RV Follies (Displacement or Missed Targets)
Archived from the former firedocs blog. 10 April 2006
This is long -- it's a whole article -- be warned, skip it if you're in any hurry! :-)
There is some degree of politically incorrect even in the layman's remote viewing field. Things that you just wouldn't do. ('You' in the generic sense of course.)
I don't just mean the PC issues like whether you sell a free manual on eBay that you stole off my website...
or whether you have zero shame about telling 30 million people how their children are going to die if they don't send you money...
or whether you tell trainees your method makes them expert, and if their session doesn't match their feedback it's still great work because the underlying "secret" task they can't know about because it's "operational" actually matches it well (or, they simply never see feedback at all)...
or whether you task viewers on scandalous targets like sex acts...
or whether your 'viewer recruitment' scheme also constitutes a free-sex-for-the-guru service with attractive awestruck devotees...
or the long list of other things that go on and have gone on in the layman's field that are, to say the least, politically (though perhaps also ethically) incorrect.
Those are un-PC even to outsiders. There's also a PC tendency on the inside though.
One of the big areas that is pointedly un-PC is the discussion of problem data. This is mostly because everybody's so busy acting like they're fabulous viewers who know everything and/or their method is The Way, The Truth and The Life, that spending any time actually talking about failure would be, well, you know... like admitting to being a Mere Mortal... something that makes ya look bad. (...and hurts sales!)
Because Remote Viewing as a protocol requires feedback, it requires mostly "factual" targets (e.g., something you can take a photo of).
For the good chunk of the field that is devoid of all RV science protocol and instead calls their psychic method "the protocols," this is still sometimes the case, simply because they tend to be focused via Swann-style methodologies, which by their nature focus on physically factual data as well.
(Did you ever wonder why a target's gestalt could not be "Foggy," or "Lonely," instead of water or land? If you didn't, why not?)
Now in the part of layman's RV that either has an informed trainer/ tasker/ monitor/ hypnotist walking the viewer through session, or that has as its target such wide-scope taskings that you could report nearly anything ("water buffalo!" "aluminum siding!") and be able to make room for it in the assumed implied feedback, there's not much I can say because most data is considered accurate by those measures anyway. (Explaining I suppose why there is much claim in such areas to having insanely high accuracy rates, but a complete dearth of the same claimants viewing provably within protocol anywhere to demonstrate said skill.)
But in the part of layman's RV that tends to focus on narrow taskings, physical targets, feedback, and specific compare of data to feedback, this intensifies the clear focus well enough that there is a ton of data that is just wrong. Sometimes the data is wrong. Sometimes the whole session is a bust. And sometimes the session is just a radically different result than expected.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. "It's wrong, file 13!" "Don't waffle, it's just wrong!" "You missed the target, move on."
Science and Viewer Accuracy
Something you notice with scientists is that they really, aside from a clinical interest in how it affects whatever they're attempting to study, do not give a rat's behind about the subject's personal process. It seems to fall into the same category as whether a scientist worries about how the kitten with electrodes might feel. They don't. If they were more concerned with those feelings than the end result of an experiment, they'd have a different job.
Because psychic functioning has a small though consistent effect-size in research (since RV came on the scene), one of the basics is that it can't be studied unless there is enough of it to study. This (combined with scarcity of funding) has forced scientists into flatly requiring viewer skill, one of the most important elements of that being consistency. Most of the few viewers working in the modern labs are of substantial skill. They can provide "enough to study," in the way of results. Usually they are long-experienced, at the least.
On the whole it's fair to say that thanks to the early 70s to late 90s (a period fuzzily a bit before/ after StarGate), most any question a layman has about how something works, has already been addressed by research. But sometimes the answer was, "Get better viewers." That solved a problem, but that doesn't mean anybody understood the cause.
Over the last few decades of psi research, nearly everything that might come to mind as an idea about something to study, has been covered in science at least indirectly, at least once. Whether it's been covered well, or with all possible parameters, or during a period when enough was known about other issues of impact to make that worth accepting, is another question.
"How" something works of course, is not "why" it works. That's the abyss where the safety of observable, measurable results takes a nosedive off the edge into wild speculation, mysticism, and assumptions. (Since not only laymen but frankly most scientists who aren't hard physicists don't really understand the term/concept of 'quantum' nearly as well as they think, much of the world now assumes that term must explain everything.)
Scientists for the most part aren't allowed to openly ponder the 'why'--primarily since doing so requires that they use the framework of what is already believed to be understood in science, and as of yet there isn't much of a theory in science that explains psi (...not counting the ever-popular assumptions about 'quantum'). (Well, that's not true. 'Academia' does have a theory. The theory is "if it isn't fraud, it must be error.")
