.

Once in a while a good projection yields a startlingly clear result: “it’s on Elm Street!” but don’t count on it.

There are various strategies that can refine the observation to narrow down the location. Simply describing the façade of the building and its relation to local landmarks may be enough.

The alphanumeric problem (i.e. the superposition of possible states) is the reason one can place attention on the numerical entry in an astronomical catalog and perceive the unique object or group of objects it refers to, but one cannot view a space object and expect to obtain its catalog number. It could have had many, so you will see a blur.

With practice it is possible to reason quite well without the use of words. It is important for a viewer to learn to do this because words are the means by which ordinary reality is sustained. Remote viewing does not function in ordinary reality, so the viewer must learn to suppress the internal dialogue.

One of the things I do with students is to place an object in a coffee can, put the lid on and put the can on a shelf across the room. When the students file in, notepads in hand, I point to the can. “Look inside this coffee can and describe what you see.”

They remote view the can in silence and everyone scribbles notes. When they are finished, each person reads his or her notes aloud. (This is psychologically important because it cures people of the fear of being wrong and helps them develop confidence in their own perceptions.)

Then the can is opened and the object is passed around and discussed.

There is a trick to being able to do this kind of viewing successfully. You will be able to examine the object at your leisure as long as you do not name it. Once you name it to yourself, you will be unable to perceive anything except that word. Whatever you saw right up to that point is all the information you will get.

Don’t believe me? Try it yourself.

WHAT REMOTE VIEWING CAN DO

WHAT REMOTE VIEWING CAN DO

I have spent a little time explaining the limitations of remote viewing as I understand them. Now for the advantages:

You can be present in mind in virtually any place in the world, and with a few simple precautions no one will notice you. If you would like to know what someone thinks about something, you can share his thoughts. If you are interested in a piece of technology he is familiar with, you can get him to explain its workings to you in detail. Because the exchange is not mediated by words, there is no language barrier.

You can “see” things that ordinary human eyes will never be able to see. Extremes of pressure, hard vacuum and deadly radiation will not affect you. The more knowledgeable you become about the universe we live in the better viewer you will be.

You will be able to perceive the ramifications and future consequences of events occurring in the present.

You will be able to perceive radiation, gravity gradients and many other things.

With practice you will be able to utilize any sensory mode you choose, including some for which we have no words. You can tour the White House and compare the coffee served to low level staffers and security personnel with what is presented in the Oval Office.

If you have the patience to develop a specialized technique, you can share the consciousness and sensations of animals. (I teach this as a shamanic technique, but it is basically what Aleister Crowley called “assumption of the godform.” I suppose he never used it to learn more about animals.)

You (your attention) need not remain on Earth. You will be able to tour the entire universe and enjoy its infinite beauty and complexity.

LEARNING PREFERENCES AND ETHICS

LEARNING REMOTE VIEWING

Single pass direct perception can be learned in about a half hour if the student follows the directions. –Is that too much to ask? Sometimes. We are taught in childhood that acts of mind are “imaginary” or unreal, and that ther no rules that apply to thoughts. This is incorrect. Acts of mind are acts of attention provided there are some possible states to pay attention to. They are real acts with real consequences.

If I may digress, some of the best students I’ve ever had were engineers. They followed the instructions. (Give an engineer a checklist and he’s a happy man.) They didn’t expect to get results without putting in effort. They reported truthfully on their mental states. And they were brave.

My most difficult students were New Age psychologists. Many of them did not actually believe in the existence of objective reality. You’ve heard “you create your own reality.” Well, these folks literally believed in that. Therefore, while what I said about acts of mind was true for me, they felt it wasn’t necessarily true for them. They also did not report accurately on their mental states. Psychologists lie to themselves a lot more than engineers, I observed.

--How could I know about someone’s mental states? Observing human attention in all of its configurations is a skill of long standing, and it is essential to me as a teacher.

AUTONOMY

Remote viewing is easy to learn provided the student has not already internalized an incompatible procedure. Once a psi accessing mode has been developed into a habit, it can prove difficult to change.

