Remote Viewing and other stuff

The other day I was walking in the woods, and I happened to crawl under a branch of a tree, somehow, inexplicably, I managed to skewer my hat - and my head within the hat - on some sharp object which opened up my head into a gaping wound and resulted in a lot of blood feeding a nearby yew tree. Convalescing at home – the Dr didn’t want to see me - I read an eclectic mix of books, as you do, including the Corpus Hermeticum, The Men Who Stare at Goats, and the Grey Lensman. And then I thought I’d write about Remote Viewing. Clearly the bang to my head was stimulating my neural circuits.

Introduction - What is Remote Viewing?

Remote viewing was developed as ‘psychic spying’ in the 1970’s and used up until the 1990’s within the US military intelligence machine. Remote Viewers were given map coordinates by their handlers, and would travel within their inner vision to the location and report on what they could perceive. Although not exactly scientific, at least not in conventional terms, the remote viewing was (apparently) useful enough to exist for at least twenty years, and was declassified and then disbanded by the CIA in 1995. It became a subject of ridicule in the 2004 laugh-out-loud- book The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson.

Humans as Psychonauts

Human beings have had mystical journeys and visions for millennia, perhaps as long as humans have been self-aware, at that biblical moment when Adam and Eve took the apple from the tree of knowledge and moved in their evolution from biological automatons to self-aware human beings capable of ‘divine’ thought – that it is to think like their creator(s), the Elohim, to become, as we read in the book of Genesis, ‘like gods themselves’.

Our ability to imagine and visualise and to have internal visions seems to be integral in the creative impulse. Artists, for example use this type of cognitive process all the time.

But, in the depths of prehistory, before there were artists, I would suggest that the ability to have these creative inner visions was the particular remit of the tribal shamans, who developed their ability to perceive ‘other worlds’ and actively explore them; but which would have become a part of the tribal belief system in which all members would partake at one time or another: for example, the Native American vision quest.

However, this idea that the ‘soul’ could travel and perceive, or look into, different facets of reality or indeed look at faraway places, is not isolated to tribal beliefs or shamanic modes of consciousness, but has existed in literature and religious texts for millennia; for example, Gilgamesh descending into the underworld to find Enkidu, or Enoch’s journey with the Angels, or Dante Alighieri’s pilgrimage from Hell to Purgatory and finally Heaven. It is surely a very human process to ‘travel’ to such places whether as a literary device or as a mystical experience. However, it is in the mystical experience which piques my curiosity.

We may reflect on the ancient mystical text of the Corpus Hermeticum which states that you can send your ‘soul’ to a faraway place, not by travelling from A to B but as being their instantly because you have willed it to. The Corpus states: ‘…command your soul to travel to India and it will be there faster than your command. Command it to cross over the ocean, and again it will be quickly there, not as having passed from place to place but simply as being there.’[1]

Which sounds very much like this idea of remote viewing!

The Men Who Stare At Goats

If you read Jon Ronson’s hilarious 2004 book The Men Who Stare at Goats, then the whole history of remote viewing sounds even more crazy.  One of the recurrent laughing points in the book is that the head of the psychic spying department (and the Chief of the US Army Intelligence) Major-General Albert Stubblebine III, who in the opening pages, tries to use the power of mind to run through a wall. Each time he impacts on the wall he fails …what he wants to do is actually pass right through it. His rationale is somewhat like this; a human being is made of atoms. The wall is made of atoms so why cannot one’s atoms pass through the space around the wall’s atoms? Cue the canned studio audience laughter. But, hold your laughter one dang minute. As we have read in my last blog post, according to quantum theory at the quantum level there is no boundary from where the human body stops and the universe begins, so much so that - since the presence of mind is integral in the quantum universe - remote viewing, according to Quantum Theory is quite possible, even walking through walls.

In fact, the walking through walls is a useful thought experiment to run through here... As Doc Emmett says in the Back to the Future films, ‘you’re not thinking fourth dimensionally!’.