In any specific study to focus on targeting, tasking, distraction, displacement, viewer training, or a dozen other things at least, concern with whether or not a viewer was, or could be made to be, or prevented from being, wrong -- "made to error" from accurate session data -- has been looked at. But on the whole, because funding is limited and scientists require good viewers so they 'have enough measurable psi to study', overall there's been a lot less concern about why a viewer misses a target than simply how to reduce this happening if it's seen -- and prior to that point, how to hire viewers good enough that how often this happened would be minimal. One wouldn't be spending all their time trying to figure out that inaccurate-data part, as you'd have better things to do spending your time figuring out the accurate-psi part.
If a viewer "misses" the target too often, it's not a cosmic inquiry into why, it's just that they aren't good enough. The lab hires a better viewer.
Seems to me it's possible that just as viewers of poor caliber don't have enough psi effect-size result to easily study, that maybe viewers of the higher caliber don't have enough psi "total-target-displacement" effect to study either. (It may never, ever be considered that. It's just "wrong.") It might not be easy to study "why" you as a viewer are wrong about the subjective experience. They can only measure your reporting of it. So it's lost to a decent research protocol before we begin. It becomes an issue for every viewer to figure out or accept, on their own.
How many "shades of wrong" are there?
This morning I am interested in the area that some would call "being off-target" and others would call "displacement." I don't like either of those terms here--although both qualify technically--because they carry other meanings or at least 'concept-baggage' that "blends and blurs" different problems together.
A word for what I want to talk about is difficult even to invent, because defining it is a very subjective thing, and there's no way to be sure that every person using the word really has the same criteria for using it, the same parameters for its meaning, etc. I'm not just talking about missing a target in general or having totally wrong data. This is a very specific, yet very personalized, experience. Experienced viewers know what I am talking about. I know in my gut and from talking with literally thousands of people in RV over the last decade that this 'distinctive' feeling about it is a real thing--or at least a "perceivably distinct experience" let's put it that way--it just doesn't have a label. Being 'off target' is the given for any data not matching the target assigned. This is more than that; there is something else that seems as if it is involved.
Every viewer knows that even if you (to use the common model) 'connect' with the target (or the part of yourself which locally-replicates it internally, whatever), and even if you FEEL that contact, that a little AOL can go a long way toward destroying your session. A little tends to lead to a lot (AOL: the gift that keeps on giving!). Anybody who's had a session driven by some partly-subconscious attention/interest/filter (AOL drive) can testify to how clear it all seemed, heh heh! That is one kind of being wrong. After the fact, the viewer can usually see that this happened, see why or where or how it happened.
There is data that is symbolic. That is allegorical. That is humorous, punny, or that is in analogy, that is in one of many ways an indirect or representative or reflective version of the target. That is another kind of being wrong. After the fact, the viewer can usually see that this happened, and while not always clear on on the why or how, it's at least usually visible--at least in places--when this has occurred. (Most of RV from my perspective is learning to 'feel' this well enough to translate it, to understand how your mind works and what things mean.)
There is data that is wrong because it was translated incorrectly; articulated badly; provided incompletely; or otherwise mutated or mutilated by the viewer somewhere between the impression of something and getting it into some communication form.
Sometimes data's just wrong. In this case I'm referring to pieces of data in a session.
There is data that results from sessions where one simply is not in target contact. The viewer wanders the map of trying to get a grip on it, and if they get some data accurate it might well be solely by chance (the vagaries of english and the limited-set of base forms and dynamics in our world don't help there, as they so often bring data match by coincidence), or just a small spark in an otherwise dim session.
There are more examples but to stop there for now, we have data that is pointedly wrong, based on:
- AOL causing the whole spectrum of distortion factors resulting in what I generically call "affected data"
- data that is incompletely translated
- data that is incorrectly translated
- data that is just flat-out wrong, but by this I mean pieces within a session
- data that is just the side-effect of a lack of decent target contact to begin with.
Now to most people, it's all just being wrong. Non-viewers really don't care why it's wrong, in part because they have no way of knowing. There is no way for anybody but the viewer to know when data is simply flat-out wrong vs. a mistranslation of something vs. some internal symbolism etc. Not until feedback. (Research shows that prior to feedback, viewers are abysmal at predicting the likely accuracy of their sessions.)
That is why it's so hard to come up with a word for what I'm trying to get around to talking about here, because it would require a fairly experienced viewer being very careful about how they think about something to correctly delineate a small segment of their viewing experience.
There are sessions that are, in the opinion of the viewer, good sessions. Not because they match the feedback, though 'good sessions' by definition do. But because the viewer simply honestly feels, body and soul, that the session was on-target. This 'feeling' can carry viewers along even when poor session results would disturb them, because on some subjective level they simply know that they had the target and the problem was just the details.