Autonomy is a key issue. In some schemes the viewer enters a passive trance state and waits to be given direction. The viewer relies on another person to select the target and control the experience. In extreme versions, the viewer never directly perceives the destination. He or she produces fractional images and sometimes symbols, which are given to someone else to collate and interpret.

Many of them have told me that they cannot select their own targets, or destinations. This must be done for them by someone else. If they are ‘front loaded”—provided with information about the target—they will be unable to remote view it.

This problem does not occur in direct perception. We can remote view anything we wish without permission or help from any other person. Our skill set begins with suppressing the internal dialogue and goes on from there.

It is hard to switch from a non-autonomous to an autonomous psi accessing mode. People who have learned to relinquish autonomy have a difficult time getting it back.

It is entirely possible that they don’t want it back. Perhaps they feel more comfortable with someone else calling the shots.

Whom would you trust to control your acts of mind? If the answer is a resounding “nobody but me!” you would probably like the direct perception approach. But if the answer is “a cool intelligence agent,” you would be happier with a non-autonomous method.

Now let’s compare the results. Check out some of the other remote viewing websites. Look at their raw session data. You will see batches of isolated perceptual elements, symbols, etc. Some of them actually use spreadsheets.

By contrast, remote viewing by direct perception is as good as being at the scene, with the saving grace that (if you know what you are doing) nothing there can hurt you, and (with a few elementary precautions) nobody will see you.

There is really no comparison in terms of the amount of detail that is recoverable. For example, a specific scientific question can be addressed via direct perception even though that requires a significant amount of prior knowledge about both the target and the question.

The concept of a thought experiment takes on new significance when the viewer can review the possible states. “Which of these features is responsible for the tendency of the aircraft to destabilize during a specific maneuver?” It is not a difficult question.

ETHICS

Some ethical considerations obtain. I do not believe that any onus is attached to acquiring knowledge by remote viewing, although I think it is rude to remote view your friends and loved ones. Should you learn a secret, you are responsible for what you do with it. You should never reveal anything without considering what the consequences may be, not just for you but for other people.

Acts of mind are, first and foremost, acts. They merit the same ethical standards given to physical behavior.

In that connection-

When I was first learning arts of mind a rare event occurred. I met a dark side practitioner on the astral, in circumstances that allowed us to have a conversation in spite of our mutually antagonistic alliances.

I prize the encounter because I learned something.

I asked him why he did evil. He scoffed at me. “When I want something I go for it,” he said, “and I take down anyone who stands in my way. But except for that, if someone doesn’t interfere with me I let them alone.”

“But you” he went on scornfully, “your ambition far exceeds mine. You want to make your ideas the standard for everyone else’s life. You want to inflict your good intentions on the whole world.”

It was a bad tasting pill but it was the truth. I finally understood why my teacher insisted on respecting other people’s right of choice. Girding up for battle and setting out to mop up the local dark side practitioners was wrong, not because we couldn’t do it but because, unless they trespassed against us or someone who asked for our help, we did not have the right to interfere.

Enforcing our concept of right and wrong on other people without their consent is simply tyranny, indistinguishable from what the dark side does.

Respecting another person’s power of choice does not at all equate to pacifism. One can return a psychic attack to its perpetrator with substantial force. Depending on the strength of the attack and some other factors, the return might even be fatal for the attacker. But his choice has not been taken away. The defender has merely altered the consequences.

Walk softly, behave ethically, and try to abandon egotism. It is a big universe. It can be a wonderful place if you approach it correctly.

ABOUT REMOTE VIEWING

REMOTE VIEWING

Remote viewing denotes the act of acquiring knowledge about events in a distant place (or time) independent of ordinary means. The term was coined during the groundbreaking SRI studies which established remote viewing as a phenomenon known to science. Before the invention of this term what we now call remote viewing was known as astral projection.

Currently, a number of approaches and purported instruction schemes are available on the internet. Some claim to be the only “real” or the only “true” remote viewing methods. Some entail significant sacrifices of autonomy, an issue I will address separately.

Instruction in these methods may be quite expensive. Some make statistical claims of accuracy.

As a trained statistician, I can assure you that no statistic is meaningful without its context. These claims are largely being made by individuals who do not understand statistics and who do not have a background in scientific research.

