Target Acquisition Errors

Aside from the million things we screw up in any given session--those are things that experience teaches, so they don't phase me--what is the biggest problem in remote viewing, the thing that makes it the most exasperating, the thing that makes evaluation the most difficult even with solid controls, the thing that makes it most inconsistent?

Incorrect target acquisition. Or, to put it another way: it appears that sometimes, we knock on the wrong door. And we have an entire conversation with the 'identity' there, and it's a good conversation, and we feel ok about it, until feedback when we realize that the target identity we were communing with has approximately zero relationship to the intended target identity. And since we never know physically exactly *what* target-identity we were talking to, we have no feedback for the experience.

Now some would argue that it simply "wasn't psychic" because it was "totally off-target". I disagree. I think it doesn't have feedback so we cannot validate whether or not it's psychic, that much is true, of course. But I think given the feeling of the overall session can be compared to a lot of other experience--and 'no decent psychic connection' is a known experience, and something wholly different than what I'm talking about--I believe in those cases, the viewer still had a session, met a target, collected data, etc. It's simply that unfortunately, the 'identity' of the target they met was incorrect. They got the street address wrong in the matrix or whatever the hell it might be, who knows.

It's easy to admit that it's wrong--that part isn't in question. The debate is whether or not this is an issue of "not being remotely psychic," vs. "being at least potentially psychic, but apparently about the totally wrong thing."

Some people think this doesn't matter. That the only thing that matters is that it was wrong. Yet I consider this issue one of the biggest issues in viewing. Of course it matters, if you are expecting practice and feedback to actually do you some good.

But other issues, all of them are usually process or interference issues, and can be learned from with feedback, like any other sport of a sort. But simply being 'off target' after a whole session that seemed just fine, and did not seem to have any intent or process difference from any other on-target session, there is nothing that we learn from that.

Except not to trust ourselves, except that psi is whimsical enough to make us want to kill it sometimes, except that our actual feelings and perceptions are unreliable. In short, it does all the harm of a form of negative feedback, but none of the good that feedback can if it shows you how you were inaccurate, which leads at least sometimes to understanding why. It's just a bad experience, period.

If you judged most sessions by criteria as harsh as the science lab might, a ton of sessions that viewers consider on-target but poor or even average would probably be considered not on target, simply because they either didn't have enough data to demonstrate that, or had too much data that was inaccurate. The english language, and the relatively small number of unique "forms and dynamics" in our reality, not to mention the issues of symbolism and analogy, mean that it's actually quite an accomplishment to write out say, 20 lines of data, and not be able to find something that can conceivably be considered a match to target -- even if we cycled through ten feedback photos, none of which were the actual target. (Don't even start me on 32 page sessions...) I think the problem is a bigger problem than laymen realize because I suspect that laymen greatly underestimate how often it happens with them due to this.

Even in the lab, there were two numbers that people like McMoneagle used to quote: the percentage of the time they were on-target, and then when they were on target, the percentage of data that was likely to be accurate. The issue with contacting the 'proper' target has always been an issue.

Psychic work camouflaged this throughout history, because the psychics knew the target, and so you never really had a chance to see them 'completely off target', because they either knew enough about it, or had enough exposure to people or environmental information, that they would always describe something that sounded like it could be accurate; whether any of the details really are, is another story.

Remote Viewing solved this problem with the doubleblind. If the target is a goldfish pond and the viewer describes a man, they are off-target. If the target is a child's bedroom and they describe a nuclear reactor, they're off target. If the target is a deer and they describe something in space, they're off target. Remote viewing gave us the chance to prevent the pollution of front-loading and other non-psi sources of info, so we could truly see what a person was connected with psychically. And what we see, not surprisingly, is that people aren't nearly as accurately-connected to the universe around them as many assume. This is part of why a lot of people really hate the double-blind, not surprisingly, and will argue extensively and creatively for why it really doesn't matter. It matters. If they were better, they wouldn't have a problem with it.