Sometimes, a viewer has a session that in every possible viewer-experience way, is a good session. It is consistent in the way that only the best sessions or serious AOL-drive sessions tend to be. It has many qualities reminiscent of the most legit sessions. And then they get feedback.
And the session doesn't have one damn thing to do with the target.
The 'wrong' data cannot be tracked to any of the common types listed above. It may even have the 'hallmark' of an on-target session: when you "dive" and BAM! the data hits you right off, often with a strong gut-feeling, and both initially and when it comes in bursts it just pours in. There wasn't time to develop any AOL let alone AOL-drive, in some of these cases. There wasn't 'conscious' translating going on. There wasn't a lack of contact.
The viewer is left feeling, psychologically, that it was a GOOD SESSION . . . on the WRONG TARGET.
This is a politically incorrect thing to mention in the RV field. In part this is because a lot of ignorance about protocol and sloppiness of protocol has resulted over the years in various viewers or groups claiming 'displacement' over all kinds of things. "Well that target number it turns out was assigned to Matilda last june for a nuclear reactor which totally explains why you described that cow as advanced technology." Of course, since many in the RV field don't seem to grasp that target definition is an issue of intent, and that any such belief before/during/after the session, by tasker or viewer, can literally cause it to become so, this kind of logic often generates its own seeming self-fulfilling evidence.
It is probably the primary hindrance of viewers doing their own research: that psi follows intent, so the whole of the process is geared toward being a self-fulfilling prophecy. (Enough of that and you end up with the situation of Dr. Courtney Brown's last book, where the leader of a small, psychologically and psychically interdependent group, comes up with a theory, feels sure it is right, they all experiment to see, and whaddaya know, it turns out they validate the expert, the trainer, the leader (and in doing so, get re-validated by him in turn)--"he was right!" Over and over. That this even repeated and still didn't make him suspicious that his protocol had problems and results weren't objective, is so exasperating.)
So as a sort of backlash against the myriad of excuses that have been used over the years to excuse missing a target, it's now more socially correct for us all to suggest that if you miss the target, your data was just wrong, get over yourself, move on, go view. I'm usually the type that says this very thing in fact. If anything, I almost rejoice that finally a decent chunk of the layman's online field has gotten experienced and savvy enough, and is critical thinking enough, to be able to do this.
But some days, and this morning is one, I really feel that we are missing some hugely important factoid in remote viewing that science hasn't or won't or can't study, and that viewers have no explanation for and, should they even bring it up, sounds so much like trying to just 'make excuses for poor results' that as a social, "politically incorrect" kind of thing, they're reduced to silence.
Associative RV
There is no way to reduce noise without looking for its sources. In ARV, this might equate to reducing displacement by looking at its sources. Though not everything is nailed down in that area, research shows that displacement tends to be much higher when the viewers see the 'options' themselves, so that is not done in a science ARV protocol (though it's often done in the layman's field). Because science stays in protocol, they don't have the issue that layman's ARV groups do, such as "soft" validation of viewers by taskers (or other viewers) who share info about the options or about the session or even about overall group-issues informally later (or they shouldn't anyway), so there are some side-effects of those things that science may not suffer and layman's groups do.
Modern psi researchers say that displacement is not an issue unless the protocol has problems; the ARV protocol has 'evolved' gradually to resolve those issues. I've never met a layman's group that didn't deal with it, though.
I've long had a completely different perspective about ARV. I have two theories and not only are they not novel but I am not even sure they're compatible. I assume at some point I will adopt one of them. The first was my first theory, that it was all about 'probabilities', and I figured people who did really well at precog might be capable of subconsciously "holding the line" of the probability they predict. E.g., if Jane predicts that X will happen, she may be psychically capable of remaining in (or even moving to!) probability X, so that the outcome will validate her. In short, it might be less viewing skill than reality-skill, you might say.
My second theory is that people never displace by accident. You see I think if you just didn't do well, you would simply be inaccurate, and even by chance or guessing someone still may correctly associate your session to the target. The only way to guarantee a negative outcome -- literally, "psi-missing" -- is to specifically describe one of the other options in ARV. There is little chance that there will be a correct match of session and target, if the session describes some highly unique, specific element from one of the 'alternative potentials'. So it seems to me that maybe displacement in ARV, particularly when it is really severe and clear, is not "inaccurate viewing" but in a way, highly accurate psi-data that is deliberately, though subconsciously, wrong. Why, is anybody's guess.
So what model besides "screwed it up" do we have for explaining the occasional "great session that feels, in your gut, that it IS correct, but for reasons inexplicable seems to be on a target which is clearly not the one assigned"? I don't buy retro-tasking / session-hijacking. Not because I disbelieve in the dynamic of it, but because I feel operationally it's useless and I think something a good deal more complicated--and less personal--is probably the case at least in regards to what I'm talking about here.