Excellent statistical support exists for remote viewing and associative remote viewing. What I object to is the ignorant use of a statistic out of context as a sales tool.

Some of these individuals claim to have worked for the United States government. This may be true, but it is not necessarily a recommendation.

Before spending any money for instruction in remote viewing or to hire someone as a consultant, I recommend that you request a verifiable track record. Anyone who cannot or will not provide this should not be taken seriously.

In my opinion the best kind of verifiable track record is made by viewing real events in real time, in advance of confirmation via news articles or other objective means.

Anyone can claim to have a track record. A genuine expert should be able to create one starting at the time you make the inquiry. I don’t mind discussing my past track record, but I am willing to create one de novo if the situation calls for it.

HOW IT WORKS

Remote viewing as I teach it it is a composite of skills. The viewer must be able to suppress the internal dialogue. See COUNT. Attention is then placed on the destination or target. The viewer images the target, developing a mental picture. Without words, the viewer analyzes his perceptions and makes mental notes. Afterward the interface with the target is terminated in an orderly, controlled way.

Observation is a physical interaction between the viewer and the destination. The link is two-way. Interaction can go well beyond the simple act of observation. Consequently, the remote viewer must control the interface and must be able to terminate it properly and quickly should the need arise.

Targets, or destinations, vary in the technical difficulty they present. They also differ in the potential danger to the viewer.

Example of easy non-threatening targets: deep space objects, such as stars, galaxies and nebulas. These objects are large, beautiful and easy to see. They are complex and intellectually interesting. If you are at all curious about how the universe is made you will find their study rewarding.

Examples of technically challenging and potentially dangerous targets: UFO cases and traditional adepts such as sorcerers, brujos and shamans. Exotic domains, such as Tibetan Buddhism, should be approached with caution.

Keep in mind that many phenomena which have been recorded in myth and folklore are real. Common sense and politeness are highly advisable when you set out to become an astral tourist. (By the astral I mean the wider universe, that is, everything that is outside the little shoebox of ordinary reality.)

Challenging targets require a much higher skill level than easy ones.

Examples of targets that should be avoided: trivial and hypothetical questions. They have no training value and they are unsuitable, as you will see.

A trivial target is something of no intrinsic interest: “tell me what is in my desk drawer.” This is a mundane question, and the questioner already knows the answer. It is not worth the effort. Trying to answer this kind of question is like trying to pick up a single grain of sand. It is hard to be accurate, and if you succeed, so what?

”My soul mate” is a hypothetical target. The question may have multiple answers in the course of a lifetime, or the answer may not exist at all. There is no collection of possible states that reliably corresponds to it, so remote viewing cannot give a meaningful answer.

A good remote viewing question needs to be clearly defined, important to someone and answerable in principle.

THE PHYSICS BEHIND REMOTE VIEWING

THE PHYSICS BEHIND REMOTE VIEWING

We live in a complex present, a permanent now in which everything that can happen does and it all happens at once. Past, present, future and possible events are all around us, and they are just as real as the events we happen to notice and remember.

Every interaction between one real thing and another is mutual in that the interaction changes both observer and observed, both actor and what is acted upon.

For our purposes a real thing is defined as something for which there exists a collection of past, present, future and possible interactions with other objects.

In ordinary reality, which is merely a set of beliefs about reality, only one thing happens at a time, the past never changes and no one can see the future. To enter a room you must use the door, and remote viewing, of course, is impossible.

Fortunately, these beliefs do not describe the real world. I recommend that you take time to read the scientific literature about remote viewing, beginning with the seminal IEEE article by Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ. Dean Radin’s work in meta-analysis probably requires some familiarity with statistics to be fully appreciated, but is well worth reading. The scientific evidence in support of remote viewing and psi in general is as strong as the evidence for any other phenomenon in science.

In our era, passionate beliefs far overshadow the quest for truth. If you, the reader, have the passionate belief that psi does not exist, it is a waste of time for us to argue about it. I don’t feel the need to convince you of anything. If you are curious, though, I encourage you to read on.