If we draw a Stickman General Stubblebine in a square and assert that this is a 2D reality is the reality in which Stickman Stubblebine lives. The square resembles the walls of his room, and even in this 2D reality Stubblebine is still running at the walls, but he still cannot pass through the walls, he still keeps bouncing off the walls and he fails. But if the stick man could use an energy generator so powerful that he could momentarily push himself into a 3D world of our reality, then the Stickman would now be standing on the page in 3 dimensions and now can simply step across the line, and has thus passed through (or over) the wall. Once he returns back to the 2D reality he finds that he has finally managed the feat of walking ‘through’ a wall.

So, if walking through walls is a possibility, although with current technology improbable, (as one would have to have energy generator loaded with a very rare and stable element that can release enough energy for interdimensional travel.) then Remote viewing is actually more accessible. We don’t need colossal amounts of energy we just need to focus the brain, which is a quantum creation, holographic even, to interact with a quantum and holographic universe. That is to say, to be open to the possibility that there are dimensions which exist that we cannot perceive but are there and that we have greater powers than we could imagine. At least at the quantum level.

Science Fiction as precursors to Science Fact.

Imagine being able to, as EE ‘Doc’ Smith wrote in the classic Science Fiction Lensman Series, to send a thought-beam out, to a different part of the world, a different planet, even across the galaxy. A thought-beam which is a perceptual beam. Perhaps also consider that Science Fiction has pre-empted or even influenced many technological things that we take for granted today so why not the development of the human mind? Just because we cannot accept such a premise, and that we would ridicule those who would suggest such a premise does not mean that it is not a future possibility.

Bringing it back to General Stubblebine running at a wall of his office and bouncing off it hurting his nose, it wasn’t his theory that it was incorrect rather the technique. It always was theoretically possible; he should have just approached it as a thought experiment.

As for remote viewing, I just think that man has been a visionary since the days of the prehistoric tribal shaman, and yet if we modernise the tribal shaman, and put him in a suit and give him a Starbucks Latte, and a new target subject to explore; I think it takes little more imagination to perceive, not the underworld, purgatory, or of animal spirit guides, but of actual physical targets. Cydonia on Mars for example, or the dark side of the Moon, or elsewhere in the cosmos, the Pleiades or some such place. The real danger I guess, is meeting another mind in the vastness of space, an alien mind.

Science Fiction gives us the thinking space to explore such a possibility, and I can’t help but returning to the works off EE ‘Doc’ Smith and his Lensman series. This idea that an ancient ‘grandparent race’ of humanoid aliens seeded us in some remote past and has kept an eye on us ever since, secretly breeding us to create certain individuals with the psychic ability to become ‘Lensman’ (or Lenswomen), that by wearing a crystal lens could become, in modern terms, the archetypal Remote Viewer.

Who knows what the future may hold in the development of the human mind?!

Conclusion

As a highly visual artistic individual, the idea of exploring imaginative worlds in one’s inner vision is fairly normal for me, and by extension, it seems little more difficult to believe that one might somehow extend one’s mind out into the environment. It seems relevant to refer back to my previous blog post about perception when I discuss that there is a sense of mind in all things, and the basis of the universe is mind and that furthermore, there is no boundary from where the body stops and the universe begins. If thoughts are electrical impulses, or wavelengths, and we are all vibrating atoms, and so is everything else around us, then perhaps there are a myriad of possibilities of how we might interact with these vibrations perceptually.    

 

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[1] Copenhaver BP (Ed.) (1992) Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius CUP.

