Not Ready to Shift–Need More Proof!

There is definitely something to be said for the social phenomenon of ostracizing the unknown. We all are prone to becoming defensive of our current beliefs. However, when Galileo suggested that the Earth was round, there was no reason for people to want this to be true; it was a new idea without any positive implications, as it challenged the Catholic Church’s belief that Earth was the center of the universe. This isn’t to say Galileo should ever have been imprisoned, but simply that the situation was much different than our present situation with remote viewing.

Right now, there isn’t any reason why one wouldn’t want to believe in remote viewing. If proved to be true, remote viewing would provide a number of benefits. It could be used for the military, the police force, locating lost objects, etc–the list goes on! So why, then, would people want to ignore the plausibility for such an idea? The reality of the situation is simply that there isn’t enough evidence at this point to support the idea of remote viewing, and until adequate scientific conclusions can be made and replicated, we can’t rely completely on its validity.

 

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Wanted: A Shift in Paradigm

For several decades, remote viewing has been studied with success and it is a psychic phenomenon that has considerable research behind it. The first response to evidence that challenges an existing paradigm, is to deny it.  We accuse those who promote remote viewing of fraud and convince ourselves that remote viewing cannot exist. Humans have a history of not accepting ideas until they are forced to, usually when their survival depends on it. As evidence accumulates, we will reach a point where the results cannot be ignored. One such example is scientist Galileo. His invention of the telescope allowed him to collect evidence that Earth and all the other planets revolved around the sun. Most people during that time believed that Earth was the center of the universe and he was imprisoned to keep him from spreading other “crazy” ideas. He was outcast for his revolutionary ideas because the concept he proposed simply did not fit people’s worldview. The future is very promising for remote viewing if we can only stretch our current paradigm to fit its existence.

 

Who Says Consciousness is Trainable?

In arguing that remote viewing can be taught through training our consciousness, one suggests that consciousness is a separate entity from the brain. Consciousness is a scientific mystery and there are many theories that exist regarding its origin. It has yet to be proven that consciousness isn’t defined by a monistic philosophy: that mind and matter are the same “stuff”. Remote viewing suggests a philosophy of Dualism, that there is a rigid distinction between mind and matter. It also suggests that there is such thing as a collective conscious, that our minds are all entangled somehow and interact with one another. In reality, it is very possible that the physiological processes that occur in our brains directly manifest our individual consciousnesses.

 

Training Our Consciousness to Remote View

Psi can be learned. It is something we can tap into in our consciousness and be trained, like a muscle, to work for us. During the Stanford research, the government sponsors were looking for a control subject, a normal person who wasn’t a born psychic. A photographer with no previous psi experience named Hella Hammid was chosen. Head researcher Russell Targ said that when she left the program almost a decade later, she was one of their most reliable remote viewers (Targ, 2012). Can everybody learn remote viewing? Russell Targ certainly believes so. During Hella’s nine trials of viewing distant geographical targets, she achieved statistical significance of almost one in a million that her impressions could have occurred by chance (Targ, 2012). Doesn’t this mean something? Joe McMoneagle, one of the most successful government remote viewers wrote a book called “Remote Viewing Secrets: A Handbook.” In this book he teaches readers how to remote view themselves. He says that good remote views possess a mixture of one third of desire and focus, one third quality and intensity training, and one third natural talent” (McMoneagle, 2000). To him, the most important thing a student must learn to do remote viewing is to understand “zen” (McMoneagle, 2000). Zen is important because remote viewing is all about tapping into a greater unconscious that we are not often aware of. There is a lot more to reality than our five senses tell us. Consciousness extends beyond the very nature of physical time and space.  Remote viewing is all about learning how to quiet your mind. Psychologist and remote viewer Keith Harary says in order to remote view, he had to “learn how to separate his own thoughts, what he calls, ‘mental noise’ from impressions, feelings and images related to the subject or target. After you get yourself out of the way, you can peel away all of that and there’s another later and that is the perceptive layer” (Guthrie, 1995).  According to these trained remote viewers, this is a skill that can be acquired by tapping into something we have beneath the surface we can work to strengthen.

Reply to ‘CIA Sponsorship of Remote Viewing’

It is often said that the CIA sponsored SRI team produced successful trials of remote viewing. However, the word “successful” is yet another subjective characteristic. While there were some instances where the pictures drawn by the remote viewers matched the pictures present at the site, these were only a few out of hundreds and hundreds. This brings us back to the idea of the confirmation bias: where researchers (and in this case, military officials) look for evidence that remote viewers could actually match their assigned sites because they would like to believe in the reliability of remote viewing.

Over 24 years, $ 20 million was invested in this program; however, in the grand scheme of government investments, particularly over such an extended period of time, this is merely a blip on the government’s financial radar. On that same note–why did the funding stop? As researcher French points out: “It strikes me as incredible that funding would be terminated for such a promising program (with inherent risk that other nations would gain a lead in terms of psychic warfare) if the results produced were really so impressive” (French, 2010). Additionally, the fact that all participants have fully disclosed the details of their experiences with the government to the public, and that these participants have not since been apprehended by the CIA, one can assume these experiences were not deemed entirely crucial and valuable to CIA affairs.

CIA Sponsorship of Remote Viewing

If all the statistical evidence isn’t enough for you, it says a lot that the government funded research on remote viewing for over two decades. Recently unclassified, the Stanford Research Institute was conducting studies to determine whether phenomena such as remote viewing might have any utility for intelligence collection” (Puthoff, 1996). The research began with a man named Ingo Swann who showed researchers at Stanford his amazing abilities of being able to remote view. As more work was done, protocols were expanded and viewers were testing their limits; progress. In their second year of the program, the CIA sponsor decided to challenge the team to provide data on a Soviet site of ongoing operational significance (Puthoff, 1996). Remote viewer Pat Price and the team came up with a very thoughtful and intricate experiment to minimize any “cueing” of the target site, while still keeping in mind the Soviet site on which intelligence was needed (Puthoff, 1996). Were the results not promising, the experiment would have ended but Price drew a multisensory crane and an attempt at a building layout, both of which were accurate on the target site when it was finally seen. The SRI team experienced much success over the two decades and although funding ceased, it was quite a success. While I understand this information is from very trained remote viewers, their controlled experiments produced significant results. Additionally, the US government funded NASA, which, in time, was able to get man to the moon. In order for the government to commit so much funding, there must have been some pretty compelling evidence.

Importance of Reliability in Parapsychology

“The weight of proofs must be suited to address to the oddness of the facts.”

– Pierre Simon Laplace, 18th Century

Replicability is way more important in parapsychology than it is in regular psychology because it means a radical shifting of what we believe. (French, 2010)