We can use the "you're just making up the 'seems to be on another target' bit for self-validation, in reality, the session is just wrong so get over it" standard response. And in a way I like that response for the sake of "learning-theory": if the viewer doesn't take total responsibility for results in a fairly critical way, they're doomed. On the other hand, if there might actually BE something which contributes to the causation of this, we're never going to find it or reduce it by ignoring it.
We can use the "it's displacement onto some other target for some unknown reason," which maybe is a no-brainer/obvious even if 'the other target' could be some wholly self-created invention of course. But since we aren't working ARV here (so there are no 'other options'), I dislike that term/model for the experience.
I have wondered if there could be an effect similar to a "harmonic" or a "reflection." Now, my own belief system holds that everything is inside us and we are sort of "evoking" it from ourselves as a "local internal energetic replication of a non-local energetic construct". (Heh. "It's magic" would be easier.) So honestly, I don't know how the harmonic-or-reflection concept could possibly work with my own belief system. Those things seem like they require a linear "signal line" kind of belief, where something hits some kind of interference and, even if only shifted by the slightest degree, a laser light for example would end up somewhere completely different. I didn't say the theory was consistent with my beliefs.
"You didn't focus enough." Normally, that's a given. But on these sessions, I swear, this reminds me of a charismatic church I attended when young, where everybody spoke in tongues, and if you did not spontaneously break into bizarre utterance the minute someone 'laid hands' on you, the response was that "you didn't commit enough" to Jesus. I didn't really buy that then, and I'm not really sure I buy this now. Maybe both have some truth -- maybe some really intense psychological emphasis would have changed it in both cases! -- who knows. But I don't feel right accepting this about these rare but occasional sessions, either.
But for me as a viewer, that's how it feels when it happens.
It feels like I connected solidly with something right off, had a very good session on it, and it wasn't the target intended.
There are times when, after a session, I feel utterly certain that a certain aspect of a target was factual, and there is no feedback on it. I'm stuck: if I hunt it down, I've blown protocol, but if I don't, I never know. Sometimes feedback comes by accident or just "later" though, or is provided by a tasker only because it's specific to 'the focus of the target' (and the 'target' was not, in that case, 'defined by the focus of my feedback' obviously). And when you feel that solid about something, or at least when I do, usually it turns out to be right. That kind of feeling doesn't come very often. But when it does, it's solid enough to make you willing to argue over feedback.
Simply accepting that the rare but occasional session of this type is 'wrong' is not enough for me on some level. Sure, I do if viewing with others. I tend to be over-critical, not under-critical, when it comes to my viewing (with a couple exceptions of late), so it's not hard for me to say whoops, missed. Happens plenty.
But there is a part of me that feels like this is important, and this has some reason and meaning, and that it just isn't fair to do it to myself -- to seemingly view really well and then be told, "Totally sucked. Missed by a mile." when I feel that the viewing-process may actually have gone fabulously, albeit not on what was intended. It almost feels like I am giving myself totally wrong feedback and that it does me mild harm in some way.
As if, the error, whatever it was, was not the viewing, but was some initial connection that underlies that. Something that maybe we should be looking at separately. Maybe the fact that it takes a session to get evidence on the 'connection' (for lack of a better term) has blurred two different things together.
I think I will call it a 'folly'. You know, like a stairway that goes nowhere: it's still a real stairway, it's still a functional stairway, there is nothing whatever wrong with that stairway, and maybe the session is the same; it's just that the whole context for it is inapplicable -- it leads out into nowhere, for example -- rendering it totally moot. You wouldn't go to the carpenter and say, "Your stair making skills stink!" You would say, "Whoever said to build that here was obviously confused." There are two different issues involved here. At the least.
I wish I understood it. I don't have any bright ideas for how a viewer could explore this sort of thing. Generally, if for no other reason than learning, we recognize what was wrong then turn toward what is right. Spending ANY time "making excuses for why a session doesn't match a target" is not healthy for any viewer.
But those rare, solid-connect sessions that appear to be a great session on some other target are just disconcerting as hell. I really feel that the viewing in those sessions is good--but that the TARGET CONTACT was specifically... shifted? displaced? reflected? whatever -- so that it was wrong.
We call both of these aspects -- connection to "proper target" and the whole process of fleshing out data -- "viewing." But in reality, this particular experience makes me think they may be discrete, though intertwined, processes.
This morning, my session was a Folly. Not the first one I'll have, not the last one I'm sure.
I would not assign the label of Folly to 99% of my sessions, filled with all bazillion of the well-known problems that sessions tend to have. Any target-matching data in a session (aside from sheer coincidence) would invalidate a session for this label. A session Folly for me means the session had instant, solid contact, clear impressions, excellent gut-feelings and was quite consistently a session that felt like good target contact... with something that feedback shows was not the intended target.
How? Why?
Who knows?
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