But what we also see is that somewhere in the "making that appropriate connection" part of the process, there's often a problem--one we are not doing anything to consider or work on, because we haven't any idea how, so everybody acts like the problem doesn't exist (or "doesn't exist for me, because I am super-viewer, ta-da!"). Instead we obsess on AOL, Stage 5 tools and how accurate-yet-succinct we can be (please god) in a session; those things, we can do something about. Having a perfectly good session that turns out to be on the perfectly wrong target, nobody's got any answer for.

In modern RV, the benefit of the doubleblind mostly comes in for the evaluation aspect; frontloading prevents the lack of target contact from being so obvious. I think there may be a good use for frontloaded-evaluation of existing sessions, or even MILDLY frontloading a second session (the first being truly doubleblind, and only IF the first one appears to at least be in the target genre), but the initial "clean contact having to prove itself" is something unique to RV and the best thing going for its accuracy in implementation. As psychics, viewers aren't any more or less accurate than psychics throughout time, they're simply working in an improved model that maximizes the ability to see when target contact is off, by minimizing the ability to get or skew information based on non-psi sources. (Of course, this doesn't stop viewers from wanting to revert RV to the muck it was dragged out of in a couple dozen different ways, but that's another topic.)

Now the science lab with RV wanted the best viewers. If you weren't testably, provably good, you were out. A teeeeeeeny number of people worked 'long term' (as opposed to occasionally or for a couple studies, some of which might have dealt with skill in the average person) as a result. Now with McMoneagle the general gist of it --to me anyway-- often ended up sounding like, "Ok, well it works for him X% of the time, but almost nobody else truly is talented like that, so give up, take your ball and go home." (My response to this impression the first time I got it is unprintable, lest the search engines avoid me ever-after.)

But essentially what the lab did by accident or design was filter down to the incredibly few humans who had the greatest percentage of correct-target-acquisition. That does not mean they were the best or most amazing psychics, that should be understood: consistency means a great deal more than star-power when it comes to labwork. So when you consider that target-acquisition wasn't even great for them (ranging from 50-80+%, although the measure in a layman or application settings would be higher than the measure in the lab), it brings home how big an issue it probably is for the rest of the world.

But because nobody knew how to deal with that, they simply worked to get people who had the least issue with it. And because their viewers had the least issue with it, they either didn't bother studying it, or haven't told us about it if so, or didn't figure out how to touch it. So the primary problem in psi, that we had from the dawn of time, but with the advent of a decent RV protocol we could finally see clearly, still hasn't been touched, improved on, or better understood.

Worse, this is the one factor that the scientists say doesn't change--ever. That viewers may get better based on practice, when they "are" on-target, but as far as their % of accurate target acquisition (to begin with) goes, it is 10, 20, 30 years later the same as when they walk in the door, as if it's something set in genetic-stone.

In the science psi world they've accepted that only a tiny fraction -- half of one percent, maybe -- of people are decently talented for lab work, and of those, that their ability for accurate target acquisition, totally aside from other viewing-related skills, never improves.

This is true based on their data.

It offends me greatly anyway.

To me, this is like people who go on diets, and after a few pounds don't lose weight, and continue dieting, and they still don't lose weight, and they call it a 'stall'. You go to the bodybuilding world and you don't see people having nine month 'stalls', because nobody in that world would put up with such a thing: if what they were doing wasn't working, they would have done something else long prior. You go to weight watchers meetings where people have been in the group 20 years and they are still fat but they continue to have hope that doing the same thing they've been doing for 20 years is magically going to work now. (Einstein once said doing the same thing and expecting a different result was the definition of insanity.) And when it clearly is not working to any degree, whether because their body isn't responding or because nutritionally their body is incapable of staying on that eating plan, they accept that as if it is a tragic fate, and generally, nothing changes. Except sometimes they give up.

It's like a cult mentality -- you see it in dieting, you see it in religion, you see it in all kinds of things where there is any kind of doctrine that has to be defended even when quite obviously it is at best insufficient for consistent results and at worst an abysmal failure.

Remote Viewing has a little of that too, even in the most legitimate corners. I don't personally find it acceptable that we have no idea what causes inaccurate target acquisition, and no idea how to improve that. And I don't find it reasonable that the assumed explanation for this is that you don't love jesus enough you didn't focus well enough.

