Remote Viewing as a Way-Station

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 22 May 2006

I wonder sometimes, about the larger world of our species and cultural conscious psychic development, and how it is best served.

So far, I have felt that RV served this requirement best. It seems a necessary bridge between the fear, superstition, fuzzy thinking, etc. that psychic functioning has always been nearly-drowned in, and the mental model that is necessary for any practical development, practical research whether formal or personal, and practical application.

RV is to psi what Ceremonial Magick or QBL (Cabala) studies are to Wicca. A methodical, experimental, documented process of personal development, with feedback, with observation, with adjustment, and with an end result of personal growth.

There is nothing wrong with non-RV "psi" work, at all; nor can psychic work be blamed for all the bizarre and bogus stuff that's been dripping off it and sitting on it since time began. And there are plenty of psychics and Wiccans who are as utterly dedicated, documented etc. as those in the other variants; there are, however, generalities: psychic work and Wicca is more open, more freeflowing, in many ways. It's simply something slightly different, depending on the details.

The difference isn't just in words and protocol; it is in the entire conceptual framework it is found within. The differences are broader and deeper than any amount of semantic argument could demonstrate.

But will RV be the final answer?

RV is still my favorite thing, and I feel it's important that plenty of people hold that line for the future. Yet I look at the remote viewing field at large, and it seems to me that somewhere . . . something went wrong. Something long before our time, actually. But something which the current field of dedicated viewers may or may not be able to lift the art entirely away from.

Maybe the 'founding intent' was polluted in some way. Maybe politics. Maybe government. Maybe there is just too much baggage of the overlord-control-issues of RV's brief little life.

Maybe the muddy confusion about the term's definition that has been present nearly as long as the term has. Even Ingo Swann, involved in the coining of the term, uses the term itself in so many ways through different articles that the list of quotes posted on it could be as confusing as enlightening. I feel sure I know what he means. Hahaha.

Deliberate psychic functioning seemed to start at one end of the spectrum, and as part of RV, got yanked nearly over to the other side. On the internet, some people go on interminably with left-brain over-analytical approaches that (aside from usually being an avoidance of doing as opposed to talking about), I gradually feel are an oxymoron to the entire function of it, and get us only farther and farther from truly understanding it. Sometimes I see stuff written about RV that is so removed from it I am reminded of how some people, to best understand a butterfly, would kill it and stick it under a microscope. There is learning there. But is it the learning we want? And is it possible that some people only go that direction because they are so incapable of the internal requirements for other kinds of understanding?

So then some people, with the aliens and religious entities brought into the equation, yanked RV yet another direction, from spiritual warfare to cult indoctrination, and that too has its own extremes. Then the dark side came along, the paranoid side, Big Brother is Watching You Watch Them ya know . . . and yanks it yet another way.

We have an uneasy peace when we gather viewers of many stripes together on the internet: a stand-off level of cultural homeostasis, resulting from a tight gridlock of paradigms about Remote Viewing, all with their own private extreme.

I feel that RV is a doorway. Not the final answer, but a necessary waystation. I begin to feel that thinking of RV as anything else puts limits on just how much a bridge and catalyst it can be for our people.

The path once traveled expands to something vastly larger than the term "RV" can begin to encompass. RV as a sole doctrine is landlocked. At some point, if a person wants to go farther, they're going to have to, at the very least, expand their definition of what fairly connects to it.

For those who wish to pursue conscious psychic functioning, study within RV parameters, "RV for its own sake" is, I think, almost necessary at some point, just like certain exercises are necessary in shamanic practices before you can do other things.

But even RV, if kept too rigidly, is a high toll with no shore in sight. Like the glittering distractions of the New Age with its crystal side-roads away from spirit, RV with an overzealous lock on definition can extract an even higher personal price than commitment to it already demands.

RV is the ferry across spirit to the larger questions of Self. But don't pay the ferryman . . . until you get to the other side.