Going Down the Rabbit Hole: Anthropology, Shamanism and Quantum Theory

In my studies as a postgraduate I learnt that culture influences perception. Or, to be more precise; that Phenomenal Absolutism and Ethnocentrism affects how we see the world around us due, in part, to the mental constructs that have been instilled in us since birth – in other words we see what we have been told we should see: language and our internal dialogue enforces a particular view of reality.
Phenomenal Absolutism refers to the naïve belief that the world is exactly as the observer sees it, and this value is believed to be universal – that all observers must perceive the situation exactly the same as he or she does. And this ‘viewpoint’ is passed on from adult to children ad infinitum. So, for a child, once language is learnt, the vast majority of what the child learns as 'real' is through reports of other people’s experiences, hence the child’s concept of reality, even of the physical world that surrounds them, is based on second-hand information, that is based on a type of ethnocentrism called enculturation. The child is enculturated to perceive in a certain way, that is to say, culture has influenced what the child sees.[1]
The same sort of argument is mentioned in the introduction of Carlos Castaneda’s book, Journey to Ixtlan where it is described how children are incessantly taught how to see the world until such times as the child is capable of perceiving the world as it is described. This makes the child a member of some greater group to which they (and we) belong, with whom we all share a common perceptual interpretation of the world; so as to say our perception of reality is really nothing more than a flow of descriptions, from other’s second-hand information, drummed into us from birth.[2]
Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos refer to this programming in their book You Are The Universe although they discuss this at the neurological level, talking about the neural wiring in the brain, a little like a computer that has been programmed (although of course we are a little more than a computer as we have a mind);
‘The brain can be trained, and everyone’s brain has been. It accepts only the model of reality it was trained to accept…The model of reality you are following right this minute is wired into the synapses and neural pathways of your brain.’
They go on to say that the same visual information, say, an old man walking down the street, will have a different meaning to different people. For some he will be invisible, to others an object of sympathy, to others a drain on society and to others a typical grandparent.[3]
They conclude that the response of the brain is overriding what you are seeing, or in other words: the response is controlling what you are seeing rather than what you are seeing controlling the response. Our perception of reality is, again, what we have been trained to think it is, rather than what it actually is.


Let us take this idea forward. Consider a table. We are so used to a table being this everyday thing that we use, with legs and a top surface, that we – not only take it for granted – we hardly even see it anymore. A table is just a table. We have seen it our entire lives. We have been told what reality is, what a table is, our whole lives – we have been taught and this teaching has been reinforced. But there is more to a table than its appearance... we have to also consider its essence.
Imagine a round table in a room. Is it round? Yes, you say.
But your point of view shows it to actually to be oval due to perspective, and so it doesn’t present as round at all. Your knowledge of it being round is something drummed into you from childhood, of, you know, all the shapes we have to learn as children. From this programming we know that a round table is a circle on legs. But when you look at it, it is distorted via perspective. Already we are seeing a difference from it’s appearance (an oval table) and its essence (a round table). But there is more to it than just that...

 
The Physicists David Bohm and Basil Hiley use this example in their book The Undivided Universe; to explain the difference of the appearance of a table and the essence of a table because it all depends at what angle you are looking at the table, and it also depends at what scale you are looking at the table, for example under a microscope it would look quite different, the appearance changes and so therefore does the essence of what it is:

 
‘…as we go round a circular table, what we see immediately is an everchanging elliptical shape. But we have learned to regard this changing shape as a mere appearance, while the essence, i.e. the true being, is considered to be a rigid circular object…But further investigation shows that this object is not solid and eventually discloses an atomic structure [and] the solid object [a rigid circular table] now reverts in our thought to the category of appearance, while the essence is the set of atoms out of which it is constituted.’

 
If we then look deeper into this atomic structure, it is then the atomic structure that has to be re-categorised as ‘appearance’ whilst the essence is now smaller and yet even smaller sub-atomic and sub-sub atomic particles ‘quarks, gluons, preons, or else sets of excitations of strings’.
As we go ever deeper what we thought was ‘essence’ becomes ‘appearance’ until we reach some smaller and smaller particle or quantum field or force. [4]

Quantum theory actually makes the relationship between perception and reality more complicated due to the rule that until we can apply a measurement or observation to determine a state of a thing, such as a particle, then that particle doesn’t exist and thus only be described as being in a possible number or variety of different states, existing as a sum of all these possibilities.

 
Bringing this theory into the everyday world; if we take a bigger thing, such as the moon, then; until we observe the moon, then the moon doesn’t exist, only the sum of the possibilities of the moon exist. This theory was supported by Neils Bohr and opposed by Albert Einstein, the latter who saw it as hopelessly naive, and overly logical, however this was what they had found in quantum theory and Bohr was just applying the theory from particle physics it into the real world[5]. In confronting such an idea Erwin Schrödinger made his famous thought-experiment with a cat in a box. 

