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.