There are a ton of problems that can and do happen in RV. Issues with focus, assumption, imagination, and other kinds of AOL are common, but you can SEE those when you evaluate your results. This issue--this target acquisition issue--you can't see at all.

And since people like McMoneagle say "intent" is what it's all about, I'm a little torn: on one hand, he's the boss so to speak, I take his comments on RV very seriously. On the other hand, if even he hasn't improved his 'target acquisition'% in 30 years, then he's no help at all on that particular subject--nobody is.

Aside from process issues, there are 'interference' issues. Sometimes you just can't seem to make contact, you wander, you stare at the paper, whatever, there are other problems that can arise. But all of these are recognizeable when they occur. If that's an issue, you can view later, you can make up exercises to make it intense but brief or different in some way. If process issues come up, you can deal with them as a learning process. But process issues, and interference issues, can be perceived, and as a viewer gets more experience, dealt with more adequately. Target acquisition issues are really a different kind of problem.

First, you spend all this time on a session and the whole thing is considered trash. This is hardly improved by feedback which tells you that. You may have spent the entire session being adequately psychic and well-behaved in process, only to have all of it invalidated as not-counting, despite that aside from the initial acquisition aspect, the rest of the session might have gone very well, you'll never know.

It's demoralizing. I've been fortunate that it doesn't seem as common with me as with others I see, but it still happens to me too sometimes, and it pisses me off in a big way. Viewers don't talk about this much, I assume because everyone wants to be considered good at it. I consider it the RV-family dysfunction, like that Issue Nobody Talks About (the elephant the mother in the AA commercial is vaccuuming around).

Second, it's not uncommon for RV applications groups to pretty quickly get into the mode of wanting to pour in all kinds of non-psi info to the process, particularly frontloading. This annihilates the ability to clearly perceive when a viewer is offtarget; thanks to frontloading, every perception they get is going to be brought through a model that will make it seem like it could be so, and we're back to where we were with psychics before RV came along and the doubleblind gave us the first means to half-way evaluate at least whether someone was truly 'in touch' with the intended target or not. At least with RV, historically the project manager had the option to exclude 'obviously off target' sessions, or retask for a different session. Killing the protocol just means you have to take everything because now everything looks equal on the surface.

In the layman's world, there's so much creatively positive evaluation of sessions (particularly long ones which have SO much data they hit nearly every possible target along the way), that I think a lot of viewers only notice totally off-target sessions maybe 20% of the time it actually happens. But I have yet to meet anybody who's never had it happen.

And I have yet to meet anybody who has the slightest idea what to do about it. They focus. They intend. They practice harder, or more, or longer, or less, or change methods... it still happens sometimes. Nobody knows why.

Thus far, everybody has apparently been content to accept the hopelessness of built-in target-acquisition frequency limits.

I'm not. I don't know that I can do anything about it, but there has got to be something we're missing about this process.

Once target contact is made, viewing is not rocket science. Most anybody can do it. Practice obviously makes a difference. Clear thinking and communication skills probably matter more than excessive amounts of psi 'talent'; a little, once you have target acquisition, is enough.

So to me, everything comes down to target acquisition. In the lab they just hire people already good at it. In my world, I'd like to know how to make anybody better at it.

So far, most of what RV has brought to the table toward improving this issue is: "Describe the target." Wait, there's also the previous one: "Here's a number that has no relation to anything but which I meditated on related to the target. Use this to focus and describe the target."

Hmmnn. Not exactly a leap forward on the scale of development, is it.

I see approximately no evidence of any serious efforts toward improving the accuracy or the clarity of initial target acquisition. I'm sure there have been some, somewhere, by someone, but it isn't visible or known to me (I'm glad for refs if anyone has them).

Is there something we are missing about "intent?"

Is our use of "conscious intent" only partly-workable because that isn't the ideal way to go about it? What other options are there?

Are there psychological, or spiritual, or physical exercises that would contribute to improving this situation, reducing the inaccuracy in acquisition issue?

What is the point of trying so hard in all the process areas, if one of the most important facets of overall accuracy--initial target acquisition--is insufficient yet completely ignored?

PJ