It goes something like this:
A cat is placed in a sealed box facing a gun. The gun is connected to a Geiger counter and the Geiger counter is connected to a piece of uranium. Since the uranium atom is unstable it will undergo radioactive decay and as soon as the uranium nucleus disintegrates the Geiger counter will detect it and the bullet will kill the cat. To find out if the cat is alive or dead at any given point in time we need to open the box to observe it. Once we look in the box the cat will either be alive or it will be dead. But before we open the box, according to quantum theory, the cat is neither dead or alive, all there exists is a sum of the possibilities of the alive cat and the dead cat. It was a ridiculous type of thought experiment but with the weirdness of quantum theory it represented the findings of particle physics, however it couldn’t be rectified in the ‘real world’ – the cat cannot be both alive and dead at the same time, that would be impossible. The cat must exist, clearly, either as an alive cat or a dead cat before you looked in the box. 

A physicist called Hugh Everett came up with a solution to this conundrum of quantum reality, in that all the possibilities exist in the real world through parallel dimensions, so when the box is open, the universe divides, leaving two universes, one in which the cat is alive and one in which the cat is dead. This is essentially the many-worlds explanation; that for any decision the other variables remain in situ in another universe – due to the universe splitting. [6]

In terms of a crime, think of someone being murdered, in a parallel universe the victim isn’t murdered but carries on living, and has a rich and wonderful life. This universe runs parallel to our own.
Food for thought.
Let us now consider something else...

One of the aspects of Shamanism - the prehistoric spiritial belief of hunter-gathers - and in so called ‘pagan’ thought the world over, is the idea that everything has life. It is called animism. We can see it in the Japanese religion of Shinto and their belief in kami, just as we can see it in the Native American culture, everything is said to have a sense of life or consciousness, even something inanimate such as a rock: that a sense of consciousness purveys everything.

In the book You Are The Universe, Chopra and Kafatos state that the basis of the entire universe is indeed consciousness – that we live in a conscious universe – and you cannot differentiate the biologically living things (such as the tree) with the supposedly inert things (such as a stone or rock). They use the example of a rock with moss growing on it, both of which have ‘life’.
They say: ‘choosing to call the soft green moss on a rock a living thing while denying life to the rock is merely a mind-made distinction. In reality, everything in existence follows the same path from its origin (dimensionless being) to a state that consciousness chooses to create out of itself…a rock and the moss that clings to it share life on equal terms.’ [7]

This type of thing was discussed two decades before by theoretical physicists Bohm and Hiley in their book The Undivided Universe in which they state that:

 
‘…a rudimentary mind-like quality is present even at the level of particle physics, and that as we go to subtler levels, this mind-like quality becomes stronger and more developed.’

 
And that:

 
‘Through enfoldment, each relatively autonomous level of mind partakes of the whole to one degree or another…’

 
The conclusion, that seems very close to a Native American view is that:

 
‘…each human being similarly participates in an inseparable way in society and in the planet as a whole. What may be suggested further is that such participation goes on to a greater collective mind, and perhaps ultimately to some more comprehensive mind in principle capable of going indefinitely beyond even the human species as a whole.’

 
And that ultimately, that:
‘…one could say that through the human being, the universe is making a mirror to observe itself. Or vice versa the universe could be regarded as contiguous with the body of the human being.’ [8]


To the Native Americans this connection to all things, this continuity of balance and harmony in the universe is called the ‘Sacred Hoop’. In the words of the Muskogee Medicine Man Bear Heart, it is:
‘…the circle of all life…Everything is part of the Sacred Hoop and everything is related. Our existence is so intertwined that our survival depends on maintaining a balanced relationship with everything within the Sacred Hoop.’ [9]

In this Sacred Hoop, just as in quantum physics, everything has a sense of consciousness, even the trees and rocks. Everything is connected.

 
The Pueblo Spiritual Adviser Patricio Dominguez states that:

 
‘We like to think of ourselves as separate both from each other and from the rest of the world, but we are not. Our physical existence is only one level of the greater reality, which has many layers, many dimensions, and many paths through which everything is connected and through which everything is both a part and a parcel of the one great whole.’[10]


Essentially quantum theory concurs with Native American belief. Whether we can adopt the same point of view ourselves depends very much on our own cultural milieu and hence rests on our ability to see past our specific cultural and neurological programming, drummed into us from birth.