Returning to the paradigm, the past, present, future and possible all coincide in the now. Every interaction—we could just as well say “observation”—changes all parties to it because their possible states impinge on each other. The collection of possible states (yours, mine, my cat’s, everything) continually evolves.

Among other consequences, this means that the past is not fixed. Your memory of what took place in the past may not agree with other people’s recollections, and places you revisit may not look quite the same.

This line of reasoning suggests that physical constants can also change. I am confident that they do.

As children we learn to discriminate the possible states using various criteria. We learn that a certain collection of states is called objective reality. In this collection gravity works and we receive only sense data derived from the immediate environment. We arrange everything that ever happened to us on a timeline because linear time is one of the rules of ordinary reality.

Linear time is not one of the laws of the universe because there is no ultimate clock to keep track of it. There never can be, because the collection of possible states is always changing. There is no single standard against which the passage of time can be measured.

Children are taught the difference between the past and the future. They need to be taught because the possible states are different in content but not in kind.

When we remember a past event, we fish it out of the collection of possible states. “When we lived in Birmingham we had flower wallpaper in the dining room…” The fishing expedition returns a batch of possible states in which this was so.

The collection can be further refined: “…and I fell off the swing in the park.” The imaging capability of the brain returns

a visual image of the incident, which is considered a memory.

Memory is plastic. It is not like a book that we always carry with us. It changes from time to time because reality changes. As the collection of possible states evolves, what may have been a majority state in the collection (and therefore easy to pay attention to) can be reduced to minority status. The world may come to remember things differently than you do, but this does not mean that you are wrong. We can each remember in detail something that could have happened to us but in ordinary reckoning did not.

(Remember, ordinary reckoning includes the requirement that only one thing can happen at a time. That is not the way the universe really works.)

From this standpoint memory is simply the ability to focus attention on a selected possible state and form an image of it.

If that is true, why don’t people remember the future? The answer is that they do. There are many recorded instances in which people have had vivid memories of a future event. You may be able to think of a few in your own life.

Now what if you wished to focus attention on a very special group of possible states: if I were in the Oval Office at a certain time, what would I have seen and heard? If I were able to move about freely in the planet Jupiter, what would I have perceived?

If there are possible states referenced by the question, and if you know how to pay attention to them and create the image, you will have your answer.

We all use remote viewing—the ability to pay attention to future and possible states—every day. When we have a collection of errands to do, we reflect briefly upon the order in which we will do them. After a pause the inner person produces a decision.

Where does this decision come from? I suggest that it comes from a survey of the possible states. This may be the source, or a source, of what we call intuition.

A good remote viewer can produce a report that is as accurate as he or she could have given from being at the scene.

Essentially, the question the viewer is asking the universe/collection of possible states is “what would I have perceived if I had been there?’

If the viewer is present in some sense, which is what I have argued, why don’t people perceive him or her?

In fact they sometimes do. The immediate reflex of most people is to reject the perception. “This person did not come in by the door, and is floating in the air: it is only a figment of my imagination.” And they spontaneously forget what they saw.

One of my students learned to move his perception about. He floated down University Avenue in Berkeley enjoying the novelty of not having to cart his physical body along. Suddenly a ragged street person spotted him and pointed at him, shouting “Ya think nobody can see ya but I can, I can see ya!”

The student was startled and snapped right back into his physical body. His attention defaulted to the collection of states we identify as ordinary reality.

That collection has no special virtue. It is simply the collection of states we have been taught to place attention upon.

All of the possible states are real. That is why we are able to image them.

If possible and future states are all around us in the now, why don’t we see them? The answer is that we do. Many people spontaneously have images or intuitions about the future, or about distant events that they cannot possibly know about in any ordinary way.

Remote viewing is a way of accessing the possible states. When you view a distant location you are using the same capabilities you use to see across the room. You are simply paying attention to a different collection of possible states.

Your participation in events at that distant location can be as powerful as you wish it to be, given that you have developed enough skill.

Note that what happens in a location you are viewing can affect you. Its possible states will impinge on you, and vice versa. It is worth taking time to acquire some skill in managing your own possible states so that you can avoid (ahem) unfortunate occurrences.