[1] Segall, M. H., Campbell, D. T., & Herskovits, M. J. (1966). The influence of culture on visual perception The Bobbs-Merrill Company Inc.

[2] Castaneda C (1972) Journey to Ixtlan Arkana Publishing

[3] Chopra D & Kafatos M (2017) You Are The Universe Harmony

[4] Bohm D & Hiley BJ (1993) The Undivided Universe, Routledge


[5] Kumar M (2008) Quantum Icon Books
[6] Kaku M (1994) Hyperspace Oxford University Press
[7] Chopra D & Kafatos M (2017) You Are The Universe Harmony
[8] Bohm D & Hiley BJ (1993) The Undivided Universe, Routledge
[9] Bear Heart and Molly Larkin (1998) The Wind is My Mother Penguin


[10] Morton C & Thomas C.L. (1998) The Mystery of the Crystal Skulls Thorsons

When Art is not Art: Deer Skulls, Making Special and Neuroarchaeology

I have these creative urges, every so often I feel the need to carve wood or similar. But I have shied away from conventional art; you know the sort of thing – sitting down with brushes and a canvas for the sole purpose to frame it and put it on a wall.

What I do is solely for the creative process rather than the end result, mainly whittling, but also finding wood and other materials to work with. I admit I do put the finished article on Instagram @walkaboutandwhittles so I suppose, in a way it does become an art-form which is viewed, and that egocentric need for "likes". But, that aside, the motivation behind the creative act is not to make money, or to put the finished piece in a gallery, but to allow the image that was once in my mind to become a physical thing; or in some cases to simply create with no idea of what the finished product will look like. 

I am currently working on some deer skulls that I have collected over the last year. I decided one day to paint them, in part inspired by Mexican skulls, but mainly as I felt inspired to augment the skulls or as Ellen Dissanayake* says, “make special”. 

As I began to paint the skulls, I found that my ego started to lesson its hold on the process, and as I started to explore the undulations of the skulls that the notion of art had disappeared and I was left with this higher purpose, almost as if I was honouring the spirit of the Deer that once inhabited the skull. 

In that instant I started to see art and “making special” in a more prehistoric format, in which anything remotely intellectual or sophisticated disappeared. “Art” or whatever I was doing had, suddenly, a different purpose, related to a different sense of consciousness, to connect with nature, with the spirit of the deer, perhaps even with something more mysterious and undefinable, something shamanic...

At that point I considered how I would display this “art”, and first of all I was going to hang it on my front gate so I could give the impression of voodoo, but soon concluded this idea was foolish;  then I thought of putting it in a local wood which gets lots of footfall so people would see the skulls, and it would be like an “art installation” and people would wonder who did this and to what purpose, I might even trend on Instagram and Twitter. But I felt this was again not right, it felt disrespectful to the deer and disingenuous to the process which I had engaged with.

So, I decided that, when the skulls were finished, I would simply take them back to the woods from whence they came, hanging them in the trees. There is some precedence for this in the Native American culture which I saw in a Ray Mears TV program, they would attach skulls to the trees of the animals they hunted to show others so that further hunting would not deplete the local population. 

As for my deer skulls, I was sure that no one would ever see them again, but that was now unimportant; the whole “value” of the act, was in the specific sense of ritual, or ceremony – I had taken from the forest and I had made the skulls “special” and now I was going to replace them back in the forest, deep in the woods, where no one would ever see them again.

It reminded me very much of the mystery of Chauvet Cave (France) when a prehistoric person created a tremendous display of animal representations, then left them. The case wasn't a gallery, it wasn't a prehistoric cinema, it wasn’t a place of continual ritual purpose, and the artist wasn't even an artist...the “art” wasn’t created to be seen and studied or admired. It was a one-off act of creation. It was an “act” rather than “art”.

Although substantially less skilled that the painter of Chauvet Cave, I was nevertheless starting to feel the same way in my own whittling and collecting things from the woods (and painting skulls). I concluded that, in exploring my own need to be creative (as I had done previously in my barefoot running) I had inadvertently conducted an experiment in “neuroarchaeology”, aligning my own thought processes, however temporarily, to those of prehistoric man.

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*see Ellen Dissanayake (1995) Homo astheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why